The next morning, Una caught the Sixth Avenue el at Twenty-Third Street heading southward. Walking, though perhaps safer, would take far too long. Especially without her boots. Her feet would be frostbitten by the time she arrived. The unseasonably cold day with its low-hanging clouds and fits of wet snow otherwise worked in Una’s favor, though. Fewer coppers would be out patrolling, and she could wrap her scarf up to her ears without looking suspicious.
Even so, it was difficult to keep her hands still and thoughts steady. Her encounter last night with Edwin still pained her. When she’d returned to her cramped, stinky lodging house and unbuttoned her dress to wipe the day’s grime from beneath her armpits, she’d half expected to find a gaping wound between her breasts. One of those raw, oozing wounds that never seemed to heal no matter the ministrations.
Worse still, that phantom pain had made her so insensible, she’d taken off her boots to sleep as if she were back in the dignified nurses’ home. In the morning, they were gone.
Now, she tucked her sodden, rag-tied feet beneath the seat and tried not to shiver. The city passed outside the window in a gray blur. It hadn’t snowed enough to cover the soot-stained roofs or grime-covered streets, only enough to transform the dust, ash, and manure into mud. She reached into her coat pocket where her last few possessions remained—the medallion of Mary, which she rubbed for luck, and Barney’s slightly crooked pin. If he refused to help her, as Edwin had, Una had no one else to turn to.
At the Bleecker Street station, a copper shuffled aboard the car. Una wasn’t surprised, seeing as they were headed toward the courthouse and City Hall. But that didn’t stop her breath from catching in her throat nor her pulse from racing. She kept her head lowered. The benches that lined either side of the car were nearly full, but he squeezed in between two gentlemen directly across from her.
“Some weather, eh?” he said as the train picked up speed again.
Una waited for someone else to reply. When no one did, she raised her head slightly, smiled, and nodded, praying that was the end of his blather. But no sooner had she lowered her gaze, than he spoke again.
“Beats them hot summers, though. Don’t ya think?”
She nodded again, tucking her feet back as far beneath the seat as she could. His deep-set eyes and russet-colored hair were vaguely familiar. The timbre of his voice too. Una shifted through her memories, the whoosh of her pulse against her eardrum drowning out the rattle of the car.
Grand Central Depot. The day before her arrest. He was the copper who’d chased her all the way to Thirty-Eighth Street. The only time he’d gotten a close look at her was when she’d turned her coat inside out and pretended to be a ragpicker. Might he remember her face? She cursed herself for toying with him that day and protracting their encounter.
She glanced out the window above his head. There were over a dozen blocks to go before her stop. If she got off at the next station and waited for another train, it would look suspicious. Especially if he saw her rag-covered feet as she exited. No, she’d have to wait it out and pray he didn’t recognize her.
“Weather like this puts me in mind of my days as a lad back in County Clare,” he said.
How many times would she have to nod demurely before he stopped yapping? Then again, if he were talking, it meant he wasn’t thinking back to that privy yard where they’d met.
“My father was from Clare too.”
The copper’s expression brightened. “Was he now? What part?” “Lahinch.”
“Really? That weren’t but a stone’s throw for me own home.”
And that was enough to get him rhapsodizing about the old country until his stop at Chambers Street. He tipped his cap to her as he left, saying he hoped they’d meet on another ride soon. Una sighed once the car doors closed behind him, her first full exhale in nearly half an hour. She got off at the next station and made her way through the mud to the Herald Building on Newspaper Row.
The lobby attendant, a spindly man with a bushy mustache far too large for his narrow face, refused to admit her without shoes, forcing Una to wait outside until Barney was fetched down.
“Good God, Una, where are your boots?” he asked when he saw her. “It’s a long story.”
With Barney to vouch for her, the attendant made no further fuss about her entry. He did scowl, however, at the wet, muddy footprints she left on the polished stone floor as Barney led her to the stairs.
Unlike the last time she’d been here, reporters and typists crowded the newsroom. Clouds of cigarette smoke curled around the dangling gas lamps.
“Is there someplace else we can go?” she asked above the click of typewriters and clamor of voices. “Someplace private?”
“Mr. Hadley might lend us use of his office a moment. Or maybe—” “What about the roof?”
He looked down at her feet and frowned. “You’ll freeze up—” “I’ll be fine. I’d feel better knowing we can’t be overheard.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve gotten yourself into even more trouble than before.”
Begrudgingly, Barney led her back to the stairs. They climbed several more flights and exited onto the roof through a heavy steel door. The cool, misty air prickled her skin. Melting snow puddled at her feet. The nearby spires of St. Paul’s and Trinity churches pierced the low-hanging clouds.
“It’s too cold up here,” Barney said. “Let’s go down. I’m sure we can—” “There’s a killer at Bellevue.”
“What?”
“Do you remember several months back hearing about a fence who’d been strangled?”
“Sure, I thought it might be related to those other killings I was investigating in the slums. But the police figured a woman for it. Some pickpocket from the Bend.” He stopped and cocked his head, his staid expression morphing into wide-eyed surprise. “Wait a minute. That was you!”
He took a step backward, slipping on a slick of ice. Una grabbed hold of his wheeling arms before he fell.
“Of course it wasn’t me. I mean, I was there, but I didn’t kill him. I know who did, though.” She let go of his arms and tiptoed to a dry patch of roof in the lee of a chimney. Barney followed. There, with the soft murmur of the streets rising from below and the occasional flake of snow still spitting from the sky, Una told him everything.
“Do you believe me?” she asked when she was done. “I don’t know. It’s certainly an intriguing conjecture.” “‘Intriguing’! Three people are dead. Maybe more.”
“Bad choice of words. My apologies.” He lit a cigarette and offered one to Una. She reached out to take it, then waved her hand no. Barney slipped the cigarette case back into his jacket pocket and continued. “But you’re mad if you think we can just walk up and get a confession out of him.”
“We? Does that mean you’ll help me?”
“It would make a great story.” He took a long pull on his cigarette and then flicked ash onto the ground. “Only trouble is the how of it.”
Una wished Dru were here. She had the mind for such schemes, even if she hadn’t the stealthiness to pull it off. Una thought back to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” How was it that Mr. Dupin got the orangutan’s owner to confess?
“I’ve got it,” she said after a moment. “We must lure him out, away from Bellevue, under the false pretense that we have something he wants.”
“And what is that?”
Una shook her head. She hadn’t gotten that far yet. They couldn’t very well put an advertisement in the paper about a missing orangutan the way Mr. Dupin had. She stared out at the city as she considered. From this height, she could see all the way south to Battery Park, its trees faintly green despite the cold. Ships lined the Hudson, masts furled, anchors dropped, while others sailed its choppy waters, navigating around the steamers and tugboats that belched smoke into the air. When she turned her eyes inland, the Five Points intersection was visible, tenements choking it on all sides. She followed Mulberry Street to the Bend, then shifted her gaze northward, hoping to see the sprawling gray fortress of Bellevue. But church spires and smokestacks stymied her view.
What else had Mr. Poe said in that silly story of his? A line near the beginning came back to her: Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.
“We must make him think somehow his crimes are about to be discovered,” she said. “That will make him rash and more easily fooled.”
Barney nodded slowly. “I think I see what you’re getting at.” He stubbed out his cigarette and turned to her with a mischievous smile. “You said you were friends with him?”
“After a fashion.”
“But he likes you. Enough that he would trust you?”
“I don’t think he’ll hurt me if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“And you say he caught you snooping around after that lunatic woman was killed?”
Una nodded. “Good, good.”
Una couldn’t see what on earth was good about that. If anything, it would make Conor more suspicious of her. And she certainly didn’t like to think that she’d befriended a killer.
“What if you convince him you’ve met a woman who shares your same suspicions about the recent deaths at Bellevue and knows who the killer is? This woman—Mrs. Bean, we’ll call her—has agreed to tell you the killer’s identity, but only if you meet her at Washington Square after dark.”
“I don’t see how this will lure Mr. McCready out.”
“Tell him . . . tell him you’re afraid to go alone and ask him to accompany you. By the time you arrive, he’ll be so on edge it will be easy to trick him into confessing. Meanwhile, I’ll be listening behind a bush. Once he says anything incriminating, I’ll jump out and apprehend him.”
Una frowned. The plan wasn’t as absurdly simple as she’d hoped. “How will I know which bush you’re hiding behind?”
“We’ll pick a spot.”
“What if it’s windy and you can’t hear our conversation? Or what if there’s a copper on patrol who tries to hassle us for loitering after dark? Or worse yet, recognizes me.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Una rubbed her hands together for warmth. “What about one of those panel cribs shakedown thieves use?”
“Panel what?”
“It’s a room in a boarding house specially set up for robbery. A woman lures a man inside, and her partner—hidden in a wardrobe with a revolving false back—sneaks out to steal from him while he and the woman are… well, you know… distracted.”
Barney’s ears flushed bright red.
“It’s the perfect place for you to hide and listen while I trick Conor into confessing.”
“I don’t know…” He fumbled with his tie, leaving it crooked and uneven. “What if something happens to you before I can get out?”
Una reached into her coat pocket and pulled out his silver pin. She straightened his tie and pinned it to his shirt. “I’ll be fine. I told you, I don’t think Conor will hurt me.”
Barney fingered the pin. “I was wondering where that went.”
“I owe my freedom to that thing. Sorry it’s a bit bent.”
“So how do you plan on getting him to confess?”
“I was hoping you’d have an idea for that.”
They sat in silence for a moment, gazing out at the city. The snow had stopped, and the sky was beginning to clear.
“You said you know what sets him off,” Barney said finally. “Use that against him. Get him riled up enough, and he’s bound to slip up. It’s worked for me dozens of times when I’m trying to get a story.”
“He’ll be suspicious, though, when we arrive, and no one’s in the room.”
“Tell him… tell him the woman must be late. To him, you’re just a sweet, innocent nurse, remember? He’s got no reason not to trust you.”
Una considered this. The whole plan was risky. Only an overeager reporter and a desperate woman would come up with such a cockeyed scheme. But Una was desperate. This was her only chance to clear her name. Otherwise, she’d be on the run, hiding and grifting forever. She tried again to pick out Bellevue among the distant blur of shapes along the East River. More importantly, she couldn’t let Conor hurt Dru or anyone else.
“What do you think?” Barney asked. “We can scrap the whole idea and go to the police if—”
“No.” She stamped her feet to warm her toes. “You’ve got to spring for a new pair of boots, though.”
