She sat in one of the lobby’s leather chairs and went back to the beginning of the article and read more slowly. Malone, shock, mangled (that was new), unidentified — aha! “Our reporter and our sketch artist penetrated to the bowels of the City Mortuary to actually see the body. (See sketch.) What they returned with is a once-beautiful face, rendered horrible by maniacal violence, but reconstructed by the specialists of the city morgue and our artist for the express purpose of aiding the authorities, in hopes that someone in the great public will recognize her. Our reporter adds that she was of middle stature and had luxuriant hair the color of a new-minted penny. Neither he nor our artist was able to see more than…”
New-minted penny. That meant copper. Copper-colored hair, not “flaming red,” therefore…
It was as if it had fallen on her from the ceiling. She remembered where she had seen the face.
It was the woman she had seen in the hotel when they had arrived. A woman who had been with a good-looking young man. A woman there for a tryst, the hotel detective bought off. The woman’s radiant smile. A lady of the night? A fallen flower? No, she didn’t believe that, wouldn’t believe that. And even if she was…?
Good God! She, Louisa Doyle, was the member of the great public who could identify the murder victim!
She was upstairs as fast she could push herself into a lift and cause the boy to make the thing go. She burst into their sitting room and shouted, “Arthur! Arthur!”
He was in a corner, working by the light from a window. His forehead was on his left hand; he barely moved when he said, “Not now, Louisa.”
“Arthur! I know who the murdered woman was!”
“Louisa, please! Tell me over dinner. Can’t you see I’m working?”
“But, Arthur—please. This is so important…”
“And what I’m doing is not, I suppose.” He threw his papers to the floor. “All right! Now that you’ve successfully interrupted me, what is it?”
“Oh — oh, I needn’t discuss it just now — I’m so sorry, my love—”
“Louisa, tell me.”
“No, you’re quite right; I was thoughtless.”
“You will drive me mad!” He showed her by pulling at his somewhat sparse hair. “Are you my wife or are you not?”
“Of course I’m your wife, Arthur.”
“Then I order you to tell me whatever nonsense you have to say about a murder! So that I can go back to work!”
She considered being angry, perhaps weeping. She was hurt, no doubt of that; on the other hand, he was the man and he had been working. She settled for a somewhat girlish chagrin and utter simplicity. “I found a picture of the murder victim in a newspaper. The murder in the Bowery that I told you about. I recognize her. I saw her in the hotel lobby yesterday.”
At least he didn’t ask her where she’d got the newspaper; she’d have had to lie again. Instead, he asked for details of the murder, which he’d quite forgotten; he asked to see the newspaper sketch; he asked her to explain why she remembered the woman. Then he tore the newspaper sketch to bits and told her that she was being utterly silly and he never wanted to hear about the matter again.
“I have a duty to report it.”
“Duty to whom? To report what? I forbid you to do such a thing.” His voice fell back to the level of a patient father’s explaining life to a child. “What you think you know about the woman is pure surmise. And what in the world do you know about trysts and assignations? You know nothing about why she was in the hotel; you know nothing about the man. In fact, your ‘recognizing’ her is pure female romancing and wouldn’t stand up in a court of law for ten seconds. Louisa, what can you be thinking of? I think you are exhausted and have overexcited yourself. Remember that you have been ill! Low fever can lead women to hysterical invention — you have woven an entire tapestry of cobwebs, my dove!” He took her hands and sat them both down. “My dearest wife, think how it would look if you went to the police with this tale. What would a sharp detective make of a perhaps non-existent encounter in a hotel lobby, and a newspaper hack’s sketch that could be any of a hundred thousand women in New York? My love, think!”
“You always say that police detectives are the stupidest men in the world.”
“Don’t throw my words back at me, Louisa! It’s not becoming to you. I ask you to think. Think of what it means if Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle tells the police she has a clue in a murder case. Do you know what the newspapers would call you? ‘Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.’ That’s what they’d call you. ‘Mrs. Sherlock Holmes Finds Novel Clue.’ Do you see? My dove?”
She drew her hands away. “You think I’m imagining things.”
“No, dove, no — you’re too bright and too much my shining star for such a thing! I mean you don’t have facts.”
And of course, he was right. She didn’t have any real facts, if by “facts” one meant something like the date of Magna Carta. “Of course you’re right, Arthur. Please forgive me for interrupting you.”
He kissed her. “You should always be able to interrupt me. I was rude and churlish to you. Forgive me?”
They kissed. He went back to work. She went into the bedroom.
But, dammit, that woman was the one I saw in the hotel lobby! I know what I saw!
A closed carriage assigned to Commissioner Roosevelt pulled up at a side entrance of the City Mortuary. Roosevelt was out the door before its wheels stopped grinding against the curb. He bustled across the pavement and yanked open the door as if he expected to make an arrest on the other side. “Well?” he bellowed.
“All clear.”
“You’re Cleary, are you?”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant Cleary. Murder Squad.” Cleary was a tall, sad-eyed man with black hair that stood up like a hog’s bristles. He was in fact the commander of the Murder Squad, and if he was offended because Roosevelt didn’t remember having met him twice before, he didn’t show it.
Roosevelt dropped his voice. “Harding’s in my carriage. Everybody’s out of the way?”
“All o’ them. The body’s been pulled out.”
“I want you to go ahead of us and make absolutely sure nobody will see him. Harding’s an eminent man.”
Cleary went off into the building, and Roosevelt did an about-face and marched back to his carriage and opened its door. Seconds later, a man stepped down, but he kept his shoulders hunched and his hat slightly raised and tipped so that it masked his face. The two men raced across the pavement, Roosevelt even faster than the other so that he could open the mortuary door.
They went through, then moved along a tiled corridor whose overhead electric bulbs seemed less to drive the dark away than to dilute it into some kind of gray-green soup. Both encountered, but neither acknowledged, a smell that was the odor of death: chemicals, rot. Roosevelt led the way toward Cleary, who waited at the far end; when they got close, Cleary vanished to their right. They followed; there was Cleary, holding a door; again he vanished; they hurried to the door, found a stairwell, Cleary at the bottom.
In the cellar, Cleary pointed at a chipped metal door.
The two men went through. On the other side was an enormous room with an arched ceiling. Seemingly far away, like something on a stage whose perspective has been manipulated, a table was covered with a white cloth whose undulations suggested a mountain range shaped like a female body.
Roosevelt led. Behind him, the other, no longer trying to hide his face, had straightened and revealed himself as a man of sixty or so with a deeply lined face and not much hair. Roosevelt reached the table. He grabbed a corner of the white cloth and, as if brutality were required, twitched it off so that a woman was revealed from her copper-colored hair down to the tops of her breasts.