Disquiet Heart Page 17

  “A lucky coincidence on your part.”

  “I bet the Gazette would pay five.” I made as if to reach for the papers on his desk.

  He clamped a hand atop them. Holding them in place, he used his other hand to slide open a drawer, reached in, plucked out a half eagle and flipped it through the air to me.

  I caught it, grinning. “Ten dollars a week then?”

  “Eight-fifty!” he roared. I was shocked to hear him capable of such vehemence.

  Then quickly he returned to his lifeless monotone. “Freak accidents, lucky coincidences, special kinds of mutilations, anything like that and you get a bonus. Track down those missing girls and you get a bonus. But your regular pay is eight-fifty. Take it or leave it.”

  I believed at the time that I would have no trouble finding an abundance of bonus material. Not only because humanity itself overflows with it, but because I, it was beginning to appear, had been born to the macabre. Like Poe, I was a magnet for the grisly.

  I believed, naively, that if I kept my eyes wide open I would be able to see carnage swirling all around me, while I, serenely observant in the eye of the storm, remained unscathed. Little did I realize then that these are the necessary illusions of youth—invulnerability, self-determination, control over one’s own destiny—necessary lest we scurry like mice to the nearest cave, there to cower in impotent fear. Little did I realize that no one escapes the tornado of life unscathed. Even in its quietest moments the winds of that storm continue to rage, turning every object in existence into a projectile, a missile, so that even the most unlikely of them, even an airborne broom straw, can puncture an innocent’s heart.

  18

  I SAW little of Poe and Brunrichter over the next few days. The first assignment I gave myself was the very one Mr. Lovesey had disparaged—to interview the families of the missing girls. None was eager to speak with me, a mere writer with no authority, and on more than one occasion I was looked upon with contempt, my questions responded to with anger. At times it seemed I had presented myself to these families as a whipping boy, for upon me they vented their frustration with the police, demanding to know why nothing had yet been done, why those goddamn watchmen couldn’t get themselves organized and do a better job of it. Nobody cared about their girls, they said. Nobody gave a damn. But just let some councilman’s daughter go missing and then let’s see how fast the watchmen scrambled.

  Through it all I managed to piece together a bit of information. Two of the girls had been waylaid while returning from the homes of acquaintances, one coming home from a visit with a cousin, one after fetching a bucket of beer for her parents, one after delivering a bundle of knitting, another after cleaning a church. The first girl to go missing had simply gone for a walk after arguing with her mother about the color of a bolt of cloth they intended to buy for dresses.

  All had disappeared from some street or alleyway below the aqueduct. This placed all of them within a twenty-minute stroll from Vernon’s bank on Liberty. His residence, I could only assume, would be nearby. It also placed them within a twenty-minute stroll from most of Pittsburgh, but this was a fact I chose to ignore. I hoped somehow to link all the girls to Vernon because I disliked the man, had disliked him from the first moment I had heard him speak at Brunrichter’s picnic. He had on that occasion displayed the arrogance and despotic nature of a well-to-do bachelor, used to satisfying his own selfish needs and no others, and I would have been thrilled to discover that the families of all seven girls did their banking with Vernon, thereby providing him the opportunity to know the girls at least by sight and name, enough to excite his nefarious urges. Unfortunately, only two of the families used any bank at all, and only one of those used Vernon’s.

  In the end, after exhausting the patience of every family member who would speak to me, I learned little of consequence. By all appearances, each young woman seemed the victim of a random kidnapping, of some madman who prowled the streets in search of an occasion to strike. My questions accomplished little more than to drive the grieving families even deeper into their grief.

  And so, after my first day as an honest newspaperman, I was left with no option but the one employed by the police themselves, which was to sit back and wait for a bit of usable evidence to appear, to eventually float to the surface like a drowned horse. As a slightly dishonest newspaperman, however, another option remained.

  Next day, a few minutes before the noon hour, I stationed myself within view of the front doorway of Vernon’s bank. I hoped that he would return home for his midday meal, thereby leading me to his place of residence. I would then scrutinize the building, assess the number of servants employed therein, and determine how best to use those privateering skills of stealth and sneakery acquired as a gutter rat in Manhattan. I was a much bigger rat now, not so light on my feet as I had been at ten years old, but I did not doubt my ability to gain entrance to any edifice in Pittsburgh. In fact the prospect of a bit of brigandage—all in the service of journalism and truth, of course—thrilled me more than just a little.

  As luck would have it, Vernon did not return home at noon but dined instead at a small tavern a block north of the bank. I was forced to return to the bank later that evening, at the business’s closing hour, in hopes of finally following Vernon home. But instead he returned to the tavern. And there spent the next two hours swilling lager. I admit to having a mug or two myself while hidden behind a beam across the room from him.

  He was a man of huge appetites, both in beer and in victuals. And, even more telling, in the way he gathered others around him, calling fellow businessmen to his table so as to fill their glasses from his own pitcher, regaling them with loud stories that grew even louder as the evening progressed, laying a hand on the arm or hip of every waiter girl to pass within reach, and, on two occasions, pulling one of them onto his lap.

  The light outside was in its gloaming by the time he departed. Into the lavender dusk we went then, back past the bank with Vernon a dozen strides ahead of me. He kept a slow but fairly straight line and did not meander side to side, not drunk but thoroughly relaxed and sated.

  And finally to his house, just a block and a half beyond the bank. It was a solid two-story structure of yellow brick, with a small covered porch out front and a tiny yard boxed in by a low white fence. The house was completely dark, and no servant met him at the door.

  He unlocked the front door and stepped inside, turning to the right but remaining framed there in the open doorway. There must have been a small table there beside the door, for I watched him bend down and a moment later a glow erupted, a lucifer had been struck. He used it to light an oil lamp, adjusted the flame, filling the room with light. Then he closed the door.

  I moved closer, watching the movement of his lamp past the windows. Another lamp was lit, but it remained stationary while the first lamp disappeared toward the rear of the house.

  I checked quickly to see who might be watching me, saw no one looking in my direction, and sprinted forward, leapt his low fence, and made my way to the rear corner of the house. Soon the back door swung open and Vernon emerged. He came out into the yard and, singing to himself, crossed toward the privy.

  He went into the outhouse and shut the door. Yellow light shone through the vent holes shaped like a half moon and four stars. Vernon continued to sing in a low baritone.

  I looked at the house’s back door, standing open, a soft light coming from deep inside. I could stroll inside unnoticed if I wished, it would be as easy as that. But to what avail? At best I would have a few minutes to search the house, and surely the light from the oil lamp, as I carried it racing from room to room, would arouse somebody’s suspicion. Better to wait until daylight, I reasoned, when Vernon was at his bank. I could then search the place at my leisure. All in the service of journalism and truth, of course.

  NEXT MORNING, I did just that. At half past nine, by manipulating both ends of a piece of stiff wire, I persuaded the lock on Vernon’s rear door to snap open. I
stepped into a kitchen warm with morning light and still redolent of his breakfast coffee. The empty cup, along with a small pan, a bowl and spoon, all having been washed clean, sat drying on the enamel counter beside the sink basin. I guessed that he had breakfasted on coffee and oatmeal, and found it amusing that a man so gluttonous by night would be so miserly by morning.

  I also wondered why he employed no servants but kept his own house—not lavish by any standards, not even my own; in fact it was downright ascetic—when he could easily have afforded several. Was he merely a spendthrift? Or were there more execrable motives at play here?

  Into the front rooms then, a dining room and adjoining parlor, each furnished quite plainly with the barest minimum of pieces, nothing new, nothing bright or welcoming. And nothing, I observed with disappointment, conspicuously damning.

  Up the stairs I went, moving quietly, though I knew I was alone. Three of the bedrooms were empty, completely empty, the walls bare and the scarred wooden floors uncovered. Only the final bedroom gave evidence of habitation. And here, too, was evidence of Vernon’s other half, the self-indulgent side of a puzzling personality. A thick braided rug covered most of the floor. Two cherrywood dressers, one with a large mirror, and the bed with its wide feather mattress, covered the rest of the floor.

  But I merely glanced at these furnishings, scarcely took them in at all. I had not even crossed over the threshold and into the room before my breathing quickened and my heart began to race. For there on one side of the bed, laid out and smoothed like the skin of a radiant ghost, was a woman’s underdress, what I thought of then as a petticoat because at seventeen I had no names and little familiarity with women’s undergarments, especially with any so impractical as this, a pearly, brilliant and silky white, with lace across the bodice and over the slender shoulder straps, the fabric as delicate as any I had ever seen, the entire garment from the hem of the skirt to the turn at the top of the shoulder straps laid out and smoothed by Vernon’s hand so that not a single wrinkle creased it.

  I was trembling as I tiptoed forward. Perhaps I even giggled, I felt that giddy, that triumphant. Beside the bed I lowered myself to a knee and eased my face close to the bodice and sniffed. The faint scents of powder and lilac, dizzying, intoxicating. Yes, yes, a woman had worn this petticoat—a young woman, one of the missing women, yes!

  Unthinking, heedless of the consequences, overcome with what I thought of as my victory, I stood and snatched up the garment, my trophy. It felt almost slippery to the touch and weightless as a whisper as I crumbled it into a ball and crammed it inside my shirt, so cool against my skin. Only when I was several blocks away from the house, making my way toward Ridge Avenue and the safety of my own room at Brunrichter’s place, did I feel the idiotic grin slipping from my mouth, feel the corners of my lips turning down as if something heavy in the city below was yet attached to me there, pulling like fishhooks.

  REGRET BALLOONED in me. What had I been thinking? Truth was, I hadn’t been thinking at all, else I would not have touched that underdress. What good would it do in my hands? I could not show it to anyone, could not turn it over to the police, could not trot it out before each of the grieving families to ask, Was this your daughter’s? Any of those actions would prompt the question, And how did you come to possess it, Mr. Dobson?

  My career in Pittsburgh would be over before it got started. Not a soul would trust me were the news to get out that James Dobson, budding journalist, was also a sneak thief, a burglar, a looter of women’s unmentionables. And if none of the families could identify the underdress—and on second glance the silky garment struck me as something more befitting a banker’s paramour than a merchant’s or day laborer’s daughter—what then? Word might spread that I was trotting around town with a woman’s undergarment in hand. Word might spread to Vernon himself, and he would speak discreetly to the watchmen employed in his bank, he would have me beaten, arrested, perhaps even worse. He might do as little as to spread a rumor, in fact not a rumor at all but the truth so subtly nuanced toward the salacious, that I had gone to the trouble of breaking into his house only to steal no money, no silver candlesticks, nothing but an airy underdress left behind by one of his intimate acquaintances.

  I would be made a laughingstock. Ruined not only in Pittsburgh but as far and wide as the story might carry. And worst of all, far worse than all that, Susan’s eyes would be opened to the blackguard at the heart of me, and she would turn her back on me forever.

  A half-dozen explanations came to me then as to why a silky underdress might be laid out across a bachelor’s bed. Among the more credible ones: It lay there awaiting his mistress, whether another man’s wife or simply a progressive young woman such as Lydia Cavin, who visited Vernon on occasion and could not risk carrying her lingerie to and fro; or it lay there as a memento of an earlier tryst, or as last vestige of a lost love who had spurned him; or it lay there as an incentive to a lonely man’s self-pleasure; or, finally, the one I preferred, if only because I was feeling so mean-spirited and low suddenly, it lay there because it was Vernon’s own nightwear, the wardrobe of a secret midnight life.

  Had I searched Vernon’s bedroom more carefully I might have found evidence to validate any one of those possibilities. But no, I had been too impetuous for that. Stupid, stupid man.

  The garment was worthless to me. It proved nothing—nothing but my own foolishness. Come evening Vernon would return home to discover the underdress missing; for a few moments he would go dizzy with confusion and fear—had he mislaid it? Where could it be? He would search everywhere, in every unlighted crook and corner of the house, in a panic that his secret, whatever it was, had been discovered. And in the end he would arrive at the only conclusion possible: the garment had been stolen. His house, his privacy, his secret life had been violated.

  Would he suspect me? There was no reason to do so. Yet my guilt made me itchy with nervousness. I crammed the underdress into the bottom of my battered valise and vowed that, when next I found myself alone in the house, I must turn it to ashes in Mrs. Dalrymple’s stove.

  19

  FOR THE rest of that day and the ones to follow, my daylight hours were engaged in strolling the city in pursuit of other stories, an activity that helped to distract me from the voice that kept reiterating what a fool I had been. From the docks to beyond the city limits and back again I walked, trudged, hopped rides on wagons, a peripatetic scavenger of mischief and mayhem, of stories to tell. My face soon became a familiar one atop Grant’s Hill, where I routinely visited Chislett’s magnificent courthouse and the adjacent jail, nicknamed Mount Airy. After the hanging piece came out, the personnel of those two buildings took to greeting me by name. Or, rather, by pseudonym.

  “Mornin’, Mr. Dobson.”

  “Here about that stabbin’, Mr. Dobson?”

  “Wagon rolled over down on Findley, Mr. Dobson. Broke a woman’s back, it did. Leastways that’s the story her husband’s tellin’. And wasn’t he lucky to come out of it with nary a scratch!”

  In short, because the young Mr. Dobson had kept a cool head when another man lost his (in decapitation by hanging), the world of journalism opened wide its arms to him. People everywhere were eager to share their tales with me (especially if the telling of them painted the speaker in a pure light and tainted others by contrast). And I, like all ambitious men, was eager—no, make that desperate—desperate to have a name that commanded respect, even if the name had to be invented. Especially desperate now that the scoundrel Augie Dubbins had momentarily taken over while in the banker’s bedchamber, and in the action of a few seconds had shown the damage he could do to both Dobson and himself.

  I did my best to put the episode out of my mind. Though I would keep my eyes and ears open for any talk about the missing girls, I would do far better, for a while at least, to tend to other business.

  WHEN ON occasion I did return to Brunrichter’s estate, typically in the evening hours after a supper with Susan and Buck, I usually found Po
e and Brunrichter in the library, ensconced in smoking robes and slippers, enjoying their brandy and pipes. (Previous to this Brunrichter had favored the cigar, but he switched to pipe smoking because Poe preferred the meerschaum.)

  Neither man ever broached the subject of my hanging story. Nor did either of them question my comings and goings, save for the one time when, early in the week, as I crept past the library doorway and toward the stairs, hoping to avoid further human interaction for the day so as to savor alone a recollection of my time in Susan’s gaze, the doctor called to invite me in for a cognac. Only when I stepped to the threshold did I see that Brother Jarvis was also seated inside.

  “Thank you,” I said, “but I believe I will retire, if you gentlemen don’t mind.”

  Poe looked especially mellow that night. His eyes were calm, gaze peaceful, mouth relaxed. His face over the past few days had gradually lost its gaunt expression, the features and lines softening. I was gladdened to note that, though he drank with Brunrichter most every night, not once had he displayed a tendency toward any of the unpredictable or aggressive behavior that alcohol previously had provoked in him.

  He asked, his voice slow and thick, “Are you finding sufficient interests to keep you occupied, Augie?”

  “I’m doing newspaper work now,” I told him, in part to see how he might react to the notion.

  My news made no impression on him. He nodded and smiled, already staring at the fire. A moment later he looked up at me again and asked, “Hmmm?,” but I said nothing more, and his gaze soon lost its focus, and he turned away, his head lolling drowsily, and smiled at his host.

  I found this brief exchange unsettling. Had his affection for me, his concern, his interest in my welfare been abandoned altogether? Where was his curiosity, his penetrating questions? Had we grown so distant that he no longer cared?