Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (20 page)

She retreated into the blackness of the doorway through which her dead daughter had just been carried. “We’ll see it done,” she said again, and the door was pushed silently shut.

Part II: The Female Gang

Chapter
28

For the
Tribune
of Friday, March
17
,
1882
, Simeon Lightner prepared an extensive account of the terrible incident that had taken place before the houses belonging to Black Lena Shanks. Considering the sensational nature of the case and the luck of his having been a witness to it, Lightner composed the paragraphs in the first person. He began with the history of the two buildings at numbers
201
and
203
West Houston Street, which had been disreputable for more than two decades; appended biographies of their inhabitants, and reminded readers of Black Lena Shanks’s appearance and testimony at the trial of her sister-in-law, Maggie Kizer; told of the events within the Mulberry Street headquarters of the New York police that had led up to the attempted arrest of Daisy Shanks, and then presented a detailed ledger of the altercation on the sidewalk before the house.

Simeon Lightner concluded:

The presence of mind and daring of Mr. Benjamin Stallworth are entirely to be credited. When Daisy Shanks, the ‘Laughing Abortionist,’ emerged from No.
203
, intent on finishing the job begun by her mother and her offspring, he halted her murderous progress with a courageous and well-timed bullet.

By the time that I had returned to that part of West Houston Street, having secured the assistance of two other officers, the injured woman had already been removed into the house and Mr. Phair and Mr. Stallworth had advanced to the succor of the three endangered policemen. Officer Pane, who had been in charge of the expedition, lay in a heap beside the balustrade of No.
203
, dazed and inarticulate. The second officer, Thomas Raven of No.
30
East Third Street, jerked convulsively against the bricks. Blood poured from wounds in his mouth and his eye. He was pronounced dead upon his arrival at the Hospital of the City of New York. The third policeman, Richard Scoggins, of No.
77
Second Avenue, lay stone dead, the victim of two nine-year-old children.

Officer Pane owes Mr. Stallworth a large debt of gratitude for his very survival.

Mr. Phair informed us that no movement had been apparent within the house for at least five minutes. While Mr. Stallworth was dispatched to find a doctor in the neighborhood, the two officers cautiously entered the door of No.
203
.

The policemen made a thorough search of the premises, but discovered no one. The four malefactors, Lena Shanks, Louisa Shanks, and Rob and Ella Shanks (the twins), murderers all, had gathered their specie and their jewels and walked out the back door of No.
203
. They slipped through an alley to King Street, and disappeared from human sight.

The corpse of the abortionist was found on a couch in a magnificently appointed gold parlor on the ground floor of No.
203
. Every piece of furniture, every scrap of cloth, and every morsel of decoration in the chamber was gold.

The dead abortionist lay with her hands folded neatly over her breast. Her injured neck and bruised head were draped with a gold lambrequin that had been snatched from the mantelpiece. All the ornaments that had stood before the great gold-tinted mirror lay in fragments of gold pottery and gold glass upon the hearth of gold tiles. By her side was a purse containing a handful of emeralds, and a note in a fine but hurried hand which read: “These jewels are to be redeemed for cash. The money is intended for burial expenses. The marble marker is to read: DAISY SHANKS. WELL-BELOVED.
1859
-
1882
.”

It was the opinion of the doctor who first examined the corpse that, had the absconding family paused to secure medical assistance for Daisy Shanks, she might well have recovered from the bullet wound. The criminal mother, intent only upon her own safety, had abandoned her daughter without compunction and torn the children away from their mother’s corpse.

The Commissioner of Police has registered a protest with the Mayor’s Office against the raising of a monument to the memory of an abortionist. He wishes rather that the receipts of the sale of the jewels be expended on obsequies intended for the two dead police officers, Thomas Raven and Richard Scoggins.

A close watch will be kept on the two houses, although the police admit that it is unlikely that the murderers will return. Altogether about $
15
,
000
worth of merchandise, almost all certainly stolen, has been recovered from the cellars of the two buildings. This amount does not include the furnishings of the rooms of the houses, which in most cases were splendid and costly. In addition, besides the surgical instruments found in a bedchamber on the fourth story, there was a printing press in one of the rooms on the second floor. Also found were counterfeit plates for the printing of bogus $
10
-bills, and a supply of paper similar in quality and texture to that employed by the Government Printing Office.

The Police Department has issued descriptions of the four murderers, and declares itself confident that they will soon be brought to justice. Twenty-eight officers have been assigned to the search. In so desperate a case as this, the zeal of the police is laudable, and we must only hope that their sanguine confidence is justified.

Duncan Phair, writing above his own name again, eulogized the dead officers, execrated the Shanks, and concluded:

Yet, even if this strange family of more than incredible wickedness is never found, never brought into a court of law, the citizens of New York may rest assured that they will do no more harm upon this island. Their identities and aspects are too well known to remain undiscovered here, and they dare not revert to their former criminal ways. From these, if not entirely from others like them, we are safe.

Chapter
29

Lena, Louisa, Rob, and Ella, whose descriptions and murderous offenses were tacked up in police courts all across the country, were not to be found. At six
p.m
. on Thursday, March
16
,
1882
, they had entered the house at number
203
West Houston Street bearing the corpse of Daisy Shanks—and never been seen again. In succeeding months there came to be rumors of them, such rumors as invariably arise when there is a matter of substantial reward. Lena was known to be running a house of prostitution in Montreal, the twins were picking pockets on a Mississippi steamboat, Louisa was in California, affianced to a state legislator who knew nothing of her past.

Yet the fact was that the Shankses had disappeared quite as effectively as if the door to number
203
West Houston Street had momentarily opened onto Hell and they been swallowed into perdition, as they deserved.

But all of New York knew what had become of the Stallworths in the six months following the death of Daisy Shanks. They had risen—not spectacularly; for too rapid a rise would have been inconsistent with the Stallworth sense of propriety; but with a most respectable sureness and complacency.

The campaign in the
Tribune
had proved a splendid success. After it had been revealed that Duncan Phair was the author of the articles that had been signed “A Republican Counselor” and “A Friend to Virtue,” much business of a prestigious and highly remunerative nature had been thrown the way of the firm of Phair & Peerce. Duncan was even commended by the bar for his researches in the Black Triangle.

The Stallworths could point proudly to the Black Triangle as a blasted area now, where vice remained in-of-doors. The most notorious places of gambling, illegal liquors, and prostitution were shut up, and those wishing to dissipate themselves must do it in dark and secret places within the Black Triangle—or else in the numerous other parts of the city where depravity kept an open shop.

The
Tribune
had been the most widely read of the papers detailing the moral corruption of the city; and the police department thought to do itself most good by following up on that paper’s discoveries. It seemed at times that the police dogged the footsteps of Simeon Lightner, Benjamin Stallworth, and Duncan Phair through the Black Triangle. Each dusty window those three men peered into was soon boarded over. Every threshold they crossed was sealed the next day. Any rouged lady who spoke to the three men on the street would be forced to remove her lodgings to the Tombs.

Judge Stallworth had not been behindhand either. Trials in the venue of his court were dispatched with a rapidity that astonished even the public prosecutors and public defenders, who had thought themselves calloused to the summary nature of trials within the Criminal Courts Building. Criminals arrested in the Black Triangle paid large bribes to their arresting officers to say that they had been picked up in another street, so that they would not come before Judge Stallworth. Sentencing was harsh, and the
Tribune
faithfully reported his remarks on lengthy prison sentences as undeniable deterrents to crime.

Marian Phair’s Committee of the Suppression of Urban Vice had not returned to the Black Triangle, but its strongly worded letters, numerous petitions, frequent subscriptions, and weekly and very fashionable meetings, did not go unnoticed. Membership on the committee was exclusive and sought after. The women of Marian’s class begged their friends to take them along or wrote Marian long letters in apparently irresistible adulation of her efforts to render the city safe and decent. Marian was gratified to find that descriptions of her ensemble, worn at Monday’s meeting, appeared in Saturday’s
Tribune
, article for article, in the column, “Fashion Hints for the Week.”

Helen Stallworth had continued at Marian’s meetings and took embarrassingly brief minutes of the inconsequential proceedings. But she no longer complained to her father or even to Marian, for she now was convinced that she was doing some real good for the unfortunates condemned to live in the Black Triangle. She went there almost daily, sometimes in the company of Mrs. General Taunton, but of late even by herself, wearing her simplest black dress, with a large basket of foods and necessaries on her arm. She could call a hundred beggars and petty criminals by their cant names.

Her second life—as she thought it—apart, so different, so worthy, wholly unsuspected by her family, brought a smile to Helen’s countenance at odd times, so that the others wondered at her happiness. Helen, who before had always considered lying a sin only slightly less reprehensible than “enforced adultery” (what she called rape), now delighted in the panoply of deceit with which she kept her charitable work hidden from her family.

Benjamin, on his part, was happy also. The many months of expeditions into the Black Triangle, the slight but constant attention that was afforded him because of his supplementary endeavors and his unexampled heroism in having shot the Houston Street abortionist before she slit the throats of the three injured policemen, raised him in his own and others’ estimation. He was no longer merely tolerated. His grandfather, for instance, now and then spoke a word to him which was not unkind; and Marian, when no one else was by to take her attention, sometimes condescended to converse with him. His father no longer demanded to know the hour of his coming in at night, and had a latchkey fashioned for his use. His presence was no longer required in the offices of Phair & Peerce, and altogether Benjamin’s existence was less onerous to him than it had ever been before.

He had not entirely left off gambling, for it was too great a pleasure to him: real excitement in what was still, despite its increased amiability, a fairly dull life. But all his wagering now was justified as investigation, and he never put down on a table more than he could afford to lose. Benjamin’s only debt remaining was that owed to Duncan and his father for payment of his losses on New Year’s Day; but as neither of them had ever mentioned the circumstance again, Benjamin had begun to assume that it was forgotten or forgiven.

Edward Stallworth’s sermons had attracted much attention, and the size of his congregation and his collections had increased markedly over the past half year. The texts had been reprinted not only in the
Tribune
, but in the
Presbyterian Advocate
, the
Christian Dawning
, and the
Cumberland Spectator
as well. Among his parishioners now were families from Brooklyn and New Jersey, who ferried across to New York every Sunday morning and raised ire against Edward in the hearts of their abandoned clergymen.

The dissension that remained in the clergyman’s family was on account of the killing of Daisy Shanks. The incident had been made out by Duncan Phair, the only creditable witness, to have been an act of heroism on Benjamin’s part; it had been reported as such in the
Tribune
and never thereafter questioned. Duncan had told the judge the true circumstances, and the judge had replied that he was just as surprised to hear that Benjamin was possessed of luck as of real courage. Edward Stallworth had feared at first that the circumstance of his son having shot a woman dead in the streets of the Black Triangle might tell against him, but when this proved not the case—his parishioners unanimously congratulating him on having raised so stalwart a boy—he came to smile indulgently on the act.

Helen, however, was horrified by the killing, begged Benjamin to tell her that it had been merely a frightful accident. But Benjamin, counseled by his uncle, stood up for his own bravery in the matter, and would not admit his careless culpability. From that moment, Helen became estranged from her brother; and any deception practiced by her upon him and the family that supported him in his shameful pride was a virtuous prevarication. Thereafter, Helen never disabused those in the Black Triangle of the notion that she was the daughter of Mrs. General Taunton; she tried not even to think of herself as a Stallworth.

August had been spent by the family at Saratoga, in the best hotel, and though their expenses were of the most fashionable proportions, the family concluded that they received full value for their money, if not in accommodation, fare and comfort, then at least in the matter of new and fashionable acquaintance. This was of particular use to Marian, who upon her return to the city in September, was besieged with invitations to dinner, late night parties and opera boxes. Only Helen did not enjoy the month; she had pleaded in vain for permission to remain in the city alone—but propriety would not hear of such a course, and Helen must suffer in luxury.

The beginning of autumn was an exhilarating time for the Stallworths, and their Sunday afternoon dinners together were happier—or at least less troubled affairs—than they had been in many years. On Sunday, October
1
, the family was still gathered around the table, though Marian’s children Edwin and Edith had already been removed to the nursery, when the conversation fell, as it was often wont to fall, to the Black Triangle.

“Lightner says that we’ve just about exhausted the place,” said Duncan, “and I must say, I can’t help but agree. We’ve been on it now for nine months, and to try to take it even as far as the end of the year would be beating a dead horse.”

“Oh yes,” said Judge Stallworth, who had already discussed this matter with his son-in-law, “and now it is the question of moving on that must be attended to.”

“Moving on?” asked Edward Stallworth. This was the first he had heard of the abandonment of the Black Triangle, and it distressed him, for he had expected to continue his sermons with the active support of the
Tribune’
s
researches. “Moving on to what, pray?”

“To Pell Street, Mott Street. Lightner thinks, and I agree, that we ought to move on to the Chinese question. The new Chinese immigration law goes into effect next month and will doubtless draw attention to the area. There’s bound to be excitement of some sort: murders, bribery, illegal entries into the country. And of course, if there’s nothing else, we can always blow open an opium den,” laughed Duncan.

“Well,” said Edward Stallworth, “I’m not certain that the Black Triangle is exhausted of its vice, and it seems to me that the Chinese population is so alien a group, what with their outlandish appearance and peculiar ways and unknowable habits, that it will be only with the greatest difficulty that you will stir up any interest in them. The Irish are just as objectionable, and far more populous. I think it might be better if you continued with the Triangle, perhaps taking it from a slightly altered point of—”

“Yes!” cried Marian, who was more forthright in her objections than her brother. “What’s to become of my committee if you and Mr. Lightner and Benjamin simply walk away from the Black Triangle? My committee is certain to fall apart!”

“Oh,” said Helen softly to her aunt, “it need not, I think, Marian. There’s still much good to be accomplished in the area, even if it’s not to be written up in the
Tribune
.”

Judge Stallworth glanced sharply at his granddaughter, wondering if her mild sarcasm were deliberate. “Marian, certainly not,” he said, “Duncan will insure, through Lightner, that the activities of your committee continue to receive notice in the
Tribune
.”

“Oh yes, of course I will,” said Duncan lightly, and smiled at his wife.

“Well,” said Benjamin, with some of his new-got confidence, “I don’t see why this can’t be eased into, gone into slowly. We could be into the Chinese question before they know we’ve left the Triangle. And I don’t see any reason why the heathen Chinese can’t be used as the subject of a sermon or two. Why, they’re in need of salvation, I suppose, as much as the rest of us.”

“I think you’re right, Benjamin,” said his grandfather, and Benjamin blushed for the pleasure of the old man’s approbation.

“Well,” replied Edward Stallworth, “I suppose that I shall have to make the best of it; but please leave me time to study this question of the Chinese before you throw yourselves into the area completely.”

“Of course, Edward,” said Duncan in a conciliatory manner. “Your printed sermons have proved enormous capital to us, you know, and we have every intention of continuing to publish them. We sincerely hope that you
will
see fit to assist us.”

Edward Stallworth, suffering himself to be persuaded out of the Black Triangle and into the Chinese community to the east, had just declared that he must rise and return to the church to prepare himself for the evening service, when the knocker of the front door was sounded.

The Stallworths glanced at one another in surprise, for late Sunday afternoon was not the time for making calls in New York, except by appointment. Peter Wish was sent to the door and he returned a few moments later bearing, on a silver tray, eight oblong black-bordered envelopes.

Marian Phair took them all from the salver and flipped through them. “How odd!” she exclaimed. “There’s one for each of us—Edwin and Edith too. Someone’s dead, but who is so stupid as to send out memorial cards to every member of a family? And children
never
receive mourning cards. It’s unheard of!”

She took the one directed to her and began to open it. Judge Stallworth took the others, picked out his own, and passed the rest to his granddaughter.

“Who brought these?” asked Edward Stallworth of Peter Wish.

“A child,” replied the servant. “A little boy dressed in black.”

Helen had taken hers, but before she had lifted the flap she glanced at her aunt on the other side of the table. Marian’s hand, holding the envelope, had dropped heavily on the table and she looked about her in pained surprise.

Helen ripped open the envelope that had her name upon it. Inside was a funeral announcement, a small card of waxed glossy paper, machine-cut on the borders, and representing a young girl weeping over a tombstone in a cemetery with willows. But written across the tombstone in a fine copperplate hand was the legend:
R.I.P. HELEN STALLWORTH
.

“Oh!” cried Helen, and the card fluttered to the floor.

Duncan Phair found an identical card in his, but one which bore the text:
ASLEEP IN GOD. DUNCAN PHAIR
.

“Peter!” he cried out, “run after the boy!”

Peter Wish rushed out of the room, and in the meantime the Stallworths at the table stared at the mourning cards in their hands, each of which announced his or her own death. Edwin and Edith’s cards lay beside their mother’s plate, unopened.

“A poor poor joke,” said Judge Stallworth, and ripped his card in two.