“You’re gonna learn—stay outta people’s businesses.”
The tallest made two mistakes. He forged ahead of the others and he lowered one hand to reach for his blackjack. Bell took advantage with a one-two combination that knocked the gangster to the pavement. Guard up—left hand and forearm protecting his chin and gut, right positioned to slough off a punch or throw his own—he bloodied a nose with a lightning jab and back-stepped as fast as he had waded in.
“Last chance, boys. Out of my way.”
The short guy laughed. He thrust out his hand with a sharp twist and his blackjack slid from his sleeve into his palm. “Last chance? Gonna fight three of us?”
“Not while wearing my best suit.”
Bell flared open his coat, revealing the use-polished grips of the Colt automatic in his shoulder holster. “I will shoot two and fight the last man standing.”
Isaac Bell headed to the Bellevue Hospital morgue late the following afternoon, where he showed Anna’s photograph to a recently appointed assistant coroner.
“I have no Anna Pape. And no Anna Waterbury.”
“Any unknowns?” Bell asked.
The new assistant was working hard to modernize the obsolete institution that had been run for too many years by a commission of elected, often unqualified, and occasionally corrupt coroners. Improvements included making a record of the dead with photographs. He flipped through the file pages, and Bell agreed when he said, “No kids like this one—funny you should ask, though. We might have a younger woman coming in later. Sounded like a murder. One of the bosses went over himself.”
“Where?”
“In the Tenderloin.”
Bell asked for the address, caught the trolley across 34th Street, and strode swiftly down Eighth Avenue to West 29th Street. Captain Mike Coligney was standing outside a run-down building of flats. He was talking to a coroner Bell did not know personally and ignoring shouted questions from newspaper reporters held at bay by uniformed cops. Bell walked past, exchanged a private glance with Coligney, and waited half a block away until the official drove off in a Marmon.
Coligney greeted him gravely. “Sorry, Isaac, she could be your girl.”
“Who found her?”
“The actor who lives here claims he came home from a month in the Midwest. He swears he didn’t know her. We’re holding him while we check, but it looks fairly certain he only left Pittsburgh this morning—the show he was in got canceled. She’s been dead at least a day.”
The reporters’ shouts grew insistent. At an imperious glance from Coligney, his cops herded them farther down the street. He said to Bell, “I have six daughters. I won’t have salacious speculation about a child from a good home. It’s not that she was some unfortunate streetwalker.”
“Did the neighbors hear anything?” Bell asked.
“Not in the flat. Not in the hallway. Not in the lobby. We’re guessing she came under her own steam. In which case, she knew her killer.”
“Unless she was carried in.”
“We’ve got no witnesses to that. No, it looks personal. Vicious. Jealous rage.”
“May I see her?” asked Bell.
Coligney hesitated. Bell said, “A fresh pair of eyes can only help.”
“You’ll write me a report.”
“Of course. Thanks, Mike.”
Coligney raised a cautioning hand. “I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything. But just so you know before you go in there, Isaac. She’s really been carved up.”
5
Isaac Bell stood still and catalogued the location and
condition of everything in the room. Personal possessions—Shakespeare plays on a shelf by an easy chair; busts and engravings of the actors Booth, Mansfield, Irving, and Jefferson; photographs of leading ladies, signed and framed; and a glass box stacked with programs—confirmed the actor’s alibi as much as the punched train ticket he had shown Captain Coligney’s detectives. It was more a home than a rented room, and it had been left neat as a pin, drapes drawn, bed made, wardrobe closed. Dust thinly layered tabletops, and a spiderweb linked the busts, but a landlady or a neighbor must have watered the house plant, a healthy geranium, during the month he was away. The windows were shut tight, and Bell guessed the air would smell musty if it weren’t for the blood scent that lingered. He made a mental note that the killer had known the place was empty. The actor was lucky his show hadn’t closed a day earlier or he’d be dead, too.
She was on the bed, on her back, still half in her overcoat. Her hands were positioned at her sides, open, one in a glove, the other bare. Her palms bore no cuts. She had not fended off the knife. Her face, too, was unmarked, neither cut nor bruised. But it was swollen, and her skin was tinged blue. With her cheeks rounded in death, she looked remarkably similar to the cherubic photograph taken when she was fifteen.