Winter at Death's Hotel (29 page)

He stared down at the floor, then the desk. She was surprised to see that he was trembling. He took a pen and drew a somewhat shaky line through the bill's total and wrote “$100.” He handed it to her, the paper vibrating in his fingers. “Payable today at the cashier.”

“Of course.”

“And you're moving to the annex, you understand.”

“I hope I shall have the help of the hotel staff to do the move.”

“Of course, of course, yes, naturally, yes…” He seemed disoriented. She left him without saying anything more, leaving him staring at his office floor.

***

“We're moving, Ethel.”

“Oh, madame!”

“Only next door into the annex. Do you know the annex? It's quite part of the hotel.” The truth was, she knew she was taking a step down—after all, what did “annex” mean? And what would Arthur say about it? But she was saving money. Surely he would understand.

Hearing nothing from Ethel, she put her head into the bedroom and said, “
Do
you know the annex, Ethel?”

Ethel looked severe. “The people who stay in the annex rarely have servants, madame, so I wouldn't hear. I believe it's patronized mostly by the better sort of traveling men.”

“Oh.” That complicated the problems of the bath.

Ethel said, “The rooms over there don't have bells to call the servants, even. You'd have to go to Reception to have them ring for me.” The words seemed to give her perverse satisfaction.

“Oh. Oh, dear.” She hadn't thought to ask about a bell. What else would she find in the annex? She hadn't demanded a room in the front, but surely Carver would give her one because she was in a front room now. She pictured herself huddling in some back attic like a despised relative.

“I'm sure it will be quite satisfactory, Ethel.”

And
how
bad
can
it
be?

The question that answers itself.

***

Dunne was sitting in a dive called Shankey's with a schooner of beer in front of him that, except for some collapsed foam, held precisely what it had held when it had been brought to him an hour before. Shankey's tolerated cops so long as they ordered—and paid for—a drink. Cops used the place as a sanctuary; it was tucked in behind the House for the Detention of Witnesses at 203 Mulberry and was the Tenth Precinct's refuge from wives, senior brass, and creditors. Dunne used it to think and to make notes where neither Cleary nor Finn could see what he was doing: Finn, who had also been using it as a refuge, had cleared out when Dunne had come in.

At the moment, Dunne had his street directory on the table in front of him with the map pulled out and unfolded so that the city, from Central Park south to the Battery, was displayed. The map was the one that everybody used, Mitchell's map first drawn in 1853 and constantly updated. The island of Manhattan looked in it like a thick penis about to penetrate the New Jersey Bay, which rather tickled Dunne; at the moment, however, he had the map placed vertically so that the penis seemed too flaccid to penetrate anything.

Dunne had had the Wop mark up the map with his researches—the locations of the two “Bowery Butcher” murders; possible sightings of old men in wagons (not necessarily Jewish) within an hour of the times of discovery; and, a small inspiration of Cassidy's, the locations of the theft of horse-drawn wagons that had been reported to the police on the nights of the murders. Lots of men who could afford a scrawny horse to draw a wagon around New York could not afford a stable, so they left horse and wagon in the street, tied to a weight or a lamp-post. It wasn't strictly legal, but it was cheap; to balance that benefit, there were a lot of thefts. And a lot of those never got reported: the wagons were usually old and rotten; the horses were headed for the glue works. But maybe, if somebody had stolen a horse and wagon to carry a corpse, luck would smile and the theft had been reported.

Dunne found the marks on his map intriguing. They didn't yet form a pattern, nor could he say that they gave him a theory. At best, they gave him a notion, really something more like the kind of images that flow through the mind just before sleep. What his mind imagined now was a man stealing a horse and wagon somewhere uptown to carry a woman's body somewhere downtown. That was all. Not even an old man; not even a Jew. Perhaps not even a man.

Cassidy stopped at the bar and got the necessary beer and took a curving path to Dunne that had something to do with not spilling the beer.

Dunne, although he had seemed to be asleep, said, “Well?”

“Can I drink some of this? I'm perishing.”

“You can as far as I'm concerned. Don't let Teddy see you.”

Cassidy drank deep, holding the back of his head with his free hand as if he thought it might come off as he tipped back. “Aaaahh.”

“That doesn't tell me much about the matter at hand.”

Cassidy put his beer down and turned an expression of resigned patience to Dunne. “You're a hard man.” He wiped foam from his sandy mustache. “I found him.”

“I'm glad to hear that.”

Cassidy opened a small notebook flat on the table. “Name of Carnahan, William, Number 3077. Walked the beat up in the Sixteenth on the night of the first murder. The only thing he put in his book was meeting Roosevelt.”

“Did he indeed! Teddy vetting the foot soldiers. Admirable. What time?”

“Bit after eleven. But he has no memory of anybody with a horse and wagon.”

“Wouldn't you know.”

“Well, he didn't. We had one stolen from Twenty-Eighth west of Ninth Avenue sometime after ten, but if it went by Carnahan, it was invisible.”

“You mean he was too busy having a quick one or he was trading tales with some pal. All right, it was worth a try; you did the best you could.” Dunne looked at his map. “
Maybe
we have him—or her—traveling south on Broadway below Nineteenth Street at eleven-fifteen or thereabouts.” He tossed his pencil down on the map. 'We've done all the connecting precincts down to the Bowery. It's a sad fact, Cassidy, but we're stymied.”

“Until he murders somebody again.”

“You always see the bit of blue in the gray sky.”

***

The room was smaller than the bedroom she had had in the hotel proper, and of course there was no sitting room. Her trunk and several pieces of luggage would have to go into a boxroom.

She and Ethel spent part of the afternoon sorting her clothes and packing the trunk with things she could live without. Louisa was left with only one evening dress, and she felt rather proud, in a puritanical sort of way, for thus denying herself. She kept one traveling outfit for when she would go to meet Arthur, and her cashmere cloak and her best London waterproof, which wasn't really waterproof but was made of two layers of wool and would be useful in the New York cold. Five day dresses filled the new room's tiny clothes cupboard, and there was space on its shelf for only three hats.

“Well, shoes aren't a problem, at any rate.” She was trying to cheer Ethel, who was suffering pangs of loss of status. “I have to have room for only one shoe of each pair.”

“Madame means to wear that black boot with every shoe she owns?”

“Only the black ones; the colored shoes will go into the trunk. For later. We must be practical, Ethel.” She'd broken the news to Ethel that she was to eat in the employees' and servants' dining room; the reaction had been stoic, and for all Louisa knew, Ethel preferred things that way. Still, she said very little all afternoon and oversaw the move to the annex with the resignation of a saint moving to Alaska.

Louisa had determined to see the move as an opportunity, not a bad turn, and as soon as she was in the room alone she sat at the minuscule desk and made herself a budget. She would be ruthless. She wrote “Budget” at the top of a sheet of hotel paper, then drew lines with pen and the edge of a book and made three columns, “Item,” “Proposed,” and “Actual.” She went back to the top and wrote in the date. The budget would be for the week; next week, she would make a new one.

She began to write down the items—Food, Transportation, Gratuities, Gifts—and bit the end of the pen and then added Postage, Telegrams and Miscellaneous.

The difficult part was filling in “Proposed.” The truth was, she had very little idea how much she had been spending—on cabs, for example, or on gratuities to the boys and the doorman and cab drivers. In the end, she added up the little money she had on hand and added two hundred dollars as the money Arthur would wire when he got the telegram she had sent earlier:

MOVING SMALLER ACCOMMODATION HOTEL STOP LESS EXPENSE STOP PLEASE WIRE FORTY POUNDS FOR REMAINDER STAY HERE AND RAILWAY TICKETS TO MEET YOU SHORTLY STOP LOVING LOUISA

She made a guess at how long the money would have to last, then pro-rated the total for a week, and wrote that amount at the bottom of the Proposed column. Then she parceled the amount out into the other columns. Food was easy; she knew exactly what the hotel would charge her for its American plan, two dollars and sixty-five cents a day. Transportation was a poser, however. Need she go anywhere? Newcome was going to give her a tour in his friend's carriage; that would be free. She wouldn't have to go to City Hall again, nor down to Minnie's newspaper. And she could walk on her own now, more or less. Surely she could walk to the Madison Square Garden tomorrow night to see the Wild West.

She put a zero in the Proposed column for transportation.

The rest of it was painful: one gift a week for the children, postage reduced accordingly; telegraphic costs that would allow only one telegram a week, and she'd already sent that to ask for more money. Nothing for clothes or small treats for herself.

She liked the feeling that gave her:
Nothing
for
myself
.

Gratuities. She would have to give less, and less often. She had probably been giving too much, anyway. Whom could she ask? Mrs. Simmons, who would undoubtedly set the amounts too low; Louisa had seen one of the boys scowl at her. And she would ask Newcome, whom she had forgiven for offering the carriage when he hadn't meant it, and who was a man of the world.

For Miscellaneous, she allowed herself three dollars a week. She had no idea what it would include.

On the back of her budget she made vertical columns where she could keep a running tally of each category day by day. When she was done, she felt better about everything. Even the smallness of the room comforted her, gave a kind of blessing to her self-denial.

It was not, in fact, a bad room at all. The bed was quite pretty, the furniture good. The walls had been papered in a tasteful pale blue and pink that made it seem larger. To be sure, the room was in the back of the annex, but she had a window that got the afternoon sun (at an angle) and looked out on the blank wall of the hotel itself, so that nobody could look in. She was on the first floor (second floor to Americans) and could see, if she put her forehead against the glass and looked down, the door through which the kitchen workers went into the hotel. She supposed the ones who got the breakfasts came quite early. She hoped they would be quiet. Being the annex and not the hotel proper, there were no two-foot-thick walls to keep out the noise.

She sighed. Arthur would be nearing Milwaukee, and the telegram would meet him there. Then he would go to St. Louis and turn east again. She would meet him in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, depending on the cost of the tickets.

She reread his two letters. One was beginning-to-end complaints, and she skimmed it and put it back into its envelope and into her letter-carrier. Couldn't he understand that she, too, needed something to cheer her up? But that was unfair.

The other letter was a bit more like it, and a good deal better than that in its early part:

My darling little wife, How I miss you, especially in the nights! I miss your dear corporeal self, which I long to hold and kiss and—but you will know what I long to do, as I hope you do, too. This separation seems to me more wearing than the months when you were in Switzerland, because I am doing something I dislike and most days I don't dare have even the comfort of looking forward to a letter. The post here is so unpredictable that I am sure that letters have piled up at hotels I have already left, and there they will lie, the corpses of affection, for years!

I had for a change a jolly evening yesterday at what they called the University Club of Chicago, which is a club for any varsity man who cares to pay the fee. For once, the majority of the audience were male, some wives scattered about but not too many, and all were most appreciative. After dinner, I did have a run-in or two with fellows who rather badgered me (being, I think, the worse for American whiskey), but even these didn't spoil the evening. One of them chastised me for killing Holmes and went on at great length about how I could resurrect him and make the whole business of the Reichenbach Falls—which as you know I worked very hard to make perfect!—a trick of Holmes's, who is really alive and has been haring off after criminals all over the world while poor Watson sits grieving for him. The other chap, who I think was “in cahoots” with the first, told me rather boozily that I was a genius but not in the way I thought, because anybody could have created Holmes, but the genius lay in creating Watson!

I don't know what one can do with such people. Sober them up, I suppose.

I pray for you daily, my only love, and I wait with the impatience of a Dartmoor prisoner for the time when we shall be together again, and we shall be with our dear children and I shall have the reality of you in my bed again! Your own loving, lonely, yearning Arthur

She sat at her window, the letter in her hand, and stared at the dark bricks of the wall opposite. A slow, sleety rain was falling. For no good reason she could think of, she began to cry.