“I want to see the lady you mentioned, Monsieur Nast,” Dupin interrupted forcefully. I was a little mystified at this, and I must have looked it. “Madame Roebling, I think the name was? The lady who builds this bridge.”
I tried to explain to him that we couldn’t just walk in on the Roeblings, but Dupin wasn’t having any of that. There’s a thing called a New York minute, and inside of one of those we were pulling up at the door of the Roebling house in midtown in another cab that Curtis was going to get all sore about paying for. And Dupin was explaining to some sour old curmudgeon in a spiffy black and silver livery that he was the godson of Colonel Maximilian Roebling-Lefevre of the Légion d’Honneur, and on that basis would be delighted to pay his respects to the lady of the house.
The curmudgeon went away and came back with a different face on. Mrs. Roebling would be delighted to see us in the morning room.
She didn’t look all that delighted, though. It was like walking in on a funeral, which I guess in one sense we were. Mrs. Roebling looked as pale as death, and though she rallied enough to greet us, she couldn’t find a whole lot to say.
“You’ll have to forgive me, gentlemen,” she said. “I–I’ve just had some very bad news. Twenty workers on one of our construction projects have died in the most tragic of circumstances. It appears that our working practices may be to blame. The caisson sickness has incapacitated a number of our masons and navigators, and laid my husband low. And now— now it seems it’s taken a score of men at a single stroke!”
She started in to crying at this, which was a distressing thing to see. I made the usual there, there noises, but Dupin surprised me — surprised both of us — by laughing. Not the belly laugh, this time, but a little snort like a steam kettle saying it’s ready. Mrs. Roebling gave him a startled look.
“Pray, sir,” she said, affronted, “what can you find in these awful facts to amuse you?”
Dupin made a dismissive gesture. “The facts, Madame,” he said, “the facts are not amusing at all. What is amusing is the refusal of all parties concerned to acknowledge them. You feel responsible for the deaths of these men?”
Mrs. Roebling blanched at the blunt question. “Why yes,” she said, “to some extent, I do.”
“Then calm yourself. You are not responsible at all, and I will prove it. But tell me, how was the news brought to you?”
“By a runner,” Mrs. Roebling said. “Sent by the foreman, Mr. O’Reilly, shortly after eight o’clock.”
“And then?”
“And then, hard on his heels, an attorney came from the mayor’s office to tell me that my building permits had been revoked. We now owe the city a great deal of money. We must pay for a full inspection, which will be expensive and onerous. There will be a fine, besides, for so serious a breach of safety regulations. And of course, compensation for the families of the dead men must also be found. I fear this may sink our project completely.”
Dupin glanced at me. “The mayor’s office?” he queried. Evidently I’d been appointed his personal perambulatory encyclopedia.
“253 Broadway,” I said. “Don’t tell me you want to go see the mayor, Dupin. It’s a long haul back the way we came, and a long haul west, and I let the cab go.”
Dupin didn’t seem to be listening. He’d turned his attention back to Mrs. Roebling again. “At what time, precisely, did these runners arrive?”
Mrs. Roebling couldn’t say — not precisely — but the butler (the gent in all the black and silver) was called and he knew the times to a nicety. See, that’s what I mean about clothes and moral seriousness. The runner from the works had arrived at 8.27, and the clerk from City Hall at 8.33.
Dupin absorbed this news in solemn silence, then turned to me again. There was a kind of a gleam in his eye. “I do not, Monsieur Nast, wish to see the mayor. But I think perhaps I would like to see the commissioner of police.”
Mrs. Roebling gasped. “Do you honestly believe, sir, that a crime has been committed?” she demanded, her face clouded with bewilderment.
“I believe, in fact,” Dupin said, “that several crimes have been committed. But I will not speak of things I cannot prove. Of this morning’s events, however, I can speak with absolute certainty. Those men were murdered, and the culprit is already known to you.” He turned to the lady again. “Madame,” he said, “I request you to remain here, and to ignore for the moment any communications from the mayor’s office or from city officials of whatever provenance. I will tell what I know, and we will see what we will see. But I assure you, you will pay for no inspections nor levies. The compensation, yes, since the men are dead and you would not wish to leave their families destitute. But that will be the limit of your exposure.”
We left the lady in a pretty confused state — and to be honest, I was more than a little consternated myself. Otherwise, I think I would have put up more resistance. But Dupin had the hang of summoning cabs now, and that was a terrible power to put in a Frenchman’s hands. He waved his cane like an orchestra conductor, and a two-horse rig rolled to a halt right in front of us. He was jumping up onto the running board even while I was explaining that this was a fool’s errand. I had no choice but to jump up after him.
“You can’t just walk into the police commissioner’s office and make wild assertions, Dupin,” I told him, in something of a panic. “Especially not in this city. It just won’t wash.”
“Pourquoi ça, Monsieur Nast?” Dupin snorted. “Why will it not wash?” He wasn’t even looking at me. He’d taken out a fancy silver pocket watch and was consulting it with a look of deep deliberation.
Where to begin? “Well, for starters, you’re not even armed.”
“But yes. I am armed with the truth.”
“Oh, jumping Jehoshaphat!”
I carried on remonstrating with him, because I kind of felt like it was incumbent on me to be the voice of reason. But there wasn’t any way of shifting him. I just got sucked along in his wake, and before I knew it we were walking up the steps of the police headquarters building.
Two officers standing up on the top step, like bouncers at the door of a bar room, looked us up and down and asked our business. Dupin was looking at his watch again, so I handled the introductions myself — with something of a sinking feeling in my stomach. I said we were from the Harper’s Weekly and we’d love to talk to Commissioner Smith and maybe sketch his portrait for the papers.
One of the cops led us inside, leaving the other one to take care of the business of looking tough and surly by himself for a while. We got some curious glances from the flatfoots sitting in the bullpen, and the officers in their little working cupboards. Dupin looked neither left nor right, but when we finally approached the commissioner’s door, he put on a turn of speed and got there first.
“See here,” our tutelary spirit said, “I got to announce you, is what.”
“I am the Chevalier Auguste Dupin,” the Frenchman declaimed, with fine contempt, “and I will announce myself.”
The door was already ajar. Dupin threw it wide with a thrust of his cane and walked inside. I followed him, into a fug of smoke chopped into lines of solid white and solid black by the sunlight filtering through the window blinds. It looked like the men in that room had put the sun in jail, almost. Had thrown it behind bars. A fanciful notion, obviously, but they were the men to do it, if such a thing could be done.
There were six of them, but I only saw four out of the gate. Police Commissioner Hank Smith, whose office this was, his doughy face overshadowed by a massive brow like the ledge over a cave. James Kelso, his superintendent, who looked like a cardinal of the Church of Rome, thinning hair swept back and thin lips pursed. Mayor Oakey Hall, with his pendulous, bifurcated mustache like the mandibles of a huge spider.