Текст книги "Riptide"

Автор книги: Michael Prescott

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

1891

The poet Robert Burns was right. The best laid plans o’ mice and men, and all that.

Hare had expected to read of the foreigner’s arrest in the first news accounts of the murder at the East River Hotel. Instead he encountered quite a different story.

The dead woman had been found in the morning by the hotel staff. She was known as a regular patron of the establishment, a certain Carrie Brown.

But the man who had lodged with her was not in police custody. He had disappeared. Only his name was known, or at least the name signed in the hotel registry: C. Kniclo.

The police had surmised how Kniclo made his escape. He could not have left via the hotel’s main door, locked as it was after midnight. Apparently he opened a trapdoor in the ceiling of his room, which led to the roof; bloodstains were found on the scuttle. From the roof he descended to the street via a fire escape. Later that night a bloodstained man matching Kniclo’s description appeared in the lobby of the Glenmore Hotel a few blocks away. Told there were no accommodations, he tried to use the lavatory to wash up, but was ejected from the premises.

Kniclo must have regained consciousness only to find himself covered in blood in a room with a murdered woman. Rather then panicking as expected, he had proved distressingly resourceful.

His disappearance was bad enough. Worse was speculation in the press that Kniclo might not be the killer at all. It was suggested that he had left the hotel earlier, and that some other party had attacked Carrie Brown when she was alone in her room. Accordingly, suspicion had fallen on the other guests of the hotel that night, especially those who had lodged on the fifth floor. This included “Mr. Wilson,” the impromptu alias Hare adopted when the hostess, Mary Miniter, filled in the registry.

There was nothing to connect Hare to the name Wilson, but Mary Miniter had gotten a good look at him, and from news accounts it was obvious she was talking to the authorities. She could provide them with a good description. He had admitted to being a Brit. If the steamer records were searched, and the authorities in London were contacted...

The damnably elusive Mr. Kniclo had put a crimp in a Hare’s plans, opening the door to exactly the hysteria he had hoped to avoid.

The headline of the New York Times on April 25 framed the matter concisely.

Choked, Then Mutilated

A Murder Like One of ‘Jack the Ripper’s’ Deeds.

Whitechapel’s Horrors Recorded in an East Side Lodging House.

The Herald, not to be outdone, countered with its own headline.

Ghastly Butchery by a ‘Jack the Ripper’

Murder and Mutilation in Local Whitechapel Almost Identical with the Terrible Work of the Mysterious London Fiend

Strangled First, Then Cut to Pieces

Not only did the press trumpet this alarum, but the police seemed to take the connection to Whitechapel quite seriously. The coroner told reporters that the crime could be the work of “the fiend of London.” There were rumors of transatlantic cables flying between the New York Police Department and New Scotland Yard. A manhunt was underway throughout the city, far surpassing the effort that would be made in any ordinary slaying.

It was ironic. He had come to the States to escape the attention of the authorities, and on his first night he had stirred up a new hornets’ nest. And all for a gray-haired crone who in a saner world would never be mourned. A crone, he learned to his amusement, who was known to her few friends as “Old Shakespeare” for her habit of reciting doggerel.

It was said Old Shakespeare came to New York seeking fame on the stage; failing in this ambition, she gave herself up to drink and debauchery. Well, she occupied the limelight now.

The situation was grave. All thirty-five hundred members of the NYPD had been mobilized to search every hotel and flophouse for anyone who’d lodged at the East River Hotel on the night of April 23.

After leaving the scene of the crime, Hare took a room at a doss-house four blocks away—a safe enough distance, he thought, given the certainty of the blond foreigner’s arrest. But there was no arrest, and he had to leave the doss-house the next day, forfeiting the two bits he’d put down in advance for his second night. He had seen plainclothes detectives going from door to door in the neighborhood.

He relocated outside the Fourth Ward, believing that the dragnet would not extend beyond the precinct. But he had barely settled into a slum boardinghouse called the Anderson Inn when he heard rapping on his door. More police officers, these in uniform. He answered their questions smoothly, claiming to have arrived by ship that very day, but he wasn’t sure he persuaded them. Once they were gone, he went on the run again, surrendering another two bits.

He passed that night in an alley. On the following day he took the ferry to Jersey City, where he found another boardinghouse. There he hoped to be undisturbed, but reports appeared in the press of a possible Jersey City connection to the killing. He had no way to know if the police were on his trail, or if this new investigative avenue was merely a coincidence.

Either way, it was obvious the furor was not diminishing. The chief of police was under mounting pressure. Hundreds of possible “suspects” had been rounded up. It seemed as if every foreigner in the New York area was at risk of arrest. If he were caught up in the general melee, and then identified by that bitch Mary Miniter...

His heart was racing all the time. He could scarcely sleep. He awoke at every stray noise. He expected capture at any moment.

Every day he bought a full complement of newspapers—the Times, the Sun, the World, the Herald, the Tribune, the Broadway Eagle, the Morning Journal. He read and reread every article, obsessively teasing out hidden meanings.

A hunted Hare, he joked grimly to himself. That was what he was.

Matters could not continue down this road. Disaster lay in sight.

On Monday, April 27, he returned to New York City, retrieved his baggage from the storage locker, and took a taxi to Grand Central Station, where he boarded a New York Central train bound for Chicago. He carried little with him except some clothes, his London diary, and a handful of keepsakes acquired through the years. There was a white handkerchief from Polly Nichols, the first whore gutted by his knife, and a miscellany of items belonging to the others: a small tin of sugar, a comb, a pawn ticket never redeemed, and two brass rings pulled from Annie Chapman’s hand.

The train bore him north through New York state, branching west at Albany and continuing through lush valleys that bristled with the first green shoots of springtime. He passed Syracuse, Buffalo, and Detroit, heading into the nation’s great open spaces, its prairies and grain fields. An endless horizon beckoned. By the time he reached Chicago he was refreshed. The world was made anew, and all things were possible.

Even so, he kept an eye on the news from New York, less from concern than from curiosity. The case had turned amusing, and it appeared a foreigner would pay for the crime after all. Not the blond Swede or German or whatever he had been, but a different foreigner altogether. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that one was as good as another.

The suspicions of the police had fallen on a certain Algerian, Ameer Ben Ali, who had the misfortune of taking room 33, across the hall from the murder site, on the fatal night. Ali was the sort of character one encountered everywhere in dockside slums, a drifter, possibly a small-time hoodlum. It was claimed that a trail of blood led from Carrie Brown’s abattoir to Ali’s room, though more sober reports suggested that the crowd of reporters themselves had tracked the blood across the hallway.

Be that as it may, the unfortunate Ali was seized by the police and subjected to a dubious trial in which he defended himself in laughably broken English much as C. Kniclo might have done. By now all thoughts of a blond blood-spotted foreigner had been put aside, and press and public clamored for conviction of the Algerian rogue. The jury obliged, sentencing Ali to life imprisonment at a penal institution known by the peculiar nomenclature of Sing Sing.

Hare received word of the jury’s verdict in July, as he languished in Chicago, planning his next move. He took the development as a favorable omen. Life in his new country had commenced on a most promising note. He could only hope he would be so fortunate in his escapades with other victims.

For there would be others, of course.

There always were.

nine

Jennifer pushed her chair away from the table and sat looking at the book.

Jack the Ripper’s diary. That was crazy. Right?

“Right,” she murmured.

But she wasn’t sure.

If somehow this book was the authentic testament of history’s most infamous serial killer, then she had to assume that the bodies in the cellar were the Ripper’s work, as well.

Jack the Ripper in California.

She ran her fingertips over a page of the diary and felt the faint rise of the lettering characteristic of iron-gall, a common 19^th-century ink. The ink wasn’t washed out, as it would be if it had been diluted to simulate aging. There was obvious bronzing—iron-based inks oxidized naturally within eighteen months—and significant feathering; the ink had bled into the paper, a sign of age.

The writing was smooth and showed none of the “tremble” seen in attempts to disguise one’s handwriting. In some forgeries of old documents, flourishes were added to the handwriting to produce a more antique appearance. She saw no decorative additions here.

But why would there be artificial flourishes? The diary was no conscious imitation. It was real. It might be the product of the Ripper, or of someone who believed himself to be the Ripper, but it was not written to fool her. It was not left in a tin box underneath a heap of skeletons to play mind games with a psycholinguistic analyst in the 21^st century.

The vault of bones was a time capsule left by the killer, whoever he was. The diary and the bodies were his message to the future, his mocking announcement that he’d gotten away with it and was forever beyond capture.

She wondered if he had murdered them here. Had lured them to the house, killed them in its confines. In a back room, perhaps, where their cries would be unheard. This room...

If she lifted the carpet, would she find bloodstains on the hardwood floor? If she peeled back the wallpaper, would she find scratches grooved by clawing fingernails? If she closed her eyes, would she hear screams...?

At the front of the house, the doorbell buzzed.

The noise startled her. She took a steadying breath, then left the study and made her way through the house to the front door. She opened it, and Maura was there.

“Oh,” Jennifer said. “What are you doing here?”

“And hello to you, too. I was coming by to check on you. And it looks like it was a good idea. You seem pretty frazzled. But at least you’re alive. You could have called to let me know.”

“Sorry.” Jennifer ran a distracted hand through her hair. “It’s been a hectic day.”

“Tell me about it. I’m showing a two-bedroom condo the size of a file cabinet to a lovely young couple who’ll soon be in debt up to their earlobes, when all of a sudden the place starts boogying. The lady had a freakout, and the last I saw of her, she was insisting they move to Seattle.”

“Seattle has earthquakes, too.”

“I mentioned that, but she wasn’t in a mood to be reasonable.”

Maura Lowell, thirty-seven, was a real estate agent who worked Venice and Ocean Park. She’d met Jennifer through Richard, back when Richard was looking for a condo of his own. She and Richard dated for a while, one of the many times when Richard went out with a woman older than himself.

“And of course,” Maura added, “right away I was worried about you. I mean, look at this place.” She rapped the doorframe. “A stiff breeze could knock the thing over. I figured a quake would do you in for certain.”

“It would take more than a quake to bring down this house.”

“Yeah, yeah, they don’t build ’em like this anymore. Well, you’re alive, and I’m hungry, so let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere food is served. It’s after six o’clock, kiddo. Chow time. Unless you’ve got something better to do?”

Jennifer thought of the diary, the skeletons. “Not a thing.”

 

 

ten

They ate in downtown Venice at the Reality Bites Café, an offbeat little bistro where TVs suspended from the ceiling displayed movies shot locally. At their corner table Jennifer faced Touch of Evil, the Orson Welles classic that used Venice as a stand-in for a decaying Mexican border town. In the 1950s it hadn’t been much of a stretch.

“I love that flick.” Maura pointed to the screen behind Jennifer, where a different movie was playing. She looked over her shoulder long enough to identify it as White Men Can’t Jump.

When Jennifer turned back, Maura was flirting with the busboy again. He was a tanned, muscular surfer type with peroxide blond hair and a slack, goofy expression.

“You and me, we should go somewhere,” Maura was saying. “The night is young, and so are you. It’s a winning combination.”

The surfing busboy kept glancing at Maura’s StairMaster legs and carefully exposed cleavage. “Sorry, I’m on the clock tonight.”

“They can’t work you all night. Eventually you have to get off.” She placed an emphasis on the last two words.

“Around midnight, yeah.”

“I may be back around midnight.”

“I’ll be here,” he said with a dopey leer.

“Are you seriously coming back?” Jennifer asked when the busboy had left.

“Why not? Look at that ass. He can ride me like a surfboard any day.”

Jennifer laughed. “He’s a teenager.”

“That’s the way I like ’em, young and horny and not too bright.”

“You don’t care much about the social niceties, do you?”

“Let me tell you about the social niceties. Last week I hooked up with this new guy in our sales office. We’re in the elevator and we just decide to go at it. So we hit the stop button, freeze the elevator between floors, and have a little ooh-la-la.”

“You didn’t.”

“We did. I don’t know about niceties, but it was nice, all right.”

“You have no shame.”

“I haven’t told you the best part. He’s just zipping up when I noticed the goddamned security camera in the ceiling. We gave somebody one hell of the show.”

“I would never be able to show my face there again.”

“The way I figure it, it wasn’t my face they were looking at. Besides, it’s L.A., the land of sunny hedonism—surf, sand, and sex, not in that order.” She regarded Jennifer appraisingly. “When was the last time you got the sweet end of the lollipop?”

“It’s been a while.”

“Maybe I should fix you up with the busboy. You need him more than I do.”

“You can have him. Besides, we don’t know anything about the guy. He could be crazy, for we all know.”

“Now don’t go acting prejudiced, kiddo. Just because Venice is a mecca for every psycho nut job and schizo head case …” She looked stricken. “Oh, crap. I’m sorry.”

“Not a problem,” Jennifer said stiffly.

“I wasn’t talking about him.”

“I know. We never talk about him. Do we?”

“Should we? Do you want to?”

Jennifer almost pursued the subject. Almost said she couldn’t entirely forgive Maura for walking out on Richard in the early months of his illness. No, it wasn’t as if they were that serious, and their relationship probably wouldn’t have lasted anyway, but there was something unseemly about Maura’s rush for the exit at the first sign of trouble.

But there was no point in saying it now. She other things to deal with.

“No,” she said. “Forget it. It’s not important.”

“Then how come you’re so pensive all of a sudden?”

“You reminded me of something that happened today.”

“Involving … Richard?” It was rare for her to speak his name.

“No, involving the earthquake. I checked for damage, and I—I found something in the cellar.”

“Buried treasure?”

“You’re half right.”

“So it’s treasure, at least?”

“No, but it’s buried. Bodies. Skeletons.”

She told the story, all of it, even the discovery of the diary and what it might mean.

“You’re pulling my leg,” Maura said when she was finished.

“Wish I were.”

“Jack the freakin’ Ripper?”

“Not so loud.”

“Come on, Jen. Things like this just don’t happen. Am I on one of those reality shows? Is Ryan Seacrest hiding somewhere?”

“It’s for real. I told Casey, but with the quake, the police are all tied up till tomorrow.”

“Well, you can’t stay there, not as long as those things are in the house. You can bunk with me. We’ll have a pajama party.”

“Thanks, but I’m not worried about being in the house. I’ve seen bodies before.”

“Dead bodies at a crime scene are one thing. Dead bodies in your crib are another.”

“Did you say crib?”

“Hey, I can talk street. I just keep it on the down-low. Seriously, you can’t stay at home right now. It’s just...icky.”

“They’ve been in my house all along, Maura. For years.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t know about it. It’s like, I’ve got no problem eating in a restaurant as long as I haven’t seen the kitchen. But if I saw what went on in there, with the rats and roaches and the waiters peeing in the soup, forget about it.” Someone at the next table had picked up on the last few words. She glanced at the eavesdropper and reassured him, “Not this place. This place is fine.”

Jennifer decided not to eat the last of her cheeseburger. “I admit it’s a little...unnerving. But I can deal with it.”

“I still say you should unload that house, buy a nice little bungalow in the Valley. I can get you a great deal on a fixer-upper with potential. This skeleton thing is a sign from God.”

“In the Valley you can’t smell the salt air. Besides, the house has been in my family forever.”

“I know, but—hey, wait a minute. How’d those dead guys get there?”

“You mean, which one of my forebears put them there? That’s what I’d like to know. It couldn’t have been my father. The bones are older than that. That leaves my grandfather, Frederick Silence, and my great-grandfather, Graham Silence. He immigrated from England and married here in the U.S.”

“You know your genealogy? Impressive. I can barely remember my mother’s maiden name.”

“After I learned how my father died—well, I needed to know as much as possible about our past. About whether the illness was hereditary. Turns out, it is.”

“So if one of these people wrote the diary, it would have to be old great-grandpappy Graham?”

“If we assume that the diarist really did live in England, and wasn’t just fantasizing that part of the story...then yes.”

“Did Graham come over to these shores in the right time frame?”

“It was sometime in the late nineteenth century, but I don’t have the date.”

“There must be a record somewhere.”

“Richard inherited the family papers. God knows what he’s done with them. Let’s change the subject, okay?”

“Are you kidding me? I hawk condos for a living. This is the most interesting thing that’s happened in my world in months. Makes today’s shaker look like a hiccup.” She took another swig of her Malibu Bay Breeze. “Tell me more about this diary. You think it’s for real?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what do you know?”

“Ordinarily, if I’d come across anything like this in, say, an antiquities shop, I would figure there are three possibilities. The book might be a modern forgery. Or it might have been written a century ago by someone who followed the case at the time and deluded himself into believing he was Jack the Ripper. Or it could be the confession of the Ripper himself.”

“I take it we can rule out forgery. I mean, given the circumstances.”

“Yeah, he sure didn’t forge those skeletons. But the second possibility is a live option. Suppose the diarist lived in Venice and only imagined he was the Ripper. An overactive fantasy life isn’t uncommon in psychopaths.”

“But we know he was a real killer, not just a Walter Mitty type.”

“Even so, he might have begun by writing the diary as an exercise in fantasy. Later, he could have progressed to actual murders.”

“A copycat? Some psycho who idolized Jack so much he wanted to be him?”

“It could make more sense than thinking the real Ripper ended up thousands of miles from home.”

“We’re talking about the most wanted man in the world. He might have had good reasons to hightail it out of England.”

Jennifer was dubious. “I’ve never heard anything about Jack the Ripper operating outside London.”

“How much do you really know about him?”

“Not much. Hardly anything, in fact.”

“That’s gotta change.”

“I intend to do some research, obviously.”

“Of course you do. And you’re going to start tonight.”

***

The Purloined Letter Bookshop was two blocks down from the café. The store specialized in mystery and true-crime, offering both new and used books, shelved together, with no discount on used editions.

“May I help you?” the proprietor asked as they entered. He was a small man with narrow shoulders and a narrow face.

“We’re looking for something on Jack the Ripper,” Maura said.

“Oh, I have plenty of those.”

The narrow man led them down a narrow aisle to a narrow bookcase where a special section had been reserved for Ripper books. Dozens, scores, of titles.

“Any you’d recommend?” Jennifer asked, bewildered by the array of choices.

“Depends on what you’re looking for. If it’s a straightforward, factual presentation of the case you’re after, Sugden’s Complete History is your best bet.” He handed her a thick paperbound book. “For the original documents reproduced verbatim, there’s Evans and Skinner.” He gave her an even thicker paperback, as chunky as a brick. “Then there are the letters attributed to Jack—another Evans and Skinner title, Letters from Hell.” He produced a large hardcover and added it to her armload of books. “Or there are the more speculative ones. Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer—controversial, claims to have solved the case.” A smaller paperback was added to the pile. “Or we have The American Murders of Jack the Ripper, a book that says Jack migrated to the US for a time.”

Migrated to the US. Jennifer was happy to let him stack that book on top of the others.

“And The Diary of Jack the Ripper, another controversial title.”

Maura interjected, “They found his diary?”

“Some folks said so.” He set the book atop the pile in Jennifer’s arms, which was now both heavy and precarious. “The diary’s been examined, though—chemical analysis and whatnot. The tests show it’s a fake. Too bad. Be quite a thing, wouldn’t it? To find the real diary?”

Maura nodded vigorously. “Sure would. Wouldn’t that be something, Jen?”

Jennifer ignored her.

“Now I realize,” the proprietor said, “you won’t want more than one or two of these. I’ll give you time to decide.”

“No, that’s all right,” Maura said. “We’ll take them.”

He blinked. “Which ones?”

“All of them.”

“Okay.” He pronounced the word slowly in two distinct syllables. “Well, let’s ring ’er up, then.”

“You’re pretty free with my money,” Jennifer whispered when the man had walked away.

“Just saving you time, kiddo. You know you’d end up buying all of them eventually.”

At the counter Jennifer thumbed through the books while the owner wrote up the order on a clipboard. In The Ultimate Jack The Ripper Companion, she came across a photo section. Ghastly photos of the dead. She had seen autopsy shots before, but something about 19th-century mortuary shots creeped her out.

Maura pointed to a display bin near the register. “You know what? This is the guy you need to talk to.” The bin was stocked with paperback copies of A Hollywood Murder, by Harrison Sirk. “He lives in L.A., and he knows everything about local crime.”

“He’s a TV star. I can’t just call him up.”

“I can. He’s a friend of mine. Every now and then I spend an afternoon escorting him to high-end properties. He’s not in the market to buy. He just likes to snoop. But it’s cool, ’cause he pays me for my time. Anyway, he’ll take my call.”

“I don’t know.”

“I know. I’ll set everything up. Besides, he’d love to meet you. You have at least two qualities he’ll appreciate.”

“Let me guess.” Jennifer pushed her boobs together. “These qualities?”

“No, smarty. Number one, you’re into psycholing-whatsis, which from everything you’ve told me is an up-and-coming area of criminal profiling. And number two, you’ve got a mystery to solve. Sirk loves a mystery. Maybe he’ll see a book in it.”

“I don’t want a book.”

“Then be discreet. Don’t tell him anything more than what he needs to know.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Maura grabbed one of the Sirk books and put it on the counter. “She’ll take this, too.”

Jennifer frowned. “I will?”

“It never hurts to tell an author you’ve read his book.”

She looked at the photo on the back cover, showing Sirk posed on a balcony overlooking Sunset Boulevard, the smoggy cityscape stretching behind his obese but sartorially impeccable figure.

The proprietor read off the total. She paid with a credit card. He glanced at it. “Silence. Unusual name.”

“Yes.”

“Family from England?”

“Originally.”

“So was Jack, of course.” He smiled. “You two have something in common.”

“Maybe more than you think,” Maura said cheerfully, and Jennifer shot her a glare.