Riptide

“Oh. Yes, it was the quake.”

“So you have forensic evidence of a homicidal maniac at work in Abbot Kinney’s Venice. How Grand Guignol. But as you surely realize, a proclivity for acts of violence against the fairer sex is not unique to our man Jack. Your killer might have been anybody.”

“Well, there are…other possible connections.”

“Pray tell.”

“I’d rather not. At least not right now.”

His fixed smile had taken on the quality of a grimace. She took a certain malicious pleasure in withholding morsels of information from this man’s snapping jaws. She couldn’t entirely escape the suspicion that he’d known very well that the news about her father would throw her off balance.

Sirk produced a dissatisfied sigh that segued into a wheeze. “Very well. I shall contain my curiosity-for the time being. Patience, however, is not among my very short list of virtues.”

She believed him. He was only an obese silver-haired raconteur, but when she looked at him, she saw a shark scenting blood.

“What I’m mainly interested in,” she said, “is any information you might have on murders in the Venice area around 1908 or 1910-that general time frame.”

“That’s easily answered. I have no information at all. As far as I know, there was never any suspicion of a serial killer at work in Venice, or anywhere in the Los Angeles area, at that time.”

“Would you know about it, if there had been?”

“Naturally. It’s my life’s work. I know all the dark corners of this city’s past.”

“Well, then I guess I’ve taken up your time for nothing. Sorry about that-”

“No need for apologies. And no need to rush off, either. My company isn’t so appalling as all that, now, is it?”

“Certainly not,” she lied.

“I may not be able to fill you in on evil doings in turn-of-the-century Venice, but I can answer any questions about old Jack.”

“I have a stack of books that will give me those details.”

“Have you read them?”

“Not yet. I’ve looked at some photos and a timeline, that’s all.”

“Then let me give you a proper introduction to the Ripper. It’s the least I can do, after you’ve come all this way.” He leaned back in his chair, hands folded on his lap. “When you think of Jack the Ripper, what’s the image that comes to your mind?”

“I suppose…a man in black, wearing a top hat, maybe a cape, creeping along some alley in the fog.”

“Very good. A most evocative visualization. And entirely inaccurate. Jack the Ripper wore neither a top hat nor a cape. Such accoutrements would have stood out altogether too obviously in London’s East End, a neighborhood not known for its well-dressed habitues. Most likely he wore a deerstalker hat or perhaps a bowler- what Americans call a derby.”

Sirk himself was American, Jennifer thought, but apparently he didn’t think of himself as one.

“The murders took place in street corners and courtyards, not in alleys. And fog? Not a single one of the Ripper’s canonical murders occurred on a foggy night.”

“Canonical?”

“The ones that are indisputably his. No one can agree on when the Ripper started killing. The conventional wisdom is that he killed five, his last victim being Mary Kelly in November of 1888. But some people aver that Jack’s career continued until as late as 1891. There are even a few fanciful souls-now this will interest you-who claim he relocated to the United States in that year. They credit him with the murder and mutilation of a certain Carrie Brown, an aged and rather down-at-her-heels prostitute in New York City.”

“You don’t buy the idea?”

“It’s a bit of a stretch, I would say. Although if Carrie Brown had been murdered in London in the right time frame, there would be little doubt she was one of the Ripper’s girls. Photos were taken of the scene. Here, I’ll show you.”

He rose, grunting with effort, and searched a crowded bookcase until he found a large hardbound volume. He flipped it open to the photo section and thrust the book at her.

There were two grainy photographs, both taken in a cheap hotel room. One glance at the pictures showed why some people pegged the New York murder as the Ripper’s work. It was the same butchery seen in Mary Kelly’s bedroom. Carrie Brown lay in a tangle of her own clothes pulled up over her hips, her limbs in disarray. She had been opened up and hollowed out.

She stared at the photos while Sirk resumed his seat. “The Devil’s Henchman mutilated his victims too,” she said finally.

Sirk lifted a silvery brow. “Why, yes.”

“Like this?”

“There are only so many ways to disembowel a woman, I’m afraid. Just as there are only so many ways to make love to her.” His face blossomed in a sickly leer. “What else do you know about old Saucy Jacky?”

“He wrote letters to the police. Taunted them.”

“Not necessarily. Yes, the police received numerous letters purportedly from the killer, but the great majority of them-quite possibly all of them-were hoaxes. The authorities had made the mistake of printing up some of the earlier letters as broadsheets and distributing them around the city. This inspired people to try their hand at the communications. It became a fad.”

“He sent Catharine Eddowes’ kidney to somebody.”

“Half a kidney was posted to the chairman of an ad hoc vigilance committee. It may have been Kate Eddowes’ kidney, or only another hoax, perhaps perpetrated by a fun-loving medical student. People had a robust sense of humor in those days.”

If the diary could be trusted, the kidney was no hoax. “But he did take some of his victims’ organs.”

“Yes, on occasion.”

“So he must have used the alleys to escape, at least. He could hardly stroll down a major thoroughfare covered in blood.”

“Jack would not have been covered in blood. He would asphyxiate the woman before he began to cut. When the heart stops beating, blood stops pumping. Spatter would have been minimal. And the organs he took were easily concealed in a watertight tobacco pouch, a common appurtenance of the period.”

“If he’d been stopped and searched-”

“Most likely he would not have been stopped, because he was not the sort of man the constabulary was on the lookout for. He may have been too respectable, too genteel. It was widely assumed that the killer was an obvious degenerate, a drooling maniac. And the upper classes maintained that men of a certain station did not patronize whores.”

“They couldn’t have really believed that.”

“Perhaps not, but they intended to be seen as believing it. Antipathy toward the ’unfortunates,’ as they were dubbed, was a common feature of Victorian thinking. Quite a few men held that women were congenitally inferior, the ebb and flow of the menstrual tide rendering them slaves to emotion. If this was true of the average middle-class female, it was doubly true of those who sold their bodies for coins.”

“Then maybe the authorities should have made some effort to get them off the streets,” Jennifer said with a touch of bitterness.

“And put them where? In the workhouses, which were no better than prisons? Or perhaps in the prisons themselves? Some ended up there. Though prostitution was not illegal, loitering for purposes of prostitution was illegal. It would take a keen legal mind indeed to draw this distinction, but the jurors of the period were apparently up to the task.”

“It wasn’t a good time to be a woman, I guess.”

“But then, it so rarely is.” Sirk heaved himself upright. “If you don’t mind, I find that all this talk has put me in need of additional refreshment. You’re sure you don’t want anything?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”