The Cutthroat Read online

  Bell was inclined to concur with the cops that she had come to the flat voluntarily, but less inclined to assume it was for a tryst. Even discounting for a doting father’s blindness, he thought that Anna’s age, her sheltered upbringing, and a passion to succeed in the theater all suggested an innocent girl unlikely to strike up a liaison so soon after leaving home.

  The cops had put great weight on the viciousness of the assault, characterizing it as the rage of jealousy. Or the anger of rejection, thought Bell. He was thinking she could have been lured to the apartment under a pretext that had nothing to do with a tryst. But he was painfully aware that when it fell to him to report to her father his daughter’s fate, he wanted to soften the blow, no matter how slightly.

  If only, he thought, I had found her in time.

  “Stop right there,” said Captain Coligney when he saw the expression on Isaac Bell’s face. He raised a big hand that would have halted a freight wagon. Bell pounded down the front steps and brushed past him, heading for Broadway and Times Square.

  “Leave him to us,” Coligney shouted. “We’ll get him.”

  “Not if I get him first.”

  Fifteen minutes after he left the house where Anna was murdered he was looming over the desk of the New York Times drama critic. “Mr. Klauber, I am Isaac Bell. Our mutual friend, Walter Hawley, introduced us at the Amen Corner shortly before he died.” Walter L. Hawley had been chief political reporter of the Evening Sun.

  “Bell? Certainly,” Adolph Klauber drawled in a Louisville, Kentucky, accent. “In the insurance line, if I recall. What’s up, Mr. Bell? You look mighty upset.”

  Bell said, “Within minutes, actors are going to telephone you to tell you that a young actress named Anna Waterbury lived in their boardinghouse. I want the address.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “Miss Waterbury was just murdered.”

  A blurted, unbidden “What?” died half voiced.

  Fury had contorted the handsome features of the tall, powerful man looming over his desk. Klauber flinched and swallowed hard, in sudden fear for his own life. Then a transformation as startling as the critic had ever witnessed on any stage changed Isaac Bell’s face again. Rage hardened to deliberate, measured, everlasting resolve. He spoke in a voice as cold as an Arctic sea.

  “The vicious cutthroat who killed the poor girl slaughtered her so gruesomely that the newspapers will be printing extras. I am betting that some actor who knew where she lived will telephone you. Her neighbors will help me identify the cutthroat.”

  “Why would they telephone me?”

  “Because before you became a critic, you were an actor, Mr. Klauber. Who would you have telephoned when you were struggling for a place in the theater? The police? Or a famous drama critic who used to be an actor and is therefore sympathetic to the backstage standpoint.”

  “I hope—no, I trust—I would not have been so crassly ambitious.”

  “You forget the indignities suffered, the disappointments, and the poverty. From what I’ve seen the past few days, the theater is a hard life, and it’s easy to get lost.”

  “Well,” Klauber conceded, “everyone’s got to make a living somehow.”

  His telephone rang.

  Isaac Bell bounded up the front steps of Anna Waterbury’s boardinghouse—two time-battered, nineteenth-century town houses merged into one, mid-block, on a cross street off Broadway. He knew he would be lucky to have five minutes before cops and reporters besieged it. The front door was flung open before he could knock. A pair of vaudeville dancers, the woman in swirls of silk, the man in white tie, looked crestfallen.

  “You’re not Mr. Klauber.”

  “Mr. Klauber sent me,” Bell lied. “We need your help. What are your names?”

  “Heather and Lou,” said the woman, who was an extraordinarily beautiful brunette with long dark hair.

  “Heather and Lou, how well did you know Anna?”

  “Only from the supper table,” said Heather.

  “Do you recall the last time you saw her?”

  “Yesterday. She never came home last night.”

  “Did she leave with anyone?”

  “She left alone.”

  Bustling up behind the dancers came their landlady, Mrs. Shine, a round woman with suspicious eyes and a work-worn face. She looked appalled when Bell asked whether she had known Anna, and she protested that she ran an orderly house and she could not be held responsible for what her boarders did away from the house.

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  The landlady crossed her arms. “Not on this premises.”

  “Would any of your other boarders know whether she had a boyfriend?”

  “Only Lucy Balant. They shared a room.”

  “May I speak with Lucy?”

  “If you take yourself to Philadelphia,” said the landlady, and one of the hovering dancers explained, “Lucy is an understudy in Jimmy Valentine—”

  “Oh my Lord,” groaned the landlady. “Look at them!”

  From one direction pounded a phalanx of police, from the other a mob of reporters. Uniformed cops were trailing plainclothesmen. The reporters were shouting questions.

  Isaac Bell hurried uptown to the Knickerbocker. He wired instructions to the Philadelphia field office and several other offices around the continent, issued orders to every detective in the bull pen, then raced across town to Grand Central Terminal, where he caught a train to Waterbury, Connecticut.

  He was in the Brass City in less than two and a half hours, but the newspapers had beat him to it. No one answered the telephone when he called from the Waterbury Station, and when he got to the Pape home, a three-story brick mansion flanked by stone turrets, he found reporters milling outside the spiked fence.

  A thug in a black coat and fedora guarded the gate, and two flanked the front door—Pape Brass company cops, Bell assumed. He palmed his Van Dorn badge to shield the flash of gold from the reporters. “Mr. Pape is a client. If he wants to see me, tell him let me in the back door.”

  He received the polite “Wait here, please” that he expected. Private cops treated Van Dorns with kid gloves, hoping to be remembered next time the agency’s Protective Services branch was hiring. The guard hurried back. “Walk around the corner. One of the boys will take you through the side gate.”

  Bell was ushered down a service alley and in the servants’ entrance. A liveried butler led him through the house and across an immense drawing room dominated by a pipe organ. He knocked on the door to a library that doubled as Pape’s home office and left Bell face-to-face with the grieving father.

  “I can only say how sorry I am, sir. I promise you that we will never give up until we bring her killer to justice.”

  “She’d be alive if you had found her.”

  6

  Isaac Bell bought the New York papers from a Bridgeport newsboy who ran onto the train when it paused in the station. All hewed the same line—guided, Bell was certain, by Captain Coligney—that an innocent young woman of a good family had been lured or forced to the room where she was murdered. None raised the possibility that Anna might have known her murderer.

  Deprived of the salacious, the papers fell back on a tried and true comparison to the ultimate evil. Back in 1888, nearly twenty-five years ago, a string of murders in London were a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. To Bell’s day, in 1911, reporters routinely likened them to any unsolved knife attack against a woman.

  Police at work on the Anna Pape case suspect a moral pervert similar to Jack the Ripper whose gruesome murders in the Whitechapel district of London startled the world.

  “The cops reckon a boyfriend,” Bell told a hastily organized squad of his best available detectives. He had wired others who were out of town to report to New York, but he would manage with these for a start. />
  “A boyfriend is my instinct, too. Or at least someone she knew and trusted. There’s no evidence, so far, that she didn’t go to the flat voluntarily. And the way he cut her up strongly suggests jealous rage. That said, we have no one who witnessed her arrival at the flat, no one who saw her being carried, dragged, or marched into the building. Would they have? Probably, but no guarantee, particularly late at night.”

  “Any sign of knockout drops?” asked redheaded Archie Abbott.

  “The assistant coroner conducted the autopsy, which means it was scientifically sound. Chloral hydrate is swiftly metabolized, but he found no alcohol in the contents of her stomach, either.”

  The detectives nodded their understanding. The taste and odor of chloral hydrate were masked by alcohol, so it was a reasonable bet the killer had not slipped the victim knockout drops in a drink.

  “Chloroform?” asked Harry Warren. The grizzled Gang Squad chief was one of Bell’s closest confidants.

  “The assistant coroner told me that the odor would have dissipated by the time her body was discovered. I certainly didn’t smell it. But the autopsy revealed something unusual. Her neck was broken. Which takes a mighty strong hand. Anna was petite, but it does suggest we are looking for a big bruiser who doesn’t know his own strength. Nonetheless, the main point is this, gents: it is imperative that we establish whether she went there voluntarily, vital that we confirm whether she was acquainted with her killer or was attacked by a stranger. If it was personal, we will discover his name. If it wasn’t personal, then a vicious cutthroat is prowling the city and may kill again. Either way, I want him in the electric chair.”

  “Why would she go with the man if he wasn’t a boyfriend?” asked a young detective still on probation.

  “Hope,” answered Bell.

  “Hope for what? That he’ll become a boyfriend?”

  That drew some smiles, which faded when Isaac Bell said in an icy voice, “Anna wanted to be an actress. She hoped for a role in a play.”

  Lucy Balant walked home to her shabby hotel, exhausted. She had never been so tired in her life. She hadn’t spoken a word of Alias Jimmy Valentine yet, hadn’t set a foot onstage except to rehearse lines with the stage manager for the roles she stood by for. But that didn’t mean she didn’t work. They paid her, fed her, and housed her, and in return the company required her to do any job needed. Skilled with a needle, she assisted the wardrobe mistress. Long days started very early in the morning, repairing costumes and washing them in the theater’s old-fashioned laundry, cranking them through the wringer, then racing up six flights of stairs to the roof to pin them on clotheslines, and ironing them when half dry.

  She plodded up the stairs and into her room, shut the door, and leaned against it for a moment of peace and quiet in the dark. This was their last night in Philadelphia, then on to Boston, where maybe one of the regular actresses would get sick, or quit, or fall off the stage and break her neck.

  “Lucy?”

  She jumped, her heart leaping into her throat. A tall figure was in her room, standing in the shadow between the bed and the wardrobe.

  “Don’t be afraid.” A woman’s voice, thankfully.

  A raven-haired woman in her twenties stepped into the light spilling through the window. “I have to talk to you.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I let myself in.”

  Lucy’s heart was still pounding. “I locked the door when I left.”

  “I picked the lock. Lucy, my name is Helen—”

  “Picked the lock? You forced your way into my room. What are you talking—why are you here?”

  “I must talk to you. My name is Helen Mills. I am a Van Dorn detective. There is no reason to be afraid.”

  “I am afraid. What are you doing in my room?”

  Mills had recently been promoted to full detective—the first woman for the Van Dorn Agency—after graduating college. Quick to see opportunity and quicker to act, it only occurred to her belatedly to put herself in Lucy’s shoes. How would she or any woman alone feel if the door to her hotel room turned out not to be the protection she thought it was?

  “I am sorry. This case is so important, I forgot my manners.”

  “If you ever had any to start with— Case? What case? Why didn’t you just wait in the lobby? Or you could have found me at the theater.”

  “I am sorry,” Helen apologized again. “But I wanted your full attention.”

  “You have it. So what do you want?”

  Helen Mills said, “I have terrible news and I need your help. Your roommate Anna is dead.”

  “What? No! She was fine when I left New York.”

  “Anna was murdered.”

  Lucy staggered back a step and struck the bed, which nearly buckled her knees. “No, she . . .”

  “I have to ask you some questions. Your answers could help us find the man who murdered her. I’m sure you’re upset.”

  “How would you feel?”

  “I would be very upset . . .”

  “What do you mean murdered? What happened? Who’s the man?”

  “We don’t know, yet. If you can manage to answer my questions, you can help us find him.”

  “But why? That doesn’t make sense. She’s a really nice girl. She wouldn’t hurt anyone.” Still in her coat and shaking her head, Lucy sat on the bed. “She read for my part. If she’d gotten it instead of me, she wouldn’t have been killed.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Would she have told you if she did?”

  Lucy said, “I would have known it. All she cared about was getting a role. That’s all she wanted. That’s why she left home, and it didn’t sound to me like her home was bad. I think she had a wonderful home.”

  “Did she have a man who was hoping to be her boyfriend?”

  “No one I saw.”

  “Was there any man she might have gone with to an apartment?”

  “I doubt that,” said Lucy. “She was Miss Innocent. I’d be amazed if she ever kissed a boy.”

  Helen said, “But for some reason she went to an apartment with a man.”

  “Alone?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Well, that’s a surprise, I must say. A huge surprise— Oh . . .”

  “What?”

  “No, it couldn’t be. He was too old.”

  “Who was too old?” asked Helen.

  “Some old man, a Broadway producer, was coaching her to read for a role.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “No, I never saw him. She just told me about him.”

  “How old?”

  “She just said ‘old.’ He limped. I think he used a cane. And he was married. Or, at least he wore a wedding ring. She really thought he was going to help her get a role.”

  “Did she read for the role?”

  “I don’t know. She said he knew someone important in the show. She was sure she would get the job.”

  “Did she say in what play?”

  “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The spring tour. Barrett & Buchanan are taking it on the road.”

  Isaac Bell was expecting her to wire a report. Instead, Helen Mills went straight to the Broad Street Station and took the train to New York City. Racing uptown from Pennsylvania Station, she stopped at the Almeida Theatre, where Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had been playing before it went on tour, then hurried to the Van Dorn field office at the Knickerbocker.

  Bell was issuing orders in the bull pen and detectives were rushing out. Ordinarily, they would welcome her with big greetings, but tonight all she got were grim nods. Bell sent Harry Warren on his way and conferred quietly with Archie Abbott, who had been his best friend since they boxed in college. An actor before his socially prominent mother demanded he quit the stage, Archie
knew the ins and outs of show business.

  Finally, Bell beckoned her to join them.

  Helen Mills had apprenticed under Isaac Bell and become his protégée. Mr. Van Dorn had ordered her on the Philadelphia posting to broaden her experience. She hadn’t seen Bell in months, and the first thing she noticed was a face so joyless, it looked hacked from granite. She exchanged a quick glance with Archie, who confirmed with a nod that Bell was deeply shaken by Anna Waterbury’s murder. She went straight to business.

  “I found Lucy Balant.”

  “A wire would have saved time.”

  “Wires can be confusing. I thought this was too serious a case not to report in person.”

  Isaac Bell raised an eyebrow and gave her a knowing look. Helen Mills possessed a strong drive to be in the heart of the action. Not a bad quality in a detective. At least when tempered with common sense. “Go on,” he said. “Report.”

  She told Bell what she had learned and concluded, “It seems to me that it’s a question of how old that producer was. Too old to be strong enough to kill?”

  “Young people,” said Bell, “see everyone as old. The middle-aged recognize middle age. And the old see everyone as young. Anna was only eighteen.”

  “Young enough,” said Archie Abbott, “to believe a man who claims he can pull wires to get her a role.”

  Bell said, “For all we know, he’s only thirty-five and limps because he got shot in the Spanish–American War or hit by a trolley.”

  Archie said, “He picked the right show to lure the poor girl. Jekyll and Hyde is a sensation, packed with modern scenic effects. Barrett & Buchanan are going to clean up with that tour.”

  “I saw it with my father,” said Helen. “Women were fainting in the aisles.”