Winter at Death's Hotel (40 page)

His writing was almost like a penmanship example, eminently legible. She read off the items, and with each one he picked it from somewhere out of sight and put it on the counter between them. He asked her twice if that was everything, was she satisfied? and then he had her sign the ticket and sign in the ledger in which he had listed everything.

“Louisa Doyle parentheses Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle. You related to the Sherlock Holmes writer? Are you really? Don't feel bad, dear, all kindsa people come in here and leave things. I had a duchess oncet. You'd be surprised at the politicians and their wives. Cops. Cops' wives. Everybody gets caught short now and then.” He was counting out paper money, US gold and silver certificates. He slid them under the grille. “Count it, please.”

He opened a drawer to his left and took out two small boxes in bright blue and yellow and passed them to her. “That's your ammunition. You notice I don't give it to you until the very last. That's so you won't use it to hold me up. I don't think you will, but we got a rule.”

“I shall need only one box, I think.”

“No, you need two. One's .32 shorts, one's .32 longs. The shorts you can use for practice and like that; the longs're for getting serious. They're more powerful. Neither box is chock full—there's four missing from one and six from the other—but those are boxes of fifty, so you can scare a lot of husbands before you run out.”

“That was generous, to give me both boxes. I wouldn't have known any better.”

“Believe it or not, we aren't hairy monsters with bad breath in this business. Just don't really shoot your husband, okay? It makes us look bad. And learn to use that gun. They're dangerous things.”

“Thank you.”

“Thirty days, dear. No exceptions.”

“You were really very good.”

“Don't spread it around town. Enjoy New York.”

Outside, she felt suddenly better, almost buoyant. A wintry sun had come out, and the avenue looked warmer and brighter. She was pleased with herself about the gun, which somehow was connected with Minnie. It felt dreadfully heavy in her handbag, and whatever would she do with it? She thought of what it would be like to walk along Seventh Avenue with a loaded revolver in her bag. No, no, that would be impossible. And pointless. Her fears had nothing to do with the daylight or the city; hers were night-time fears. And centreed in the hotel.

Perhaps she could put the gun on her bedside table.

Or in a shoe pushed under the bed.

Arthur
will
be
furious.

As soon as she was back in her room in the annex, she wrote a note to Colonel Cody: “My dear Colonel Cody, I know it is an imposition but I must ask you for a favor. Is there anyone in your Wild West who could give me a few minutes to teach me to shoot a revolver? (I greatly prefer that it be a woman.) I feel so helpless because of my ankle, and this city is so dangerous. Yours sincerely, Louisa Doyle.”

***

Detective-Sergeant Dunne was there at exactly one, not in the same room as the evening before but in a small office at the back of the hotel. Louisa was led to it by one of the hotel employees, who told her somewhat dismissively that the office was “old Mr. Carver's,” as if old Mr. Carver had disappeared a generation before and was not living five floors above them. The office was small, furnished with little more than a desk and two chairs and an oak filing cabinet, and it smelled of dust and being too long closed.

Dunne was standing at a window with his back to the door when she was shown in. The same plainclothes man she had seen at the mortuary was with him, already seated and going through the pages of a notebook; he jumped to his feet when he saw Louisa and said, “Mrs. Doyle!”

Dunne turned, looked at her, nodded several times as if her coming confirmed something. He and Louisa said, “Please sit down,” at the same time, Dunne to Louisa, Louisa to Cassidy.

Dunne was still wearing his hairy overcoat, which seemed entirely wrong; the sun was pouring down outside. A hat, presumably his, lay on the empty desktop.

Dunne glanced back at the window, then around the room at framed photographs that hung at eye level, only a few inches apart, like a belt. He gestured. “
Please
sit down, Mrs. Doyle.” He grasped the chair behind the desk, but instead of pulling it out so as to sit in it, he carried it around the desk and put it down facing hers so that they were a few feet apart and he could lean one arm on the desk. He pointed a finger at the other detective. “That's Detective Cassidy. You met him at the Tombs.”

Cassidy gave her a quick smile and went back to his papers. Dunne sniffed and intertwined the fingers of his hands on his chest and looked at the floor. He said, “I want to put some things in order, Mrs. Doyle. It's the way I do some of my thinking. It doesn't always seem like a very good way to other people.” He went on studying the floor. “Couple of weeks ago, you were just checking into the hotel and you saw a woman with a man, and you later identified the woman as the first victim of what they're calling the Bowery Butcher.” He raised his eyebrows. “Identified her correctly, as it turned out.” He sniffed again. “That got you a visit from two cops from the Murder Squad because you'd written to Commissioner Roosevelt about it.” He unwound his fingers and leaned his elbows on his knees and grasped his right wrist with his left thumb and forefinger, still not looking at her. “Then, I hear, you went to the morgue and tried to have a look at her there.” Now he looked up. His eyes were the pale blue of innocence, but they had finished with innocence a long time before.

“It isn't true that I tried to see the first victim at the morgue. I tried to see the
second
one. That's when you took me for the carriage ride.” She worked at making her voice bland. She looked at him and then away from him, settling on the oak filing cabinet behind him.

He said, “Sorry I got that wrong. I know better. What you did was, you got the sketch artist to verify that that was her in the newspaper.” He looked up. “One of my people talked to the sketch artist. Also the hotel Hawkshaw here, when he was telling me that he got the patrolman's notes for you. Which, by the way, was a crime—both you and him.”

“I didn't know that, and it seemed quite harmless.” Not quite true, of course.

“And then you managed to get into the morgue to look at the third victim. With the sketch artist again.” He waited. He said, “Looking at a corpse didn't bother you?”

“To the contrary, it upset me a great deal. But I don't faint, if that's what you mean.” She made herself concentrate on the paper labels in narrow brass holders on the fronts of the oak drawers—she thought that the top one, hard for her to read because of her eyesight, said “Registers.” Something of that length, at any rate.

“So you didn't actually see the first corpse, but you did verify that the newspaper sketch was accurate. You went to Printing House Square to make sure the sketch was accurate, and that's how you got to know the Fitch girl—right?”

“Yes.”

“
Then
there was the second murder, and you tried to have a look at
her
. And I was there and took you for a carriage ride.”

“What are you getting at, Detective-Sergeant?” She looked back at him, allowing the look to be a challenge, then quickly swinging back to the filing cabinet. The second drawer was labeled “Menus, [something] Dinners, [unreadable].”

“And then when Miz Fitch was murdered two days ago, you were the one who identified
her
.” He waited. He said, “You
kissed
her.” He looked at her but seemed to expect no comment. He got up and put his hands behind him and paced toward the far wall, where he looked at a photograph and turned back. “You were here to see the first victim; you try to see the second victim; you identify the third victim! Now, I have a question that you may find insulting, but I have to ask it. Does any of this have to do with your husband and the books he writes?”

It didn't insult her, because she believed he already knew that the answer would be no and would be truthful. She said, “I think you know it didn't.” She looked again at the file cabinet and the third drawer, which was labeled “History…” and narrowed her eyes and said to herself that she thought there was a dash and then “Plans” and then something else.

He rubbed his chin, used an index fingernail to part the hairs at the middle of his mustache. He looked at another picture and said, “You do admit that you seem to be at the center of a lot of this.”

“I'm not at the center of anything! I'm on the outside, trying to see in.”

“But you do understand that there aren't many women who will make two separate trips to look at pretty horrible corpses.”

“They were
women
. I wanted to know what had been done to them!”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? Why can't men understand that it's what this killer is doing to
women
that matters? He's debasing women, he's humiliating us, he's…he's…
erasing
us and turning us into something else. Sausages!”

“But what good does looking at the bodies do?”

She frowned. “It helps me to…reach them.” She said, “To understand what he represents.”

“What everybody says about this killer is that he's a maniac. He doesn't ‘represent' anything, does he?”

She didn't want to parrot Victoria Woodhull. She wanted it in her own words. “I want to understand whether he
represents
all of you.”

He frowned again. He looked at Cassidy. He looked back at Louisa. “
Men?
” He sounded astonished.

“You don't believe me.”

He didn't respond to that but sat again and put his elbow on the desk, the side of his head on that hand. “You said last night that this hotel is cursed. What'd you mean by that?”

“I suppose I meant Mr. Newcome's murder. Do you have a suspect yet?”

“We're looking.” He pursed his lips and stared at her. “You know that Newcome was what's called an ‘invert.'”

“I came to understand that, yes.”

“The likeliest explanation is that the fella he brought to the hotel killed him. It's pretty common. His pocketbook was gone, also the bureau drawers had been gone through, a box of cufflinks and studs.” He sighed as if it were depressing. To her surprise, he said, “I don't care for coincidence.” She must have shown her surprise, because he added, “You see a murder victim here; couple weeks later, man gets murdered here. Death's hotel, it sounds like.”

“And there's the French maid two years ago.”

“That was a disappearance.”

“So far as you know.”

“And not something that happened in the hotel.”

“So far as you know.”

“I remember that case. The doorman saw her leave the hotel; he never saw her go back in. Neither did anybody else.”

“The hotel's as porous as a colander, Detective-Sergeant. Look at Newcome and whoever it was who went in just before him. The French maid could have had a key to the workers' door, just like them.”

He nodded slowly. “You've been thinking about this a lot, haven't you.”

“I don't like coincidence, either.”

“You think there's something in the hotel?”

“I think that perhaps Newcome…recognized somebody when he was in the alley—when he looked inside. I think that you should entertain the idea that he was killed because he recognized somebody. Or is that simply a hysterical woman's idea?” She shook her head. She told him then about the noises in her room before she'd moved to the annex; then she told him about the missing drawers, but she said “garment.”

“By which I suppose you mean a lady's unmentionables, and if you didn't mean that, please correct me. No? Did you report it?”

“I mentioned it to somebody.”

“Who?”

“The hotel detective.”

Dunne snorted. “He didn't do anything about it, did he? He wouldn't—he'd know it wouldn't go anyplace. Well, I can see where a noise and a missing garment would worry you. Are you afraid here?”

She wanted to tell him that she was very afraid, that she was so frightened sometimes she couldn't sleep, but to do so would be to put herself with the believers in ghosts and Marie Corelli's archangels and Mrs. Simmons and her dog. Instead, she found herself telling him about the noises that the servants said they heard and what they thought they were.

“Is that what you're afraid of? Ghosts?”

“Of course not! But there's something
wrong
with the hotel.”

“Two deaths and a disappearance. That's hardly a record for New York hotels.”

“Three deaths. The architect.”

“I missed that one.”

“He's supposed to have jumped off the roof. Before the hotel was finished.”

Dunne got up and walked to one of the photographs. He looked at it very closely. After several seconds, he turned to Louisa and beckoned. “Look at this.”

She went to stand next to him. She could smell him, a mixture of tweed and man and a bit of pipe smoke. He said to her, “What d'you make of these pictures?” as if they were continuing some conversation that had been interrupted.

“I haven't seen them before. Oh!” She was slightly near sighted but could read the white letters in the lower right corner of the closest of them, “Carver Pittsburgh.” She stood, looked at several more. “Oh, this one must be of the hotel when it was being built, don't you think? It says ‘Carver New York.'”

“Most of them say that.” He was standing in front of one of the photographs signed “Carver Pittsburgh,” this one of an austere woman in a black dress of twenty years before. She looked as if she had never smiled. “His mother, d'you think?”