Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (9 page)

Chapter
10

Although the
Tribune
had already reported the vicious murder of Cyrus Butterfield under the headline
FIRST CRIME OF THE NEW YEAR
, and told who the victim was and how he had died, Simeon Lightner decided to take Duncan Phair’s advice and exploit the story. A few days after the lawyer’s corpse was found near the North River docks, the paper provided a highly colored account of the man’s last day upon earth. It followed him to work on the morning of Saturday, December
31
, threading with him his legal way among associates and clients, watched him at luncheon at a small eatery on Murray Street—even providing the menu—and spoke of his last appointment at a quarter of six in the afternoon with the representative of a firearms factory in Connecticut. The testimony of a minor clerk in his law office provided the last sight of Mr. Butterfield alive, as he climbed into a cab just outside his building. Eighteen hours later the article picked up again with the report, quoted at length, of a policeman on beat near Dock
42
, who found the naked corpse of Cyrus Butterfield wedged up between two barrels, a small but deep wound in his left breast.

No member of Mr. Butterfield’s family—his wife nor his sister nor his brother-in-law nor his children—could account for his being anywhere near the West Street docks, when his home was far up in the country on East Eighty-fifth Street. They could not have been more surprised if his corpse had turned up in Singapore or Liverpool. No one denied that the portion of New York demarcated by Canal Street, MacDougal Street, and slanting Bleecker Street was dangerous, but no one could say what had taken Mr. Butterfield to the Black Triangle on the last evening of the year—this was the first time that memorably and sinisterly descriptive designation had been brought before the public.

Cyrus Butterfield’s practice was exclusively given over to the legal concerns of large New England manufacturies, and certainly none of his clients was of the common criminal class. Thus, there was some mystery attached to his presence there, and Simeon Lightner—writing anonymously—stated that the
Tribune
meant to find out what it was; the
Tribune
meant to bring those responsible for the bereavement of so estimable a family as the Butterfields to summary justice; the
Tribune
meant to show that the lassitude of the Democratically controlled police force was in some measure responsible for this gifted man’s shocking and sudden demise. And Duncan Phair, writing as “A Bereaved Colleague” of Mr. Butterfield, quoted alarming figures on the number of murders committed in the same precinct over the most recent year, the number of unidentified corpses that had been taken from those streets to the city morgue, and—in appalling contrast—the infrequent arrests and even rarer convictions for those crimes.

The article excited much notice, and the following day Simeon Lightner came back with a description of the murdered man’s clothing and jewelry. This was provided by Mrs. Butterfield, who was a meticulously observant lady. Her grief had not caused her to forget that her husband had worn his sapphire studs and stickpin on the day he left the house never to return. The
Tribune
announced that all its sources would be thrown into the task of searching out every second-hand dealer in the length and breadth of the city, to trace these items that had been stripped from Cyrus Butterfield, possibly even while he was still struggling for life in the cold black alley between barrels that had been packed with salted cod.

On the third day, the paper carried a full half-page account of the funeral of Cyrus Butterfield at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, where the family had worshipped before moving so far north of the city. Edward Stallworth’s stern sermon was printed at length. A circumstantial account of the progress of the funeral procession and Edward Stallworth’s quiet remarks at the graveside closed with an affecting comparison of the quiet rural charm of Greenwood Cemetery and the shrill wretchedness of the Black Triangle. “Here,” said the minister, spreading wide his arms to encompass the bleak winter beauty of the graveyard, “in the garden of graves, death is made to seem gentle, almost enviable; while
there
, in those unfortunate streets which collectively we may call ‘The Black Triangle,’ life its very self is hideous and insupportable. Here, Cyrus Westen Butterfield, surrounded by the happy dead, will be forever at rest; and there, those responsible for the death of our beloved brother, will never cease from trouble.”

By the fifth day, when a reward of fifteen hundred dollars was offered for information leading to the capture and arrest of those responsible for this infamous crime, the entire city knew of the death of the lawyer. The police, who at first had seen no reason to distinguish this homicide from any of the several dozen murders of respectable persons that occurred in the city every year, doubled their efforts under the pressure exerted by the excited public. They examined the stock of the second-hand dealers (saving the
Tribune
the trouble), grilled pawnbrokers, called in their informants, delved into hellholes to question proprietors and known criminals, stopped persons in the street all but at random—but no one could tell anything of the circumstances of the death of Cyrus Butterfield.

At the height of this clamor, after printing a large selection of outraged letters which demanded to know why such things were allowed to happen in the greatest city in the country, the
Tribune
announced that it was instituting a series, to appear twice weekly, which would expose that very Triangle of corruption and crime in which Cyrus Butterfield had lost his life. It warned that the revelations would be shocking, but guaranteed the truthfulness and impartiality of their reporters in recording the vice that slunk and caroused within a pistol shot of Washington Square. Simeon Lightner looked on Duncan Phair now with some respect, for his suggestions on how to exercise the Butterfield murder to best advantage had been astute.

Every night now forays were made into the Black Triangle by three men banded together for protection: Simeon Lightner, Duncan Phair, and Benjamin Stallworth. They could not, of course, disguise themselves as denizens of the place, for their bearing and their speech would have betrayed them immediately; but it was not difficult to pretend that they were only three boon companions, intent on gaming away their funds, filling their heads with liquor, and searching out the best places in which to give way to temptation. Benjamin, if he were good for nothing else, at least lent the group an air of bumbling inconsequence.

This common recreation of gentlemen amusing themselves in the haunts of the lower classes was called “shooting the elephant.” Criminals never disapproved of it, for such men became easy marks; they rarely failed to become drunk, and so were easy to rob or cheat or dupe. They were, in fact, the easiest money to be had, for there was no need for the criminal to sneak uptown and crawl through the cellar windows of fine houses, when the masters of those houses themselves were so obliging as to take a cab down to West Houston Street and present themselves as ambulatory victims. And men who were victimized did not always complain to the police, for shame was attendant not only upon admitting that one had been tricked, set upon, or robbed, but that one had been in such a place to begin with.

The
Tribune
, which was the principal voice for Republican sentiment not only in New York but across the country, had decided to conduct its researches without the help of the police. It was feared that the strong connections between Police Headquarters and Tammany Hall might cast doubt upon the integrity of the investigation. Therefore, until the greatest part of the series had appeared, Simeon Lightner had decided to remain anonymous, so that he might not be observed or subverted by the department. The three men disported themselves in one low hall after another, night after night. They roamed the streets, stopped to talk with prostitutes, and hired girls to dance with them at Harry Hill’s and Bill McGrory’s. Benjamin was even allowed, within strict limits, to exercise his gambling vice at one crooked table after another. He never won, of course, but all his wagers were subsidized by Duncan Phair.

The first article appeared on Monday, January
16
, when for a week the
Tribune
had had no new information with which to fan public furor over the murder of Mr. Butterfield. It was a description of a panel house on Hudson Street where gentlemen, who resorted there with street prostitutes, were surreptitiously robbed. While the young woman kept the gentleman’s attention with some amorous play, a confederate crept through a panel in the wall and purloined the wallet from the gentleman’s coat—which the prostitute had placed on a chair conveniently near the panel.

The
Tribune
stated that it could confirm the existence of over twenty-five such houses in the Black Triangle alone, each building housing an average of seven prostitutes who not only afflicted their partners with disease—and charged them for it—but robbed their pockets as well. The gentleman thus robbed did not dare protest for fear it would become known that he had lain the night in the arms of such a woman; and if in dismay of the sudden discovery of the theft he did raise a cry, it might well be stifled with a knife below the ribs. Mrs. Butterfield did not take kindly to this last inference, which sneakingly suggested that her husband had met his death in such a manner, and she did not cooperate further with Simeon Lightner or any other representative of the
Tribune
.

At the end of the article, Duncan Phair gave the police department’s estimates of the number of prostitutes in that area, the number of houses of ill fame—both lower than the
Tribune’
s own figures—and compared these numbers with the records of arrests and convictions. The police department’s performance was distressingly poor.

Many of the letters the
Tribune
received commenting on this article it printed over the following two days. Then came time for the second article, which described the depravities of Harry Hill’s place: the wild, inebriate dancing, the assignations engineered with scandalous forwardness, the obscene Punch and Judy shows, the illegal and bloody fights in the back rooms. And thus the
Tribune
kept up: an article on Mondays and letters the next two days, another article on Thursday, and letters on Friday and Saturday. Fashionable New York was fascinated by this information, which for the first time appeared in a well-respected journal and had been written in a tone of voice that declared, “No one has ever plumbed these depths of iniquity before. . . .” The
National Police Gazette
printed a sarcastic editorial article which pointed out that it had been writing of the Black Triangle for many years and had presented the same information that the
Tribune
was now claiming for its own. But the gentlemen and ladies who had never seen the articles in the
Police Gazette
did not see the editorial either and imagined that the
Tribune
was breaking new ground, tearing apart the sidewalks to expose the hot-walled red-lighted hell that, swarming with repulsive shrieking monsters, surged beneath their feet.

Chapter
11

Lena Shanks was clever in limiting her business to female criminals, refusing to purchase even a single yard of stolen lace from a male thief. Although she thereby forwent much rewarding custom, she also, in effect, protected herself against arrest. To convict a fence, the state of New York must prove that the receiver of stolen property had knowledge that the goods had been illegally appropriated. But this was so difficult a task for the law that the police rarely undertook to gather evidence except upon the most notorious, the most indiscreet, and the most successful fences of the city. Lena’s very financial mediocrity protected her from persecution.

She had won the trust of female criminals by her scrupulous dealings and by frequent acts of charity. She was known to have advanced money to women who were incapacitated by bodily injury, to have sent baskets of food to the Tombs on the arm of her daughter Louisa, and even to have constructed a special dress for a woman who was intent on stealing whole bolts of silk from H. B. Claflin and Company. Lena rarely smiled, she rarely had a kind word, but her careful upright respectful dealings with these women—many of whom were used to gross mistreatment and abuse at the hands of men—was a far more welcome thing than smiles and kind words which might, after all, be only feigned.

Lena did not trade at all with male thieves, nor with the wives or consorts of thieves, for she knew of too many fences betrayed by the criminals they supported. Resentment would be got up and allowed to fester over the price paid for some large haul and the fence would be turned over to the police in such a way as to prove his complicity. Women working on their own did not fall into such evil ways, and though Lena realized that she could do a much greater volume of business if only she would accept merchandise appropriated by men, she preferred to conduct herself in a manner that did not endanger her family or her trade.

It happened once that an unruly male pickpocket tried to force Lena to accept seventeen gold watches that he had taken during President Grant’s funeral procession down Fifth Avenue. It was not that there weren’t other fences in the immediate neighborhood who would have been pleased to accommodate him, or that he might not get a better price elsewhere, but it rankled with the thief that this saturnine fat woman would have nothing to do with men. At last, enraged by Lena’s adamant refusals, the pickpocket screeched out a series of wild threats, and pulled a knife from his pocket to show that he was in earnest. With a surprising swiftness, Lena Shanks raised her cane and brought it down so hard upon the man’s wrist that the bones were fractured. At the same time, Louisa rushed from behind the curtain and kicked the thief out the door into the path of an oncoming water cart. He was trampled beneath the hooves of the horses, but lived; however, his wrist healed awry and he had to train himself to pick pockets with his left hand. He never regained his former proficiency, and died penniless in New Jersey a year after. This incident did not go unreported in the neighborhood, and no more men came to Lena Shanks’s pawnshop.

There were in
1882
many hundreds of female criminals in New York, and this number certainly did not incorporate prostitutes, of whom there were many thousands. Each female had a specialty. She was a shoplifter, or a blackmailer, or she stole from gentlemen sleeping in the Central Park, or she lifted watches in gambling halls, or she lured drunken men into alleyways to be set upon, or she practiced any of a large array of confidence games upon the credulous of all description. But most common were the thieves, of one description or another, devoted to one method or another for the acquisition of one sort of plunder or another. These women, with daily mounds of ill-got clothing, jewelry, and fine stuffs, must resort to a fence to have that spoil turned to cash.

A young girl called Evvie O’Shea operated a single effective ruse. Answering advertisements in the papers, she went to be interviewed for the position of a servant. Her references were false, as were her name, her antecedents, and even her hair. She was respectful to the mistress of the house and was sometimes offered the place. However, her purpose was not to secure a salaried position, but only to steal whatever could be pocketed during her brief minutes in the house of her prospective employer. Say she got three rings from a dressing table when a lady of Eighteenth Street made the mistake of receiving the applicant in her dressing room. An hour later, the rings were exchanged on West Houston Street for thirty-five dollars, and Evvie O’Shea went her way. By the time that the unfortunate woman on Eighteenth Street had applied to the police for the recovery of her jewelry, providing exact descriptions of the stolen rings, the property existed no more. Clothing and linen too could be altered quickly and easily, but with so drastic a change in appearance, that the owner herself would not know it, displayed upon a rack in the street.

On this small scale, women were more successful as thieves than men. In shoplifting, pickpocketing, and petty confidence games, they excelled because of the lightness of their touch, because of their gentle address, because potential victims were less likely to suspect a female of perpetrating a crime. It was the men who succeeded in robbing banks, purloining enormous fortunes in negotiable securities, engineering fabulous swindles, denuding mansions of their contents. However, it was also men who were most frequently caught, because after a great haul in the way of profits they became reckless and extravagant, boasted drunkenly of their exploits to boon—but not entirely trustworthy—companions. Frequently they were betrayed by informers. Women were closer, more apt to hide their gain and remain mute concerning the state of their fortunes, displaying equable behavior in adversity and prosperity alike.

Lena Shanks had no difficulty in selling precious metals and gems, for even the most respectable jewelers in the city paid well and without asking questions. Altered clothing, bolts of cloth, and items taken directly from shops were sold in lots to the second-hand dealers around Chatham Square and along Catherine Street, who with their faked auctions and their persuasiveness with the country visitors to the city, usually managed to sell an item at a price far above what they paid, or its actual worth.

Furniture and objets d’art, which could not be disguised without substantially diminishing their value, were purchased only at a discount from the normal rate of one-third. These were more difficult to dispose of because of the chance that an object might be identified and traced. Lena Shanks was fortunate in having relatives in Philadelphia, who every couple of months drove a hearse up to New York, loaded it with stolen goods, and returned home again. The horses wore black plumes, and the father and two sons, dressed as undertakers, were never stopped or questioned.

Bonds, securities, stolen cheques and money orders Lena refused altogether, as dangerous to those unversed in the intricacies of modern finance.

With Louisa helping either her mother or her sister as was required, and keeping books—she was a competent forger as well, and often found little ways of exploiting this talent—the Shanks women made just about fifty thousand dollars a year. This would have been a fortune to many New York families living with every trapping of respectability and good breeding.

The greater part of these receipts was kept undisturbed in half a dozen banks along Sixth and Seventh avenues and had accumulated a great amount of interest through the years. Lena Shanks considered that avarice was no virtue among criminals, for greed led one into danger, and such hazards might compel one to take rooms in Centre Street—at the Tombs. “Be like Louisa,” cautioned Lena, “always we should be like Louisa, quiet . . . quiet. . . .”

Monday, January
9
, was chill and raw in New York. The snow that had briefly turned the Black Triangle white on the previous Tuesday had long disappeared—trampled by men in search of liquor or marks, soaked into the skirts of women who trod the streets, lapped up by urchins to assuage their hunger, and even in a few places swept away by the municipal authorities who were paid millions of dollars a year to do so. In the middle of this short bleak afternoon, the Sapphic Pugilist, wearing thick boots and a plain gray-checked dress, strode briskly and with purpose along West Houston Street. Finding the pawnshop open, Charlotta Kegoe turned in there, rather than knocking at the private door of the second Shanks building.

Lena Shanks sat behind the counter, sewing black frogs onto a red silk jacket, where before there had been round ebony buttons. Ella Shanks sat at the deal table building a house of cards, which promptly collapsed when Charlotta’s heavy tread set all the room to shaking.

“ ’Lotta,” nodded Lena, in brief greeting.

Charlotta Kegoe returned the nod and stepped forward to the counter.

After sending her granddaughter to fetch Louisa, Lena asked, as she pinned a frog to the edge of the jacket, “News, ’Lotta?”

Charlotta nodded. “Anyone show you the papers this week?”

“Someone writing about us, about our street,
nicht?
”

“Yes,” replied Lotta, and drew a folded
Tribune
from beneath her arm. “Brought you one in case you hadn’t seen today’s. Offering a reward and vowing to check all the pawnshops in all the streets around here, looking for the jewelry of this man who was murdered.”

“Where?” demanded Lena, “where does it say so?”

Charlotta opened the newspaper and pointed out the article. At that moment Louisa Shanks parted the curtain in the back of the shop and smiled at her friend. Ella slithered past her aunt and hopped onto a stool beside her grandmother.

“ ’Lotta,” said Lena, “
danke schön
.”

Charlotta passed into the back with Louisa Shanks.

Lena continued to sew and listened to Charlotta’s resounding footfalls up to Louisa’s room on the third story. Ella stared out into the street, counting the passersby aloud. Some peered curiously into the shop but none ventured inside. Most of Lena’s business was conducted in the early morning or the very late afternoon, and the hours between were quiet.

“Ella,” said her grandmother, “read to me.” She pointed to the article written by Simeon Lightner. Ella, who was nearsighted, leaned forward precipitously, with her elbows on the paper and her eyes only inches from the text. She stumbled through the article, skipping over the difficult words altogether and making rather a jumble of some sentences. Her grandmother, a poor reader herself in English, did not object to the lesions in comprehension and, in truth, was not much interested in the
Tribune’
s
indignation over Cyrus Butterfield’s death, and the newspaper’s call for swift vengeance. But when Ella came to the paragraphs that talked of reward, Lena had the child read slowly and repeat each sentence before going on to the next.

“
Verstehst?
”

Ella nodded: “They’ll give money to anyone who’ll say who killed the man by the docks. Nana, do we know who killed him?”

“Go on,” said Lena, and Ella continued. The next paragraph contained the description of the clothing and jewelry of which the dead man had been stripped. Ella looked up at her grandmother at the end of this recitation, but so discreet was the child that she did not say aloud what she knew very well—that Maggie Kizer had received three hundred dollars for the very items of jewelry there enumerated.

“Again,” said Lena, but just as Ella had begun the paragraph for the second time, they were interrupted by the arrival in the pawnshop of a short, slender snub-nosed woman dressed in widow’s weeds. It was Weeping Mary, one of Lena’s most frequent customers, who always appeared as if she had just got over a crying jag and was desperately trying to prevent another from overtaking her.

Weeping Mary was a pickpocket who plied her trade exclusively in churches. Each Sunday she attended divine services at some fashionable church in New York or Brooklyn, sitting with the servants in the loft and pretending to be of their number, mingling with the crowd outside, and sometimes managing to pick the pockets of gentlemen, but more often satisfying herself with pocket handkerchiefs or bits of lace and trim from the dresses of ladies. During the week she went to funeral services, where her morose appearance stood her in good stead, and she often passed as a bereaved devoted servant of the deceased. Funerals were easy, Weeping Mary said, for the mourners were frequently quite distracted with their grief and unlikely to feel the slight tug at their pockets or to hear the single snip of the fine scissors that cut away part of their dress.

Though Weeping Mary rarely came away with anything really valuable, she did a great volume of business. She was not lazy, within the scope of her profession, and had developed quite an ear for sermons. She knew the hymns of half a dozen different denominations, could recite all the Catholic prayers and all the Protestant creeds; and though it might be dangerous to return too often to one church, she was sometimes drawn back by the eloquence or the fine appearance of one preacher or another. One of these was the handsome Presbyterian minister whose church was at Madison Square, and when Weeping Mary saw the open
Tribune
on the counter in Lena’s shop, she cried dolorously: “These handkerchiefs I brought you today, took ’em right off the widow and her two girls when they was getting into their carriage, took ’em at the funeral of the lawyer got himself killed down at the docks on New Year. Thought there might be a turnout for that one, and ’deed there was. Church was full, been there of course myself before that, but never saw so many there before. Hardly knew where to turn first. Don’t think they was all his friends, people wanting to see if they’d have the coffin open, as if they were going to have a little opening in his coat so you could see where the knife went in. Well the coffin was closed, and everybody thought that they was going away with a disappointment, but I tell you how it happened, Lena, nobody went away with a disappointment then, because that preacher—such a fine-looking man—climbed up into the pulpit and prayed a little prayer, and we sang a little hymn, and then he prayed another little prayer and spoke of the deceased like he was his own brother, and then just when everybody thinks that the coffin’s going to be taken away, this preacher suddenly starts in on railing against
us!
”