The Angel of Darkness Read online

  “Not a chance,” I answered. “Down at the Institute. Gotta be out by tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes, I know.” Miss Howard bent her head in heartfelt sympathy and sorrow. “He must be crushed,” she added quietly.

  “That and more. Almost as bad as—well, you know.”

  “Yes …” The green eyes turned toward the park with a faraway look in them, and then she shook herself hard. “Well, with the Doctor away, you and Cyrus will be free to give me a hand. If you’re willing.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Mr. Moore’s apartments,” she said, doing her hair back into its usual bun. “He’s not answering his doorbell. Or his telephone.”

  “Probably not home, then. You know Mr. Moore—you should get over to the Tenderloin, check the gaming houses. His grandmother’s only been dead six months, he can’t have lost all his inheritance yet.”

  Miss Howard shook her head. “The man at the door to his building says that John came in over an hour ago. With a young lady. They haven’t left again.” A small, mischievous smile came into her face. “He’s home, all right, he just doesn’t want any interruptions. You, however, are going to get us in.”

  For the briefest moment I thought of the Doctor, of how he’d been trying hard to discourage me from my lifelong tendency to get into the kind of goings-on what Miss Howard was currently suggesting; but, like I say, my moment of consideration was brief. “Cyrus just came in,” I said, returning her smile. “He’ll be game—this house’s been like a morgue, these days. We could use a little fun.”

  Her smile grew into a grin. “Good! I knew I had the right man for the job, Stevie.”

  I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, crawling back inside the room. “You just had the wrong shoes.”

  Miss Howard laughed once more and took a swipe at me as we headed in to rouse Cyrus.

  I hadn’t been wrong in thinking that, after a year of things going badly in the Seventeenth Street house, Cyrus would be ready for something that might break the routine. In a matter of seconds he was back in his light tweed suit, starched shirt, and tie, and as we headed down to the front door he pulled his favorite old bowler onto his head. The pair of us listened as Miss Howard explained that it was urgent we get Mr. Moore to Number 808 Broadway, where a lady in great distress was waiting for her return. The matter, Miss Howard declared, had “not only criminal but quite possibly international implications.” More than that she didn’t want to tell us just yet, and more than that neither me nor Cyrus needed to know—what we wanted was a bit of action, and we both knew from personal experience that, given our guide, we were likely to get it. Lengthy explanations could wait. We fairly shot through the foyer and out into the iron-fenced front yard, Cyrus—ever the careful one—pausing just long enough to make sure the house was securely locked up before we made our way down the small path to the gate, started west on the sidewalk of Seventeenth Street, then turned north on Third Avenue.

  There was no point in either getting the horses and barouche back out of the small carriage house next door or wasting time trying to hail a cab, as it wasn’t but four and a half blocks’ walk to Number 34 Gramercy Park, where Mr. Moore had taken apartments at the beginning of the year after his grandmother’s death. As we moved from one circle of arc light to another under the street-lamps that ran up Third, passing by simple three- and four-story buildings and under the occasional sidewalk-wide awning of a grocery or vegetable stand, Miss Howard locked her arms into Cyrus’s right and my left and began to comment on the little bits of night activity that we saw along the way, plainly trying to control her excitement by talking of nothing in particular. Cyrus and I said little in reply, and before we knew it we’d turned onto Twentieth Street and reached the brownstone mass of Number 34 Gramercy Park, the square bay and turret windows of a few of its apartments still aglow with gas and electric light. It was one of the oldest apartment houses in the city, and also one of the first of the kind they called “cooperative,” meaning that all the tenants shared ownership. After his grandmother’s sudden death, Mr. Moore’d given some thought to moving into one of the fashionable apartment houses uptown, the Dakota or such, but in the end I don’t think he could face moving so far away from the neighborhoods of his youth. Having lost the second of the only two members of his family he’d ever been close to (the other, his brother, had fallen off a boat after jabbing himself full of morphine and drinking himself senseless many years earlier), Mr. Moore had tried hard to keep ownership of his grandmother’s house on Washington Square, but her will had stated that the place had to be sold and the proceeds divided up among her squabbling blue-blood heirs. Being suddenly and completely on his own in such a deep way was confusing enough for Mr. Moore without venturing into unknown neighborhoods: in the end, he came back to Gramercy Park, to the area where he’d grown up and where he’d learned his first lessons about the seamier side of life while slumming as a teenager over in the Gashouse District to the east.

  As we started up the steps to the brown marble columns that surrounded the stained glass of the building’s entrance, I kept a sharp eye on the shadowy stretch of trees, hedges, and pathways—two blocks wide, one block long—that was Gramercy Park behind us. Oh, it was surrounded by wealthy houses and private clubs like the Players, sure enough, and was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence some six or seven feet high, to boot; but any Gashouse tough worth his salt could’ve made short work of that fence and used the park as a hiding place from which to jump unsuspecting passers-by. It wasn’t until I saw a cop walking his beat that I felt all right about turning away from that dark mass and joining Cyrus and Miss Howard at the door.

  It was locked up tight at that hour, but there was a small electrical button set in the frame. Miss Howard put a finger to it, and then we heard a bell ring somewhere inside. Soon I could make out a small form moving slowly our way behind the stained glass, and in another few seconds we were faced by an old gent in a striped vest and black pants who looked like somebody should’ve buried him about ten years back. His wrinkled face turned sour at the sight of us.

  “Really, Miss Howard, this is most irregular,” he grumbled in a hoarse, wheezing voice. “Most irregular. If Mr. Moore does not answer his bell, then I’m certain—”

  “It’s all right, Stevenson,” Miss Howard answered, cool as ice. “I’ve reached Mr. Moore by telephone, and he’s told my friends and me to come up. Apparently there’s some problem with the bell. He’s told me where he’s hidden his spare key, in the event it happens again.”

  The old corpse took a long, snooty look at Cyrus and me. “Has he, indeed?” he mumbled. “Well, I’m sure I won’t be held responsible if there’s anything untoward about this. Most irregular, but …”He turned toward the elevator door behind him. “You’d better come on, then.”

  We followed the man as he pulled open first the outer wooden door and then the inner metal grate of the plush elevator. Taking a seat on the little cubicle’s velvet-pillowed bench just to tick the old doorman off (successfully), I studied the polished mahogany and brass around me, wondering what poor soul had to spend half his life keeping it in that shape. If it was the old man in front of us, I allowed as he had good reason for his cantankerousness. Closing the grate and then the door again, the man put on a pair of worn, stained leather gloves and then gave a hard tug on the elevator’s greased cable—which came up through the floor and ran on through the ceiling in one corner—to set the thing into motion. We began a gentle glide up to the fifth floor, where Mr. Moore occupied the apartments that faced the park on the building’s north side.

  When the grate and door clattered open again, Cyrus and I followed Miss Howard down a beige-painted hall that was interrupted at various points by still more polished wood doors. Arriving at Mr. Moore’s, Miss Howard knocked and then made like she was waiting for Mr. Moore to open up. Turning to the doorman, who was continuing to watch us carefully, she said, “It’s late, Stevenson. We mustn’t keep you up.”

  The
doorman nodded reluctantly, closed the elevator up again, and headed back down.

  As soon as he was gone, Miss Howard put an ear to the door, then looked at me with those green eyes dancing. “All right, Stevie,” she whispered. “You’re on.”

  Reformed as I may have become since moving in with Dr. Kreizler two years earlier, I still carried some of the tools of my old trade with me, as they could, on occasion, come in handy. Among these was my little set of picks, with which I proceeded to make short work of the fairly simple tumblers inside the lock in Mr. Moore’s door. With a gentle little click the door popped ajar, and Miss Howard beamed with delight.

  “You really have got to teach me that,” she murmured, patting my back silently and pushing the door farther open. “Now, then—here we go.”

  Mr. Moore had decorated his apartments with as much of his grandmother’s furniture as his family would let him get away with, as well as with some fine English country pieces what Dr. Kreizler had helped him select. So the place had a kind of split character about it, feeling in some spots like an old lady’s house and in others like a rugged bachelor flat. There were some seven rooms in all, arranged in a kind of crazy order that wouldn’t have made much sense in a regular house. In a stealthy little file we made our way down the darkened main hall, being careful to stay on the runner carpet all the while, and as we did we began to come across various articles of men’s and women’s clothing. Miss Howard frowned when she saw all this, and her frown only got deeper when, as we got close to the bedroom door, we began to hear giggling and laughter coming from inside. Drawing up in front of the door, Miss Howard balled one hand into a fist and made ready to give it a good rap—but then the door suddenly opened, and out popped a woman.

  And this was, I can say now with even more appreciation than I could then, a woman. With long golden hair that hung down to her waist and robed in only a coverlet that she clasped with one hand at her side, she had a set of stems on her what started in a pair of slender ankles and didn’t seem to end till somewhere up around the ceiling—and the ceilings in that building were high, mind you. She was still giggling as she came out, and we could hear Mr. Moore inside the room, pleading with her to come back.

  “I will, John, I will,” the woman said melodiously through rich red lips. “But you must give me a moment.” She closed the door again, turned toward the bathroom what was situated down at the end of the hall—and then caught sight of us.

  She didn’t say anything, just gave us a sort of puzzled little smile. Miss Howard smiled back, though I could see it was a struggle for her, and then held one finger to her lips, urging the woman to be quiet. The woman aped the same gesture, giggled once more—she was obviously drunk—and then continued, without any further word of explanation from or to us, on her way to the bathroom. At that Miss Howard smiled much more genuinely—not to mention a little wickedly—and opened the bedroom door.

  The dim light from the hall didn’t let us see much more than a jumbled mass of sheets on a very large bed, though it was clear there was a person under the mass. Cyrus and I stayed by the door, but Miss Howard just strode right on up to the bedside, standing there like she was waiting for something. Pretty soon the mass under the sheets started to move, and then the top half of Mr. Moore’s naked body appeared, his short hair tousled, his handsome face a picture of happiness. His eyes were closed, and in a kind of childlike way he reached out and put his arms around Miss Howard’s waist. She didn’t look too happy about it, but she didn’t move, either; and then, feeling her dress, Mr. Moore mumbled:

  “No, no, Lily, you can’t get dressed, you can’t leave, this night can’t ever end …”

  That brought out the derringer. To this day I can’t tell you where it was that Miss Howard managed to keep it so that it was always out of sight yet always so available; but in a flash it was in front of Mr. Moore’s closed eyes and smiling face. The smile disappeared and the eyes popped open, however, when Miss Howard pulled back the hammer.

  “I think, John,” she said evenly, “that even through the sheets I could clip off both your testicles with one shot—so I advise you to unhand me.”

  Mr. Moore darted away from her with a shriek, then covered himself completely with the sheet like a kid who’d just been caught abusing himself.

  “Sara!” he shouted, half in fear and half in anger. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? And how the hell did you get in here?”

  “The front door,” Miss Howard answered simply, as the derringer disappeared into the folds of her dress again.

  “The front door?” Mr. Moore bellowed. “But the front door’s locked, I’m sure I—” Looking to the doorway, Mr. Moore caught sight first of Cyrus and then of me—and that was all he needed to see. “Stevie! So!” Patting his hair down onto his head and trying to compose himself, Mr. Moore stood, still covered in his sheet, and drew up to the fullest height he could manage. “I would have thought, Taggert, that the bonds of male honor would have prevented you from playing a part in a scheme like this. And what have you done with Lily?”

  “She’s in the bathroom,” Miss Howard answered. “Didn’t seem at all disappointed to see us. You must be losing your touch, John.”

  Mr. Moore only frowned and looked to the doorway again. “I shall direct my comments to you, Cyrus. Knowing you to be a person of integrity, I can assume that there is some good reason for your being here.”

  Cyrus nodded, with the ever-so-slightly-patronizing smile that often came onto his face when he spoke to Mr. Moore. “Miss Howard says there is, sir,” he answered. “That’s good enough for me. You’d better ask her about it.”

  “And supposing I don’t wish to speak to her?” Mr. Moore grunted.

  “Then, sir, you’ll be a long time getting an explanation …”

  Faced with no other option, Mr. Moore paused, shrugged his shoulders, then plopped down onto the bed again. “All right, Sara. Tell me what’s so all-fired important that it’s got you breaking and entering. And for God’s sake, Stevie, give me a cigarette.”

  As I lit up a stick and handed it to Mr. Moore, Miss Howard moved around in front of him. “I have a case, John.”

  Mr. Moore let out a big, smoky sigh. “Splendid. Do you demand the front page, or will the inside of the paper do?”

  “No, John,” Miss Howard said earnestly. “I think this is real. I think it’s big.”

  Her tone took a good bit of the sarcasm out of Mr. Moore’s voice. “Well—what is it?”

  “A woman came to Number 808 this evening. Señora Isabella Linares. Ring a bell?”

  Mr. Moore rubbed his forehead hard. “No. Which gives her something in common with you. Come on, Sara, no games, who is she?”

  “Her husband,” Miss Howard answered, “is Señor Narciso Linares. Now, does that ring a bell?”

  Mr. Moore looked up slowly, intrigued in a way that clearly pleased Miss Howard. “Isn’t he … he holds some position in the Spanish consulate, doesn’t he?”

  “He is, in fact, private secretary to the Spanish consul.”

  “All right. So what’s his wife doing at Number 808?”

  Miss Howard began to pace around the room purposefully. “She has a fourteen-month-old daughter. Or had. The child was kidnapped. Three days ago.”

  Mr. Moore’s face turned skeptical. “Sara. We are talking about the daughter of the private secretary of the consul of the Empire of Spain in the City of New York. The same Empire of Spain that Mr. William Randolph Hearst, our friend in the Navy Department”—by which he meant Mr. Roosevelt—“certain of my bosses, some of the business leaders, and much of the populace of this country have been openly insulting and trying to goad into war for years now. Do you honestly think that if such a child were to be kidnapped in New York, said Empire of Spain would not make the most of the chance to cry foul and declare the barbarity of its American critics? Wars have been fought and avoided over less, you know.”

  “That’s just the point, John.” As Miss Howa
rd went on, both Cyrus and I drew closer, now very interested in what she was saying and not wanting to miss a trick. “You would think that the Spanish officials would react that way, wouldn’t you? But not at all. Señora Linares claims that the kidnapping occurred when she was walking alone with the baby in Central Park one evening. She couldn’t see the abductor—he came from behind and hit her on the head with something. But when she went home to tell her husband what had happened, he reacted strangely—bizarrely. He showed little concern for his wife, and less for his daughter. He told her that she must tell no one what had happened—they would wait for a ransom note, and if none came, it would mean that the child had been taken by a lunatic and killed.”

  Mr. Moore shrugged. “Such things do happen, Sara.”

  “But he didn’t even try going to the police! A full day passed, no ransom note came, and finally Señora Linares declared that if her husband wouldn’t go to the authorities, she would.” Miss Howard paused, wringing her hands a bit. “He beat her, John. Savagely. You should see her—in fact, you’re going to see her. She didn’t know what to do—her husband said he’d do worse if she ever talked of going to the police again. Finally, she confided in a friend of hers at the French consulate, a woman I helped out with some minor marital rubbish a few months ago. The Frenchwoman told her about me. The señora’s waiting for us. You’ve got to come and talk to her—”

  “Wait, wait, wait, now,” Mr. Moore answered, holding up his cigarette and trying to salvage his night of pleasure. “You’re forgetting a few things here. In the first place, these people are diplomatic officials. The laws are different. I don’t know exactly what they are in a case like this, but they’re different. Second, if this Linares character doesn’t want to pursue it, then who are we to—”