“My mother, she had a brother, a Mr. Sweet, but they had become estranged when they were still schoolchildren. He had never approved of her, she claimed. He would not take us in after my father died, or so she said.
“Like so many people who grow up hearing stories from their parents and accepting these stories as truth, as I got older these stories she told me failed to make sense any longer. For one thing I learned that war widows and orphans of dead soldiers receive pensions from the government, but we never had. My mother was very cruel. But until I went to school and saw how lovingly other girls’ mothers treated them, I had always believed that regular beatings from one’s mother were normal. She handed these out with impunity, often for no logical reason I could discern. As an older child I realized she had utilized me chiefly for a punching bag. I was the convenient someone on whom she could release her hate and her disappointment and her frustration safely. In those days people rarely intervened in such matters. She’d pulled my hair, sometimes right out of my head in clumps. She hated my hair. She brushed it so hard trying to make it straight that my scalp would bleed. She used stove polish to cover the color which she said was ridiculous, as if she believed I had chosen it just to vex her. She told me I was born a freak of nature and threatened to sell me to the circus.
Her favorite weapon was that same silver hairbrush with which she would slam my head when my hair would not behave the way she wanted. I could not calculate for you the number of times my mother hit me so hard on my noggin that I fainted. I marvel today that I am still alive and basically sane, although some might argue that point,” she smiled. “The other women in the house witnessed these beatings. They would see me, a helpless child, collapse and fall to the floor unconscious. But none ever tried to stop her, or to protect me, or call the police, or to my knowledge challenge my mother in any way.
“She demanded that I follow in her profession! Hannah, I was only a girl of eleven then! There was one terrible red-faced man who she entertained that frightened me out of my wits, the way he looked at me. He had a cruel face and a crude manner. One day she offered me to him. She told him I would do whatever he wanted me to. I shook like a leaf, I was so terrified. He looked at me like I was dirt. When she asked him why he didn’t want me, he said it was because of my orange hair. That it didn’t look human, that perhaps I was half orangutan! He said that! That I looked like an orangutan! And when he left, she was so angry that I could not earn her money that she nearly beat me to death with that hairbrush. That man returned two or three more times. Each time she tried to convince him to have at me. In my little-girl mind, knowing how she had nearly killed me before, I thought whatever that man might do to me would not be as bad as a skull-whacking from her. So I found myself encouraging him as a way of saving myself from her assaults. She undressed me as he watched. I had no idea what I was doing except trying to save myself from a crushed skull, so I imitated the mannerisms of those other women in the house I saw when they were standing before a new customer. The man sat there and watched for a long while. Finally, he brought me closer to him. He turned me ‘round and ‘round and scrutinized me...”
Ruth stopped short, her voice breaking. Tears filled her eyes. Hannah waited expectantly for her friend to finish, but something stopped Ruth dead in her tracks. A nightmarish memory. “Ruth? Please, go on,” Hannah encouraged her gently. She could see Ruth was on the verge of revealing something very significant. But Ruth did not finalize the thought.
“Afterward she would scream at me like a madwoman because I was ugly and nobody other than just one or two of those awful men would ever want me. She said I was a millstone around her neck and that she just might as well throw me off the jack-knife bridge.”
Hannah was being sickened. “Oh! Dear Ruth!” she exclaimed. Ruth nodded, then continued.
“I lived in terror. I suffered terrible headaches throughout my childhood, and even today I can experience such a pounding in my brain that I must vomit to gain any relief. But thankfully nowadays these fearful episodes have become less frequent and the severity is lessened somewhat.
“As I grew older I questioned the stories she had told me about our family. Around age twelve I had found a document in my mother’s private papers on which she had taken a sworn oath at the county clerk’s office that I was born in August 1864. I was shocked. She had always told me I was born in February 1863. The man she claimed as her husband and my father had died in December 1862.
“She did not have a photograph of him. When I was very little she claimed that she did have one but she had put away somewhere—she forgot where exactly—and when she came across it she would show it to me then. I asked many times after that until one day she claimed she had never had a photograph of him. That he never had one made, and she said she only told me that so as to shut me up.
“I used to have daydreams about him. I imagined him handsome and gallant and heroic, riding a beautiful horse, brave in battle. I pictured him and my mother very happy and in love, living in a tidy little cottage. I pictured him holding me as an infant in his arms, kissing me, telling me how much he loved me. But then came the day I found that paper about my birth, and I calculated. I was reeling from the revelation for weeks afterward. I tried to find any way possible to relate the date of my birth and the date of my father’s death so as to somehow make it possible that he was indeed my father. But at one point it all came together, those dates, my mother’s vicious treatment of me, her profession, the realization that my schoolmates’ mothers were nothing whatsoever like her. Finally I had to accept that it was probably one of the men who were her customers who had to be my real father. That she had never married. That she had fabricated the story of her marriage. For many years after that, and still to this day, when I pass by men on the street I would search for those who might have hair like mine. I would stare into strangers’ faces to see if I could decipher any resemblance to me that might make it possible that he might be my parent.
“Later when I fully understood what a prostitute was, and that none of my schoolmates’ mothers were prostitutes, I wanted to stop going to school altogether. But school was my only refuge. I was a very quiet child. I spoke very little. The other girls would be naturally curious and ask me about my parents. I constructed an elaborate story about my mother and I, that we went to live with my grandparents after my father had been killed in the war and that they took wonderful care of us.
In that same collection of my mother’s papers I also found a letter, a scathing letter from her brother Mr. Sweet, admonishing her for the life she had chosen. Mr. Sweet had been a census taker in the 1865 New York State Census. In that letter he related to her the comments he’d written at the end of the census document in answer to the question asked of enumerators: ‘What other changes in the condition of the people have you observed since 1860?’
He had answered that during the Civil War he observed a large increase in prostitution and a tendency of Buffalo’s judiciary not to protect respectable neighborhoods from the curse of houses of prostitution. That the increase in wages during the War had resulted in laborers working less, and thus spending increased time and money with prostitutes. He condemned the city’s Police regulations which allowed these houses to be scattered all over the ward instead of confining them to one locality. He called for licensing the houses and confining them to one section, saying that many valuable lives would be saved of the virtuous and that the lower classes would also be benefited. Twenty dwellings in his district he found were supported wholly or in part in the receipts of the proceeds of prostitution.”
Ruth abruptly stopped speaking. She gazed downward at nothing in particular as though Hannah had ceased to be in the room. She was apparently reliving another vision she refrained from describing aloud. As distressed expressions flitted across her face she suddenly caught herself, took a deep breath, and emerged from her dark imaginings.
“All my life I have searched for answers, Hannah. I have learned much from othe
rs by their behavior. Words mean absolutely nothing. When I was older and I asked the other women in the house how they could allow someone among them to beat her baby on the skull with a hairbrush, they made their excuses to me, all of which were cowardly and pathetic. The house mother, Mrs. Burke…she would just turn away from me and leave the room. All that any of those women had to do was take that brush away from her, or order her to either stop or get out. But not one of them ever intervened, neither through word nor deed. There were twenty two of them, Hannah, and only one of her. They could have stopped her. But no one ever did.”
Four To The Skull
◆◆◆
The fact was, Jim Sullivan’s sprinting days were behind him. It wasn’t that he had not recovered from his broken leg after slipping on the ice, he had just not recovered good as new. “It takes time,” Dr. Burwell assured him, “a man your age.”
Jim was reexamined by the police department doctor when he returned to work. The police doctor recommended that Jim be reassigned from his pickpocket and shoplifting detail to the pawn shop detail. There’d be no pursuing crooks on foot there. Jim’s pawnshop duties would entail sniffing out merchandise found at the various money lenders around town that might be stolen. This would not mean that his other detective duties on which his reputation had been so admirably built would change. He would still be investigating murders, suicides and various and sundry other crimes. These would remain his foundational duties. But in between people killing each other or themselves his unoccupied time would be filled with sniffing out purloined goods at the pawnshops.
Upon taking up the pawnshops detail he became a bloodhound of sorts. Spotting a gold and diamond pocketwatch he might ask himself, why would anyone pawn a diamond watch at a pawnshop in a seedy part of town? The wealthy had their upscale specialty pawnshops where they could discreetly hock some family treasure for quick cash. There were two of these, both within blocks of Delaware Avenue’s mansions. Both employed armed guards. A diamond pocketwatch there drew no questions. But at a pawn shop at the bottom of Michigan Ave., such a transaction was suspicious. So he would question the proprietor at length. Any hesitancy on the part of the owner would be met with a threat to revoke his license, effectively putting the store out of business. Jim found that with just a smidgen of persuasion he could get a sharp description of the person who pawned the item, and sometimes a tip on where the suspect might be found.
James H. Rodebaugh had shot himself in the head at his office at the Niagara Mill and Elevator Co. on Letchworth Street. Or so it appeared. Investigators were suspicious. The record of the Buffalo Police Dept. in recent years with regards to solving death crimes was so terrible that once Supt. Bull was fired and Mike Regan took his place, rigorous measures were put in place by the new Chief in regards to dealing with any suspicious death.
Rodebaugh’s wife stated that he did not own a gun. A suspicion of murder had detectives looking closely at Rodebaugh’s coworkers. None of them owned a gun either. Jim remembered that Bruckheimer’s shop had quite a collection of pistols and revolvers. He took the death weapon there and was told by Mr. Bruckheimer that he did not recognize it. However, his employee, Mr. Delby, who was expected in first thing the following morning, might. The following day Delby did indeed recall it, as it had a circular mark on the barrel from a cartridge that had fired too tightly. He had sold the weapon to the dead man. Rodebaugh had come in the previous Tuesday and bought a .22 caliber. Within an hour, having decided the .22 was not powerful enough to do the job right, he returned and exchanged it for a heavier caliber, the self-same death gun.
P. A. Wright of Rochester reported a stolen bicycle to police. On his rounds of the various pawnshops, Jim spotted a wheel fitting the description. He rifled through the sheaf of papers he’d brought with him, consisting of the various police reports of stolen merchandise. He read the bicycle’s description found there. It fit to a T. He called the bicycle owner from the shop, the Shylock none too happy to be stuck with the long distance telephone charges. He protested.
“Serves you right,” smiled Jim dismissively.
“Hello, is this Mr. P.A. Wright?” asked the Detective.
“Yes, yes it is. Can I help you?”
“Mr. Wright I am Detective Sergeant James Sullivan of the Buffalo Police Dept. I have found your bicycle in a pawnshop here in Buffalo.”
“Bully! Oh, that is just marvelous! Can I come get it? “
“Certainly.” Jim gave him the name and address of the pawnshop.
“Thank you so much, Detective. Now if you could only find my violin!”
“What violin is that, sir?”
“Last Christmas my precious violin was stolen from me at the Central Station there in Buffalo.”
Wright went on to describe the instrument while Sullivan scanned the line of guitars, mandolins and other musical wares displayed on the wall behind the long counter. Jim listened as Wright recited its details.
“...and it has the inlay of a black beetle on the chin rest.”
Jim’s eye caught a violin on the wall and asked the proprietor to bring it down. “Hold the line a minute, won’t you Mr. Wright?”
Sure enough there was a beetle on the chin rest. Jim questioned the proprietor. “Oh, that came in around last Christmas. Let me see.” He moved quickly, eyeing the telephone and mentally calculating the mounting toll charges. He opened a drawer holding a neat collection of three-by-five cards not unlike such found in a library. He pulled out the appropriate card and receipt.
“Yes, a fella pawned it on December 27—for $10. I remember it well because the man identified himself as ‘Mike Thompson’ even though he had a very heavy accent—like Hungarian or Serb or something of that nature.”
Mr. Wright overheard the conversation. He was ecstatic. Upon hearing the thief had only been given $10, Mr. Wright exclaimed, “$10? But that is a very fine $520 violin! Oh, never mind, I’ll take the train there first thing in the morning! I am thankful you have located both items, Detective.”
“You’re welcome, sir. Goodbye.”
Jim addressed the proprietor.
“Mr. Wright will be here first thing in the morning. Hand over his items upon establishing his identity,” Sullivan ordered. Then without asking he clicked the ear-piece hook a few times to summon the operator.
“Frontier. Who may I connect you with?”
“Yes. Operator, connect me to Police Headquarters.”
The proprietor felt the detective was taking extraordinary advantage of his telephone.
The desk sergeant answered. There was great excitement there. A love triangle murder-suicide had just occurred. Jim’s presence was needed. He was provided the particulars and departed immediately.
◆◆◆
Sixteen-year-old Florence Morton had gone to 145 Eagle St. to visit her mother at her flat and drop off some packages. Florence was currently on the bill at Fenton’s Hall as Dora Morton, dancer. Although Charles Morton, the most recent in her mother’s long line of “husbands” was not her father, she took his name regardless. Florence performed heel and toe dances and all sorts of fancy stepping, but she did not sing. Florence had begun her stage experiences young. She had been out with the Easy Money company touring the small towns in New York and Pennsylvania. The “Easy Money” company found things quite the contrary from what the name might indicate.
Her mother Elizabeth Morton married Charley Morton some five years previous and since then had used his name. Charley Morton was well known about the Tenderloin in the olden days. He was a legitimate actor and a pianist. He played for some time in Tug O’Hara’s saloon which had since been closed by the police. His last piece of acting that can be remembered was at the old Music Hall where the Teck Theater now stood. He played the heavy part with a stock company. For the past few years Morton had been in a sanatorium dying from consumption. At different times Mrs. Morton had been around with subscription lists for the benefit of her husband. Somehow she had neglected to send any of
the money she had collected from kindhearted strangers his way.
Florence knocked at her mother’s door repeatedly but got no answer. She looked through the keyhole but her view was blocked by the key inserted from the other side.
In the flat directly below lived Mr. and Mrs. George Rauttenberg. Mr. Rauttenberg was a piano player at Harry Delberto’s saloon on Broadway. The Rauttenbergs’ attention had been drawn by the knocks rapped upon the door above. Mrs. Rauttenberg called up the stairs, “I don’t believe anyone is at home, dear.”
Florence came down and said, “That’s odd. My mother asked me to come at this hour. Her key is in the door from the inside. I am worried.” The Rauttenbergs, now concerned, accompanied Florence back upstairs. They hadn’t heard a sound for hours.
Mr. Rauttenberg had his key and got the idea to try and dislodge Mrs. Morton’s key with his own. Rauttenberg took his key and by manipulating it in the keyhole managed to force Mrs. Morton’s key from the door. It dropped to the floor inside with a heavy thunk. Then he stepped aside allowing Florence to bend over and look through the keyhole. Mr. Rauttenberg took note that Florence had a very lovely bottom. Mrs. Rauttenberg took note of Mr. Rauttenberg admiring Florence’s lovely bottom. Mr. Rauttenberg took note of Mrs. Rauttenberg catching him in the act of admiring Florence’s lovely bottom and her resultant skewering of him with her customary death stare.
Florence screamed.
She saw her mother lying face down on the floor covered with blood. She half-fainted. Luckily, the helpful Mr. Rauttenberg was right there to catch her in his waiting arms. Florence quickly recovered her senses. She told the Rauttenbergs what she had seen and the latter promptly notified the police of the Franklin Street Station by telephone. Sgt. Hanavan and Patrolman Denny then went to the house. The police broke open the door. It caught on an obstruction. A weight lay directly in front of the door. They pushed hard against it just enough to allow themselves to enter. That’s when they saw the second body. It was a man’s. A .38-caliber revolver lay by his head. The man was not groaning so it was supposed at first that he was deceased due to the four holes in his head. But a spark of life was ultimately noticed in him and the Emergency Hospital ambulance was telephoned for. Surveying the scene, brilliant sleuth Patrolman Denny declared with authority that the man had killed the woman, then shot himself in an attempt to commit suicide. Four times. In the head.
Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins Page 47