“Newsstand right next to the hotel, madame — out the entrance and turn to the left.”
“Oh, thank you. Oh, I didn’t bring a hat.” She said it to herself, but he heard it and immediately rang a different bell for a boy — like most of the “boys” old enough to be her father — and said to him, “Tell the kitchen tea for Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle, now—will that be tea here or in the room, Mrs., um, Conan Doyle? — here, then. Then come right back and hop it next door to get her a newspaper; she’ll tell you which one.” He gave her a smile to tell her what a fine job he’d done of passing on her commands.
She had to wait only seconds while the boy trotted somewhere in back and shouted “One tea now!” in a voice she could hear: the ground floor of the hotel was not to be congratulated for its quiet, then. And he was back, asking which paper.
“Oh, something, mmm, masculine. I should think something…” She was going to say “literary,” but the boy said, “Sporting, I’m on it,” and he was gone. Then he was back, she handed over a coin, and then she was seated in a leather armchair at one of the tables in the lobby holding a folded sheet of pink newsprint with POLICE GAZETTE across it in highly decorative, in fact vulgar, letters. Below that it said, EXTRA EDITION, the letters only slightly smaller, a jot more tasteful, and then in huge black type MURDERED AND DISFIGURED WOMAN’S CORPSE FOUND UNCLOTHED IN BOWERY ALLEY.
Tea, toast, something called gooseberry jelly, and milk and sugar were put down in front of her.
“Good heavens!”
“Ma’am?”
“Oh? Nothing. Oh, thank you.” A young woman was trying to spread a serviette over her lap.
“We got coffee, too. Just ast.”
“Yes, thank you, thank you so much.”
She turned the pink page. There was an engraving of a woman lying in what could have been taken for an alley — something cylindrical might have been meant as an ashcan — but the woman was fully clothed. There was also a smaller engraving of a decrepit building and another next to it with a large sign that said “Bar,” under it the caption, “A Scene in the Bowery.” The rest of the page was type:
“Worst Thing I ever Saw” Says Policeman Veteran of Thirty Years “She Shone in the Light of My Dark Lamp Like Marble”
One of the most hideous crimes in the history of that hideous place, the Bowery, literally came to light yesternight when a policeman’s dark lantern picked out its disgusting lineaments from the gloom of an offal-strewn alley off Elizabeth Street. Making his rounds as was his wont, this grizzled veteran of three decades on the force, Patrolman James Malone, said to the Gazette of his awful discovery, “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I never knew that human hand could be so cruel. This is the work of a fiend.”
The unfortunate victim, undoubtedly a lady of the pavement who chose her Lothario neither wisely nor well, was mutilated in ways not fit to be described in print, nor will we stoop to give words to the disfigurement of a once-pretty visage. With flaming red hair and a statuesque physique, this broken blossom met her Destiny at the hands of a man — dare we say that word, man, for one so heartless? — whose savage use of the knife surpasses the worst excesses of such grisly legends as Geronimo and Bluebeard.
Readers of the Gazette will recall the murder a few years back of another fallen female, one who called herself “Shakespeare” for her ability to quote at length from the Bard. We recall the ravaging of her body and cannot but wonder if a similar — nay, perhaps the same! — hand was busy here.
The Municipal Police are hard at work on the apprehension of the perpetrator of this atrocity before — it must be said — he might strike again. A member of the Murder Squad who must remain nameless told us that their eyes are turned toward the docks. “This bears the marks of a foreign, probably an Oriental, mind. The knife may well have been one of those with a curved blade called the kris or the kukree.”
Officer Malone hinted that the victim was unclothed when found. More terribly, she seems to have been arranged deliberately in a place and posture that would emphasize the horror of her death. Although neither Officer Malone nor his superiors could speak to us in detail at the time of going to press, citing public safety and the strict moral code insisted on by Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, we were able to infer from the small amount of blood noted by Officer Malone that the unknown woman was murdered elsewhere and brought to the place where she was found. The means of conveying her there is unknown, as of course is the identity of the person who did it.
We will say, after our long familiarity with the police and with crime, that neither the location nor the final position of the victim was accidental. This poor creature was not “dumped” in the alley. What the policeman found when first he looked with his dark lantern was deliberate.
It showed forethought and it showed a mad intelligence of the foulest kind.
What has been let loose among us?
On the facing page was a large photograph of a buxom young woman in what appeared to be a corset with a lot of frou-frou above the bosom — perhaps what was called a Merry Widow — and tights. And a large hat. Louisa was bewildered: was this the victim before the murder? No; a caption said, “The Lovely Miss Adelaide Keecher, now Singing ‘When I Take You to My Heart’ at Tony Pastor’s Theatre on Fourteenth Street at Third Avenue. She’s a peach!”
The only remaining page, the verso of the lovely Miss Keecher, was all advertisements — for pills of several sorts (“Men’s Romantic Failure Cured!”), corsets (illustrated), pistols by mail, practical jokes (The Flatulence Pillow, The Drip Glass, The Rubber Snake), books on dreams, Masonic conspiracies, the Rosicrucians, Hindoo love secrets.
How extraordinary!
She looked again at the first page, then at each of the four; then she went back to the account of the murder and read it again. As perhaps was intended, she got more questions than answers from it: What sort of mutilation? What “disfigurement”? What was that about “posture”—was the dead woman standing up somehow? Why did the policeman say it was the worst thing he’d ever seen? He was a policeman; surely he saw ugly things often — wasn’t that what the police were for, to serve as barriers between the ugliness of life and decent people?
She dawdled more than an hour away, thinking these thoughts, watching the first people drift into the lobby, then into the restaurant. She had all the time in the world, she thought. A great luxury.
She had some notion what the Bowery was. There was a song about it; she couldn’t remember it, but she knew there was a song. And there was something in her guidebook, she thought, probably a mention in the section called “Areas of New York City to be avoided.”
Murder was hardly surprising to her. She had followed the Ripper murders in London several years before; so had everybody, she supposed. And her husband, after all, had dealt at second hand with murder and all sorts of crimes; they were what had made Sherlock Holmes go. But this murder, she found, disturbed and fascinated her. Perhaps it was its happening on her first day in New York. Or her first night, more precisely. It seemed foolish to be distressed by the murder of a prostitute (and of course she knew what prostitutes were; she hadn’t been raised in a convent, after all). Nothing could be further apart than her night, in the arms of her husband in a luxurious hotel, and that of the woman who had been killed and mutilated (how?) and disfigured (how?)