THE DEVILS DIME (3 page)

“I believe you might find what you’re looking for in here.” Twickenham pulled back the chair and used his own muslin cuff to banish the worst of the dirt collected there.

He spent a few moments identifying the various piles as to what Jess might find in each, until he reached the far end of a cluttered shelf. He reached a hand toward a thick file bound with string and seemed to hesitate. Twickenham chewed his bottom lip, glanced sideways at Jess, took in a long, rattling breath and at last made up his mind. He tugged it from the shelf and plunked the tattered blue folder onto the table.

“This is a bit outside the scope of what you asked for,” he began, his face crinkling into a clandestine grin, “but it’s some of our best stuff. All that,” he said, as he swept his short arms out toward the orderly piles on the surrounding shelves, “is mostly appetizers and the occasional main course. But this,” he beamed and plucked the frayed brown shoelace that held the bulging folder together, “is better than Christmas pie.”

Chapter Two

If there were mice, they knew enough to stay away when Deacon Trumbull took the back stairs to Heaven. The men who joined him might have profited from that wisdom. But it was greed and nothing more that had brought them to the table in the abandoned room above McGlory’s. And it was greed that kept bringing them back.

“He won’t last long.”

The hard voice and clipped words hushed the whining tones that had escalated around the crude table. Deacon Trumbull’s malignant self-assurance hovered about them, silencing any objection the three men might have offered. His crisp, pristine shirtsleeves rested on the scarred surface, diamonds glittering in the opulent studs of his cuffs. The cigar he nursed covered the room’s shabby mustiness with its rarefied aroma.

Below the table, supple gray leather shoes bespoke the man’s wealth, their white linen summer-weight spats ornamented with understated elegance. They weren’t such a vast step above those of the other three men, but there could be no doubt that their Italian felted leather linings made them the finest to be had in New York City.

The man they called Cash cleared his throat and flicked an ash from his own Havana Partido. “He completely shut down that Denver operation, Deac. He’s no slouch.”

Trumbull glared, his blue eyes hooded. The nickname annoyed him, had ever since boarding school days when Cash had begun to shorten his name. It had been a power play, purely designed to make the pampered brat seem an equal with Deacon. As if that could ever happen.

He waited a beat, and let his companions work equally to hide their nervous swallows. He would have laughed outright, if there had not been such a strong element of truth in Cash’s warning. He was absolutely correct. Jess Pepper was no slouch. But Deacon had already resolved that the man’s luck at uncovering a Denver syndicate that had been selling young, nubile boy-flesh to a hungry European market would be his own undoing.

Jess Pepper might have brought a million-dollar enterprise to its knees in that cow town, but he was in New York City now, lured by the fame a byline in the
Times
offered. And not only was he in New York, but he’d planted himself right in the center of the cross hairs. The offices of the
Times
were, after all, in Chief Deacon Trumbull’s precinct.

“You leave Pepper to me, gentlemen.” He swept his gaze around the table, pausing just long enough to see the subtle submission he required before changing the subject. As was his habit, he brought them back to the point of tonight’s emergency meeting before adjourning. “Tell that shyster at the Blue Blade that he can continue to deal for us or prepare to meet his Maker.” Trumbull stood, drawing the meeting to a close.

“And if he says no?” The question came from the only one among them who had come up from the gaming hells to earn his place at the table.

Deacon Trumbull speared him with his own questioning look. The man knew very well what to do if O’Hanlon balked again, but Deacon felt no compunction at spelling it out for him. “If he says no, my boys will tell his widow she has three days to get out of my tenement.”

The three men nodded, rose, donned their hats and the suit coats they’d carefully laid across a spare chair earlier. Each one engaged in his own ritual of tidying his look before stepping out into the darkness of a Tenderloin back alley.

Four men went four separate ways. But in each mind a brief yet fascinating game of running the odds was taking place. Just how long
would
Jess Pepper last?

. . .

New York City was noisy, noisier than Denver in a million ways. Denver had cattle being herded to the stockyards down side streets, their bellows bouncing off nearby buildings, shuffling hooves muffled by hard-packed dirt. This city, on the other hand, had folks being herded into clanging trollies, their heels making clipped rhythms on the bricked causeways, their piercing voices sailing above the street ruckus as they hawked their wares or called for a hansom cab. All this escalated to carry above the sound of ferries trumpeting their departures from nearby piers. He reckoned he’d just have to get accustomed to it.

Jess propped one leg on a footstool and rubbed at a kink in his neck. He’d resisted reading the information he’d collected until he was back in his apartment, knowing from painful experience what happened when he became absorbed in a project. Spending the night in that basement morgue wouldn’t have been the worst thing to ever happen to him, but it was certainly something he’d consciously avoid.

For two hours he’d been so caught up in his reading he hadn’t moved. Now he dragged his eyes from the page and let his gaze roam the walls of his flat, blinking his bleariness away.

He followed the pattern of faded wallpaper upward until it disappeared beneath simple cherry cornices that topped the windows on two sides of his parlor. The east and south exposures had been a big part of what had drawn him to the place.

After all, a writer needed plenty of light.

Jess had found the third floor furnished apartment at the corner of Broadway and East Fourth just a week earlier. He’d passed up a quieter second floor spot on the back of the building for these rooms overlooking the busy intersection.

Three dollars a month more, but the light and the view were worth it.

He didn’t mind that the curtains flanking the French doors that led to his balcony had seen a brighter day. What was important was the fact that the balcony existed, and Jess had already taken to sitting there for a half hour at the end of each day. People-watching.

But not so today.

Today, Jess sat in a cane-seated rocker he’d dragged away from the heavily manteled fireplace and into the late afternoon light that streamed through the window. Articles he’d already studied were piled up on the floor beside him.

Many had provided tidbits of information that he could weave into his diatribe against the confidence riffraff, and his mind had followed a very lucid trail as he gleaned facts for the story in progress.

He had the makings now of several fine columns and even allowed himself to feel a bit of enthusiasm. That is, until he opened the last folder — the tattered blue one with the knotted shoelace holding it together. Twickenham’s “Christmas pie”. It had sat there on the table, taunting him, daring him to find out why the old geezer had hesitated to trust him with it.

Within seconds, the entire premise of his earlier work was forgotten as he absorbed the details of the reports he now held in his hands. The reports that had been tied into a bundle marked in large, faded letters, ‘Samaritan Files’.

The pages revealed details on twenty cases. All unsolved. All having taken place two decades earlier. And all fascinating.

The final article, printed more than a year after the last reported attack, when the city was beginning to feel safe again, encapsulated the crime history in chilling prose. The eloquent words stood out in harsh relief against the yellowed page upon which the column had been printed nearly twenty years earlier.

Samaritan Vanquishes
Midnight Attacker

Twelve maidens and six young matrons venture out onto the streets of New York City once again, each excursion inciting a bit less apprehension than the previous.

More than a year has passed since the last of these women fell victim to a crime of the streets. A year to heal and mend. A year to find courage in their survival.

And while they did survive, their lives must surely have been forever changed.

Two who shared their experience, however, shall never again see the light of day, their hearts having given out over time, perhaps unable to shed the recollection of horrors that descended upon them in the dark of night.

In truth, these two have perished of fright, and traded this earth for heaven’s safe haven.

And yet the other eighteen victims might easily have perished as well, were it not for the heroic intervention of a man known to this city as The Samaritan.

Tall, he is, and rugged of face, they say. But gentle of voice. His grip of steel wrenched fainting victims from the clutches of a fiend bent on killing. Or worse.

“Fear not, darlin’,” reportedly the only words spoken by their rescuer who appeared out of the gloom at the very moment each broken victim thought she had breathed her last. And each, when coming out of her fainting stupor, was reported to have asked her medical attendant, “Where is the good man?”

And that, dear reader, is the question that remains unanswered a full year later. Where, indeed, is the good man?

Some say the good Samaritan was a traveling clergyman. Others insist he was the ghost of a Civil War soldier, bereft at having left his womenfolk as he went off to fight the war, unable to find them when he returned.

If the sabered ghost could not save his own, perhaps he could save the daughters of someone else.

Still others, like Deacon Trumbull, a flatfoot cop on the beat, maintain the Samaritan and the attacker are one and the same.

Samaritan or Saint? Ghost or Angel? Perhaps we shall never know. Perhaps we can only be left to wonder.

To wonder at the flicker of fear in a maiden’s eye as we, mere men, approach.

To wonder if she might be one of the many who survived to fear another day, rescued by a good man with a gentle voice.

Who saved her from death. Or worse.

Then melted into the black night.

It was eight o’clock by the time Jess had re-read the most gripping stories from the faded folder, and he’d stopped only once, to light the gas lamp on the wall.

The scenarios were strikingly similar. Young women alone on the street after dark. Brown hair, small stature. Accosted and nearly beaten to death before being saved by a passing Samaritan.

And many of the incidents had taken place not ten blocks from where he sat at this very moment.

Jess focused on the random tapping of the crocheted shade pulls that danced at the ends of their strings in the light breeze. Was this the kind of place those young women had been coming home to when evil had waylaid them on the street?

Perhaps.

Jess closed his eyes and sifted through the detail he’d gleaned from the stories. The victims were surely terrified. He shuttered his mind, forcing it to take on the darkness of the street. He tried to cover himself with the panic and fear the victims must have known. To render himself helpless.

But it was useless, sitting here in his sanctuary. How could he hope to describe a terror he’d never known himself?

The answer was simple. He wouldn’t.

After nearly twenty years, these were dead stories. Glimpses of happenings that had gone stale in memory. He should not dredge up the anguish for eighteen survivors who may never have fully forgotten their nightmare. He shouldn’t bring a fear of the streets back into the public mind.

But Jess could not shake the feeling that from the newspaper morgue, from that repository of things long dead, had come this folder with one resonating voice that refused to die. The voice of a Samaritan never identified, a hero never thanked.

Jess knotted the shoestring around the bulging folder and wondered idly if the man still lived. If saving the lives of twenty young women had changed his life in any way.

Beyond the balcony the rumble of heavy-wheeled market wagons and trolleys had given way to the pleasant rhythm of carriage horses and the occasional sputtering vehicle motoring up Broadway. It was getting late. As the city sounds abated, the rumbling of his own stomach finally wrestled his attention away from the folder. Best attend to supper.

Jess organized the files on the empty half of an already cluttered marble-topped chest. His fingers ran back and forth over the word ‘Samaritan’, and even as he backed away from the table, he felt the thickening air that hung between his hand and the musty pages.

The story had him now. He knew that. He could no more disregard it than he could his empty stomach.

Jess snatched his Stetson from the hook beside the door and descended the three floors of Sutton House. With garish images from the gruesome stories still tumbling in his mind, he strode out into the night looking for food.