She glared at him silently.
“There were two things that bothered me,” continued Roosevelt. “Why would these women let the Ripper approach them when they knew he was killing prostitutes in Whitechapel? They’d been warned repeatedly to watch out for strange men. But then I realized that you’re a trusted, even a necessary, member of the community. They were all looking for Jack, not Jane.
“The other thing I couldn’t figure out,” he said, “was how the Ripper could walk around in blood-spattered clothing without drawing everyone’s attention. I made the false assumption that the killer had picked the spots for his murders and hidden fresh clothing nearby.” Roosevelt grimaced. “I was wrong. Those murders were so deranged I should have known there couldn’t be anything premeditated about them. Then, when I was at Marie Kelly’s apartment tonight, I saw how you ripped out her intestines with your hands and I knew how much blood you had to have splashed on yourself, it occurred to me that I’ve never seen you when you weren’t wearing blood-stained clothes. After all, you do nothing all day but deliver babies and perform abortions; there’s nothing unusual about a midwife’s clothing being bloody.”
“So maybe a midwife killed all them women!” yelled Irma. “Do you know how many midwives there are in Whitechapel? Why pick on me?”
“That’s what’s been haunting me for six weeks,” answered Roosevelt. “I knew everything I had to know right after you killed Catherine Eddowes, and yet I couldn’t piece it together until I realized that a midwife was the likely killer. You made a major blunder, and it took me until tonight to realize what it was.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Irma, curiosity mingling with hatred on her chubby face.
“You told me you heard a woman scream, and then the Ripper knocked you over while he was escaping from the scene of the crime.”
“He did!” said Irma. “He come running out of the darkness and — ”
“You’re lying,” said Roosevelt. “I should have known it immediately.”
“It’s God’s own truth!”
He shook his head. “I found you on the ground less than a minute after we heard Catherine Eddowes scream. The Ripper knocked you down just before I got there, right?”
“Yeah, right.”
Roosevelt grinned in triumph. “That’s what I missed. It would have taken the Ripper five minutes or more to disembowel poor Catherine and arrange her innards on the ground the way he did. Surely she couldn’t have screamed four minutes into that. She was dead before he started.” The grin vanished. “That was you screaming. What better way to escape from the scene of a murder than to have a solicitous policeman escort you to a hospital? If there were any contradictions in your statements, we would write it off to hysteria. After all, you’d just come face to face with Jack the Ripper.”
She glared at him balefully.
“Before we put an end to this, perhaps you’ll tell me why you did it?”
“I told you before,” said the midwife. “I honor the commandments. They broke ‘em all! They were all sinners, and God told me to rid the world of ‘em!”
“Did God tell you to disembowel them, too?” asked Roosevelt. “Or was that your own idea?”
Suddenly a butcher knife appeared in her hand. She held it above her head, screamed something unintelligible, and leaped toward him. Roosevelt never flinched. He kept the pistol trained on her and pulled the trigger.
She fell backward, a new red blotch appearing on the front of her blood-stained dress.
She tried to get up, and he fired once more. This time she lay still.
My Dearest Edith:
Please destroy this letter after you have read it.
I have faked the symptoms of the malaria I contracted some years ago on a trip to the Everglades, and have been relieved of my unofficial duties here. I will be put aboard the next ship to America (quite possibly on a stretcher if you can imagine that!) and within a very few days I will once again be able to hold you and the children in my arms. And I’m pleased to see that Harrison defeated that fool Cleveland without my help.
My work here is done. I would have preferred to arrest the fiend, but I was given no choice in the matter. Jack the Ripper is no more.
If I make that fact public, two things will happen. First, I will probably be arrested for murder. Second (and actually more important, for no jury would convict me once they have heard my story), Whitechapel will remain a blight upon the face of England. Whereas a conversation I had a few days ago has convinced me that as long as the British authorities think the madman is still at large, they might do something positive about eradicating Whitechapel’s intolerable conditions. If that is so, then it may actually be serendipitous that only I (and now you) know that the Ripper is dead.
At least I hope that is the outcome. One would like to think that if one’s life didn’t count for much, at least one’s death did — and if Whitechapel can either be cleansed or razed to the ground, then perhaps, just perhaps, these five unfortunate women did not die totally in vain.
Your Theodore
Theodore Roosevelt returned to London 22 years later, in 1910, on the way home from the year-long safari that followed his Presidency.
Whitechapel remained unchanged.
1897:
Two Hunters in Manhattan
This is my most recent Roosevelt story. It was written for Darrell Schweitzer’s original anthology The True History of Vampires, and the conceit was to have real historical characters interact with vampires at various times and places.
Well, when it comes to real historical characters my first choice is always Teddy Roosevelt, and if there was a vampire in Manhattan in the mid-1890s, he was just the man to deal with it, as he was the city’s Police Commissioner from 1895 to 1897.
Things had not been going well for New York’s Commissioner of Police. He’d started like a house afire, cleaning up most of the more obvious crime within a year — but then he came to a stone wall. He’d never before met a problem that he couldn’t overcome by the sheer force of his will, but although he had conquered the political world, the literary world, and what was left of the Wild West, Theodore Roosevelt had to admit that after making a good start, his efforts to conquer the criminal elements of his city had come to a dead halt.
He’d insisted that every policeman go armed. In their first three shoot-outs with wanted criminals, they’d killed two bystanders, wounded seven more, and totally missed their targets.
So he’d made target practice mandatory. When the city’s budget couldn’t accommodate the extra time required, almost a quarter of the force quit rather than practice for free.
He’d begun sleeping days and wandering the more dangerous areas by night — but everyone knew that Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t a man to miss what he was aiming at, or to run away when confronted by superior numbers, so they just melted away when word went out (and it always went out) that he was on the prowl.
1896 drew to a close, and he realized he wasn’t much closer to achieving his goal then he’d been at the end of 1895. He seriously considered resigning. After all, he and Edith had four children now, he had two books on the bestseller list, he’d been offered a post as Chief Naturalist at the American Museum, and he’d hardly been able to spend any time at his beloved Sagamore Hill since accepting the post as Commissioner. But every time he thought about it, his chin jutted forward, he inadvertently bared his teeth in a cross between a humorless smile and a snarl, and he knew that he wasn’t going anywhere until the job was done. Americans didn’t quit when things got rough; that was when they showed the courage and sense of purpose that differentiated them from Europeans.