The Cutthroat

“The college.”

“Yes, Mr. Young.”

“Have you performed with any legitimate companies?”

“This will be my first.”

“Have you ever read for any legitimate companies?”

Helen looked flustered.

“Well, have you?”

“I read for Jimmy Valentine.”

“How did you make out there?”

“I decided against taking the part.”

Young smiled thinly. “That would jibe with a story making the rounds about Mr. Lockwood’s broken nose. Was it you, Miss Mills, who socked the star?”

“I’m afraid I lost my temper.”

Young sounded sympathetic: “It is not easy to be an attractive girl in the theater. However, I would caution you to ponder precisely how much you are willing to sacrifice to go on the stage.” He was stepping so far beyond the unspoken boundaries of awarding a job to an angel’s protégée that the angel himself stiffened visibly.

Isaac Bell made him nervous. While seemingly typical of the wealthy men who pursued actresses, something about him seemed off. He was so much more fit and alert than layabouts like the Deaver brothers. And Bell seemed truly concerned for the girl’s well-being, almost a fatherly concern — though if he were her actual father, he would have been no more than nine or ten years old when she was born. Maybe it was true that Helen Mills was the niece of one of his investors. Maybe Tennyson was thinking of stage managers when he wrote: “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.”

He plowed ahead, determined for some perverse and unsafe reason he could not quite put his finger on, to shield her from disappointment. “Women of privilege rarely make a go of it in the theater. Give me a shopgirl for the ferocious ambition and hard work the stage demands.”

“Don’t worry about privilege, Mr. Young. I was a scholarship girl in college. I grew up in a mill town without a pot to— I mean, a penny to my name.”

“Excellent,” said Henry Young. He had been misled by the young woman’s striking poise. “The general business you will read for will include occasionally appearing as a housemaid, wielding a feather duster, in Mr. Hyde’s library, and standing by to be strangled on a regular basis. See if you can put this over.”

He handed her a page of playscript. “Take your time. Tell me when you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.”

“Go on, then.”

She rolled the paper into a cylinder, which she held like a feather duster, lowered her eyes as if timid or dazzled by her employer, and read, “‘Mr. Hyde hasn’t come home yet, Dr. Jekyll.’”

“You’ll do.”

“Do you mean I get the role?”

“You will be paid twenty dollars per week, take your meals on the train, occupy an upper berth in the Pullman car, and buy your own clothes.”

Isaac Bell cleared his throat. It sounded like a growl.

“All right, Mr. Bell, we’ll provide costumes, and she may descend to the first lower berth that becomes available.”

* * *

James Dashwood talked his way into the Clark Theatre and wandered around asking for Henry Young until he found him.

“Detective Dashwood.”

“You remember me?”

“I’m a stage manager, I can never forget a face even when I want to. It was in Boston. You were wondering whether Anna Waterbury read for me, and you thought you had seen me before. Did you figure out where?”

“Syracuse. Obviously, I didn’t ‘see’ you: I was still a kid out west when you were the Syracusan Stock Company’s treasurer.”

“You must have seen an old wanted poster.”

“Do Barrett and Buchanan know?”

“All of it. The ticket fraud. The gambling that drove me to the fraud. The foolish going on the run. The arrest. The prison sentence.”

“Why did they hire you?”

“They say I learned my lesson.”

“So they trust you.”

“I’ve never given them reason not to.”

Dashwood raised a skeptical brow.

Young said, “They are decent men, Detective— Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to load eighty people and two sensational scenic effects featuring the height of mechanical realism onto a railroad train.”

* * *

Isaac Bell gathered the Cutthroat Squad in his car.

“We’ve infiltrated both tours and narrowed the field of suspects. Harry Warren and Grady Forrer exonerated the Alias Jimmy Valentine head rigger, Bill Milford, and scenic designer, Roland Phelps, who grew up in New York and were definitely living in the city during the Ripper’s rampage in England — Milford in the Tenderloin, Phelps in his family’s Washington Square town house.

“Helen Mills has eliminated the actor Lockwood, from Alias Jimmy Valentine, by establishing that he is neither strong enough nor quick enough to overwhelm his victims. On the other hand, she has learned that Lucy Balant is getting ‘coached’ by the star of the show, Mr. Vietor. Her roommate, Anna Waterbury, was coached by the Cutthroat. So we keep the book open on Mr. Vietor. Fortunately, Jimmy Valentine will catch up with us in St. Louis the day after tomorrow.