Thanks for the Meal
Every Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Hertz would dress in her brightest silks and lace, adorn herself head to toe in dazzling jewels, and settle into the great chair in her parlor.
At the appointed hour, the eight madams who managed her brothels would huddle in a small waiting room, then approach her one by one. Flat on their faces, they would hand over chamois leather bags stuffed with the money they had taken in.
Mrs. Hertz would count the cash, review the books, and dole out praise or rebuke as the occasion demanded. Then she would lecture them on the hardships and trials she had endured to build her empire.
For several days I circled Rosie Hertz’s house and the streets around it, mapping every approach and exit. A few of my men and I even slipped inside more than once, rehearsing the hit. So this was not my first time.
I scaled the wall, crossed past the servants’ quarters, and left my shoes beneath a half-open window at the rear of the house before climbing in. Rosie Hertz’s bedroom lay at the far end of the corridor off the living room.
I was creeping down the hall when the grandfather clock in the parlor began to chime.
Dong… dong…
On the eleventh stroke I twisted the doorknob, dropped into a crawl, and inched across the floor on my belly toward the bed.
I rose and looked down at the sleeping face of Rosie Hertz. A faint smile curved her lips, as if she were deep in some happy dream.
There are girls who walk into it for the money. But more of them get lured in, raped, hooked on dope, and blackmailed into staying.
Tanner had told me the main hunting grounds were the dance halls that had exploded with urbanization and industry—and Ellis Island, the choke point every immigrant had to pass through.
The Jewish and Italian gangs keep specialists for that work. Clean suits, pretty faces. If a girl won’t bite, those bastards track her home, threaten her, snatch her, and break her body.
Rosie Hertz bought those women. Girls who vanished overnight, their existence erased, were beaten and locked away until they became machines for making money. The ones who could not endure it took their own lives.
The favorite method is disinfectant. It’s everywhere—bathrooms, kitchens. I heard hundreds of whores have swallowed the stuff. Plenty of them were still in their teens.
I opened the bag of money and drew out a small brown bottle. Phenol—the same poison my mother used to scour drains and trash bins.
I uncapped it and stepped close. Pinching Rosie Hertz’s nose made her mouth fall open of its own accord. Her eyelids fluttered, just beginning to lift—
I jammed the brown bottle into her mouth.
Her eyes flew wide. In an instant they flooded red and filled with tears. I clamped her nose and mouth shut, and the whole bed shook beneath her thrashing. I watched her face, her eyes, without expression.
I was not doing this out of any sense of justice. The only feeling that registered was the damp weight of my gloves, already soaked through with her filthy fluids and the phenol.
A moment later, Rosie Hertz went limp.
Before rigor could set in, I pulled the bottle from her mouth and tossed it onto the pillow beside her head. The reek of phenol filled the room so thickly it made my head swim. I twitched the curtain aside and left the window cracked halfway open.
Outside her door, I gave a light, rhythmic knock on the next room down.
The door eased open a crack, and a pair of eyes peered out at me.
“Done?”
“Yeah. Hurry.”
I nodded. The door swung wider, and a man stepped into view—Cory, the one who had gone out during the building contract and then vanished without a trace. He had been stealing since he was ten. The practiced little thief had pretended to leave, slipped back inside the house, and kept watch on Rosie Hertz the whole time. The purpose, of course:
“She hid the money in the room.”
Cory took the lead. We re-entered Rosie Hertz’s bedroom—and he must have locked eyes with her still-wide-open stare, because he recoiled hard enough to bounce off the wall.
“Jesus—! Nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“I told you we don’t have time.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
Wiping his forehead, Cory opened the massive Gothic wardrobe that dominated one wall. He pulled out the drawer unit beneath it, revealing a steel safe cleverly concealed behind it.
“Can you open it?”
“I’m Cory. Nobody cracks a safe better than me.”
“Go get it.”
He pressed his ear to the dial and worked it back and forth.
Click… click…
Clack.
The door swung open.
“See? I’m Cory.”
“Bravo.”
Inside lay cash, jewelry, stock certificates, real-estate deeds, and ledgers. No time to sort through any of it. What I could tell at a glance was that the bills far exceeded the money I had given her.
I swept everything from the safe into Rosie Hertz’s checkered traveling bag, which I pulled from another wardrobe. Meanwhile Cory squeezed his eyes shut and stripped the gold and diamond rings from her fingers.
Once we had everything, we shut the window, drew the curtains, and left the way we had come, following the escape route we had planned. Over the wall, and then I collected the money bag Cory handed me. One last piece of business remained.
Cory peeled off first. I jammed the dead Jacob’s hat down over my brow, walked up to the iron gate at the front of the mansion, and hammered on it, shouting:
“Rosie! Rosie Hertz! It’s Jacob! Open this door before I stop asking nice!”
My voice rang through the quiet residential street. A light came on in one wing of the Hertz mansion, and two maids cracked the door to peer out. That was enough. As witnesses, they would remember little more than the shadow of a man claiming to be Jacob.
“Bang!”
I kicked the iron gate, prowled along the wall for a moment, then turned and melted into the dark. I rejoined Cory, and together we headed home.
At the same hour, on the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, something weighted with chains and sinkers dropped from a sailing fishing boat.
Splash!
Captain River Grey clamped a cigar between his teeth and lit it. He watched the match fall, watched the water rise in a ring of bubbles where it hit.
“So who was that, anyway?”
He blew out a stream of smoke, then let the question go and dropped onto the deck. He was still alone.
Start building a crew from here. There are sailors out there you can trust and work with—I’m sure of it.
He had found one, at least. Tomorrow he would meet the kid and have a serious talk.
The tense operation of the night before was over. Saturday morning felt no different from any other.
I went into the office, finished my work a little early, and came home to help the family put together a cozy dinner.
“Big Brother, what are all these?”
“They were here this morning. You’re only just noticing?”
“Roa is so busy in the mornings she can barely open her eyes. Eat breakfast, wipe the sleep out, get dressed, go over to Aunt Mary’s, listen to the kids talk… and, uh… and…”
Roa rummaged through the brown paper bags in the corner of the kitchen with her short arms. Inside were borax and baking soda—safe household disinfectants, not phenol. And then—
“Whaaat?! Is this for Roa?!”
A pink hair ribbon with a bow. The moment she saw it, Roa yanked it onto her head in a frenzy of excitement.
“How does Roa look? Doesn’t it look amazing?!”
“Oh my, our little girl is just too pretty.”
“Pink? That’s so tacky.”
“Little Brother is the tacky one. Exactly the way you look right now. Yup. Tacky.”
“But what are all those—”
Mother was mid-sentence when someone knocked at the door.
“Mrs. Nora Graves? Police.”
Thud.
Everyone froze and stared at the door. Roa did not race over to fling it open the way she once would have. She did exactly as I had taught her—slipped into her room and cracked the door just enough to peer out with wide, round eyes.
Knock, knock.
“Mrs. Graves?”
When the officer called again, Mother glanced at me, drew a steadying breath, and opened the door.
Two policemen stood there. One of them was the same officer who had come around during the sewing-machine warehouse murder—and I had seen him again at the station after the anarchist assassination attempt.
“Been a while, Kieran.”
“I’ve been well, sir. And you?”
“Same as always. And this gentleman here is the detective for the Gramercy district.”
The detective had sharp eyes. He addressed himself more to Mother than to me.
“Detective Thomas Beersford. Yesterday you met a woman named Rosie Hertz regarding the purchase of a building, correct?”
“That’s right. Why?”
“She was found dead in her home overnight.”
“Oh my heavens!”
Mother clapped a hand over her mouth.
“How—how could that have happened?”
“We’ll know more once the investigation is complete, but the direct cause of death appears to be the ingestion of phenol. It may have been suicide by poison.”
Phenol…
Mother started to turn, then shook her head hard.
“Suicide? All of a sudden? When we saw her yesterday there wasn’t the slightest hint of anything like that. She was sharp as a razor about the building price.”
A woman that obsessed with money, killing herself the same night? It was impossible to believe.
“Personally, I’m leaning more toward homicide. Especially since the phenol she ingested was a disinfectant that was never used in Mrs. Hertz’s household.”
Phenol was for places like the Lower East Side, the tenements. The wealthy preferred safer, more refined disinfectants.
“Four of you went to see Rosie Hertz yesterday. According to the real-estate agent, Mr. Morris, you and your mother rode home together in a carriage?”
“That’s correct.”
The problem was Cory and me. The detective’s gaze cut sharp as a blade.
“Why didn’t you come straight home afterward?”
“I had something to pick up. We stopped at a department store.”
“And what did you buy?”
At that moment the bedroom door burst open and Roa appeared, proudly showing off her hair ribbon to the detective.
“Big Brother bought this pink hair ribbon just for Roa! Doesn’t it look wonderful?!”
“W-well, isn’t that nice.”
“My birthday’s already over, and Christmas is still ages away, so Big Brother’s surprise was a real surprise!”
The detective scratched his forehead and turned back to me.
“Anything else?”
I held out the brown paper bags. As the officers checked the contents, one of them asked Mother:
“You don’t usually use phenol, ma’am? Seems like everyone around here does.”
I was about to answer when Roa cut in again. My palms were starting to sweat.
“Big Brother says Roa must never, ever use that stuff—it’s too dangerous. I already know it’s dangerous. It hurts when he treats me like a baby, but what can I do? If I want meat, I have to be good.”
“So the little lady likes her meat, does she?”
“There are people who don’t like meat?! Amazing!”
The detective’s eyes drifted toward the ceiling. Roa kept derailing the conversation so thoroughly he seemed to have forgotten his next question. After a moment of thought, he finally asked:
“Was your friend Cory with you as well?”
“Of course. You can check.”
The brown bags were things Leo and Marcus had bought at Macy’s the day before. To build our alibi, the two of them had made a point of throwing around our names all over the store.
The detective glanced at Roa, then called me out into the hallway.
“I understand you handled the building inspection for your mother, so I’ll ask you. Did you know what was in the basement of the property at 137?”
“I never went down myself. I only heard there was a saloon. The agent said it would be a headache.”
The detective pressed in, sensing an opening.
“Then why buy a headache?”
“Someone had split what used to be one building into two. I bought it because they could be joined back together. The price was right, too.”
“And the basement saloon? What were you going to do about that?”
“Talk it out with the owner.”
“Talk?”
The detective snorted and shook his head.
“You’re a lucky man. Right now we’re hunting the owner of that basement saloon as a suspect—Jacob Reich. He’ll be shutting his doors any day now.”
The case was unfolding exactly as I had planned. The NYPD was looking for Jacob, the man who had supposedly killed Rosie Hertz, cleaned out her safe, and fled.
“If you happen to see the perpetrator, contact us at once.”
“Of course.”
I thought the questioning was finished—until the detective tossed out one last question.
“By the way, how did you afford the building?”
“Do I have to answer that as well?”
“Do you have any idea how much fourteen thousand dollars is? You’ve barely started the factory, and you live around here. Anyone would find it strange that you put together that kind of money.”
“What’s stranger is assuming it was our money in the first place.”
“Hmm?”
To settle the question of the money’s origin, I put two names on the table: Anne Morgan of the WTUL, and Big Tom Foley. Anne Morgan had genuinely invested in Mother’s company, and Big Tom Foley—through Tanner—had asked to borrow a few hundred dollars for us.
The detective’s eyes went wide with disbelief.
“Anne Morgan I can almost swallow. But Big Tom Foley?”
“Big Tom Foley of Tammany Hall, yes.”
The other officer, who had been listening in silence, leaned in and whispered something in the detective’s ear. The detective’s face registered shock, then he nodded.
The Russian anarchists’ assassination attempt. That was almost certainly what he had mentioned. At the time, Big Tom Foley had leaned on the press to protect me—which was why only a single line with the name “Kieran” had ever appeared. Easy enough not to know if it wasn’t your precinct. Even my own family didn’t know.
“I’ve heard about your exploits. An honor to meet you.”
The detective offered me his hand, and the investigation was over. In better spirits now, he even went out of his way to say goodbye to the family.
“Sorry to have troubled you. And for the little lady—here.”
He held out a piece of candy. Roa hesitated and shook her head.
“Big Brother says never take anything from anyone who isn’t family.”
“……”
“Well raised. I’m the kind of man who catches criminals, though—you can trust me. And when somebody offers you something free, you take it quick. Chances like that don’t come often.”
He had a point. When it’s offered, you take it. Roa looked at me. I nodded, and only then did she accept the candy.
“Thanks for the meal!”
Three days after the incident, every Monday-morning paper ran the Rosie Hertz murder as its headline. The NYPD issued a warrant for the fugitive suspect Jacob, and the fallout led to the shuttering of the underground brothel.
After breakfast the family scattered, and I sat alone in the living room going through what I had taken from Rosie Hertz’s safe.
My own fourteen thousand dollars had been recovered intact. On top of that, I had walked away with another twenty thousand. The jewelry would need to be fenced before I knew its value. Two other items, though, gave me pause.
Counterfeit bills—and Rosie Hertz’s ledger of bribes.