A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

write? Can they learn?”

“Some can,” I answered. “Others are slower. The youngest are the quickest, it seems. I have great hopes for them.”

“I wonder if they understand how fortunate they are. What a pity the Reverend Mr. Wickham didn’t live to see this. He would have been so pleased with what you’ve accomplished.”

“Yes.” Would he have? Edward always believed the poor should care for their own.

The Inspector was still thinking of my late husband. “I had an aunt who succumbed to gastric fever,” he said. “Dreadful way to die, dreadful.” He suddenly realized I might not care to be reminded of the painful method of Edward’s passing. “I do beg your pardon — that was thoughtless of me.”

I told him not to be concerned. “I am reconciled to his death now, as much as I can ever be. My life is here now, in the school, and it is a most rewarding way to spend my days.”

He smiled. “I can see you are in your element.” Then he sobered.

“I came not only to see your school but also to tell you something.”

He leaned forward in his chair. “The file on the Ripper is officially closed. It’s been more than two years since his last murder. For whatever reason he stopped, he did stop. That particular reign of terror is over. The case is closed.”

My heart lifted. Keeping up my end of the conversation, I asked,

“Why do you think he stopped, Inspector?”

He rubbed the side of his nose. “He stopped either because he’s dead or because he’s locked up somewhere, in an asylum or perhaps in prison for some other crime. Forgive my bluntness, Mrs.

Wickham, but I earnestly hope it is the former. Inmates have been known to escape from asylums and prisons.”

“I understand. Do you think the file will ever be reopened?”

“Not for one hundred years. Once a murder case is marked closed, the files are sealed and the date is written on the outside when they can be made public. It will be a full century before anyone looks at those papers again.”

It couldn’t be more official than that; the case was indeed closed.

“A century…why so long a time?”

“Well, the hundred-year rule was put into effect to guarantee the anonymity of all those making confidential statements to the police during the course of the investigation. It’s best that way. Now no one will be prying into our reports on the Ripper until the year 1992.

It is over.”

“Thank Heaven for that.”

“Amen.”

Inspector Abberline chatted a little longer and then took his leave.

I strolled through the halls of my school, a former church building adapted to its present needs. I stopped in one of the classrooms.

Some of the children were paying attention to the teacher, others were daydreaming, a few were drawing pictures. Just like children everywhere.

Not all the children who pass through here will be helped; some will go on to better themselves, but others will slide back into the life of the streets. I can save none of them. I must not add arrogance to my other offenses by assuming the role of deliverer; God does not entrust the work of salvation to one such as I. But I am permitted to offer the children a chance, to give them the opportunity to lift themselves above the life of squalor and crime that is all they have ever known. I do most earnestly thank God for granting me this privilege.

Periodically I return to Miller’s Court. I go there not because it is the site of Edward’s final murder, but because it is where I last saw Rose Howe, the young girl who helped me deliver the Macklin baby. There is a place for Rose in my school. I have not found her yet, but I will keep searching.

My life belongs to the children of Whitechapel now. My prayers are for them; those prayers are the only ones of mine ever likely to be answered. When I do pray for myself, it is always and only to ask for an easier place in Hell.

Ghost Station CAROLYN WHEAT

Carolyn Wheat (b. 1946), was a New York legal aid attorney for twenty-three years and later an administrative law judge. When she introduced Brooklyn lawyer Cass Jameson in Dead Men’s Thoughts (1983), the torrent of lawyer novelists (male and female) that would be unleashed by the success of Scott Turow and John Grisham had not yet begun. That first novel was well received, receiving an Edgar nomination, but Wheat proved the opposite of prolific, the second Jameson novel appearing three years later, the third not for another eleven. When she stepped up production with books like Mean Streak (1996) and Troubled Waters (1997), a novel that looked back on radical 1960s activism much more briefly but just as effectively as Turow’s Laws of Our Fathers (1996), it became obvious that Wheat ranks near the top not just among lawyer novelists but contemporary crime writers generally. After leaving the practice of law, she became a valued teacher of writing, including a stint as Writer in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Wheat’s short stories, collected in Tales Out of School (2000), display a variety nearly as remarkable as their uniform excellence. Some of them have the expected legal background, including the chilling jury-room tale “Cruel and Unusual” and a rare Sherlock Holmes court-room story, “The Adventure of the Angel’s Trumpet,” but many of them do not. “Ghost Station,” about a New York transit cop, she credits to her experience working for the NYPD.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk. The words burned my memory the way Irish whiskey used to burn my throat, only there was no pleasant haze of alcohol to follow. Just bitter heartburn pain.

It was my first night back on the job, back to being Sergeant Maureen Gallagher instead of “the patient.” Wasn’t it hard enough being a transit cop, hurtling beneath the streets of Manhattan on a subway train that should have been in the Transit Museum? Wasn’t it enough that after four weeks of detox I felt empty instead of clean and sober? Did I have to have some rookie’s casually cruel words ricocheting in my brain like a wild-card bullet?

Why couldn’t I remember the good stuff? Why couldn’t I think about O’Hara’s beefy handshake, Greenspan’s “Glad to see ya, Mo,”

Ianuzzo’s smiling welcome? Why did I have to run the tape in my head of Manny Delgado asking Captain Lomax for a different partner?

“Hey, I got nothing against a lady sarge, Cap,” he’d said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that if there’s one thing I can’t stand…” Et cetera.

Lomax had done what any standup captain would — kicked Delgado’s ass and told him the assignment stood. What he hadn’t known was that I’d heard the words and couldn’t erase them from my mind.

Even without Delgado, the night hadn’t gotten off to a great start.

Swinging in at midnight for a twelve-to-eight, I’d been greeted with the news that I was on Graffiti Patrol, the dirtiest, most mind-numbing assignment in the whole transit police duty roster. I was a sergeant, damn it, on my way to a gold shield, and I wasn’t going to earn it dodging rats in tunnels or going after twelve-year-olds armed with spray paint.

Especially when the rest of the cop world, both under- and aboveground, was working overtime on the torch murders of homeless people. There’d been four human bonfires in the past six weeks, and the cops were determined there wouldn’t be a fifth.

Was Lomax punishing me, or was this assignment his subtle way of easing my entry back into the world?