The Cutthroat

Isaac Bell stood still and catalogued the location and condition of everything in the room. Personal possessions — Shakespeare plays on a shelf by an easy chair; busts and engravings of the actors Booth, Mansfield, Irving, and Jefferson; photographs of leading ladies, signed and framed; and a glass box stacked with programs — confirmed the actor’s alibi as much as the punched train ticket he had shown Captain Coligney’s detectives. It was more a home than a rented room, and it had been left neat as a pin, drapes drawn, bed made, wardrobe closed. Dust thinly layered tabletops, and a spiderweb linked the busts, but a landlady or a neighbor must have watered the house plant, a healthy geranium, during the month he was away. The windows were shut tight, and Bell guessed the air would smell musty if it weren’t for the blood scent that lingered. He made a mental note that the killer had known the place was empty. The actor was lucky his show hadn’t closed a day earlier or he’d be dead, too.

She was on the bed, on her back, still half in her overcoat. Her hands were positioned at her sides, open, one in a glove, the other bare. Her palms bore no cuts. She had not fended off the knife. Her face, too, was unmarked, neither cut nor bruised. But it was swollen, and her skin was tinged blue. With her cheeks rounded in death, she looked remarkably similar to the cherubic photograph taken when she was fifteen.

A circle of horizontal bruises around her neck paralleled the deep slice in her throat that had nearly cleaved her head from her torso. The absence of cuts on her hands, her blue-tinged skin, and the bruises gave Bell hope that the killer had strangled her before he went to work with his knife.

The tall detective moved at last and stepped deeper into the room.

* * *

Pools of blood had soaked her coat and the bedspread, but none had fountained onto the headboard and the walls, which Bell took as further evidence that her heart had stopped beating before arteries were severed. He counted ten crescent-shaped slices on her arms and legs; they varied in length, but were all shallow and had bled very little. Puzzled and curious, he copied them in his notebook.

He inspected her fingernails. Two were broken, but he was surprised to see neither the blood nor torn skin he would expect from her scratching her killer’s wrists as she fought to live. For fought she must have, if only at the last moment. One of her boot heels was partly torn from the sole as she kicked against the floor or the bedpost.

Bell was inclined to concur with the cops that she had come to the flat voluntarily, but less inclined to assume it was for a tryst. Even discounting for a doting father’s blindness, he thought that Anna’s age, her sheltered upbringing, and a passion to succeed in the theater all suggested an innocent girl unlikely to strike up a liaison so soon after leaving home.

The cops had put great weight on the viciousness of the assault, characterizing it as the rage of jealousy. Or the anger of rejection, thought Bell. He was thinking she could have been lured to the apartment under a pretext that had nothing to do with a tryst. But he was painfully aware that when it fell to him to report to her father his daughter’s fate, he wanted to soften the blow, no matter how slightly.

If only, he thought, I had found her in time.

* * *

“Stop right there,” said Captain Coligney when he saw the expression on Isaac Bell’s face. He raised a big hand that would have halted a freight wagon. Bell pounded down the front steps and brushed past him, heading for Broadway and Times Square.

“Leave him to us,” Coligney shouted. “We’ll get him.”

“Not if I get him first.”

Fifteen minutes after he left the house where Anna was murdered he was looming over the desk of the New York Times drama critic. “Mr. Klauber, I am Isaac Bell. Our mutual friend, Walter Hawley, introduced us at the Amen Corner shortly before he died.” Walter L. Hawley had been chief political reporter of the Evening Sun.

“Bell? Certainly,” Adolph Klauber drawled in a Louisville, Kentucky, accent. “In the insurance line, if I recall. What’s up, Mr. Bell? You look mighty upset.”

Bell said, “Within minutes, actors are going to telephone you to tell you that a young actress named Anna Waterbury lived in their boardinghouse. I want the address.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Miss Waterbury was just murdered.”

A blurted, unbidden “What?” died half voiced.

Fury had contorted the handsome features of the tall, powerful man looming over his desk. Klauber flinched and swallowed hard, in sudden fear for his own life. Then a transformation as startling as the critic had ever witnessed on any stage changed Isaac Bell’s face again. Rage hardened to deliberate, measured, everlasting resolve. He spoke in a voice as cold as an Arctic sea.