In the Shadow of Gotham - By Stefanie Pintoff Page 0,12

her fertile imagination could invent.

“She had quite a tale to relate,” the mayor said, continuing to berate us for not notifying him. Because he had known the Wingates so well, he was personally offended, but his true concern involved how the public would react.

“This kind of news can cause widespread panic if we don’t handle it right,” he said. He rambled on in terms that ignored the loss of human life we had witnessed today; he was more concerned with how Dobson’s business community would react. If businesses were scared away, tax revenues would be lost. But once he finished saying his piece, he bid us good night. “I’ll be keeping a close eye on this one, men. I expect to see regular reports—and solid progress, mind you. We need this case solved straightaway.” He walked away with a confident step, as though his command alone could accomplish the task at hand.

Of course, I knew better. For every murder case I solved in the city, there were at least ten I didn’t. Merely wanting to solve a case wasn’t enough. And neither was political pressure. You also needed sufficient skill, intelligence, and more than your fair share of luck. But a man like Fuller—who was less concerned with the murder itself than he was with its political fallout—would never understand that.

“Did you have any thoughts about the locket?” I asked quietly after the mayor left, for I had asked Peter his opinion about the two miniature photographs it contained.

“I can make some inferences from these photographs,” Peter said, “though whether they’ll help you is another matter.”

“Go on,” I said. I certainly hoped something he had discovered would help, for the locket otherwise seemed a dead end. While Peter had developed our photographs in his darkroom, I had dusted the small locket for prints. I found none that were usable, unsurprising given how dirty the locket had been.

He pulled the locket photographs gingerly from his pocket and turned the two pictures toward us. “As to the type of print, though the photographs are small, I was able to determine that they are what we call Woodburytypes.”

Joe and I simply listened, knowing Peter would go on to explain what that meant.

“The Woodburytype is a process that reproduces a high-quality photograph and, to the untrained eye, may look exactly like a gelatin silver print. And both processes have much in common: This process is used when the photographer wants to produce a print that will last for years without any loss in quality. And it allows photographs to be enlarged with no loss of detail whatsoever.”

He sighed, closed the locket, and returned it to me.

“But the fact remains it is a Woodburytype—which for your purposes is significant in two respects. First, I would expect there to be other, much larger prints of these photographs in existence. Most photographs made with this process are large prints suitable for gluing into luxury albums. You wouldn’t normally choose a sophisticated development process like this if your only goal was to create small photographs.”

He paused a moment. “And second, because these photos are Woodburytypes, we know they were taken at least five years ago. The Woodburytype process was discontinued in 1900 because its cost had become too high. I myself stopped doing it even earlier.”

Joe breathed a soft, low whistle, as he settled back in his chair. “So she has known the man in the locket for at least five years—and yet her closest cousin could not identify him!”

“Looks that way,” Peter said.

I suspected I already knew the answer to my question, but I had to ask anyway. “Both photographs were taken at the same time, by the same photographer?”

“In my opinion they were,” he said, and his opinion was unequivocal. “You’ll notice the backdrop, the lighting, and even what I call the tone of each picture seems markedly similar. If they were taken in the New York area, it may be possible to locate the photographer, since the expensive nature of the process would necessarily limit the number of photographers offering it.”

Our conversation continued along these lines, exploring different possibilities, until we were interrupted by a commotion near the front of the bar. After a moment, I heard my name called. I hastened to join Mrs. O’Malley by the door, where a delivery boy waited with a telegram for me. He had attempted to come inside, but had been hindered by Mrs. O’Malley’s inflexible idea that boys should be at least sixteen years old before they