Winter at Death's Hotel (22 page)

“Do you work for the
Express
, too?”

“Nah, I'm what you call a title searcher by trade, but I know Minnie personal, so she come to me as an expert. Anything you want to know about propitty, ast me. As a favor 'cause you're lame, I'll push the carts back and get you new ones, that way you won't make collywobbles of the files. First name's Leonard, you can call me that. No food or drinks on the table, by the way, and if you brought your lunch, push yourself off from the table when you eat. Anything else?”

“Where do I hang my coat?”

“Over the back of the chair. We ain't supposed to be here, that's the pernt, get it? Minnie greased Cullum, so it's kosher, but it's like we ain't here. Cheers.”

Cheers, indeed.
A less cheerful place would have been hard for her to imagine. The walls were gray-green, the ceiling gray-tan and discolored with stains; the floor was oiled wood, blackened with dirt. Such light as there was came from windows high in the walls—she could see pairs of legs walking past several of them—and from electric bulbs with inadequate shades high against the ceiling.

She sighed and set to work.

She had brought pencils and two fountain pens and a pad of lined paper that Ethel had bought for her at the newsstand, whose operator had reportedly greeted her with, “Hey, Limey!,” a familiarity that had caused Ethel to growl, “I'll Limey him!”

She opened the first file. Inside were papers tied in bundles with more faded and rotted tape. Presumably, the bundles held the same sort of documents, each bundle having to do with a property that (she didn't need to know this, but Cullum had told it to her rather breathlessly because he was in a hurry) could be located on a plat map in the Hall of Records, which was in another building. But what she wanted was the name of the most recent owner of each property, and that would be—presumably meaning in the ideal case—toward the bottom of each bundle. She put the first bundle in front of her and pulled on the tape knot to untie it.

“Don't do that!”

Startled, she looked up. It was Leonard. He bent over her and tied the bundle tight again. “We did that, we'd have a fine mess, wouldn't we! Someplace in each file, there's an index.
That's
what you want.”

“Nobody told me.”

“Cullum's too thick to look through a ladder. He don't understand what people who don't do this twelve hours a day don't know. He thinks everybody walkin' up and down the streets off City Hall Park awready knows there's an index. Here.” He flicked through the bundles and extracted a sheet of paper. “This is an index. Sometimes they's two, even three sheets—depends how often the propitty's been sold. So on the left, see, there's the propitty numbers that tell you what plat map to look on. Then there's a colyumn gives the street address. Then there's this last, big colyumn where the propitty owner's name is. The current owner is always the
last
name. They don't cross nothing out, that's strictly ta-boo. So you get all these names sometimes, and they really cram them in, sometimes they draw arrows and put more down at the bottom of the colyumns; I've seen them continue on the
back
of the page, which is really stupid because they's so easy to miss. Anyway, that's it. Find the index, look at the
last
name for each propitty and check it against the list Minnie gave you. Minnie gave you a list, right? Oney thirteen names on it, so it's a piece of cake, goes like lightning. Mostly.” He grinned. “You'll catch on, smart girl like you.”

Minnie had indeed given her a list of names—Cleary's and Grady's, their wives' maiden names, and the names of several brothers and some married sisters. By the time she had finished the first cartload of files, she knew the names by heart. She hadn't found any of them in the indexes, but checking, even futilely, had taught them to her.

“Leonard!” All she had to do was call his name, and he would jump up, usually laughing, and run to get her cart. He loved this work, she realized; when they took a break at his insistence, he told her that doing anything having to do with real estate was “my kind of work,” that he learned from everything. “I'm gonna know more about who owns what and how and when and for how much than anybody else in the city.”

“And then what?”

“And then I'm gonna do deals and rake in the shekels.”

They were smoking two of Leonard's cigarettes in a part of the basement that had a curled and faded No Smoking sign high on the wall. Louisa was both worried and excited to be doing something illicit. She had at first objected, then joined in; Leonard had said that she was “a girl with grit.”

“I'm hardly a girl, Leonard.”

“Manner of speaking. M'father always calls my ma ‘the old girl.' How'd you get that black eye?”

It was much faded but still visible. She thought he was hoping for a tale of wife-beating, but tripping on a carpet seemed good enough.

“I bet you're a peach when you're all in one piece,” he said. It made her laugh. She said, “An old peach, young man.”

“Yeah, well…” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his heel. “I'm old for my years, everybody says so.”

By noon, her fingers felt dusty and she had dust in her nose and even, perhaps, her lungs. She took the long walk to the ladies' convenience and washed her hands and face and thought how terrible it would be to do this all day, five and a half days a week, and then remembered her mother and was ashamed.

Minnie was waiting for her in the street. “Lunch is a pushcart in the park. It's a warm day.” Louisa had been looking forward to a pot of tea and perhaps a nice tray of sandwiches. Instead, they sat on a bench with white mugs of scalding coffee (five cents deposit on the mug, redeemable when it came back to the kiosk) and a kind of sandwich bought from a pushcart—some sort of unidentifiable sausage with a heap of sauerkraut on it, the whole mess mashed between two halves of a long, soft roll.

“It tastes rather good,” she said.

“Seasoned with hunger. I live on these things. This is people's food, Louisa—news to you, right?”

“I don't like you saying that, Minnie. I don't advertise it, but I haven't always been well off.”

“I thought you were a lady. Ain't you?”

“Of course I'm a lady, but that isn't only a matter of money. I think I've always been… My mother always wanted me to be a lady. Kept telling me I had to be one.”

“Hard on you, huh? Pushed you.” Minnie was chewing the sausage and sauerkraut with enthusiasm.

“No. She was the gentlest person I've ever known.” She was looking out over the park, the people moving in twos and small groups, a great many men in tall hats. It could have been London, except for the pushcarts selling food. Without realizing quite what she was going to do, Louisa began to tell Minnie what she had come from. “My father was a clergyman and a very bad one—he thought he was better than his parishioners and far better than his wife. And his daughters. All he really cared about was fishing. He drowned when I was eight. My mother moved us to Glasgow, where she had family; we lived in a tenement, with my grandmother down the stairs and a married aunt up. I had older sisters and an older brother and a little brother. One sister, older than I, died of diphtheria the first year. My older brother ran off two years later. My other sister married and moved away. My little brother and I were all my mother had left.”

“She worked, did she?”

“My mother sewed kilts for the British army in an attic workshop with some other women. Soldiers said the wool was so coarse it wore the skin off their knees. I've seen my mother come home with her fingers bleeding, trying to force the needles through four layers of it. By the time I was ten, I knew that I should be helping her. But she said I had to stay in school. I wasn't going to end up like her. If I heard her say that once, I heard it a hundred times.”

“You're not so different from me, you mean.” Minnie finished her sausage, licked her fingers. She eyed Louisa. “I grew up on a farm. Until I was fifteen. I'm like your brother—I ran off. It was a miserable place. They were hard people with hard lives and hard ideas. I couldn't take it. You want some fried dough?”

“Good heavens, no. I didn't know there was such stuff.”

“Oh, get off it, Louisa! You probably got the same thing in England only they call it Spots and Blotches or something.”

“I'd rather eat library paste.”

“You're the limit.” Minnie went off and came back with a round, brown thing that looked like a large muffin dusted with castor sugar. She insisted that it was deep-fried dough. “Italian,” she said. She lifted it as if in a toast. “At least the Italians brought good food when they came over. What'd the Irish bring us? Boiled potatoes and cabbage.”

“How are you coming on the medical reports on the two murders?”

“It's on my list.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I'm a busy working girl and I have to make a list.”

“Is that a way of saying I'm not a working girl?”

“It's a way of saying you have to wait your turn.”

“Minnie, I'm going through those wretched files for you!”

“There's a lot going on right now, Louisa.”

“Minnie, you promised!”

“It's on my list, I told you!” She finished the fried dough and licked her fingers. “I'll get to it, I really will.”

“When?”

Minnie shrugged. Louisa let a breath hiss out. She told herself that she liked Minnie but thought that she was selfish and a user of other people. “Really, Minnie,” she said.

“What? You going to get the galloping peedoodles and stop working in City Hall because I haven't brought you some damned useless medical report?”

Louisa struggled into her crutches. “No, I'm not. I
keep
my promises.”

***

Leonard found the first property that afternoon, a tenement on Water Street whose owner was one of Lieutenant Cleary's brothers.

“It could be legitimate,” Louisa said. “His brother could be in that business.”

“Yeah, yeah, could be. My ma says, ‘If could be was feathers, we'd all sleep in feather beds.' We'll see.”

Louisa finished her third ward, Twenty-Three, and Leonard brought a cart loaded with files of properties east of Bowery and north of Canal Street, which he told her was an immigrant area and likelier than the ones she had been working on. He smacked the cart of new files. “Most of N' Yawk's immigrant, let's face it, but these streets're where they come first crack outta the box—they used to be Irish, then German, now they're Jews and some Italians. It's the story o' New Yawk—it's history in buildings! Isn't that great?”

She found her first match almost at once, this time between one of Cleary's sisters and a tenement on Broome Street. She called Leonard; he looked over her shoulder (his face too close to her hair, one hand on her chair so that his fingers touched her back) and said, “That's a double-decker. That means it's one a the old style—two buildings on the same lot, catwalks that go from one to the other on the sixth floor, I ain't joking, they're something! Cellars under them, too, people crammed inta them like matches in a box. They're something. Okay, you're doing good.” He patted her shoulder. She thought Leonard entirely lacked respect for either age or gender.

They had found three more between them before she left at four o'clock. He offered to walk with her “someplace,” even asked her whether she didn't want to “catch a show and maybe a bite to eat.”

“Leonard, I am a married woman, and I don't go out to shows or restaurants with men, even if they're far younger than I.”

“What, you don't like me?”

“It has nothing to do with liking; it's a matter of what's proper.”

“Proper's just a word for losing time! We're young; we gotta grab hold of life while we can. Your husband waiting for you at home?”

“No, he's…traveling.”

“So, you're married to a traveling man, you think he's being proper out on the road? Come on, live a little!”

“Leonard, someone is waiting for me,” she lied.

“Oh, but your husband's traveling. I get it!” He laughed. He was enormously good-natured, she thought. “Okay, sweetheart, I see what's going on. Why didn't you say you're way ahead of me?”

She found a cab, for which Minnie had given her the fare; still, she wished she had the courage to try the Elevated Railway; it would be so much faster. As it was, the journey up the island at the busiest time of day took almost an hour.

Two letters from Arthur were waiting for her at Reception along with a telegram that said

WIRING TEN POUNDS BANK TODAY STOP PLEASE BE FRUGAL STOP PLEASE STOP ARTHUR.

Ten pounds! She'd asked for a hundred.

But she tamped down her anger. Something was better than nothing.
Still
…

“Oh, madame, Galt was here to do your ankle but he's had to go again.”

“Oh dear. Well, it doesn't matter, Ethel.” She looked at her maid. “Or does it? Have you and Mr. Galt walked out yet?”

“We had a stroll down Fifth Avenue this afternoon, madame, as he had a few minutes while the doctor was with old Mr. Carver, and I had no duties. I was sure you wouldn't—”

“No, Ethel, not at all.” She took off her hat and gloves.

“In fact, if it's all right, we hoped to go to see Mr. Irving this evening, as it's Mr. Galt's evening off. If I could change my usual day—”

“Yes, yes, do go. I shall simply go to bed, anyway. I find I'm tired. I suppose it's being ill, or injured, at any rate.” She was about to say that she wanted Ethel to help her into a bath, but there was a knock at the door; Ethel answered it, said something Louisa didn't hear, and then turned to Louisa with a frightened face. “It's another policeman, ma'am. He's downstairs and he wants to know if he can come up.”