Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions

by Amy Stewart

  Constance was shocked to hear her talk that way. Had Norma really said all of that to a complete stranger? She felt her face go red and she had to swallow hard to get her voice back.

  “It was a scandal for the man who harassed us and was found guilty. My sisters and I did nothing to humiliate ourselves. That’s a fiction that Norma has invented for herself. The difference between Norma and me is that I do not go around charging people with crimes I believe they might someday commit. I hope you regard your duties as I do mine.”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “Good. Then let’s not keep these ladies on an assignment that has no merit, when there is surely more serious work to be done, and girls in real distress who could use their help.”

  Mrs. Headison wouldn’t look at Constance after that, but she nodded and went over to her desk to write something down.

  “Thank you,” said Constance. “Now, I wouldn’t want Fleurette to find out about our misunderstanding . . .”

  “Misunderstanding?” Belle Headison sounded bereft.

  “Yes, because that’s all it was. It would only upset her to think we didn’t trust her, and we do.”

  With her eyes still on her desk, Mrs. Headison said, “Oh, it’s never the girl I mistrust, but the hands she might fall into. Take that white slave case of yours. What’s to become of that poor girl?”

  “Yes, I saw you at the press conference.”

  “Mr. Courter invited me. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Constance minded very much but tried not to let it show. “Minnie Davis insists that she left home of her own free will. It would be the worst sort of exaggeration to call it a white slave case.”

  Mrs. Headison shook her head pityingly. “I wouldn’t be so sure. I had a girl just like her a few months ago. Claims she ran off willingly, and found a man who might get around to marrying her one day, except he never did.”

  “What became of her?”

  She seemed surprised that Constance would even ask the question. “Why, I had her sent to the state home on a charge of social vagrancy. I’m sure you’ll do the same with Miss Davis.”

  “I’d like to try to put girls like her on a better path,” Constance said. “Some of them never meant to do wrong. Don’t you think they can be saved?”

  “Saved for what?” Belle Headison seemed genuinely puzzled by the question. “They’ll never marry. No employer would have them. There’s no telling what social diseases they might be spreading among the men in this county, just before we’re about to send our boys to war. Can you imagine? No, I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to keep them away from society until they’re much older, and not such a trap for healthy young men. Besides, we don’t want a child born to a morally degraded mother. We’d have an entire generation of degenerate and feeble-minded children. I’d lock Minnie Davis up until she was quite past childbearing age. Wouldn’t you?”

  43

  CONSTANCE TOOK THE TROLLEY as far as Main Street in Hackensack, then decided to walk the rest of the way to clear her head. It was one of those blindingly bright afternoons that was always accompanied by a high wind in winter. The men walked with their hands clasped down over the tops of their hats, and the women felt around for pins and straps and ribbons. Every shop awning snapped and shook like a sail. A strip of bunting had worked loose from the Odd Fellows Hall and flew high above the second-story windows, tethered by a single fraying knot at the base of a flag-pole.

  From across the street, she spotted Sheriff Heath coming out of the Bergen Evening Record’s office. He paused for a minute in front of Mr. Terhune’s shop and looked in the window. There were a few other men admiring whatever was inside. Constance stepped up next to him and saw that it was a motorcycle.

  “It looks like a terribly clumsy bicycle,” she said.

  “It’s quite a bit more than that,” Sheriff Heath said.

  “You’re right. It’s probably noisy, too.”

  “I’ll tell Mr. Harley you’re not impressed.”

  “Are you planning to take Mrs. Heath to Washington on one of those?”

  He turned to her and tipped back the brim of his hat. He had a way of leaning in and squinting at her sometimes, as if he were trying to read small type. “What do you think? Congressman Heath?”

  It took her breath away, the way he put his ambition out before her like that.

  “I thought Sheriff Heath sounded just fine.”

  He shrugged and said, “So did I. But the law says a man can only serve as sheriff for one term in a row. I could run again someday, if Washington won’t have me.”

  “Oh, they’ll have you. Why wouldn’t they?”

  He turned and they walked together toward the jail. “I’m up against a brick-maker. There’s less to dislike about him.”

  “Well, I’d vote for you,” Constance said, although she didn’t like the idea of voting him out of town.

  “Then I wish you could,” he said.

  “I didn’t think you wanted to go to Washington.”

  They passed a barber shop, a druggist, and a hardware store. Every man coming in and out wanted to stop and shake hands with the sheriff. Constance could see him as a politician, making promises and giving speeches. He would miss the crooks, although he might find some in the capital.

  After that business concluded, he said, “The local party nominates the best man for every office. They put me up for sheriff and I was glad to have the chance. Now they’ve put me up for Congress. Mrs. Heath believes I can win. She intends to make my campaign a success. I’ll let her run the whole thing if she wants. It’s good to see her taking an interest.”

  That was as much as Sheriff Heath was going to say about his marriage, but Constance understood. It was better between them when Cordelia could be on his side, and have a cause to rally around. She was miserable living in the sheriff’s quarters, and who could blame her? Of course she preferred a nice home in Washington.

  By now they’d reached the jail. She followed Sheriff Heath into his office.

  “One of our guards has an aunt in Atlanta,” he said as he settled behind his desk. “You’ve made the papers again.”

  Constance groaned and dropped into a chair across from him. “Why would they bother about me all the way down there?” She took the article from him. It had been folded several times, and was heavily marked with underlining and exclamation points by the guard’s aunt, who apparently thought the whole business appalling.

  From the very first paragraph, Constance found herself agreeing with the aunt.

  Constance the Cop is a real police officer, stout-hearted and daring. She does not hesitate to venture into a physical mixup with the sterner sex in the pursuit of her duty. Also does she operate the “halter hug,” which, though it may sound rather enticing to the imaginative masculine reader, still it has proved to be just as distressingly effective to the culprit as a regular wrestling strangle hold. For Constance’s arms are both lithe and muscular, and while they unquestionably could be shaped to tenderer ends have, nevertheless, the compressive power of steel cables when hardened by the call of duty.

  She couldn’t bear to look at another word and tossed the paper back to him. “I feel sorry for Atlanta if it must send all the way to New Jersey for its entertainment.”

  The sheriff spread the story across his desk. It took up the entire front page of the Sunday magazine, and two more pages inside. “You’ve made quite a sensation, Miss Kopp. I don’t recall a reporter from Atlanta visiting us here in Hackensack.”

  “That’s because he was never here!” She turned the paper around and ran her finger down the lines of type. “He copied most of this from other papers. There’s a long bit about the Kaufman case, and quite a lot about von Matthesius, all pulled from other reports. And he fabricated all the quotes himself.” She pointed to a line at the end of the story from a New York police officer who, the reporter claimed, witnessed her capture of a fugitive at a Brooklyn subway station last year: “Gee! I seen some
A1 strong-armed performers in my time, but that chicken cop’s got somethin’ on all of ’em!”

  The sheriff was a man who valued dignity and sobriety above all else, so it took some effort to hide his amusement. “Are you quite sure he made that up?”

  “Oh, please don’t tell me that women officers are being called ‘chicken cops’ behind our backs.”

  He held up his hands in mock surrender. “If they are, I’m not going to be the one to tell you. How’d you get along in Catskill?”

  “Poorly,” Constance said. “Please don’t remind me again that the only reason you hired a woman was to get the female population in line. Whatever magical powers I possess are wasted on the Davises. Isn’t there something else we can do for her?”

  “Well, I don’t know what it will mean for Miss Davis, but the case against Anthony Leo is falling apart. If she won’t testify against him, then it’s nearly impossible to make a case that he took her forcibly over state lines. And thanks to your efforts, the landlord has told John Courter that he hasn’t anything useful to say in court about men sneaking in and out of the place. He won’t be testifying.”

  “But that has to be good news for Minnie, doesn’t it? If Anthony Leo’s to be released, surely she will be, too.”

  “We’ll know in another week or so. He’s going before the judge and you’re to bring Minnie back from Trenton for the day. They might dispense with her case at the same time, I don’t know.” The sheriff was sorting through the morning’s mail on his desk. He held out a handwritten note to her.

  “It’s Carrie Hart. She was just here looking for you. She says it concerns Fleurette.”

  44

  THE NOTE INSTRUCTED Constance to meet Carrie at the library if she returned within the hour. Constance hurried back downtown in the direction she’d just gone, but stopped short as she pushed through the library’s double doors.

  Carrie was sitting at a table with Norma, their heads bent over a newspaper.

  The shock of seeing Norma out on her own in public was beginning to wear off, but she couldn’t guess as to how Norma managed to keep turning up at the side of Constance’s professional acquaintances. Had she ever introduced Carrie and Norma? Surely not. She rushed over, bewildered, and sat across from them.

  “What’s this about Fleurette?” she whispered. “I wish you wouldn’t scare me like that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that your sister’s gone missing?” Carrie asked.

  “She isn’t missing,” Constance hissed, although she could see from their pitying expressions that her version of events held no interest. To Norma she added, “I can’t seem to turn around without you showing up with another hare-brained scheme. What’s the matter with you?”

  Norma spoke with a note of grim triumph. “She didn’t go off with May Ward.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Constance said. “Of course she did. We have postcards from her! Freeman Bernstein told us she joined the company.”

  “Look.” Norma pushed the newspaper across the table.

  “Why are you reading the Scranton Times?” But then Constance saw the notice about May Ward’s show. The entire cast was listed. There were eight Dresden Dolls, and Fleurette was not among them.

  It unsettled her, but she didn’t want to admit it. “What does this tell us?”

  Norma snorted. “I don’t know why you have to be so thick-headed. She isn’t there. If she ever was with the troupe, she’s run off.”

  “Or she’s been kidnapped,” Carrie put in, a little too eagerly. “Norma told me about the hidden messages in the postcards.”

  “She hasn’t been kidnapped,” Constance said crossly. “Norma, I can’t believe you’d involve Carrie in this nonsense. Of course there aren’t hidden messages in the postcards.”

  “We just haven’t found them yet,” Norma said.

  “Oh, you mustn’t blame her,” Carrie said. “I was here a few days ago to work on a story, and I overheard Norma asking after the Pennsylvania papers. She gave her name to the librarian and I introduced myself. I’ve never met the other Kopps!”

  “What a shame,” Constance mumbled.

  “Well, they don’t take the smaller papers here,” Carrie continued, “but of course, we take everything at my office. I told her to meet me here this morning and I’d have exactly what she’s looking for. And here it is! Now, where do you suppose Fleurette has gone?”

  “Harrisburg,” said Constance. “It says right here that Harrisburg is the next stop on the tour, and I have every reason to think she’s with them. There could be any number of reasons why she isn’t listed with the company. Maybe she’s an understudy. She said she hadn’t learned all the steps yet.”

  “She didn’t tell us she was an understudy,” Norma said.

  “She might not have wanted to. Or maybe the paper had an old notice, printed before Fleurette joined.”

  Carrie and Norma exchanged a maddeningly conspiratorial look. “That isn’t all we know,” Norma said, regally.

  Constance waited, although her outrage was beginning to simmer over. At war inside of her were twin emotions: fury at Norma, and terror over the idea that Fleurette really had disappeared.

  Carrie leaned across the table to deliver the news. “This Freeman Bernstein. Norma was right. She did remember him from the papers. He’s the one who ran that pleasure resort up at 110th Street a few years ago. Did you ever see it? It was right on Fifth Avenue.”

  “I don’t go in for pleasure resorts,” Norma said, as if anyone needed to be reminded of that, “but I did read about this one. Carrie found it in her archives.”

  “It was called Midway Park,” Carrie continued. “Mr. Bernstein meant it to be a little Coney Island right in the city. Female trapeze artists, calcium lights blazing all night, a merry-go-round, and a brass band—you can imagine the way the neighbors complained, but he had a few thousand people through there every night. Anyway, he was putting all these little buildings up, and one of them fell over in a storm and hurt a few people. That was enough to get it closed down. A few months later, he formed a new corporation under a new name and went right on to the next venture.”

  “That’s what he does,” Norma said. “Every few years, he’s running a new scheme under a new name. You remember Beulah Binford and the murder scandal down in Virginia? He tried to put her on the stage after the trial. Can you imagine making a show of that mess?”

  Norma started shuffling through a stack of clippings. Constance slapped her hand down on top of them. “Norma. I can see what you’ve done. You’ve put together an entire file of grievances against Freeman Bernstein, and you’ve enlisted the help of a reporter who surely has more important work to do. It’s bad enough that you’d pull Belle Headison into this. I can’t believe you’re bothering Carrie with it, too. I can’t take a step in this town without finding someone else you’ve enlisted into this nonsensical scheme of yours.”

  Norma didn’t bother to answer and went back to studying her newspapers. Carrie smiled brightly and said, “Oh, this is a far more interesting story than anything you’ve given me. Courthouse duty is dull, but this—this is perfect! ‘Woman Deputy Rescues Sister.’”

  “We don’t know that she needs rescuing.”

  “Of course she does,” Norma said.

  Carrie sat back in her chair and watched the two of them, clearly amused.

  Norma shuffled her papers around. “You admit it looks suspicious.”

  “I don’t like Fleurette being gone any more than you do, but we mustn’t turn it into a criminal case.”

  “Well, I won’t be satisfied until someone has laid eyes on her and can report back that she’s being looked after. We really don’t have any idea.”

  “Fleurette is not being forced at knife-point to send home cheerful postcards, if that’s what you think.”

  “I know exactly what I think. You’re the one who refuses to see the facts.”

  Norma was staring at Constance rather ferociously, waiting for
some sort of answer, which never came, as there was no way to respond to a statement like that. Finally Norma hoisted an eyebrow and said, “I’ve waited long enough. Carrie and I are getting on a train and you can’t stop us.”

  Norma on a train? Norma, for whom a trip to Hackensack was once exotic?

  Constance blamed Carrie for this. She’d fanned all of Norma’s wild notions about kidnappings and secret plots, and failed to see that her mistrust of Freeman Bernstein was founded on nothing more than a generalized contempt of any outsider who tried to interfere with her family.

  But now there was this grain of doubt, this disquieting possibility that something really had gone wrong with Fleurette. What if she really had disappeared, or fallen in with bad company? What if she really was stranded somewhere, and very much in need of rescuing?

  Constance wasn’t about to admit that Norma might be right. She said, “I can’t seem to stop anyone in this family from getting on a train. But if you’re going, I’m coming with you, if only to intervene before you make fools of yourselves.”

  “You don’t have to. Stay home if you don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it, and I’m not staying home,” Constance said.

  That’s what passed for a compromise with Norma.

  45

  “YOU’RE UP EARLY,” Fleurette said from behind a mouthful of pins.

  “I haven’t been to bed.” May Ward tried to sound gay about it, but her voice cracked. It was six in the morning, and they had a train at noon. Her room smelled of spoiled wine and stale cigarettes. Dresses and stockings were flung over every chair and heaped on the floor around her bed. It was no wonder her wardrobe was in such poor repair: she was always stumbling over skirts, crushing beadwork, and snagging hooks and buttons. Never had Fleurette seen such fine dresses so thoroughly abused.