Unholy Fire (26 page)

The tirade slowly faded to silence.

I waited ten seconds and began hammering again. There was a sound of something falling heavily to the floor, followed by a bout of tubercular coughing. Finally, a key moved in the lock, and the door cracked open a few inches.

I could see nothing. The room was as dark as pitch and reeked of whiskey.

“Valentine Burdette said you could help me,” I spoke into the void.

As soon as Val's name was out of my mouth, the door swung open to reveal a tiny, unshaven old man with a bulbous, blue-veined nose. Barefoot, he was wearing an unbuttoned officer's blouse over long, filthy underwear. With his tangled white hair and barbarous smell, the man reminded me of a miniature version of Val. He had to be the oldest lieutenant in the army.

Looking past me, he saw the small crowd gathered in the corridor.

“I'll tickle your catastrophes, by God!” he bellowed, his rheumy eyes arched in contempt. Laughing as they went, the clerks swarmed back into their offices.

“Burdette sent you?” he asked, breathing a cloud of whiskey in my face.

I nodded.

“I work nights,” he replied, as I followed him back into his lair.

He opened the heavy black curtains that covered the window, letting enough light into the room for me to see that it served as both bedchamber and office.

“Has Burnside gotten off his ass yet?” were his next words.

“No.”

“I'm not surprised,” he said, motioning me toward a chair next to his cluttered desk. “During my thirty years at the Priory School, he was the most dim-witted boy it was ever my misfortune to have in the classroom. I don't know how Lincoln could have elevated him to the top job. How can I help?”

Picking up his pants and socks from the chair, I sat down.

“I am searching for a young woman who could be an important witness in the murder of this prostitute,” I said, showing him the rendering of the dead girl.

I told him what Val had concluded about her sexual practices after examining the body. He shook his head laconically.

“She could have worked in any of a hundred places,” he said. “Hell, there is one that caters to deviants right across the street from the War Department. I rated it poor and tried to close it down, but General Halleck fancies one of the girls in there.”

“Val suggested that I start with the more expensive houses that cater to men with unusual sexual tastes. He mentioned a place called Marble Alley.”

“You could start there,” he said, “but your dead girl sounds like someone who might have performed in one of the private shows.… Don't ask me where to find them. The locations tend to move quickly. There is a sizable group of wealthy perverts here in the capital who enjoy watching women perform with different species. I'm told it can cost a hundred dollars or more to attend one.”

“Are there any houses that specialize in German girls?” I asked next.

He laughed at that.

“German, Irish, African, Chinese, Creole, Greek, Turkish … They say America has become the great melting pot of the world. When it comes to the flesh trade, that is definitely the case. Our whorehouses offer the purest form of democracy you can find.”

When he opened the top drawer of his desk, I heard two bottles roll together with a loud clink. Pulling one of them out, he set it on the table.

“You partial to this?” he said, pouring himself a generous glass of whiskey.

“No, thanks,” I said.

He reached into another drawer, removed a file folder, and tossed it to my side of the desk.

“Those are paid advertisements from the
Evening Star
,” he said. “They describe the virtues of those houses that have the money to advertise their wares.”

I opened the folder. The first advertisement in the batch read,

Maude Shively

187 B Street South

For the truly discriminating taste,

Miss Shively has surrounded herself

with twenty-eight famous beauties to assist her

in the entertainment of her callers.

She has used rare judgment in selecting

them, not only for their beauty in face

and form, but also for their intellectual

and social attainments, conspicuous

among them being that far-famed

Creole beauty, Hallie DuShane.

Lieutenant Mahoney had come around to peer over my shoulder as I read.

“Creole means she is a black girl,” he said before taking a swallow of his whiskey. “Most of them are contrabands.”

The folder was filled with dozens of advertisements just like the first one, including “Mary Hall's,” “Cottage by the Sea,” “Madame Russell's Bake Oven,” “Fort Sumter,” and “The Ironclad.” The difficulty of finding the sad-eyed companion of the dead girl became ever more apparent.

“Are these places open now?” I asked.

“They're like churches, son,” he said. “They are never closed to those seeking release from the cares of daily life.”

He drained his glass and put the bottle back in the drawer. Picking through the clutter on top of his desk, he found another set of papers and handed them to me.

“You can take these reports with you,” he said. “They are the product of six months' honest endeavor on my part … the rating for every bordello in the city with more than five girls. As you can see, they range in quality from ‘best' to ‘very low.'”

“What does ‘very low' signify?” I said.

“Very low means you will almost certainly contract diseases that have yet to be discovered in the equatorial jungles.”

The list was single-spaced and ran seven pages long.

“Have you ever heard of a house called, ‘The Birds of Paradise'?” I asked him.

“Good name, actually,” he said, after a few moments thought. “No … I would have remembered it.”

“What about a gentleman's club run by Congressman Laird Hawkinshield?” I asked next.

“You can find a congressman in just about every house in the city,” he said with a chuckle. “If he owns one, I've never heard of it.”

“I'll start with Marble Alley,” I said.

“Val could be right,” he said. “You may very well find her there. Start with Julia Dean's at the beginning of the street and work your way down to Sal Austin's. There are about forty houses between Pennsylvania and Missouri Avenues in a three-square-block area that cater to officers and wealthier types. Someone should recognize the girl and hopefully steer you to her friend.”

He picked up the drawing of her and stared at it again before handing the paper back to me.

“With a face like that, it's hard to believe she was selling herself,” he said. “But then I was propositioned a few nights ago by a girl of eleven,” he said, finishing his glass. “She had been working in the trade for more than a year.”

After leaving him, I walked downstairs to my old office. In my absence, Harold Tubshawe had covered the top of my desk with his case files. He wasn't in yet, and I took the liberty to examine the docket folder on the Silbernagel case. Based on his latest handwritten notes, the attorney for Mr. Silbernagel was to begin presenting his defense case that morning. Harold had prepared a complete dossier on each of the witnesses the attorney planned to call, as well as a detailed set of questions for his cross-examination.

There were also handwritten notes in the docket folder indicating that Harold had engaged in secret conversations with the officers judging the case, and that two were already prepared to find Silbernagel guilty. If this was true, Harold had acted both unethically and illegally. To balance the books a little, I took his case folder with me when I left, dumping it in the incinerator near the back entrance to the building.

At nine o'clock that morning, I started my search for the sad-eyed young woman. Marble Alley looked like the kind of prosperous residential street one might find on Beacon Hill in Boston. The buildings were mostly brick, with impressive facades, stone staircases, and high windows.

At the first address on Mahoney's list, an iron rail fence enclosed the front yard. Just inside the gate stood a lifesize statue of a forest nymph. A young boy was sitting on the stoop at the top of the front steps. He was dressed in brightly colored pantaloons out of the Arabian Nights. Someone had powdered his face and painted his lips with red gloss. The powder was streaked with tears. He looked up morosely as I went through the front door.

The house smelled of cinnamon and stale cigar smoke. There were potted palm trees flanking the main hall, and two front parlors, both of which were empty. I walked down the hall until I came to a third parlor, which was decorated with heavy Empire couches and chairs. Burgundy drapes covered the windows. A piano stood in the far corner.

A lush-figured girl was coming out of the room as I went in. Following behind her was a federal officer, his tongue protruding out of his mouth like a lolling dog. A second girl was sitting on one of the red-tufted couches in the parlor. She smiled and stood up when I came in. I asked her if I could speak to Julia Dean on an urgent matter. She left without saying a word.

A gigantic painting on the far wall caught my attention. It was a poorly executed oil rendition of
The Rape of the Sabine Women.
Unlike the original classic, all the physical couplings were graphically portrayed. I heard a noise behind me and turned to see another woman entering the room. Around fifty, she had a coarse, weathered face and big ursine body. She was dressed in a loose-fitting muslin robe and smoking a thin cigar.

“I am Julia Dean,” she said.

I removed the drawing of the girl from my uniform blouse and handed it to her.

“Do you know this young woman?”

I waited for a sign of recognition in her eyes. There was none.

“Is she your wife?” she asked, looking up at me.

“No.”

“You would like to meet her, is that it?”

“No. Actually, she's dead.”

“I think I understand,” she said, with sympathy in her voice. “Well, I have a girl who could be her twin sister coming in here at about four, if you would like to come back then.”

When I told her it was a police matter, her manner abruptly changed.

“What police?” she demanded, her voice suddenly becoming combative. “I know every man assigned to the Alley on the Metropolitan force, and I already have an arrangement with the army.”

It was obvious she thought I was there to demand a bribe.

“I'm with the Provost Marshal's Department,” I said, taking back the drawing. “We are investigating the murder of this young woman.”

“Well, I have no idea who she is.”

“I haven't suggested you do. I am merely looking to find someone who might have known her.”

“General Meagher happens to be a good friend of this establishment,” she said, unable to control her anger. “I have a good mind to tell him about the badger game you boys keep playing with the honest business people of this city. I don't think fighting soldiers would take kindly to it.”

“Have you ever heard of a house or club called the Birds of Paradise?” I asked next. She shook her head no.

A minute later I was back on the street and working my way down the long list of houses on Tim Mahoney's list. For the next seven hours, I showed the drawing of the dead girl to madams, prostitutes, street peddlers, procurers, hostlers, cab drivers, and anyone else who might conceivably have seen her or met her in the previous days and weeks.

At the end of that time, I had learned several interesting facts. Parrots were the birds of choice in at least half the whorehouses in Marble Alley. General Meagher and a number of other senior officers seemed to be regular patrons of many of them. Every house had a piano or pipe organ for entertaining their customers, and most, if not all of them, were paying bribes to both the Metropolitan Police and the U.S. Army. No one, however, recognized the dead girl in the drawing, and no one had ever heard of a club called the Birds of Paradise.

As darkness fell, I stopped at one of the restaurants near Missouri Avenue. Sitting at a table near the front window, I ate a bowl of mushroom soup and watched the flood of humanity going in and out of the bawdy houses. Something continued to gnaw at the back of my mind, an amorphous fragment of memory that I knew was important but simply could not remember. Several times it drifted close to the edge of consciousness like a wary fish, but each time darted away.

It was dark when I emerged back on the street. The air hung heavy with acrid smoke from the city's thousands of wood and coal fires. A man came down the block lighting the street lamps with a long match pole. As I again scanned the list Mahoney had given me, two uniformed policemen converged on a beggar across the street. Using their truncheons, they beat his shoulders and back until he scuttled off toward the blighted neighborhood beyond Missouri Avenue.

My wound began to ache as the air got colder, and I thought more than once of giving up and going back to Mrs. Warden's. At one point I also found myself longing for the sweet release of laudanum. I could almost taste the earthy bite of it and feel the grain alcohol warming me inside. Val's last words about finding the girl's killer, however, kept me going through the long night. I continued to work my way through the neighborhood, stopping at each house to ask my questions.

It was approaching eleven o'clock when I crossed off the name of the last house on Mahoney's list. I had spoken to the madam, and she had failed to recognize the girl's likeness. Beyond Missouri Avenue, I could see the dingy buildings, weed-filled open lots, decrepit rooming houses, and saloons that were part of the area known as Murder Bay.