Mysteries of Winterthurn Page 22

  Miss Florette Sparks, 18 years of age; of Tyre Street, South Winterthurn; the sole support of her widowed mother and agèd grandparents; an employee of the Foxcroft Shoe & Leather Works Company of South Winterthurn at the time of her death in early April.

  Added to which dolorous roll was now,—

  Miss Eva Teal, 16 years of age; of Cadwaller Street, South Winterthurn; survived by a mother and married sister, Iris; an employee “of varying merit” of Shaw Brothers Textiles, of South Winterthurn, at the time of her death in early June.

  Since each of the girls had endured unspeakable torments before her death, and since each of the bodies had been found in the same general area, all but the most captious of observers agreed that the murders were the work of a single hand; and gave evidence of conforming to some unknown perversity of design. Ah, many were the “amateur-experts” of Detection, some of whom had traveled from as far away as San Francisco, and even London, England, who had strained their ratiocinative powers in the task of deciphering a code herein!—to the ill-disguised contempt of the local law enforcement officers, who, while having very few leads of their own to follow, knew at least that a luxuriant puzzling over names, initials, months of the year, days of the week, dates, hair and eye coloring, and the like, not to mention anagrams and acrostics formed by the victims’ names, would prove a fruitless activity. (Here, I suppose it must be said, in some embarrassment, we have an early manifestation of the deleterious effects of crime literature,—whether the esoteric works of Poe or the newly popular works of Conan Doyle—upon the impressionable amateur.)

  As for the appellation the “Cruel Suitor,” which caught the public’s fancy early on, and has held fast ever since,—this poetical and, in truth, altogether astute designation seems to have arisen from testimony at the inquest into Dulcinea Inman’s death, when one of the dead girl’s weeping acquaintances reported that Miss Inman had confided in her, not a week before her death, that she was “being courted” by a gentleman, in the utmost secrecy: for, it seemed, while this gentleman was enamored of her, he had earlier affianced himself to a young lady of his own social set; and was not free, at the present time, to declare his heart. As to the name of this suitor,—this was less clear; nor had Miss Inman indicated with any confidence his exact place of residence, save to boast to her friend that it was “across the river,”—which is to say, in a more affluent sector of the city.

  Handsome, gracious, genteel, “wondrously well-mannered,” and charitable as Miss Inman’s suitor was,—for he was always pressing small gifts upon her—he had, it seems, a fault or two: being surprisingly mercurial in his temperament; and possessive; and jealous; and inclined at times (Miss Inman claimed she had no idea why,—surely she gave him no cause) to be cruel. He might grow sullen with no provocation, or, yet more alarmingly, he might burst out with the most cutting remarks; he might pinch her, in play, yet not altogether in play; he might twist her slender wrist; or squeeze her shoulder, and shake her; or even slap her: and all, Miss Inman had said, for no reason she could discover. “Yet it seemed that his good qualities outweighed the bad,” Miss Inman’s friend testified. “For what reason, otherwise, would poor Dulcie have put up with such behavior?” (At which point the gentlemen who were conducting the inquest could not forbear exchanging significant glances with one another. For what reason, indeed!)

  As none of the suspects in Miss Inman’s murder answered to this curious description, the authorities were inclined to dismiss such talk of a “gentleman suitor” as mere girlish phantasy, scarcely worth being recorded. For what shop-girls, and servant-girls, and factory-girls, of South Winterthurn or elsewhere, did not concoct somesuch absurd notion out of the very air?—either in innocent self-delusion or, more wantonly, that they might impress others.

  Frank Shearwater, the much-respected sheriff of Winterthurn County, doubted that the girl’s testimony could be allowed any credence at all; and regretted that he could not in some wise suppress it, to keep it from the newspapers and the rumormongers: for careless talk of a “gentleman suitor,” or a “cruel suitor,” could not fail to influence further witnesses, and, as it were, contaminate the police investigation.

  Which seems to have come about, indeed,—for of the five girls eventually slain, all but one (Miss Euphemia Godwit) had confided in a close acquaintance, or a sister, that she had been chosen as the object of a secret adoration, by a gentleman “whose name could not be revealed.”

  AS THE READER who is familiar with Xavier Kilgarvan’s career may recall, the young “consulting detective” had been traveling abroad for some months at this time; and, quite by happenstance, returned to Winterthurn City only four days after the discovery of the fifth victim’s body. As, in his characteristically meticulous way, he will examine the details pertaining to each of the earlier deaths, I shall refrain from setting them forth in this space; and concentrate upon the curious circumstances surrounding Eva Teal’s death, and the “presentation” of her body in the Half-Acre.

  Alone of the five victims, Eva had been placed (unless the exigencies of the death rigor had forced her thus) into a supplicant praying position: her lacerated jaw and elbows steadying her against a rock, and her bloodied wrists, though untied, nearly meeting behind her bowed head: her childlike stubbed fingers spread in an attitude of frozen fright. An expression both strained and obsequious yet showed on her blanched face, which had not, oddly, relaxed after death, so that it would have demanded a charitable eye, to see in this heart-rending countenance those “pretty,” “charming,” and “alluring” features for which, it seems, the young girl had been known. (Newspaper likenesses of Miss Teal, or “Eva,” as she came to be called, vary widely, as a consequence of the skill of the artist, and the degree of his wish,—following the order of a calculating editor, doubtless—to emphasize the victim’s angelic, or seductive, traits. Yet the most authentic-seeming of the drawings show an ordinary, and even vulgar, species of comeliness: Eva’s eyes disingenuously round, and close-set; the nose snubbed; the mouth rather full and slack, inclining toward the sensual.) When the luckless creature was found in the Half-Acre, her appearance was of course grievously ravaged; and only the crudest of authorial sensibilities would wish to limn it here. However,—most piteous of sights!—the girl’s fair brown hair was yet charmingly curled, as if for a Sunday’s excursion; and her tattered green poplin dress, prettily decorated with white velvet ribands by Eva’s own hand, was indeed, as her mother later testified, the victim’s “Sunday best.” (Other items of feminine apparel,—amongst them a hat, gloves, and undergarments of divers sorts—were nowhere in evidence.)

  Death had been most savagely inflicted upon Eva, by way of repeated stabbings about the torso, belly, and thighs: upward of one hundred strokes, as the county coroner, Hans Deck, estimated. Not until some hours later, however, when the body was being prepared for identification in the morgue, did another factor somewhat embarrassingly come to light: which is to say, Eva appeared to have been strangled as well, by a thin gold chain so tightly twisted about her neck, it had sunk deep into the tender flesh; and a small gold cross had been wrenched off the chain, and placed flat on the victim’s tongue,—as a mockery of the communion wafer, perhaps. (Which grisly element, as we shall see, would give credence to the theory of ritual murder, allegedly practiced by Jews against Christians in earlier times.) Eva’s jaws were badly bruised, and the teeth bloodied; but, as rigor mortis had long since set in, it was not to be wondered that the coroner had failed to note this detail.

  Being of a naturally conservative character, Mr. Deck declared only that Eva had met her death in a “suspicious” manner: very likely not self-inflicted (as it was a truism of the trade, strangulation must be invariably homicide), nor yet accidental; her misfortune executed by an “unknown assailant, or assailants.” As to the precise hour of death,—Mr. Deck vaguely ascertained that it might have been at any time within a span of, say, twelve hours: roughly between the hour of 7:00 of the previous evening and 7:0
0 of the morning of June 8. Whether the body had been violated in a carnal manner, Mr. Deck chose not to explore, as it had oft been his experience that such information was difficult to obtain, and, in this case, the great number of lacerations would doubtless obscure the evidence. And, too, when girls of doubtful reputation and family were involved, promiscuous sexual activity rendered a verdict the more problematic and disagreeable: witness the earlier examples of “Effie” Godwit (rumored to have been intermittently employed by the Hotel Paradise, one of the most notorious of the Rivière-du-Loup brothels, and approximately four months pregnant at the time of her death), and the sweet-faced scullery maid Tricia Furlow (rumored to have seduced a goodly number of the male servants at Shadow-Wood House, and even the young master, Ringgold Peregrine, himself). The sheriff, Mr. Shearwater, observed that Eva’s mother and sister both insisted that Eva was a good Catholic girl, who never, or rarely, “kept company” with the opposite sex: whereupon Mr. Deck cannily replied that such an insistence is never not made, in repellent cases of this sort.

  Of nearly three dozen persons closely questioned by Mr. Shearwater and his deputies, a small number provided information that appeared to be moderately helpful; and several stood out as likely suspects,—these being Eva’s brother-in-law, Lyle Beck, a husky, sullen, and unusually bellicose hackney driver, in his early thirties; and a most pathetically frightened young man named Louis, who lived directly below the Teals, in their crowded tenement building on Cadwaller Street; and the distraught office manager of the Shaw textile mill, Isaac Rosenwald, a Jewish gentlemen of forty-one years of age, who had been called in for questioning as a consequence of an anonymous tip received by the authorities. (This piece of information, written in an eccentric hand, part stiff and part flowery, as if the writer had sought to disguise his or her handwriting, was sent to Mr. Shearwater by way of a Negro messenger boy, sometimes in the employ of the Barraclough horse trainers, and prized for his reticence, so far as the identities of his gentleman customers were concerned: nor did he seem to recall, at this juncture, who had sent him on his errand. Apart from this “tip,” however, the office manager Rosenwald had already been charged, by certain of Eva’s co-workers at the mill, with having “shamelessly favored” her, and, by others, with having “displayed animosity against her”—!)

  These leading suspects, and some eight or ten other men, ranging in ages from fifteen to fifty-nine (most of them being residents of the lowlife neighborhood, adjacent to the factories, mills, warehouses, etc., of South Winterthurn, in which the Teals lived), were considered by Mr. Shearwater to have unconvincing alibis regarding their whereabouts on the night of June 7, and through the early morning of the eighth; and, though few of them were ascertained to have actual criminal records, their characters were such that so repulsive and unnatural a crime as that committed against Eva Teal was not beyond their powers. (Ah, how eagerly, and with what civic zeal, informants stepped forward to tell their tales to the authorities!—so long, of course, as they were promised the cloak of anonymity. The Shaws’ unpopular office manager was not alone in being denounced by persons wishing to aid in the investigation, for Lyle Beck, and Louis, and any number of men in the neighborhood, not excluding the parish priest, were eventually named; and even a half-witted and grotesquely obese boy, the son of a German tavernkeeper, who was brought cringing to the sheriff’s office,—a creature so deficient in mental capacity, and so sickly, it quite beggared understanding why anyone would wish to cause him trouble.)

  Both Mrs. Teal and her married daughter Iris insisted, with some vehemence, that Eva had been an uncommonly good girl, and had had no enemies; that she had never flirted with any men or boys; that she had always acquitted herself diligently at the mill; and never failed to bring home every penny of her weekly wages,—which is to say, $2.50, for some seventy-two hours of labor. So far was she from being one of the troublemakers amongst the mill-hands, that she shunned their very company, for being “coarse” and “ill-bred”: so pious a Catholic was she, as to have never missed a single Sunday’s communion,—save perhaps as a consequence of sickness, when it had been necessary for her to eat a small breakfast before going to mass. Her eyes angrily aflame with tears, Mrs. Teal lashed out against “certain Orientals” in the neighborhood who, it seemed to her, stared at her and her daughters most brazenly,—indeed, at all the white women and girls on the street; while the more hesitant Mrs. Beck (herself but a girl of no more than twenty, and hugely pregnant) averred that it “should not surprise her if the Jew at the office,”—which is to say, Isaac Rosenwald—had lured her sister away to murder her for being a good Catholic girl, and shrinking from his advances. “Under the pretext of worrying about a negligible injury of Eva’s, Mr. Rosenwald once took her by cab to a doctor across the river,” Mrs. Beck said, “and as Eva was not her usual chatterbox self in reporting the adventure to us, I cannot think but that something went amiss: this incident having taken place shortly after Easter. Moreover, is the Jew not ugly—!” she said with a fastidious shudder.

  The Teals’ testimonies, though convincing at the time, were badly undercut by revelations made by other witnesses, who lived in their neighborhood or had worked at the mill with Eva: for, it seemed, Mrs. Teal enjoyed the reputation of being a “shameless liar,” who presented herself as a widow when, in truth, her drunkard husband had abandoned her, to live downriver with a girl half his age; and she so frequently quarreled with Eva, over the matter of Eva’s slovenliness about the household, and persnickety ways with her own toilet,—and, most damning of all, her “popularity” with the opposite sex (“whether boys yet in short pants, or grizzled old rips three times her age,” as one of the older mill-hands sourly phrased it), that several tenants in her building had risen up in arms to ask that the Teals be evicted. As to Iris Beck,—it was known through the parish, as a friend of Mrs. Teal’s confided, that Iris and Lyle had married rather more out of dire necessity than romantic inclination; and that Beck not only was a drunkard and a brute, who abused his simpering wife, and “made overtures” to Eva, but was rumored to have a second family elsewhere, doubtless under another name. The sheriff was concerned to know whether Beck had ever displayed any actual brutality, or threatened such, to Eva, in the presence of the witness: but it seemed he had not,—or, rather, being on his good behavior before other parties, he had confined his bullying to his wife, who was well habituated to it. Iris was the more discredited as an impartial judge of her sister, another neighbor woman claimed, for it was known that she had always been jealous of the younger girl’s curly hair and sparkling eyes: and had, upon more than one occasion, loudly quarreled with Eva in the street, and declared she would “gladly see her fry in Hell.”

  Several girls of Eva’s own age, who worked either at the Shaw mill, or at one or another of the South Winterthurn factories, wrung the hearts of their male queriests by weeping as they described their belovèd Eva: who had always a smile, and a witty rejoinder, and oft-times a present (if only a wild daisy or lily plucked from a field) for a friend; and who was so utterly lacking in guile, it seemed always to break her heart when a cruel or spiteful remark, uttered behind her back, was told to her. True, Eva could not always keep pace with the more experienced workers at the mill, whose impatience she sometimes provoked by her spells of fatigue, dizziness, “sick headache,” and the like, particularly as their shift stretched into its later hours; and it was held against her that the foreman sometimes excused her early, or neglected to reprimand her for making mistakes. It was true too that Eva contrived to meet her beaux while telling her mother she was visiting a friend, or attending mass: and that, out of sheer vivacity and playfulness, she sometimes “flirted” in the street, believing herself safe in the company of her friends.

  Since perhaps the age of thirteen Eva had let drop hints, of an innocently vain sort, that she had numerous admirers whose names she must keep secret; and, in recent months, she had quite surprised her friends with certain purchases made across the river,�
��a straw sailor hat with a smart blue band; a pair of charming shoes with mother-of-pearl buttons and zebrawood heels; various cloth flowers, ribands, strips of lace, etc.—which seemed at last to bear out the truth of her imaginings. (Indeed, yes, one of Eva’s friends told Mr. Shearwater,—the green poplin dress was surely one of these purchases: for it could not have been more than a week old at the time of Eva’s death, and had raised quite a storm with Mrs. Teal when it was first brought home.) Eva had coyly hinted of a “gentleman suitor” and took no pains to hide certain bruises at her wrists, or bumps, scrapes, cuts, etc., on her face,—murmuring only, with both trepidation and delight, and not a little pride, that “members of the masculine sex were so very curious, in their moods of jealousy, and adoration, and again jealousy, one could never hope to predict their behavior—!”

  One of the girls speculated that these purchases of Eva’s might have come by way of an innocent source,—for there was an elderly woman who kept a tearoom on Fisk Street, and who, though irascible generally, had always admired Eva for her “spunk” and “dash”: as for the bruises,—it was no secret that Mrs. Teal, when drunk, beat her daughter; nor did Lyle Beck restrain himself from displaying his bad temper in Eva’s presence. (The tearoom proprietress was so shaken by the girl’s death, and so in terror of the authorities, she could not even be questioned: but averred only that she knew nothing of Eva Teal,—and could not have recognized her in a cluster of other girls. Eva’s mother and brother-in-law, it scarcely needs be said, angrily denied ever having laid a hand on Eva, either in chastisement or in play.)

  Though named countless times as a troublemaker in the neighborhood, and a youth “particularly taken with” Eva, the nineteen-year-old Louis, who was variously employed as a stable boy, dock worker, day laborer, etc., cravenly denied having approached Eva at any time; and declared, most outrageously, that he did not know her name; and had not recognized her likeness (this, a charcoal sketch rendered by a local artist) when it was pointed out to him in the Gazette. This ill-featured youth, whose cheeks and forehead fairly bristled with pimples, and whose left leg was shorter than his right, as a result of childhood rickets, so vigorously denied all knowledge of the slain girl that he roused the irritation of the authorities, no less than their professional suspicion, and fairly begged, as it were, to be taken into immediate custody. (Indeed, after several hours’ interrogation of this young man, which came to as little as that with the half-witted German boy, one of the sheriff’s deputies, Norland Clegg, averred that, so far as he was concerned, they had “got their man”; and he could wish for nothing more than to be allowed, in private, to extract a full confession from the wretch.)