The Barrel Mystery
William Flynn
William J. Flynn
The Barrel Mystery
CHAPTER I
THE BARREL MURDER
Where the East River swims around the foot of Eleventh Street is an old abandoned wooden dock that looks more like the broken skeleton of a buried wreck than the thing it used to be. A covey of barges are huddled against the wharf opposite, and this wharf gradually becomes solid pavement where the lumber yard begins. It fronts the street with the most dilapidated board fence in Christendom made up of broken odds and ends covered with a crazy patchwork of corrugated iron scrap stained and rusted by the weather. If an old-time pirate – one of those romantic devils with scarred and battered features and a black patch over one eye – should suddenly peer at you through one of the many cracks in the splintered stockade you could not be very surprised; in fact, you would almost expect it to happen.
Farther up is a livery stable, a mere hole in a pile of bricks, once red now slavered over with white-wash once white. Outside is a man clipping the mane of a truck horse with its harness dragging in the filth. On the corner is a saloon, such as you find on the East Side, shouldering against the dry dock storage for live poultry with chorus of cackling inmates. On the corner opposite is a huge, green cheese of a building occupied by various small manufacturers. The third corner bulges with the huge cisterns of the gas works soiled and smeared with soot and fumes. The fourth corner has become historic. Every Secret Service man in the city knows what is on the Northwest corner of East Eleventh Street and Avenue D. They know the old, battered red brick walls that belong to the New York Mallet Works, walls that look as if they have been scarred by a fusillade of machine guns, walls with rusted chicken-wire netting before windows that are never cleaned except when the rain is drumming against them, walls that are broken by a huge portal closed by a worm-eaten, wooden gate quite in keeping with the whole thing. There is a ramshackle tenement next door with rooms for rent and shutters all drawn – shutters that were doubtless a shrill green once upon a time but now camouflaged by the blasts of blistering sun and cutting rains into a crazy-quilt of strange hues, shutters maimed and broken and dangling and just hanging together. The only open aperture in the weird and forbidden dwelling is the entrance, breathing filth and the sour odor of poverty. Crowding close to the tenement is an almost cavernous fodder and feed store, its broken, soiled windows half-hidden behind shattered boards and laths from which remnants of bill-posters, stained and ragged, flutter now and then. A heap of rubbish, garlanded with a jumble of rusty wire and battered tin cans, adorns the broken curb. A pair of cast-off baby shoes with buttons dangling are sailing on a pool of dirty water.
Desolate as the spot is it appeared even more so on the morning of April fourteenth, 1903, in the haze and the drizzling rain of an early hour. But Mrs. Frances Conners, an Irish woman, did not notice these things as she crossed the spot on her way to the bakeshop to get rolls for breakfast. She was used to the place. Wrapped up in the red sweater affected by East Side women and bending her head under her umbrella, she paid no attention to the very things that would have made a stranger pause and gaze. As she slipped across the corner, however, she noticed a barrel standing on the curb in front of the mallet works. That barrel was not there the day before. It was quite a big barrel, the kind they use for shipping sugar. Her feminine curiosity was aroused and she retraced her steps. In this instance curiosity revealed a deed that horrified the entire country, frightened the citizens of New York, and threw the Detective Bureau at Police Headquarters into a panic. The revelation also brought home to many people the disquieting realization that there were assassins in our midst that defied the efforts of our police to cope with them.
An overcoat was thrown over the top of the ba