Page 65 of If Looks Could Kill

A boardinghouse with no servants provides no coal. A boardinghouse with no cook provides no meals. A landlady with a suspected killer in the upstairs front bedroom develops a sudden deafness to the ringing of the service bell.

Around three p.m., the reporters start queueing. The doorbell starts ringing. From his cold and hungry room, Jack carefully pulls the curtain to one side for a covert glance.

The curtain’s movement does not go unnoticed. There they are, pointing upward. A knot of reporters clusters on the curb. They have the ink-smeared, jackal-like look of the men of the press the world over. A woman, even, scribbles in her notebook. Good God, is no place safe?

Not in this city, it seems. If he can give them the slip and make it to the train station, however, he can make his way upstate to his sister’s house in Waterloo, where he can rest up in secret until he’s ready.

A planet awaits him, and he needs just such a broad canvas for his next project.

The tantalizing idea reverberated through his dreams last night.

A live donor extraction. They should’ve let him serve as a surgeon during the war. Finally, he will get his chance.

His recipe for the elixir can be modified so that those phases requiring heat can be performed in advance, and the human tissues can be added afterward without cooking them. It might, he thinks, offer even more potency this way.

He is giddy with expectation. This will work. And the time is now.

Any action taken here could hang him, with the glaring eye of suspicion trained on him.

Americans are even less understanding of the cost high causes require.

So petty, so stubbornly democratic in clinging to their favorite delusion, that one life is worth as much as another—and, what’s more, the delusion that they actually believe it, when their daily deeds in the streets and in their courts prove anything but.

Give them a sensational killing, however, and suddenly the precious life of Miss Nothing will be blazoned across the headlines from coast to coast.

Even so, time is not on his side. He needs a cure now.

The doorbell rings. He hears the door open, and after a conversation, someone is admitted. One of the reporters likely posing as a boarder. He must put a stop to this.

He enters the corridor, pocketbook in hand, and peers down the stairwell to the lower landing. It’s a young girl, not even twenty. He hesitates. Beyond his view, blocked by the banisters, Mrs. McNamara regales her with instructions.

“Your day starts at five in the morning,” the landlady explains.

“You’ll need to start the stove, heat the wash water, fill the coal bins, empty the ashes, carry up the wash water to the guest rooms, then work with the cook—pray God we find one soon—on breakfast preparation.

Thank heaven you’re English. I had an applicant who couldn’t speak a word.

Just gabble, gabble, gabble in her foreign lingo.

Once you’ve served and cleared the trays, start turning over rooms. Dust, sweep, strip linens… ”

Is this new maid a reporter in disguise?

Possibly, but she’s so very young and so shy of manner, barely even returning her new mistress’s gaze.

She can hardly be one of these brazen “New Women” the papers go on about.

Her shabby clothing and self-effacing demeanor would be hard to fake.

Just one of the city’s hundreds of thousands of poor working girls.

Perhaps he can send her out on some errands. To a newsboy, for the latest papers; to a chemist, for some laudanum, to help him sleep later on. And best of all, to a pub—even that McKenna’s on the corner would do, the one the British detective favors—for food.

He hurries down the stairs. “Ah,” he says. “Mrs. McNamara.”

Like an Act of God, her husband appears in a doorway to supervise the encounter.

“Meet Pearl,” Mrs. McNamara tells Jack. “She’s answered our advertisement for help. I’ll just get her situated and suited up, then she’ll be along to see to you presently.”

He nods at the girl, who won’t even meet his gaze.

“I wonder,” he says, “if I might trouble Miss Pearl—and you, of course, Mrs. McNamara, if you’d be so good as to excuse her—to run some small errands for me?”

His landlady’s expression puckers. “I couldn’t possibly spare her. We’ve got a great deal of training to cover, and—”

He makes a show of opening his billfold, revealing a thick sheaf of bills there. “Some food, a newspaper, a bottle of wine. Perhaps something at the chemist’s,” he says casually. “I was hoping to make it worth her while.” He pauses for effect. “And yours, of course.”

Mrs. McNamara is no fool. “Take your pick of help chambers,” she tells the new girl. “Garret floor. I’ll just speak to my guest and be with you in a moment. Leave your coat on.”

The Pearl girl trips up the stairs nimbly enough. She seems strong, even; strong and lively, with a pleasing vitality. A nice bloom to the cheeks. Eyes bright, not that she lets you see them, and lips pink. She is perfect.

Not as a serving girl. As a philosopher’s stone.

Mrs. McNamara has been addressing him while his eyes followed Pearl.

“Funny thing,” she says. “It’s practically a bidding war out there, the way they’re jostling and queueing to have a look at you. Out the front. Out the back. Swarming like roaches.”

An apt description. Jack sighs and opens his billfold once more. “How much?”

He proffers a few bills to the landlady.

She declines to take them.

He offers more.

She waits.

“My God,” he mutters. “You’d think I’d booked myself at the Astor House.”

The husband, a man of few words, is also a man of few expressions, but he seems to register that his wife’s hospitality has been slighted. His pouchy eyes study Jack balefully.

“You can suit yourself, I’m sure,” says Mrs. McNamara airily. “And you can run your own errands if you please. Your legs work as well as anyone else’s, I daresay.”

He thrusts a fat clump of bills at her, taking care not to touch her aged skin. “Her first errand,” he mutters, “will be to my banker.”

He marches stiffly up the stairs, realizing that, as barbed retorts go, this one was rather lacking.

When they think he’s out of earshot, he hears them snort with contemptuous laughter.

He returns to his room and opens his metal tray of knives, polishing and sharpening and fidgeting with them and picturing where their carotid arteries are located until the new girl is ready for her marching orders.

Her very presence calms him, which can’t be said of any other female on the planet.

In his hour of need, she appeared.

She is a gift, a sign of divine approval. Proof that he need not trouble himself with second thoughts and qualms. God is in this endeavor. He needed a pure and healthy maiden, and heaven sent him one.

Pearl, then, is exactly what he deserves.