Time Out of Mind (46 page)
Authors: John R. Maxim
Tags: #Horror, #General, #Psychological, #Suspense, #Memory, #Thrillers, #Fiction, #Time Travel
“
It would.” Tilden took a breath.
“
Will there be anything else, Inspector?”
“
No, sir.” Williams rose to his feet,placing the hat on
a table beside his chair. “I'll leave you to your grief now.”
He stepped toward the door and paused. “By the way,
sir, did you leave this house at all that night?”
“
No.”
. “You're certain, sir?”
“
Yes.” He decided to risk it. “There's the baby.”
“
The baby. Yes, of course.”
“
May I ask you a question?”
“
Yes, indeed.”
''Why is an officer of your rank conducting this inves
tigation?’ '
“
Well, sir”—Williams made a sweeping gesture, which
took in Tilden and the apartment's furnishings—“not all
the men in the lower ranks are as tactful as me in dealin'
with people like yourself. Some of them might even have
asked if you, by the slightest chance, might have a lady
friend you want to keep quiet about and they might have
asked you for a little gift appertainin' to them keepin' mum
on it.” He held up a hand before Tilden could start toward
him. “The real truth is, I'm lookin' in on you as a favor
to a mutual friend. That's Mr. Gould, by the way.”
“
Jay Gould?” Tilden's eyes widened.
“
There ain't but one. And he has nothin' but kindly
thoughts for you, sir. I know he hopes you feel as kindly
toward him.”
“
Good afternoon, Inspector.”
causing a pipe-banging rush of water that would allow Til
den to believe he'd not been listening in case that was the way his friend wanted it. But Flood had left the door ajar,
not so much to eavesdrop as to be within quick reach if
Tilden's interview with Williams turned ugly. The stare-
down he'd given that copper promised as much. Tilden was
a handy enough man with his fists, fair to say, but he'd be
no match for Clubber Williams if it came to that, even if the Clubber was twenty years his elder.
Flood himself was just a boy of fifteen when he saw Williams lay out some of the toughest men in New York. John had been working as a swamper in the old Florence Saloon down on Houston Street near Broadway and taking
a pass-the-hat fight in the alley out back four or five times
a week. Clubber, though they did not yet call him that, was
the new patrolman assigned to that little section of the
Fourth Ward where the worst of the city's gangs had their
hangouts. There was a chalkboard on the wall of the Florence where the Whyos and the Plug-Uglies kept a sporting
record of the policemen each gang had killed or maimed.
The gang that let two weeks pass without having a copper's
hat or ear to show as a trophy had to stand drinks for the
other. But taking souvenirs was becoming harder work
those days because the coppers were learning never to walk
in groups of less than three. Over in Five Points, coppers
had learned not to walk at all. Except Clubber Williams. Williams saw things different. His first day on the beat he
walked right up outside the Florence and commenced to
pick a fight with the two toughest men he saw there—
Hoggy Walsh and Dandy Johnny Dolan of the Whyos—
and he smashed both of them to the ground with his stick.
Dandy Johnny Dolan got up and tried to use this eye-
gouger he had special made for his thumb—it was carryin'
eyes around in his pockets that finally got him hung—but
old Clubber smashed his hand and then his knee and threw him through the Florence's window. Four more Whyos and
two Plug-Uglies came runnin' out to teach him a lesson,
includin' Skinner Meehan with his hash knife, and Clubber
laid 'em out to a man. It's said he cracked a skull a day
for three years after that till they jumped him to captain
and put him where the money was. Now there ain't a whorehouse or gaming joint in all the Tenderloin, well
named by Williams himself, that don't ante up to him the first of every month.
Did you hear?” Tilden asked as John Flood reentered
the living room.
“
Not a word, lad,” he answered, “unless you want I did.”
window looking out upon New York. “Is there anyone in
this city,” he asked sadly, “who does not know that Ella
was ... deceiving me with Ansel Carling?”
“
Not so many lad. Not so many at all.”
And for that number,” he added, “how many will al
ways believe it was I who killed her?”
”
I did not hear that either, Tilden,” John Flood said
firmly. “And I don't ever want to hear it again.” Flood
had made up his mind it was an accident at worst, a suicide
at best. “If you'd choked the life out of her with your own
hands, I would not have blamed you. But you didn't. 'Twas
she who fell; you did not knock her down. 'Twas she who mocked you and spited you to the end when a single word
of repentance would have saved her. What else could you
have done? Could the man I know have stepped aside and
let her run on up to Ansel Carling's kip?”
I should have. I should have just walked away and gone
home.”
She'd be dead as Kelsey's goat all the same. Forget it,
lad. It was no murder. You had no murder in your heart.”
snow had stopped, and it remained in great mounds on
every street corner and along every curb. Ella's body, not
much colder dead than alive, was being kept on ice in a
Ninth Avenue mortuary until the gravediggers could catch
up with their backlog or until her family answered his wire
asking if they'd rather she lie among her own in Philadel
phia. He hoped they would take her. It would save him the
agony of a service and it would place her all the farther
from his thoughts. The Reverend Bellwood from Saint Tho
mas had come to comfort him and during his visit had
inquired of his plans to have the child christened before bis
soul went much longer without that protection. Saturday next, Tilden decided. Be done with it. What name, sir, the
Reverend Bellwood asked. Her name, not mine. Call him
Huntington.
“
Huntington Beckwith.” The minister wrote it down.
“And the middle name?”
“
Sir?”
Have you chosen a middle name? It is customary to bestow one or more family names upon a child in addition
to his Christian name so that he may carry his heritage with
him always.”
“
His heritage, you say?”
“
That is the custom, Mr. Beckwith.”
“
Give him the initial
B.
Nothing more.”
''ß, sir? What does it stand for?”
“
It stands alone. It is his heritage.”
It will be so, sir.” Though he was doubtful, the Rev
erend Bellwood agreed.
But if bastardy is his heritage, let him carry it. May God
forgive me that I cannot love this unlovely child. True
enough that the child cannot be blamed for his mother's
sin, but even if this were a pretty and well-tempered infant,
which it is not, how could I ever look upon its features
except to be reminded every day of his life of Ella
Huntington and Ansel Carling.
Through the window, on down Fifty-seventh Street, his
eye fell upon the signal tower of the Sixth Avenue Ele
vated, Cyrus Field's elevated. Even that had now turned ugly where once the sight of it had never failed to thrill
him. Tilden's father had helped to build it just as he'd
helped Cyrus Field ten years before that in the stupendous
accomplishment of laying the Atlantic cable. Beckwith &
Company had financed or secured loans for both and had issued the shares. The Sixth Avenue Elevated was a wonderful success. The fulfillment of one dream and the begin
ning of another. Crawling, congested traffic in the city's
streets would be a thing of the past. And Cyrus's New York
Elevated Company was turning a solid profit. It was much
more successful, much better managed, than the rival Met
ropolitan Railway Company, which ran the Second Avenue
Elevated under the rapacious ownership of Jay Gould and Russell Sage. Yet Cyrus Field had agreed to a merger of
the two companies. Tilden and his father were against it.
But Field was adamant. A centrally managed cooperative system was essential to well-ordered growth, he said. Just
so, Stanton Beckwith argued, but not with these two brigands. They would surely raise the fares until the people are
squeezed dry, and they will work every possible mischief
with the company's shares.
They did, of course. Gould quickly moved to double all
fares and Field, though resisting at first, finally yielded to
Jay Gould's argument that the resulting windfall would per
mit expansion all the way to the borders of Westchester.
But when the
New York Times
loudly condemned the ac
tion, pointing out that the new Manhattan Company would
be picking the average worker's pockets of one full dollar
a week out of the mere eight that he probably earned, and when that paper began tarring Field with the same brush as
Gould and Sage, Cyrus, Tilden believed, began to fear for
the place in history his Atlantic cable accomplishment had already secured for him. He forced the restoration of the five-cent fare, threatening to take his case to the public if Gould did not yield on the matter. Gould did yield, agree
ably on the surface but deeply resentful of Field's senti
mentality and poor business sense. More, that Cyrus Field
had defied him. Gould was not a man to forget such a thing. It was said of Gould that he ate his revenge cold. He would
wait. In the meantime, he would content himself with the ten-cent fare being charged for the specially decorated par
lor cars. But even these revenues soon fell beneath his ex
pectations. Too few men and women were willing to pay
the extra fare, the novelty of Axminster carpets having
worn off, for so short a ride.as a shopping excursion to the
department stores of Fourteenth or Twenty-third Street or
the daily half-hour ride to a Wall Street office.
By this time, Ansel Carling had become one of Gould's
most trusted agents, to the extent Gould trusted anyone at
all. Carling had first surfaced ten years earlier in San Fran
cisco, where he appeared at the offices of the Central Pa
cific Railway bearing a letter of introduction from the
governor general of the British East India Company. The
letter said that after serving in the British army with great
distinction, Carling, third son of England's reclusive Sir
Andrew Carling, had joined the company and soon became
one of the driving forces in the completion of the railway
between Lucknow and Calcutta, slapping aside govern
mental interference and Sikh attacks with equal vigor. The
Central Pacific's president, Collis P. Huntington, no relation
to Ella, put him to work extorting bribes from towns along the railroad's right-of-way, offering them a choice between
paying for a line or spur to be laid through them or with
ering into ghost towns as the spurs were granted, legally or
not, to the higher bidder elsewhere.