“How do you know he doesn't write for one of those trashy little newspapers they sell at supermarket checkouts? How do you know he's even from Greenwich?”
“This is also a public library, Barbara.”
“Whose purpose is to serve this town,” Barbara Blackthorne added, “not to embarrass it.”
The younger woman winced but said nothing.
Barbara stood up. “Well, I'm going to have a talk with Mr. Hoagland.”
Lesko watched her go, heading toward the elevator across the library floor.
“The lady's upset,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Carol Oakes looked up from her index cards.
”I didn't mean to eavesdrop. Couldn't help hearing. But now that I have, who's Anthony Comstock?”
Carol continued sorting. “Oh, he was a nineteenth-century vice crusader. A fanatic, actually, and a thundering ass· Have you ever seen September Morn, the painting?”
“Sure. My mother hung a copy in the upstairs bathroom. Kind of a polite nude. With folded arms.”
Carol squinted, remembering. ”A French artist did it, I forget who or when. But a New York art dealer bought a bunch of prints and they weren't selling. The dealer had a brainstorm. He put a copy in his gallery window, then made an anonymous call to this nut, Comstock, saying that a lewd painting was being displayed where passing schoolchildren could see it. Comstock rushed down, brought a reporter, and tried to have the dealer arrested for peddling smut if he didn't take it out of his window. A crowd gathered, the paper ran the story, and within a few weeks this ordinary little nude was one of the best-known paintings in America.”
Lesko laughed. He'd tell his mother next time he called Florida. “Yeah, but what's the connection with Greenwich?” he asked.
She shook her head. ”I really don't know. Some scandal about prostitutes back then who moved up here from New York and married locals.”
“What happened? The guy struck out on September Morn, so he decides to bother retired hookers? Every town in the country must have at least a couple.”
”I suppose,” Carol guessed, “but this is Greenwich. Most of us could care less, but some of the older families are sensitive. Mrs. Blackthorne' s people have been here forever. After a while they make a hobby out of being very Greenwich. Ancestor worship is part of the hobby. Some of these people don't even want you to know they go to the bathroom, so you can imagine how they get if you start poking around their family trees with anything less than admiration.”
Lesko closed his atlas. He liked this girl and was enjoying the conversation, but he wasn't sure if it was heading anywhere useful. But Sturdevant, on the other hand, must think he's on to something. A guy named Anthony Cornstock comes here a hundred years ago and starts rooting out ex-hookers. There's got to be a connection with the Tilden Beckwith who was a ringer for Corbin, but what's the connection between Beckwith and a hooker? Did he stash one here? Why out here? Why would he go to the trouble?
“Thank you, miss.” He tipped an imaginary hat to Carol Oakes. “Nice talking to you.”
Lesko wandered past the card files to a point where he could see down aisle seven. Sturdevant was at the far end on one knee, one book under his arm and another in his hands. He was checking its index. Lesko guessed he could count on at least a minute to go back and see what Sturdevant had on the microfilm machine. He walked quickly in that direction.
Sturdevant had left the machine on and a fuzzy front page was projected onto the reading surface. Lesko touched the focus knob. The Greenwich Graphic, the masthead said, August 1890. Comstock's name jumped up from a two-column headline, comstock beaten, it said. Then underneath in bold type, “Thrown Down Stairs.” Then in smaller type, “Vows to Press On Fearlessly.” Who threw him down the stairs? Beckwith? No. Some doctor named Palmer. Way to go, Doc.
Sturdevant's note pad was lying open on the projector. His notes were spotty. Cryptically written. A lot of names.
Comstock. Margaret/Charlotte fearful?
Dr. Miles Palmer. Delivered J's grandfather?
Carrie Todd and Belle Walker. Retired prosts? Possibly.
Laura Hemmings too. Did they recognize Margaret?
Charlotte. Lesko raised one eyebrow. Charlotte Whitney Corbin, right? Corbin's great-grandmother. She lived here in Greenwich? Sturdevant sure thinks so. And she had a kid here. Corbin's grandfather. His namesake.
All the other names, except for the doctor, seemed to be known or suspected ex-hookers. Charlotte Corbin too? Otherwise, why should she be afraid of Comstock? Margaret. Margaret slash Charlotte.
Wait a minute.
Holy shit!
Lesko backed away from the machine and looked to see if Sturdevant was on his way. He was but someone stopped him. Up near the information desk, a tweedy-looking man of about sixty had just intercepted Sturdevant. Mrs. Blackthorne was returning to her seat and Carol Oakes was giving her a “you're such a twit” look. The man in the tweeds had to be Mr. Hoagland who, Lesko assumed, had to be the head guy around here. He was questioning Sturdevant and Sturdevant was not loving it. But Sturdevant at least was not telling him to buzz off as Lesko would have. He was opening one of the books he carried and asking a question in return. Lesko decided he had another minute at least. He hurried back to the machine and flipped Sturdevant’s notebook to its preceding page.
More names and notes, most of which meant nothing to him. Colonel Mann. Town Topics. Something about the colonel blackmailing Tilden. And a lot of stuff about a blizzard. Someone named George Baremore. Baremore found first, then Ella. Lesko moved back one more page.
There it was. Margaret Barrie and Charlotte Corbin— same woman. Lesko scanned the rest of the page. There were references to a Hiram Corbin who had died in a train wreck, leaving Charlotte a widow. But the tone of Sturdevant's notes seemed to doubt that Hiram Corbin ever existed, or at least that Charlotte was ever married to him. Sturdevant thought she'd been carefully set up here by Tilden, probably with a full but concocted life history. Lesko put the note pad back the way he found it.
So, Lesko asked himself, what do we have? Tilden has a mistress, probably a hooker, who gets pregnant. The pregnancy is probably deliberate because hookers don't have that kind of accident. He moves her up here with a new name so she can have the kid in peace. But then along comes Anthony Comstock a year or so later and makes everybody so nervous that they're still touchy about it. But why, come to think of it, did he come? Did someone blow the whistle?
Lesko shifted his attention back to the projected page of the Greenwich Graphic. The story about Comstock being thrown down the stairs offered little more information except that he'd broken three ribs. It contained almost no background detail, which suggested to Lesko that Cornstock’s activities were being reported on a continuing basis and that this was just the latest episode. The rest of the page contained routine local news, a few ads and social notes, an argument over whether the main street should be electrified. The name Laura Hemmings caught his eye. It was one of the names in Sturdevant’s notes. The item was a report on the weekly meeting of the Women's Christian Temperance Union of Greenwich. They were going to have a tea dance in September. Laura Hemmings would head the dance committee and—aha!—in charge of decorations would be Mrs. Charlotte Corbin. The item went on to say that this inseparable pair was the same duo that organized the famously successful July 4 pageant and the uproarious roller-skating party of last May. Lesko sniffed. Reformed bimbos are as bad as reformed drunks. But this group didn't sound like the Carrie Nation types who used to go around smashing up perfectly good saloons with hatchets. It seemed more like a social club than a bunch of pain-in-the-ass teetotalers.
“I'm afraid I'm using that machine.” Lesko heard the voice behind him.
Shit!
“Oh, sorry.” Lesko moved aside. “Those old ads just caught my eye.” He saw an expression of annoyance on Sturdevant's face, more than his being there should have justified but Lesko understood. After being bugged by Mr. Hoa
gland and Mrs. Blackthorne, Sturdevant didn't need another nosy local taking an interest in what he was doing.
Lesko touched a finger to the projected page. “Dr. King's New Discovery for Consumption.” He smiled. “Says here it contains chloroform and opium. A couple of shots of that and you wouldn't know whether you were sick or not. I didn't know they could sell opium like that.”
“Oh yes.” Sturdevant relaxed a notch. “Opium and cocaine. There were millions of addicts in this country at the turn of the century because of patent medicines like that one. Even Bayer's aspirin used to contain cocaine.”
“No kidding.” Lesko raised his eyebrows. ”I knew about booze in these old medicines but I didn't realize about the drugs. A drugstore I was in once had this old poster for Hostetter's Celebrated Stomach Bitters. Whatever you got, this stuff would fix it. A little card underneath the poster said it was forty-four percent alcohol, which is a fairly decent shot.” Come on, Lesko said in his mind, smile at that. I'm just a harmless guy who hangs out in libraries. No smile? Okay. We'll try something else.
“My grandmother wouldn't touch a drop,” Lesko lied. ”I mean, she was one of these temperance ladies, but if she was feeling down she'd swig some stuff called Lydia Pinkham's Extract right from the bottle and it was as good as a martini, I find out later.”
“Temperance ladies?” He had Sturdevant’ s attention. “You mean in Greenwich?”
“Yeah.”
“Your family's been here a long time?”
“Since just after the Civil War. They had the butcher shop in town.”
“Does the name Charlotte Corbin mean anything to you?” Sturdevant asked. “Your grandmother might possibly have known her.”
Lesko shook his head. “Doesn't ring a bell.”
“Or Laura Hemmings?”
Lesko shrugged. “Sorry. She told a lot of stories about the old days but I don't remember those names coming up.” Come on. Ask.
“Did she ever mention a man named Anthony Cornstock? He caused a stir in town back around 1890 by trying to root out some former prostitutes who'd come here to live.”
“The religious nut. Yeah.” Lesko brightened. He told Sturdevant the story of September Morn. “Some people around here still get touchy about all that hooker stuff he did.”
` “So I've learned.” Sturdevant gestured in the general direction of Mr. Hoagland while hefting the two volumes he was carrying. “And these Greenwich histories don't shed much light on it either. There's barely a mention.”
No shit, Lesko thought. Who do you think would bother writing a history of Greenwich except someone with two last names, like Carter Woodruff the third, who lives back in the four-acre zoning and who wants all his friends to have something nice for their coffee tables? One of those types is going to write about ex-bimbos? He's going to say, Guess what, some of our grandmothers screwed half the U.S. Navy before they moved up here and picked out a Yalie to settle down with?
”I guess those newspaper files are your best bet.” Lesko pointed. “You're trying to track down those two women you mentioned? What were they, hookers or temperance?”
“I'm not really sure. They were both certainly members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.”
“You could try Chicago,” Lesko said offhandedly. As he expected, Sturdevant’ s eyes widened in surprise.
“Chicago? How could you know?” He stopped.
“The WCTU,” Lesko explained. “They got their national headquarters out there. Up in Evanston. My grandmother, if she wanted to look up a member she lost track of, she'd write to Evanston and if they had the address they'd forward the letter.”
“That's an excellent suggestion, Mr ...”
Lesko pretended not to notice he was being asked his name. “The next thing you do is check with the county tax assessor's office. It's easiest if you have a street but a name is enough. They'll have a record of how many times the house has been bought and sold and who owned it. Another good bet most people don't think of is the Water Department. They'll know when they first turned on the water for a particular house. If they had electricity, it's even easier.”
“You'd make a good detective,” Sturdevant observed.
“Yeah. Well, look, I gotta run.” He turned away toward the chair on which he'd left his coat. “Good luck finding those ladies.”
Lesko waved off Sturdevant’ s call of thanks and headed back toward the information desk. At a pay phone nearby he opened the Greenwich directory to Beckwith. There were two listings, only one of which showed a Round Hill Road address. Lesko made a note of both. Returning to the rack of atlases, he found a Hagstrom street map of Fairfield County and, fishing out a dime, made a Xerox copy of the page showing both Round Hill Road and Maple Avenue. He then blew a kiss toward Carol Oakes. Lesko stepped through the automatic doors.
Letting Sturdevant see him might not have been ideal, he knew. But maybe it helped move things along. Harry Sturdevant seemed like one of those very deliberate types, aside from being an amateur. He'd be in that library forever, getting all bogged down in the historical romance of what he was trying to find out instead of zeroing in on who, what, when, and where. And who did what to who. Whom. Maybe now he'd make a couple of those connections quicker. Lesko had, for sure. He knew, for example, that Sturdevant was already aware of the connection between Tilden Beckwith and Jonathan Corbin. Sturdevant also seemed aware that a woman named Margaret was in the picture, but it apparently came as news to him that this Margaret and Corbin's great-grandmother were the same person. It might even be news to Corbin, although Lesko somehow doubted that. It sure wasn't news to Dancer and the Beckwiths.
Lesko looked up at the sky as he unlocked Mr. Makowski's car. It was still mostly clear. But far to the west he could see what looked like a misty mountain range. More snow maybe. He hoped so. The Corbin guy always gets so much more interesting when it snows. But for now, speaking of interesting, maybe it's time we had a chat with those nice folks up on Round Hill Road.
”I think you're being silly,” Gwen Leamas said to him as they walked slowly past shop windows toward Maple Avenue.
“Your uncle doesn't have to know everything,” he told her. “Like you said yesterday, some things are private.”
“But you're talking about one obscure gossip item this Colonel Mann printed almost a hundred years ago.”
“It hurt her,” he said quietly. “And it frightened her.”
She took his hand. “Jonathan, should I start worrying about you all over again?’'
“What do you mean?”
“You do understand she's long dead, don't you? You're talking as if she isn't.”
”I know she's dead.” Most of the time, I know that. ”Gwen”—he gave her a squeeze—“there's so much buzzing through my head that I couldn't possibly know except through Tilden Beckwith. When I talk about these things out loud, and you get that worried look like now, and your uncle looks at me like I'm a laboratory rat, you can understand if I get self-conscious. I'm also tired of people scribbling every time I open my mouth. That's another reason I didn't want to talk about Colonel Mann.”
“Will you tell me if I don't scribble?”
“It's not that big a deal.”
“What if I look blithely unworried? How's this?” Gwen twisted her face into a wide-eyed simper, her front teeth protruding over her lower lip.
Corbin tried not to laugh. He turned his head away toward the street. A car went by. Something about that car. Oh, shit. Cut it out. He turned back toward Gwen Leamas, whose face was determinedly frozen into that same idiotic expression. Corbin surrendered.
'‘There really isn't much to it.”
“Tell me anyway. Just tell me a story and this time don't give a thought to how you know it.”
“There was a newspaper called Town Topics. He ran it. Like your uncle said, he was a very pleasant-looking man who used to carry sugar for horses, but he was a real bastard underneath.”
”A blackmailer.” Gwen nodde
d.
“He'd pay household servants, for example, for tidbits about their employers. If the information was juicy enough, he'd go to the people involved and extort a lifetime subscription out of them for thousands of dollars. The problem got so bad that employers would deliberately drop little made-up stories in the hearing of their servants. If one appeared in print, the servant would be fired.’'
“And one of Tilden's servants sold him out?”
”I think it was Ansel Carling. But remember, this Colonel Mann was also a double-crosser.”
“Go on.” Gwen walked with him.
“Tilden and Margaret went to the World Series that year—1888, I guess. It seems to me it was the Giants against the St. Louis Browns and the first four games were in New York. Anyway, after the fourth game an issue of Town Topics came out with a blind item that said—see, I even remember this—‘What scion of a respected Wall Street firm, lately and suspiciously widowed, has been attending the world championship series of baseball in the company of a lovely but soiled dove who is very much in a delicate condition?’ There was never much doubt who he was talking about because whenever he'd run one of these blind items, all you had to do was look over at the adjacent column and you'd see a harmless and legitimate reference to the same person by name. Margaret used to read Town Topics. Everybody did. So she opens the paper and there in one sentence she not only sees herself identified as a prostitute but she sees doubt expressed openly about the circumstances of Ella's death.”
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