The Cutthroat

He had stuck to his rules. He had practiced self-discipline and restraint. He had planned. He had anticipated. He had hoped. But still he was tripped up: Little Beatrice’s nose was as sensitive as his. In Cincinnati, of all places, despite laying extraordinarily elaborate groundwork.

“Is that a false beard?”

She actually reached up to tug it. He recoiled, jerked his head away from her hand.

“It is, isn’t it?” She laughed, and stood on tiptoe to inspect it closely. “That’s the best one I’ve ever seen.” Her laughter died as she considered the oddity.

He was quick, he reminded himself. He had better be. The suspicion of danger had narrowed her eyes. Still, he was confident that he held the advantage. She was only operating on instinct. He had at his command decades of know-how.

“Why are you wearing a false beard?”

“To hide…” he said, then cast his eyes down as if too dismayed to complete his thought. He could still control her.

“From what?” she asked sharply. Her voice had an unpleasant edge, a grating noise that he longed to silence. But he couldn’t silence her before he coaxed her to join him inside his cottage. It was next to the river at the end of a dark lane. The last girl he had brought here, Rose — Rose Bloom — had entered willingly. But Rose had not smelled spirit gum, nor noticed anything to trip him up.

It was all too easy to imagine how the cottage would look to a girl who was already wary: remote, tucked away in a storehouse district, the only dwelling on the lane. He had had the front porch painted a warm yellow so that it looked welcoming and had installed an electric light on the front porch, and had left another burning inside. Pleasant, lived-in, welcoming, a cosy cottage on the outskirts of town, with a rowboat dock convenient to the Ohio.

“For you,” he answered.

“I don’t understand.”

She stopped walking abruptly and looked around as if noticing for the first time that the street was devoid of people. They had just reached the storehouses at the corner of his lane. They could smell the river. “What do you mean from me?”

“Not from you,” he stammered. “To protect you. To hide my face.”

“From what?”

“Scars. I was wounded horribly in the Spanish War.” The false beard was so gray, it was nearly white, which would make him rather too old to have fought in the 1898 War. But hopefully for a girl so young, a war of thirteen years ago could have been fought a hundred years in the past. Ancient history. Civil War. Revolutionary War. War of 1898.

She said, “Oh.” Still standing there, still gazing around — looking for help, he feared — she said, “Well, so am I.”

He searched her pretty face by the streetlamp. “Scarred?”

“From a fire.”

“Where?”

“Where you can’t see.”

“Can’t see? I saw you dance on the stage.”

“The corset covers it. A lamp exploded when I was a little girl. It looks horrible. I’ll never let anyone see.”

“You poor thing.”

“Well, you’re a poor thing, too.”

“Aren’t we a pair?”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. And I promised you supper. My housekeeper will be quite put out if we let it get cold.”

“Is she there now?”

“She better be. Who do you think serves supper and washes the dishes?”

Still, she hesitated.

He took a chance and went for broke. “You know, Beatrice, in all my days of booking national tours, I’ve never met a dancer who wasn’t famished after her show.”

That got him a grin that wrinkled her pretty nose, and suddenly they were friends.

“I’m starving!”

He shrugged his cape off one shoulder and offered his arm.

“Step this way.”

* * *

Late that night, he propped Beatrice in a kitchen chair while he ate a cold supper. Just before dawn, he tied his cape around her, gathered her in his arms, and climbed down the steep stairs to the dock. The river smelled rank. The fierce current was so loud, he could barely hear her splash.

“Good night. You were lovely.”

How wrong he was about that.

32

Isaac Bell jumped off the extra-fare St. Louis Limited at Cincinnati and headed straight to the morgue in City Hospital. The talkative coroner, who greeted him on the front steps, started apologizing for the condition of the old building. “Dates back to the 1860s. We’re building a fine new hospital across town.”

“May I see the girl?”

A barge hand had spotted her butchered body jammed under an Ohio River wharf. The Van Dorn field office had already reported a dancer missing from the continuous vaudeville house where she worked, the same theater where the singer Rose Bloom had disappeared months earlier.

Beatrice Edmond had told a friend she was trying to land a part in a road company, but she had not said which one. The field office chief had found no one who had seen her at any of the Cincinnati theaters where tours were playing — not Tillie’s Nightmare, the Marie Dressler show at the Bethel, nor Alias Jimmy Valentine at the Lyric, nor Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Clark, and surely not Salome at the German.