by Amy Stewart
I hurried past a puppeteer making wooden ostriches dance for a crowd of children, and a man with a banjo playing for pennies. A boy down the street bore woolen piecework in a pile over his shoulder, running it up the stairs of a workhouse and landing back on the sidewalk before I had even covered the block. On the corner a pair of skinny girls in braids sold matches and shoelaces to any young man who walked by. They ducked into an alley when a policeman blew his whistle and I wondered what else they might have been offering for sale. From some window above me, a trumpet played a popular melody and a bent old man sitting on a stoop banged out the rhythm on an ashcan.
Felix’s building stood just off Ninth Avenue on a block that cowered under the shadow of the rickety and noisy elevated train. From the tracks came the perpetual drift of soot. It landed on hat brims and lodged in eyelashes and nostrils. Everyone kept their noses in their collars when they crossed under the tracks, and I did the same.
He lived in one of those skinny old buildings only two rooms wide. It had the appearance of having been dropped into place from above. The front door was locked and the shades pulled down over all the windows.
Before I could ring the bell, the door opened and a bony old woman in a house dress stepped out onto the stoop with a pail of murky water. I walked in as if I belonged there and she didn’t stop me.
Just inside the door, a row of five mailboxes gave the names of the tenants on each floor. Felix von Matthesius was not among them, but there was a German name, Reiniger, on the top floor, so I decided to begin there and work my way down.
The stairs were as unreasonably narrow as the building itself. My skirt brushed both the wall and the iron railing as I climbed. At each landing I had to maneuver my shoulders and the brim of my hat to get around the corner with any kind of clearance. The walls were of a dingy old cracked plaster stained with tobacco smoke and, here and there, the black traces of a long-ago fire. The stair rail had given way and been propped up with wooden stakes that didn’t look like they would hold the weight of a child, much less any person of more substantial size.
In the hall on each floor, wooden planks showed through layers of painted floor cloths of the kind that had been common when I was a child. All the doors were closed and I heard no noise from the occupants of the rooms as I climbed. From one of them I could smell coffee burning and from another came the odor of a pork chop in a pan.
At the fourth-floor landing I stopped to catch my breath. A bald man with an enormous belly opened his door and peered out at me. He had a pipe clamped between his teeth and a maimed hand, twisted and marred with a purple scar, tucked into his suspenders.
“Nobody home up there, miss,” he said out of the side of his mouth not occupied with the pipe.
“That’s fine. I mean to leave a note.” I was still huffing from the climb.
“I told the men last night. He’s not coming back.” He sucked on his pipe until an ember in the bowl lit up and cast a little orange light.
“Which one of them was here last night?” I asked, trying to make it sound as if I didn’t care one way or the other.
“Just some cops. Aren’t you one of them?”
“Why would you say that?”
“You look like one of those ladies they put in the dancing parlors,” he said, taking an exaggerated survey of me from head to toe. “Respectable-looking, and big enough to catch a girl if she ran. Hell, you’d catch me if I tried to run.” He took the pipe out of his mouth and gave a raspy laugh, showing a gold tooth. Something about the man’s convivial grin endeared him to me, even though he looked like a tramp, or like he was one week’s rent away from becoming one.
“Aw, I’m sorry, miss,” he said when I didn’t answer. “I didn’t mean to say that you were big, just that you’re . . .”
“It’s all right, Mr. . . .”
“Teddy Greene.”
“Mr. Greene. The man who lived upstairs. Was he a shorter man, fair of complexion, German stock?”
“That’s the one,” he said. “Never did get a name. After Mrs. Reiniger passed away, he moved in. He’s been quiet enough. Kept to himself. He left in an awful hurry. Must be in some kind of trouble, is that right?”
I glanced up the stairs. The final passageway was even narrower than the rest. Mr. Greene saw me looking up at it and said, “That one got added on. Used to be nothing but a tarpaper shack on the roof, but the landlord figured he could fix it up and charge rent for it. Go on up. You won’t find nobody.”
He was right. The topmost flat had been built as an afterthought. The steps leading up to it were made of rough wood that had once been painted black. At the top step was a scarred wooden door, and pinned to that was a note. I lifted it up and recognized Sheriff Heath’s handwriting.
Dear Mr. von Matthesius,
I’ve sent my men to find you and to ask your help in searching for your brother, Herman Albert, who vanished earlier this evening from the Hackensack Hospital and may be in poor health and in need of a doctor’s care. If you find this note before my men find you, I advise you to report to the Hackensack Jail immediately.
We await your assistance—
Yours very truly—
Sheriff Robert N. Heath
I reached out to smooth the folds of the letter. In the course of doing so, the door drifted open.
The room beyond was dim and still. I held my breath. Nothing moved. There wasn’t a sound except the distant clamor of the street below.
It was only a small shabby flat with a sink and a hot plate just inside the door. A pair of unwashed teacups sat alongside a jumble of saucers and spoons. If there was a window, it was heavily curtained. The rest of the room was too dark to make out from my vantage point.
I couldn’t get over the feeling that someone was standing behind that door, waiting for me. I nudged it open another few inches with my foot and stepped inside.
The rooms—there were two of them, the one in which I stood and another beyond—had been built in the last ten years or so and were of simple construction, with odd-sized windows that didn’t open and pieces of mismatched trim around the doors. It looked like the whole room had been made out of the broken and discarded remnants of other buildings. The walls were so thin that the sounds of the street drifted right through them: a train rattling past on its elevated tracks, a bell ringing on a pushcart, a newsboy calling an extra.
A heavy tapestry curtain hung in the doorway between the two rooms. I pushed it aside with my elbow—I was reluctant to touch anything for fear I’d leave with a case of fleas or pox—and found in the next room only a sagging mattress in the corner, an empty wardrobe, and a metal washtub. On a corner shelf was a bowl holding the kinds of things a man might pull out of his pockets at night: beer hall tokens, match-books, a stray button.
In the back was a small door with no knob and no lock, only an iron gate latch. I lifted the latch and gave the door a shove. It opened onto a wobbly tar and gravel roof. I stood looking at the uneven line of rooftops stretching along Ninth Avenue and down Sixty-First Street. I could’ve easily hopped from one to the next, dodging laundry lines and chimneys all the way to the end of the block.
A bucket on the roof seemed to answer for a toilet. I turned quickly away but couldn’t help but see the alleyway below where, if I looked long enough, I would start to see rats scampering between the piles of ash and chicken bones and other filth thrown down from the roof. I squeezed back through the door and shut it behind me.
As I parted the curtain between the back room and the front, a voice said, “It’s bigger than I thought it would be.”
Teddy Greene was standing in the front room, huffing from the effort of climbing the stairs. He kept his pipe clenched in his teeth and grinned gleefully at me.
I started to explain what I was doing inside, but before I could, he said, “Don’t worry about me, miss. No questions asked. I know you won’t take nothing, a lady like you. Nothing here you’d want, unless he stole something. Is that it?
Has he got some jewels hidden around here? ’Cause if he does, I’ll help you look for ’em.”
“Oh, no, Mr. Greene. In fact, I can’t be sure he’s done anything wrong at all. Another man is missing, a relative of his, and I—I mean, we—we need some help finding him.”
“You and the sheriff?” he asked, with a gimlet-eyed look and that sharp, gold-toothed grin.
“That’s right. You saw the note from the sheriff. Do you know anything at all about where Felix went or what he did? Had he any sort of employment?”
“He seemed to be some sort of peddler. Always carrying things upstairs and then hauling them down again to sell in one of the second-hand shops around here. I thought there might have been something under-handed about it. Selling other people’s things.”
“What things?”
“Paintings, mostly. Sometimes a rug.”
“And you don’t know how he came by them?”
“Never spoke to him.”
“Well, he’s in no trouble. We’re only looking for a relation of his.”
Teddy Greene took a step closer and peered up at me, pulling on his pipe and releasing a stream of smoke that had the peculiar odor of burnt oranges. “What’d he do? The one you’re looking for.”
“I shouldn’t say.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Well, he’s an elderly man, with silver hair and a mustache, although he’s clean-shaven at the moment . . .” I trailed off, realizing von Matthesius had probably disguised himself already.
He coughed up another raspy laugh and pointed the stubby finger of his maimed hand at me. “You’re hunting a fugitive, aren’t you, miss?”
“I suppose you could say that.”
“That’s quite a job for a lady. Say, if you have a picture of the fellow, I’ll show it around the neighborhood. Must be a reward out for him, right?”
Was there a reward? I didn’t know and I wasn’t sure it was within my authority to offer one, but then again, I wasn’t acting under anyone’s authority. “I haven’t a picture, but I’ll deliver a reward personally if you can help us find him. Just get word to the Hackensack jail if anyone turns up here. Can you do that?”
He nodded, puzzled. “Yes, miss, but don’t they have a photographer at that jail in Hackensack? You’re going to need a picture.”
“The sheriff has one and I expect it will run in the papers.”
“Then I’ll look for it.”
I paced around the room one more time to make sure there was nothing that might help me. Mr. Greene just pulled at his pipe and watched.
“Where are you going now?” he asked.
“Oh, there’s quite a bit more to do,” I said, but the truth was that I hadn’t any idea where I might go next.
“Well. If I see that portrait in the papers, I’ll take it around. Teddy Greene’s your man.”
At the mention of a portrait I knew all at once exactly where to go. I took my leave of Mr. Greene, rushed down the cramped stairs to the ground floor, and hurried across town to Henri LaMotte’s studio.
9
PRISONER ESCAPES BY RUSE
Dr. von Matthesius Flees from Hospital After Pleading Illness
HACKENSACK, NJ — Dr. Herman Albert von Matthesius, a prisoner in the Bergen County Jail, who said that he had been suffering from rheumatism ever since his arrest last January, and was sent to the Hackensack Hospital for treatment last Tuesday, escaped from that institution late last night. Sheriff Robert N. Heath of Bergen County formed a posse and searched the county all night, but did not find the fugitive, who, it was supposed, was carried away in an auto.
Von Matthesius was arrested in Rutherford on January 31 at his home, where, he said, he conducted a sanitarium. The complaint was made by three young men, Louis Burkhart and Alfonso Youngman of Brooklyn and Frederick Shipper, assistant engineer of the steamship George Washington. At his trial here on June 15 the prisoner testified that he was a graduate of the University of Berlin, had served as a missionary and missionary doctor in Mexico, and was an ordained minister. He said he was not a licensed physician in the United States, but had practiced medicine in the Panama Canal Zone. He also testified to having been connected with a nerve institution in California.
He has been visited weekly at the jail by his brother, Felix von Matthesius, whose address on the visitor’s book at the jail is given as 110 W. 61st St., New York, but the man could not be found there by the Sheriff. Both County Physician Ogden and Doctor G. H. McFadden of the hospital staff have insisted that the doctor was feigning illness.
Henri LaMotte passed the paper to me after reading the story aloud. We were seated in his basement office, surrounded by the stacks of jute envelopes that held photographs he’d taken for detectives and lawyers all over the city. This was his version of a filing system: towers of envelopes so precarious that they slid over every table, chair, and window-sill in the place, giving the impression that anyone who sat still long enough might get buried under them, too.
Mr. LaMotte was not a photographer in the ordinary sense. He didn’t run a portrait studio or take pictures for the papers. He earned his living by sending photographers out to get evidence for lawyers. Most of it involved following spouses accused of infidelity or trailing smugglers and embezzlers.
I’d stumbled across his studio the year before, when I was looking for another address in the neighborhood, and I did a small favor for him by going to a hotel for ladies just off Fifth Avenue to take pictures out a window.
Although Mr. LaMotte and I had only known each other a short while, we sat together as comfortably as old friends. He was a short, bald man who wore a preposterous wig that was always slightly askew, and he carried an expression of endless bemusement. He spoke with a faint French accent that betrayed his European roots, but when I addressed him in French he insisted that we speak the language of New Yorkers. “Go to Paris if you want to hear French,” he would say airily, with a wave of his hand, as if that were a last resort that one shouldn’t even consider.
I read the account in the paper a second time and wondered what Sheriff Heath made of it. He must have been infuriated to see that Dr. Ogden had spoken to reporters. It was entirely likely that the doctor had given reporters the story in the first place, and that he’d done it for the very reason Mrs. Heath feared the most, which was that it would publicly discredit the sheriff and bring about charges against him.
“They don’t say a thing about you,” Mr. LaMotte said. “Are you sure you’re involved in this?”
“Of course I am. Only Dr. Ogden might not have known. The sheriff said he would try to keep my name out of it. It isn’t widely known that the sheriff employs a ladies’ matron.”
“And if people did know, he’d be criticized for putting the ladies’ matron on guard duty,” Mr. LaMotte said.
“That’s right.”
“Then it’s a good thing you came to me, Miss Kopp.” He jumped to his feet and turned the sign in his shop window around from OPEN to CLOSED, then locked the door.
“I’ve nothing but black tea and soda crackers. Will that do?”
It wouldn’t do—I hadn’t eaten all day except for Norma’s half sandwich at the train station—but I thanked him and said it would be just fine. He put a kettle on and in a few minutes we were sitting across from each other with cups and saucers perched on our knees. Just holding a hot drink in my hands calmed me a little.
“Now,” said Mr. LaMotte, “have you a list of the places old von Matthesius might have gone?”
I blew on my tea and considered it. “The only address I knew about was his brother’s, and nobody’s been there.”
“What do you know of his other associates? His friends or, for that matter, his enemies?”
“Nothing,” I admitted. I must have seemed ridiculous for having run off in search of the man with so little in the way of information about him.
“And what exactly did he do to get himself locked up?”
That was the
question I still couldn’t answer. “There were charges of a serious nature brought by three boys.”
“Yes, we read that much in the paper,” he said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head. He was clearly enjoying himself. “But you must know more about it than that.”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t part of the investigation or the trial. Once he was in jail, he started asking for me because I spoke German, but he never said a thing about his own past.”
“Didn’t the sheriff tell you anything?”
“He wouldn’t, and he hadn’t any reason to. I know everything about the female inmates but quite a bit less about the men. And the police down in Rutherford handled the case. Sheriff Heath might not have had all the particulars himself. He doesn’t always.”
“Oh, I’m sure he knows. He just isn’t telling.”
“Not necessarily. We’ve as many as a hundred inmates coming and going. We don’t get them until after the arrest, and sometimes not until the conviction. We wouldn’t have any reason to know about witnesses or associates or any of that. But he must be going back through the case now.”
“Then we could telephone him.”
“I can’t. You don’t understand what I’ve done. He was only just starting to hand me a bit of responsibility again, and I know he was prepared to give me a badge. Now I’ve gone and shown him that I can’t do the job. If I’m so easily fooled by an old man, how can he trust me to do anything at all? If I’m to be of any help I must do it on my own, and quietly so as not to draw attention to myself.”
Mr. LaMotte seemed impressed by my little speech. He waved a fist in the air and said, “That’s good thinking. So you’ll start at the beginning. Go and talk to those victims. Find out for yourself what he did. Get right into the thick of his old life, and you might just find him right there.”