What would it be like to live like this? Boys and men did it every day, swimming or stripping off their shirts if they were workmen. They never needed someone else to button them into their clothes, never needed someone to peel off their dresses like dead snakeskin. Their heads didn’t ache beneath straw nests heaped with plumes and fake flowers and entire dead birds. They didn’t have to pile their hair atop their heads like another hat, clamped in place by metal combs.

Men could shave their faces and even their heads as often as they pleased—twice a day in New York City, according to Max. They could shuck their clothes as easily as they shucked their jobs. Even a Negro man could do up his own clothes, except when he had to do up some white man’s first.

She started at the sound of voices—male voices, somewhere near the Lagoon—and quickly headed for the shack. Her exhilaration faded: All she wanted to do was sleep. All she wanted was to be back on the horsehair sofa in Lenore’s apartment with Abriana’s arms around her as they huddled beneath the scratchy wool blanket and their mother whispered at them to hush, she still had work to do, she couldn’t hear herself think why couldn’t they just…

“Pin!”

Her mother stood in the doorway, her face pale and eyes red, lips stained by the patent medicine she drank when she was restless. “Pin, where in God’s name were you? Are you—”

“I’m fine, Ma. I’m just fine,” Pin yelled, and pushed past her into the shack, so her mother wouldn’t see she was crying.

Chapter 61

Chapter 61

FRANCIS WAS RELIEVED to see that Gilda Belascu’s parents were no longer among the crowd inside the station house. He saw no sign of Cabell or any reporters. Thank God for small favors, he thought. Most of the Riverview force was there, along with at least a dozen men from Robey Street. At the desk, O’Connell looked up wearily.

“Bacon. Thought you went home.”

“I need to talk to Hickey.” O’Connell sighed and cocked a thumb toward Hickey’s office. “Are the girl’s parents with him?”

“Nope. Someone from St. Procopius came for them, that Bohemian church on the South Side. But the coroner’s in there—”

Francis thanked him and hurried down the hall, where several of Cabell’s men stood chatting in a cloud of cigar smoke.

“Sergeant Bacon,” one of them called. “How’s the freak show?”

Francis ignored him. He rapped at Hickey’s door, didn’t wait for a reply before entering. Hickey was slumped behind his desk, with Dr. Phipps, the Cook County coroner, seated across from him.

“Francis,” said Hickey, bleary eyed. Rusty stubble shaded his jaw; he appeared more haggard than Francis had ever seen him. “Why the hell are you here?”