Nevermore (6 page)

Her appraisal of Chester’s talents proved somewhat inflated. The two-act they put together during the summer of the Thaw trial, the “Merry Musical Marchingtons,” never rated higher than fifth billing on the three-a-day. Now they took whatever bookings they could get, performing at weddings and bar mitzvahs; working summers in Coney Island and the occasional split week at small-time Loew Circuit theaters in the Bronx and Brooklyn. For the most part, they hung out on the pavement outside the Palace or lingered over coffee at the Somerset with friends from the old days, out-of-work jugglers and comedians.

“With those earphones stuck on his head, he don’t care what kind of howling goes on next door.” Maude addressed her remarks to the hotel’s daytime manager, a ginger-haired young man named Bloom, decked out in so many freckles he looked camouflaged. “It’s bad enough I got to listen to the El roaring by outside, all day long and half the night …”

Her angry stare focused not on Bloom, but Chester, slumped in his ratty armchair, fiddling with the dial of a little single-tube reflex circuit Crosley 50. Ever since he first bought an experimental crystal set five years ago, he’d been addicted to radio. Maude thought it just another fad. She still called it the “wireless,” wisecracking that it had less future than their act.

“I don’t hear anything,” Bloom said.

“Just wait.” Maude pointed at the wall. “It’s like someone is getting skinned alive in there.”

They waited. An uptown train rattled by on Sixth Avenue just as the howling started. Bloom couldn’t be sure. There was too much racket.

“Shhh!” Maude put her finger to her lips like a schoolteacher.

Bloom remained quiet. He kept glancing at the door, thinking this a waste of time. Suddenly, the most unearthly shriek came through the wall, a wail of torment echoing all the way from the depths of Perdition. Bloom jumped, giving a mouselike squeak of terror. “What’d I tell ya?” Maude’s knowing smirk once carried to the back row of Keith’s Union Square.

“My goodness! Whatever could that possibly be?” Bloom did not look like a happy man.

“Ain’t it your job to find out?”

“Six-D is Mrs. Speers’s room. I believe she’s out on tour.”

“So, you gonna wait till she gets back? Me and Marconi here gotta put up with that caterwauling in the meantime?”

The tortured howl made Bloom’s flesh crawl. “I’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said.

Maude Marchington followed Mr. Bloom out into the hall and watched as he rapped his knuckles on the door to 6-D. No answer. He shrugged his shoulders and knocked again with somewhat less enthusiasm.

“Either you do something about it, or I’m calling the cops,” Maude said.

“The passkey’s in my office.”

Maude waited by the elevator until Bloom returned. Less than five minutes had elapsed. “It’s just as I thought,” he said, the scissor gate rattling shut behind him. “Mrs. Speers informed the front desk she was leaving Tuesday, to go out West for twenty-eight weeks on the Orpheum Circuit.”

Bloom was a catty sort and knew this last information would hit a nerve. He got to observe tenants twice in their careers: first on the way up, and later, on the way down. Mrs. Speers had played the Palace at the beginning of the month and was clearly ascending. The same could not be said for Mrs. Marchington.

His remark had its desired effect. Maude remained silent, following him down the dusty hall to 6-D. Bloom imperiously inserted the passkey. When the door swung open, the morbid wailing diminished. They both stood apprehensively on the sill, peering into an empty room.

Not precisely empty. Aside from the usual run-down furniture and threadbare carpet, an H & M wardrobe trunk and several suitcases stood in line along the wall by the door, waiting for the express men to come and collect them. Maude stepped inside first. An unfamiliar sweetish smell hung in the air. Bloom sniffed, wrinkling his nose, trying to place it.

“So, she went on tour and din’t take no luggage,” Maude sneered.

“Perhaps she changed her plans.” Something definitely wrong here, aside from the unearthly noises. Bloom struggled to put his finger on just what it might be.

Maude glanced around, a disgusted expression souring her features. “Nice to see the management doing all this redecorating,” she said. “They wouldn’t tumble for as much as a can of paint when we asked for something to be done about our dump.”

That was it. Fresh wallpaper. Bloom ran his fingers along a moist seam. He smelled the drying paste. Someone had recently papered the room. Bloom couldn’t imagine Mrs. Speers doing such a thing. She was never coming back to this fleabag.

A low moan filled the room, like a child weeping. Bloom and Mrs. Marchington stood stock-still, transfixed by the desolate wail. Gradually, the sound amplified, building into a demonic shriek more terrifying than anything either of them had ever heard before.

It came from within the wall. Bloom pressed his ear against the spot. There was an empty resonance when he drummed his fist on the new wallpaper. The wall was hollow. Bloom stepped back in disbelief. “A closet,” he said, thumping along the outline of an invisible doorway. “There should be a closet …”

“What…?” Maude had never been a quick study.

“Wait here!” The day manager bounded out of the room.

She shrugged. “Who’s going anywhere?” She didn’t like being left alone with that awful sound and stepped half out into the hallway, watching Bloom run to a fire safety station down by the elevator. A red-painted axe hung above a red sand bucket and the accordioned pleating of a folded canvas hose. Bloom seized the axe and rushed back to 6-D. He pushed past Maude, his eyes wild and white.

Maude watched from the doorway. Bloom paused, breathing in short gasps like a cornered animal. He surveyed the wall, taking some mental measurement, and with a wild cry, swung the axe over the top of his head. The excess force proved a miscalculation on Bloom’s part. The opening to the former closet had been sealed with nothing more substantial than sheets of cardboard, plastered and papered over, and the axe ripped through it as if it Were stage scenery.

Flung off balance, Bloom dropped to one knee. The axe hung from a long, ragged tear in the wall, its weight slowly pulling the upper portion of damp plaster and cardboard away from the opening, peeling it back like the lid on a tin of deviled ham. And, sure enough, packed inside was the dead meat.

Held upright by coathooks in the closet wall behind her, Violette Speers’s corpse stood at stiff attention, the top of her head split apart deep into her brow. A clotted mingling of brains and blood caked her hair, forming a stiff crimson wig. Her left eye hung completely out of the socket, dangling down her cheek like a stranded tadpole. Maude Marchington screamed.

Her scream echoed within the closet. Perched on the dead woman’s shoulder, a scrawny, one-eyed black cat squinted out into the unaccustomed light. The hideous creature opened its red maw and howled.

S
IR
A
RTHUR
C
ONAN
D
OYLE
stooped to lift a volume of Heroditus from a footlocker piled with books. He slipped it into the careful line already arranged along the back of a rather too-small desk in his corner suite at the Plaza Hotel. He always traveled with a reference library, endeavoring to maintain a regular writing schedule even when engaged on a speaking tour. Nowhere near enough room on the desktop for everything he brought. If he spoke to the management they would make every effort to accommodate him, but he decided against any fuss. It didn’t matter where he wrote; railway carriages and waiting rooms had always served as well as his study. He piled the extra books against the wall, thinking of all the great literature composed on lap desks over the centuries.

The little writing table stood in the semicircular corner alcove and warm morning sunshine angled in on the eastern side. Sir Arthur glanced out a north-facing window at the new spring green showing in the trees of Central Park. Aside from the hotel’s fine service, he most enjoyed the Plaza’s splendid location. Such spots were at a premium in New York, a thoroughly inhospitable city, in Sir Arthur’s opinion.

Never comfortable in any town, Conan Doyle preferred the capitals of Europe, where the inconveniences were offset by rich historic tradition. Compared to the amenities of London (charming irregular streets, unexpected squares and parks by the dozen, and the decidedly human scale of its white-and-black Edwardian buildings), the rigid grid of Manhattan closed in like an urban purgatory. Looming skyscrapers crowded out the sun, and thoroughfares snarled with motor traffic and a never-ending pedestrian manswarm.

Grand Army Plaza remained a pleasant exception. Here, the constricted canyon of Fifth Avenue opened onto a three-sided square in a splendid preamble to the liberating expansiveness of the park itself. Sir Arthur turned to the east-facing windows and took it all in. He always made a point of learning the local geography, seeking to inform his fiction with an exact sense of place. Last year, on a previous trip to America, Scully, the doorman, had pointed out the surrounding landmarks.

The circular fountain, surmounted by a graceful bronze statue of “Abundance,” delighted him. Pulitzer, the newspaper chap, paid for the whole thing, a gift to the city. Sir Arthur preferred it to the “Eros” fountain, stranded like a damsel in distress amid the congestion of Piccadilly Circus.

The crown jewel of the square was the extravagant building to the south. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s turreted mansion rivaled the royal palaces of Europe. A spiked, ornamented iron fence surrounded the carriage entrance facing onto the plaza. It took thirty servants to run the place, Scully told him, with a certain note of vicarious pride.

Sir Arthur marveled at the vulgar ostentation of America’s merchant princes. All along Fifth Avenue, facing the park north of the plaza, a mile-long row of chateaux and palazzi, each deserving a country estate, crowded together cheek by jowl like an overdressed chorus line rudely competing for the limelight. How ironic that a nation priding itself on creating a classless society tolerated this obscene nouveau-riche overindulgence.

A brisk knock interrupted his musing. Sir Arthur consulted his pocket watch. Right on time. He opened the door to admit a waiter wheeling a serving table with a proper hot English breakfast housed under covered platters. He praised the young man for the hotel’s excellent service and ushered him out with a tip. Breakfast in bed was a luxury he and his wife enjoyed when traveling. At home, such utterly sybaritic behavior remained a rare holiday treat, but in foreign hotels it seemed just the ticket.

Sir Arthur rearranged the crystal bud vase, fanning fringed ferns around a single red rose. Satisfied with the arrangement, he pushed the breakfast table into the darkened bedroom.

The knight pulled back the heavy drapes, flooding the pale yellow room with sunlight. Smiling, he bent to awaken his lady with a kiss. She roused, her smile drowsy, her heavy golden hair unpinned and tumbling across her breasts. “Lovely morning,” he said. “No less lovely than you.”

Jean drew him down beside her on the bed. “You’re lovely,” she purred, her voice thick with sleep.

“Am I, indeed?” He kissed her slender neck and the strap of her nightgown slipped from her shoulder. A soft, chaste kiss, yet her flesh blushed pink at his touch.

“Indeed, indeed, indeed …” Her nimble fingers unfastened the buttons on his waistcoat.

“I say,” he protested, “there’s breakfast waiting.”

“You’re all the breakfast I need.”

Her probing kiss silenced any further discourse. By the time they got around to the porridge, coddled eggs, broiled tomatoes, kippered herring, bacon, and buttered toast, everything was soggy and cold.

The knightly couple had separate schedules that day. Sir Arthur arrived back from interminable meetings in a thoroughly disagreeable mood. He had barely enough time to bathe, shave, and dress before their dinner engagement. Winding uptown through Central Park in a cab restored his robust good humor. The invitation to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Houdini had been a long-anticipated pleasure.

Before the start of Houdini’s much-publicized war on psychics, the two men corresponded frequently on the subject of spiritualism, and when the magician toured England in 1920, Sir Arthur provided introductions to a number of well-known mediums. Thanks to these letters, Houdini obtained over a hundred psychic sittings in Britain, insisting he was an impartial observer. Midway through his tour, when the April daffodils bloomed in saffron profusion about the countryside, the great Self-Liberator journeyed down to Windlesham, the Conan Doyles’ home in Crowborough, for a well-remembered luncheon.

They had hoped to get together again last year when Sir Arthur first lectured in America, but Houdini’s busy vaudeville schedule made this impossible until the very last moment. Two nights before sailing back to England, the Conan Doyles were guests of the magician at the Earl Carroll Theater for a performance of Raymond Hitchcock’s “Pinwheel Revue.” The occasion was a celebration of Mr. and Mrs. Houdini’s twenty-eighth wedding anniversary.

Sir Arthur remembered a splendid evening. “Hitchy,” the irrepressible master of ceremonies, introduced him to the audience and urged Houdini onto the stage where, after an uncharacteristic display of modesty, the magician agreed to perform his famous “Needle Mystery.” Houdini stopped the show. Sir Arthur never forgot the startling appearance of all those glittering threaded needles. There had been no time to prepare any sort of trick. Clearly, he had witnessed a supreme psychic manifestation.

The cab pulled to a stop in front of a four-story brownstone house at 278 West 113th Street. Every window glowed with electric light. In contrast with its more somber neighbors, the building declared itself boldly on the dark street, a bit of the Great White Way transplanted uptown. “Quite festive,” observed Lady Jean.

Houdini himself opened the door mere seconds after Sir Arthur pressed the buzzer. His welcome warm and effusive, the magician ushered them into a wood-paneled foyer where a slender Oriental servant took their coats. A tiny, dark-haired woman with bright intelligent eyes and a broad, full-lipped smile stood shyly to one side. Two small energetic dogs scampered about her feet.