The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Stories Read online

  “Yes, yes, we did. Amazing coincidence.”

  “Amazing. You know, I was a sort of acquaintance of Czolgosz’s up in Buffalo.”

  The big man’s manner began to change, subtly. “You knew him?”

  “Him and a few others. William Kidd, a girl named Sadie . . .”

  “Yes. Well, Czolgosz received a fast but fair trial. It is all over now.”

  Ben nodded, unsmiling. He would have liked a cigarette, but he needed both hands free. “Czolgosz dies the end of October. But it’s a shame he’ll be dying alone. The man who hired him to assassinate McKinley is still at large.”

  “You must be mistaken, Mr. Snow. No one hired Czolgosz. Heaven knows the Buffalo police tried hard enough to implicate others, but they were most unsuccessful.”

  “They just didn’t look in the right places, Mr. Plenty. They didn’t look, for instance, in the alley off Broadway when Czolgosz and Kidd were being paid for the assassination. Ten o’clock, the Sunday night before the shooting.”

  “You should write fiction for me, Mr. Snow.” Plenty’s hand went to the beer pitcher, but this time it shook a little as he poured.

  “Not fiction, fact. I saw it myself. I saw a big man with a ring on his finger, very much like your ring, Mr. Plenty.”

  “Who are you, sir? What is your business with me?” The beer was forgotten now, and behind his head a sudden afternoon breeze was disturbing the curtains.

  “I already told you my name, Mr. Plenty. My occupation might be listed as a justicer. I had a bit of justice for your friend Kidd last week.”

  “Kidd!”

  “I killed him.”

  “I know no Kidd.”

  “I think you do. I think you paid them both to assassinate the President. I think you’re just about the leading Anarchist in the country, Mr. Plenty.”

  “I could have you arrested for making charges like that, Mr. Snow. Charges without a shred of evidence to back them up.” He opened a desk drawer and started to reach inside.

  “The gun that killed Kidd is aimed right at your fat middle, in case you have any ideas.”

  He brought out a box of cigars, and the harmless gesture seemed to renew his sagging strength. “No ideas, Mr. Snow. Only a cigar—not poisonous, not exploding. I am hardly a violent man.”

  “You spoke of evidence a moment ago. I think I have some, in addition to my eye-witness identification. You were so anxious to get out your special edition on the assassination that you slipped a bit in your editorial. You mentioned that Czolgosz paid four dollars and fifty cents for the gun.”

  “I believe other papers have mentioned the fact.”

  “But they hadn’t then—that’s just the point. When you went to press Czolgosz hadn’t talked yet. I knew the price of the gun because I was standing next to him when he bought it. But how did you know it, Mr. Plenty? It proves you not only had contact with Czolgosz the night I saw you together, but that you had contact with him or Kidd later in the week—and that the subject of the gun was specifically discussed.”

  “My reporters bring me these things!” he screamed, pounding the desk.

  “Someone told me it cost four-fifty!”

  “Then there’s the matter of the telegram. A friend of mine, a detective, saw a telegram from someone called The Asp, giving instructions to Czolgosz a week before the assassination. Sadly, my friend was too much the detective. He couldn’t have really seen the words The Asp, because the is rarely used in telegrams. I haven’t seen many of them, but I know too that they’re printed with all capital letters. So instead of The Asp what my friend must have seen really were simply the capital letters ASP, printed together. ASP for Arthur S.

  Plenty.”

  “You call that evidence?”

  “Some of the Lincoln conspirators were hanged for far less.”

  It got to him then, and he stopped shouting. He just sat there, gazing across the desk at Ben. “All right. How much do you want?”

  “Only justice, Mr. Plenty, that’s all. It’s my country, too.”

  “McKinley was no good. He deserved to die if anyone ever did.”

  “I’m no judge of that. And neither are you.” He paused, then asked the big question: “But tell me one thing about it. This man Kidd—who was he, really?”

  “I don’t know—a drifter, someone Emma Goldman picked up in St. Louis.”

  He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “She found Czolgosz in Cleveland.”

  “Was she in on the plot?”

  He shook his big head. “Not really. I sent Czolgosz to Cleveland to recruit more people, but he came back empty-handed. He and Kidd were the only ones. He had lists of other Anarchists, but I made him destroy them so the police wouldn’t find them in his room.”

  “All right,” Ben said. It was another dead end. William Kidd was a buried issue.

  “Do you want money?”

  “No.”

  “What are you going to do—tell the police?”

  Ben looked at him, feeling pity and revulsion mingle in his mind. “I don’t know. I don’t really know. I suppose I’ll have to think about it.” And he got up to leave. “Goodbye, Mr. Plenty.”

  He walked out of there and waited for the slow elevator down, really not knowing what he would do. Perhaps an unsigned letter to the police . . .

  At the entrance Ben found his passage blocked by a gathering crowd of curious, excited people. A woman was screaming and another seemed to have fainted. He fought his way through to the center of the crowd, much as he’d done that night in front of the Buffalo hotel. But this time it wasn’t Claude Musset with a knife in his chest.

  “He jumped! I saw him go!”

  “God, what a mess. Anyone know him?”

  “It’s Plenty, the magazine publisher. He ate in my place every noon.”

  Ben walked away, feeling sick. It was a sort of justice, he supposed, but one he hadn’t figured on. Still, a man who felt he could take the life of the President of the United States would probably feel no qualms about taking his own life if circumstances dictated it. There’d be no need for a letter to the police now. Czolgosz could die alone for his crime and no one would be cheated.

  Except maybe the history books . . .

  THE RIPPER OF STORYVILLE

  Ben Snow met Archer Kinsman in a little Texas town near the Gulf Coast. It had been a year of wandering for Ben, and with the coming of winter he’d headed south ahead of the snow and cold. Here, near the Mexican border, there was still a scent of the old West in the air, still a blending of horseflesh and longhorns and gunsmoke. It was Ben’s sort of town —at least till Archer Kinsman found him there.

  Kinsman was old, not so much in years as in appearance. He was a man with one foot in the grave, and the fancy carriage, the pearl-handled pistols, the expensive cigars would not keep him out of it. He found Ben in the back room of the Rio Cafe, and settled down across the table from him with an air of troubled haste. “You’re Ben Snow, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” Ben said, taking in the trappings of wealth, the ashen complexion that aged the hard lines of the face.

  “I’d like to hire you for a job,” he said, “I’m Archer Kinsman. You may have heard the name.”

  “Sorry. I’m a stranger in these parts.” Whatever he wanted, it would probably be good for a free drink at the very least.

  “But your fame has preceded you, Mr. Snow.” And there was the knowing smile again, that look which had followed him across the West.

  “You want to hire a gun?”

  “I want to hire the fastest gun in New Mexico.”

  “Wrong state, Mr. Kinsman. This is Texas.”

  “But you’re from New Mexico, aren’t you?”

  Ben sighed and drained the bottom of his beer glass. “Yes. I’m from New Mexico.”

  “Let me buy you a beer.” He signaled to the bartender out front. “I’ve heard stories, you know. About your little adventure in Mexico, and the others. You’re quite a man.”

  “Let’s be frank, Mr. Kinsman. You’ve heard stories that I’m Billy the Kid, not dead after nearly twenty years but very much alive, wandering the West with a fast gun for hire. The stories aren’t true.”

  Kinsman brushed it aside. “Of course not—didn’t believe them for an instant! But you’re still the man I want to hire. There is absolutely no killing involved. In fact quite the opposite. I want you to bring my daughter back from New Orleans.”

  “Then why do you need a fast gun?”

  “I need a man who can protect himself against some tough customers. My daughter . . . well, perhaps I should tell you the whole story.” He passed a handkerchief across his face, and his skin was as white as the cloth. “There were the three of us—my wife, my daughter Bess, and myself. We lived up north a ways. After years of nothing I’d managed to get together enough money to buy a small ranch, and things were looking pretty good. But I suppose I wasn’t a very good father. I certainly wasn’t a very good husband.

  One night I found my wife in bed with my foreman. I shot him, of course, but she jumped in front of my gun and they both died. Bess was eighteen when it happened, and I guess it was an awful shock to her. I never knew whether she blamed me or her mother more, but I suppose we were both destroyed that night in her eyes. Anyway, she left the ranch—walked out on me—and I haven’t laid eyes on her in six years.”

  Though his eyes had blurred a bit in the telling, it was still more than obvious that Archer Kinsman was carved out of stone. His wife and daughter had gone, and for all his words the fact didn’t really upset him. The only thing that interested Ben was why, after those six years, he was suddenly taking some action. “You say she’s in New Orleans?”

  Kinsman nodded. “At first she wrote to me occasionall
y. Not so much to reassure me as to add to my torment, I think. She’d drifted along the coast to New Orleans and become . . . well, a common prostitute. I think that’s the worst thing a father can say about his daughter, but damn it there’s no other halfway polite name for it. She wrote me that she was following in her mother’s footsteps, and it was a letter near tore my heart out. I went looking for her a few years ago, got as far as that section—Storyville, they call it now—and I turned right around and came back home. I guess I was afraid of what I might find.”

  “And you want me to go there, to find her?”

  He nodded again. “I’ll pay you well to bring her back to me, Snow. I know you’re a man can do it.”

  “Why is it so important, after six years?”

  His hand shook as he reached for his drink. “Look at me, just look at me! There’s death in these eyes, on this face. I’ve been to the best doctors in the state and they all tell me the same thing. A blood disease of some sort. No cure, no hope. I’ll be a dead man in a month, two months, three months at most. It’s an awful thing to know you’re going to die.”

  “Everyone has to die, Mr. Kinsman.”

  “But do you really believe that? Don’t you think, deep down inside, that you might be the exception?”

  “I might have when I was younger,” Ben admitted. “I think every youth has dreams of immortality.” And then suddenly, hardly knowing he’d spoken the words, or why, he added, “I’ll get your daughter for you, Mr. Kinsman. I’ll bring her back.”

  “God, I want to see her worse than anything else in the world. To see her before I die. I’ve written her, sent her a hundred dollars every Christmas, and on her birthday . . . I’m a rich man now, Mr. Snow. It was almost as if complete success followed on the tragedy of my life. A year after she left me, a year after I killed my wife, oil was discovered on my land. Imagine—damned black stuff that kills off the grazing land! And yet it’s made me a millionaire. I’d kept it a secret for a long time, not daring to tell Bess when I wrote her, fearing that she’d come back just for the money. But last month I told her, because with death staring me in the face that was her money, all of it.”

  “Did she answer your letter?”

  “No. As I said, at first she wrote fairly regularly. Lately, during the past two years, I’ve hardly had a word from her. A simple Thanks scrawled on a post card in response to my Christmas gift. And a cheap greeting card for my birthday. At least she still remembers that. But nothing, not a word, when I told her she might soon have a million dollars.”

  “Do you have her address?”

  “No. I write to General Delivery and she picks them up there. I have a picture, a photograph, taken when she was fifteen, if that’s any help.”

  Ben studied the photograph, and saw a girl with long blonde hair. A pretty girl who might now be beautiful. In the picture she still clung to the wisp of innocence about the eyes, but that would be gone now. The face would be changed. And the body. And the mind.

  “All right,” Ben sighed. “But you still haven’t explained it all. Why me? Why not just a lawyer to bring her back?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it’s the murders that have added to my anxiety.”

  “Murders?” The word sent a familiar chill down Ben’s spine.

  “I imagined you’d read about it in the papers.”

  “I rarely read papers.”

  “Three weeks ago one of these women was killed in Storyville. Slashed to death with a knife. Last week there was another identical killing. Some of the papers have hinted there’ll be more. They think it’s him.”

  “Him? Who?”

  “That English fellow. What was his name? Jack the Ripper . . .”

  Storyville had come into being in the heart of New Orleans only a few years earlier, in ’97, as a result of a city ordinance sponsored by Alderman Story. Although prostitution had been legal in the city since before the Civil War, this was the first attempt to limit it to a specific section of the city. It was a large hunk of the area, too—bounded by Iberville Street, St. Louis, North Basin, and North Robertson Street. In it were to be found the houses, saloons and casinos which made up the dark side of New Orleans life. Street after street, here was the Arlington Palace, the New Mahogany Hall, the Poodle Dog Cafe, Pete Lala’s Cafe, and more. White and Negro, working together, playing together.

  The houses themselves ranged from marbled, elevator-equipped palaces like the New Mahogany to tiny one-room “cribs” just off the street. It was a city in itself, and over it all hung the muted beat of a new music, muffled only by the closed doors and shuttered windows now that winter had shuffled south.

  Ben Snow heard the music on his first afternoon in Storyville, as he wandered down Basin Street on the flimsy trail of the girl named Bess Kinsman. He wore his gun under his coat—not the tiny Derringer he sometimes carried but the old .45 he hardly knew the heft of any more. New Orleans was Eastern, but it was still .45 country. At least this week. It was four days since he’d left Kinsman in Texas, long enough for another girl to have died horribly in the shady back alleys of Storyville. The morning paper had told him all there was to know: her name was “Sadie Stride, Negro,” about thirty years of age. She’d been found face down in a shallow fountain in front of one of the more elaborate houses. There was no doubt that the same knifer had killed all three girls.

  Ripper Prowls Storyville! one paper screamed. And maybe he was prowling. Ben didn’t really care at that point, so long as he kept his knife off one girl named Bess Kinsman. But the heavy gun felt good at his side.

  “Bess Kinsman.”

  “Bess Kinsman? Don’t know her. Nearly six hundred girls in the district this winter. Look, go over to the Arlington Annex and buy a Blue Book for a quarter. If she’s a Storyville girl she’s listed in there.”

  “Thanks. What’s that music they’re playing, anyway?”

  “That there’s called jazz sometimes. It’s real music.”

  At the saloon called the Arlington Annex there was a single black piano player, and he too was running through the rhythm and beat of it. The customers, a mixture of races, seemed to have caught the feeling of the music.

  A dark girl at the bar was moving her body a bit in time to it, and one couple was doing a fast dance in the back. Ben followed instructions and purchased a Blue Book for twenty-five cents, then sat down at a table to study it with growing amazement.

  Here, in carefully alphabetized lists, were the women of Storyville—white, octoroon (though only a half-dozen of these), and “Negro.” There were ads for the bars too, and for some of the available musicians. They were piano players for the most part, colored almost exclusively, and several prided themselves on their ability to play jazz. But just then Ben was more interested in the listing of girls. Kinsman, Bess—there it was, as big and bold as life. All right, Bess, we’ve found you.

  He walked the three dusky blocks to the address that had followed her name, not really knowing whether he’d find a mansion or a crib. The place, when he reached it, was somewhat between the two extremes, a pale gray house that needed painting. It was not the typical New Orleans place, with scrolling ironwork on the second-floor balcony. No, this one looked more to Ben’s inexperienced eye as if it might originally have been built by a Northerner —perhaps one of the post-war wave that swept over the disaster of the Southland.

  “I’m looking for Bess Kinsman,” he told the colored girl who answered the door.

  “Sorry. We don’t open till seven.”

  “I’m here on business. But not your kind, exactly. I want to talk with her.”

  “She ain’t here. I’ll call Countess Lulu for you.”

  Ben shrugged and stood waiting on the doorstep, trying to conjure up a mental portrait of the woman named Countess Lulu. He would have been way off—she was white, somewhere past forty, with a look of quiet dignity which must have accounted for the name. At one time she might have been heavier than she was now, for the flesh of her face seemed strangely folded in spots, aging her certainly beyond her years.

  “Yes? You are looking for one of my girls?”

  Ben nodded, removing his hat because it seemed the thing to do. “That’s right, Bess Kinsman.”

  “You police? About the Ripper?”

  “No, nothing like that. I just want to speak with Bess. I’ll pay for her time, if that’s what’s bothering you.”