The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Stories Page 9

  But Musset then had mentioned something “big,” something apparently even bigger than the discovery of a living Billy the Kid. Ben puzzled over that for some time, trying to fit together the pieces of what he’d seen and heard.

  The detective’s killer, it seemed, must be one of three persons—Kidd, Sadie, or Czolgosz—since these were the only ones he’d had any contact with in Buffalo. Those three—and the mysterious name in the telegram, The Asp. But Ben himself had spent the evening talking with Sadie in a bar, and Czolgosz was supposedly in Cleveland for the day. That left Kidd as the best bet for the killing, and now Ben remembered all too well how he’d left the bar right after Musset. Had he noticed the detective lurking around earlier in the week, and followed him from the bar to knife him in some shadowed place within sight of the hotel? And what had Musset discovered that made his death necessary?

  It was dawn when Ben finally settled down on the bed, with the breeze from Lake Erie cooling the room so that he needed a blanket. He slept . . .

  The Saturday papers were full of the murder, though Musset had not yet been identified as a Pinkerton detective. Ben anticipated another rash of headlines when that fact reached the newsmen. It was early evening when he made his way back to the Broadway hotel, half expecting that Kidd and Sadie would already be gone, in flight like the autumn birds to some distant, uncertain location. But they were still registered, though not present at the moment. Ben waited around a while and then went back to his hotel. If they were still in town they apparently were going to ride out the storm of the murder. Perhaps, if he was lucky, they hadn’t even noticed him speaking with Musset at the bar.

  On Sunday his luck was better. It was the first of September, and the following day was the semi-holiday, Labor Day, which Musset had mentioned.

  It was hot in the city that afternoon, with shirt-sleeved men watching longingly as bartenders rolled barrels of beer into dim caves of coolness. Ben was having a beer at the bar beneath the hotel when he saw Kidd in the little lobby, greeting a slender man with slightly stooped shoulders and a smooth, round face. He strolled casually over to the door until he was within earshot.

  “You get in last night, Leon?” Kidd asked.

  “Yeah. Took the boat back,” said the dull-eyed man, who must have been Czolgosz. “How are things?”

  “Good. We’re meeting him at ten tonight.”

  Czolgosz nodded and they went past Ben into the bar. If Kidd recognized him as Musset’s companion, he gave no sign. Ben waited until they were seated over their beers, then went out to the sweaty room clerk. “See that little brown-haired guy in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He staying here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “John Doe.”

  “You kidding?”

  “Look, mister, you asked me his name. He’s registered as John Doe and that’s all I can tell you. We don’t ask questions.”

  “Thanks,” Ben said with a sigh, turning away. And what did it all mean?

  Czolgosz had used his real name just a few days earlier without apparent worry. Was this new secrecy connected somehow with Musset’s killing?

  He thought about it most of the evening, and that night at ten he was standing in the shadows across Broadway from the hotel. They came out together, Kidd and Czolgosz, walking purposefully down the nearly deserted street. About a half block from the hotel they paused at the mouth of a narrow alley, looked both ways, and entered it. Ben crossed the street after them, his right hand curled lovingly about the cool metal of the Derringer in his pocket.

  The gaslight was far enough down the block so he entered the alleyway in deep shadow, moving his left hand along the rough brick of the wall to guide him. The alley ran through to the next street, and there the gaslight was almost at its entrance, so that the three figures were silhouetted to his eye. Three—Kidd and Czolgosz and a third man, much bigger. Their conversation was low, but something changed hands—an envelope, perhaps, for Kidd and another for Czolgosz. Something on the big man’s hand, perhaps a diamond ring, caught the light and sparkled a moment. Then it was over. The big man looked over his shoulder at a waiting carriage under the gaslight. Ben drew the little gun from his pocket, knowing he must act now or not at all.

  But what could he do? Shoot them down in an alley for a crime they might know nothing about? Perhaps Musset had been the simple victim of an attempted robbery. No, for now the gun had to stay silent. Ben backed carefully out of the alley and ran silently up the block to a convenient doorway.

  In a moment Kidd and Czolgosz were visible, heading back in the direction of the hotel. But now the hunt began in earnest for Ben. As he had once tracked Indians across the western plains for the Army, he now tracked these two through the streets of Buffalo. He was back at the hotel early Monday morning, ready to stay with the first one who came out. This day it was Kidd, who did nothing more than wander aimlessly about the downtown area. But he had better luck next time, when he followed Czolgosz to a Main Street shop and stood only a few feet away while the little man bought a .32 Iver Johnson revolver with an owl’s head stamped on either side of its hard rubber handle. It cost four dollars and a half.

  On Wednesday evening there was a stir of activity through the city with the arrival of the President to attend the Exposition the following day. His wife’s illness had caused him to miss the original date back in June, but now the city was giving him a regal welcome, complete with the booming of cannon in the evening air. Kidd and Czolgosz were up in their rooms, but Ben found Sadie once more alone in the bar.

  “Hello, there,” he said, sitting down without an invitation.

  “Oh! You again.”

  “Not down greeting the President at the station?”

  “Not me. I leave that politics stuff to my husband.”

  Ben signalled the bartender for a couple of beers. “I’m still trying to see him.”

  “He’s around all the time. Him and his friend.”

  “Do they have a job here?”

  “Who knows? As long as there’s money coming in, I don’t ask questions.”

  She lifted the beer and downed half of it without pausing for breath. “Good. I was thirsty.”

  “How much longer you going to be around? I’d still like to catch your husband.”

  “He said something about leaving the end of the week.”

  This time Ben didn’t stay long with her. It wouldn’t do for Kidd to find them together, not just then. But soon, before the end of the week, Ben was going to have to act.

  On Thursday Czolgosz traveled, with fifty thousand others, to the Exposition where President McKinley delivered a surprising speech modifying his views on reciprocal trade. Ben paid little attention to the speech, but the place itself fascinated him. There were pavilions and displays everywhere—bearing such wondrous names as the Temple of Music, and the Fountain of Abundance, and the Court of Lilies. There was, toward evening, the giant cream-colored Tower of Light, more than four hundred feet tall and lit by thirty-five thousand electric light bulbs. The buildings for the most part had the massive Spanish look of mission architecture, in keeping with the Pan-American theme. And everywhere there were these wonderful electric lights, powered (in some manner unfathomable to Ben) by the waters of Niagara Falls some fifteen miles away.

  As the lights were starting to go on, Czolgosz left the Exposition and wandered back downtown, where he sat alone in the park until ten. It was a dull sort of a night, warm and dull, but to Ben—the silent watcher—it had the muggy feel of impending doom.

  On Friday morning, with Kidd’s hours in the city growing shorter all the time—at least according to Sadie—Ben knew he must do something. Still, perhaps this would be the day they’d reveal themselves somehow. He chuckled to himself, thinking that his indecision reminded him of a fellow named Hamlet in a play he’d seen in Kansas City.

  So he followed Czolgosz again. The slender man seemed to move with purpose this morning. He bought a cigar at the bar, then strolled a few blocks till he came to an open sewer. He paused a moment, dropped a bundle of papers down it, then kept walking. In a small side-street restaurant he ate breakfast, then paused at a barber shop for a shave. He boarded a streetcar for Niagara Falls, but soon changed his mind and returned to downtown Buffalo. All the time he seemed to be preparing—for what?

  In the afternoon, at a little after two, he returned once more to the sprawling grounds of the Pan-American Exposition, with Ben not far behind. Presently he joined a line waiting outside the Temple of Music, standing patiently beneath the sculptured heads of composers which looked down upon the scene.

  Ben stood a little apart, watching, and presently he asked a passing policeman, “What’s the line for?”

  “Shake hands with the President. Four o’clock. Better get your place.”

  “Thanks.” Ben watched the line with a puzzled frown and began to roll a cigarette. Somehow Czolgosz hadn’t seemed the type to stand under the hot sun waiting to shake the President’s hand. Then, as his eyes scanned the crowd, he picked out Kidd, lounging casually near the cooling Fountain of Abundance. Both of them, here together!

  At four o’clock the lofty doors of the Temple of Music swung open, and the Presidential reception had begun. The line of waiting public moved between a double row of police and soldiers, toward the President in his black frock coat and white vest A few men, apparently Secret Service agents, stood by him. It was hot under the hundred-and-eighty-foot dome of the place, and a number of people were wiping the sweat away with their handkerchiefs.

  Ben watched it all from the doorway. He watched Kidd, casual in the heat, watched Czolgosz produce a bulky handkerchief from his pocket, watched a man with a bandaged hand now greetin
g the President.

  And then he saw it.

  Czolgosz was not using his handkerchief to wipe away the sweat—he was holding it against his body, as if his hand too were bandaged. But there was nothing wrong with Leon Czolgosz’s hand!

  Nothing wrong. Something wrong. Everything wrong!

  Czolgosz was in front of President McKinley now, being urged alonggently by one of the guards. Ben’s hand dropped to the Derringer in his pocket. Only seconds. God, seconds . . .

  Czolgosz fired twice through the handkerchief.

  McKinley shivered, straightened in astonishment, and began to fall, falling as soldiers and guards flung themselves upon the assassin and clubbed him to the floor, his handkerchief ablaze from the powder, fists and rifles beating at him. “Be easy with him, boys!” McKinley called, bloody from the stomach but alive.

  “I done my duty,” Czolgosz muttered as they dragged him away still beating him, slapping him, punching him.

  Ben watched it all with a sort of disbelief chilling his spine. When he looked around for Kidd he was gone, into the madness of humanity that surged and screamed and scrambled on all sides. What was there to do now? What was there to do, now that he knew the thing Claude Musset had died knowing . . . ?

  A President does not die unnoticed in America, and though it took McKinley eight days to breathe his last, the shock waves had already gone out across the nation. Czolgosz admitted under the third degree that he was an Anarchist, though he constantly refused to implicate others in the plot. But the very word Anarchist was enough to inflame the countryside. Arrests were made from New York to New Mexico, and in Wyoming a Czolgosz sympathizer was tarred and feathered. In New York, Plenty’s Weekly rushed a special edition through the presses while the police were still trying to get the facts from Czolgosz, and thundered editorially: “A two-bit Anarchist with a four-fifty pistol has plunged the nation into turmoil, and as President McKinley lies between life and death in a Buffalo home, the eyes of America are on Theodore Roosevelt, who might at any moment become the youngest man ever to serve as President of these United States.”

  After days of questioning, Czolgosz admitted his connections with Emma Goldman, though he denied she’d had a hand in the crime. A warrant was issued for her arrest in St. Louis, but she fled the city before it could be served, fearing harsh treatment by the police there. She finally surrendered a few days later to Chicago police, but she fared no better with them. One officer punched her in the face, and she must have learned that the third degree was much the same in every city. Back in Rochester, meanwhile, her father was being excommunicated from his synagogue.

  And in Buffalo, Ben Snow read all the papers, listened to all the talk, and waited. William and Sadie Kidd hadn’t quite made it out of the city in time. They’d been picked up for questioning and held by the police for several days, though it seemed certain they’d be released soon unless Czolgosz broke down and told everything. At first the police had confidently asserted that others were involved in the assassination plot, but as the September days drifted on and Czolgosz maintained his silence, it seemed more and more likely to Ben that these others would escape. He thought about the shadowy man in the alley, with his flashing diamond ring, and wondered if they would ever meet.

  McKinley died on September 14th, and Theodore Roosevelt became President. Two days later, on Monday, the Buffalo police released Kidd and his wife for lack of evidence. Ben followed them to the hotel while they packed, with a sense of impending doom building up within him. They were going, the police could not hold them, he could not hold them. If he went to the police with his story, what would it prove? Could he even connect the assassination with the murder of Musset a week earlier? With every tick of the clock Kidd was walking out of the scene, out of Ben’s life.

  And if he was Billy the Kid?

  There was one thing, one way of knowing. One thing that had haunted Ben down all these years. They’d thought he was Billy because of his fast draw.

  Billy had been the fastest gun in New Mexico back twenty years earlier. He’d still be fast—faster than Ben maybe—but it would be a way of knowing. If Ben could get him to draw, then nick him in the shoulder or elbow, he might have the admission he needed. And if Billy couldn’t swing for McKinley’s assassination, there were still those twenty-one killings waiting back in New Mexico.

  Ben followed them through the dark streets at a narrowing distance, seeing only a short man with a suitcase, a woman with a hatbox. He waited until their passage to the station took them along a deserted areaway, where there was no one to disturb what would happen. The doubts were still in his mind, the uncertainties, the hesitations, but he realized it was now or never. He must act or Claude Musset would have died for nothing.

  “Billy!” he shouted from fifty feet away.

  They turned, startled, and in the flickering of the single gas streetlight Sadie recognized him. “That’s him! That’s the guy was asking me the questions!”

  A little closer, so the Derringer could cover the gap. A little closer, but not too close . . . “I’ve followed you across the country, Billy. Draw!”

  “What the hell . . . ?”

  “Draw! ”

  . . . Aim for the shoulder . . . or the elbow . . . fast, as soon as his hand comes out with the gun . . . as soon as . . .

  Ben saw it coming, almost faster than the eye could follow, and felt the hairline of pain as the blade sliced through his shirt. The Derringer roared in reply, true—too true—to its mark. The shock of the knife, instead of the expected pistol, had made his brain reject the carefully planned shot, and the habit of a lifetime had asserted itself. Kidd staggered once, then fell on his face, his hand already groping for a second knife.

  “You’ve killed him!” Sadie screamed. “He’s dead!”

  Ben walked up slowly, wiping the blood and pain from his side. “I’m sorry. I only meant to wound him.” How many times had he spoken those words before, if only in his heart? The eternal lament of the gunfighter. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few bills. “Take this. Get out of town, Sadie . . .”

  But she only kept on screaming to the lonely street, and he realized with a sort of shock that she’d really loved this man crumpled now at her feet. He turned, sadly, and walked away fast—and though he remembered now the knife in Claude Musset’s chest it somehow didn’t help. Kidd, whoever he was, had paid for his crimes, whatever they’d been.

  Away from there, away from the screaming woman and the dead man, he paused out of breath and tried to collect his thoughts. There was still one person who could tell him what he wanted to hear, one man who might know the true identity of William Kidd. The man in the alley . . .

  The offices of Plenty’s Weekly occupied the entire ninth floor of a thin building in lower Manhattan. New York, everything about it, was unbelievable to Ben and so he simply ignored it. He had one goal in coming to the city, and when he’d risen in the ornate open grillwork elevator and waited the proper length of time he finally found himself face to face with the legend itself.

  Arthur Plenty leaned back in his oversized chair and gestured toward the pitcher of beer on his desk. “Help yourself, kind sir. No one can survive New York summers without lots of beer— plenty of beer, you might even say! Ha, ha, ha!”

  “Thank you,” Ben said quietly.

  “And what was your business again? Busy, you know. Getting out aweekly is busy business. Ha!”

  “I read your special edition on McKinley’s assassination.”

  “Horrible thing, horrible! I only pray this man Roosevelt can hold the nation together.” He poured himself a beer and scooped the sweat from his beefy face.

  Ben Snow smiled thinly. “I was surprised at your concern, since you had criticized McKinley so often in the past. And you even ran an article on assassinations a while back . . .”