By the time Howe completed Mrs. Edwards’s examination, he had completely remade her. What the jury now saw was a crusader who had been active in the temperance cause, as well as Henry Bergh’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows, and the Society for Supporting the Gospel Among the Poor of the City of New York.
The assistant district attorney handled this paragon of virtue with care. He asked Mrs. Edwards if she had a license for her activities, and, when she snapped that dogcatchers didn’t have licenses either, he tried another tack.
“The anarchist Emma Goldman doesn’t have a license to kill judges. Do you think society has no right to restrain her?”
Edwards wasn’t at all intimidated. “Are you saying you don’t know the difference between a cat and a judge?”
In despair, Williams let her step down.
During a break in the proceedings, Max and Biddle strolled outside for cigars.
“That’s a lot of societies,” Max said, blowing sun-shot snakes of smoke.
“I have my own society,” Biddle said, “and the way you’re going, you’ll get in.”
“I’ll bite.”
“I call it the Society for the Suppression of Benevolence.”
“I like it. I suspect there are dues.”
“Not at all. We’re all volunteers, like our counterparts in the morality dodge. Of course, we have to work for our crust.”
Biddle showed his long yellow teeth. In the sunshine, his face also took on a yellow cast. Max feared that the old reporter’s visage, with its dry, transparent skin, might suddenly tear like old paper.
His thoughts drifted back to the trial. While he had the chance, he peppered Biddle with questions. “Isn’t Howe endangering his own people?”
“How so?”
“Well, isn’t he exposing where his friends in the skin trade are doing business?”
“We’ll see, but I doubt it. He’ll avoid specifics. There are two words I predict will never pass his lips: ‘police’ and ‘Tammany’ Willy will be outraged, but he won’t go overboard. You’re just starting out; you may not see the beauty of it, but you’re witnessing something unprecedented.” Biddle said, lowering his voice out of respect. “It’s the perfect unholy alliance.”
The Reverend Weems turned out to be a clean-shaven man who looked too young for the pulpit. When he smiled, he exhibited a set of rabbit teeth; and he smiled often, a disconcerting habit for a man of the cloth. Three carefully arranged strands of black hair curled down over his high, prematurely bald forehead.
Howe began leading his character witness through his paces. “Reverend Weems, your cousin Mrs. Edwards has assisted you at the Society for the Suppression of Vice?”
“Yes, she’s gathered information for us during the course of her work.”
“Gathered information?” he asked in mock surprise. He paused, waiting for this revelation to sink in. The church itself sanctioned Mrs. Edwards’s work. “How exactly did she do this?”
“At night, when she saw vile resorts doing business, she left cats there to brand them.” The Reverend Weems grew solemn. “The city is swarming with these establishments, and we must do our best to discourage them.”
“Ahh…. So the Midnight Band of Mercy points the way for you to do your good work?”
“Yes. They have been a great help.” Weems’s tic of a smile broke out again.
“How did they accomplish this?”
“When they have the opportunity, they line the cats up with their tails pointing in the right direction. If they can make out an address, they inform us, but it is often impossible in the dark. And these panderers often tear the numbers right off their own buildings. We come by in the morning and knock on their doors.”
“Until you identify these despicable enterprises?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you find inside?”
“The purveyors try to hide them, of course, but we find young girls in there. Children forced into white slavery. Some are as young as ten or eleven years old.”
A subdued, nervous chattering swept the courtroom.
In a rush, Max recalled another one of Mrs. Jabonne’s young charges. He’d met her the previous year, but he could still hear her childish prattling, he could still see her sickly skin, her flat chest, he could still feel the hard knot in his stomach. When she had demonstrated her casual knowledge of sexual mechanics, he had fled. To his shock, he couldn’t help sympathizing with Weems.
Did Biddle have it all wrong? Was Max’s own instinctive distaste for goo-goos misguided? Was he harboring blue-nosed impulses himself? Was the shadow world within, as well as all around? Was there a place where paradox became Natural Law? Evanescent contradictions drifted just out of his grasp.
Howe turned and with a stern glance silenced the crowd. “Some of us have innocent children of that age. Then he asked the witness, “After you locate one of these houses of ill fame, what do you do?”
Weems didn’t bother to hide his glee. “We add it to our map.”
The court fell dead silent. Howe turned and scanned the onlookers’ anxious faces one by one. Beneath the tense quiet, Max sensed a collective terror rising.
Now the lawyer let his voice boom out. “You have a map of the city’s brothels?”
“And, now, so does Willy,” Nick pointed out.
“Yes. So far it includes three hundred and ten houses.”
“And what do you do with this map?”
“We show it to Mr. Comstock.”
Now the dam burst, voices rising against the Reverend Weems’s indecent snooping.
“Who gets your end wet, mister?” an onlooker shouted.
Hisses and catcalls rained down on the minister, who alternated a stony expression with spasmodic grins. Now Max, who moments before had felt surprisingly warm toward Weems, was brimming with disgust.
“You shake down the girls too?” another outraged citizen called out.
“Gets his gash for nothing. That’s what!”
Hisses and catcalls rose in a cracked chorus. Weems couldn’t seem to control his tic-like smirk. What an ally—Postal Inspector Comstock, who used a telescope to spy on the Academy of Music’s French Ball? The same Mr. Comstock who wanted to dress Greek statues and who bragged about how many tons of erotic literature and racy postcards he had burned as United States Government Special Agent?
Wasn’t he also the Comstock whom William H. Howe had previously dismantled in the Victoria Woodhull case? Comstock and E[owe on the same side? There were no sides. What did a world without sides look like?
“The Midnight Band was particularly helpful because they often visited undesirable neighborhoods?” Howe prodded Weems.
“Yes, and they went out after dark to pursue their charitable business. Evidently, the lechery trade is doing quite well. Most of our poor city’s deviants are conceived in these brothels.”
The district attorney bolted to his feet. “Objection! With all due respect, the Reverend Weems has no standing in this field.” He paused to ripples of laughter. “Unless he’s made an intimate study of the problem.”
“Peepin’s his profession!” an anonymous voice called out.
Judge Thompson slammed his gavel down, bringing the crowd to heel. “Yes, what is the witness’s expertise, Mr. Howe?”
Howe offered a ceremonious bow. “Yes, of course. I shall lay the groundwork, Your Honor. Reverend Weems, you are a frequent correspondent with the Academy of Sciences, are you not?”
“Yes, I have a deep interest in biology. I studied with Professor Cardozo at Yale before I went to divinity school.”
“Excellent. Is it your opinion that my client is harming the American cat?”
The question jarred Max. They had drifted so deep into two-legged territory that he’d forgotten the four-legged beasts entirely.
“To the contrary, Mr. Howe. Nature, as Mr. Spencer and Mr. Da
rwin have pointed out, exercises a savage form of benevolence.”
“She’s weeding out the bad stock? Improving the breed?”
“To put it in a simple way, yes.”
“One more question: how long has Mrs. Edwards been working with you on your campaign?”
“She’s been risking life and limb for us for over two years.”
“She’s dedicated to rooting out this scourge?”
“We do not have a more dedicated collaborator.”
Moments later, Howe wound up his direct examination. Showing no stomach for impeaching the clergyman, Williams allowed Weems to step down without cross-examining him.
Howe’s closing statement, a full two hours and twelve minutes, numbed the senses. He appealed to the jurors’ more delicate sensibilities. Would they really send a defenseless woman like Mrs. Edwards back to the Tombs? Could they imagine what would happen to a lady of her refinement when she was tossed into a pit full of dips, grifters, kleptomaniacs, and hardened ladies of the town? He quoted the Bible, Shakespeare, and the Civil Code. When he began to evoke poor Mrs. Edwards, weak, bent, and broken on the day of her release, he couldn’t contain his tears.
Her children behind the defense table burst out crying.
Max found Howe’s old-fashioned, ham-fisted performance repugnant. Who would be convinced by these transparent manipulations? Then he saw two jurors on opposite sides of the box openly weeping. The lawyer had made no attempt to disprove the charges against his client. Instead, for the third time, he touched on Mrs. Edwards’s attempts to fight the white-slave trade and how she had risked life and limb in the most dangerous districts to protect innocent children from vicious procurers.
Max wasn’t so sure Mrs. Edwards killed cats simply to help the Reverend Weems’s crusade, though. By her own testimony, the cat killings had come first. Mrs. Edwards had taken too much pride in the catricides to be Weems’s pawn. She’d turned the witness stand into her own pulpit.
Howe’s voice played a full scale of agony; his expansive face performed a complete repertoire of outrage. Unashamed, he brayed, he moaned, he groaned, his great body shuddered.
“Reminds me of your Adler, Max,” Biddle whispered.
Nick had never alluded to Max’s racial origins before, but his comparison had merit. Max had seen the famed Adler perform Macbeth in Yiddish and had been similarly put off. At the time, he had chalked up the actors hyperbolic mannerisms to an overwrought Eastern European Jewish sensibility. Perhaps Biddle was wrong, though. In his antiquated way, Howe seemed to be drawing from an ancient blood-and-thunder tradition that had nothing to do with keening Jews from the Pale.
“I hesitate to draw too graphic a picture for you,” the lawyer boomed out to the jury. “But what won’t these slave masters do to squeeze an extra coin out of these defenseless girls? And if my client risked life and limb to retrieve one poor soul, are we then to fling her into prison to rot with the rest of the lost? I don’t think you have it in your hearts to commit such a crime against a purity crusader whom we ought to get down on our knees to thank from the bottom of our hearts.”
Another juror honked into his handkerchief. How did the baggy old charlatan do it? Perhaps he believed every word he said, if only for a heartbeat.
When the jury began deliberating, Biddle checked his pocket watch. “They’d best get back before our deadline. Want to put something on it?”
“Sure. A dollar says she’s acquitted. What difference does the law make?”
“Smart boy. Hardly worth it. Will you give me four to one?”
Even those odds sounded safe.
chapter twenty-two
Who would have guessed it? Guilty with a suspended sentence,” Biddle chuckled, graciously accepting Max’s crumpled bills. “The jury paid attention to the law after all.”
Convicted, Mrs. Edwards walked free. Howe and Hummel had proven their client culpable of an admirable offense. Max had lost on a technicality, but it would cost him real money.
“Not exacdy,” Max muttered. Losing a sure bet always stung. Before he knew it, he was going to have to make a withdrawal from the Madison Savings Bank.
“They convict your girl, but they demonstrate wisdom at the same time,” Biddle continued, turning the knife. “I thought the foreman was eloquent, didn’t you? Asking the judge for leniency like that.”
“And Howe barely knew this judge, too.” He had to laugh when he recalled the bottle of German wine Howe had sent over to Judge Thomspon’s table. Didn’t the judiciary cost more than a mediocre grape?
“Well, I’d say you do a squib on the Reverend Weems, and I’ll knock out the lead story. Shouldn’t be too tiring.”
Max thought the Weems angle was more than a squib, but he kept that to himself. He’d work it up and let Pamell decide.
“Did you like the way Willy tugged at their heartstrings?”
Max stuck his finger down his throat. “Gag-worthy, if you ask me.”
“Ahh, you might have a visceral response, but you see the truth now, don’t you?”
“What’s that?”
“People love it.”
“I suppose so.”
“I’m going to tell you something else, my young friend. At the same time, Willy was working for his own pocket. Do you see how?”
“I’d say a few sportsmen will be getting subpoenas soon.”
“On the ball. Think of this, though. Even the ones who don’t will be more malleable in other embarrassing circumstances, eh? Abie Hummel on one side, the church on the other. What a squeeze play!”
Why was Biddle taking such a huge delight in the impending misfortune of his fellow clubmen? Max was almost certain he knew. Having settled his own Howe and Hummel subpoena long ago, and therefore immune from persecution, the old reporter felt free to enjoy the carnival.
First Max tried City Hall, but the mayor didn’t care to comment on Reverend Weems’s charges. However, Max knew he could get a good quote out of Superintendent Byrnes if he wormed his way into his office. He had to wait two hours, but finally Byrnes granted him an audience.
Without looking up from his paperwork, Byrnes asked, “Did they throw your little biddy in the black hole, boyo?”
“Actually, she got a ten-dollar fine and a suspended sentence.” “That seems about right. They had Howe and Hummel?” Now Byrnes fixed his small dark eyes on the wiry reporter. The detective probably knew how the trial had turned out already, but Max played along. “Both at the same time. Something else came up, though, that I thought you might want to comment on.”
Carefully observing the stone-faced Byrnes, he explained how the Midnight Band had been helping the Reverend Weems in his crusade.
Byrnes greeted Max’s revelations about Weems with a shrug. “It may come as a surprise to certain members of society that these establishments are so widespread,” he said, adopting his most elevated vocabulary, “but I assure you they’re like any other business. They have rent to pay and have goods to sell, and they sometimes operate in the most refined neighborhoods. When you shut one down, it only opens up the next: day in a different location that charges a higher rent. Of course, the prices go up to compensate.”
“So there’s no point chasing them from one location to the next.”
“What’s the result? The city pays more, the procurer pays more, the clientele pay more, but in the end, they all come up with the dollar. Who gets it in the neck? The taxpayer, that’s who.”
Evidently, inflation had to be kept out of the brothel business for the good of society. Byrnes seemed perfecdy earnest, though he left out the fact that at every fresh place of business the madame had to pay a new initiation fee to the local pantata. Whether Byrnes himself got a piece of the action was an open question, but Police Commissioner Jimmy Martin had somehow managed on a modest public servant’s salary to hire a retinue of servants and buy a brownstone next to the Rockefellers.
“Is this on the record?” Max asked, struggling to keep a straight face.
If he played Byrnes’s comments up top, the Weems squib might be worth as much as Biddle s lead piece.
“I’ve said as much in the past.”
“What about his charges regarding the young girls?”
Byrnes worked his jaw, coughed, and then put on a dignified air. “Appertaining to that allegation, we stick to the letter of the law. The age of consent is sixteen now. Maybe for some it ought to be never, but that isn’t practical.”
Smiling inwardly, Max scrawled Byrnes’s comment on his pad, and circled the word “we.”
With a deadline hanging over his head, he arranged his notes in a neat pile next to his upright typewriter and ripped off four grafs. By morning, the Reverend Weems would be famous—and infamous as well. If the story had legs, Sim Addem would soon be telling Weems jokes at the Hoffman House bar. Max could already hear Sim’s gravelly delivery. “So the Reverend Weems goes to catch the Busy Flea show at the Slide, only he don’t know what’s a flea.”
Looking across the newsroom, he picked out Nick Biddle in shirtsleeves and soft felt hat, scrawling away with abandon. Before he knew it, the old freeloader would be putting the bite on him for supper. Tearing the Weems story out of his typewriter, Max slipped through the maze of desks, climbed to the throne, and made his offering. Parnell produced an indecipherable growl. He had to get outside.
The next thing he knew, he was stalking north on Park Row. Mind legs pumping, he forged his way uptown. He was a speed-walking machine, free of Howes, Hummels, Biddies, cat ladies, and philosophy of any stripe. His body bounded along, reveling in escape. Better to do handstands and somersaults for nickels. A light drizzle fell in the failing light. Sharp and clean, cold drops spattered his hair, trickling down his cheeks. He held his course, heading for home.
Belle flung open the front door. “Max! Danny’s playing tonight. Are you going?”
She radiated excitement, her cheeks, despite a dusting of rice powder, visibly flushed. Bare inches from her, Max caught his breath. Her dress, cinched with a wide striped belt, wasn’t at all revealing, but it clung to her figure in intimate pleats and folds. A fine watch chain hung down below her tiny waist.
The Midnight Band of Mercy Page 21