The Cutthroat Read online

  All three of the showmen noticed belatedly that the old man reeking of whiskey and nickel cigars had the crafty eyes of a seasoned police reporter with a nose for a big story. Or the cynicism to create one. “What I mean,” he said, “is that since you’ve been on tour, young girls have been getting murdered and mutilated. I’m curious whether the horror of these crimes has affected ticket sales?”

  “Why would it?” blurted Barrett. Buchanan tried to stay him with a gesture, which would have been futile if Isabella Cook had not laid her hand on his arm.

  “Well, you boys may be too young to remember, but when I was a young pup reporter in New York, Richard Mansfield’s Jekyll and Hyde company came back early from London with their tails between their legs. They had opened to wonderful reviews, as good as they got here. ‘The curtain fell upon a shock of silence,’ said the Telegraph, ‘followed by a roar of sympathetic applause.’ But then Jack the Ripper started murdering. Girl after girl, like is happening here. London audiences stopped buying tickets. As if they were saying, Too much blood in the street. Who wants to see it in the theater, too?”

  Buchanan said, “We’ve noted no falloff in bookings.”

  “No empty seats?”

  “None,” said Barrett, and the publicist finally got a hold on himself to claim, “The wraps are actually increasing.”

  The “wrap” was the money taken in at the box office, counted when the curtain went up, stacked in brick-size packs wrapped in paper, and delivered under armed guard to the Jekyll & Hyde Special’s steel safe, to be divvied up at prescribed intervals with the Deaver brothers.

  “Why do you suppose your ticket sales have not been affected yet?”

  “Audiences love the play,” said the publicist, “because it is a piece with class written all over it, and it has a great plot.”

  “What about Alias Jimmy Valentine?” asked Barrett.

  “What about it?”

  “Jimmy Valentine’s been dogging us in every city we’ve played. Why blame us? Why not blame them?”

  The wire-service man pounced with a cold smile. “Because Alias Jimmy Valentine doesn’t have murdered girls in its show.”

  “Nonsense,” said Buchanan.

  “Fact is, I hear in many quarters that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is jinxed.”

  “Nonsense,” said Barrett.

  “Add it up—Mr. Medick, the previous holder of the rights, tumbled to his death from a fire escape. Poor Miss Cook’s husband, the late Theatrical Syndicate booking trust magnate, Rufus S. Oppenheim, was blown to smithereens, along with his yacht, before you opened in New York. And now all these girls are getting murdered. Is there anything you would like to say to reassure audiences?”

  The other reporters had pencils poised.

  Buchanan stepped forward before Barrett could speak. “Yes. Please write that John Buchanan and Jackson Barrett hope that their play will offer audiences a respite from the cares of the world.”

  “Tell ’em it has an exciting plot,” said the publicist. “They’ll kick themselves if they fail to see it.”

  The reporter wrote down both answers, and turned to Barrett. “Mr. Barrett, have you anything to add?”

  “Our hearts go out to the poor women and their families who loved them, and we pray the killer is arrested very soon.”

  John Buchanan was red-faced and seething when he finally got Jackson Barrett alone in his Toledo dressing room. “Did you have to say that to that infernal reporter?”

  “Say what?”

  “‘Our hearts go out to the poor women and their families who loved them, and we pray the killer is arrested very soon.’”

  “Somebody had to say it.”

  “Did you hear what our publicist said? Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yes. That’s why I said what had to be said.”

  “You gave that reporter exactly what he wanted. You made a direct connection between those murders and our show. That story will dog us around the country, slashing sales just like Jack the Ripper did to Mansfield.”

  “Nonsense! We live in modern times,” said Jackson Barrett. “Jack the Ripper was a Victorian fiend. We don’t have fiends in the twentieth century. Our audiences will mob the box office for blood and gore.”

  “Is that a fact? Would you like to hear what that son of a bitch reporter said when he barged back into my private car after the others left?”

  “If it will make you happy, of course I would like to hear what he said. What did he say?”

  “He asked, ‘How will we answer a murder victim’s father and mother who claim that our Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde provoked her killing?’”

  “‘Provoked’? Ridiculous. It’s a play.”

  “‘Ridiculous’? Tell that to Richard Mansfield.”

  “Mansfield died in aught seven.”

  “I know that,” shouted Buchanan. “But in London, according to that bastard reporter, that was the main thing that killed Mansfield’s box office. People asked, did the play provoke Jack the Ripper?”

  “Absurd.”

  “I know it’s absurd. You know it’s absurd.”

  “That reporter knows it’s absurd.”

  “But what if ticket buyers don’t know it’s absurd? What if they blame us?” Buchanan sank in a chair and put his head in his hands. “We are sunk . . . Jackson, how in blazes can we get around this?”

  Barrett grinned the way he did whenever he came up with a big idea. “Tell you what. We have an airplane, right?”

  “What airplane?”

  “Flying over the stage. The one you said cost too much. Fortunately, I prevailed. Audiences love it.”

  “So what?”

  “So we paint an airplane red. We paint ‘Jekyll’ and ‘Hyde’ on the wings. We fly it over the city where we’re playing. A billboard in the sky.”

  “It’s not a real airplane. It’s a stage prop.”

  “We rent a real one that looks like ours. With an aviator to fly it.”

  “That would cost a fortune.”

  “We’ll save a fortune in billboard passes. Why give free tickets to shopkeepers who put our ads in their windows when we have a billboard in the sky?”

  Buchanan took a deep breath. A billboard in the sky was a bold idea. If the publicist could make hay with it, it might actually save them.

  “I know a pilot.”

  “Wire him!” said Barrett.

  “Her.”

  “Oh, one of your ladies?”

  “No, it’s not like that. She’s happily married, she has children, and I know her father.”

  “Ugly, too, I presume?”

  “Driver! Stop. Head for Chelsea.”

  Isaac Bell was on his way to Waterloo Station to take the boat train to Southampton Docks. Acting on sudden instinct, he ordered the cabby to make a detour.

  “Ain’t you got to get to your ship, guv?”

  “I’ll be quick, and triple your fare when you get me to the station on time.”

  Wayne Barlowe was working in his loft, putting finishing touches on the whale.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Slipped in the bath.”

  “Did you find Emily?”

  “She loved your sketch,” said Bell, and told him about Jack Spelvin. “Did you ever see Spelvin perform at Wilton’s?”

  “No.”

  “You’d remember his face if you had?”

  “Of course.”

  “I gave her your sketch. Could you make me another?”

  As happened on their last meeting, Barlowe’s hands flew without hesitation.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “Alive—barely. She seems to have landed in some sort of safe berth at the Salvation Army. How long she’ll stay there will depend on whether she goes back to the laudanum.”
r />   The sketch was in Bell’s hands in moments, a near replica of the first. He asked, “Could you draw another of him when he’s older? The way he’d look today, if he’s still alive.”

  “Are you assuming that Spelvin was not an innocent actor?”

  Bell said, “I have to consider every possibility. Including if Emily was not hallucinating, Spelvin was not innocent.”

  Barlowe hesitated. “I have to consider twenty years of variables, twenty years of events, that changed him. Drink, tobacco, illness, accident, grief.”

  “Joy,” said Bell. “If it is he, I doubt he feels grief.”

  “I’m asking you, is he Jack the Ripper?”

  “Draw him like he is the Ripper,” Bell said brusquely. “I want to see what he might look like now. Start with what people saw when he was young—bounding like a hare, handsome, angelic—and imagine he’s been lucky, no illness, no accidents, few disappointments.”

  Barlowe picked up his pencil reluctantly. He worked for a few minutes and handed Bell a sketch of a pleasant-looking, somewhat elegant man in his forties. The face lacked the eye-catching qualities of Jack Spelvin in his youth.

  Barlowe said, “It’s too general, Bell. Do you see what I mean? He could be anyone.”

  “You are too modest,” said Isaac Bell. “Far too modest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are an artist.”

  Barlowe had captured the face of a chameleon.

  Twenty-three years after the so-called Jack Spelvin mesmerized Emily, this man in his forties could indeed be anyone—almost invisible in one instant, bland in another, and striking in the next. A girl might not even notice him until he was ready to be noticed. She might see him as innocuous. Or harmless. Or intriguing. Or dazzling.

  He would choose.

  29

  The Cutthroat dipped an artist’s brush in a vial of spirit gum. He painted the adhesive on the lace backing of a gray mustache made of human hair. Then he dipped the brush again and coated the skin above his upper lip, exhaling through his nostrils to dispel the nauseating odor of alcohol and pine resin. To make the glue dry faster, he fanned it with an old souvenir program stolen the night that Mansfield’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opened its ill-fated London run at the Lyceum.

  He had carried it everywhere in his vagabond life and cherished the illustrations of scenes from the play. An ordinary paper program the theater gave away would have disintegrated years ago, but the souvenir was printed on strong silk. Though mottled from the oil on his fingertips, and drips of spirit gum, the colors had never faded. Every page transported him back to a haunting night of melodrama, mastery, and death.

  He tapped the brush handle to his lip. When it stuck to the spirit gum and lifted the skin, it was ready. He pressed the mustache to his lip and held it firmly. The coupling of gum to gum felt warm for a few moments and then it was on good and tight. He tested the mustache in the mirror with a gentle, fatherly smile. It flexed naturally.

  He grayed his hair, dabbing in pressed powder with a densely bristled goat-hair makeup brush. Old-fashioned gold wire-rimmed spectacles aged him further, while their tinted glass shielded the fire in his eyes. He worked a wedding ring on his finger; few married men wore a wedding ring, and the girls took it as a sign of extreme fidelity. His detachable shirt cuffs—instead of up-to-date sewn-on cotton—were as behind the times as his specs and made of stiff celluloid that protected his wrists from their fingernails.

  Before he stepped out into the night, he gazed upon the program cover.

  Richard Mansfield in

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  A Souvenir of the Lyceum Theatre

  Lessee and Manager, Mr. Henry Irving

  August 8, 1888

  The Cutthroat felt his heartbeat quicken. He had scrounged pennies for the cheapest seat in the back of the Lyceum. The play was a culmination of an obsession that had deepened nightly since he first feasted on the Robert Louis Stevenson novella and the lightning bolt of recognition that the story struck. It was an entirely new way to regard what every man knew in the darkest part of his heart. Everyone knew that good and evil resided in every man. Everyone knew he had to resist evil. Until Jekyll and Hyde promised what everyone wanted: the means to have both.

  There had been rumors of a play. An American actor was said to have bought dramatic rights from Stevenson. Then came word it had opened in New York to magnificent notices. London was next, and opening night from even the cheapest seat in the house was everything the Cutthroat had hoped for.

  And more. In Mansfield’s adaptation, Hyde attacked women as well as men. For the Cutthroat, everything he wanted fell into place. It took only a few short hours after the curtain fell for him to murder a woman who denied him. By a miracle and some good luck, he didn’t get caught. A cask of spoiled wine in the St. Katharine Docks storehouse, where he paid for his bed as the night watchman, preserved the body while he got rid of it in pieces.

  He would be more careful next time. He would plan. Savor. Anticipate. Returning to the theater repeatedly, he had prepared for that next time. Prostitutes were safest, he decided, the nature of their bargain being privacy. It was safer to kill them in their places, leave their bodies, and sleep safely in his own place. Three weeks later, he killed his first prostitute. Set off by the play, he let the demon in him come and go. In between, he led a blameless life. He was in every aspect Jekyll and Hyde. But unlike Jekyll, he needed no secret potion to become Hyde. The play was his potion.

  But suddenly he was punished. Returning to the Lyceum one evening, he found the theater dark and shuttered. The Mansfield play had failed, driven out of business by his own Jack the Ripper murders. The audience had dried up. Who wanted to watch a play about horror when the horror of real-life killings gripped London? He would wait three long years before he saw Jekyll and Hyde performed in New York.

  He tested the mustache with another smile, took one of the capes hidden under a false bottom in his trunk, and swirled it over his shoulders. He snatched up a walking stick and strode into the dark streets at a jaunty pace. When he saw her, fair-haired in the glow of a streetlamp, he slowed his pace and transformed the walking stick into an old man’s cane by the simple act of leaning on it.

  She looked him over, saw he was old and rich, and gave him a hopeful smile.

  “Would you tell me your name, miss?”

  30

  Isaac Bell had fired off two final cables to New York before he boarded his ship at Southampton. To his Cutthroat Squad:

  LUSITANIA

  PILOT BOAT

  To Grady Forrer in Research:

  MURDERED GIRLS

  MISSING GIRLS

  TRAVEL PATTERN

  Lusitania flashed past sail-driven pilot boats as she raced along the Fire Island coast at her twenty-five-knot service speed. Slowing at last for the first time since she put to sea at the Needles, the four-stack Cunard liner stopped beside the lightship Ambrose at the entrance to the channel. The steam-powered Sandy Hook pilot boat New York launched a heavily laden yawl in the lee of Lusitania’s cliff-like black hull. The yawl’s oarsman rowed to the ship. The harbor pilot climbed her rope and wood Jacob’s ladder.

  An agile quartet of Van Dorn detectives clambered after him. Lusitania’s assistant purser, as lavishly tipped as the pilot-boat crew, took them directly to Isaac Bell’s stateroom.

  “Grab a seat. The Cutthroat Squad has four uninterrupted hours, until the tugboats land us at 13th Street, to think out loud. I expect bright ideas to spark others.”

  Archie Abbott, Harry Warren, James Dashwood, and Helen Mills crowded onto chairs and the edge of the bed. Grady Forrer leaned quietly against the bureau. Bell paced.

  “The question is no longer whether Anna Waterbury’s murderer is Jack the Ripper. The question is how has he managed not to get caught for the twenty years he’s b
een murdering women in our country?”

  “But is he Jack the Ripper?” asked Harry Warren.

  “Here’s what he might look like if he is.”

  The ship’s photographer had made copies of Wayne Barlowe’s aged drawing. Bell passed them around.

  “This could be any gent in his forties,” said Archie Abbott.

  “A rather handsome ‘any gent,’” said Helen Mills. “Outstanding.”

  “But not unique.”

  “Looks like a grown-up altar boy,” said Harry Warren.

  “This eliminates men who look older and younger,” said Dashwood. “He’s not thirty. He’s not fifty.”

  “Why don’t we print these up like wanted posters?” asked Mills. “Warn street girls about a man who looks like this.”

  Isaac Bell thought of Wayne Barlowe, caught in a similar bind, refusing to draw the angelic and possibly innocent youth for the police posters, and second-guessing himself ever since. “No,” he said. “Archie’s right. This drawing could be many gents in their forties. If we print these up, we’ll get bullies forming lynch mobs and a bunch of innocents dancing from their necks.”

  “That’s a valid point,” said Helen. “But the girls he’s killing are innocent, too.”

  Bell said, “I’ll consider it after we isolate the city he’s operating in. Meantime, a better angle is to decipher the crescent shapes he carves in the bodies.”

  “Did the London Ripper do this to his girls?”

  “He cut symbols. But they were different. We need to know what his crescents mean.”

  “How come no one’s seen him attack?” asked Helen. “No one’s even heard a scream?”

  “Three reasons,” said Bell. “One, he’s a predator. That means he’s extraordinarily alert and aware of his surroundings. Probably the last time he had to run was the night when a con man named Davy Collins caught a glimpse of him in ’eighty-eight. Two, he never frightens his victim before he has complete control of her. He’s made an art of putting her at ease. Three, America is a big continent. When he arrived, he reckoned he’d never get caught if he kept moving around. If the Van Dorn Agency hadn’t been working up the Anna case, no one would have noticed the connection between her and Lillian Lent in Boston and Mary Beth Winthrop in Springfield. Fortunately, we are working the case, so the All Field Offices Alert turned up a slew of his killings. We know he’s still in business. We know what his victims look like. And I’m betting he looks something like this picture.”