Kopp Sisters on the March

by Amy Stewart

  She didn’t dare stir. She had never been so still and quiet for an entire day.

  The news came to her in whispers and rumors: a pair of voices floating in from the street through her half-opened window, a glance at the news-stand when she rushed out with a quarter for the egg and butter man. It was impossible not to hear about the Beattie murder. The whole town was swimming in it: the gossip started as a ripple, then swelled to a current that tugged at all of them.

  And the story going around town was that Henry Clay’s explanation didn’t add up.

  Louise hadn’t been shot by a man standing over her in the road, came the whispers from the coroner’s office. She’d been shot by someone standing at eye level, who very nearly pressed the barrel right up in her face. She hadn’t been shot inside the automobile, either. Her blood was all over the road. There was hardly any in the auto, according to the sheriff who impounded it, except right up underneath where she lay in Henry Clay’s lap while he drove her dead or dying body back to Richmond.

  Most damning of all were the dogs. There wasn’t a Virginian alive who wouldn’t believe a bloodhound over a guilty-looking husband. The dogs picked up the scent of the blood where it soaked into the ground, but there was no trail leading in any direction to point out which way the killer went. The dogs just ran in a circle, yipping in frustration.

  It was almost as if the killer had driven away in an auto, the newspapermen speculated, tartly.

  The worst came the next day, when Louise had been dead only forty-eight hours. An old Negro woman walking along the railroad tracks found a rifle. She took it straight to the police. Henry Clay had claimed that he’d wrestled the gun away from the attacker and thrown it into his auto, only to have it jolted out on the street as he drove hell-bent for Richmond with Louise’s head across his knees. That was a fine tale, except that this gun was found quite a ways down the railroad tracks, suggesting that it had been thrown, not merely dropped, from a speeding vehicle. Now it fell to the police to decide whose rifle it was, and whether it had been used to kill Louise.

  Beulah didn’t so much hear the story as she breathed it in, like a poisonous gas that seeped under the door. What kind of man puts a gun to his wife’s head like that? She closed her eyes and tried to picture it: bland, blameless Louise, standing in the road begging for her life, and half-crazed Henry Clay with that rifle he’d been brandishing all afternoon.

  If he could kill his own wife like that, the mother of his child, what might he do to Beulah if she displeased him? She didn’t dare think on it overlong. He might yet come after her, if the police weren’t already watching his every move.

  When a tap came at her door, she feared he’d done exactly that. Did he think he could hide from the authorities, in her single room? Would he expect her to run off with him?

  She wouldn’t answer. She couldn’t. She sank down, silently, into the little wooden chair where she ate her supper every night. With one knee tucked under her chin she held her breath and waited.

  Another tap, and a little scratch, like a fingernail against the paint. And then a voice that she knew.

  “Beulah, honey? It’s Henrietta. Let me in, quick.”

  Henrietta Pitman, her old chum from her days down on Mayo Street, one of the girls Claudia ran with. Beulah wouldn’t call her a friend, exactly, but Henrietta was a girl of her ilk. They were the same—or they had been, at one time.

  For that reason Beulah opened the door.

  Henrietta rushed in, chased by a cloud of ersatz jasmine perfume. She kept a scarf of yellow chiffon around her head, but that did little to disguise her: Henrietta was a certain type of girl and she looked it. Anyone passing her by on the street could tell exactly who she was.

  She closed the door behind her and leaned against it. With one glance she took in Beulah’s surroundings, the dust hanging in the air, the pan on the gas plate where she fried herself an egg every day, her only decent dress hung from a peg on the wall.

  Beulah saw in an instant that Henrietta would take in these details and relay them to the girls back on Mayo Street. She would peddle them like the unofficial currency they were.

  The first words from her mouth were “You didn’t shoot that woman, did you?”

  Beulah hesitated, thinking she might pretend not to know what woman Henrietta was referring to. She waited too long, because Henrietta said, “The police are over at May Stuart’s right now. They think you had something to do with it.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” Beulah put in hastily, before Henrietta could infer otherwise. “I was at my Meemaw’s all night. Go ask her.”

  “They know you had something to do with Henry Clay.”

  “Lots of girls had something to do with Henry Clay.” It was true: Beulah had never been the only one. She hadn’t been loyal to him, either. How could she, in her line of work?

  “Well, it’s in the papers that there was another woman. Everybody’s saying that Henry Clay Beattie shot his wife because he was in love with a woman who had his baby and gave it up.”

  “That could’ve been any girl in Richmond,” Beulah said flatly.

  “They say it was a woman who wore a black veil to his wedding, and then hunted him down no matter how many times he tried to get away, and refused to let him go.” Henrietta looked triumphant about it. How she loved to be in the middle of a mess like this. Beulah hated to give her the satisfaction, but Henrietta was the only one who’d come to her. She hadn’t been given a choice of messenger.

  “How’d they find all that out?” Beulah asked reluctantly.

  “Louise’s mother. She knew all about that woman, because Louise went crying to her over it. She told the police everything she knew. And now they’re coming for you.”

  “Well, let them come,” Beulah said, although she wasn’t at all certain that was the right position to take. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Then you don’t know anything about Henry Clay and a gun?”

  There was some small sound outside—a door closing, a package dropping on the sidewalk—and Beulah, believing it to be a knock at her door, nearly jumped out of her skin.

  Henrietta heard it too and looked around uneasily. “I came to warn you. I didn’t have to, but I did it on account of the times we used to have together. You do what you have to do, but I don’t want to be caught here.”

  She put her hand on the doorknob. Beulah said, “I could run off to Claudia’s, if I knew where to find her.”

  If Henrietta knew, she wasn’t telling. “Don’t bring your sister into this. She got out.”

  With that, Henrietta was gone. Beulah could hardly breathe. How far ahead of the police had Henrietta been? How many minutes before they came through the door? Those constables were all friends of her grandfather’s. They’d find her.

  If she could sneak over to the station, she could hop on board any train going out of town. It didn’t matter where. Give it a week, she thought. Let Henry Clay confess, if he was man enough to do it, and clear her of any wrongdoing. If he did that, the police might decide they didn’t need to talk to her after all. She packed up the smallest bundle of possessions she could manage and set out for her grandmother’s.

  Beulah didn’t have a dollar to her name, but Meemaw was all too happy to make a contribution to the cause of sending Beulah out of town.

  “Go on, and don’t tell me where you’re going,” Meemaw said. She didn’t try to hug her, but she did put her thumb under Beulah’s chin and squint at her, as if she was trying to memorize Beulah’s face.

  “I’ll be back,” Beulah said.

  “You might not,” Meemaw said.

  Beulah ran out the door. She was on her way to the train station, with nothing but a little carpet bag under her arm, when a policeman who knew her from her days down on Mayo Street put his hand on her shoulder.

  28

  “DID EVERYONE LEARN ‘My Little Red Carnation’?” Fleurette called.

  “She’s not still out singing that sappy old thi
ng, is she?” Tizzy groaned in that languid way she had. Her tent-mates followed suit, rolling their eyes and grumbling about the stilted, old-fashioned songs.

  “Of course she is, and they beg her to sing it if she leaves it out,” Fleurette said. “It’s one of her most popular songs.”

  May Ward’s concert was by then only a week away. An upright piano had been delivered for the occasion, and Clarence had been pressed into service. Fleurette had selected her chorus and begun a series of rehearsals in the mess hall after supper. Beulah refused to take part in the singing and dancing, but she attended rehearsals anyway, and helped with the costumes and whatever other small favors Fleurette asked of her. She wanted the concert to go off well, for Fleurette’s sake, but she had to admit that Tizzy was right: the songs were tired and held little appeal for the young women at camp.

  The song was written for a man and a woman, but when May Ward performed it, one of the girls stepped up and sang the man’s part. Fleurette took that role. The others were supposed to harmonize behind her.

  My little red carnation,

  Sweetest in all creation,

  Why all this meditation?

  I love you fond and true;

  I’m filled with desperation,

  Caused by your hesitation,

  My little red carnation,

  I love no one but you.

  Tizzy couldn’t bear the song and led a full revolt. She sang in a squeaky, grotesque voice, aping Fleurette’s dance steps behind her, and the others followed suit. Soon their voices dissolved into laughter.

  “Oh, that’s enough of little red carnations,” Tizzy called, jumping down from the stage. “Let’s have a look at these costumes.”

  May Ward liked her chorus in frilly white dresses reminiscent of the Dresden dolls after which her act was named. Fleurette had done her best to put something together with whatever material she had on hand. Even a tablecloth was pressed into service. The result was a set of aprons that could go over the shirtwaists and skirts the girls wore every day.

  They were neatly hung from a rope that ran alongside the stage. Tizzy flung herself at them and tossed them to the other girls in the chorus.

  It enraged Beulah to see Tizzy behave so spitefully. Fleurette was too stunned, at first, to react, but Beulah had been saving up plenty of sharp words for Tizzy and didn’t hesitate to deploy them.

  “Get your hands off of her costumes,” Beulah said, grabbing the aprons away from Tizzy. “If you’re too high-and-mighty to sing the song, you won’t be wearing one anyway.”

  Although Tizzy was surrounded by girls shrieking and laughing, she remained perfectly still herself in the face of Beulah’s criticism. Like ice, this one.

  “Let’s see what you look like in a costume, Roxanna,” Tizzy said. Beulah didn’t like the way she leaned on that made-up name. “How about you try on the bonnet, see if you like it?”

  Fleurette had made little white bonnets out of handkerchiefs to go with every frilly apron. They were tucked inside the pockets. Tizzy pulled one out and slammed it down on Beulah’s head. This brought more giggles and whistles from those cowardly girls who followed Tizzy everywhere.

  “Oh, that’s pretty!” shouted Liddy.

  “All you need now is a red carnation!” called Ellie.

  But Tizzy, once again, was an island of calm among them. “You remind me of somebody in that bonnet,” she said. “Who is it?”

  There was a mirror propped up across from the stage so the girls could watch themselves dance. Beulah glanced over at it and saw the resemblance at once.

  It was the same kind of bonnet she wore in that picture that all the newspapers ran.

  There she was again, six years older but not so terribly changed from before: Beulah Binford, the Other Woman in the Richmond Murder Case.

  29

  BEULAH RIPPED OFF that bonnet and ran blindly out of the tent, which put her right in the path of Constance, come to tell the girls that curfew was imminent. Because Beulah’s eyes were squeezed shut to stop the tears, she hurled herself bodily into Constance. This had no effect on Constance’s gait: she probably could’ve kept walking with Beulah hanging around her neck.

  But she didn’t. She just swept Beulah up into her arms unhesitatingly. It wasn’t an embrace, exactly, but it was not quite as forceful as those holds she’d been teaching her late-night army.

  “What’s come over you?” Constance asked, pressing her lips right into the top of Beulah’s head. “Something’s not right.”

  When Beulah didn’t answer, Constance took a step back and held her at arm’s length. “I’ve seen a girl in trouble, you know.”

  Constance had eyes of a color that Meemaw would’ve called hazel. She looked at Beulah with a mixture of compassion and scrutiny. Beulah knew that look. It meant that Constance was sympathetic to a point, but reserving judgment.

  In that moment, she could’ve broken down and told Constance everything. She had a feeling that Constance wouldn’t kick her out of camp just for being Beulah Binford. But what good would it do for her to confess? All she wanted was to suffer through the rest of that infernal camp and to trudge back to New York, hat in hand, and hope she could put some semblance of her old life back together. She’d have left already if she had so much as a dollar in her pocket. Having already paid her room and board, she had no choice but to see it through.

  She couldn’t bear to have anyone look at her too closely. She jerked away from Constance. “I’m not in trouble, and I’m not your little sister. I’m just getting myself to bed by curfew is all.”

  She walked away at what she hoped looked like a normal pace. If she ran, Constance would snatch her right back up again.

  THAT PICTURE IN the papers had made it so much worse for her. She didn’t understand it at the time—how could she have?—but without a picture, she never would’ve made the headlines. And without the headlines, she would’ve been nothing more than a footnote in the Beattie murder trial. Instead, she became the scandal at the very center of the whole mess.

  When the newspapers get hold of a good picture, they take a little story and turn it into a big story. Once it becomes a big story, it runs all over the country.

  It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t understand that. What did she know of newspapers, and of how stories spread?

  She should’ve had a lawyer representing her, not a Broadway show manager. That seemed so obvious in hindsight, when she recounted the whole mess to Mabel and saw it through her eyes.

  “What you did,” Mabel told her, once she had heard it all, “was no different from what a thousand other girls have done. You went around with a man who wasn’t your husband. You had a baby and you gave it away. There’s nothing so unusual about that.”

  “Well, there might’ve been a few dollars that changed hands,” Beulah pointed out.

  “And some girls have their rent paid, or their dinner bought for them,” Mabel said. “There’s no difference, not to my thinking. But the way they splashed you across the front page—that’s what was different. That’s why the whole country knows your name and not the names of every other girl who did the same thing. And I blame that vaudeville man for that.”

  Mabel was right, of course. Beulah never should’ve agreed to see him, but she was lonely in jail, and eager for news. The police kept telling her she was only being held as a witness. Once the trial got under way, they assured her, the judge would decide whether Beulah would be called to testify. She might even be released before the trial was over.

  Beulah didn’t know whether to believe that or not. She didn’t know what to think. She wanted to write a letter to Meemaw, but what could Meemaw do for her now? There was nothing to do but wait.

  She’d been in jail a week before he turned up. From her cell, she could hear the guards arguing about whether he should be allowed to see her.

  “I thought you said no visitors,” one guard said.

  “She’s allowed to see a lawyer,” said the other guard.<
br />
  “The girl says she don’t have a lawyer,” the first guard said.

  “Well, somebody must’ve hired him. He’s come all the way down from New Jersey. Might as well let her see him.”

  With that, Beulah was led into a little windowless room furnished with two chairs and a table bolted to the ground. She wore the same dress she’d been arrested in seven days earlier, the jail lacking any sort of inmate uniform for women. She must’ve looked a shambles. She hadn’t seen a comb, and had been given only one shallow basin of water per day with which to make herself presentable.

  The man waiting for her, on the other hand, was immaculately dressed in a black suit with lapels that must’ve been silk, the way they shone a little in the light, and a red vest with a tie to match. He wore an enormous gold ring on one hand. A good heavy gold watch hung from his vest pocket.

  Beulah had an eye for precious metals. She didn’t look him over so much as she appraised him.

  “You’re no lawyer,” she said when they were alone.

  The man found that entertaining and leaned back in his chair, his fingers laced together behind his head. “No? What am I?”

  She cocked her head and took in his hair pomade, his striped vest, his spotted tie, and his black patent shoes, shined to perfection. They reminded her of a tap dancer’s shoes.

  “You’re a show-man.” She pronounced it like that, coming up first with the word show and then the word man.

  He leaned forward and put his hands down on the table, looking over at her from under heavy eyebrows. “You’re not too terribly wrong, Miss Binford. I’m a manager. I manage people, and I help them with their image.”

  “Image?” Beulah patted her hair, which she knew looked terrible.

  “Not how they look, although that does come into it. But how they appear. In public, I mean. In the papers. I help people manage how the rest of the world sees them.”