Winter at Death's Hotel (48 page)

Then Marie was running toward her, shouting, “Louisa,
ma
chère
—dear God, it's you!” A woman in a big hat was recoiling away from her. Two older women were leaning on each other and embracing. Another was trotting toward the room's the outer door. Louisa screamed, “It's the Butcher!” She turned and pushed the remains of the door closed on the ladder, seeing Galt's feet and legs as he came down.

“Help me!” she shouted at Marie. “Help me keep him out! Marie—!”

Galt pushed on the door from the other side and forced her back. She leaned her shoulder on it and reached back for the gun. Behind her, Marie was shouting something—“
La
table, la table!
”—and then Galt was pushing on the door and reaching through the opening, trying to find her with his hand. The hand touched her arm, clutched fabric; she recoiled, put her back against the door as her sleeve tore, and then she had the gun out and she put the gun forward until it was almost touching the groping hand and pulled the trigger.

Three women were carrying the library table toward her. They were all straining; the woman in the big hat had her eyebrows up and her eyes popping out, but it was she who panted, “Only a few feet more, girls—keep going, keep going…” and Louisa ducked aside as they smashed the oak table into the door. She helped to push the door closed; they leaned into it and moved it a few inches more.

The woman in the hat was piling a chair on the table. “Get the furniture—come on, girls, lend a hand…!”

Marie bent over Louisa. “How badly are you hurt?”

Louisa looked at her without understanding, then realized that she must look as ravaged as she felt. “Get Ethel to a doctor. He stabbed her breasts.”

“Oh,
mon
dieu
…”

Furniture was piling up on the table. Galt was still pushing at the door from the other side, and it bulged where Louisa had splintered it. She saw his bloody hand up there, and she pulled the trigger again, and then again and again, and at last she understood that the gun was empty and she had been hearing only metallic clicks, and she threw the gun at the door.

The woman in the hat had organized two of the women into a human bosun's chair by showing them how to hold on to each other's wrists and make a seat. They got Ethel on her feet and leaned her back into them, and that was the way Louisa saw her carried out, barely conscious between two women who were taking small steps and carrying all her weight.

“I need to get the police!”

“You need a doctor. What has he done to you?”

“Get
out
, Marie! Send for the police…”

Marie and another woman had formed another bosun's chair and Louisa found herself leaning back into it, her cane in her hand. Marie, scuttling toward the door with her, panted, “You left it somehow. I found it when I came in.” She raised her voice. “Get the door, someone! And lock it behind us. Everybody out! We have a murderer here!”

Louisa heard the door slam, and they carried her along the corridor to the lift. “Put me down, please.”

“You are hurt and exhausted, my dear.”

“The fire alarm!”

Next to every one of the hotel's elevators was a red box with a glass front and the legend “Break glass to warn of fire.” Louisa swung her cane. The glass broke with a satisfying noise, and she pulled down the lever inside. At once, bells began to clang. The other women looked startled, then disapproving. One of them said, “It says to do so only in an emergency.”

“This is an emergency.”

“But it isn't a
fire
emergency.”

Then the lift came, with its clashing gates.

The effects of the alarm had reached the lobby ahead of them: men and women were standing among the leather chairs, many with newspapers in their hands; half a dozen had gathered at Reception, where the panjandrum was using soothing tones to say there was no cause for panic. Carver the younger was in his office doorway, looking upward with an expression of the deepest anxiety, as if the still-ringing alarm meant that the sky was about to fall.

Louisa, driven now by a kind of mania, tore herself away from Marie and headed for Carver. At the same time, the front doors opened and Detective-Sergeant Dunne and Cassidy burst through. She heard Dunne shout over the sound of the alarm and the panicky guests, “Where's the fire at? How bad is it?”

But she focused on Carver. She screamed at him, “Galt is the Butcher!”

He seemed dazed. “It's a fire.”

“It isn't a fire, you fool! It's Galt—Galt is the Butcher! Galt is a murderer. Listen to me!
He's killed your father!
”

Her arm was grabbed; she was turned in a quarter-circle. Manion was there, his face contorted. “What happened?”

She pulled herself away and backed a step, raising her cane to keep him away. “It's Galt! He tried to rape me and he tortured Ethel and he's murdered three women—can't you understand?
He
kills
women!
”

Then Dunne was elbowing Manion out of the way. “Tell me, Mrs. Doyle.”

“The Butcher is upstairs! Is that enough sense for you? He tried to rape me, and he was going to kill me the way he's killed the others! He's got a room up there with jars of women's body parts in them, and he murdered old Carver and scalped him. You have to believe me, you fool!”

Dunne said to Cassidy, “Who's this Galt?”

“The old man's nurse.”

Dunne said, “Did we question him?”

“He seemed okay.”

People were pouring out of the lifts. Manion looked at them and started for the stairs to the mezzanine, his right hand inside his jacket where the bulge of his gun showed.

She screamed at Dunne. “He doesn't know about the tunnels! Galt will be in the tunnels.”

Dunne gave Cassidy a push. “Stop that damned fool! Manion! MANION!” Halfway up the marble stairs, Manion looked back. “You get back here! Nobody's going up there until I straighten this out. Dammit, Manion, if I have to come after you…!” But by that time, Cassidy had caught up with him, and he frogmarched Manion back as if he were a prisoner.

Dunne shouted at Manion, “You stand there until I want you!” and then reached to take Louisa's arm again; she shrank away, found herself being caught from behind by Marie Corelli. Dunne said, “Mrs. Doyle, what tunnels? Tell me what I am to do!”

“Don't touch me.”

Dunne looked as if he had been slapped. “All right, all right! How do you know this fella is the Butcher?”

“Because he has women's organs in jars and he has Minnie Fitch's face!”

Behind her, Marie, on whom she was leaning, feeling her big breasts and her belly against her back, shouted, “He tried to break into my room to kill this poor little thing!”

Dunne looked at the two of them. His eyes went back and forth. Then he whirled on Cassidy and said, “Get to the telegraph—it's right along there—call Mulberry, ask for—no, the Sixteenth Precinct first, get every man they got over here
now
. Don't use the Black Maria, tell them,
run
. Then telegraph Mulberry, tell them we may have the Butcher cornered in the New Britannic, I need everybody from every precinct from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-Eighth. And have them tell Roosevelt. Got it? Go!” He looked toward Reception. “And turn off that damned fire bell!”

“It isn't a matter of ‘may' have the Butcher,” Louisa said. “He's here! Or he was, while you were wasting time asking me stupid questions!” She turned her head to watch several firemen come through the front doors.

Dunne's voice was weary. “I have to have facts; I can't call out the whole police department because of your feelings.”

“I don't have any
feelings
.” She sagged against Marie. “Have you ever been dragged through a tunnel by a madman, Detective-Sergeant? Have you ever had somebody threaten to put a knife up inside you and turn it round and round? Have you ever had a man's hand feel up inside you! I've been put through hell, and you want
facts
.”

He took his hat off and swiped his forehead with a hand. “I can't make sense of it, Miz Doyle!”

She got her weight on her cane and pointed at a straight chair against the wall. She limped there and sat; Marie stood next to her, holding her left hand, formidable in her corseted armor. Dunne looked at them and apparently saw at last the proofs of what she had been through—the dangling manacle, the dirt on her hands and face, the tangle of her hair, the new bruises, the torn dress. He knelt but now had the sense not to put himself too close to her. “Tell me, Mrs. Doyle.”

She knew she was near hysteria. The word made her laugh at herself, the hated word, the foolish word. Her throat hurt from shouting. She couldn't focus. But she told him out of sequence what had happened and what she knew: the tunnels, the doors by the fireplaces, the peepholes. “Old Carver built it because he was a—”

“Peeping Tom, we know.”

Her voice was hoarse. “He photographed women. There are photographs on the walls of a room. I think it was his laboratory. Now Galt has it fitted up—” She choked and started to weep. “He had Ethel strapped on a table with a drain for the blood and he'd stabbed her in the, the…” She laid a hand over her own breast. “And he said how he was going to kill us while we watched each other.” She held up the manacle. “He was going to chain me to a pipe but I…shot him…” Her sobs whirled out of control.

“You shot him? You had a gun?”

“I…yes…in my pocket. I pulled the trigger and he was hurt, but not badly because he didn't fall down and I shot him again and broke one of his jars, it had a…a…a
uterus
in it and he screamed and I shot him in the back!” She looked at Dunne with haunted eyes. “But I didn't kill him. Perhaps you can't kill him. Perhaps he's…” She leaned her head on Marie's hip. “He chased us through the tunnels and I got to Marie's room and saw them and went down the hole where the door is and he was trying to get in overhead and I…” She held both hands up and mimed holding on to the hatch.

Marie smoothed her hair back and kissed her cheek. “It's all right, my love, it's all right.” She turned to Dunne. “She had to kick her way out—into my room, I mean—and then she was like a little typhoon, pushing the door and screaming, and he really did try to come out and get her, and she shot him again. In the arm. There was blood, I swear it. Then we put a very heavy piece of furniture against the door to keep him from getting into the room and we got out and pulled the fire box and came down here.”

He turned back to Louisa. “I can't get this about the tunnels into my head. There are tunnels in the
walls
? So he can go into the rooms?”

Louisa leaned her head back against the chair and told him again about the tunnels and which rooms had doors. She said, “If you go into the tunnels, Galt will kill you.” She looked at Dunne.

“We'll see about that.”

Then Cassidy came back and said he'd sent the telegrams, and he pointed at the bronze doors, where three policemen were coming through. “From the Sixteenth, I'll bet.” Cassidy waved at them. “Over here! Coppers over here!” But the crowd was too big and too noisy now. Cassidy said, “We're gonna have to deal with this crowd or it'll be hell.”

“You telegraphed Mulberry?”

“I did, and then I telephoned, too. They'll get the precincts. Roosevelt's at home; they're calling him. He's only a coupla blocks away.”

Dunne got up, his knees cracking. More policemen were coming through the door, looking belligerent and confused. Behind them, firemen in helmets and rubber coats were pushing their way in, as well. Dunne muttered, “Ah, Cripes, it's gonna be a complete combobberation!” He pushed his way to Reception and climbed up on the mahogany desk, the panjandrum looking shocked. Carver, now with a telephone earpiece in one hand and his eyes red, looked on from his office doorway. Dunne roared, “Quiet! Quiet down, the lot of you!” He had a parade-ground voice. Louisa flinched. “I'm Detective -Sergeant Dunne of the Municipal Police! There is no fire! You hear me good? There is no fire! You boys from the fire department, the hallways on this floor, if you will, but please in the name of Mary and the saints, don't start dragging hose in here!” He looked over the heads of the crowd at the scattered policemen. “I want every copper in this place to gather around me
now
! You and you and you—you hear me? Get it moving, then—now means now!” Dunne walked along the reception desk to get as close as he could to the guests. “All of you guests, I want you to stay down here in the lobby!
Don't go back to your rooms.
We want every guest out of his room and down here, is that clear?”

After the noise and chatter of earlier, it was weirdly silent. Louisa could hear a horse-tram going by in the street, even footsteps on the pavement. Dunne said, “We have reason to believe that there may be a dangerous criminal in the hotel.” The hubbub swelled up again; Dunne bellowed, “Quiet! We're going to search this building from stem to stern with a fine-tooth comb! We will arrest anybody we find above this floor! I don't care who you are or how famous you are, if you're above this floor of the hotel, I'm going to throw you in the lock-up and ask questions later!”

Louisa thought,
Galt
could
be
gone
by
now. They're taking too long. He's too clever for you
. She began to shake.

Dunne jumped down and headed back toward her, trailing a dozen uniformed policemen. He said to Cassidy, “Get armed men at every exit from the building, including the ones that go to that annex next door. There's back doors the help use and the little door on Fifth. If we're really dealing with the Butcher, we know he's a clever shicer and he's twisted our nose before, so
no
mistakes.
” He bent over Louisa. “Have you seen a doctor?”