The Gilded Hour
Page 115

“Oh, the glory,” Oscar said, and tucked a fresh cigar, whole and unblemished, into the corner of his mouth.
•   •   •
IN THE EARLY afternoon they went first to the Avalon, the most luxurious and expensive hotel on Fifth Avenue. Jack thought they might be overshooting—the dead woman had not been dripping with jewels, after all—but Oscar loved the Avalon almost as much as he disliked the Avalon’s general manager, and he took any opportunity to visit the former and irritate the latter.
The closest Jack could get to an understanding was the fact that Oscar had grown up in the same Lower East Side tenement with Thomas Roth, who had clearly worked his way up and out. Oscar’s lodgings were evidence that he didn’t put much value on material possessions, but at the same time he resented Thomas Roth for having them. Now he pulled the concierge aside, flashed his badge, and insisted on an immediate meeting with Mr. Roth. They would be waiting in the lobby.
The carpets underfoot were Persian, the deep chairs and sofas of the softest leather, the mahogany tables inlaid with rosewood and pearl, spittoons of hammered copper with carved marble feet, porcelain vases three feet high, chiseled mirrors in carved and gilded frames. As a Christmas present Jack had brought his sisters here for tea on a particularly miserable December afternoon. He had never seen them more enchanted with anything than they were with the Avalon dining room: silver coffee urns, hand-painted china, pristine linen, perfect sandwiches and petit fours, and waiters as straight and exacting as soldiers.
Oscar deposited himself in a deep club chair and sighed, content.
The fuss made Jack antsy. He said, “I’m going to check in.” If not for the perfect ring of smoke floating toward the ceiling, Jack might have thought Oscar had fallen asleep. Jack went back out onto the street and the call box on the corner. He was back not ten minutes later, just in time to see the general manager approaching. Thomas Roth was stalking toward them like a man on a suicide mission.
Jack picked up his pace to intercept and called out: “Oscar. Word from the Gilsey House at headquarters, they’ve got a missing guest who may be our Jane Doe. Jimmy Breslin is waiting for us.”
Oscar waved an arm in the air as he sauntered away. “Never mind, Roth. I’ll be back to deal with you another day.”
•   •   •
THE GILSEY HOUSE general manager was an old friend, the brother of Jack’s first partner when he walked a beat.
“Jimmy,” Jack said with real pleasure. “The last time I saw you was on the handball court, what, six months ago. You beat me soundly, if I remember correctly.”
“Sure I did,” Breslin said. “Right after you beat me twice in a row. I’ll be back there someday soon to try my luck again.”
“We hear you’ve misplaced one of your guests,” Oscar said.
For a split second Jack thought Jimmy might take offense, which meant that he was on edge, which meant there really was something to talk about and in fact, he didn’t waste words.
“We had a lady check in last Tuesday, someone we see now and then with her husband, but this time she was alone. She said she was waiting for her sister to join her, but no sister ever showed up.”
Jack took out his notebook and let Oscar lead with the questions. Now and then he glanced up to gauge the look on Breslin’s face, and saw nothing more than the professional demeanor of the general manager of one of Manhattan’s most exclusive hotels. The guest—he identified the missing woman as Abigail Liljeström, the wife of a Buffalo industrialist—had gone out early on Wednesday and asked that no one disturb her room until she specifically requested service. She hadn’t been seen in the dining hall or any other part of the hotel since.
“So that’s five days that nobody’s seen her,” Oscar clarified.
Jimmy nodded. “This morning the matron came to mention it to me, with a copy of the newspaper article—” He dug it out of his pocket to show them. “That’s when I called it in.”
“The matron recognized the description in the article as Abigail Liljeström?”
“She did. So I came up here to see. There’s no sign of trouble but she hasn’t been here for days.”
Jack thought for a moment. “We’ll need to talk to the matron and to any of the maids who dealt with Mrs. Liljeström directly. The desk clerks too. We’ll want one or two of them to come to the morgue to identify the body.”
“Should I send a telegram to her family?”
“We’ll do that,” Jack said. “But not until we’re sure what we have.”
•   •   •
JACK STAYED BEHIND to go through the room while Oscar took two maids and the matron to the morgue. It wasn’t something Jack especially liked doing, but he had a knack for the work, a way of piecing things together that he often didn’t understand himself.
He went through the clothes hanging in the wardrobe: day dresses, carriage and walking dresses, a robe, a nightdress, a pelisse all in silks and velvets and fine wools. He checked the pocketbooks and came up with an unaddressed envelope, a few coins, a handkerchief, but no identification. The clothes were very fine, but it was the shoes that made him pause. They were custom made for someone with very small feet, leather dyed purple or green or red, some with mother-of-pearl buckles, others with silk flowers. There were three hatboxes, and a trunk with fitted drawers for handkerchiefs, stockings, garters, ribbons, and undergarments. It occurred to him that one of the maids must have helped her lace her stays, but none of the three they had interviewed mentioned that particular service.
There were a few books on the bedside table along with framed photos: an older couple, a balding man of thirty-five or forty who was probably the industrialist husband, and two children, a boy and a girl. Well fed, overdressed, looking solemnly into the camera.
He found nothing in the drawers of the desk or dresser and finished quickly, skipped the elevator and ran down six flights to talk to the desk clerk. Thinking to himself that the industrialist had gone wrong somewhere, to have let it come to this.
32
THE SISTERS OF Charity did not tolerate idleness. Thinking back, Elise couldn’t ever remember having nothing to do; in the convent the novitiates scrubbed floors, peeled potatoes, carried slop buckets; later there was work in the infirmaries, learning how to clean and bind wounds, dispense medications, handle sick children. If she hadn’t shown an affinity for the infirmary she might have ended up in the laundry, starching and ironing habits. The idea could still make her shudder.
She had never known what it was to be idle, but now with her third full day as Nurse Mercier at the New Amsterdam, she really understood what it meant to be busy. The children she had cared for at the orphanage had come into the infirmary with colds, infected scrapes, sore ears, lice, rickets, upset stomachs. Children with scarlet fever or broken bones or needing surgery had been transferred to St. Vincent’s, where doctors took over. She rarely learned what had happened, and asking was discouraged.
At the New Amsterdam she had already assisted in the setting of a broken ankle; she had debrided and dressed lacerations and burns, recorded temperatures and pulse rates, sterilized surgical instruments, the variety of which was astounding. She gave shots and enemas and emptied her share of bedpans. She learned the names of instruments: bistouries, tenotomes, tenacula, curved and straight scalpels, forceps and bougies and probes. Twice already she had been allowed to assist the circulating nurse during surgeries: one to correct an umbilical hernia, and another to remove a tumor of the breast. Which reminded her, of course, of Sister Xavier, who had been her patient the first time she had come to the New Amsterdam.
She wondered if she would ever miss Sister Xavier the way she missed some of the others, and decided that it was unlikely. In fact every time she asked a question—and she took every opportunity to do just that—she thought of Sister Xavier’s scowl and she had to suppress a grin.
The freedom to ask questions was the best thing of all, better than the kind generosity on Waverly Place, better than the bed overrun by pillows, better than the simple uniform that let her move unrestricted, and the freedom from the bonnet she had never learned to like. She was careful not to overtax people; she portioned out questions, watching for signs of irritation or distraction, and withdrew.
Of course she also sterilized bedpans, folded sheets and towels, ran errands, fetched medicines from the pharmacist in his little warren of rooms, took care of charts, and filed endless amounts of paper, but none of those things bothered her. She wanted to be of help; she wanted to be indispensable, so that no one ever considered sending her away.
When her shift ended at three, she was going to walk to the Woman’s Medical School and present herself to be interviewed as a prospective student. In her pocket she had a sealed letter of reference from Dr. Savard (Anna, as she was supposed to be called outside the hospital). Then she would walk back to Waverly Place and change out of her uniform while Lia and Rosa and Chiara—fourteen years old but just as impetuous and full of energy as the littler girls—interrogated her about her day, half in English and half in Italian. She would help wherever she was needed until dinnertime, and then she would be at the table with all the good people who had taken her in as if she were a treasured niece rather than a stranger who had come to their door without warning.