FEMME FATALE Read online

  PRONOUNCED DEAD

  The two men of medicine immediately declared their patient dead. Mr. Thomas just as swiftly departed for Philadelphia to inform the dead man’s family. Such is the speed of rail transport in our modern day that Mrs. Bishop was at Hawkes Funeral Parlor on Sixth Avenue later that morning, gazing upon her young and handsome husband’s dead body through the glass top of a coffin.

  Who can guess at the many deep feelings that crowded that poor woman’s mind? In times of such utter sorrow, often the smallest detail will assume significance. Mrs. Bishop asked the attendant to comb her husband’s hair. No doubt the physicians’ long night of attendance had disarranged it.

  A GRISLY DISCOVERY

  The attendant nervously drew a comb through the dead man’s hair, the eyes of his widow fresh upon him. He dropped the comb . . . and it disappeared! It had fallen, subsequent inquiry revealed, into the corpse’s empty brain cavity!

  At this Mrs. Bishop wailed in despair. It was all too evident that an unauthorized autopsy had already been performed upon her husband, upon a man known to suffer from catalepsy, who always carried a note—his “life guard,” he used to say—explaining his condition and prohibiting an autopsy and also using ice or electrodes on his body. The note also listed the addresses of Mr. Bishop’s family and lawyer, to be alerted if he ever fell into a trance.

  Mrs. Bishop, in that dawning moment of horror, cried out, “They have killed my husband! Those doctors slew him for his brain.”

  No note was ever found, or admitted to have been found.

  A MISPLACED BRAIN

  The issue of Mr. Bishop’s missing brain soon became a chorus. In addition to the dead man’s wife crying “Murder” at the Lambs Club and Dr. Irwin’s office, the mother of the deceased, Eleanor Fletcher Bishop, descended on the scene and demanded a coroner’s inquest.

  In no time Dr. Irwin and Dr. Lee, Dr. Ferguson and Dr. Hance, the men who had performed and witnessed the autopsy, were arrested and forced to pay bail in the princely sum of $2,000 each.

  ANOTHER SHOCKING MISPLACEMENT OF AN ORGAN

  For the dead man’s brain was indeed found. It had not been stolen, it had been concealed . . . in his chest cavity.

  At the inquest, Mrs. Eleanor Fletcher Bishop testified to her own propensities to catalepsy, and to her son’s previous apparent deaths (erroneous and fortunately not followed by hasty autopsies). One occurred in 1873, when he was but a lad of seventeen. The doctors found no respiration, no pulse in his motionless form, and thus he was declared dead. Twelve hours later, young Mr. Bishop awoke “with a start” on the application of tincture of ammonia (which has often been known to revive many a whalebone-corseted damsel from a dead swoon).

  He had been pronounced dead at least two more times, according to inquest testimony, and always had emerged from his trances none the worse for wear . . . save for the autopsy following his final and ultimately fatal swoon at the Lambs Club shortly after one of his greatest triumphs.

  But weep and wail as the women would, none of their pleas and cries could change the fact that the mistakenly dead man was indeed dead for good this time, irretrievably dead, bereft of breath when he had been bereft of brain. The elder Mrs. Bishop tried to prevail upon the undertaker to chisel on his headstone epitaph: “Born May 4, 1856—Murdered May 13, 1889.”

  She was denied the editorial comment in the epitaph.

  For despite a New York Penal Code prohibiting any dissection without permission, a jury of the late Mr. Bishop’s supposed peers (although according to his advance man, Mr. Augustus Thomas, “he had no peers”) released the doctors without penalty.

  The senior Mrs. Bishop did not slacken her labors, appealing to Joseph Rinn, a renowned psychic investigator and long-time friend of the escapologist, Houdini. It is even rumored that she presented the case to an obscure British doctor who had written a mystery story involving poison pills.

  The fact remains that the man, whether dead at the time of the autopsy or not, was certainly dead now, and so has remained since interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in New York City on May 20th last.

  May he rest in peace, but this humble reporter inclines to the theory that he will not.

  “Well, Pink.” Irene sat back after perusing this rather lurid report when I had passed it on to her. “This case appears to be almost as outré as your recent experiences in Europe trailing the Ripper. I had no idea that they told such grisly tales in the New York World. No wonder you were so dismayed that the Ripper story was too volatile to print in any land.”

  “The real world is grisly and I tell it as it happens.”

  “But what has this macabre little case to do with us?” I asked.

  “Not you, Nell. Not a bit. It’s Irene. When I returned home, I found that Nell Nelson, an upstart imitator of my own undercover methods most noted for a sordid ‘slave girl story,’ had stolen this gem right out from under me whilst I was off chasing a story Whitehall and Sherlock Holmes and half the world wants to keep me from writing. I decided to follow up on the blank spots Miss Nelson leaves in her journalistic efforts. This got me to talking to the sort of folk who put on these kind of shows and shortly thereafter I came across this!”

  She withdrew a larger sheet than the newspaper from the portfolio and flourished it at us like a flag.

  This example of the typesetter’s art was even more emblazoned with large type in fancy faces, and words that shouted rather than whispered.

  MISS MERLINDA THE MERMAID, it as good as screamed. SHE GLITTERS, SHE SLITHERS THROUGH THE SEA, THIS NYMPH OF THE ATLANTIC COAST BREATHES WATER NOT AIR, COLLECTING TREASURES FROM DAVY JONES’S LOCKER, BEWITCHING ALL WHO SEE HER WITH HER CURRENT-BLOWN LOCKS, SEA-GREEN EYES, AND SHINING SCALES.

  I passed it to Irene with what I believed was damning silence.

  She took the playbill, and smiled. “Quite a rare souvenir by now, I should think. This I remember. Who would think that I would become more noted for my ‘shining scales’ on the international opera house stages than in the theaters of New York?” Irene yawned, like a bored shark. “Is this the shocking evidence of my past you have stumbled upon, Pink? Buffalo Bill has already recalled my long-ago performance as a Denizen of the Deep. I promised him a reprise of the act at his Wild West Show in Paris before l’Exposition universelle closes this fall. He is even now constructing the water tank for me on a wagon, which should be an innovation. I was never a mermaid in motion before. Hardly a scandalous revelation, don’t you think?”

  “I recognized you at once.”

  At this point, I stared at the playbill she had produced as if it were a scandal sheet. The mermaid’s face and hair had been handtinted peach and auburn, with excessively pink cheeks and lips that one would think the cool and briny deep would hardly confer upon even a mermaid without cosmetic aid. I must admit relief to see that her seaweed-long tresses and danging necklaces of shells and lost Spanish jewels quite bridged the gap between her face and the skirt of scales that sufficed to depict a mermaid’s tail.

  Irene certainly was far less scandalous than numerous female equestriennes, electric ladies, wire-dancers, and magician’s assistants I had seen pictured in flesh-colored tights that clung to the lower limbs all the way to their, well, corset covers, and left no detail of the female form unguessed. Irene’s colorful tail was the model of discretion compared to these!

  And so I told Miss Pink in no uncertain terms.

  “I don’t care if our friend Irene disported, or disports herself, in false scales,” Pink retorted. “The fact is that Mr. Bishop had a large collection of playbills upon which he . . . and our mutual friend, were featured performers.”

  “Odd,” Irene put in, “I don’t remember him.”

  “He, as you, was a child performer. You often appeared on the same bills. As I tried to trace the playbills missing from his assemblage, I discovered that someone was collecting these old-time souvenirs everywhere I went. The playbills were being sold to unidentified third parties, or went my
steriously missing. So as I tracked backward from Merlinda to ‘Little Fanny Frawley,’ the petite pistolera or sharpshooter of twelve (a clear predecessor of Annie Oakley), to tiny Rena the toe-dancer, I discovered that everyone recalled you, but no one knew where you had gone, or had come from. When asked about your parents, they blithely assumed you were everybody else’s offspring.”

  “So that is why you assembled the cast you did for your séance: several there remembered me, and knew me, or of me, at least. Did you really expect that exercise in Spiritualism to produce any useful results?”

  “Before anything came of it, it produced what you call ‘murder,’ didn’t it?”

  “And if it truly did, so much more shame on you.” Irene allowed herself to look utterly unforgiving, which I had seldom seen in our eight years of association and never directed at me, thank God. Despite her . . . unusual history . . . she had a moral center that I had to respect, even if I could not understand it. It forgave deeply personal foibles but not the smallest sins against others. “What have you stirred up, Pink, in your zeal for stories and to ‘unmask’ me? My past was eccentric, I admit. I admit that I want it to remain my past, and forgotten, but I’m not ashamed of anything I did. Can you say the same? The medium is dead.

  “She was an honest fraud,” Irene added as an epitaph from a fellow showman, “and I do remember being excessively fond of her as a child, though I do not much remember being a child.” Irene’s revived emotions forced her to a long, forbidding silence, a condition I had never witnessed before.

  “What have you done?” she said at long last. “And can anyone undo it?”

  Pink crushed her hands together on her lap. “I don’t know. One thing I observed from the dead man’s playbills that I was able to see: the Gemini Twins were listed on them, and one of them, Sophie, was the medium who was killed. And I just noticed in the paper today an obscure notice of the death of Abyssinia, a former Egyptian dancing girl of that same era, who died bizarrely in the embrace of a former performing partner, a twenty-five-foot pet boa constrictor.”

  My interest perked up. Was it possible that Madame Sarah might meet a similar fate?

  “I was only pursuing the truth of your ancient history, but I seem to have stumbled over a trail of recent suspicious deaths, including Bishop’s, and possibly murders. I’m now convinced that Sophie’s death was deliberate, yet am no closer to the identity of your mother.”

  “The truth will not be caught sometimes, Pink, and sometimes is not worth the price of catching. So to find a murderer, you are convinced that you must also hunt my true mother among these theatrical folk, a quest I gave up before you were born. It’s an unlikely relationship. You have confused your obsession to solve the mystery of myself with the trail of a story worthy of reporting in your newspaper.”

  Pink’s eyes lifted to challenge Irene’s assertion.

  “Yes,” Irene went on, “by the time I was five or six, I saw that where I came from didn’t matter. It was where I was going. By ten years later, Professor Marvel, the Walking, Talking Encyclopedia, had not only schooled me, but he had found me a singing teacher, and I had found my true voice. No matter what I did, I was no longer a disciple of Terpsichore, or some future Little Sure-Shot. I was a singer, and from then on my days in the amazing arts of sensational theater were numbered. I sang my way out, note by note, a ‘lonely orphan girl.’ ”

  Irene’s apologia, if indeed that was what it was—an explanation for being what she had been and had become—ended on that final, cutting note. She had quoted what Elizabeth Cochrane, also known as Nellie Bly, had signed herself on the key letter to the editor that began her journalistic career. Lonely orphan girl.

  We were all that, we three. I due to the death of my mother at my birth and my father’s death before I turned twenty. Irene for having been birthed indeed as Athena, from some mysterious thought rather than a mortal man and woman who could be named. And “Nellie Bly,” the creature Elizabeth Cochrane eventually created on the death of her father that left her mother and siblings unprovided for, save by her own workaday efforts.

  Perhaps Irene should amend Pink’s phrase to “poor brave little lonely orphan girl.”

  “Is it my past,” Irene asked, “that you pursue? Or your own?”

  “Too many of us are orphan girls,” Pink said. “I pursue the social customs that make us ashamed of our origins.”

  “There is a difference between shame and discretion,” Irene said, “and until you learn it, you will hurt other people rather than help them.”

  “Blame me for Madam Sophie’s death, if you will. It was your deliberately foggy past that set me on this path.”

  “No. It was my deliberate decision to use you as I could to save my dear ones that made you so resentful. You are a strong young woman, Pink. You will go far. Just try not to do it on other people’s pain.”

  “I cannot believe that you are so indifferent to the fate of your own mother! Have you no heart?”

  “It is better than being all heart, and having no conscience. We owe the present, not the past.”

  I was utterly lost during this contretemps. Perhaps it was because I had a much more boring past than either of my companions. I sighed. Surely, the unconventional Englishman, Quentin Stanhope, had taken note of that very fact and discreetly retreated in the face of this lamentable lack.

  I was a Woman With No Past, and therefore, dull. Irene, apparently, had danced, shot, and sang her way to present fame and fortune, which was sadly stalled because circumstances had forced her to become anonymous. Life was not fair.

  “Miss Pink,” I said, reverting to my governess mode, which was dull but effective. “You owe Irene and myself more than an apology. You owe us an explanation, so that we may undo any ill you have done.”

  “Not even you, Irene, can bring the medium back to life!” she burst out, truly contrite.

  “No,” said Irene, “but we can find out who killed her. If you are wrong, Pink, and she has no connection to me, still her death was sudden and undeserved and merits solving.

  “If she died, as you think, because she was related to me, or knew who was, it was still an evil, senseless death. ‘Each man’s death diminishes me.’ That was written by a sixteenth-century poet, a man whose life combined great self-indulgence and great holiness. You see? Nothing is ever simple, ever clear-cut. And those words are as true today as they ever were.

  “Use my past as a goad, if you think you do so for the common good, Pink. But you need no fancied relationship to me or my past to make me care about Sophie’s passing. In principle alone, it’s an abomination that is not to be tolerated. If you are right that this murder relates to me or my past, then it is an abomination that is not to be tolerated, but it is no worse a crime to me because I might be a cause. No murder is acceptable, to any civilized person. I would still want to find who had killed her.”

  “Exactly,” I said in my sternest tones. Then I looked at Irene. “Can we?”

  “Ah, Nell,” Irene said, once we were alone again in our hotel room. “Can you understand why I don’t wish to solve the mystery of my mother?”

  “Of course. She was no doubt a scandalous woman. I am sorry, Irene, but it is likely you share the same miserable past that Godfrey does: you were conceived in shame and secrecy, sin and error, and it is best left thus, and unsaid.”

  “Such conceptions are rarely that simple, Nell. If Pink is right, and she may be, my . . . secret birth could cause deaths today. That is a notion I cannot accept.”

  “You know, Irene”—I leaned near and whispered—“I used to think as a child, quite fancifully, of course, that perhaps I did not have a mother who perished at my birth, but was an . . . offspring of the Prince of Wales, or a Gypsy fortune-teller, who left me on the parish steps, and then I had been adopted by my kindly father.”

  Irene regarded me with the utmost attention during this confession, and then cackled like a hyena afterward. Like a soprano hyena, I might add.

/>   “We are all foundlings, Nell, in our own imaginations! Even the child of the most fortunate birth sometimes imagines a lurid past! Pink is unearthing the capacity of the human mind to deceive itself, that’s all. ‘I am so much more uninteresting than everybody thinks!’ the little voice speculates. Well, Nell, in your case, you are more interesting than anybody thinks, which is why Quentin is so taken with you.”

  “He is? Truly? Quentin taken with me? No.”

  “You know it’s so, though you dare not admit it, not even to yourself. It’s amazing how much we will not admit to ourselves, much less anybody else. Just as I know that Pink’s quest into my past will unearth truth, though I dare not admit it. Well! There is no stopping a daredevil reporter, so we must steal the march on her. We will follow the trail she has cut through this wilderness of American antecedents.”

  “I don’t want to know,” I wailed.

  “Nor do I. I was not lying. I have forgotten most of my youth, probably for good reason. Pink is forcing me to revisit it. It may not be pretty and it may not be what I wish to remember. If I have a mother who can eventually be identified and named, I despise her, Nell. There is no point in finding her, except that I may have a specific name to hate.”

  “Irene! She is your mother.”

  “Is she?”

  “A mother is sacred.”

  “Is she?”

  “She should be.”

  “We all should be more than we are.”

  “Agreed, but until we are, what are we to do next? Perhaps Godfrey should join us?”

  “No! I want no one else to know of this until I understand it myself.” Irene sighed deeply, and a single breath of hers could resonate to the back wall of an opera house. “I would never voluntarily stir up my own past, Nell. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my theatrical origins, silly as they were. It’s that I believe that the present is all that matters.”