“Yes,” I answered. “At this point I’m—”
“Uh-oh,” Joseph interrupted. “Scotch Ann’s yelling, it looks like I’ve got a customer. Gotta go.”
“Wait, Joseph. Just tell me—”
“Sorry—can’t talk. Could we meet? Later tonight, maybe?”
I wanted to press him for more information, but knowing his situation I let it go. “All right. The same place. Ten o’clock?”
“Okay.” He sounded happy. “See you then.”
I replaced the earpiece of the ’phone and shot out of our headquarters.
Grabbing onto the back of a Broadway streetcar after leaving Number 808, I made the trip to Twenty-second Street in a matter of minutes. After jumping back down to the cobblestone pavement that bordered the tracks along that stretch of the avenue, I looked across the way at a triangular group of buildings that were covered with enormous signs advertising everything from painless dentistry to eyeglasses to steamship tickets. Tucked in among these notices, painted on the windows of the second story of Number 967, were a tasteful (and therefore distinct) group of golden letters: MITCHELL HARPER, ACCOUNTS SETTLED. After waiting for a break in the traffic, I crossed over and headed into the building.
I found Sara locked in private conversation with Mr. Harper in his small office. Neither the man nor the room matched the pleasant gold-leaf lettering on the windows. If Mr. Harper employed a cleaning service, you couldn’t tell it from the soot that coated the few pieces of furniture in his office, while the roughness of his clothing and large cigar were exceeded only by that of his unshaven face and jaggedly cut hair. Sara introduced us, but Harper didn’t offer his hand.
“I’ve read a great deal about medicine, Mr. Moore,” he explained in a coarse voice, locking his thumbs into his stained vest. “Microbes, sir! Microbes are responsible for disease, and they pass through the touch!”
For an instant I thought of telling the man that bathing might give those microbes something to worry about; but then I just nodded and turned to Sara, my face asking why in the world she’d forced me to come to this place.
“We should have thought of it right away,” she whispered, before saying out loud: “Mr. Harper was engaged by Mr. Lanford Stern of Washington Street in February, to attend to some outstanding debts.” Recognizing that this didn’t jog my memory one bit, Sara added confidentially, “Mr. Stern, you will recall, owns a number of buildings in the Washington Market area. One of his tenants is a Mr. Ghazi.”
“Oh,” I said simply. “Oh, of course. Why didn’t you just say that—”
Sara stopped me with a touch, obviously not wanting Mr. Harper to learn the real nature of our business. “I saw Mr. Stern this morning,” she said pointedly, and finally I realized why we should have thought of going back to Mr. Stern at the beginning of this phase of our search: the elder Ghazi had been months behind in his rent at the time of his son’s death. “I told him,” Sara continued, “about the man we’re anxious to find—the man who we believed worked as a collector, and whose brother has died, leaving him a great deal of money?”
I nodded and smiled, recognizing that Sara was developing her own talent for impromptu falsehoods. “Oh, yes,” I said quickly.
“Mr. Stern said that he referred all his back rent accounts to Mr. Harper,” Sara continued. “And—”
“And as I told Miss Howard, here,” Harper cut in, “if there’s estate money to be had, I want to know what my cut’ll be before I reveal anything.”
I nodded and faced the man fully—this was going to be child’s play. “Mr. Harper,” I said, with a broad flourish, “I feel confident in saying that if you can provide us with the whereabouts of Mr. Beecham, you can expect a very generous percentage. A finder’s fee, as it were. Say, five percent?”
Harper’s saliva-soaked cigar almost fell out of his mouth. “Five per—why, that
“Five percent of all there is,” I repeated. “You have my word. But tell me—
The man looked momentarily unsure of himself. “Well—that is, I know them
“Let him go?” I queried. “Why?”
“I’m a respectable man,” Harper answered. “And this is a respectable business. But—well, sir, the fact is you occasionally have to use a little muscle. Do some convincing. Who’s going to pay their bills without a little convincing? I originally hired Beecham because he was a big man, and strong. Said he could handle himself in a fight. So what does he do? Talks to them. Chats it up, that’s what he does. Well, shit, sir—oh. My apologies, Miss. But you’re not going to get any money out of anybody by talking to them. Especially not the immigrants. Hell, you give them the chance, they’ll talk you into the grave! That Ghazi character was a good example—I sent Beecham to his place three times and he never got one nickel out of the man.”
Harper had more he wanted to tell us, but we didn’t need to hear it. After asking him to write down the address of the stale-beer dive he’d mentioned, Sara and I told him that we were going to check his lead out that very night, and that if it led to Beecham he could expect his money very soon. Ironically, this avaricious little man had given us the first piece of free information we’d had in two days—and the only one that was destined to amount to anything.
CHAPTER 41
As we came out of Harper’s building we ran headlong into the Isaacsons, who had found my note. Immediately repairing to Brubacher’s Wine Garden, the four of us went over what the account settler had said. Then we devised a plan for the evening. Our options were fairly straightforward: if we should locate Beecham we wouldn’t confront him, but rather telephone Theodore and have him send down several detectives—men whose faces would be unknown to Beecham—whom we’d set to work shadowing the man. Alternately, if we were able to find out where Beecham lived, but if for some reason he wasn’t in, we’d quickly search his place for evidence that might permit an immediate arrest. That much settled, we all drained our glasses and, at about eight-thirty, boarded a streetcar and began our expedition into Five Points.
The effect of that storied neighborhood has always been difficult to describe to the uninitiated. Even on a pleasant spring night like the one we moved through that Thursday, the place exuded a deep sense of mortal threat; yet that threat was not always or even usually exhibited in loud or aggressive ways, such as was the case in some other shady parts of the city. In the Tenderloin, for example, a general air of defiant carousing reigned, making encounters with drunken toughs out to demonstrate their prowess a routine matter. Yet such were little more than noisy displays, generally, and a murder in the Tenderloin was still a noteworthy event. Five Points was an entirely different breed of neighborhood. Oh, there were shouts and screams to be heard, all right; but they tended to drift out of buildings, or, if they did originate outside, to be quickly stifled. Indeed, I think the most disconcerting thing about the area around Mulberry Bend (the few blocks of the Bend itself were at that time being demolished, thanks to Jake Riis’s tireless campaigning) was the surprisingly low level of outward activity. The residents of the neighborhood spent most of their time crammed into the miserable shanties and tenements that lined the streets, or, more often, packed into the dives that occupied the ground and first floors of a remarkably large number of those squalid buildings. Death and despair did their work without fanfare in the Bend, and they did a lot of it: just walking down those lonely, decrepit streets was enough to make the sunniest of souls wonder about the ultimate value of human life.
I could see that Lucius was doing just that as we reached the address Harper had given us, Number 119 Baxter Street. A few dirt- and urine-covered stone stairs next to the building’s entrance led down to a doorway that,
