by Bill LeFurgy
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Abigail McHenry. Good afternoon, Mrs. Martha Chase. Good afternoon, Police Commissioner Adolph Lipp.”
Lipp’s scowl deepened as he looked back at her. “Miss.”
“I do so love your dress, Sarah,” said Mrs. Chase. “I’m so envious—whose creation is it?”
“A team of seamstresses assembled the garment. I do not know their names.”
“Well. You look so glamorous and sophisticated—I do so hope we will continue to see this side of you in the future.”
“I find your dress pleasing. You are charming.” Sarah turned to Mrs. McHenry. “Your dress is also pleasing and you are equally charming.”
“Let us return to our conversation before the interruption,” said Lipp. “I was detailing the decline of our once great civilization.”
“Oh, yes. I was treated so very rudely by a store clerk the other day,” said Mrs. Chase. “The girl had the sauciness to refer to me as ‘you’ rather than ‘madam.’ In my day all the clerks were properly trained men. Now, even in the finest department stores, half the staff are uncouth girls from the hinterlands. It is beyond outrageous.”
Lipp nodded with great solemnity. “You raise a critical issue, madam. Those girls not only lack manners—they are in the city alone, without parental guidance, leaving them free to indulge in the basest forms of behavior possible. Wearing dresses well above their ankles. Attending moving pictures and sitting in the dark with strange men. It is but a short step to smoking cigarettes, consuming alcohol, and throwing away any scrap of virtue they retain.” Lipp’s scratchy voice rose and fell with the cadence of a sermon. “Mark my words—this moral decay is only going to get worse. The values we cherish are trampled underfoot by a new generation that cares nothing for decency. Today’s youth are under the sway of a scandalous popular culture that nourishes wickedness.”
“The awful slang young people use,” said Mrs. McHenry. “I mentioned an eligible bachelor to a debutante of my acquaintance. Do you know what she said? ‘He’s crackerjack. And such an awful swell dresser.’ I had no idea if she cared for him or not. The girl sounded like a scullery maid.”
Sarah galloped past the warning flags waving from her mental checklist. “Henry David Thoreau equated slang with vitality. He wrote, ‘It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand the slang of today.’” The matrons exchanged looks.
Lipp pointed at Sarah, his eyes smoldering. “This young woman is a perfect example of what is wrong with our country today. She has been made hysterical by too much education and from trying to do a man’s work. She has lost sight of a woman’s place. She quotes godless decadents when she should be looking after a husband and children. Not that any decent man would have her, mind you.”
“Excuse me, sir. Your beverage.” The waiter stood with his head down and tray extended within Lipp’s grasp. The tray had a bottle of water and a partially filled tumbler. Lipp sniffed and peered carefully at the glass before taking a sip. He screwed up his face as if concentrating on the flavor of a vintage wine before guzzling the entire thing, holding on to the tumbler.
“Coloreds make for good servants, but it pays to be careful. You never know if they might mix up your water with their gin.” Lipp held on to his glass and gestured to the waiter to leave. The waiter hesitated for a second, glanced at Sarah, and edged away.
“Commissioner, I worry terribly about beastly criminals,” said Mrs. Chase. “What can be done to keep us safe?”
“I have a plan to attack the problem.” said Lipp. “We need to free the police to do their jobs. Right now they are constrained by do-gooders and the press, who question everything the patrolman does on the beat.”
A city detective in a rumpled suit approached and asked Lipp in a rough whisper to step away. The men walked off with the commissioner still clutching his glass.
Sarah followed them through the open double doors and into the hallway. Lipp stopped to set his empty glass on a marble-topped credenza so abruptly that she almost collided with him. Fortunately, they had their backs to her and she was able to slip behind a nearby column. She noticed the servant unobtrusively remove the commissioner’s glass.
“The notes in the Bible are fake, sir,” said the detective to Lipp in a low voice. “Book was published in 1906 but the writing’s dated 1899. Another thing: Harden’s beat good. Got him in lockup—just clinging to life, he is.”
“I demand to see Jack Harden,” Sarah said, stepping around the column to within inches of Lipp. “I am a physician. Take me to him immediately.”
Lipp gave a violent start before backing away and then waving a fist at her. “Get away from me, you contemptible woman.”
“Commissioner. That is no way to speak to a lady.” Margaret’s voice was regally calm.
“I overheard that the police have injured Jack Harden.” Sarah was talking very loudly. “I must attend to him medically. There is not a moment to spare.”
Margaret looked first at Sarah and then at Lipp, who had turned an alarming shade of red. “Is there a Mr. Harden in your custody, Commissioner? Is he injured?”
“The man is a lowlife thief who resisted arrest.”
“Dr. Kennecott knows this man and vouches for his character. Why not allow her to examine him?”
“Out of the question,” said Lipp, pounding his walking stick on the marble floor.
“I agree with Mrs. Bonifant, Commissioner.” Blaine Bonifant had joined her along with several leading citizens who, while plainly uncomfortable with the scene, did not offer the commissioner any aid. “I urge you to allow Dr. Kennecott to visit the man,” said Blaine in his booming courtroom voice. “Immediately.”
“I may need to take him to the hospital.” Sarah’s vision was getting foggy around the edges and her breath was coming in short bursts.
“Sarah,” said Margaret, “use our carriage. The detective will accompany you to the police station. You have the authority to move Mr. Harden to the hospital if you deem it necessary. Isn’t that so, Commissioner?” She nodded once at Lipp to indicate the discussion was over.
Lipp gave his walking stick a feeble tap as he looked away from Margaret. “Do it, Detective.”
“Yes, sir.” The detective answered hurriedly as Sarah was already running for the door with two bunched handfuls of her dress lifted to the top of her shins.
Chapter 20
Jack—Thursday, October 14, 1909, 3:00 p.m.
Blood and puke. The pain came a second later. The agony squeezed out everything, and it took a long time to grasp that he was stretched out on a slimy stone floor. He made a faint slurping sound as he worked his lips.
“Not dead after all, eh? Police surgeon wasn’t sure you’d make it. Man was a complete incompetent. I had to roll you over myself after he left so you wouldn’t choke to death on your own vomit.”
Jack pulled himself up on one arm to see a man kneeling next to him. He was older, with a shock of white hair flowing over his forehead, and a couple of days’ worth of white stubble on his chin. “Where?” His tongue felt like a slab of wood. Black spots blurred his vision as he propped himself against a wall.
“This is district lockup.” The man put a cracked cup to Jack’s lips. At first, the water sloshed around in his mouth as if he had forgotten how to swallow. Jack touched his face. The left side was bloody and pulpy with torn tissue. There was no sight in his left eye.
“Thanks for the drink.”
“Glad to do it. It’s my job to help people.” The man stood and stretched.
“Why you here?”
“Good question. I’m just a businessman and an honest citizen. I run a family pharmacy.”
“Coke peddler.” Forming the words and pushing them out was hard, but Jack sensed it was important to try to talk, try to stay awake.
“If that’s how you want to put it, sure. I’m just like every other druggist.” The man sat on a rough wooden bench. “The trouble is that I—allegedly—sold cocaine to
Negroes. Now, over the years, I sold more cocaine than German aspirin to white customers. Plenty of opium, morphine, and chloral, too. Had a whole product line of patent medicines to fix everything from indigestion to toothache. Everything changed when I expanded my business to black customers. Cops came down hard on me.”
“Drugs mess up everyone.”
“Yes, sir. And that’s any man’s free choice. Can’t stand the phonies who turn a blind eye to one group of people using drugs and get frantic when another group does the same darn thing. Did you see that article in the paper the other day?”
Jack knew about the cocaine hysteria that had recently burst upon the city. The drug used to be legal and widely used, but lurid—and wildly exaggerated—reports of blacks misbehaving while using the stuff had the authorities cracking down on the major distributors, nearly all of whom were pharmacists reaping fat profits.
“It was all wrong.” The man was now pacing. “Going on about how colored washerwomen are dying out in Baltimore. All those Negro women who walked with clothes baskets on their heads. Gone! Paper says those women started drinking beer, then five-cent whiskey, then taking cocaine—and it was the coke that finally made them stop working. Now, any fool knows the steam laundry is what put washerwomen out of business.” Jack grunted. He was tired and wished this gent would shut up.
“Then there was that story with that idiotic headline ‘Baltimore Negroes Run Wild on Cocaine,’” continued the druggist. “Says that dope arouses their worst instincts. Complete nonsense, but who gets blamed? Honest businessmen such as myself. All for just helping people restore their vitality.”
Jack shut his good eye and invited blackness to seep around the edges of the pain.
“What about you, sir? I’ll wager you know about the invigorating benefits of cocaine and are against its prohibition.” The man pulled up Jack’s sleeve. “Looks like you haven’t started injecting. Wish I could give you a shot right now. Snap you right out of your funk.” Heavy footsteps came down the corridor. “Sorry, brother,” said the man, “they aren’t done with you yet.”
A key rattled in the cell door, and two sets of hands yanked Jack to his feet. His eye fluttered as he was half dragged down the corridor and dropped into a chair in an interview room. O’Toole sat across the table. “Taking your time killing me, aren’t you, Snake,” said Jack.
“Need to talk with your redheaded whore. Where’s she at?”
“I’m flattered, but she’s out of my league. And out of town by now.”
“She’s still in town. Hiding.”
“So what? You got the Bible.”
“Need to tie up some loose ends.”
“Got no idea where she is.”
O’Toole pulled out his .38 Special and scratched the side of his chin with the iron sight at the end of the barrel. “Way I see it, you got no reason to live if you don’t tell me.”
“Screw you, Snake. I’m half dead already. Do me a favor and finish the job.”
The detective scratched the other side of his chin while looking at the rear wall, no doubt weighing the pleasure of shooting Jack against the mess from splattering his blood and brains all over the place. He put the gun away. “Nah. I’ll let you rot in that cell until you squeal or die. Makes no difference to me.” He stood up. “By the way, Detroit whipped Pittsburgh today, five to four. Series is tied at three games each. The Pirates are finished, just like you.”
Another detective walked in. “Snake, commissioner says some skirt doctor has to look at this guy. No joke.”
O’Toole’s mouth twitched once before he stalked out of the room. The other detective followed, and things were quiet for a moment until he heard the rustle of fabric along with a light tap-tap of footsteps.
“Jack!”
Squinting with his one eye, he thought he saw Sarah, wearing a very fancy red dress. She dropped to her knees next to him and held a cloth to the left side of his face. “Press this as tightly as you can to the injury.” Sarah rustled back out the door, and the sound of her shrill voice ordering the cops around was enough to make him think about smiling. Two cops came and dragged him out of the station and put him in a fancy carriage. Sarah got in next to him and told the driver to go to Johns Hopkins Hospital.
“No,” Jack said. “Let me die someplace else.”
“You are disoriented.” She was sitting very close, and his head lolled against the fine cloth of her dress. This couldn’t be real. “Sarah. That really you? You’re so close. So nice.”
“Jack. You are going into shock. Please try to remain conscious.”
He faded in and out of awareness as the carriage bounced and swerved. This was it—he was going to die. The thought didn’t bother him much. He’d already lived longer than he’d expected. And he’d seen so many people killed, so many bodies ripped apart and piled on top of one another, that death was no stranger. The Grim Reaper had always been close by, whiling away his time like a spectral hoodlum leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette. The villain was about to flick away his cig and take care of business.
A fan turned slowly on the ceiling. Thick bandages wrapped the left side of his head. The rest of his body was a lump under a long white sheet. He tried to sit up but couldn’t move.
“Keep still.” He rolled his head and saw Sarah sitting on a chair next to his bed.
“What happened?”
“We are at Johns Hopkins Hospital. You needed emergency surgery to relieve the swelling in your left eye.” She set aside a book and stood over him.
“Thanks.”
“You were lucky to have an excellent surgeon.”
“Yeah, I always catch the breaks.” He rubbed his good eye. “Did I dream about seeing you in a fancy dress?” She was now wearing a long white gown over a plain black skirt and a shirtwaist with a lace collar that covered her neck.
“I was wearing such a dress. I came directly from the banquet.” Her eyebrow trembled faintly.
“Did I bleed or slobber on your fancy duds? I’ll pay for the damage.”
“That is of no consequence.”
“I remember laying my head on your chest. You must have hated that.”
The eyebrow shuddered. “I was preoccupied with tending to your injury. And trying to quiet your semiconscious ravings about me. And about Clara Sullivan.”
“Drawing a blank on that—sorry. Hope I didn’t say anything too idiotic.”
“I did not record your . . . spontaneous remarks regarding myself.” She blushed deeply as she fumbled for the notebook in her bag. “But your comments about Clara Sullivan are relevant to our case, I believe.” She flipped to a page. “You spoke in fragments, such as ‘Clara set me up,’ ‘still in town,’ ‘cops looking for her,’ and ‘lying bitch.’” Sarah spoke in her deadpan voice, although Jack wondered if he heard a slight emphasis on the final bit.
“I wasn’t at my best this morning,” said Jack. “Clara shows me this Bible supposedly from Nick’s slave great-granny. Had a handwritten family tree in it—seems Great-Grandpa Shaw got her pregnant, then took the baby and raised it as his only heir. Bottom line is that Horace Shaw is one-eighth black. Like an idiot, I took the thing from her. She wanted to take the attention away from herself and put the cops on me.”
“How did she obtain the Bible?”
“Nick gave Lizzie the Bible to hold. Lizzie used that chisel I found to stash it under a floorboard. It was how Lizzie and Clara hid things at home.”
“That would explain the laceration on Lizzie’s finger and the blood on the tool,” Sarah said. “She may have injured herself accidentally.”
“Yep. She did such a good job hiding the Bible that Nick couldn’t find it after she died. Clara knew just where to look when she found her sister’s body.”
Sarah kept her arms tight across her chest. “I overheard a detective tell Police Commissioner Adolph Lipp the Bible was counterfeit.”
“Yeah, figured as much. Clara probably copied the family stuff into another Bible, hop
ing that it would distract the cops long enough for them to think I had what they wanted. And long enough for her to drop out of sight.” Sarah moved over to a table next to the bed and reached for something. “Clara probably wanted to shake the cops so she would be free to sell the real Bible for a boatload of money to Shaw.” He lifted his blanket and tried to swing his legs down to the floor, but they barely budged.
“You must stay in bed.” Sarah was filling a big hypodermic needle.
“Can’t—got to track down Clara. I’m starting to think you’re right—she could have killed Lizzie. Woman’s bad to the bone.”
“It is time for your morphine.” Sarah bent down with the needle ready.
Jack knew dodging that thing was impossible. “Wait—we have to keep working.”
“I will examine new fingerprint evidence in the Pathological Building, which is nearby. I expect that work will advance the investigation.”
“What about—” She jabbed him with the needle. Warm pleasure spread from his arm to his entire body in seconds. Everything seemed impossibly wonderful as he watched her walk away.
“Wake up, Jack. Come on now, wake up.” He heard the voice from far away, as if he were in the basement and the caller upstairs. It was a woman’s voice, full of authority yet caring. A sharp smell jolted him awake in his bed in the Hopkins Hospital ward. Jack still felt a lingering euphoria from the morphine, although his body was starting to hurt again.
“Time to change your bandages and give you a bath, Jack.” A young woman dressed all in white—including a pointy little hat—stood over him holding a bottle of smelling salts. She took his wrist and felt his pulse.
“I’ve got the prettiest nurse in the whole place,” he said in a woozy slur.
“Aren’t you the charmer.” She let go of his wrist and began to unwind the bandages on his head. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls who wrap gauze around that thick head of yours.”
“What time is it, anyway?”