A Curtain Falls (27 page)

The answering cry came from a pushcart owner. “Hot sausage on a roll! Come and get ’em while they’re hot.”

I walked along the park’s north side, breathing hard because of the heavy, stale smoke from a terrible fire yesterday that continued to permeate the air. The building that had burned— Benedict’s Undertaking, better known as the West Side Morgue— was much farther south, in the Italian section of
Greenwich Village. But it had been a significant fire, killing four firemen. And its aroma would last for days as a pungent reminder of the tragedy.

Death seemed to draw even closer as I passed Hangman’s Tree, rumored to have been an execution site some hundred years ago. I quickened my steps, slowing only as I came to the marble Washington Arch, under which Fifth Avenue passed. I turned left, past stately redbrick Greek Revival row houses— no longer home to the city’s most fashionable, wealthy residents, who had since moved farther uptown, but still beautifully maintained. Dr. Vollman’s well-appointed offices were in the last building near the corner of University Place.

He greeted me enthusiastically when I knocked, which led me to believe he and the others had been impatiently awaiting my arrival— though I was right on time as promised.

“Professor of sociology?” I asked, noticing the brass-and-iron plaque outside his door. “Surely this isn’t a university building.”

I knew that New York University had largely moved its undergraduate classes uptown to the Heights campus in the Bronx, but a few classroom buildings remained, mainly by the factories that bordered the east side of the park. In short, they were nothing like the upscale row house I had just entered.

Dr. Vollman made a sound that passed for a laugh, but could just as easily have been a hacking cough. “Sociology remains my official affiliation,” he said, eyes twinkling, “at least until they create a department of forensic learning. And I daresay that will not come ’til I’m long in the grave. Follow me,” he added. “The others are waiting for you.”

Leaning on his cane more heavily than I remembered from
our first meeting, he led me along a wide corridor of cream walls and thick gold-and-red carpet to a back room. Along the way, he explained that he had adapted the first floor of his residence for academic purposes with the university’s approval. As the aging professor had found it more difficult to navigate the university’s sprawling campus, his department had accommodated his physical limitations.

“Besides,” he added, “they like to continue offering some courses here at the Washington Square Park campus. It’s more convenient for many of our students.”

He directed me into the simple spare room that he had obviously created for classroom purposes. A large chalkboard was at its rear, behind a round table designed to seat at least ten students. To the left, an oversized window offered an unobstructed view of the horse stables on Washington Mews. A plain walnut desk, polished to a high gloss, was in front of the window, facing into the room.

Alistair and Isabella were already seated at the table, but both rose automatically to greet me and exchange the usual pleasantries before our discussion turned to the business at hand.

“So you want me to look at new items— and also reassess some old material.” Dr. Vollman lowered himself gingerly into a chair, taking out a silk cloth to polish his glasses.

“That’s right.” I put my bag on the table, first spreading out the photographs of Emmaline Billings’s tattoo, which a photographer in Dobson had developed for me the night before. “We hoped you might be able to make something of these,” I said as the handwriting expert inched his chair closer to me.

He grunted, holding each photograph up to the light, one by one.

“Careful,” I said, for he was handling them more roughly than I would have preferred. “We’ll need to turn these over to the police soon.”

In fact, I’d have to turn them over the moment Mulvaney remembered to ask me for them— though in the excitement of Poe’s arrest, he appeared to have forgotten about this piece of evidence. I had taken eight close-up photographs, and the three of us watched hopefully as Dr. Vollman reviewed them.

But in the end, he shook his head sadly. “I can do nothing with this. Handwriting analysis cannot interpret what has been written with a needle rather than a pen. You may be able to do something with the grammar, but I can do nothing with the writing itself.”

He whistled as he pushed the pictures aside. “He’s a real bastard, isn’t he, to do this?” He glanced at Isabella. “Pardon my language, miss. But if Emmaline Billings was alive, the process of getting this tattoo would’ve been pure torture.” He paused for only a beat. “Do you know whether she was?”

“We don’t,” I said. “Not yet.”

And to find out, I’d need to contact the coroner’s office directly. I was unlikely to hear further details from Mulvaney— and I ignored another pang of guilt that I was pursuing this matter behind his back.

Alistair drummed his fingers lightly against the table, which had the same glossy walnut finish as Dr. Vollman’s desk. When he finally spoke, he chose his words carefully. “The man— for the evidence does suggest he is a man— that we seek here has the most unusual criminal mind I have encountered in my career.”

“You’ve studied so many violent criminals who have done
terrible things. I don’t understand why you believe this man to be unique,” Isabella spoke quietly.

“Because I believe we are seeking a man whose personal charm completely masks his violent tendencies. According to their friends, at least two victims had a new man in their lives— specifically, a new beau who sent gifts and squired each victim about town.”

“But plenty of actresses have admirers,” I reminded him. “And there is no evidence to suggest the new gentleman each actress was seeing was the same man.”

“Likewise, there’s no evidence to suggest he was not,” Alistair parried. He took a deep breath. “Whoever he is, he has managed to gain his victims’ trust, convincing them to meet him alone at strange hours at the theater. After he came to know them and seduce them, only then did he kill them. And he did so in a manner that reveals two striking elements unique to this killer’s personality: his brilliant theatricality and his cruelty.”

“But his cruelty wasn’t obvious until Miss Billings’s murder,” Isabella said, troubled. “His first two murders were . . . well, almost shockingly beautiful.”

“Because he didn’t mark their bodies before,” Alistair said, musing, “whereas here he did.”

It was the same thought that had occurred to me at the dead house. “Why would he change his behavior like this?”

Alistair leaned back in his chair, intertwining his fingers. “It’s what I’ve been thinking about ever since you told me. And something important has occurred to me: his cruelty wasn’t visibly obvious in the other murders— but it was there, all the same.”

“But the act of writing on her body has to mean something additional,” I persisted.

I directed my question to Alistair, but Isabella intervened to answer. “Maybe we can figure out
why
he did it by looking at
what
he wrote.”

I sat up straighter. “Yes, I’d wanted to ask you about that as well.” I spread the photo before us again.

Lo! ’tis a gala night

. . . its hero the Conqueror Worm

“I guessed that ‘gala night’ refers to the theater,” I said. “He repeated the phrase in his latest letter to
The Times.
”

“It may also be another strategy to frame Poe,” she said, eyes dancing.

“Because?” I asked, eyebrows raised.

“These two lines are from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe called ‘The Conqueror Worm,’ ” she replied. “It’s about a play in which mimes run around aimlessly, chasing a Phantom they never capture. There is an audience of angels who can only weep— and in the end, a monstrous worm emerges to eat the mimes before the curtain falls.”

“It sounds awful,” I said, aghast.

She laughed, and the sound was like the pealing of bells. “It
is
awful. It suggests life is nothing but a ridiculous dance, at the end of which awaits a hideous death.”

“Literally, worms eating the body?” Alistair asked.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Why in the world would he put that on her back?” I asked.

Isabella’s response was slow but sure. “I believe he means to tell us that we’re the angels.”

“How so?” I demanded.

“Because our fate is to watch— weep—and accomplish nothing,” she said simply. “And he has defiled her body, just as the Conqueror Worm will do.”

We were all quiet for several moments.

“But who is he?” I said, drumming my fingers against the table. “And why is he targeting Frohman’s actresses?”

“He is someone who is cunning and seductive. Remember, he entices the women to dress themselves, perhaps even rehearse a scene onstage after everyone else has gone home. He told each victim that he planned to ‘make her a star.’ ”

I flashed once again to the image of Charles Frohman rehearsing with his Juliet at the Knickerbocker Hotel. For now, I put it out of my mind and continued to talk.

“The moment each victim realized what he really had in mind would have been a horrible, cruel betrayal. And strangulation itself— well, it’s one of the more excruciatingly painful methods by which to die. So even if he managed to make each victim
appear
to have died a beautiful, peaceful death— the reality each experienced was anything but.” My voice was bitter. I agreed with Alistair: this killer was among the most brutal I’d ever run across.

“So first things first,” Alistair said. “We know that we are dealing with an uncommonly vicious killer. We believe him to be someone other than Timothy Poe; perhaps Dr. Vollman will now be kind enough to confirm that for us.”

“Of course.” Dr. Vollman had removed his spectacles, but now he put them back on as Alistair placed a copy of the Eliza Downs letter in front of him. I added the
Times
letter that had been received yesterday.

“I have the
Times
reporters, Riley and Bogarty, to thank for
procuring the Downs letter,” Alistair said with a grin. “They caught Captain Mulvaney in a generous mood; he agreed to lend them this letter for their breaking news feature about Poe, which hit newsstands this morning. But they intend to milk the story for all it’s worth— so in exchange for another interview, they agreed to share the letter with me.”

Captain Mulvaney had indeed been in a charitable mood if he had resorted to lending out evidence to reporters. Unless— and this was quite possible, I realized— the prosecutor didn’t plan to charge Poe with Eliza Downs’s murder. He didn’t have the cooperation of the Downs family; they had objected strenuously to the idea of having her body exhumed. And the case against Poe for the two subsequent murders appeared airtight— more than what was needed to sentence him to the electric chair at Sing Sing. Miss Downs’s death, less clear-cut, might actually hurt the prosecution’s case.

“And I have some additional samples you can use for comparison,” I said. I handed him the notebook page where Poe had written his first, false address as well as the declaration of innocence Poe had passed to me yesterday. I had also managed to procure a receipt signed by Charles Frohman— the result of my having shamelessly bribed one of the Knickerbocker Hotel clerks.

To these, Alistair added his own find. “Another gift from the
Times
reporters,” he explained as he placed down a card such as might come from a bouquet of flowers. “As you know, they spoke extensively with the friends of Annie Germaine, the second victim. One of them discovered this note among her things.”

We read its three-word question, printed in a sloppy script: “Backstage at 11?”

“So you’d like me to compare these samples for consistencies that may indicate the same writer. Excellent.” Dr. Vollman put on a pair of white cotton gloves.

At first I thought he did so from habit, since each writing specimen was preserved in a wrapper. But, one by one, he temporarily removed each document from its protective cover, walked it over to the five-foot-high window, and examined the paper in the light. We were silent for some fifteen minutes until at last he was done and pronounced his verdict.

“If Timothy Poe is indeed the writer of these,” he said, picking up the address scrap and yesterday’s letter, “then he cannot be the same writer who penned this.” He pointed to the eggshell-blue letter found by the first murder victim.

“What did you find?” I asked, excited that he may have seen something to confirm I was right about Poe.

His lips curved into a half smile. “I compared the way there is a loop in the blue-letter writer’s
j
and
y
to similar letters in your writing sample by Poe. They are not alike, at all. Also, we noted the first time we met how the blue letter begins with a false leftward slant that shifts rightward by its closing. Poe’s writing is absent any slant, even in his long, rambling confessional to you. Look here.”

He pointed to the phrase
I swear to you I am innocent.

“In such a state of agitation,” Dr. Vollman continued, “he could not camouflage his natural handwriting even if he wished to do so. So I see— word by word, slant by slant— that you have two very different writers at work.”