Banwell kept reading, his features hardening.
'No one would believe her anyway, George.'
George Banwell held the letter out for his wife.
'Why?' Clara asked quietly, taking it.
'Why what?'
'Why does she hate you so?'
Dawn was breaking when Littlemore and I finally got back to the police car the detective had waiting for us a few blocks south of the Manhattan Bridge. The two of us had shot up through the elevator shaft and into the air a good ten feet before falling back into the water. We hadn't made it all the way up. We had to hang from the elevator cables, freezing and exhausted, until the water rose high enough to pull ourselves onto the pier. From there, we loaded the trunk in a rowboat — the same boat in which we had traveled to the pier the night before. Luckily, Littlemore's car was waiting at a dock about two blocks south; I don't think either of us could have rowed further. I had a feeling Littlemore had broken some rules in getting us the police car, but that was his business.
I told the detective that we had to telephone the Actons; not a moment could be lost. I had a terrible foreboding that something had happened there in the night. The detective drove us, soaking, to the station. I waited in the car while Littlemore limped in. He returned after a few minutes: all was quiet at the Acton house. Nora was fine.
From the police station, we went to Littlemore's apartment on Mulberry Street. There we put on dry clothes — the detective lent me an ill-fitting suit — and drank about a gallon of hot coffee each. We drove to the morgue. I suggested smashing the top of the locked trunk with a pickax, but Littlemore was determined to proceed by the book from this point forward. He sent a boy running for the locksmiths, and we waited, our hair still wet, pacing impatiently. Or rather I paced, having cleaned and bandaged my ankle. Littlemore sat on an operating table, resting his bad leg. The trunk lay at his feet. We were alone. Littlemore had hoped to find the coroner, whom I had met yesterday, but that gentleman was not in.
I ought to have left Littlemore. I should have checked in with Dr Freud and my other guests at the hotel. Today, Friday, was our last full day in New York. We would all leave for Worcester tomorrow evening. But I wanted to see the trunk opened. If the Riverford girl were inside, surely that would prove Banwell was her murderer, and Littlemore could finally arrest him.
'Say, Doc,' Littlemore called out, 'can you tell from a cadaver whether somebody was strangled to death?' The detective led me to the morgue's cold room. He found and uncovered the partially embalmed body of Miss Elsie Sigel. Littlemore had already told me what he knew of her.
'This girl wasn't strangled,' I said.
'That means Chong Sing is lying. How can you tell?'
'No edema in the neck,' I replied. 'And look at this little bone here; it's intact. Normally it breaks if someone is strangled to death. No evidence of any tracheal or esophageal trauma. Very unlikely. But it does look like asphyxiation.'
'What's the difference?'
'She died from lack of oxygen. But not from strangulation.'
Littlemore grimaced. 'You mean somebody locks her up in the trunk while she's still alive, and then she suffocates?'
'Looks like it,' I said. 'Strange. See her fingernails?'
'They look normal to me, Doc.'
'That's what's strange. They're smooth at the tips, undamaged.'
Littlemore got it at once. 'She never struggled,' he said. 'She never tried to get out.'
We looked at each other.
'Chloroform,' said the detective.
At that moment, there came a knock at the outer laboratory door. The locksmiths, Samuel and Isaac Friedlander, had arrived. With an instrument resembling oversized garden shears, they cut through the two padlocks on the hasps of the trunk. Littlemore had them sign an affidavit attesting to their actions and instructed them to wait so that they could further witness the contents. Taking a deep breath, he opened the lid.
There was no smell. A confused, densely packed assortment of waterlogged clothes, studded with jewelry, was all I saw at first. Then Littlemore pointed to a black matted mass of hair. 'There she is,' he said. 'This isn't going to be pretty.'
Donning a pair of gloves, Littlemore grasped the hair, lifted it up — and his hand came clean away with a fistful of sopping, tangled hair.
'He's cut her up,' said one of the Friedlanders.
'Cut her to pieces,' said the other.
'Geez,' said Littlemore, gritting his teeth and throwing the mass of hair onto the table. Then he snatched it back up. 'Wait a minute. This is a wig.'
The detective began emptying the contents of the trunk, one item after another, recording each object in an inventory and placing them into bags or other containers. In addition to the wig, there were several pairs of high- heeled shoes, a considerable collection of lingerie, a half dozen evening gowns, a trove of jewelry and toiletries, a mink stole, a lightweight lady's coat — but no lady.
'What the heck?' asked Littlemore, scratching his head. 'Where's the girl? There must have been another trunk. Doc, you must have missed the other trunk.'
I offered the detective my thoughts on that hypothesis.
Littlemore accompanied me into the savagely bright street. I asked the detective what he would do next. His plan, he said, was to scour the trunk and everything in it for some link to Banwell or to the murdered girl. Perhaps the Riverford family in Chicago could identify some of the girl's belongings. 'If I can put Elizabeth Riverford's name on just one of those necklaces, I got him,' said the detective. 'I mean, who but Banwell could have put her things in a trunk under the Manhattan Bridge the day after she was murdered? And why would he do it if he wasn't the murderer?'
'Why would he do it if he was the murderer?' I asked.
'Why would he do it if he wasn't?'
'This is a fruitful conversation,' I remarked.
'Okay, I don't know why.' The detective lit a cigarette. 'You know, there's a lot about this case I don't get. For a while I thought the killer was Harry Thaw.'
'The Harry Thaw?'
'Yup. I was all set for the biggest score any detective ever made. Then it turns out Thaw is locked up on a funny farm upstate.'
'I wouldn't call him locked up, exactly.' I explained what I knew from Jelliffe: that Thaw's conditions of confinement were lax at best. Littlemore wanted to know the source of my information. I told him that Jelliffe was one of Thaw's principal psychiatric consultants and that, from what I could tell, the Thaw family seemed to be paying off the entire hospital staff.
The detective stared. 'That name — Jelliffe. I know it from somewhere. He doesn't live in the Balmoral, by any chance?'
'He does. I dined at his home two nights ago.'
'Son of a bitch,' said Littlemore.
'I think that's the first time I've ever heard you swear, Detective.'
'I think that's the first time I ever did. So long, Doc.' Moving as quickly as he was able, he limped back into the building, thanking me again over his shoulder as he disappeared.
I realized I had no money. My wallet was in a pair of trousers hanging on a clothesline outside Littlemore's kitchen window. I found a nickel in the detective's pocket. It was a good thing I woke up when my train pulled into the Grand Central subway station; I don't know where I might have ended up otherwise.
At a two-story house on Fortieth Street, just off Broadway, Detective Littlemore banged the gaudy knocker furiously. In a moment the door was opened by a girl the detective had never seen before. 'Where's Susie?' he demanded.
The girl, through a cigarette that never left her mouth, would say only that Mrs Merrill was out. Hearing
