Winter at Death's Hotel (38 page)

This one was pop-eyed and fortyish, not a reporter, she thought, but one of the copy-editors, unless she was confusing him with somebody else she'd seen up on the dais. He said, shaking off her hand, “Look in the saloons, lady. Unless you're his wife.”

“Which saloon?”

She had moved around to block his progress. He looked disgusted but shouted over her head at a boy, “Hey, Gargan, where's McClurg at today?”

“The Seventy-Seven! He's in the back polishing the sketch.”

“Where is the—”

But the man had pushed past her.

She went down and learned from Information where the Seventy-Seven was—just along Park Row at number 77, of course. She set out on foot, her cane clicking on the pavement, her ankle hurting her from the first step.

***

Detective-Sergeant Dunne took the same low chair in front of Roosevelt's desk, wondering if the great man had deliberately made his own chair high and the visitor's chair low. It was the sort of thing a little man would do, Dunne thought.

“Well, do we have him?” Roosevelt bellowed.

“I went to talk to Harding. Harding's not a suspect anymore: he was visiting one of his coal mines in Pennsylvania the day before his wife was murdered, that night, and part of the next day. His secretary was with him and vouched for him.” Dunne sighed. “Unless Harding paid somebody to kill his wife.” He looked at Roosevelt, who was frowning and pursing his lips.

Dunne went on, “We picked up a guy named Gerald Oppenheimer, not that that's necessarily his real name. It was the name Harding gave me. The one who was seen with his wife at the New Britannic, we hope.”

“Poor Harding—he knew all along. What sort of fellow is this Oppenheimer?”

“Ladies' man. A sort of gigolo, only he's a con man, too. His game is, he dances around some rich man's wife, makes her fall for him, gets her to give him presents, then he goes to the husband and says he'll stop for a chunk of money.”

“A complete blackguard, you mean.”

“Harding sent him packing. Which could be made to look to a jury like the gigolo's motive for murdering the wife.”

“I see, I see. Mm.”

Dunne was watching Roosevelt closely, probably more closely than Terrible Teddy understood. “But no better than the motive Harding might have had for paying somebody to kill her.”

Roosevelt scowled at that. “Men like Roscoe Harding don't have women chopped up.” He made a gesture with an index finger that meant “Get on with it.”

“But neither one had a motive for murdering the other women, unless you want to say he did it to cover his tracks, but that's far fetched.”

Roosevelt frowned. “What does this ‘gigolo' say?”

“He says he's got cover for the second killing: he was in a room at the Earle with a girl all that night. But so far we can't find the girl. This last killing, he's vague. He was maybe in his room all night, or maybe he was drunk in a concert saloon. He can't remember, is his tale. The first one, Harding's wife, he says he didn't do it.”

“Can he be broken?”

Dunne didn't like beating confessions out of people. It was his view that anybody could be taken to a precinct cellar and rubber-hosed until he'd admit that he'd shot Lincoln. “Is that what you want us to do?”

Roosevelt glanced at him and looked away as if he meant not to be there when the actual words were spoken. “A man like that deserves no mercy.” He seemed to wait, perhaps for agreement from Dunne. When none came, he said as if to himself, “Better that he hang for all three than that the police be punching-bags for the press.” He didn't look at Dunne, but concentrated on something on his desk. “Get a confession from him by…customary methods. I want to have something for the newspapers by tomorrow at two p.m.”

Dunne got up and left.

***

The Seventy-Seven could have been a saloon anywhere, although Louisa didn't know that because she'd never been in one before; it had matchboard walls and a few pictures and some men sitting where they didn't have to communicate with each other while they drank. She was frightened and disgusted, but what she wanted was too important to stop.

“No ladies allowed,” the barman said to her.

“Where's McClurg of the
Express
?”

“You his missus?”

“Do I look it? He's supposed to be in the back room. Where's the back room?”

The man glanced at a closed door and said, “You can't go in there.”

“Oh, can't I!” She was already heading for the door. The barman came around the end of the bar and tried to head her off; she waved her cane and he ducked and backed, and somebody laughed. She put her hand on the knob and went through the door and closed it behind her.

McClurg was lying on a horsehair sofa with his coat off and a bottle and a glass on the floor beside him. He looked up but didn't move. “I thought it was Attila the Hun,” he said.

“Where's Minnie Fitch?”

“The question of the hour. It redounds from house to rooftop to the mountains! Where is Minnie Fitch? Gone where the woodbine twineth, I hope
not
. Don't I know you?”

“You met me with Minnie in a bakery and did some drawings.”

“So I did.” He sighed, reached for his glass and drank, put it down. “What now?”

“We have to go to the mortuary, Mr. McClurg.”

“Oh my God, why?”

“Have you seen the Butcher's third victim yet?”

“No, and I ain't going to, because she's got no face to sketch. They already called and told us. Can't put a sketch of a woman with no face in the noospaper, m'dear, the kiddies would be shocked.”

No
face. So that's why they can't identify her.
She tried not to think of Minnie without a face. “You said Minnie might be gone where the woodbine twineth, Mr. McClurg.” Louisa tried to keep all feeling out of her voice. “Well, maybe she has.” She plucked McClurg's coat from a brass hook on the wall and held it up. “Come on. The City Morgue.”

He looked at her. “Minnie?”

“Minnie's disappeared. In the mortuary there's a…” Her voice broke. “A woman with no face.
Come
on, you drunken sot!
”

“You can't talk to me like that.”

“Pretend I'm your wife. Come
on
!”

He sat up and took several breaths. “You're too much like Minnie.
She
bosses me all over the place. Look, I told you, there's nothing at the morgue!”

“You mean you're afraid of what we'll find.”

“You've got a screw loose, lady.”

She advanced on him with the coat. “It's Mrs. Doyle. Put this coat on at once.”

She led him through the saloon to the jeers of several drinkers. Outside, she made him hail a cab because her ankle hurt too much to walk. At the morgue, a different man was on duty; he knew McClurg, hardly noticed when the artist said “My assistant” and jerked a thumb toward Louisa. They went down into the depths, Louisa limping, and an attendant shook his head at McClurg and said, “I told the papers, this one's got no face.”

McClurg said with drunken dignity, “Orders are orders. Lead on.”

The attendant led them in and pulled out a slab. “You really want to see this one?”

He pulled the sheet that covered the body; piling the cloth on the head so that the face couldn't be seen. What had been a gray mountain range became a wax-like female body. The color had drained from it with the blood; now it was not much different from the shades of stone and dried concrete, slightly yellowed, of the walls.

Fortified, or at least forewarned, by the medical reports on the first two murders, Louisa was able to stand there. The smell was strong, repellent, but she stood there. She looked.

What was there to see? Only the pathos and the disgust of it. She had to steel herself to look at the rawness of the flesh where the breasts had been, now the color of meat boiled too long in water; they were revolting, at the same time deeply touching. She thought of the pride she took in her own breasts; unconsciously, she put a hand on one, pressed it, felt her heart.

The doctor's wife in her looked and knew that everything from the stomach down had been removed. She said, “Did you wash her?”

“First thing we did.”

“Was there blood?”

“Some. She'd bled out, but he'd cleaned her up some. Not like the first one, though.”

“And the…intestines, and so on?”

“Taken out, you know? When they brought her in, the guts were looped around her, wrapped up her legs and all like that.” He was watching her. He was trying to make her faint or sick, she knew. “He'd hung her on a meat hook under a sign that said ‘Sausages.' Like her guts was sausages, get it?”

Louisa moved closer to the body.

“Don't touch it!”

“Hush.”

She reached to turn over the hand on which Minnie had shown her a burn scar.

“Don't touch it, I said!” The attendant's voice was brutal.

She made her own voice savage. “She isn't an
it
! She's a woman!”

“I call all the stiffs ‘it.'”

Louisa put her back to him and turned the hand over. He began to shout; she felt his hand on her shoulder, but she was looking at the shriveled skin in the yellowed palm, the scars of the childhood burning. She said, “Oh, Minnie.”

Behind her, McClurg gagged, staggered, and vomited where he stood. The attendant swore. He let go of Louisa and roared at them to get out, look at the mess, now he had to clean it up!

Louisa heard him stamp away down the long room; there was the rattle of a metal bucket. She reached forward and jerked the cloth off the head.

The face had indeed been flayed. Her eyes went at once to what was left: the underlying muscles and tendons, half face, half skull in shape. The teeth were horrifyingly visible. The eyes were still there, now seeming huge. Louisa felt bile surge up her throat and into her mouth; she clenched her jaws, forced it down.

She gazed down at the terrible eyes, no more now like Minnie's eyes than they were like billiard balls on a table. She studied the browning facial muscles, the softness of what had been lips. She bent and kissed them.

“Hey, lady, Jesus!”

As if, with a kiss on the skinless lips, she could take away the kiss that had come between them. Or give it back in a different way.

He pulled her away. She smelled McClurg's vomit, smelled the corpse of her friend, which was only the smell of all corpses. McClurg was leaning on a wall, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. His eyes were running tears. She said, “You'd better tell them that it's Minnie.”

McClurg said, “I'll do a sketch of her. I can do it from memory.” He began weeping.

The attendant held up a mop. “Not till you clean up your mess on my floor, you don't!”

Louisa snatched the mop from him. “I'll do it! You heartless, brainless dolt! You should be ashamed—you should be horse-whipped!” She began to scrub furiously. Most of what McClurg had thrown up was whiskey. It could have been much worse.

When Louisa returned to the hotel, it was well past six o'clock. The police had kept her in an office at the morgue to question her about her identification of Minnie Fitch. Louisa had never been examined by the police before, so she wasn't prepared for what seemed to be their hostility. The hostility, she decided, was really a cynicism born of hearing a lot of lies for many years. Still, she felt more like a suspect than a witness. She became angry when the questioning was done all over again by a man who introduced himself as Detective Forcella from the Murder Squad.

“You
knew
it would be her, Mrs. Doyle?”

“I thought it might be. I didn't say I
knew
.”

“Why'd you think it ‘might be'?”

“Because it was so unlike her not to have come to work.”

The detective looked at a policeman and squinched up his mouth and nose as if he'd smelled something bad. He was young and rather good looking in an Italian way. He said, “Where were you last night, Mrs. Doyle?”

She started to say angrily that that was none of his business, but she realized that she would only waste time if she did; she said, “In my room at the New Britannic Hotel.”

A look she didn't understand passed between the two policemen, followed by some irrelevant-seeming questions about the New Britannic—how long had she been there, when had she left there today, where was her husband? Finally, they asked all the same questions again and then all three of them waited while her answers were written out in a fair copy by somebody else, and she was able to sign and leave.

“You stay where we can find you when we want you, please, Mrs. Doyle.”

There was no proper answer to that, so she gave none. McClurg, who had also been questioned, had waited for her. He was soberer, but he still was grieving. He said, “I couldn't believe it. I
can't
believe it. Why Minnie?”

“Because she wrote that article.”

“That's about the cops. You think a cop did this?”

“It wasn't just about the ‘cops.' It was also about the murderer—and the hotel.”

“You knew before we went to the morgue, didn't you.”

“That's what the police asked. I didn't know; you can't
know.
But I was standing by the elevator, and I was thinking about her not coming in today and about what she was supposed to write next…”

McClurg shuddered. He took her arm. “Don't you ever cry?”

“Often.”

“You ought to be in the newspaper business.” He had walked her to the street and got her a cab. “We'll give her a big sendoff. The
Express
will want to make a big shindig out of it. Tell me you'll come.”

She had smiled. She took the cab only to the elevated station at Chatham Square to save herself changing trains there, and then she climbed the now-painful stairs to the platform and waited for the train. It was already half dark, lights coming on in the tenement windows. There was no joy in the trip this time, nor any of its interest in the life within the buildings. All she saw was Minnie, Minnie with and without a face.

Then she was back at the hotel, puzzled by a cluster of sour-looking men and women on the pavement, and two boys coming out the bronze doors with loads of luggage. It seemed to her an odd time to be leaving a hotel, but perhaps they had found something they couldn't bear about the New Britannic. She limped around them and was surprised to be stopped by a policeman. She tried to go around—she wanted a hot bath and her bed and a sleeping powder—and he held her arm.

“Only registered guests, lady.”

“I
am
a registered guest. What in the world is going on?”

“Name?”

She waited. She said, “What has that to do with my going into my hotel?”

“You got a name, you're registered, you can go in.”

“I am Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle.”

“Room number?”

“Really, this is…!” She understood from his face that he was serious. He was young, too, and probably new, thus more truculent than he needed to be. Another, older cop was standing where the doorman should have been. He, too, was waiting for her answer: he had a sheet of paper and a pencil.

She said, “Room 201, the annex.”

The older cop looked at his paper, drew a line, jerked his head. “Let her in.”

The young one let go of her arm. The older one, to her relief, opened the heavy bronze door for her. She thought that she couldn't have done it herself, not with a weak ankle and the weight of Minnie.

The scene inside was astonishing. She saw at least five policemen. People she recognized as guests were seated in the front part of the lobby, cordoned off with brass standards and a velvet rope; other guests—she recognized Irving and Cody and a few others—were on the other side. They seemed more relaxed; several were smoking; one or two had drinks. Around the reception desk was a pile of luggage far too big to be for only one party; near it, three unhappy-looking souls were scowling at the world.

“What is going on?”

Another cop had appeared with another piece of paper. “Name and room number?”

“I just gave that outside.”

“Makes no diff to me, lady; I need your name and room number.”

She sighed to show how abused she felt and muttered, “Doyle, Annex 201.”

He made a mark on his paper and pulled one of the brass standards away from the wall. “Wait in there.”

“For what?”

“I don't make the rules and I don't answer questions. I got my orders. Take a chair.”

She wanted to make herself regal, but she felt crumpled; sagging, round shouldered. She limped into the enclosure and let herself down into a leather chair. She recognized several of the people near by. When she met their eyes, they shook their heads or made faces. She said to a tall man in good clothes whom she had seen in the dining room, “What in the world is going on?”

“Somebody's dead.”

“Who?”

“They won't tell us.”

She looked around, as if by elimination she might guess who it was; the fact was that in a hotel with two hundred rooms she could hardly know everyone by sight. She looked across to the other side of the lobby, met Irving's eyes. He smiled and bowed, said something to Cody, who then did the same.

Another cop appeared and called a name, and a man and a woman got up from her group and went away with him.

“What are they doing?”

“Asking questions.”

Death, police, questions. She had just left those things at the morgue. She had a momentary, disorienting idea that this was all about Minnie, was the same questioning, the same police, but she came to and realized it had to be different. But not usual, not merely a death; the police didn't appear by the dozen for a routine death.

Somebody was shouting at Reception. Carver was there, looking sweaty and harassed. The shouter and the others by the pile of luggage must be people who had reserved rooms and weren't being allowed to go beyond the lobby. And the people marching off with their luggage must be people who refused to wait and were going to another hotel.

She sank back into the embrace of the chair. A minute later, she was asleep.

“Doyle!”

Somebody was calling her, somebody with a telegram. No, no; that was a dream. She struggled toward the surface, remembered where she was. A policeman was shouting, “Doyle! Doyle, you here?”

“Yes—over here—I'm so sorry…”

“Come on, come on!”

She followed the policeman out of the enclosure and past Reception and into a corridor below the mezzanine where there were offices. He opened a door, shouted “Doyle!” and all but pushed her in. Inside were a desk, several chairs, a plant that needed water, two men in suits.

“Sit down, please.”

“I wish to protest at the way I am being treated.”

“Write a letter to headquarters, 300 Mulberry Street, New York, New York.” His head was down, showing a balding spot. He was looking at more papers. The other man, sitting behind him, was stretching; he had papers, too. The balding one looked up. “Please sit down, Mrs. Doyle.”

“Why am I here?”

“We're questioning the guests and the staff. There's been a death in the hotel.”

“Who?”

“I'll ask the questions, please.” He was middle aged and looked tired; he was probably bored, she thought, and irritated with all these well-off people, a lot of them foreigners, who thought they were better than he was. If he really thought all that, he was nonetheless polite. “I'm Detective Mercer of the Sixteenth Precinct, and behind me is Detective-Probationer Matthews. He's going to take down your answers. We can make this quick and short if you'll just answer what I ask.”

“Very well.” She was thinking that Minnie was dead; she had seen her corpse; she had mopped up vomit; why was she being questioned?

“Great. You just came into the hotel at…” He looked at a paper. “Six thirty-seven, that right?”

“It sounds right; I didn't look at the time.”

“When did you leave the hotel?”

“About noon. A little after, I think.”

He made a notation. The other detective was writing. “That your first time out of the hotel today?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see anything or anybody different from usual at any time you were in the hotel today?”

“No.” She wanted to say
Of
course
not
, but she was trying to be quick. She wanted to be alone; she wanted to grieve.

“Do you know a guest named Mr. Alexander Newcome?”

“Is it he who's died?”

“Please let me ask the questions, Mrs. Doyle. Do you know him?”

“Yes. To speak to. I know his aunt, Mrs. Simmons, better. But we sit and chat sometimes.”

He looked at his papers. “You've been in the hotel a couple of weeks, is that right?”

“More or less.”

“In that time, have you ever seen Mr. Newcome with anybody who struck you in any way as…unusual? Maybe somebody who didn't belong in this hotel, or somebody…maybe not a guest?”

Should
I
tell
him
about
what
I
saw
this
morning? No, it's trivial and it harms Newcome. But I should. It's only fact. If Newcome's dead, how can it harm him
? She said, “I believe I saw Mr. Newcome with someone very early this morning. From my window.”

The detective seemed to quicken. “What kind of person?”

“I don't know. A man, I think.”

“What time was this?”

“It was very early in the morning. About four? Perhaps some minutes before that.”

“
In
the hotel?”

“No—well, yes, in a way—my room is in the annex, you see.” She told him about the view from her window, the door, the figures she took for the breakfast cooks.

The detective seemed almost excited. “You're sure it was Newcome?”

Sure
. That was a hard absolute. Would she swear in a court that it had been Newcome? She thought of that face as it had looked up at her. “Yes.”

The detective swung around and said to the younger man, “Get that guy from the Murder Squad; tell him we got a break.” He turned back as the other man rushed out of the little room. “Would you like some tea or coffee, Mrs. Doyle? Happy to send for something…”

“I'd like to go to my room and lie down.”

“Ma'am, I'd love to be able to let you do that, and I promise we won't keep you a minute longer than we got to. But what you've told me is important. A cup of tea might help pass the time.”

It wouldn't pass the time. It would make it even longer until she could be alone. Minnie had laughed at her for wanting tea instead of coffee in the park. “Please. Tea.”

“You bet.” He went to the door and spoke to somebody there. When he was still standing there, closing the door, she said, “Has Mr. Newcome been killed?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Detective—I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name, it's very rude of me—”

“Mercer.”

“Detective Mercer, you wouldn't be here asking me questions if it weren't something bad. I don't think you'd be here for heart failure or a fall.”
And
where
were
you
when
Minnie
was
being
murdered?

He looked as if he wanted to tell her something, but he said only, “You'll know as soon as everybody else does, I promise.”

Her tea came, and very welcome it turned out to be, but it took another good quarter of an hour before the door opened and the wide body of Detective-Sergeant Dunne pushed in, his unbuttoned suit jacket billowing around him like a cape, making him seem all the bigger. He said to Mercer, “Why don't you get yourself a bite, lad, put your feet up. They've laid on a feed for us in the kitchen. You, too.” This to the second detective.

She didn't like the idea of being alone with any man in a small room, but perhaps he didn't like it either, because he went to the door and spoke and another, quite small man sidled in and sat in Matthews's chair. Dunne was going through the scribbled pages that Matthews had left behind. He was frowning and moving his lips. He looked up at her and said, “We meet again, Mrs. Doyle. I'll be with you in a minute.”

And that was about as much longer as he took. He sat in Mercer's chair and shuffled the papers and made a neat stack of them and then looked at her as if he meant to memorize every detail about her. He leaned back, hooked an arm over the back of the chair. “You saw Newcome with another man at four this morning.”

“About four, yes.”