THE DEVILS DIME (2 page)

. . .

All too soon the young violin teacher delivered her three little charges into the hands of their nanny and headed toward the streetcar stop that she knew took her near her new rooming house. The afternoon had fairly flown. Her three little students had been thrilled with the entire excursion — the ride uptown to Carnegie Hall, the backstage tour, their skipping trek down the long ramp to the orchestra pit. Everything about it had their bright faces transformed with wonder and delight.

She’d wanted to take them onstage, but the stage manager had taken one look at the three bobbing heads and denied permission. She’d hoped to cajole him into changing his mind, but not only would he not budge, he had a stagehand escort them to the door. She was offended, miffed, with no opportunity to express it, lest she embarrass herself in front of her students.

But when that scroungy, mangy, cocksure confidence man had approached her on Park Row, she’d let him have it with both barrels. All her disappointment at being kept offstage at Carnegie Hall had come rushing out in clipped, terse words, and she’d delivered a tongue-lashing that had the man shrinking before her very eyes.

Oh, it had felt so good.

But
cocksure
? Where had that word come from? Was she even allowed to think it? The young woman felt the flush singe her cheeks. Adelaide Magee was no prude, but if anyone had been able at that instant to read her mind, she’d have to dye her hair, change her name, and move to Timbuktu. Cocksure, indeed. New York City was having a bad influence on her already.

. . .

They were trying so hard not to stare at him that he almost laughed.

The newly transplanted investigative reporter walked self-consciously through the typing pool to the main staircase. He felt eyes on his back, saw the whispering behind discreet hands, and realized he wasn’t as anonymous as he’d thought.

Clicking typewriters seemed to lose their rhythm as he walked past. Women began furiously flipping through steno pads as he neared the longest bank of desks in the typing pool. How would they know if they’d found what they were looking for, when their eyes seemed bent on another task? The task of looking him over. Ogling him, if truth be told.

“Well, I declare,” a chirpy southern voice suddenly erupted to his left. “Why, shugah, he looks like some kinda wild west sheriff to me. You shore he’s a—” An unnatural bevy of coughing sprang up suddenly, drowning the unguarded words.

They could just get used to it. He was not going to cut his hair. Jess kept walking, wondering which he should be most grateful for—the southern belle’s outburst that made them all avert their eyes in embarrassment, or the fact that he was interesting enough to cause a ruckus.

From the well-honed corner of his eye he assessed the voluptuous beauty who had modulated her tone but still managed to keep the focus on herself. She caught his eye, raised an eyebrow, and dropped a seductive wink that had Jess working hard not to break stride.

She was a corker, all right.

He supposed he’d have to find another route to and from his office. Running the gauntlet wasn’t altogether annoying, just annoyingly distracting. As Jess reached the foyer and began his descent, he worked hard to drag his mind back around the points he’d left his desk to research.

He patted his pocket, checking for a handkerchief. He’d been warned he’d need it when he entered the dusty, mold-ridden basement of the
Times.
Adolph Ochs himself, the day he’d welcomed Jess onto the paper’s staff, had walked him to the stairwell that led to the cavernous basement. But at the top he’d stopped, turned, and admonished Jess to be wary. His tone seemed to portend of things much more sinister than mere dust and mold, but then it
had
been Jess’s first day, and he
had
been a mite nervous just being in the owner’s presence.

Jess entered the poorly lit stairwell leading to the morgue that dated back to the newspaper’s founding in 1851. Handwritten news histories originally stored neatly in organized collections had been surrounded over the years by hodgepodge bins of hot-metal galleys and photo engravings. But there was still plenty of bookbinding and paper to supply the massive low-ceilinged room with a musty odor.

He stepped noisily off the bottom stair and ignored the furtive looks from small groups of stringers huddled in dark corners among the stacks, intent on their games of craps. He’d forgotten it was payday, and stifled a grateful shudder that he was able to put things like payday out of his mind. It hadn’t been all that long since he himself had received the pittance paid to freelance news reporters who were paid by the column inch, the inches measured out on a string that always seemed to come up shorter than it looked.

A dim glow from scattered gas lamps cast eerie shadows across signs scrawled below them on the basement’s bare brick walls. ‘1840 to 1861’ was written in four-inch letters at about eye level, with an arrow pointing left. The words ‘War Between the States’ with an arrow pointing right had been added in a different hand just below. Clearly, the history collected here predated the paper’s beginning.

These crude signs were surprising. Most morgues he’d prowled had no organization at all. Perhaps it wouldn’t take as long as he’d thought to find what he was looking for.

His eyes adjusted to the gloom and he saw just ahead of him the central kiosk, identifiable only by a small grill nearly hidden in the floor-to-ceiling clutter. The stern warning his editor had issued rose unbidden to his thoughts. “Don’t even think of working in the morgue without checking in with Twickenham.”

While every possible justification for violating that rule tugged at him, Jess was determined to get off on the right foot and headed for the darkened grill behind which he hoped to find Twickenham’s desk.

“Hello?”

There was no echo in the damp hall, and his greeting fell dead, soaked up instantly by the tons of leather and parchment that surrounded him. He was about to speak again when a tablet was thrust through a slot in the grill, a crudely sharpened pencil dangling from it by a string.

Apparently he was to register his request.

As he wrote, Jess noted the times and dates and materials that had been sought most recently, according to entries further up on the page. The requests largely asked for information for obituaries.

He scribbled his name, date, and interest in street crime reports for the last decade and slid the tablet back through the opening. It disappeared with the pencil into the dark cavern and Jess heard a chair scrape, followed by a shuffling. The tablet came flying back through the slot and fell neatly into his hands.

“Wha-?”

“Try again,” came the guttural prompt.

“But-“

“And this time, use your full name.”

Jess re-read his entry.

April 19, 1896...J. Pepper...street crimes over last decade
.

He was anxious to get on with his research, and this fellow’s rules were holding things up. Biting back a grumble, he licked his thumb and rubbed it across the penciled name, then wrote in the smudged space the legal name he tried to use as little as possible.

Jessiah Saltingham Pepper
.

It was the grandiose name with which his single mother had so proudly burdened him before she promptly up and died. He laid the tablet back on the slotted shelf, and with a tentative finger, pushed it through.

Jess interpreted the silence from the other side of the cubicle as permission to continue. He turned away from the grill and was startled to come eye to eye with the keeper of the rules. He hadn’t heard the man leave his desk. But now a thin, cranky face peered around the stack nearest him and looked him sharply up and down.

Jess stopped and extended his hand.

“Twickenham?”

The man’s scraggly eyebrows narrowed over a perilously perched pince-nez. A straight Roman nose pointed the way to a jutting chin over a scrawny neck and bobbing Adam’s apple. The encircling starched collar was impeccably white but badly frayed.

“You truthin’ me?” He asked the question as he shook the tablet in Jess’s face. It seemed his social skills were as frayed as his collar.

“Why would I not?” Jess was still uncertain what it was about his request that had set the old fellow off. “Are you Ollie Twickenham?” Jess held his smile but dropped his hand.

Twickenham ignored him still. He wiggled his nose and cheek to dislodge his eyeglasses, and the pince-nez promptly tumbled from his face to dangle on a thin black ribbon attached to his vest pocket. He stepped down out of his nook and Jess realized for the first time just how short the man was.

Jess stood his ground as the man studied him, looked down at the page, then fixed his eyes on Jess again. He was coatless, with muslin protectors covering the cuffs and forearms of his green-gartered white shirt. Streaks of old ink and other unrecognizable stains proved the muslin’s necessity.

Twickenham drew himself up to his full height, which brought his beady eyes just above Jess’s elbow.

“Hmmph. You’re far too young to be Pepper,” he spat, “but then, you’re so wet behind the ears you wouldn’t know that!”

Jess absorbed the accusation that had been delivered with an unnatural, gravelly bark that sounded like planks dragged across river rock. The damaged effect was most likely the result of years of forcing a high-pitched voice to a more authoritative register.

“Ah, but I am. Pepper, that is. But please, call me Jess.”

A suspicious eyebrow launched itself halfway up to Twickenham’s receding hairline. “Of the
Denver Post
?”

“One and the same, sir. Now of the
New York Times
for...” Jess checked his pocket watch and continued, “three days, four hours and twenty-two minutes, to be exact.”

Twickenham’s jaw dropped and his eye began a rather alarming twitch.

Jess drew a gold-embossed card from his pocket and turned it with a sheepish grin toward Twickenham who settled his spectacles back onto his nose and peered over them at it. He sputtered and choked and looked to be deciding if he should just stomp off or make a stand.

A furious battle raged across his face and left the man heaving for breath before he finally seemed to capitulate. This fellow was not accustomed to being wrong.

“Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? I thought you’d be older. Your reputation precedes you, sir.” Twickenham blustered, his voice soaring into its more comfortable range.

“And yours, as well,” Jess offered magnanimously with a slight bow. If the rumors were true, Twickenham had been one of the best investigative reporters in the city, relegated years earlier to the morgue by a scandal of which he could not prove himself innocent.

Twickenham tried unsuccessfully to hide his pride at the unexpected compliment. He all but swaggered as he reached up to take Jess by the elbow.

“I’ve got just what you’re looking for right back here, son.” The little fellow stayed slightly in the lead and moved past a bank of books as if he were presenting a visiting lord to the gallery. Jess allowed himself to preen for just an instant, then followed. Whatever it was that had possessed him to actually follow the instructions this time had landed him squarely in the good graces of an icon of his profession. And it felt pretty fine.

Twickenham led him deep into the maze, talking and gesticulating the whole way. “The basement’s much larger than you’d think. It’s connected to the basements of buildings on either side of us. Tunnels and dead ends all over the place. Runs clear over to City Hall. You want to know where something is, always ask.”

He stopped in the middle of an aisle created by stacks of boxes labeled ‘Unsolved’ and turned to Jess. “One other thing you need to know. I keep a gun. You come prowling around here without checking in, you’re likely to get shot. Just a friendly warning, you know.”

He resumed his tour and Jess followed, taken down a notch by the ominous statement the old man had just spoken as calmly as he might voice an invitation to dinner.

A few paces further they stepped into an alcove created by shelves surrounding a battered desk and chair. From the layer of dust on the table, it was apparent the area was not much used.