The Cutthroat

“The vicious cutthroat who killed the poor girl slaughtered her so gruesomely that the newspapers will be printing extras. I am betting that some actor who knew where she lived will telephone you. Her neighbors will help me identify the cutthroat.”

“Why would they telephone me?”

“Because before you became a critic, you were an actor, Mr. Klauber. Who would you have telephoned when you were struggling for a place in the theater? The police? Or a famous drama critic who used to be an actor and is therefore sympathetic to the backstage standpoint.”

“I hope — no, I trust — I would not have been so crassly ambitious.”

“You forget the indignities suffered, the disappointments, and the poverty. From what I’ve seen the past few days, the theater is a hard life, and it’s easy to get lost.”

“Well,” Klauber conceded, “everyone’s got to make a living somehow.”

His telephone rang.

* * *

Isaac Bell bounded up the front steps of Anna Waterbury’s boardinghouse — two time-battered, nineteenth-century town houses merged into one, mid-block, on a cross street off Broadway. He knew he would be lucky to have five minutes before cops and reporters besieged it. The front door was flung open before he could knock. A pair of vaudeville dancers, the woman in swirls of silk, the man in white tie, looked crestfallen.

“You’re not Mr. Klauber.”

“Mr. Klauber sent me,” Bell lied. “We need your help. What are your names?”

“Heather and Lou,” said the woman, who was an extraordinarily beautiful brunette with long dark hair.

“Heather and Lou, how well did you know Anna?”

“Only from the supper table,” said Heather.

“Do you recall the last time you saw her?”

“Yesterday. She never came home last night.”

“Did she leave with anyone?”

“She left alone.”

Bustling up behind the dancers came their landlady, Mrs. Shine, a round woman with suspicious eyes and a work-worn face. She looked appalled when Bell asked whether she had known Anna, and she protested that she ran an orderly house and she could not be held responsible for what her boarders did away from the house.

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

The landlady crossed her arms. “Not on this premises.”

“Would any of your other boarders know whether she had a boyfriend?”

“Only Lucy Balant. They shared a room.”

“May I speak with Lucy?”

“If you take yourself to Philadelphia,” said the landlady, and one of the hovering dancers explained, “Lucy is an understudy in Jimmy Valentine—”

“Oh my Lord,” groaned the landlady. “Look at them!”

From one direction pounded a phalanx of police, from the other a mob of reporters. Uniformed cops were trailing plainclothesmen. The reporters were shouting questions.

* * *

Isaac Bell hurried uptown to the Knickerbocker. He wired instructions to the Philadelphia field office and several other offices around the continent, issued orders to every detective in the bull pen, then raced across town to Grand Central Terminal, where he caught a train to Waterbury, Connecticut.

He was in the Brass City in less than two and a half hours, but the newspapers had beat him to it. No one answered the telephone when he called from the Waterbury Station, and when he got to the Pape home, a three-story brick mansion flanked by stone turrets, he found reporters milling outside the spiked fence.

A thug in a black coat and fedora guarded the gate, and two flanked the front door — Pape Brass company cops, Bell assumed. He palmed his Van Dorn badge to shield the flash of gold from the reporters. “Mr. Pape is a client. If he wants to see me, tell him let me in the back door.”

He received the polite “Wait here, please” that he expected. Private cops treated Van Dorns with kid gloves, hoping to be remembered next time the agency’s Protective Services branch was hiring. The guard hurried back. “Walk around the corner. One of the boys will take you through the side gate.”

Bell was ushered down a service alley and in the servants’ entrance. A liveried butler led him through the house and across an immense drawing room dominated by a pipe organ. He knocked on the door to a library that doubled as Pape’s home office and left Bell face-to-face with the grieving father.

“I can only say how sorry I am, sir. I promise you that we will never give up until we bring her killer to justice.”

“She’d be alive if you had found her.”

6

Isaac Bell bought the New York papers from a Bridgeport newsboy who ran onto the train when it paused in the station. All hewed the same line — guided, Bell was certain, by Captain Coligney — that an innocent young woman of a good family had been lured or forced to the room where she was murdered. None raised the possibility that Anna might have known her murderer.

Deprived of the salacious, the papers fell back on a tried and true comparison to the ultimate evil. Back in 1888, nearly twenty-five years ago, a string of murders in London were a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. To Bell’s day, in 1911, reporters routinely likened them to any unsolved knife attack against a woman.