Madman: A Diamond and Doran Mystery Read online

  A head poked around the tall oak door and a timid flunky cleared his throat. “Inspector Bonfield would like a moment, sir.”

  Harkness held up a staying finger and turned to Flanagan. “You’d better bolt. The door over there leads out into the anti-room. We don’t want Bonfield asking awkward questions if he sees you come out of here. You can get back to the party from there once this door closes and he is safely inside.”

  Flanagan nodded and headed through the indicated exit. Once on the other side he stopped and put his ear to the door.

  From behind the first apartment door he knocked, Diamond heard coughing followed by hissed warnings in a language he couldn’t make out, but the urgency of the words made it clear that whoever was inside the apartment was scared to open their door to him. Diamond pounded on the shabby door again. “This is the police. Open up.”

  The door opened a crack, sending a foul odour onto the landing and revealing the face of a small child. “We don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no one in this buildin’.” The filthy boy aged about six or seven years old in Diamond’s estimation, made to close the door.

  Diamond put his foot just inside the threshold and pushed gently until he could see inside. “Can I talk to your grandfather there?” he asked, indicating an old man huddled in the corner of the dingy room wrapped in what looked like rags.

  The boy shook his head, “He don’t speak English, only me; I’m the only one. We don’t know nothin’.”

  Diamond let the boy close the apartment door.

  At door after door on the two landings he canvassed Diamond was confronted with the same suspicion and language barriers. He snapped his notebook shut.

  With a sigh of frustration he went to find his colleague.

  Callaghan hadn’t fared much better. By the time they had trudged from top to bottom of the tenement he and Diamond had battled to understand practically every European version of broken English, in some cases no English at all, to gather fewer than a half dozen statements between them.

  At the last apartment in the corner of the Metzgers’ landing Diamond tried one last time. “Can I ask you some questions about the apartment over there?”

  The tiny woman peering from the crack of open doorway looked terrified.

  “Just a couple of questions?” Diamond coaxed.

  The woman shook her head and slammed the door in Diamond’s face before he could work the toe of his boot into the gap. “Damn.”

  Diamond and Callaghan trudged back to the Metzger apartment and saw the body still lying in the middle of the floor, covered by a dirty sheet.

  The victim’s husband sat crumpled and defeated in a shabby chair in one corner of the cramped room.

  A sombre Doran interrogated his constables. “What have you two apologies for policemen found out? Did you get anything useful, Pansy?”

  Callaghan opened his mouth to speak, but Diamond took a step forward. “Constable Callaghan suggested we split up to canvass the whole building quicker, sir. So we at least have a handful of statements between us.”

  Callaghan sucked in his breath and stared at his boots.

  Doran pursed his lips, his face flushed red. A low growl rumbled from deep within his barrel chest, expanding it further. Through gritted teeth he hissed at Diamond, “When I ask the organ grinder a question I do not expect to get a response from his monkey. But as you are so eager to do the organ grinder’s work for him, you will go back to the station and write up all the statements the two of you eejits have taken and have them ready for me by first light. Am I clear?”

  Diamond blinked and took a step back. It was his turn to stare at his boots. “Clear, sir.”

  “Did you get anything useful at least?”

  Callaghan and Diamond looked blankly at one another.

  Doran, his pallor returning to something like normal, spat orders at Diamond. “Get back to the station and don’t dawdle, there’s still a full shift of work to get through.” Diamond, turning to run down the creaking tenement stairs, heard Doran bark at Callaghan, “Get a damned good description of his son from the victim’s husband, or there will be hell to pay, Pansy.”

  At his listening post in the anteroom beside Mayor Harrison’s study Lieutenant Danny Flanagan heard the chair he had just vacated being scraped along the oak floorboards. He pressed his ear closer to the slit in the interconnecting door.

  “I expected the mayor,” Inspector Bonfield’s tone was icy, “not the hired help.”

  Harkness tented his fingers and cocked his head to one side, a self-satisfied smile settling on his wet lips. “Good help is hard to find.”

  Bonfield flashed, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Harkness was warming to his task and leaned forward, rubbing his hands together like a hangman preparing to pull the lever. “Harrison expected you to follow his orders.” Bonfield opened his mouth to respond, but Harkness raised a silencing finger. “Harrison specifically told you to hold your men in check until he had left the square and the meeting was done.”

  “He wanted me to uphold the law.” Bonfield snapped.

  “He wanted you to keep the peace. And the fact that you can’t seem to appreciate the difference is what led to the debacle at Haymarket!” Harkness banged the desk to add authority to his point. Slyly he added in a tone of mock horror, “Why the mayor could have been assassinated last night because of your incompetence.”

  Bonfield wasn’t intimidated. “Listen to me you jumped up little office boy, while Harrison was making pals of every piece of lowlife scum that packed that square, my men were ready to lay down their lives, to save his anarchist loving ass. But for my men, he would be lying in a granite mausoleum somewhere, and you would be back out in the gutter where you belong!” Bonfield shoved back his chair and stood up.

  “Before you go,” Harkness smirked, “you should know that Harrison intends to toss you into the gutter as soon as it is expedient. His next election can’t be won while there are wild cards loose on the force.” Harkness flicked his tongue over his already moist lips. “That’s a direct quote by the way. You might want to hawk yourself around a few pool halls and gambling dens to see if they are hiring fresh muscle.”

  Bonfield launched himself across the desk, but Harkness was already making his exit. Flanagan barely had time to clear it before he heard Harkness opening the anteroom door. Flashing a huge smile at a surprised alderman in the hallway, Flanagan marched briskly out of the mayor’s mansion and headed back to Randolph Street to digest the dressing down he had just spied upon.

  It had been a long night. Diamond sat at his desk trying to create a report from the meagre information he and Jerry Callaghan had been grudgingly given by the Carville Street tenants. His army service had led him to foreign lands and to pick up some of the languages he came across, but none of his service had helped him at the tenement. He had felt foolish at his inability to communicate and he didn’t like that feeling. The tenants who opened their doors to him did so reluctantly. Once he had them face to face it was a struggle to make them understand that he wasn’t there to haul them off to jail, only to ask if they knew the victim or anything at all that could shed light on her murder. The languages they spoke were as foreign to his ear as his purpose was to their imagination. He decided he would find someone to teach him a few words in as many languages as he had heard at Carville Street.

  Chapter Two

  Thursday May 6 1886

  Just before dawn broke Diamond put the final sentence to the scant facts he and Callaghan had gleaned from their canvas interviews the previous night. He dropped the reports onto Doran’s empty desk and stretched. His hand brushed against his tunic pocket and Diamond felt the wad of balled up paper he had scooped up at the Carville Street apartment the night before. Curious, he pulled out the wad of paper and smoothed it open on his desk. He read the cramped writing on it twice before he grasped its meaning. He looked around the booking hall for Doran, but the sergeant was still not back from making enquiries
. Sergeant Nolan was busy briefing another shift and Callaghan was tied up with the police artist. Diamond hesitated then made his decision.

  Flanagan waved Diamond in when he tentatively tapped on the glass panel of his lieutenant’s office door. A woollen blanket crumpled on the office couch indicated Flanagan had spent the night there. Diamond had only met Flanagan once since he applied for a detective post, but was glad of the move to Station House Number Two, and the chance of potential advancement working homicide cases might bring him. He pulled out the chair Flanagan indicated and sat down, still clutching the crumpled Carville Street note.

  Flanagan’s unexpectedly welcoming attitude pre-empted Diamond’s reason for the meeting. “I was just discussing you with the mayor, and he thinks,” Flanagan corrected himself; “we think that you have special qualities.” Diamond made to protest but Flanagan was in full flight. “When I showed Mayor Harrison the letter your commanding officer sent me about you wanting a transfer to the Bureau of Detectives he was most impressed, especially with that business in the desert.” Flanagan shook his head, “Remarkable, remarkable. That’s the kind of courage we want to foster here at Chicago P. D. We want to make you a full detective right away.”

  Diamond closed his eyes, trying to suppress the panic rising within him. He hunched his shoulders in anticipation of the pain, the smell of burning flesh strong in his nostrils. He could feel the heat on his back as he sat in Flanagan’s office.

  Oblivious to his new detective’s discomfort the lieutenant blustered on. “You’ll be working under Sergeant Doran of course, but with the caveat that, as Doran is, shall we say, not as open to the newest ideas and techniques as we modern men are, he need not be included in every aspect of any given case, if you feel a direct report to me would be more,” Flanagan searched for the exact word he wanted, “effective.” He beamed at Diamond. “Am I making myself plain?”

  Diamond snapped back into the moment, unsure of exactly what point Flanagan was attempting to make plain. Still clutching the paper he had found at Carville Street, Diamond struggled to give a response. Flanagan saved him the trouble by pointing to the paper. “What have you there?” In light of what had just passed between them Diamond handed the sheet over to Flanagan and let him read it for himself. When he had finished the lieutenant shook his head and looked up at Diamond. “What does it mean?”

  “I’m not sure, sir.” Diamond shrugged.

  Flanagan laid the paper on his desk. “Where did you get it?”

  “I found it at the Carville Street tenement crime scene. I tried to pass it to the sergeant last night, but he was preoccupied. I put it in my pocket without fully looking at it and forgot it until this morning.”

  “Do we know who wrote it?”

  “No sir, but it was in the apartment doorway. I was working on the thought that perhaps the victim wrote it?”

  “Why? Why would she do such a thing?” Flanagan was pacing the office.

  Diamond cleared his throat and sat up straight in his chair. “I think it was intended to warn us about the Haymarket bombing.”

  Flanagan stopped pacing and grunted. “Maybe, maybe not. So Doran hasn’t seen it?”

  “No sir, not yet. He isn’t back from making enquiries or I would have shown it to him.”

  Flanagan hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. “Best leave it with me.”

  Diamond hesitated, then offered, “I wondered if it might be the motive for the attack on the victim. Anarchists afraid they were about to be exposed maybe?”

  Flanagan scratched the stubble on his unshaven chin. “Perhaps. But until we can establish a link between this case and any anarchist activity let’s keep this between us. Doran is very close to this bombing. Dammit if we all are. We lost a lot of men to that bloody bomb on Tuesday night and God knows how many more to the melee that followed it. Christ if that wasn’t a foul night’s work.”

  Both men sat in silence for a moment; Flanagan brooding over the damage to his station and the potential ruin of his reputation if he should fail to make arrests, while Diamond sat uncomfortably wrestling with the realisation he had somehow been granted an undeserved reward for reasons that were nothing to do with him, as he had been once before. The silence was broken by a sharp rap on the glass of the office door. Doran was glaring at Diamond. Flanagan turned the crumpled sheet of paper Diamond had given him face down on his desk and with a single motion dismissed Diamond and beckoned Doran to enter, saying to Diamond as he did so, “Lose the uniform tomorrow, Detective.”

  Diamond nodded and got up to leave. He could feel Doran’s rage through his uniform as the two brushed close enough to touch sleeves.

  In the crowded booking hall Callaghan sat at Diamond’s desk flicking through the copies of wanted posters he had just picked up from the printers. He looked up and grinned when he saw his new friend coming towards him, grim faced. “You look like you swallowed a brick. Why the long face?”

  Diamond shook his head. “It’s nothing.”

  “All right then. Did you enjoy all that writing? Can’t say I ever enjoyed writing out reports meself, but what with you being so generous and all last night, stepping up to volunteer, I guess it doesn’t matter.” Callaghan was still grinning.

  Diamond changed the subject. “What were you doing with the artist?”

  “Giving as good a description of the Metzger boy as his dar gave me, which is to say not much. The man was coiled tight as a watch spring.” Callaghan indicated the pile of wanted posters. “I couldn’t get but half a dozen words out of him, and then as I was leaving I saw him crawling over every corner of the place turning things out and over. You’d have thought when the morgue crew had just been to carry off his late missus’s remains he would have been wanting to rest or sleep or something, but there he was turning the place over, as though he had lost his last nickel.”

  Diamond leaned closer to Callaghan, “What do you think he was looking for?”

  Callaghan shook his head. “Damned if I know. Anyhow, I should be getting moving. Nolan is giving me the evil eye. I’m supposed to be distributing these missing posters from the printer now they’re done. Then I’m off to my bed.”

  Callaghan left to hand out his posters while Diamond waited for Doran to return. He slumped in his chair thinking over Metzger’s strange behaviour.

  If the victim did write the note, was that what Metzger was so anxious to find, or did Metzger write it himself? If so why?

  Diamond turned over the thought that perhaps Metzger was afraid the Haymarket bomber would find out about it and come for him next.

  Flanagan took the reports Doran offered, motioning for the sergeant to take a seat. The lieutenant leaned back in his chair. Neither man mentioned Diamond.

  “So what do you think, Billy?”

  Doran mopped the sweat from his face and the band of his derby with a scarlet handkerchief. “I tell ya Danny, I never saw such a thing before in my twenty years of policing this town.”

  “Could it be a simple robbery?”

  Doran considered for a moment then shook his head. “I doubt it was a robbery in that shite hole, but the whole thing seemed odd somehow. I can't explain it any better than that. The victim’s husband says he came home when a neighbour fetched him back from work. There’s a son missing. The father says the boy is violent. I have the rookie’s reports there, but no statements indicate anything about the boy or any violent behaviour he might be part of. Maybe there is something in it. We’ll look into it some more.”

  “Did you find a weapon of any kind?”

  “Not yet.”

  Flanagan sniffed. “Diamond thinks it might be anarchists’ work.”

  Doran’s broad, flushed face registered a scowl. “He does, does he?”

  Flanagan snapped shut the report folders, handing them back to Doran. “If this is anarchists we don't want the killers of our own boys getting away. Mayor Harrison wants this thing cleared up soon, Billy. Let’s not disappoint him.”

&nb
sp; “And the rookie?”

  “He’s your detective constable now.”

  Diamond was at his desk when Doran thundered back into the booking hall from his interview with Flanagan. Grabbing the taller man by the shoulders, Doran shoved the rookie backwards until he was hard up against the back wall of the hall. The sergeant pressed his face close enough for Diamond to see red veins forming in the whites of Doran’s eyes. Every other officer in the crowded hall fell silent, closely scrutinising the notebooks and folders in front of them. Behind the booking desk Sergeant Nolan busied himself with filing.

  “Listen to me you little gobshite, don't put ideas in Flanagan’s head before they should be there. This is my investigation, my rules and they’ll be no rushin’ to judgement without solid bloody evidence.”

  Diamond’s face reddened. “I only told him I thought --.”

  Doran cut him off, squeezing a thick forearm harder against Diamond’s throat. “It might be anarchists that killed our victim from last night. They could have kidnapped the boy too.”

  The tension in the booking hall was palpable.

  Doran’s forearm against the rookie’s throat was choking him. Doran spat the words now. “Until we know what went on at that charnel house last night we don’t make stupid guesses. And the next time you are asked for your opinion by the lieutenant you will shut your gob and refer him to me. Are we clear?”

  Diamond gasped out a strangled, “Sir.”

  “Then watch yourself, English; you’ve no idea what you’re messin’ with.” Doran released his grip and turned on his heel. Kicking a chair out of his way, he stomped out of the station, leaving a shaken Diamond behind him.

  The murmur of voices rose in the booking hall as constables resumed their animated conversations.

  Diamond could hardly breathe. He righted the upturned chair and stumbled back to his desk, aware he was being stared at. He turned on his fellow officers. “What?”