The Other Teddy Roosevelts Page 5
Second, he is trying to delude us into thinking he is illiterate. That letter of his is a masterpiece of misdirection—for if he is a doctor, or if he has even studied medicine for a year, how could his spelling, diction and penmanship be so indicative of a barely literate man?
Third, he must possess an intimate knowledge of White-chapel. The only time he was seen he eluded his pursuers, and being unseen the other times also implies familiarity with his surroundings.
Fourth, these murders must be planned in advance—a theory I have not shared with the police, because none of them would accept such a notion. But damn it, he had to know when and where he would kill each of his victims! Because if he didn’t, then how did he get fresh clothing, and without fresh clothing, how did this man, who must have been soaked in the blood of his victims, escape detection as he walked through the streets of Whitechapel on his way back to wherever he goes when his foul work is done? He must have had a clean set of clothes hidden within yards of his victim, and that implies premeditation.
Fifth, and this is the one that I cannot begin to answer: even though they have been alerted, even though they know the Ripper is lurking in the darkness, he is nonetheless able to approach his victims with complete impunity. Do they know him? Does he appear so wealthy that they feel it is worth the risk? What leads otherwise cautious women to allow this fiend to approach them? There has been no sign of a struggle at any of the murder scenes. No victim has tried to run from him.
Why?
Roosevelt pulled out his timepiece and opened it. It was 3:40 AM, and he realized that he had fallen asleep.
He looked at the letter, read it over, frowned, and began writing again.
Why? Why? Why?
Suddenly there was a pounding on his door.
“Theodore, wake up!” shouted Hughes. “He’s struck again! It’s the worst yet!”
***
Room #13, 26 Dorset Street, was a scene straight out of hell.
Marie Jeanette Kelly—or what remained of her—lay on a blood-soaked bed. Her throat has been slashed. Her abdomen was sliced open. Both her breasts were cut off. Her liver and entrails had been ripped out and placed between her feet. Flesh from her thighs and her breasts had been put on a nearby table. Her right hand was stuck in her belly.
“My God!” exclaimed Hughes, covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief.
“He was crazy to begin with, but this is past all imagining,” said another officer. “He didn’t cut her organs out, like the others. He reached in and pulled them out with his hands!”
“He had to be drenched in blood,” said Roosevelt. “Surely someone saw him, if not here, then walking the street, or trying to hide until he could change into a clean outfit.”
“Nobody saw a thing, sir,” said the officer.
“They had to!” exclaimed Roosevelt. “They couldn’t have missed him.” He frowned and muttered: “But why didn’t it register?”
Roosevelt paused, motionless—and then, slowly, a grin crossed the American’s face. The officer stared at him as if he might soon start running amuck.
The American turned and walked to the door.
“Where are you going, Theodore?” asked Hughes.
“Back to my room,” answered Roosevelt. “There’s nothing more to see here.”
“I’ll be seeing it in my nightmares for the next thirty years,” said Hughes grimly.
***
Roosevelt went to his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out his pistol, filled it with cartridges, and put it in the pocket of his buckskin coat.
Then he took his pen out, and added a few lines to the letter he had been writing to Edith. I curse my own blindness! I could have prevented this latest atrocity. I knew everything I had to know more than a month ago, but I didn’t put it together until tonight.
I am going out now, to make sure this fiend never kills again.
***
Roosevelt sat in the dark, his pistol on his lap, waiting.
Finally the knob turned, and a short, burly figure entered the room.
“Hello, Jack,” said Roosevelt, pointing his pistol at the figure.
“Jack? Who’s Jack?”
“We both know what I’m talking about,” said Roosevelt calmly.
“I just come back from helping poor Liza Willoughby!”
“No,” said Roosevelt, shaking his head. “You just got back from murdering Marie Jeanette Kelly.”
“You’re daft!”
“And you’re Jack the Ripper.”
“You’ve done lost your bloody mind!” yelled Irma the midwife, finally stepping out of the shadows.
“The Ripper had to live in Whitechapel,” said Roosevelt, never lowering the pistol. “He had to know the area intimately. Who knows it better than a woman who lives and works here and makes dozens of house calls every week?”
He watched her reaction, then continued.
“The Ripper had to have some knowledge of anatomy. Not much —but enough to know one organ from another. Your letter fooled me for awhile. I thought it was the misdirection, but I was wrong: you need no formal schooling for your work.” He paused. “Are you following me so far?”
She glared at him silently.
“There were two things that bothered me,” continued Roosevelt. “Why would these women let the Ripper approach them when they knew he was killing prostitutes in Whitechapel? They’d been warned repeatedly to watch out for strange men. But then I realized that you’re a trusted, even a necessary, member of the community. They were all looking for Jack, not Jane.
“The other thing I couldn’t figure out,” he said, “was how the Ripper could walk around in blood-spattered clothing without drawing everyone’s attention. I made the false assumption that the killer had picked the spots for his murders and hidden fresh clothing nearby.” Roosevelt grimaced. “I was wrong. Those murders were so deranged I should have known there couldn’t be anything premeditated about them. Then, when I was at Marie Kelly’s apartment tonight, I saw how you ripped out her intestines with your hands and I knew how much blood you had to have splashed on yourself, it occurred to me that I’ve never seen you when you weren’t wearing blood-stained clothes. After all, you do nothing all day but deliver babies and perform abortions; there’s nothing unusual about a midwife’s clothing being bloody.”
“So maybe a midwife killed all them women!” yelled Irma. “Do you know how many midwives there are in Whitechapel? Why pick on me?”
“That’s what’s been haunting me for six weeks,” answered Roosevelt. “I knew everything I had to know right after you killed Catherine Eddowes, and yet I couldn’t piece it together until I realized that a midwife was the likely killer. You made a major blunder, and it took me until tonight to realize what it was.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Irma, curiosity mingling with hatred on her chubby face.
“You told me you heard a woman scream, and then the Ripper knocked you over while he was escaping from the scene of the crime.”
“He did!” said Irma. “He come running out of the darkness and—”
“You’re lying,” said Roosevelt. “I should have known it immediately.”
“It’s God’s own truth!”
He shook his head. “I found you on the ground less than a minute after we heard Catherine Eddowes scream. The Ripper knocked you down just before I got there, right?”
“Yeah, right.”
Roosevelt grinned in triumph. “That’s what I missed. It would have taken the Ripper five minutes or more to disembowel poor Catherine and arrange her innards on the ground the way he did. Surely she couldn’t have screamed four minutes into that. She was dead before he started.” The grin vanished. “That was you screaming. What better way to escape from the scene of a murder than to have a solicitous policeman escort you to a hospital? If there were any contradictions in your statements, we would write it off to hysteria. After all, you’d just come face to face with Jack the Ripper.”
“Before we put an end to this, perhaps you’ll tell me why you did it?”
“I told you before,” said the midwife. “I honor the commandments. They broke ‘em all! They were all sinners, and God told me to rid the world of ‘em!”
“Did God tell you to disembowel them, too?” asked Roosevelt. “Or was that your own idea?”
Suddenly a butcher knife appeared in her hand. She held it above her head, screamed something unintelligible, and leaped toward him. Roosevelt never flinched. He kept the pistol trained on her and pulled the trigger.
She fell backward, a new red blotch appearing on the front of her blood-stained dress.
She tried to get up, and he fired once more. This time she lay still.
***
My Dearest Edith:
Please destroy this letter after you have read it.
I have faked the symptoms of the malaria I contracted some years ago on a trip to the Everglades, and have been relieved of my unofficial duties here. I will be put aboard the next ship to America (quite possibly on a stretcher if you can imagine that!) and within a very few days I will once again be able to hold you and the children in my arms. And I’m pleased to see that Harrison defeated that fool Cleveland without my help.
My work here is done. I would have preferred to arrest the fiend, but I was given no choice in the matter. Jack the Ripper is no more.
If I make that fact public, two things will happen. First, I will probably be arrested for murder. Second (and actually more important, for no jury would convict me once they have heard my story), Whitechapel will remain a blight upon the face of England. Whereas a conversation I had a few days ago has convinced me that as long as the British authorities think the madman is still at large, they might do something positive about eradicating Whitechapel’s intolerable conditions. If that is so, then it may actually be serendipitous that only I (and now you) know that the Ripper is dead.
At least I hope that is the outcome. One would like to think that if one’s life didn’t count for much, at least one’s death did—and if Whitechapel can either be cleansed or razed to the ground, then perhaps, just perhaps, these five unfortunate women did not die totally in vain.
Your Theodore
***
Theodore Roosevelt returned to London 22 years later, in 1910, on the way home from the year-long safari that followed his Presidency.
Whitechapel remained unchanged.
1897:
Two Hunters in Manhattan
This is my most recent Roosevelt story. It was written for Darrell Schweitzer’s original anthology The True History of Vampires, and the conceit was to have real historical characters interact with vampires at various times and places.
Well, when it comes to real historical characters my first choice is always Teddy Roosevelt, and if there was a vampire in Manhattan in the mid-1890s, he was just the man to deal with it, as he was the city’s Police Commissioner from 1895 to 1897.
***
Things had not been going well for New York’s Commissioner of Police. He’d started like a house afire, cleaning up most of the more obvious crime within a year—but then he came to a stone wall. He’d never before met a problem that he couldn’t overcome by the sheer force of his will, but although he had conquered the political world, the literary world, and what was left of the Wild West, Theodore Roosevelt had to admit that after making a good start, his efforts to conquer the criminal elements of his city had come to a dead halt.
He’d insisted that every policeman go armed. In their first three shoot-outs with wanted criminals, they’d killed two bystanders, wounded seven more, and totally missed their targets.
So he’d made target practice mandatory. When the city’s budget couldn’t accommodate the extra time required, almost a quarter of the force quit rather than practice for free.
He’d begun sleeping days and wandering the more dangerous areas by night—but everyone knew that Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t a man to miss what he was aiming at, or to run away when confronted by superior numbers, so they just melted away when word went out (and it always went out) that he was on the prowl.
1896 drew to a close, and he realized he wasn’t much closer to achieving his goal then he’d been at the end of 1895. He seriously considered resigning. After all, he and Edith had four children now, he had two books on the bestseller list, he’d been offered a post as Chief Naturalist at the American Museum, and he’d hardly been able to spend any time at his beloved Sagamore Hill since accepting the post as Commissioner. But every time he thought about it, his chin jutted forward, he inadvertently bared his teeth in a cross between a humorless smile and a snarl, and he knew that he wasn’t going anywhere until the job was done. Americans didn’t quit when things got rough; that was when they showed the courage and sense of purpose that differentiated them from Europeans.
But if he was to stay, he couldn’t continue to depend on his police force to do the job. Men were quitting every day, and many of the ones who stayed did so only because they knew a corrupt cop could make more money than an honest businessman.
There had to be a way to tame the city—and then one day it came to him. Who knew the criminal element better than anyone else? The criminals themselves. Who knew their haunts and their habits, their leaders and their hideouts? Same answer.
Then, on a Tuesday evening in January, he had two members of the most notorious gang brought to his office. They glared at him with open hostility when they arrived.
“You got no right to pull us in here,” said the taller of the two, a hard-looking man with a black eye-patch. “We didn’t do nothing.”
“No one said you did,” answered Roosevelt.
The shorter man, who had shaved his head bald—Roosevelt suspected it was to rid himself of lice or worse—looked around. “This ain’t no jail. What are we doing here?”
“I thought we might get to know each other better,” said Roosevelt.
“You gonna beat us and then put us in jail?” demanded Eye-Patch.
“Why would I do something like that?” said Roosevelt. He turned to the officers who had brought them in. “You can leave us now.”
“Are you sure, sir?” said one of them.
“Quite sure. Thank you for your efforts.”
The officers looked at each other, shrugged, and walked out, closing the door behind them.
“You men look thirsty,” said Roosevelt, producing a bottle and a pair of glasses from his desk drawer. “Why don’t you help yourselves?”
“That’s damned Christian of you, Mr. Roosevelt, sir,” said Baldy. He poured himself a drink, lifted it to his lips, then froze.
“It’s not poisoned,” said Roosevelt.
“Then you drink it first,” said Baldy.
“I don’t like to imbibe,” said Roosevelt, lifting the bottle to his lips and taking a swallow. “But I’ll have enough to convince you that it’s perfectly safe.”
Baldy stood back, just in case Roosevelt was about to collapse, and when the Commissioner remained standing and flashed him a toothy smile, he downed his drink, and Eye-Patch followed suit a moment later.
“That’s mighty good stuff, sir,” said Baldy.
“I’m glad you like it,” said Roosevelt.
“Maybe we was wrong about you,” continued Baldy. “Maybe you ain’t such a bad guy after all.” He poured himself another drink.
“You still ain’t told us what we’re here for,” said Eye- Patch. “You got to want something from us.”
“Just the pleasure of your company,” said Roosevelt. “I figure men who get to know each other are less likely to be enemies.”
“That suits me fine,” said Baldy. “You mind if I sit down?”
“That’s what chairs are for,” said Roosevelt. He picked up the bottle, walked over to each of them, and refilled their glasses.
“They say you spent some time out West as a cowboy, sir,” said Baldy. “Maybe you�
�d like to tell us about it. I ain’t never been west of the Hudson River.”
“I’d be happy to,” said Roosevelt. “But I wasn’t a cowboy. I was a rancher, and I hunted bear and elk and buffalo, and I spent some time as a lawman.”
“You ever run into Doc Holliday or Billy the Kid?” asked Eye- Patch.
Roosevelt shook his head. “No, I was in the Dakota Bad Lands and they were down in New Mexico and Arizona. But I did bring in three killers during the Winter of the Blue Snow.”
He spent the next half hour telling them the story and making sure that their glasses stayed full. When he was done he walked to the door and opened it.
“This was most enjoyable, gentlemen,” he said. “We must do it again very soon.”
“Suits me fine,” slurred Baldy. “You’re an okay guy, Mr. Roosevelt, sir.”
“That goes for me, too,” said Eye-Patch.
Roosevelt put an arm around each of them. “Anyone care for one last drink?”
Both men smiled happily at the mention of more liquor, and just then a man stepped into the doorway. There was a loud pop! and a blinding flash of light.
“What the hell was that?” asked Eye-Patch, blinking his one functioning eye furiously.
“Oh, just a friend. Pay him no attention.”
They had their final drink and staggered to the door.
“Boys,” said Roosevelt, “you’re in no condition to walk home, and I don’t have a horse and buggy at my disposal. I suggest you spend the night right here. You won’t be under arrest, your cell doors won’t be locked or even closed, and you can leave first thing in the morning or sooner if you feel up to it.”
“And you won’t lock us in or keep us if we want to leave?” said Eye-Patch.
“You have my word on it.”
“Well, they say you word is your bond…”
“I say we do it,” said Baldy. “If we don’t, I’m going to lay down and take a little nap right here.”
“I’ll summon a couple of men to take you to your quarters,” said Roosevelt. He stepped into the corridor outside his office, waved his hand, and a moment later the two men were led to a pair of cells. True to his word, Roosevelt insisted that the doors be kept open.