Due Diligence

by Michael A. Kahn

  Flo handed me the stack of death certificates. “See for yourself.”

  Benny leaned over to look with me. Sure enough, Douglas Armstrong was listed as the attending physician for all three women.

  I looked up at Flo and shook my head in wonder. “Him, too?”

  “So it appears,” she said.

  “Him what?” Benny asked.

  “We’re not sure,” I said. “All we know is that Armstrong and Todorovich were at Armstrong Bioproducts at the time, were also on staff at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and were listed as the treating physician for some of the women on the list who died.”

  I leafed back through the other certificates, noting the two other names that appeared on the Beth Shalom death certificates as attending physicians. “Who are these other two? Michael Bohm and Harold Rawling. Where they at Armstrong Bioproducts, too?”

  “No,” Flo said. “I called around, actually talked to Bohm. Rawling was out of town today. Bohm told me he was on staff at Mt. Sinai back then, and so was the other guy. They had regular rounds at the home, as did Armstrong. Each had their own set of patients, but whoever was there on the day a nursing home resident died would be the one listed on the death certificate as the attending physician.”

  “Did Dr. Bohm remember anything about the patients or the deaths?” Benny asked.

  Flo shook her head. “Not much.”

  “Do you think he was hiding something?” I asked.

  Flo frowned as she weighed the question. “Hard to tell with a doctor. A lot of them can be kind of squirrelly.” She looked at Benny. “You ever handled any medical malpractice cases?”

  He shook his head.

  “I worked on a bunch my first years,” she said. “Learned a lot of strange terms and got to spend time with a lot of strange doctors. It’s hard to tell whether they’re bullshitting you, but I think this Bohm was telling me the truth. I don’t think he knows diddly about those deaths.”

  “What about the attending physicians on these?” I asked, indicating the Labadie Gardens stack.

  Flo shook her head. “Pretty much the same story. I reached one of them: Randall Weaver. He was an emergency room physician back then. Split his time between Mt. Sinai and St. Mary’s. Spent one morning a week at Labadie Gardens. No connection with Armstrong Bioproducts. Didn’t know Peter Todorovich or Douglas Armstrong.”

  I finished my turkey sandwich and washed it down with a big sip of Dr. Brown’s.

  “So?” Flo said to me, crunching on a pickle. “Your turn for show and tell.”

  I winked at her and went over to my briefcase. “Here,” I said, unfolding a large document and handing it to her. Benny walked around to look at it over her shoulder.

  She scrutinized it for a moment and looked up at me. “What kind of map is this?”

  “A treasure map, I hope.”

  She frowned at it for a while.

  Benny asked, “Is this supposed to be St. Louis?”

  “Actually,” I explained, “it’s supposed to be what’s under St. Louis. The map dates back almost fifty years, but I don’t think caves move around much underground.”

  “Caves?” Flo said.

  Benny asked, “Where did you get this map?”

  “From the Missouri Historical Society. That’s where I’ve been for the last hour and a half.”

  “What happened to Clara Jacobs?” Flo asked.

  I shook my head sadly. “The poor woman is really out of it.”

  “Senile?”

  I nodded. “Pretty much so. I tried to ask her questions, but all I got for answers was gobbledygook. She ended up falling asleep on me. That’s when I talked to her housekeeper. She was hostile at first, but softened up a little after I practically got down on my knees and begged. Turns out she was with the Jacobses back when they lived in their mansion. She doesn’t think he kept any business records there, but she’s almost certain he didn’t throw them away.”

  “Why?” Benny asked.

  I turned to him. “She claims he was a document packrat. Didn’t throw any of his personal records away. She said that when he died she helped clean out the office in his home. They found stacks of canceled personal checks dating back thirty years. He had saved all of his utility bills. There were telephone bills from the fifties.”

  “So where did he keep his business records?” Flo asked.

  “She’s not certain, but she has a pretty good hunch. He owned a bunch of different companies. He used to conduct a lot of his business over the phone in his den. She overheard him enough to believe that he stored at least some of his business records in his cave.”

  “His what?” Benny said.

  I smiled. “His cave.”

  “Hold on,” Flo said. “Mordecai Jacobs had his own cave?”

  I nodded. “It was known as the Gutmann Caverns, and at one time it was the most famous cave in St. Louis.”

  “The most famous?” Flo looked at Benny. “Is there more than one cave in this town?”

  “How the fuck would I know?” he said. “I’m from New Jersey.”

  “There are other caves,” I said. “Dozens and dozens of caves.” I gestured toward the map she was holding. “According to The Spelunher’s Guide to the Caves of Missouri, which I skimmed while I was over at the Historical Society, there are more caves in St. Louis than in any other city in the world.”

  “No shit,” Benny said, impressed.

  Flo studied the map. “There are a lot of them,” she conceded.

  “Where’s his cave?” Benny asked.

  I leaned over and pointed to the spot I had highlighted in yellow. “Right there.”

  They stared at the location.

  Flo looked up at me. “It’s still there?”

  I shrugged. “As far as I know.”

  “How do we get in it?” Benny asked.

  I checked my watch. It was only two o’clock. I looked at them and smiled. “Let’s go find out.”

  We finished our dessert and headed out.

  In our excitement none of us stopped to consider the implications of the fact that Benny had been able to find us. Nor did we bother to consider whether our actions that morning could have registered on the radar screens of my pursuers. Maybe it was because there were three of us. Three seemed so much safer than one. Whatever the reason, we certainly could have qualified as the rushing fools of the old adage.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  St. Louis sits atop a thick bedrock of limestone. For hundreds of millions of years, surface water percolated through fissures in that bedrock and created a vast latticework of streams within the limestone, like arteries within a body. During the wetter millennia, the added water pressure drilled larger and ever larger tunnels through the rock. Gradually, those trickling streams became mighty underground rivers.

  Then came the drier millennia. The water table dropped, the surface waters receded to the current channel of the Mississippi River, and the landscape became familiar. By the time New Orleans merchant Pierre Laclede and his fourteen-year-old stepson, Auguste Chouteau, clambered up the west bank of the Mississippi in 1764 to admire the fertile landscape spread before them, the underground rivers had long since run dry. On Valentine’s Day, 1764, Pierre Laclede announced that he would erect a settlement on this good land—little realizing that this good land rested, like a massive green carpet, over an extraordinary network of cool limestone caves.

  The caves of St. Louis were a provincial curiosity until Gottfried Duden arrived in St. Louis in 1822. Duden was, quite literally, an industrial scout, sent to America by various brewing and manufacturing concerns in the Rhineland who were looking for business opportunities in the New World. Back in the days before electric refrigeration, every brewer the world over dreamed of access to vast natural cooling cellars where the climate remained a dry, constant fifty-two degrees year
-round—the perfect temperature for storing and fermenting beer. Accordingly, when Duden discovered what was spread out beneath the streets of that booming town along the Mississippi River, he immediately understood the opportunities it held for his German clients. I have found your Garden of Eden in the New World, he eagerly reported.

  Within twenty years, St. Louis had become the largest beer-brewing center in North America. By 1860, there were more than forty breweries in St. Louis, most owned by German immigrants, each operating directly over a limestone cave. There was the Gast Brewery Cave and the Winkelmeyer Brewery Cave and the Clausman Brewery Cave and the Minnehaha Brewery Cave and the Cherokee Brewery Cave.

  And then there were the celebrity caves.

  There was the Bavarian Brewery Cave, which sat directly below Joseph Schneider’s Bavarian Brewery on Pestalozzi Street. When the Bavarian Brewery went bankrupt in 1859, one of its major creditors, Eberhard Anheuser, bought the brewery and changed the company name to his name. A few years later, another German immigrant married Eberhard’s beautiful daughter, Lilly. When old man Anheuser died, his son-in-law, Adolphus Busch, assumed control of the brewery and made one final addition to the company name.

  And there was English Cave, nestled beneath Benton Park in south St. Louis. Used as a malt liquor brewery from 1826 to 1847, it was better known for the legend of the beautiful Indian maiden and her lover, who fled from the lecherous tribal chief and hid out in English Cave. The jealous chief posted a guard at the entrance to the cave to make sure she didn’t escape. She didn’t. The lovers died of starvation, and their skeletons were found wrapped in each other’s arms. Or so went the legend.

  And there was Uhrig’s Cave, an underground saloon and nightclub near the corner of Washington and Jefferson, connected to Joseph and Ignatz Uhrig’s brewery by a one-half-mile tunnel in which the brothers had installed a narrow-gauge railroad for movement of beer between the two locations. The brothers held concerts and plays in their converted cave and sold rides on the underground railroad. By the turn of the century, Uhrig’s Cave was a prominent national entertainment spot and the site of the North American premieres of The Mikado and Cavalleria Rusticana.

  But of all the caves of St. Louis, none approaches the fabulous story of Gutmann Caverns. In 1846, a German immigrant named Gregor Gutmann purchased a cave near Gravois south of Chippewa. It was an ideal brewery cave. Fifty feet below ground with a constant temperature of fifty-two degrees, the caverns included an enormous main chamber with tunnels at either end, one of which connected to another large chamber that could serve as additional storage space for the enormous casks in which the Gutmann Special Lager would age.

  Aboveground, Gutmann built his brewery at one end of the cave. As business expanded and his fortunes grew, he erected a huge family mansion above another portion of the cave. By the turn of the century, Gregor Gutmann’s wealthy descendants had bricked and smoothed more than two hundred yards of the family portion of the cave and had installed a variety of opulent underground additions, including, among other things, a full ballroom, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a miniature railroad, and a theater.

  Alas, poor management and constant shareholder battles among the grandchildren mortally weakened the company during the early years of the twentieth century, and Prohibition sounded the death knell. The Gutmann Brewery ended in a liquidating receivership. The last St. Louis remnants of the Gutmann family were evicted from the mansion in 1932, and the structure was condemned two years later. All that remains of the three-story Gutmann Mansion are a series of stunning black-and-white photographs that hang in the main gallery of the Missouri Historical Society. The abandoned brewery building lingered on as a vacant eyesore until the city fathers, spurred into action by a newspaper campaign against urban blight, razed the structure in 1947 and converted part of the property, including the former mansion grounds, into a small city park named after Gregor Gutmann.

  The old entrance to the brewery portion of the cave, which was just east of Gutmann Park, was used primarily as a neighborhood garbage dump until 1958. That’s when a colorful local entrepreneur and history buff by the name of Mordecai Jacobs entered the picture. He purchased a parcel of property east of the park that included what the neighbors then called the Gutmann Dump.

  Jacobs brought in a crew of men to clean out the rubbish and excavate the clay and gook that clogged the first fifty feet into the cave. To his delight, he discovered that the old storage channel was actually the front end of yet another large cave that meandered north and featured a dazzling variety of rooms of many sizes, each festooned with stalactites, stalagmites, and other formations. Even more incredible, two of the workmen exploring some of the smaller branches of the cave stumbled into a room that contained what appeared to be the bones of a large mammal. Jacobs was able to convince the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago to send down a paleontological crew, which identified the find as a large saber-toothed cat. The crew spent six heavily publicized months in the cave and exhumed more than two thousand bones of prehistoric animals, including three full skeletons of an immense, long-extinct species of saber-toothed cat. As part of his deal with the Field Museum, Jacobs selected one of the skeletons and the museum reconstructed it in a ferocious attack position. Using the lighting director of the St. Louis Muny Opera, Jacobs dramatically spotlighted the skeleton in the original excavation chamber, which he renamed Saber Tooth Cemetery.

  Jacobs had the soul of a carnival barker. He installed electric lights and advertised heavily, not only on local radio and television, but on billboards on every major highway within a 300-mile radius of St. Louis: COME SEE GUTMANN’S CAVERNS—THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD! He lured them in from all over the country. During its brief but brilliant heyday, Gutmann Caverns was in the top ten of St. Louis tourist attractions, right up there with the zoo and the riverfront. A visit to Gutmann Caverns included guided tours of all the natural formations (with Satan’s Waterfall as the highlight), the family portion of the cave, the beer storage process used by the brewery, and, of course, the Saber Tooth Cemetery.

  Unfortunately, the reborn Gutmann Caverns lasted less than a decade. In 1965, the Highway Department purchased the above-ground portion as part of the parcel needed to construct a section of 1-55. Gutmann Caverns closed on December 1, 1965, and highway construction began the following spring.

  One normally would have assumed that the entrance had long since been sealed off, and perhaps it was. But given the recollections of Clara Jacobs’ housekeeper and the fact that I had absolutely no other leads on any relevant Beth Shalom or Labadie Gardens medical records, it was definitely worth a trip down to south St. Louis to search for a way into the cave.

  We dressed optimistically, i.e., for cave exploration. I wore my running shoes and my jogging sweats—the closest I could come to appropriate attire given the grabbag of outfits Benny had selected for me. Flo put on jeans, a Kansas City Monarchs sweatshirt, and hiking boots. Benny had arrived wearing a Chicago Bulls T-shirt, baggy khakis, and high-top Converse All-Stars. Although the T-shirt wasn’t warm enough for cave temperatures, he had a windbreaker in the trunk of his car.

  On the drive toward south St. Louis, we stopped at a hardware store for a high-powered flashlight, plenty of fresh batteries, and the sorts of odds and ends that three rookie spelunkers thought might come in handy in a cave, including metal cutters, twenty-five feet of rope, several rolls of film for Flo’s 35-millimeter camera, and a backpack in which to carry it all.

  Flo drove while Benny and I tried to navigate from the backseat. I had a St. Louis street map open on my lap and Benny had the old cave map on his. We got onto Gravois and stayed with it past the Cherokee intersection. We went several more blocks, turned left at the light and weaved our way through several more intersections as the neighborhood changed from purely residential to a shabbier mix of bungalows, two-flats, and an occasional warehouse or storefront.

  Flo slowed th
e car. “Here we are,” she said.

  There was a city park up ahead on the right. I looked down at the map for a moment and then back up. “You’re right. Gutmann Park.”

  We peered at it through the windshield.

  “Drive around it once,” Benny said.

  Gutmann Park was, by any standard, entirely unexceptional. It was a rectangle three blocks long and two blocks wide. There were two ball fields, each with a rusting backstop, and a half-court basketball blacktop with several bent and netless hoops. The picnic area consisted of three picnic tables, two metal grills, and a small shelter with restrooms in back. There was a playground with a set of clunky, old-fashioned equipment: swings, slides, jungle gym, merry-go-round. Unfortunately, the one thing we didn’t see was a huge flashing red arrow with the message, “This Way to Cave Entrance.”

  The three of us got out of the car and walked the length and width of the park while Benny and I tried to coordinate the surface with the cave map. Although it was hard to be certain, since the map predated the park by at least a decade, it appeared that the cave ran directly beneath the middle of the park. We hadn’t expected to stumble across an actual entrance, of course. Nevertheless, given that the Gutmann Mansion had stood roughly between the two ball fields, I had hoped to find some evidence, although faint, of what had once been. We moved carefully through the entire out field, but found no sign of the mansion or the cave be low. Just the patchy grass and weeds of a poorly maintained field. We even checked out both restrooms, but found nothing to suggest any subterranean access.

  “Where was the other cave entrance?” Flo asked. “The one the brewery used?”

  I checked the map, got my bearings, and pointed east. “A few blocks over.”

  Across the street from the park was a row of rundown bungalows. Visible beyond the bungalows were several warehouses and, rising above the warehouses to the right, the long, looping exit ramp off the highway.

  We got back in the car. This time I sat in the passenger seat up front. As we drove toward the warehouses, I tried to trace our path on the cave map.