The Other Teddy Roosevelts by Mike Resnick Read Free Book Online Page B

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