That had been very nice. It made up for his reprimand about the lobby and the Gazette, which of course she knew was trash and which of course she’d been ashamed to have the detective see her carrying, so of course Arthur had been right.
Still, she wanted to know more about that murder.
She and Ethel took all her clothes out of the trunks and shook them out and hung them up to get the wrinkles out, although the clothes would all have to go back the next day because they’d be leaving. She and Ethel gossiped; she told Ethel about the murder. Ethel seemed to be frightened and said she would never go out of the hotel’s doors again until they were headed to the train. “Better to be safe than sorry.”
Louisa didn’t see what there was to be frightened of. Ethel was not, after all, a lady of the pavement, and Louisa thought uncharitably (and, she admitted to herself, perhaps inaccurately) that murderous fiends surely preyed on better-looking women than Ethel.
Arthur had come back rather late from his luncheon with his publishers, and then he had rested (she had thought he was just a bit tipsy) and now he was working on his lecture. It appeared that the real purpose of the luncheon had been to tell him that although it was perfectly fine to talk about the future of the novel, what people really wanted to hear from him was what Sherlock Holmes ate for breakfast, so he had to spice up his talk with some Holmesiana. This had caused Arthur to wake in a foul mood and with a headache, as he looked upon Sherlock Holmes and what he called “detective stories” as an unfortunate means to the end of writing “real” books, and, very much to that point, he had killed Holmes off and hoped to have nothing more to do with him.
Louisa got out on the pretext of taking Ethel with her to have a little walk. His last words were, “No farther west than Broadway or east than Fifth Avenue! Mind, Louisa…!”
Now, without Ethel, she went out into the pale sunshine of Twenty-Third Street, where the noise of the city was as abrupt and surprising as a blow. Hack drivers were shouting at each other; carriages were going by; horses’ hooves and wheels hammered and ground the pavement; workmen with trash barrels on wheels were sweeping dung and trash and slamming it into their barrels; men and women were almost trotting along the pavements, their shoes clicking like watchmen’s rattles.
She turned left, as much to go with the stream of the nearest walkers as because she had any destination that way. She had thought she might walk to Broadway (and beyond?) and have a peek at it: she was after all a married woman and so entitled to a little independence. Ethel had walked about; why couldn’t she? She got, however, no farther than the newsstand at the corner of the hotel.
The afternoon newspapers were lying in piles in front of the stand, which was only a small wooden structure with a front that opened outward to make two wings that were festooned with magazines. Inside, a wizened man was watching as people threw down coins and snatched up newspapers. He grabbed the coins and dumped them into a shallow canvas apron. If he had to make change, a hand dove into one of the apron’s pockets and distributed pennies as if he were planting seeds.
Louisa found that she was hoping to see another “extra” of the Police Gazette, but she didn’t see its pink newsprint anywhere. She had a bad feeling that in fact she would have to ask for it, and the wizened man would produce it from somewhere under the stand’s narrow counter. Is that what the boy had done that morning? Gimme a Gazette, will ya, Jimmy? With a wink? How sordid. And yet, how thrilling.
She tried to stand in the middle of the pavement to look at the various newspapers, but she immediately became an obstacle to the city’s foot traffic. She moved closer and got in the way of the newspaper buyers. She tried to stand at one end of the piles of newspapers, and the wizened man looked at her between wary glances at the coins the customers were tossing down — a sidelong look at her, a glance at the newspapers; a look at her, a look toward the piles. After some seconds, he said, “Djou want somet’ing er dontcha?”
“I was…looking for a newspaper.”
“Jeez Cripes, whyntcha try a newsstand?” He was interrupted by somebody who was making off with a newspaper of great value: “Hey, dat dere’s fi’ cents not t’ree. Hey, you—!”
The man had got only a step away. He looked a perfectly respectable businessman to Louisa, but the newsstand operator talked to him as if he were a criminal. “Djou want me to call a cop? You t’ink ya can steal da bread off my plate? Dat’s two more cents, Alfonse, or it’s da Tombs fer yous!”
“I’m sorry!”
“Hey, sorry don’t bring my two cents back! Fork it over!”
“I thought it was a three-cent paper!” Both men were shouting now.
“Where ya from, Cleveland? Go on!”
Two more pennies were thrown down on the counter; the wizened man shouted another insult; but Louisa missed all this. She had just seen a newspaper lifted from a pile, already falling half open in a practiced hand that was swinging it up to read as he walked. She saw “murder” and “horrible” and a sketch of a woman’s face. Was it the same crime? Would it tell her exactly what had happened to this woman? (And did she want to know exactly?)
“I’d like this one, please.”
“So take it. Gimme t’ree cents — dey’re da little ones, not like da big pennies you got back home, right, Limey? Am I right?” He laughed, showing desperate teeth. She opened the paper and tried to read and he shouted, “Get outta the way, lady — where djou t’ink you are, Bucking-ham Castle?”
Blushing, she moved quickly toward the shelter of the hotel, feeling embarrassed and bruised. How Arthur would have scolded the man if he’d been there! But better he wasn’t, better by far; bad enough that she’d gone out into the street alone, and then to be scolded in public! And yet there was something about it…like seeing the hotel detective…something—vibrant.
She slowed as she approached the hotel’s awning. She held the newspaper so she could read. There were the sketch and the article. “Woman’s Mutilated Corpse Found.”
Her attention was caught by the sketch. Her first thought was that there was no disfigurement; the Police Gazette must have had that wrong. Her second was that the conventionally pretty face looked familiar. But from where? Then she thought it was from a hundred similar newspaper sketches “by our artist,” the face in fact the fashionable face of the moment, almost an abstraction of the idea of prettiness.
She was walking slowly. She stubbed her toe on the low stone step of the hotel, caught herself, thought as usual how clumsy she was, turned into the doors that were opened in front of her by a doorman, and passed into the lobby with a copy of the New York Express held up in front of her as if she were trying to hide.
“In the darkest hours of the morning, a grisly discovery was made by…” Well yes, she already knew that. And she knew Officer Malone and his years on the force. “Unspeakable outrages were wrought on the body of this poor creature…” That was more like it, but as she read on she saw that there was no more detail than there had been in the Gazette’s extra. “Lady of the evening as she may have been, the unidentified victim…” That was no help.
She turned to page five and read on, but the story seemed to be structured on some principle of diminishing returns: the farther she got into it, the less there was. The beginning was sensation; the end was gas: “The Metropolitan Police are working on the matter and hope to make an arrest soon.”