by Amy Stewart
I didn’t know exactly what kind of law Mr. Ward practiced, but as soon as we walked into his office, I could see that he practiced it with sophistication. The walls were lined in mahogany panels that glowed and smelled faintly of furniture polish. A red carpet woven with a diamond pattern muffled the sounds of the street, and the room was lit with new electric brass chandeliers. A pair of fan palms flanked a window, rising from identical Chinese black-and-gold lacquer pots perched on tiny cast-iron claw feet.
Presiding over this stylish lobby was a girl of about twenty in a polka-dotted dress. She sat behind a dainty secretary’s desk furnished with a typewriter and a telephone. She looked up at us from under a halo of honey-colored hair, and I could see at once that she was not the usual harried clerk one met in an office in Paterson. She looked more like the kind of girl who posed for the cover of Vogue, with enormous blue eyes, three perfect freckles alongside her nose, and lips drawn like a bow tied in red ribbon. They must have held auditions to find a girl like this one. I could not imagine that she walked into their office by chance.
“Good afternoon,” she said, offering us a warm and dimpled smile.
“We’ve come to see Mr. Ward,” Sheriff Heath said. “It’s an urgent matter. Is he in?”
She lifted her elegantly drawn eyebrows. “If I could keep track of where those two are at any hour of the day, I might be able to run this place like a respectable law office.”
I glanced around. “It seems respectable to me.”
“Oh, it looks nice enough, but those two—”
The sound of footsteps and laughter in the hallway made the young woman jump up. The door opened and two men burst in, grinning.
“Gertie, you won’t believe it,” said a tall, thin man with curly hair and a pipe dangling out of his mouth. He stopped when he saw us. The man he was with—shorter, rounder, red-haired, and freckle-faced, with pale green eyes and an eager smile—came to a stop just behind him.
The girl attempted to introduce us, although I hadn’t yet given our names. “Mr. Ward, I—”
He pulled his pipe from his mouth and looked me over. “Never mind, Gertie,” he said, and then, correcting himself, “Miss Nolan. Bob and I are old friends. Good to see you, Sheriff,” he said, taking the sheriff’s hand and pumping it vigorously. “What kind of trouble am I in today?”
He grinned at me and I resisted the urge to return his smile. John Ward was not handsome, exactly, but there was something both intelligent and impish about his expression, as if he were about to tell a joke or perform a skit. From the little I’d seen of him in the courtroom, I could only imagine the kind of theatrics he was capable of putting on in front of a judge.
Once his appraisal of me was complete, he remembered his manners and introduced himself. “John Ward, miss. Attorney at law. My partner, Peter McGinnis. And you have met Miss Nolan.”
“How do you do,” I said. “I am Constance Kopp. I have come—”
“I thought I knew you!” Mr. Ward said, elbowing his partner in the gut. “It’s the girl from that Kaufman case. All right, Petey, you go on without me.”
“Hey! You’re not sticking me with Mrs. Cumberland again!” Mr. McGinnis protested.
John Ward put his pipe between his teeth. “I am. Got to have a few words with Miss Kopp. This way, my dear. You can come too, Bob.”
He led us across the lobby to a door bearing matching nameplates. Sheriff Heath followed silently behind me. “Petey and I share an office,” he said by way of explanation as he pushed the door open. “We always have. We shared a boarding room in law school and a clerkship in Trenton, and now we even share a desk. We’re like an old married couple, except Petey won’t iron my shirts.”
Before he closed the door, he pushed his head into the reception room and said, “Isn’t that right, Petey?”
Mr. McGinnis was whispering something to Miss Nolan. He stood quickly and said, “What’s that?”
“I was just telling Miss Kopp here that you won’t iron my shirts, even after all I’ve done for you.”
“I did your ironing that once, but it was an exceptional circumstance.”
John Ward cackled and closed the door. “He did iron my shirt one time,” he said with a note of wonder in his voice. Then, pulling out a chair for me, he added, “I’ll tell you that story someday, Miss Kopp. I’d almost forgotten it myself.”
I sat down gingerly, my pocketbook in my lap, and the sheriff took the seat next to me. Mr. Ward settled into a leather armchair at one end of an enormous partner’s desk, then gestured to an identical chair at the other end of the desk. “That’s where Petey takes his afternoon nap,” he said, removing his pipe from his teeth and tapping it into a tray. “But you didn’t come here for a tour of the office, did you? You’re here to see if I’m going to let you beat Henry Kaufman in court again.”
Sheriff Heath cleared his throat. He hadn’t gotten a word in since we’d arrived, and now I wasn’t sure what either of us should say. I had been prepared for a much more serious meeting.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about a thing,” he said before either of us could compose an answer. “I’m off the case!”
“I’m sorry?” I said. “You’re off the case?”
“Your sweetheart Kaufman fired me. He’s a maniac, did you know that?”
Now I couldn’t help but laugh. “He’s not my sweetheart!”
“I knew I could make you smile. Now, Miss Kopp.” And here he leaned forward and tried without much success to arrange his features into a more serious expression. “That man put me through hell—excuse me, but he did—and I can’t imagine what your year has been like. How do you suppose that sister of his puts up with him?”
“I don’t think she does,” I said.
He put his pipe back in his mouth and leaned back, looking up at the ceiling and propping his feet on the desk. “No, I don’t suppose so. You know, they used to be such nice, quiet clients. Out-of-town family, very routine business, nothing to see. Then the old man decided that the only way to straighten out his miscreant son was to give him a factory to run. I tried to talk him out of it, Miss Kopp. I did. But he signed over the bank account, gave him the keys to the factory, everything. Said he wanted Henry to know he was serious. But the truth is, the old man’s always been a little soft when it came to Henry. I’ve no idea why. Now Mrs. Garfinkel’s come to town to try to put it all back the way it was before their father got involved. It’s a real mess.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you say Mr. Kaufman fired you?”
“Well, you might call it a mutual agreement to part ways. You know those friends of his—they’re not the most law-abiding group. Henry kept bringing them in here and asking me to defend them on some petty criminal matter. Pretty soon they were all turning up with their brothers and cousins and neighbors. Harassing Miss Nolan, stinking up the place—I finally told Henry I wasn’t taking on any more criminal cases, including his. He stormed out of here and I haven’t seen him since.”
I shifted in my chair. “If you’re not going to defend him at trial, who will?”
He laughed and swung his feet back to the floor. “Some other fool. It won’t be the law firm of Ward & McGinnis, that’s all I know. But I wouldn’t worry, Miss Kopp. Kaufman doesn’t have time to find a good attorney, and a bad one will only help your case. Mrs. Garfinkel has finally persuaded her father to give her control of the bank accounts, and I don’t think Henry even turns up at the factory anymore. I don’t know where he’ll get the money to pay another lawyer.”
Sheriff Heath cleared his throat. “If I can get a word in, John.”
“Sorry, Bob. Of course. I forget myself sometimes.”
The sheriff slid the envelope across the desk. “Did you, by any chance, hire a photographer to take some pictures of a building in New York?”
Mr. Ward’s mouth fell open. “This is one of LaMotte’s jobs!”
“You know him?” I said.
“Course I do! I use him a
ll the time. Did I forget to pay him for these? Oh, I’ll be in trouble. Why didn’t Gertie take care of this?” He opened the envelope and riffled through the pictures. “Means nothing to me,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “I don’t know what Kaufman was after.”
“So it was him!” I said.
“Oh, sure it was. This was another of his crazy schemes. I should’ve fired him then.”
“What did he hire you to do?” the sheriff asked.
The telephone rang in the lobby and he cocked his head to listen. A knock came at the door, and Miss Nolan looked in. “It’s Mrs. Ward.”
He dropped his pipe back into the tray. “Not for long she isn’t.”
Miss Nolan and I both gave a little gasp.
“Pardon me, girls. Don’t ever marry, either one of you. Can’t you tell her I left with Petey?”
“She just saw him going into the Hamilton Club.”
In unison they said, “And that’s why she’s calling.”
Mr. Ward raised his hands in mock surrender. “All right. Tell her to hold the line.”
Miss Nolan retreated and closed the door behind her. Mr. Ward flipped through the photographs again and looked back up at Sheriff Heath. “Where were we?”
“John,” the sheriff said. “This is serious. Isn’t there anything you can tell us about these?”
He pushed the envelope back across the desk. “I don’t know, Bob. Like I say, he just asked me to have the building watched. I think Kaufman liked to get me caught up in his lunatic schemes, just to see what I would do. He also wanted to know what was involved with adopting a baby. Can you imagine that? Henry Kaufman with a baby?”
I jumped to my feet. “Adoption?”
Mr. Ward rose as well. “Oh, well, nothing ever came of it. I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. He just came in here asking about orphanages and paperwork. I think he was tight. He usually was.”
From the other room, Miss Nolan called for him. “Mr. Ward, she’s still holding the line!”
Sheriff Heath started to say something but I grabbed his arm.
“Let’s go,” I said.
I pulled him into the lobby. Mr. Ward followed us and took up the telephone. As we walked away, we heard him shout into the receiver.
“Peaches? Is that you?”
51
AS SHERIFF HEATH’S AUTOMOBILE rolled down Colt Street, I said, “Don’t you see? He left him in an orphanage. That’s where anyone would leave a baby he didn’t want to take care of.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
I paused. I wasn’t about to tell him how I knew.
“People do it all the time,” I said. “They drop a child off because they can’t feed it, or because the father’s gone to jail, or because the mother has to go away and work. They say they’ll come back, but they never do. Mr. Ward said he had questions about orphanages. I bet he was just trying to figure out what he would do with a baby once he had one. Lucy was right. He didn’t want to pay support, he was tired of being bothered about it, and he thought she was blackmailing him for a share of the family’s money. So he took the child and left it at an orphanage for adoption. He might have even believed it was his right to do, as the boy’s father.”
We stopped for a train crossing. We were fifth in a line of black automobiles. Behind us, two draft horses hauling a wagon of empty wooden barrels huffed and tossed their heads at the scream the train engine made as it went by.
Once the train passed, he said, “I don’t see Kaufman grabbing a baby. And what do you suggest we do? Write to every orphanage in New Jersey and New York?”
“We’re not writing letters,” I said quickly. “I don’t think Mr. Kaufman would have gone driving around New York looking for an orphanage. He would have wanted to get out of the city. Why wouldn’t he bring it right back to Paterson?”
The sheriff turned to me, puzzled. “Do you expect me to go knocking on the doors of orphanages and ask if they’ve got an extra boy around the place?”
“No. I’m going, too.”
He didn’t say anything for a few minutes as we followed the line of cars across the tracks. Then he stopped at an intersection, pushed his hat off his forehead to rub his temples, and said, “All right. We’re just down the street from one of them, so we might as well go now. There’s another out on McBride, and of course the orphan asylum is down on Market Street. I can’t think of any others.”
The days of hiding a home for girls in the countryside were over. Mrs. Florence’s home in Wyckoff had been closed for years. Any sort of orphanage or home for mothers and children would be found in the city today, near the hospital and the train station.
“Well, then, we have three to visit. We could see them all this afternoon and be home for supper.”
He didn’t answer, but he turned down Union, and soon we were driving along Albion, a tree-lined street of older homes set back from the road. At the end of the block, we came to a wide and plainly built farmhouse with green shutters and an enormous elm in front. It looked to be a comfortable and clean place for girls in confinement and their babies, but as we reached the door, I could smell rot and mildew inside. Sitting atop that was the odor of cabbage and beans.
A handwritten sign tacked next to the door read “MRS. LIVINGSTON’S HOME FOR THE UNWED AND FRIENDLESS. FORMERLY RESPECTABLE GIRLS ONLY. NO ADOPTIONS OFFERED.”
Sheriff Heath rang the bell and a baby wailed in response. Another child joined in, and soon there were three of them. Footsteps echoed back and forth through the front rooms of the house, but no one came to the door.
A skinny cat jumped on the porch and tumbled backward in surprise when it saw us. It hissed at us from its hiding place.
The sheriff rang the bell again and this time the footsteps came closer. A girl in a housedress answered the door. She was only a teenager, and shapeless in a way that suggested that she had recently borne a child herself. Her hair was tied carelessly at the top of her head. I fought to push back memories of my own confinement, and the way I’d hide whenever a knock came at the door. This girl seemed so brazen in comparison.
She had a rag in her hand, which she dropped when she saw the sheriff.
“How do you do, miss,” he said. “I am Sheriff Robert Heath, and this is Miss Kopp. We are here to see about a child. May we speak to Mrs. Livingston?”
Without a word she closed the door and left us standing there, the cat nosing at our ankles. Sheriff Heath pushed it off the porch with his boot. He looked over at me, embarrassed. “I don’t like cats.”
“Neither do I.”
We heard footsteps again and the door opened, this time revealing a short, squat woman with hair the color of a cast-iron pan and a disposition to match. She wore a high-necked dress the likes of which I hadn’t seen since my grandmother was alive, and spectacles as thick and dusty as the windows in her old home.
“We have no business with you,” she said before Sheriff Heath could get in a word. “Our girls come from good homes and the children are carefully placed with families.”
She started to close the door, but the sheriff reached out and held it. “We need a word with you,” he said. “It concerns a criminal matter. We wish to clear your home of any wrongdoing, but if we’re unable to do that today, we’ll send detectives around tomorrow. We’d like to keep it out of the papers.”
Her face settled into its frown lines, but she stepped aside so we could enter. She closed the door behind us and we stood in a dark foyer next to a stack of old newspapers and a row of empty milk bottles. There were blankets and wooden toys on the stairs, cups and tiny plates on the floor, and the smell of sour milk rising from the carpet. Mrs. Florence never would have tolerated such a mess.
She looked expectantly at us. I cleared my throat and said, “We believe a man deposited a baby boy at a church home or an orphanage last year.”
She shook her head. “We would have turned him away. We don’t let people do that anymore. Too much trouble for us, and w
e have enough trouble as it is.”
As if to illustrate her point, two girls of a tender age lumbered down the stairs, their bellies so swollen that no dress could hide their condition. Sheriff Heath looked quickly away. When they saw him, they turned without a word and disappeared.
“We’re sorry to have disturbed you, Mrs. Livingston,” I said. “Can you tell me where such a child would be taken?”
“Not to a home like mine,” she said. “And not the Catholic home either. The Orphan Asylum Hospital would take him, but he’d be sent right out for adoption if no one claimed him.”
THE ASYLUM WAS HOUSED in a fearsome brick building on Market Street, where it stood as a solemn reminder of the misfortunes that could be inflicted upon small children. More than one parent or vicious older sibling threatened to send little boys and girls there if they misbehaved. Such jokes were strictly banned in our household, but Fleurette knew about the place somehow, and when she was only five, she visited it in her nightmares. I remember lying awake on those nights and fighting the urge to go to her as my mother rose instead to quiet the child.
But compared to Mrs. Livingston’s home, the orphan asylum was surprisingly clean and uncluttered. We entered through grand brass doors and were greeted by the smell of floor soap and the sound of a typewriter. A plump older woman sat behind the desk and stopped typing when she saw us.
“Sheriff Heath,” she said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “What a nice surprise. How are dear Cordelia and those sweet children?”
“They’re just fine,” he said. “May I introduce you to my associate, Miss Kopp. She’s helping me with a case.” Turning to me, he said, “Mrs. Griggs lived next door to us before we moved to our present living quarters.”
“I’m sure Cordelia misses her kitchen,” Mrs. Griggs said.