“Foreknowledge?”
“Exactly, High Constable.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, sir,” Crommelin cried, “in deference to you, it seems suspicious, sir, that Mr. Payne’s reaction—the man who was lover and betrothed to the deceased—would not show a forewhisker of emotional reaction, if you see what I’m getting at, and when last night Mr. Padley came right out and in no uncertain terms suggested to Mr. Payne he cross the river to attend the coroner’s inquest and perform the duty of a gentleman, he declined. All this strikes me as strange, High Constable Hays.”
“Strange. And suspicious?”
“And suspicious, too, sir,” Crommelin admitted. “Most certainly.”
Hays ended the conversation, hoping his distaste for this gentleman was not evident. “Just so,” he said—what might have been taken by a certain kind of inferior mind as agreement.
In the Lair of the Green Turtle
Due to the fact that Mary Rogers’ body was found in New Jersey, by law the high constable was required to procure the approval of the mayor’s office before embarking on a full investigation.
Mayor Robert Morris had taken ill with gout, however, and to Hays’ irritation, the acting mayor, Elijah Purdy, an effete, ineffectual man not much to the high constable’s liking, refused to be forthcoming.
“The morass and implication,” declared Purdy, “the potential for disaster, are more than needs to be undertaken on the behest of our city at this time. If this poor young woman was indeed murdered in New Jersey, High Constable, as indicated by her body washing up on their side of the North River, it follows it is then New Jersey’s responsibility to pursue inquiry, not ours.”
“I think their local authorities might refute that conclusion,” Hays responded without trace of a smile.
“What, might I be so bold to ask, would those in authority in Hoboken desire to happen?” asked the acting mayor.
“Coroner Cook and Justice Merritt both would be happy to see the constabulary here in New York take charge. Although they acknowledge the tragedy of the murder, both feel strongly that the crime falls neither under their general auspice nor within their expertise, and that they, therefore, would be better served, as would the victim, if they were not made responsible for its solution. They assert the crime of murder has been carried out on one of our citizens within the confines of our own city limits. Their contention is the body of Miss Rogers has only by chance and current found its way to their shore, perhaps even after being dumped on our side of the river.”
“And what do you think, High Constable?”
“I see their point. Dr. Cook and Justice Merritt are both respectable men. Both feel we are better suited to proceed with such an investigation. I do not disagree. My single concern is to see justice done for this unfortunate young woman.”
“As is mine. But the fact is, High Constable, dead bodies found floating in the waters surrounding Manhattan Island must not be so uncommon. I can only say, occupy yourself elsewhere, High Constable. Have the good grace to allow Jersey to take care of herself.”
Hays reminded himself so went the swagger and sway of this fair city. The hidden subterfuge of power, its whim and whimsy, never failed to infuriate him, no matter who was stuffing the ballot boxes. Having dismissed Balboa, Hays angrily strode up the Broadway to the clip of his constable’s staff, muttering to himself.
His daughter Olga awaited him in the kitchen of their home. Dinner was kept warm in the coal oven. His favorite, a flat beef roast, called brust deckle, purchased from a Hebrew butcher at his small stall in the Centre Market. (This particular cut of meat from the underside of the cow, which Olga had prepared with root vegetables and tomato gravy, tended to be very tough, marbled as it is with fat and lean between the bone and main muscle of the animal. If cooked slowly at low temperature, however, the strong connective tissue will turn into a kind of gelatin that dissolves back into the meat and breaks down very slowly and flavorfully. It was her father’s favorite. Her mother used to make it for him once a week, and Olga thought it nothing less than her duty to continue the practice.)
Hays kissed his daughter’s warm cheek. “Good evening, Miss Hays,” he said.
“By the look of you, Papa, you’ve had a hard day,” she remarked.
He told her about Mary Rogers, his frustration. He confessed, “A young girl alone in the city, it is what gives me pause with you, my daughter.”
She smiled. “With me, Papa, you have nothing to worry about.”
While her mother was alive Olga worked six days a week in Brooklyn, teaching English at the Female Academy. Since then she had quit her job to stay home and look after her father and the house, only taking occasional print and copyediting jobs as they came along from the Harper Brothers, Publishers.
“I worry about you, too, Papa,” Olga chided her father. “An old man alone in the city …”
She told him, if he did not mind, she would attend later that night with her friend Annie Lynch, a colleague and friend from the Female Academy, a lecture at the New York University.
“Edgar Poe, the poet and critic, is scheduled to lay his tomahawk into Longfellow and Halleck,” she told him. “I admit to being captivated!”
THE NEXT MORNING, via Balboa, Hays sent a card to Dr. Cook in Jersey City with his request for the coroner to leave the body of Mary Rogers where it lay in its interment for the time being. Because of Acting Mayor Purdy’s restrictions on his investigation attributed to jurisdictional objections, the high constable wrote, there was little he could do presently, but problems of this nature had their way of working themselves out.
Have patience, Old Hays urged.
Meanwhile, at 11 a.m., the high constable undertook to pay a visit to Forty Little Thieves gang leader Tommy Coleman, the youthful irreverent that the reverend doctor of the Scots church had mentioned as being a possible suspect in the pilfering of the copper sheathing off the church’s steeple.
From the Tombs, the high constable made his way north across Canal to Prince Street, where, underneath the arch between Sullivan and Thompson streets, lay headquarters to Coleman’s gang in a bucket of blood operated by a giant colored woman, known in her district and beyond as “the Green Turtle,” owing to the fact she resembled nothing less than a huge reptile of the order Testudine, family Verde.
The dirty and dingy double doors descending into the Turtle’s lair stood open to the street, although half hidden below ground level. Upon entering, Hays took pause for his eyes to adjust somewhat to the darkness, before continuing cautiously down the narrow fifty-foot subterranean passageway, painted dead black. At the