grace to allow Jersey to take care of herself.”
Hays reminded himself so went the swagger and sway of this fair city. The hidden subterfuge of power, its whim and whimsy, never failed to infuriate him, no matter who was stuffing the ballot boxes. Having dismissed Balboa, Hays angrily strode up the Broadway to the clip of his constable’s staff, muttering to himself.
His daughter Olga awaited him in the kitchen of their home. Dinner was kept warm in the coal oven. His favorite, a flat beef roast, called brust deckle, purchased from a Hebrew butcher at his small stall in the Centre Market. (This particular cut of meat from the underside of the cow, which Olga had prepared with root vegetables and tomato gravy, tended to be very tough, marbled as it is with fat and lean between the bone and main muscle of the animal. If cooked slowly at low temperature, however, the strong connective tissue will turn into a kind of gelatin that dissolves back into the meat and breaks down very slowly and flavorfully. It was her father’s favorite. Her mother used to make it for him once a week, and Olga thought it nothing less than her duty to continue the practice.)
Hays kissed his daughter’s warm cheek. “Good evening, Miss Hays,” he said.
“By the look of you, Papa, you’ve had a hard day,” she remarked.
He told her about Mary Rogers, his frustration. He confessed, “A young girl alone in the city, it is what gives me pause with you, my daughter.”
She smiled. “With me, Papa, you have nothing to worry about.”
While her mother was alive Olga worked six days a week in Brooklyn, teaching English at the Female Academy. Since then she had quit her job to stay home and look after her father and the house, only taking occasional print and copyediting jobs as they came along from the Harper Brothers, Publishers.
“I worry about you, too, Papa,” Olga chided her father. “An old man alone in the city …”
She told him, if he did not mind, she would attend later that night with her friend Annie Lynch, a colleague and friend from the Female Academy, a lecture at the New York University.
“Edgar Poe, the poet and critic, is scheduled to lay his tomahawk into Longfellow and Halleck,” she told him. “I admit to being captivated!”
THE NEXT MORNING, via Balboa, Hays sent a card to Dr. Cook in Jersey City with his request for the coroner to leave the body of Mary Rogers where it lay in its interment for the time being. Because of Acting Mayor Purdy’s restrictions on his investigation attributed to jurisdictional objections, the high constable wrote, there was little he could do presently, but problems of this nature had their way of working themselves out.
Have patience, Old Hays urged.
Meanwhile, at 11 a.m., the high constable undertook to pay a visit to Forty Little Thieves gang leader Tommy Coleman, the youthful irreverent that the reverend doctor of the Scots church had mentioned as being a possible suspect in the pilfering of the copper sheathing off the church’s steeple.
From the Tombs, the high constable made his way north across Canal to Prince Street, where, underneath the arch between Sullivan and Thompson streets, lay headquarters to Coleman’s gang in a bucket of blood operated by a giant colored woman, known in her district and beyond as “the Green Turtle,” owing to the fact she resembled nothing less than a huge reptile of the order Testudine, family Verde.
The dirty and dingy double doors descending into the Turtle’s lair stood open to the street, although half hidden below ground level. Upon entering, Hays took pause for his eyes to adjust somewhat to the darkness, before continuing cautiously down the narrow fifty-foot subterranean passageway, painted dead black. At the passage end he found the front room dim and half full, but immediately the occupants, seeing who had entered, chose to abandon the premises, scurrying for the door, faces averted or half covered by caps. After some moments, with no further acknowledgment of his presence, the high constable took opportunity to pound his constable’s staff hard against the much-trudged and splintered floor in order to attract attention. With the sharp resounding of the staff, the smattering of filthy sawdust on the black boards jumped.
When still no response came, he turned from the bar, a tattered and dented sheet of metal, hammered to planks extended between two empty hoop-staved tar barrels, and took a seat at a nearby three-egged table in order to wait more comfortably. He made subtle show of continuing the light tapping of his long ash baton on the fetid floor.
Behind him there now came the rustle of movement. He turned as the Green Turtle, her skin as deeply shaded as the color of a ripe plum, entered the groggery through a curtain in the rear. She was a massive woman, weighing, Hays would guess, something in excess of three hundred and fifty pounds, outfitted with two huge Colt five-shot Paterson pistols stuck in a wide leather waistband buckled around her ample middle. Pressed against the small of her back but very nearly concealed by layers of flesh, he observed, she carried two bone-handled daggers.
She hesitated momentarily before strolling heavily behind the bar, where she stood, without saying a word, ham-sized arms akimbo, her gaze measured and glaring. In this manner she assessed Hays through bloodshot eyes from underneath a tiny black hat adorned with droopy black feathers, her black hair beneath in severe rolls.
“Madam?” He signaled her.
Taking no heed, she began polishing the sheet metal in front of her with a vigor that led Hays to imagine she applied herself thusly lest the hidden microbiology residing thereon rise up and infect her or her valued customers. Hays very nearly smiled to himself. What would have been the audacity? Could the bar top have been the copper absconded from the steeple? He rose and approached to stand directly in front of her. At closer scrutiny, he took the alloy for zinc. So not pilfered from the church, but likely from somewhere else.
Making one last swipe with her polishing cloth, she finished what she was doing as he watched, the surface in front of her now duly damp and disinfected to her satisfaction.
Again without a word, she poured a large portion of rhum from a cracked blue flagon into a chipped yellow ceramic bowl. Sloshing the drink, she pushed the yellow vessel unceremoniously in front of him.
“I need to have a word with Tommy Coleman,” Hays said to her, not touching the poteen.
“You don’t say.”
“You know who I am, madam?”
“Truefully, I don’t care who you are,” she said. “I don’t care your business. But I know who you are, Mistuh Ol’ Hays.”
He pushed the bowl of swill away from him. “I repeat myself, madam. Tommy Coleman. I am after him.”
She said, “A bit of the devil might do you some good, Mr. High.” Then, thinking better, she picked up the cracked bowl he had rejected and drank deeply of the elixir she had poured out for him. “Mr. High,” she commended, “here’s to your health and the Lord our God looking out for you and your kind.” She glanced at the back curtain. “You’ll find him through there.”
The curtain in front of Hays trembled ever so gently in some secret draft. He reached the heavy drapery, pushed it aside, and moved through it into a back room not so different from the front: several ordinary battered wood tables, dusty floor, dirty sawdust, two filthy windows, one half open, painted black. Three young men stood, one sat, inside the curtain, lounging. Hays knew them all for who they were. Standing: the bugger Tweeter Toohey, an adroit pickpocket despite him having one withered arm, and one withered leg; Pugsy
