'Mr Mayor,' I said, 'you cannot allow Miss Acton to be cross-questioned by the man who attacked her — a man who has already murdered another girl.'
'Younger, I am convinced you mean well,' replied the mayor, 'but you are wrong. George Banwell and I were together Sunday night, when Elizabeth Riverford was murdered. He was with me — do you hear it, with me — all that evening and night and well into Monday morning as well. Two hundred fifty miles out of town. He could not have killed anyone.'
In the library, after Jung's departure, curling tails of smoke wafted up to the ceiling. A servant removed glasses, replaced ashtrays, then quietly withdrew.
'Do we have him?' asked the balding man, who had been referred to as Sachs.
'Without doubt,' answered Dana. 'He is even weaker than I had imagined. And we have more than sufficient to destroy him in any event. Does Ochs have your remarks, Allen?'
'Oh, yes,' answered the portly, sideburned gentleman with the thick lips. 'He will publish mine the same day he interviews the Swiss.'
'What about Matteawan?' asked Sachs.
'Leave that to me,' Dana replied. 'What remains is to block their other means of dissemination. Which, by tomorrow, we will have done.'
Even after hearing the mayor exculpate him, I could not accept Banwell's innocence. Subjectively, that is. Objectively, I had no grounds for disbelief or protest.
Nora refused to go home. Her father pleaded. Her mother was indignant at what she called the girl's obstinacy. The mayor resolved the situation. Now that he had seen the note, he said, it was clear the hotel was no longer safe. But the Actons' home could be secured. Indeed, it could be made safer than could a large hotel with its many entrances. He would station policemen outside the house, front and back, day and night. Moreover, he reminded Miss Acton, she was still a minor: under the law, he would be obliged to effectuate her father's wishes, even against her will.
I thought Miss Acton would burst out in some way. Instead she gave in, but only on the condition that she be permitted to continue her medical treatment tomorrow morning. 'Especially,' she added, 'now that I know my memory is not to be trusted.' This she said with apparent sincerity, but it was impossible to say whether she was faulting the trustworthiness of her memory or rebuking those who refused to trust it.
She did not look at me after that, not even once. The silent ride down the elevator was excruciating, but Miss Acton held herself with a dignity lacking in her mother, who appeared to regard everything she encountered as a personal affront. An appointment was made for me to visit their house on Gramercy Park early the next day, and they departed in an automobile downtown. McClellan did the same. Banwell, casting a last glance in my direction, by no means benevolent, departed in a horse-drawn carriage, leaving Detective Littlemore and me on the sidewalk.
He turned to me. 'She told you it was Banwell?'
'Yes,' I said.
'And you believe her, don't you?'
'I do.'
'Can I ask you something?' said Littlemore. 'Say a girl loses her memory. Just comes up empty. Then her memory comes back. Can you put money on it, when it comes back? Can you bank on it?'
'No,' I replied. 'It could be false. It could be fantasy, mistaken for memory.'
'But you believe her?'
'Yes.'
'So what are you saying, Doc?'
'I don't know what I'm saying,' I said. 'Can I ask you something, Detective? What were you going to tell the mayor in Miss Acton's room?'
'I just wanted to remind him that Coroner Hugel — he's in charge of the case — thought Banwell was the killer too.'
'Thought so?' I asked. 'You mean he doesn't anymore?'
'Well, he can't anymore, not after what the mayor just said,' Littlemore replied.
'Couldn't Banwell have attacked Miss Acton even if someone else killed the other girl?'
'Nope,' answered the detective. 'We've got proof. It was the same guy both times.'
I went back inside, unsure of myself, my patient, my situation. Was it conceivable that McClellan was covering for Banwell? Would Nora be safe at her house? The front clerk called out my name. There was a letter for me, just delivered. It proved to be from G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University. The letter was long — and deeply disturbing.
Outside the Hotel Manhattan, Detective Littlemore made for the cabstand.
From the old hack last night, Littlemore knew that the black-haired man — the one who left the Balmoral at midnight on Sunday — had climbed into a red and green gas-powered taxi in front of the Hotel Manhattan. That piece of information told the detective a good deal. Only a decade previously, every taxi in Manhattan had been horse-drawn. By 1900, a hundred motorized taxis tooled around the city, but these were electrically powered. Weighed down by their eight-hundred-pound batteries, the electric taxis were popular but ponderous; passengers occasionally had to get out and help push when going up the rare steep incline. In 1907, the New York Taxicab Company launched the first fleet of gasoline cars for hire, equipped with meters so that riders could see the fare. These cabs were instant hits — hits, that is, with the better class, who alone could afford the fifty-cents-per-mile charge — and quickly came to outnumber all other cabs, electric and horse, in the city. You always knew a New York Taxicab when you saw one, because of its distinctive red and green paneling.
Several of these vehicles were parked at the Hotel Manhattan cabstand. The drivers told Littlemore to try the Allen garage on Fifty-seventh Street, between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues, where New York Taxicab had its main office and where he could easily find out who had been working the graveyard shift on Sunday. The detective's luck was good. Two hours later, he had answers. A driver named Luria had picked up a black-haired man in front of the Hotel Manhattan after midnight last Sunday. Luria remembered it distinctly, because the man had come not out of the hotel but out of a hackney. Littlemore also learned where the black-haired man had gone, and the detective went to that destination — a private house — himself. There his luck ran out.
The house was on Fortieth just off Broadway. It was a two-story affair, with a gaudy knocker and thick red curtains on its windows. Littlemore had to knock five or six times before an attractive young woman answered. The girl was considerably underdressed for the middle of the afternoon. When Littlemore explained that he was a police detective, she rolled her eyes and told him to wait.
He was shown to a parlor with thick Oriental carpets on the floor, a dazzling array of mirrors on the walls, and a smother of purple velour on the furniture. The odor of tobacco and alcohol clung to the folds of the curtains. A baby was crying upstairs. Five minutes later, another woman, older and quite fat, came down the red-carpeted stairs in a claret-colored robe.
'You've got a lot of nerve,' said this woman, who introduced herself as Susan Merrill — Mrs Susan Merrill. From a wall safe concealed behind a mirror, she withdrew a carved iron strongbox, which she opened with a key. She counted out fifty dollars. 'Here. Now get out. I'm already late.'
'I don't want your money, ma'am,' said Littlemore.
'Oh, don't tell me. You make me sick, all of you. Greta, get back in here.' The underdressed girl lounged in, yawning. Although it was a quarter past three, she had in fact been asleep until Littlemore knocked at the door. 'Greta, the detective doesn't want our money. Take him to the green room. Make it quick, mister.'
'I'm not here for that either, ma'am,' said Littlemore. 'I just want to ask you a question. There was a guy who came here late Sunday night. I'm trying to find him.'
Mrs Merrill eyed the detective dubiously. 'Oh, so now you want my customers? What are you going to do, shake them down too?'
'You must know some bad policemen,' said Littlemore.
'Is there any other kind?'
'A girl was killed Sunday night,' Littlemore answered. 'The guy who did it whipped her. Tied her up, cut her up pretty good too. Then he strangled her. I want that guy. That's it.'
The woman drew her burgundy robe around her shoulders. She restored her money to the strongbox and shut it. 'Was she a streetwalker?'
