The Other Teddy Roosevelts by Mike Resnick

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.”
    She glared at him balefully.
    “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