Fallen Women Read online

  “Do you suppose that’s her mother?” Beret asked.

  Mick shook his head. “Who knows—her mother, sister, grandmother?”

  “Will you write to her about Sadie?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it. Wouldn’t it be better to let her worry that the worst might have happened to her daughter than to tell her outright that it did? If you were her mother, would you want to know your daughter died a whore, murdered in a crib in the tenderloin?”

  “Yes,” Beret said, and Mick, realizing what he’d asked, shook his head in a sort of apology.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” he told her.

  “I’m glad I know what happened to my sister. It would be terrible to lose track of her and never know what became of her. The not knowing would be worse. But then”—she gave a wry smile—“I’m a criminologist.”

  Mick smiled.

  “Exactly what is a criminologist, Detective McCauley?”

  “An expert in crime. I think you qualify.”

  “An empty word, then.”

  “But useful.” He tucked the envelope and jewelry into his pocket, then wiped the knife and wrapped it in a rag. “I wonder if Sadie was Mrs. Anson Strunk.”

  Beret thought that over. “Perhaps you should write to Anson Strunk, then.”

  He nodded.

  “Will you tell him her profession?”

  “Not in the first letter. I’ll just say she died.”

  “Then you’ve done this before, written to families of dead prostitutes.”

  He nodded. “Nobody else in the department wants to do it. Sometimes it’s enough to say the woman’s dead. They may suspect the truth and don’t want it confirmed. Others—like you—need the details. I wait until they ask. Most of them don’t. Most of them don’t reply at all. But I still write. They’re human beings, after all.” He paused, then called to Officer Thrasher and told him to find a piece of wood to nail across the outside door to keep out the vags and the curious.

  “Will it work?” Beret asked.

  “Not likely. It won’t be an hour before some of the girls come in and take Sadie’s things. Tattered as they are, her clothes will be worn by somebody, or maybe sold to the ragpicker.” He looked around the room. “I believe we’re finished.”

  With a sigh of relief, Beret went outside. The storm of the day before was gone. Holladay Street was bathed in sunlight that already had melted the snow. A spring breeze blew from the west carrying the scent of grass, covering up the manure smell of the street. A white cat, its back arched, walked slowly past Beret, then put its paws against the side of the small building and stretched. As she warmed herself in the sun’s rays Beret found it hard to believe that a woman had just been murdered a few feet from where she stood. It was too perfect a day for that. She looked across the street and saw a tulip blooming in a vacant lot. She loved tulips. They meant spring to her. She remembered how Lillie and Teddy had vied with each other to find the first tulips and bring them to her. Once Lillie had spotted a clump of them in the park and picked every one.

  “Shall we start for City Hall, Detective? I’d prefer the fresh air to a streetcar, and the distance isn’t far,” Beret said, pushing the memory of Lillie and the flowers from her mind.

  Mick pointed behind her with his chin. “Your driver’s waiting.”

  “What!” Beret whirled around and found herself staring at Jonas, who stood by the carriage a half block away. “I told him to go back to my uncle’s house. I won’t have him following me,” she muttered.

  “Like you said before, he’s trying to protect you. Don’t be too hard on the fellow. I checked on him at the station. Do you want to know who he is? It’s not a pretty story.”

  “I have not heard a pretty story since I arrived in Denver.”

  “I remembered the case when you told me his name. I’d just started out as a copper. It was before I had the Holladay Street beat, and one of the reasons I wanted it was to keep such things from happening. I was idealistic back then.” Mick curled his lip as if to say such feelings had passed, but Beret knew they hadn’t.

  “His mother was a prostitute, worked out of a crib somewhere around here. Cock-eyed Lizzie, she was called, because one eye was off. She used to keep the boy with her, lock him in the back room when she was entertaining. Sometimes she’d go on a bender and forget about him. Lizzie had a fight with another whore. They were arguing about a john right there in her front room, and the other girl hit her and Lizzie fell against the bed. The boy must have heard it. Lizzie wasn’t found for two days, and the poor kid was in the back room all that time, locked in, nothing to eat or drink and maybe knowing his mother was dead. Can you imagine what he must have gone through, a boy like that, not more than five or six? There wasn’t anybody to take him in, so he went to an orphanage, and later on, he became a newsboy. He used to hang around City Hall. I hadn’t seen him in a long time.”

  “I wonder if my aunt knows all that about him. My uncle told me only that Aunt Varina had rescued him from some bullies.”

  “Maybe they thought the story was too sordid to tell you.” Mick glanced down at the sidewalk where the snow from the day before was melting and kicked aside a chunk of ice. “But I imagine you know plenty of sordid stories. This one isn’t so unusual.”

  “No, that’s the pity of it. I wonder if he thinks of my aunt as a substitute mother. That would explain his devotion to her.”

  “Could be. You’ll hurt Jonas’s feelings if we don’t let him drive us to City Hall. And you’ll hurt mine if you make me walk.” Mick chuckled. “Now don’t berate him.”

  “Why, Detective, I believe you have a soft spot.”

  “That’s why I let you come along to Sadie’s crib.”

  “I thought it was because I am a criminologist.” For an instant, the sun and the banter made Beret forget Sadie’s murder.

  She took Mick’s arm, and they walked toward the carriage, where she gave Jonas a long look but said nothing. The young man shouldn’t be caught between her annoyance and her aunt’s anger, for surely her aunt would not have been pleased if Jonas had returned to the house. Now that she knew the boy’s background, Beret resolved to be more understanding.

  As Mick helped Beret into the carriage, a man approached and said, “I got a tip that your whore killer got another’n, Mick.”

  “So it seems,” Mick told him.

  “You want to tell me what it looks like in there?”

  “You can imagine the scene for yourself.”

  “My readers don’t want my imagination. They want to know what happened.”

  “Since when?”

  The man ignored the retort as he took note of Beret and lifted his hat. “Miss.”

  Clearly annoyed, Mick said, “Miss Beret, may I present Eugene Latham. Gene, Miss Beret.” The man doffed his hat as Mick added, “Latham is a reporter for the Denver Tribune. Crime is his specialty, the more sensational, the better.”

  Latham looked at Beret curiously, but as Mick divulged nothing about her, he turned back to the detective. “Like I say, I heard another whore was done in, a crib girl this time. Is that right?”

  “Sadie Hops,” Mick said.

  The reporter shook his head. “Didn’t know her. Now if it’d been a parlor girl…” The smirk on the reporter’s face disappeared when he caught Beret looking at him. “Was it the same man?”

  “We don’t know.”

  The reporter had taken out a pad of paper and a pencil, and he paused. “Stabbed, I heard, just like Lillie Osmundsen, the judge’s niece? You afraid if you say the murders are connected, you’ll start a riot? The girls’ll stampede out of here like scared deer if they think there’s an insane killer on the loose.”

  “We don’t know enough to make any conclusions.”

  Mick looked at the carriage as if to suggest that Beret get inside, but she stayed where she was, glancing at Jonas, who was transfixed by the conversation. She wished she could take him out of earshot, as she wondere
d if he had listened to talk like this when his mother died. Perhaps he was remembering conversations he had heard when he was locked in the back room while his mother was working.

  “Aw, come on, Mick, give a guy a break. You can trust me. The other boys’ll be right behind me, and I want to get into print before they do.”

  Mick blew out his breath, thinking. “Look, Gene, you tell Thrasher over there I said you could go inside and look around. All’s I can tell you is she was stabbed eight times and it happened sometime last night. Her name was Sadie Hops, and I don’t know a thing about her, don’t even know if that’s her real name.”

  “Now, Mick. You can do better than that. I did you a favor on the parlor house girl that got murdered, made you a household name. My stories got picked up by newspapers all over the country, even New York.”

  “Why would I care about that?”

  Beret looked at the reporter distastefully, for the offensive write-up of Lillie’s death, with its clichés and condescending tone, that she had read in New York, must have been a truncated version of one of this man’s articles.

  Latham continued to badger the detective, but Mick refused to say more, and at last the reporter put away his pencil. He shook hands with Mick and nodded at Beret, saying, “Pleased to meet you.” Then as if to satisfy his curiosity about why the woman was there, he asked, “This Sadie some kind of relative of yours, ma’am?”

  Beret raised her head a little in a gesture of disdain, a gesture that would have made her aunt proud. “Certainly not.”

  “Begging your pardon, but it’s not every day you see a lady at a murder scene.” When Beret didn’t respond, he asked outright, “What is it you’re here for, if you don’t mind my asking, ma’am?”

  Beret continued her haughty stare, although the reporter must have been used to such looks, because he did not appear uncomfortable. At last she said, “I do mind, but I will tell you. I am a criminologist.”

  “A what?”

  “An expert in crime,” Mick told him.

  “You go to school for that?” The reporter smirked.

  “Of course. The New York Institute for the Study of the Criminally Insane.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a line of work for a lady.”

  “She helped solve the Porter-Masters murders. You remember that one, Gene.”

  “Well, sure,” he said, and walked away in the direction of Sadie’s crib.

  As she got into the carriage, Beret asked, “What were the Porter-Masters murders?”

  “Darned if I know. I made it up. What’s the New York Institute for the Study of the Criminally Insane?”

  “That’s made up, too.”

  Mick took Beret’s arm and helped her into the carriage. They were at last a team, Beret thought. Perhaps they would indeed solve Lillie’s murder—and the murder of Sadie Hops. She hoped that would be before a third woman was killed.

  Chapter 11

  Beret ordered Jonas to take the detective to the station. She would bid Detective McCauley good-bye, then go home, get out of her bloodstained clothes, and rid herself of the smell of death. She was anxious to continue with the investigation, but viewing the dead prostitute’s body had taken its toll on her. She was tired and heartsick and wanted nothing more than to let the warm water of the bath wash away the taint of Sadie’s murder.

  She settled back into the seat and looked down at her hands, which still held the detective’s handkerchief. It was filthy with blood and gore. “I’ll wash this myself and return it to you,” she said.

  “How do you get blood out of a handkerchief?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He plucked the fabric square from her fingers and threw it into the street. “There, you have better things to worry about.”

  “Yes.” Beret was silent for a while, thinking, and they rode for several blocks. At last, she said, “Detective McCauley, I want to ask you something. Do you think there is a chance the murders could have been committed by a woman? We’ve been assuming the killer is a man, but is there a possibility the culprit is female?”

  Instead of scoffing as he might have done a few days earlier, the detective thought over the question. “It is always a possibility. Some women are as strong as a man, and there are one or two girls on Holladay Street who could best me in a wrestling match. Little Annie must weigh over three hundred pounds, and Iron Betty killed a horse once when she socked it in the head. Of course, that’s rare, but yes, it’s possible.”

  “But not probable. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I am. If there’d been just one killing, I might have wondered if the killer was a woman. In fact, I did. I never completely dismissed the idea that one of the whores at Miss Hettie’s killed your sister. They can get that mad, you know, and anger carries strength. Besides, the first time, the killer used scissors. That’s a woman’s weapon. And the body was covered up, too.”

  “In my experience, women operate differently from men,” Beret said. “A prostitute might get angry enough to grab a knife—or scissors, as the case may be—and stab another woman in a fit of madness, maybe over a man or a piece of jewelry or some word of insult. She might even plan the murder of a man who’s mistreated her. I know of a girl in New York who set fire to her father, a monster who’d forced her to lie not only with himself but with any drunken bum with a dime. And I am familiar with another, an abandoned woman who drowned her children in a bathtub rather than let her husband’s new wife take them. But I’ve never heard of a woman so depraved that she murdered just for the thrill of killing. That’s a man’s way. Still, perhaps we are too quick to assume the killer is a man.”

  “As I say, I’d agree with you if there’d been only one murder. But now there are two, and I believe you are right when you say women don’t have the bloodlust that men do.” Mick continued, “Now when there’s a third—”

  “A third.” It was more a statement than a question.

  Mick looked out the window at the streets that were muddy, now that the sun had melted the snow. The carriage splashed a group of dandies who were too slow to get out of the way, and Beret thought she saw Jonas smile.

  “Yes, I’m sure there’ll be a third. And the third murder will establish once and for all that our killer is a man. There could be even more than that. If the killer is indeed mad, if it is bloodlust, then he’s only begun.” Mick thought that over. “Or maybe he’s already killed girls elsewhere. He could be new to Denver.”

  “Teddy?” Beret asked softly.

  “You tell me. Is he capable of it?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “But you didn’t think he was capable of seducing your sister, either.”

  Beret nodded. “I have been wondering if he gave Lillie drugs.”

  “Pimps are known to do that. Do you think she was a doper?”

  “I don’t know. A maid found something in her room in New York, a powder of some kind, but she didn’t tell me until after she had thrown it out.”

  “Was your husband?” Mick asked.

  “I know he tried drugs, but to what degree I can’t say. I think I need to find out.”

  “I don’t see that it matters so much. Many of the girls try opiates. Your sister didn’t die from drugs.”

  “But I want to know.”

  “Perhaps we can look into it later,” Mick said, dismissing the subject. Suddenly, he put his hand on hers. “This is hard for you. I won’t think less of you if you quit. It’s all right. I’ll keep you apprised of the progress, daily, if you like.”

  The detective’s hand felt warm, and Beret liked the touch. It had been a long time since someone had held her hand, and she’d missed that connection with a man. Nonetheless, she said, “I will not back out now. I don’t care what you think of me, Detective McCauley.” But she did care.

  Mick nodded.

  “What do we do next?” Beret asked. “Do we interview Joey Summers?”

  Mick looked down at his hand over Beret’s. “I w
ill interview Joey Summers and maybe his father, too. I told you that.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me with you?”

  “I’ll do it alone. Do you really think those two will talk about your sister in front of you? What do you think Joey will say when I ask him if he’s been intimate with Lillie? I can talk to him man-to-man, and he’ll say more, might even want to brag a little about his conquest. And Mr. Summers, I know him. He’d be furious if I brought you with me.” He grinned. “Of course, he’ll be furious anyway.”

  Beret thought that over and decided that the detective was right. “Then I must sit and twiddle my thumbs?”

  “No, I would like you to write some letters.”

  “Letters?” Beret asked scornfully. As if she were some typewritist.

  “To police departments. I think we should find out if our killer has been elsewhere. We should write to police chiefs in all the major cities and inquire whether they have had similar murders.”

  “And you think they would reply to me?”

  “They’ll reply if you sign my name. I’ll set you up with names and addresses and writing materials, and you can compose the letters while I’m chasing down Joey Summers.”

  Beret nodded, although the idea did not appeal to her. She would write a few letters to show she was willing to do her part. But she had other ideas. She would not tell the detective about them just now.

  * * *

  Beret had planned to return to the police station to begin the letters the following morning, but her aunt came down with one of her headaches and begged Beret to stay with her. So Beret had sat in Varina’s bedroom, reading to the older woman and filling towels with ice to put on her brow. Caring for her aunt reminded Beret of a time she herself had been ill with the influenza, and Lillie, ten at the time, had come into the bedroom, a white apron over her dress and a white napkin tied around her head and announced, “Hello, madam, I’m Nurse Fish. I’m going to take care of you.” Then she’d set a bell and a glass of soda water on the bedside table. “Now drink this up like a good girl,” she’d told Beret, handing her the water. When Beret gave her back the empty glass, Lillie had said, “Ring the bell if you need anything, and I will fetch it.” She’d left the room, but Beret had known the girl was lurking just outside the door, so after a few minutes, she’d rung the bell, and Lillie had come bounding back. “Yes, madam?” she’d said.