“Are you with Jesus, Papa? Is there a heaven, is there a Jesus, who cares that you were murdered and I grew up without a father? Does he care that somewhere there is a mother crying for a dead Indian boy? Did anything you or Mama or I did matter in the least bit?”
She took a splinter from the wood box and set it alight, touched it to the kitchen table and kitchen curtains, moved to the parlor curtains, traveled on to the barn, where the animals were in their stalls for the night. Led the puzzled cows and horses to the field, climbed to the loft and set the hay on fire around her. Rufus, stumbling out of the house in his nightshirt, feet and hands singed, saw her outlined in the opening to the loft, flames riding up her long hair to form a halo around her face.
Note
I wrote this story for Larry Block’s 2019 anthology From Sea to Stormy Sea (Pegasus). I had originally imagined writing a trilogy about the families who make up my nonseries novel, Bleeding Kansas (Putnam, 2008). I wanted to trace them from their arrival in Kansas in the 1850s as antislavery emigrants to the current period; this story is part of the middle story. I still hope to write the beginning narrative.
Although this is a work of fiction and all the people named in here are imaginary, some things are based on fact. Haskell Institute, now the four-year Indian Nations college, was set up on the outskirts of Lawrence, Kansas, mostly to train young Indian men and women in the domestic arts. The town of Lawrence practiced unwritten segregation against members of Indian nations as well as against African-Americans.
As Will Garrison says, part of the land in the area was marshland, drained for farms as European settlers moved into the area in large numbers.
Modesty Police, sometimes called Modesty Censors, did patrol beaches around the country in the 1920s. They did fine women whom they judged were showing too much skin.
Murder at the Century of Progress
1
23 May 1933
Miss Charlotte Palmer
c/o Stevens Hotel, Chicago
Letter to Mrs. Ben (Chlotilde) Milder
The Vicarage, St Clement-sur-Mare
England
Now that we are finally arrived in Chicago I have leisure to write you a proper letter. My nephew may have been foolish enough to lose a fortune to a plausible rogue, but he is gentleman enough to know how to look after a dithery elderly woman. From the moment he met my train at Paddington until I was ensconced today in the Stevens Hotel, every attention that could be paid to my comfort was paid. He even had champagne waiting for me shipboard! And when I gave him a gentle scold for his extravagance, he reminded me that our American cousins still practice their absurd Prohibition and that it would be some time before I could partake of alcohol again. Of course, I do not drink aside from the occasional sherry, but even my respected father saw nothing amiss in a glass of champagne for women on very special occasions. On the dear Queen’s Golden Jubilee—well, that was long ago, and I was a foolish girl of eighteen, and those reminiscences are not the news you are hoping to read here.
We arrived only this morning, so I have had no time to look around me. At the station poor Eric could not make any of the porters understand him: the Oxford accent does not translate well in this city of immigrants. When I thought we might have to spend the entire day on the platform, a rude man from the second-class car shoved his way past us. I was about to utter a sharp rebuke when he obligingly carried all of our cases to a taxi! He disappeared before I could thank him. Although he was gruff in manner, I suppose one must label him a diamond in the rough.
How extraordinary that Eric should be your cousin on your mother’s aunt’s side, as well as my own sister’s grandson. Life is filled with these most curious coincidences, but I am frankly glad that I have an intimate at home with whom to share my dismay at our relation’s stupidity!
The city is in a great bustle with the World’s Fair about to open, certainly an ideal setting for a confidence artist. Whether the man who “fleeced” Eric (I believe that is the police term for taking someone’s money through a confidence trick) will be bold enough to show his face here, I cannot say. But Eric seems convinced such a man will want to “work” this exposition; he says a venue like this is irresistible to the confidence artist.
Miss Palmer did not add that she thought Eric had a letter that had persuaded him to come to the Century of Progress Exposition. Every time she brought up the matter, he patted his jacket where his leather pocketbook resided. Whenever she taxed him with why he thought his swindler would be in Chicago, he would laugh.
“Oh, Aunt Charlotte! You’re just as prim-seeming as Granny’s other sisters on the outside, but you’re very jolly underneath. Anyway, Chicago’s just a notion I took into my head.”
She had let it go, but she was convinced the man had either said something when Eric gambled away his father’s rubber plantation or had written her nephew subsequently to lure him to Chicago: Eric had been absolutely set on coming.
An indiscreet young man, even if quite charming, Eric must have told their plans to all the world and its wife. Miss Palmer thought back. When had she received her own extraordinary letter? After they had booked their tickets, not before; she was sure of that. For a brief, idiotic moment she thought she could return to the scenes of her youth, perhaps even—
Miss Palmer clipped off the thought and continued writing.
Meanwhile, it is a beautiful day, and our hotel overlooks the great lake of Michigan, which sparkles in the sunlight. I can also see the north end of the fairgrounds; indeed, your cousin has rented an entire suite for me. If I can persuade someone to make me a proper cup of tea, I will feel quite ready to start exploring. The city has changed a great deal in the forty years since I was last here.
Miss Palmer crossed out that last sentence and laid down her pen. The fatigue of her long journey was making her garrulous. It was one thing to act the dithering maiden lady in public—one of Sir Neville Burdock’s “old pussies,” as she’d overheard him call her—but quite another to start doing it in private.
She’d been twenty-three when she first saw the great White City on the Midway. She and Papa had traveled to Chicago on the cars from Arizona, where they’d left Mother to try the desert cure. A London specialist had recommended it for lung disorders, and Mother had come home two years later perfectly cured. During her own time in Chicago with Papa, he was tied up with some tedious business about railroad investments. As for her, for a few months she thought she had opened a new book on life, but it turned out to be a closed chapter.
Miss Palmer looked at the offending sentence. It was still quite legible behind the strong line she’d drawn over it. She would have to copy the whole letter again from the beginning. It would take a spill of ink to cover the line, and Mother would never have allowed her to send a letter with such an unsightly blot on it. Even in her seventh decade, Miss Palmer could not go against the teachings of that scrupulous educationist.
2
Race Williams, to himself
The Twentieth Century Limited blows me into Union Station at 2.08 on the dot. I pick up my hat and my overnighter from the rack and saunter off the train, only to find my way blocked by an old lady with enough luggage to sink the Titanic. She has a young whippersnapper with her who’s trying to grab a porter. I oblige just so the rest of us poor saps can get moving. The old dame thanks me with so many words you might have thought she was writing a dictionary. They don’t know me in Chicago yet, but anyone in New York could tell you Race Williams don’t have a heart, or manners either.
Compared to Gotham, this burg is strictly a small potato, but you see the same guys lying on park benches and the same pathetic fools trying to cadge two bits for dope. They’re about to open a World’s Fair here that they’re calling “A Century of Progress.” We’re like a bunch of apes walking backward into the sea, and they want the mugs to believe we’re in a century of progress! There’s thirty bucks trying to keep each other warm in my wallet, and they’re all that’s separating me
from the boys on the corners with their cans full of pencils, so I walk across town until I find a place on Harrison Street where I can flop for a couple of bucks a night. It was those thirty slender dollars that persuaded me to leave the great city on the ocean for the small pretender by the lake.
If you’re from west of the Hudson, you may not know the name Race Williams—may not know I’m the first and the best of the private investigators. Still, I hesitated when a gent calling himself Lionel Maitland waltzed into my office on Monday telling me he wanted to nail Jimmy “Red Dog” Glazer.
Now, Red Dog never did anyone a day’s harm that didn’t have money to lose. He’s not the kind of guy who’d as soon plug you as look at you, and taking things altogether, I’d just as soon go after the uglier customers. Your true hoods are in oversupply, to use the economists’ lingo, and there’s no demand for them, whereas a skilled con artist is doing a hard day’s work and getting paid for it. But I’d had to swallow my pride. My last thirty were limiting my options.
So this Maitland comes in, very British, down to the cane, the gloves, the thin mustache and of course the accent. But he sees he’s dealing with a professional, and he don’t try any tricks on me. He just tells me that Red Dog bilked him of five million in a phony bottling scheme, and if he don’t get it back, well, he’ll have to sell off the ancestral home. Which would make his ancestors rise from their graves and haunt him, I suppose. Anyway, he had enough left to buy me a ticket to Chicago, enough left to promise me a thousand when I spot the Dog, and twenty if I get the dough back. And he thinks Red Dog will turn up at the Fair—partly because it’s filled with mugs and partly because Chicago’s Red Dog’s hometown.
It was my hometown, too, once upon a time, if you can call that orphanage down on Cottage Grove a home. I had hoped never to see this dim-bulb burg again after I hightailed it to the great city in 1907, but here I am—a fish out of water, so to speak.
3
4 June 1933
Miss Charlotte Palmer
c/o Stevens Hotel, Chicago
Letter to Mrs. Ben (Chlotilde) Milder
The Vicarage, St Clement-sur-Mare
England
We have been in a positive whirlwind of activity since the opening of the Fair last Saturday. Our second night, Eric struck up acquaintance with a compatriot, a Colonel Townsend, who is here with the British Industrial Council. We all had dinner together after the formal opening, but I am not entirely at ease with this new acquaintance. Colonel Townsend reminds me of Major Thorndike, who settled in St Clement-sur-Mare shortly before the Great War and persuaded poor Arnold Huxtable to open that garage with all his mother’s savings. When Arnold discovered he had been defrauded, Thorndike broke Arnold’s shoulder by flinging him from the roof of the garage. I always thought Thorndike meant to murder Arnold to keep him from talking, and I could only be happy that the police were on hand.
Now I can’t help wondering why this Colonel Townsend has so much time to spend in bars with young men like Eric. The two of them have derived vast amounts of fun from watching the celebrated fan dancer Sally Rand appear from her boat as Lady Godiva every night.
By the way, I have had several conversations with this young woman, and despite the risqué nature of her entertainment, I believe Miss Rand is actually a highly moral creature—and one with more brains than most of the men around her.
Of course, because of Prohibition, the Stevens Hotel does not have a bar, so the gentlemen retire to other parts of town where they can imbibe in private. Eric and Colonel Townsend have been joined by several Americans, including the man who was so kind as to help us with our luggage when we arrived. They play a game called poker, at which I fear my nephew has his usual ill luck.
Since ladies do not frequent such places—called speakeasies—you may be wondering how I have acquired such knowledge. It comes from the Negro woman who cleans my room. We fell into conversation the day after the Fair opened when I asked if she had attended the ceremonies.
“No, ma’am. That place is for white people, not Negroes.”
“Excuse me, my dear, but surely in the North there are no laws forbidding members of your race to enter public places?”
She continued dusting the furniture without speaking for a moment or two, then said in a cold, clipped voice, “How many jobs do you think that Fair has brought the out-of-work Negro in this city? If I told you seventy-five out of the many thousands working there, would you think it was because no Negro applied for work?”
When I didn’t answer she said, “I haven’t been there, nor will I go.” Noting the bitterness in her tone, I left her alone to clean the room.
After leaving my room, I rode the bus over to the fairgrounds. It had not struck me before that in this city of many million people, with many hundreds of thousands of African descent, how few were at the fairgrounds. Indeed, the only ones I saw were employed as janitors in the public lavatories.
My eyes have since been opened to many injustices here. No Negroes may stay as guests in this fine hotel or eat in any of its restaurants. Nor are they allowed to shop at Chicago’s most magnificent store, Marshall Field’s.
The list goes on, but to return to matters of more moment to you: when the maid saw I was sympathetic to the plight of her people, she came to warn me of the bad company my nephew has fallen into. Her uncle, it seems, plays poker at the same speakeasy Eric frequents and has talked to her of the gullible young Englishman who seems a prey for any passing card shark, to use her uncle’s term.
I tried to remonstrate with Eric, but he only laughed at me. He comes in very late now and sleeps until noon. When he gets up, he does not look refreshed. But when I suggest that we go home to England, he protests vehemently and says not until he has found the man who robbed him of his inheritance!
I can’t help worrying that Eric may be compounding his problems by associating with Mr. Williams—for such is the name of our “diamond in the rough”—and another American named Mr. Redmond, who has lately joined them. Mr. Redmond represents a South American mining company and is in Chicago to find investors among the wealthy attending the Fair. Our diamond in the rough, however, reminds me of someone . . .
The memory was elusive. Miss Palmer stared sightlessly out the window at the light dancing on the lake as she tried to capture the fugitive resemblance. When it came, she gasped softly. She stared at the paper, then picked up her pen again and quickly continued:
. . . but not anyone who would be known to you in St Clement-sur-Mare.
Well, Mr. Redmond has offered to take me to church with him this morning, although I fear the sermon will not be as interesting as those I am accustomed to hearing from your dear husband.
Miss Palmer signed the letter and took it with her to the hotel’s front desk. She had selected a number of gauzy scarves to drape around her neck and shoulders, which, with the wide brimmed hat, should keep the worst of the sun from scorching her. The cool weather of her first week in the city had suddenly changed to a stifling damp heat that she had never known at home. Dear Mother had suffered greatly from sunburn while she took the desert cure.
After their return to England those forty years ago, Miss Palmer had never been able to submit to her mother’s parental authority again. When her father died, she and Mother had lived as uneasy strangers in the house in St Clement-sur-Mare, attending divine service together twice every Sunday and again on Wednesdays. Everyone said what a devoted daughter Miss Palmer remained, as twenty turned to thirty, then somehow to forty-four, and she spent middle age nursing wounded men sent back to the village from the trenches.
But a deeper, more complicated feeling tied Charlotte Palmer to her mother. Anger and resentment, yes—but it was a vindictive desire to prove she could be more upright, more thoroughly moral than Mrs. Palmer that had given them twenty-five exhausting years together and had taught Miss Palmer that even in a small village, the pond’s surface hides more than it reveals.
Mr. Redmond thought she seemed
a little fragile and was concerned about her walking more than a mile to divine worship, but the air, humid though it was, seemed to do her good. It happened to be Whitsunday, and Miss Palmer was struck by the Collect, with its prayer “to have a right judgment in all things and evermore rejoice in the Spirit’s Holy Comfort.” Only God, of course, had a right judgment in all things, but surely, if she avoided the sin of pride, she might find her reason properly guided.
On the way back to the hotel, she was willing to let Mr. Redmond hail a cab. “Too much mortification of the flesh is as bad as not enough,” she commented.
“I’m glad you think like that, Miss Palmer. Young Master Eric would be mighty upset if you gave up your beautiful suite in the Stevens to stay in a lesser hotel. He’s a relation, I take it?”
“My sister’s grandson, Mr. Redmond, and my own godson, which makes me feel a special interest in his welfare.”
Redmond eyed the fluttering scarves thoughtfully. “I only wondered, ma’am, because—well, not to put it too bluntly. I shouldn’t like to think he was guiding your investments.”
“Investments! Now you are asking me to speak of finance, Mr. Redmond, and my dear father held that women’s brains could not encompass such a subject. I must say I am inclined to agree, although when one sees the sad squandering of family fortunes on the most injudicious investments, one cannot help asking whether the male brain is always suited for such deep subjects, either. Dear Eric . . . he is so impulsive. You will think this is most foolish, perhaps insulting to a young man of twenty-four, but he cannot sign any documents abroad without my co-signature. Still, it might keep him from pursuing some foolish-sounding venture to begin with, because of course it would be beyond me to unravel it.”
Love & Other Crimes Page 19