MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER Page 4

  “Of course not, but—”

  “Then you agree that I must do what I can.”

  “You must do nothing, Caroline. I forbid you.”

  She lifted her chin. Not an Angel of the Hearth, MacKenzie thought, but a warrior princess from some ancient myth. He had admired her tremendously from the day he’d met her, and never more than at this moment.

  “Of course, what I can do is very little,” she went on as if she had not heard her brother’s last words, “compared to what you might accomplish. I—well, you know how people hate pushy, forward women. Agatha herself has often been accused of being forward, but really it is just her sense of mission that drives her. While I—well, I have never had much to be pushy about, have I?”

  “Fortunately,” Ames muttered.

  For a long moment she contemplated him. Then: “I really do think you should go to see Inspector Crippen.”

  “And tell him what?”

  “You don’t have to tell him anything. But you might ask how the case is progressing.”

  “And what about Cousin Wainwright?”

  “You probably won’t see him, but if you do, send him to me. I will deal with him.”

  Ames could not repress a smile. He was four years older than she; he could remember the day she’d been born. From that day, he had been brought up to care for her as a gentleman should care for his sister, to protect her, cherish her, keep her from all that was sordid and vile in the world. He had done so as well as he could. It was not his fault that she had inherited the family stubbornness and, worse, its stern New England conscience that sometimes prompted her to act rashly for what she considered good cause.

  “All right, Caroline.” He shook his head. “I will go to see Crippen, and for your sake as well as Miss Montgomery’s I will try not to antagonize him too greatly.”

  Half an hour later, Ames and MacKenzie made their way along Louisburg Square to Mt. Vernon Street and up Mt. Vernon to Joy. The rain had stopped during the night, but still the morning was damp and gray, the air filled with the sour salt smell of the sea. The redbrick town houses that lined the way, with their shining black or white doors, their brass door knockers, their shuttered windows, did not glow today as they did in the sun. The city had an air of grim expectation, as if it waited for the thaw to pass and winter to return.

  “He’ll be annoyed,” said Ames, lifting his hat to a woman passing.

  “I imagine he will,” MacKenzie replied. He had met Crippen the previous autumn and had not liked him—not least because the man had seemed to want to pay suit to Caroline Ames.

  “Still, Caroline is right,” Ames went on. They trod carefully along Joy Street, down the steeply sloping sidewalk that led to Beacon; the bricks were slick with the wet, and often uneven. “She is very loyal, my sister. And it is true that Agatha Montgomery has devoted her life to her flock over at the Bower. It is too bad that it might all come to nothing now because of some madman.”

  They came out to Boston Common, dull and dreary on this dull and dreary day, tall, leafless elms lining the walkways, the grass dead and brown and patched with soot-blackened snow. Few pedestrians were about. There was skating on the Frog Pond in winter, but now the ice had melted and signs were posted warning would-be skaters away. Beyond the treetops, the tall spire of the Park Street Church rose into the pale gray sky.

  They walked up the hill past the gold-domed redbrick State House, and down again past the forbidding brownstone exterior of the Boston Athenaeum. The morning traffic was heavy, carts and wagons and carriages and herdic-phaetons all jostling for passage. At the foot of Beacon Street, they had some difficulty, but then they were across, passing the oddly truncated King’s Chapel and mounting the broad granite steps of the ornate Second Empire City Hall, going through the tall oak double doors and entering the hushed, thrumming atmosphere of the city’s municipal offices.

  They went up to the second floor, down a corridor, and into Crippen’s lair.

  “Not in, sir,” said the young man guarding the inner office door.

  “Really?” said Ames. “And when might he be?”

  “Not for a while, I’m—”

  The door opened and Crippen appeared. “Davis, did you find— Ah! Mr. Ames!”

  He had been frowning at first, but now, seeing Ames, a smile spread over his ugly little face, and he held out his pudgy hand, its fingers stained with nicotine.

  “Good morning, Inspector.”

  “And to what do I owe this pleasure?” Crippen said, shaking Ames’s hand vigorously. He was short and plump, nattily dressed in a rather common way in a brown checkered suit, yellow vest, and a cravat in a particularly hideous shade of green. His watch chain, stretched across his paunch, looked as though it needed a few extra links. Although his clean-shaven face looked young, and was surprisingly unlined for a man in his position, his hair was gray.

  MacKenzie, understanding that their dislike was mutual, did not offer to shake Crippen’s hand.

  “I merely wanted a word,” said Ames.

  “Ah! A word! Come in, come in.” Crippen was all smiles, forgetting what he had been about to ask his clerk.

  MacKenzie followed Ames into the inspector’s crowded little office, and they seated themselves on rickety wooden chairs before the overladen desk.

  “It’s about these murders over in the South End,” Ames began, removing his hat and gloves and placing them on his knees.

  “The South End,” Crippen repeated.

  “Yes. The girls from Bertram’s Bower.”

  “Bertram’s Bower,” Crippen repeated.

  You are stalling, MacKenzie thought, and that means you have made no progress in the case.

  “A couple of Irish streetwalkers,” Crippen said. “I don’t see—”

  “The proprietress there is a great friend of my sister’s, and as you can imagine, she—Miss Montgomery—is extremely distressed.”

  Crippen pursed his lips. “And well she should be, Mr. Ames. Well she should be. But we’ll have the matter cleared up quick enough, seeing as how she’s got a likely suspect under her own roof, so to speak.”

  “You don’t say. Under her own roof?”

  “That’s right. Of course, we can’t make an arrest yet, haven’t got our case complete. But we have it well in hand, Mr. Ames. You can tell your sister I said so.” Suddenly, alarmingly, he leered at them; a revolting sight, MacKenzie thought. “And how is she? Recovering well?”

  “Perfectly well, thank you.”

  “I am going to call on her one of these days, you know.”

  “You are welcome at tea any afternoon, Inspector.”

  “Is that so? Well, now, I just might turn up sometime. You can tell her that too.”

  Ames cleared his throat. “About your suspect, Inspector?”

  “Ah. Yes. Well, we must bide our time a bit. He’ll come walking into our arms one of these days, and sooner rather than later, I should think.”

  “Indeed? But he must be some kind of madman, if the newspaper accounts were correct. Have you found the weapon?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Some kind of knife—”

  “Yes.”

  “There must have been a good deal of blood, from what I gathered from the account in the newspaper.”

  “Not really. There was severe mutilation of the lower abdomen, true enough, but—”

  “Like the first girl, the night before,” Ames interjected.

  Crippen frowned. “How did you know that? It wasn’t in the papers.”

  “As I told you, my sister is a friend of Miss Montgomery’s. She went to the Bower yesterday afternoon, as soon as she saw the news. How did you manage to keep it from the early editions, by the way?”

  Crippen grunted. “With difficulty, Mr. Ames. With difficulty. Those newspaper fellows would run over their own grandmothers to get a story ahead of the competition. Anyways, where was I?”

  “You were saying there wasn’t much blood. Because of the rain, I ta
ke it.”

  “Right. It was cats and dogs all night—and the night before as well. And besides, the fellow knew his business. He strangled ’em—garotted ’em—before he cut them up. So they didn’t bleed as much as they would have otherwise.”

  “And the knife was some kind of hunting knife, or fish fillet—?”

  “From what we can tell, in both cases it was a blade about one inch wide, six inches long. Probably a common kitchen knife. The Bower’s cook says just such a knife is missing.”

  “But no idea who might have taken it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And it would be easy to dispose of.”

  “That’s right. We searched the alleys thereabouts, and the train yards, but I doubt we’ll find it. My guess is, by now it’s at the bottom of the Charles.”

  “You have spoken to the residents of the Bower?”

  “Naturally. I myself interrogated a dozen—ah—females there, and my men questioned everyone else.”

  “And what did you conclude?”

  “Nothing, for the moment. These things take time. We don’t want to arrest the wrong person and have the right one get away, now, do we? I will tell you one thing, however. Mind, it’s strictly against the rules—but you say you are acquainted with Miss Montgomery? And her brother also, the Reverend Randolph Montgomery?”

  “Yes. You have questioned him?”

  “He was here earlier. He gave us some interesting information.”

  “About—”

  “About an Irish boy who works at the Bower.”

  “Oh? And what did he say?”

  “That it would be well to keep an eye on him, the Irish being what they are. And considering what the medical examiner has just put on my desk”—he lifted a sheet of paper and let it drop again onto its pile—“the Reverend Montgomery may be right.”

  “Why?”

  “One of those girls was in the family way.”

  “You don’t say. Which one?”

  “Mary Flaherty.”

  “The first one to be killed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How far along was she?”

  “About three months.”

  Ames thought for a moment. The police department’s medical examiner was a thorough, meticulous man, a swamp Yankee from Worcester. He’d been with the department for nearly twenty years, and Ames knew the police took some pride in the fact that Boston had been one of the first cities in America to have its own forensic physician. “That is, of course, very interesting,” he said, “and in a way it might simplify the case.”

  “Precisely.”

  “You suspect the Irish boy was—ah—intimate with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any information about her other than that she was a resident of the Bower? Anything about her family?”

  “No. Most of them are from out of town, those—ah—women. They have no family here.”

  “Well, then, what about her friendship with the second girl—Bridget Brown?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They were roommates.”

  “I know that.”

  MacKenzie detected a note of irritation in the inspector’s voice, as if he thought Ames was wasting his time by giving him information that he already had.

  “My men are right on top of this case,” Crippen went on, “but even so, we have a good deal to see to otherwise. That North End gang, for instance. We’ve been tailing them for the past three years. They don’t know it, but they are about to be brought to heel.”

  “I am glad to hear it,” Ames replied easily, and, in an aside to MacKenzie: “The inspector refers to a gang of roughnecks, Irish boys. What do they call themselves, Inspector? The Copp’s Hill Boys? Yes. They are a scourge upon the city, and we will be well rid of them. They have nothing to do with this case—right, Inspector?—but still, we will be happy to see them gone, once and for all.”

  Not for the first time, MacKenzie noted that when Ames spoke of Boston, he did so in a proprietary way, as if the city were his own personal responsibility, as if it needed him to tend to it, to keep it running smoothly. It was not surprising, he reflected, given that Ames’s ancestors had been among the first settlers of the place, centuries ago, when they’d come over on the Arbella with John Winthrop. Caroline had told him that an Ames had lived in Boston ever since, and had been able to show him on a map exactly where.

  “But to come back to the Bower,” Ames went on. “The second victim—Bridget Brown—was not—ah—in a similar condition?”

  “No.”

  “But killed in the same way.”

  “That’s right. Garotted, then cut up.”

  “Were there signs of a struggle?”

  “Now, that’s an odd thing, Mr. Ames. No sign at all. She was lying in a puddle—the drains in those alleys aren’t kept as clean as they should be—but flat out on her back.”

  “And what do you make of that?”

  “That she was killed elsewhere and dumped in the alley.”

  “I see.”

  “Usually in violent killings like these, you get some indication that the victim tried to defend herself. Superficial wounds on the hands and arms, and so forth. But since they were both strangled first, we didn’t have that here.”

  “And what do you deduce from that?”

  “Hard to say. I remember four or five years ago—not my case—a woman killed her husband over in the West End. Big brute of a thing, he was. She got him quiet by using chloroform on him first, to put him unconscious before she finished him off.”

  “And did you find any trace of chloroform on either of these girls?”

  “No. But it’s hard to find that anyway. It evaporates quickly, leaves no trace. And with all the rain to wash it away—but it’s a possibility. ’Course, since he strangled ’em, he didn’t need to chloroform ’em as well, did he?”

  “It would seem not,” Ames said. He stood up. “You have been very helpful, Inspector. We will not take up any more of your valuable time—”

  “Wait!” Crippen exclaimed. “I almost forgot. One more thing. Have a look at this. If you hadn’t come in, I’d have brought it around to you myself.”

  He pulled out a drawer from the oak file cabinet behind him and extracted something. Handing it to Ames across the desk, he said, “Damned strange, isn’t it?”

  It was a sheet of rough paper, creased where it had been folded. Upon it were pasted cut-out, printed letters. Ames read:

  VPZRYPMOHJYROHJYDJSTQYRAAMPPMR

  “Well?” said Crippen impatiently. “What do you make of it?”

  “Nothing, for the moment,” Ames replied, handing the paper to MacKenzie. “What is its provenance?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I mean, where did you find it?”

  “Oh! Yes, that’s important. We found it on Mary Flaherty.”

  “Ah. She was clutching it?” But no, he thought, the rain would have disintegrated it.

  “In the pocket of her skirt.”

  “And you have put your cryptanalysts right onto it, I assume?”

  Crippen threw him a disdainful glance. “There’s no money in the budget for cryptanalysts, Mr. Ames. That’s why I thought you might like to have a look at it. You told me once that a lot of your friends over the river know strange languages. I thought perhaps you might recognize this, or that one of them might.”

  “That is possible,” said Ames. “I will certainly have a go at it.” He took out his small Morocco leather notebook and, retrieving the paper from MacKenzie, copied the letters.

  “And if you can make anything of it—” Crippen said.

  “Certainly, Inspector. I will notify you at once. I have your permission to show this to Professor Harbinger? He is a brilliant linguist, among his other talents.”

  “Does he know Gaelic?”

  “Gaelic? I don’t know. Why? Ah! The Irish connection.”

  “That’s right. Well, see what you can do with it, i
n any case. If it isn’t Gaelic, it may not be of any use to us.”

  A short while later, on Newspaper Row at the foot of School Street, Ames and MacKenzie walked along until they came to a narrow doorway that gave onto a steep flight of stairs. At the top, down a corridor, Ames opened a door whose lettering announced the BOSTON LITERARY JOURNAL. MacKenzie knew the place, had been here before: It was the office of Ames’s good friend, the proprietor of the publication, Desmond Delahanty.

  “Desmond!” Ames exclaimed as they went in. They were in a small, cluttered office with every surface piled high with papers that looked like manuscripts. Behind a desk, one foot slung on its littered surface, sat a man with very red hair worn long over his collar, and a mustache whose ends drooped down near his jawline.

  “Ames!” Delahanty replied, equally enthusiastic. He rose, threw down whatever it was he’d been reading, and held out his hand. “And Dr. MacKenzie—good to see you.”

  He was slightly shorter than Ames but equally thin, with bright blue eyes, an Irishman’s beguiling smile, and a brogue to match. MacKenzie had known Irishmen in the army, but never one so charming.

  “What brings you slumming?” Delahanty said with a grin. “D’you want to make me a present of some literary endeavor?”

  Ames snorted. “Hardly. I want to exploit you, Desmond—and your connections.”

  “My connections?” Delahanty looked around in mock puzzlement. “And what might those be?”

  Ames did not reply at once. He picked up a neatly bound periodical from one of the tables and waved it at his friend. “The new issue?”

  “Dummy copy. And only a month late.”

  “Anything good in it?” Ames was a subscriber; every now and again he found something interesting.

  “A story by a young lady that isn’t bad.”

  “Not the young lady with the illegible handwriting?” Ames said, smiling. Delahanty was often besieged by hopeful scribblers, male and female alike, whose persistence mounted in inverse ratio to their literary talents.

  “No.” Delahanty rolled his eyes. “I haven’t seen her since before Christmas, thank God. I think I finally managed to discourage her. Told her to take up some other interest, like decoupage or Berlin needlework.”