The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Stories Page 12

  “You seen Inspector Withers around this morning?” he called out to the bartender.

  “Not yet. He usually comes by about noon, but today’s Mardi Gras.”

  “I know.”

  Ben stuffed one of the Blue Books into his pocket and made for the door.

  “Say, I told you I had to have those back!” the bartender called after him, but he was already into the street, swallowed up by a constantly-growing crowd of masked, painted revelers.

  It took Ben two hours to track down Withers, and when he found him the Englishman was helping to break up a crowd that had gathered outside one of the houses on North Robertson. A girl, obviously drunk or drugged, had climbed out onto the roof in a brief beaded costume and was attempting to do a French cancan, much to the delight of the crowd below.

  “Well,” he said, finally noticing Ben in the midst of them, “enjoying the show?”

  “I’ve been looking for you. Can we talk?”

  Inspector Withers studied his set face for a moment, then motioned down the street. “At the station house. Come on.”

  Over a cigarette-stained table in an almost bare office, Ben produced the two-year-old Blue Book. He saw the spark of interest in the detective’s eyes at once, and he said, “I think I’m onto something, but I need a bit of your knowledge of the district.”

  “Go on.”

  “This book lists the girls, with their current addresses, as you know. Well, two years ago all of the dead girls were living at the same address.”

  “The hell! Let me see that!”

  “They were all at Pearl’s Pleasure Palace. Now you tell me the rest of it, Inspector.”

  Withers frowned, then leaned back in his chair. “Of course! I know one or two of them had worked at Pearl’s, but after two years I’d forgotten about the others. Pearl’s is the place that burned down.”

  “How many girls were there?”

  “At the time of the fire? She had six, I think.”

  “No piano player?”

  Withers shook his head. “Not then. That’s a recent addition to these places.”

  “All right.” Ben picked up the book again. “Here are the names I found. Sadie Stride . . .”

  “The Ripper’s third victim.”

  “Jane Swann . . .”

  “The first victim. She got out of the business right after the fire.”

  “Laura O’Toole . . .”

  “Forget her. She was killed in the fire.”

  “Mary Quinn . . .”

  “The second victim.”

  “Dotty Ringsome . . .”

  “Victim number four, just last night. As you know.”

  “And Pearl herself?”

  Withers frowned at the memory. “Pearl was a middle-aged bum, a heavy drinker. Some even said her drinking caused the fire that night. Last year she killed a man with a broken bottle and fled to South America. She’s still there, living in Brazil.”

  Ben sighed at the list before him. He turned the page and stared down at the final name he’d checked. “The sixth girl in Pearl’s house . . .”

  “And the Ripper’s next victim, if you’re correct.”

  “. . . was Bess Kinsman.”

  The Inspector’s face hardened. “Come on,” he said . . .

  But it wasn’t to be that easy. The streets, now in late afternoon, were crowded with the noise and color of carnival, filled to overflowing with masked men and painted women who had forgotten or never cared about the Ripper who had already killed four girls. They were out for pleasure, a physical representation of the “pursuit of happiness” that the Constitution guaranteed. The Constitution—no, Ben remembered, it was the Declaration of Independence—had put it nicely, but they hadn’t said anything in there about murderers. There was no law saying people had to suddenly turn off the happiness just because there was a killer in their midst.

  He watched the costumes passing in front of Countess Lulu’s house, noting especially one fellow dressed as a policeman. It looked like Piggy, but he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure of anything just then.

  Withers came out of the house, his eyes sweeping the passing crowds. “Well, she’s all right. So far, at least. I’ll send an officer down to keep an eye out.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t wear a mask. There’s a phoney cop out in the crowd.”

  Withers spotted him and started edging through the crowd. In a moment he was gone, swallowed up in the colorful flow. But Ben stood his ground in front of Countess Lulu’s. He knew Archer Kinsman wouldn’t be paying much for a dead daughter. A jazz band of sorts went by, the first he’d seen, led by a trumpet-blowing black man dressed like the devil. And as the evening’s early shadows began to lengthen in the street he went inside to see how things were.

  “What a night!” Lulu was chirping. “Every girl’s busy and there are three birds waiting!”

  “Where’s your music?”

  “Piggy’s drunk, parading out there someplace.” She left him and vanished through a hall doorway.

  He stayed a few moments, watching the costumed men who waited in the parlor. Then the thought of it all began to sicken him and he turned away, heading back to the street. His hand was on the doorknob when he heard something crash to the floor above his head. Somebody screamed—it might have been Bess Kinsman.

  Ben took the stairs three at a time, his hand already brushing aside the coat to get his gun free. Her door was locked but as he rattled the knob she screamed out again, “Ben, help! It’s the Ripper! ”

  His shoulder hit the flimsy door. He was remembering Dotty Ringsome’s door the night before, remembering what he’d found there. But Bess Kinsman was very much alive, struggling with a masked figure dressed in a checkered harlequin costume. His right hand clutched a curving knife that flickered with reflected light as they struggled by the bed. “Shoot him, Ben! He’s killing me! ”

  But her body was between Ben’s gun and the masked killer. As he moved in on the struggling figures the knife plunged downward, slashing at Bess’s stomach, darkening her pink housecoat with a sudden splatter of blood. She screamed once more and toppled to the floor, and as Ben caught her falling figure the Ripper hurled himself at the bedroom’s sole window, smashing through it in a headlong dive to the roof below.

  Ben tore away the housecoat and tried to stop the flow of blood with his handkerchief. Then, as others crowded into the room behind him, he went out the window after the costumed figure. The roof slanted upward from the window, then ended suddenly with a five-foot gap before the adjoining house. Ben took the leap without thinking twice, landing clawing at the slippery slate. Above him, against the blue night sky, the harlequin costume paused in flight to hurl a shingle of slate down at his gripping fingers. He felt the bits of rock nick his cheek, then he was up, stripping the impeding coat from his shoulders, checking the feel of the gun still in his holster as he climbed. Ahead, the enemy had swung down, hand over hand, to cling flylike to the ornate iron railing of the housefront.

  Ben followed, feeling the rusty metal under hand, seeing now the very eyes of the enemy inches away, close enough almost to reach. And the knife blade dull now with darkness, moving like a cobra as the killer hung with one hand clinging. The blade shot out, slashing, as Ben lost his footing, and hung by his ingers above the street twenty feet below. And now the slasher moved in for the kill and the sweep of the knife came closer. Dangling, Ben risked one hand, dropping it to the holster at his side, pulling the gun free, firing as he hung swinging in the air against the iron grillworked balcony.

  It was not the best shot of his life, but it sufficed. The masked figure shuddered as the bullet tore into his side, and relaxed his grip on the metal. He fell slowly, like a deflated balloon, and landed on the paving below with a sick thud of finality.

  Ben climbed down and fought his way through the gathering crowd. He bent to the bloody, broken figure and ripped away the mask. It was the face of Bess’s friend, Hugo Dadier . . .

  The following day was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and even in Storyville there were those who went to church this day. But for Inspector Withers and Ben Snow there were other things to be done. At the hospital they found Bess Kinsman resting comfortably in a narrow white bed. She was smiling, even though she’d been told a few hours earlier the identity of her attacker.

  “It’s hard to believe, I know,” she told them, “but at times there was a bit of strangeness about him. To think that he killed those four girls so horribly . . .”

  “There is no doubt he did it,” Withers said. “The knife was the type used in all the killings. Of course he’s too young to have been Jack the Ripper, but he must have been just as insane.”

  “Perhaps not,” Ben said quietly. “Or at least not quite as insane as he might seem.”

  Bess turned to him with difficulty. “You know why he did it? Why he killed the others and tried to kill me?”

  “I think so.” He turned away from her. “I imagine it will all come out at the trial.”

  “The trial!” she said, startled. “But he’s dead!”

  “Not his trial—yours. Inspector Withers is here to arrest you as an accessory in those four murders.”

  “But . . . but that’s crazy! He tried to kill me too! Why would I want those girls dead?” She was sitting up in the bed, her face as white as the sheets.

  Ben sighed, feeling tired and a bit lonely. “You wanted them dead because your name is Laura O’Toole. You wanted them dead because the real Bess Kinsman was killed in a fire two years ago . . .

  “You were clever,” he went on, “very clever. In fact, you made no real mistakes. But I was curious as to why you, of all people, hadn’t mentioned the connection among the four murder victims. The police and most everyone else m
ight have forgotten they were all at Pearl’s Pleasure Palace at the time of the fire, but certainly you would have remembered. And then of course there was the attempt on your life last night. When I found that the Ripper was your friend Hugo Dadier I was baffled for a moment. He of all people would never have attacked you last night, because he was actually at the Arlington while I was looking over back copies of the Blue Book. He knew I had found the connecting link between the victims, and he knew I would be expecting an attack on you. Also, of course, he was in a position where he could have killed you at any time—so why risk everything with his half-hearted attempt of last evening, at the very time I was expecting it and guarding the house? The answer of course was that the attack was a fake. He never meant to kill you, but he had to attempt it last night solely because he did know I was expecting it. Otherwise I might begin to suspect you.”

  “You call this a fake?” she shouted from the bed. “My stomach rippedopen with a knife?”

  “I think in that last instant you had an idea all your own. I think you decided Hugo had served his purpose in killing the girls. So you shouted for me to shoot him, which wasn’t in the plan. He saw your double cross and jabbed a little deeper than he’d planned. Of course I was on my guard as soon as you called my name through the closed door—it meant you’d been watching me enter the house.”

  “And why in hell did I do all this?” She was not the same girl anymore. The hard, cold calculation had taken over completely now.

  “Well, those four girls were at Pearl’s when it burned down, so I asked myself what they might know that made their deaths so important. And I remembered something. I remembered that Bess Kinsman’s long letters to her father stopped about two years ago. That’s when it came to me. Bess was the one who died in the fire, and you were the other girl—Laura O’Toole. You must have looked enough alike to fool occasional customers and casual acquaintances, but the other girls in the house would have known you took Bess’s place after the fire.”

  “Why? Do you know that too, smart guy?”

  “Why? Well, I imagine in the beginning it was only for that hundred dollars her father sent her every Christmas and birthday. Of course you would have known about it, and with Bess Kinsman dead in the fire you must have seen how easy it would be to change places with her. It meant two hundred dollars a year, and you were reasonably certain her father would never try to visit her here. The four girls knew about the switch, of course, and Pearl, and your friend Hugo. But people come and go so fast in Storyville, it was easy to fool the rest. Countess Lulu, for example, didn’t show up till just after the fire —so to her you were always Bess Kinsman and no one else.”

  “So why did I decide to kill the girls after two years?”

  “They hadn’t minded a little two-hundred-a-year racket, but when you got that letter last month saying Bess’s father was dying, telling you for the first time he was worth a million dollars in oil lands, you knew you had to remove the witnesses to your impersonation. Those girls would want their cut—a big cut—to keep quiet. Pearl was already far away in South America, and would never return with a murder rap waiting for her, so you had only the four to remove. Hugo did it for you, not knowing you’d take the first opportunity to dispose of him too. And of course the Jack-the-Ripper idea made a natural cover-up for the true motive.”

  “That’s a good story,” she said, calmer now. “You think you can prove it?”

  “The murders started a week after you got Kinsman’s letter about the million-dollar inheritance. It’s not evidence, but it’s a fact of the kind juries like to hear.”

  Inspector Withers interrupted her. “We can easily prove you’re not Bess Kinsman—by handwriting, among other things. And now that we know what we’re looking for, I’m sure we’ll turn up other witnesses who knew both you girls. If necessary, we can bring Archer Kinsman here to meet you.”

  “If he lives that long,” she challenged. Ben sighed and ran his hand along the white railing of the bed. “That was my first clue of something wrong—the fact that you wouldn’t go back to Texas to your dying father. The fact that Bess had kept writing to him at first implied she still cared a little for him, yet you refused to go back, even with a million dollars waiting for you. You couldn’t, of course, because though you looked a little like a picture of Bess at fifteen, you’d never fool her father. You had to gamble on getting the money anyway, knowing old Kinsman had no other relatives. I imagine you would have produced Lulu and scores of other recent friends to convince the lawyers you really were Bess, once Kinsman was dead.”

  “I’m not saying a word,” she mumbled. “We’ll see what a jury says.”

  “Yes, we will,” Withers agreed. “We might not convict you of the murders, but the fraud charges and your general character will put you away for a good many years.”

  When Ben left the room she had started to cry. The hardness was dissolving, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if Withers obtained a full confession before too many days. But for Ben now there was only remaining the short trip back to Texas, back to the waiting Archer Kinsman with the sort of story he’d hate to tell any father. He almost wished, deep in his heart, that death would beat him to Kinsman’s side. That would be the simplest way . . .

  SNOW IN YUCATAN

  It was some nine hundred miles by land from Brownsville on the Rio Grande to the vast unknown wilds of the Yucatan peninsula, and by horse it had taken Ben Snow the better part of two weeks to make the trip. He’d begun to regret the journey as soon as he was south of the Tropic of Cancer—at Tampico—where both the climate and the populace had turned suddenly ugly.

  While buying a new horse from a sleepy-eyed Mexican just outside Tampico he’d found himself set upon by a little band of drink-hardened bandits. He’d killed one, wounded another, and escaped the rest only by dint of some hard and fast riding across the shallow waters of the Rio Panuco. And all this with two-thirds of the trip still ahead of him.

  He was riding in search of a man named Chancer—Wade Chancer. Just then it was a name and a story told in a San Antonio bar. Little enough to send Ben Snow riding nine hundred miles. Still, there were times when a story told in the barroom dusk was enough to move a man. This was such a story . . .

  There’d been three of them, hard and bitter men with the unmistakable look of ex-soldiers. And it hadn’t taken Ben long to verify that assumption—they’d served in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Three ex-soldiers, spreading a pile of rumpled bills and gold coins on the table before him.

  “Two thousand dollars,” the biggest of them said. “We all chipped in. Others, too.”

  Ben Snow eyed the money suspiciously. “What’s it for?”

  “We want you to kill a man for us.”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong man.”

  The big one—his name was Ventnor—shook his head. “You’re Ben Snow, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we got the right man. Two thousand to kill Wade Chancer.”

  “You men look quite capable of carrying out the assignment yourselves. If it’s that important, why try to hire me?” He was interested. There was something here that touched the nerve of curiosity always just beneath the surface.

  “Because Chancer is a thousand miles away, down in Mexico.”

  “And I’m supposed to ride all the way down there to kill him for you? Why?”

  Ventnor spread his hands flat on the table. “He enlisted with us when the Rough Riders were formed. Most of the men were from the West—Indians, cowpunchers, stage drivers, miners, trappers—and if I say so myself we formed a pretty tough fighting unit. We went down there with Teddy and we beat the hell out of them Cubans . . .”

  “Spaniards.”

  “. . . Spaniards! They’re all the same. Anyway, we’d have been down there yet if the Yellow Fever hadn’t gotten us.”

  Ben Snow cleared his throat. “What about this man Chancer?”

  “Yeah, I’m getting to it. Well, Wade Chancer was with our troop when we went up San Juan Hill. He was with us and he deserted—and because he deserted, my brother and a few other real men died. The Spanish fire got them, at a point on our flank that Chancer was supposed to be covering. It took us a while to trace the rat, but we finally discovered he’d booked passage on a tramp steamer bound for Central America with its first stop at Yucatan.”