The Kingdom of Bones (20 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

T
he paragraph in a corner on Chapter 2 of the
Echo
—“A Magazine devoted to Society, Literature and Stage in the South”—read:

Miss Mary D’Alroy, the dainty little actress who has won so many admirers here with her recitation of “Agnes Lane” and readings from the works of Mrs. Henry Wood, will give an informal reception to the ladies and children of her audience on the stage of the Academy of Music next Tuesday afternoon. The reception will take place immediately after the matinee. These functions are always attended with great relish by those who desire to shake hands and exchange a passing word with the pretty star.

Louise had used the name of Mary D’Alroy in Richmond some years before, and had resumed it on her return. As far as this part of the South was concerned, she was well on her way to becoming a respectable performer with a verifiable past—one that could be supported by local sources, at least. Elsewhere in this vast nation she’d moved under other, similarly established names.

It was still a dangerous life. A man from San Antonio had recognized her in Chicago, and she’d had to spin him a story. Almost any other profession would have been safer to follow, but she had to make a living and support two servants, and knew of no other way. She could not sew, or cook, or do any other womanly thing of practical use. And the stage offered advantages that no other kind of living could; who but a certain kind of theatrical could arrive in a new city, offer a demure demeanor and a program of high-minded readings, and within a matter of days be on first-name terms with ladies from the best families in town? The
Echo
’s masthead rolled together society, literature, and the stage, and so, in her chosen way of life, did Louise.

After the matinee, the audience moved out into the foyer. Those with tickets for the reception gathered in the ladies’ parlor on the balcony floor while the stage was being reset, and then were led backstage and on through the wings.

Louise was waiting on the stage, along with the chairwoman of the Richmond Women’s Club, who made a short speech of welcome. Those who had never crossed the footlights before were suitably excited and awed by the experience. Some of the children stared out into the empty auditorium, row after row of seats from the parquet all the way up to the peanut gallery, stricken by a little taste of stage fright as their imaginations peopled the house.

Louise gave thanks for the welcome, told a couple of stories from her travels, gave them an extra bit of Tennyson that she claimed had been commended to her by the poet himself, and then invited their questions. The questions were usually predictable, and her responses polished.

“What drew you to the stage?”

“Seeing Shakespeare performed when I was a little girl.”

“Did your father object to your taking up a career in the theater?”

“He was in no position to. It was he who had taken me to the Shakespeare.”

Little of this was true; she’d seen no Shakespeare until her seventeenth year, and her father had died before she ever went near a stage. Indeed, it was his death that had sent her to it. Without that, she would probably have limited her performing to playing the piano and singing in various drawing rooms until some young man of suitable prospects caved in and proposed marriage. By now, she’d have been running a household that she’d filled with her own children.

She looked at these children—scrubbed, scared, bored—and, as she often did, wondered about what she was missing. Her own child, had it lived, would have been—

But at this point, she stopped the thought in its tracks, as she always had to.

One of the women said, “Will you be staying in Richmond for long?”

“For as long as Richmond will have me,” Louise said. “Much as I love to tour the world and meet new people, it cannot compare with a home of one’s own. There was a time in my life when I thought that such things could wait, and would not matter. Now, as time goes by, I find that they matter more and more.”

They seemed happy with that. After the questions, there was fresh lemonade for the children, brought onstage by the Mute Woman, and a chance for all to meet and circulate. Louise moved through the crowd, speaking to each woman as if to a sister, and marveling at every child she was offered as if it was the heartbreaking beauty or infant genius that its mother believed it to be.

She found herself confronted by the woman who’d asked the question about her father. With her was a small ginger-haired girl of about five or six years old.

“She has a question for you,” the woman said. “But she won’t tell me what it is.”

“What’s her name?”

“Alice.”

Louise got down to the child’s level and said, “Well, Alice. Oh Alice, where art thou. That’s a lovely bonnet. What did you want to ask me?”

The girl, who was snub-nosed and freckled and seemed genuinely sweet, stared past her and spoke so softly that Louise had to tilt her head to one side in order to make out her words.

What she heard was “My daddy says an actress isn’t as good as a horse.”

“A
horse
?” Louise repeated, momentarily thrown and trying not to look it. And it would have stayed at that, with Louise assuming that what she’d heard was just some piece of childish whimsy, were it not for the mother’s reaction. She reddened, caught up the child’s hand, and said, “Forgive me,” before tugging her daughter away.

She took her off so quickly that the child could hardly keep up, being swung by her arm into the skirts of some of the others.

Louise straightened up and the chatter around her died down for just a moment or two, as the people closest to her sensed that something was wrong; but no one else had heard the child’s words, and Louise’s calm smile was back in place by the time she was turning to the next person.

The reception continued for another half hour. Louise signed her name—or rather, the Mary D’Alroy name—to a few copies of the program card, and fielded a few more questions like “Did you see
Her Wrong Righted
at the Bijou?” (“One of the disadvantages of performing is the lack of opportunities to see others perform.”) She did not see the woman with the ginger-haired child again, and supposed that they’d left early.

Louise ended the event by thanking everyone and leaving the stage, to polite applause.

As the visitors cleared, she went down to the manager’s office to sort out the division of the take. The Silent Man joined her in the wings and followed her down. There had been a fifty-cent cover charge for the reception, children free. Take out the house’s share and the cost of the refreshments, and it didn’t leave much. Louise signed for the money, then handed the purse to the Silent Man for safekeeping.

As they were leaving the manager’s office together, she said to him, “I want a good carriage. Same as the ladies are getting, or better.”

He nodded and moved off. Before he’d gone a couple of strides, she stopped him.

“Not
too
much better,” she cautioned.

She knew that she did not need to explain. It was necessary to make an impression, but not a vulgar one. She needed these people to see her as a natural equal, and had only a few such well-chosen properties with which to dress her character.

Back on the now-empty stage, she collected her personal pieces together. The Mute Woman had cleared and swept up, and would meet her at the carriage. From the lectern, Louise took her copy of Tennyson’s works. Tastefully bound in green with stamped gilt covers, it was a book that she had used in many a reading, whether Tennyson featured or not. She had all her pieces by heart, rather than struggle with her poor sight or appear wearing her glasses.

Raising her voice, but without looking up, she said, “Will you come forward, or hide there in the shadows until you know for sure that I’ve gone?”

Her voice rang throughout the empty theater, but no sound came in response.

“Yes, you,” she said. “In box twelve.”

Box twelve was almost at stage level, only slightly elevated from it. It was long and deep, and backed with a thick velvet curtain.

After a few moments, something moved in the shadows, and then a man of around twenty-five years stepped forward into view.

Louise said, “I believe you owe me fifty cents.”

“I engaged the box for the season,” the young man said, unembarrassed. “Does that not cover it?”

“Not if it puts no food on my table.”

He dug in his pocket and found a silver dollar. He put his other hand on the brass rail along the box’s front edge and swung himself over onto the stage, not quite as elegantly as he’d perhaps had in mind.

Louise waited as he walked toward her with the coin held out before him.

“You have change for a dollar?” he said.

She took the money from him before she said, “I’ll owe it to you. Why did you hide yourself?”

“My understanding was that the event was for the ladies and children of your audience,” he said. “I could have worn my best dress, but I don’t think I’d have fooled anyone.”

She looked him over. He was long-limbed and moved easily. He had a heavy mustache and a rather weak chin. He seemed entirely sure of himself.

She said, “Next time you want to spy on me, Mister…”

“Patenotre. Jules.”

She blanched at his pronunciation, which was a pure American rendering of the words as the eye might see them, and not a sound that any European would recognize.

“Is that supposed to be French?” she said.

“My family’s from Louisiana.”

“Well, the next time you feel the urge to spy on a woman, Louisiana, make yourself known. Nobody likes to be watched without their knowledge.”

“But you knew I was there all along.”

“Nevertheless. You intended I would not. To me, that makes it a strange business.”

“Some people thrive on strange business. What was that about a horse?”

Louise finished gathering up her books, then held them to her in a stack like a schoolmistress. She said, “I think I can guess it from her mother’s reaction. The child probably overheard her father say that actresses are no better than whores.”

The young man mused on this, not at all shocked by her forthrightness. “Do you know her father?” he said innocently.

She gave him a sideways look.

“You speak very boldly,” she said. “For one whose preference is to hide and observe.”

“Yet when I speak boldly, you do not take offense.”

She turned square on to him. “What would you have from me?” she said. “A lock of my hair? A button from my coat? My signature on your program?”

“I’d settle for a kiss,” he said.

“For fifty cents?” she said. “
Now
I take offense. Good day to you.”

He watched her walk across the stage, away from him and into the wings. When she got there, he called out, “When do I get to collect?”

She stopped and looked back. “Collect what?”

Again, he made a show of his innocence. “My change,” he said. “If I don’t get the kiss, I want my money.”

“Where can you usually be found, Jules Patenotre?”

“I have rooms at Murphy’s Hotel.”

“Then that is where I will find you,” she said, and left him standing on the stage.

TWENTY-NINE

E
ach Pinkerton office had a criminal department. They had card files and a rogues’ gallery and the resources to track certain kinds of criminal activity. The information held by the Philadelphia office didn’t compare with the criminal departments in New York and Chicago, but it gave a good account of all the local activity. The room was stuffy and high-ceilinged, and there was a fly somewhere loose in it.

“This one may fit,” said Sebastian, pulling out one of the cards to read it more closely.

“How so?” Sayers was in one of the office’s captain’s-style swiveling chairs, hands on his knees, looking ill at ease. He was out of place in here, and he knew it.

Sebastian read for a few moments and then said, “It’s one of our closed cases. A woman engaged us to look for her husband. Forty-two years old. He owned a company making optical and scientific instruments. Happily married, five children, and he disappeared without any reason or warning.”

“People disappear all the time. That’s not enough.”

“Wait. We closed the case after a farmer found his body. At first, it was assumed that he’d fallen from a train. He lay by the tracks for a month until the farmer came along. After all the animals and insects had been at him, it was impossible to be sure of the cause of death. But in the space of that month, our agent found out a few things about him that his family would have preferred not to know.”

Sayers had been swinging the chair from side to side. He stopped.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “He led a double life.”

“He liked the vaudeville. The chorus girls best of all.”

“Louise Porter is no chorus girl,” the prizefighter said.

“I use the term loosely.”

“As does everyone.”

“I mean young actresses of any kind. He’d take a box at Keith’s theater or the old Trocadero and send notes to the stage door. Once in a while, he’d get lucky.”

“Louise has a particular method,” Sayers said. “I’ve seen it develop over the years. She arrives in a new city, sometimes with a letter of introduction to someone in society. That gets her an invitation to one salon or another, where she sings and recites and always causes a stir among the men. She might hire a hall to give a reading, but never a theater. She keeps the title of an actress, but she is never part of any cast or company. She dare not be.”

Sebastian held the card up, as if it might offer the proof of something.

“This man’s wife was on the committee of the Philomusian Club,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a women’s club. Arts, music, poetry. For all we know, some of their events could even have been hosted at his mansion.”

Sayers thought about that one. It did, indeed, seem to put a different light on matters.

He said, “Is there anything there to say how he died?”

Sebastian had to go deeper into the file for an answer. He read for a while and then, with his eyes still on the paper, said, “Our police contacts say they found needles in his body. A dozen of them. All in a cluster. Pushed in where no needle ought to go. All else might decay, but the needles did not. The family were never told.”

Sayers asked to see the paper. Sebastian checked for anyone passing the room before he handed it over, but no one was there. Bearce wouldn’t like it if he saw an outsider reading a confidential file, potential client or not.

Sayers read for a while and then said, “I believe this may be evidence of her work.”

“Her work?”

“I have learned so much about my own sex in these past fourteen years, Becker. There are men who hold that they worship innocence while they seek to consume it like dogs. And there are upright, respectable citizens whose secret dream is of pain and humiliation at the hands of another. Of a mistress, or a lover. To undergo such is an almost unbearable ecstasy for them. Most stay well within the safety of the dream. Some would go to its limit. And at that limit, there is always the possibility of something going wrong.”

“These are the men she seeks out?”

“She does not need to seek them out. Whatever signal they are looking for, they seem to find. They pursue her. Most of what I know came from the case of a man in San Francisco. He had survived her attentions, but was left damaged. His consent to what had happened meant nothing in law. There was a scandal. After that, she had to stop using her own name.”

“Good God,” said Sebastian, who until this moment was certain that he’d pretty much seen everything there was to see of human nature.

Sayers said, “Don’t you see what she’s doing, Sebastian? She’s fulfilling the letter of the Wanderer’s contract without being entirely true to its spirit. She dispenses suffering, all right, but only to those who actively seek it. If a death occurs, it’s more by their misadventure than by her intent.”

“A nice distinction,” Sebastian said drily. “As I’m sure the widows would agree.”

Alongside the post office building stood the square-towered headquarters of the
Philadelphia Record.
They waited in the foyer as Sebastian had a message sent upstairs, and within a few minutes one of the regular staff came down, greeted him as an old friend, and led them through to the archive rooms.

Here, recent copies of the newspaper were piled flat on shelves. Older editions could be consulted in huge bound volumes that needed a rolling ladder to get them down and specially built lecterns to hold them open.

They were interested in those issues that covered the weeks before the dead man’s disappearance. Sebastian wasn’t entirely sure of what they were searching for, but Sayers seemed to have more of an idea.

“Here’s one,” Sebastian suggested, and read aloud from the classifieds. “Miss M. S. Lyons. Private instruction in all the latest and most fashionable dances. Classes taught out of town. Private lessons any hour.”

Sayers glanced up from his own pages. “A dance instructor?” he said. He didn’t seem persuaded.

“You said she tried something like it before,” Sebastian suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Sayers said. “I’m in the society pages, here…” He ran his finger down an entire column in a second or two. Sebastian realized that he wasn’t so much reading it as taking in the text as a block of print and extracting from it such detail as he needed. Was that how actors got their lines so quickly? Not so much learning the words as absorbing the sense of a piece, and then re-creating the words from it?

Sayers’ finger stopped on the page.

“Here she is,” he said excitedly.

Sebastian moved to his side, and both read together. It was a small announcement in the society column for a literary lunch to be held at the Rathskeller Café and Ladies Dining Room in the Betz Building on Broad Street. The guest speaker was to be the noted actress and
récitateuse
…

“Mrs. Louise Caspar,” Sebastian read aloud. “That must be a cruel twist of the knife for you. I’m sorry, Sayers.”

“Ignore it,” Sayers said. “I can.”

There were only two photographs accompanying the society columns, and neither was of Louise.

Sebastian reread the piece and said, “I see no actual mention of the Philomusian Club.”

“The name places her in town. That’s good enough for me. And look at the date. The trail is fresh.”

They looked through more issues, but found no further reference. As they were leaving the
Record
building, Sebastian said, “We need better information. There are other newspapers.”

“Never mind newspapers,” Sayers said. “Find me a dozen rich women with time on their hands. Find me the clubs and the literary societies. The lecture circuit and the private library. Those are the fields where she beats for her game.”

They stopped at the Automat for coffee and sandwiches. It was early for lunch, and the office crowds hadn’t built up yet. Despite the morning’s excitements, or perhaps because of them, Sayers appeared to have a healthy appetite. His color was better than the day before, his eyes brighter. The cuts about his head were beginning to heal…although for the moment he continued to have the look of a barroom brawler, taken out of his element and tossed into the daylight.

Sebastian said, “Say you find her. What then?”

Sayers was oddly silent.

Sebastian said, “I don’t believe you’ve never thought about it.”

“I have thought about it,” Sayers said. “I have written the scene in my head a thousand times. But until I face the moment itself…I have no idea what will happen.”

Rather than return to the Pinkerton office, where conversations might be overheard and questions raised, they stood outside Wanamaker’s and pretended to study the window displays.

Sebastian decided to be bold.

“You drink, Sayers.”

The prizefighter took this without embarrassment or any show of defensiveness. “I have been known to,” he conceded.

“It will not help you from here.”

Sayers gave a wry smile. He said, “It is very hard for a man to deny something whose companionship has sped the passage of the harshest of days.”

“Nevertheless. If you’re staying in my house, it won’t do to be three days without a shave and have gin on your breath.”

“I can easily get a shave,” Sayers said.