by Amy Stewart
I had just taken the last cracker and nearly choked on it. “Talk to the victims? Do you mean to say that I should track down those poor boys and ask them outright?”
“What else would you do?”
I considered that. “I suppose it’s better than lurking around a train station in the hope of spotting him. But . . .”
He waved his hand as if to bat away my objections. “Of course it is! Think about it. Do you suppose your Sheriff Heath will go interview those boys?”
“No. Why would he? Whatever happened, it took place almost a year ago, and I’m quite certain they haven’t seen von Matthesius since.”
“Exactly my point.”
“I’m afraid I don’t see your point.” I ran my finger over the crumbs around the edge of the saucer, which only made me more hungry and irritable.
Mr. LaMotte set his teacup aside and leaned forward. “You went straight to the brother’s flat, even though the sheriff had already sent his men over there. Why did you go?”
“It seemed like the best place to start.”
“And where do you suppose the sheriff’s heading next?”
Having no other place in his crowded office to put my cup and saucer, I set them on the floor. “He’s going around to the train stations to talk to the station agents, and he’ll get word out to the other police departments. He’ll interview the doctors and nurses who were on duty at the hospital. He’s sending someone around to the hotels and boarding-houses in case von Matthesius was too ill to go far and took a room nearby. Now that the story is out, he’ll give a photograph to the newspapers.”
“So you must do the opposite!” Mr. LaMotte exclaimed. “Don’t go anywhere near train stations or police departments. Don’t speak to witnesses at the hospital. If you want to be of help, go to the places your sheriff friend won’t go. You must start with those poor boys.”
I still wasn’t convinced. “But—”
“Listen to me, Miss Kopp. The police can always be counted upon to do the same three or four things every time a crime is committed. They will speak to the neighbors and make inquiries at the man’s place of business if he has one. They might stick their heads into a few saloons and flophouses with the idea that if they can’t find their criminal, they’ll find another one, which is all the same to them. Then they’ll go back to the station-house and write up their notes and be home in time for supper.”
“But that’s not true of Sheriff Heath,” I protested. “He’s been out all night hunting down von Matthesius. And he has to get him. Do you know that a sheriff can go to jail if he lets a man escape?”
“Yes, but until he does, he still has to manage the jail, and keep track of a hundred or so inmates, and think about winning an election in the fall if he’s still a free man. And every day of the week brings another robbery or fire or missing girl, doesn’t it? That’s how it is for him. But not so for detectives. You have the opportunity to ask the questions no one else is asking. You can put yourself into the mind of the criminal and understand how he thinks. That’s how you get your man. And if you don’t, at least you won’t have spent all your time turning up at the same places the sheriff has already been. There’s no point in following behind him and doing all his work a second time. A detective does the work the police aren’t doing or won’t do.”
“But I’m not a detective!”
He leaned forward and cocked his head to the side, which caused his wig to slip. He tipped it gently back into place and said, “You’re not a deputy. You’re not acting under the sheriff’s orders. What do you call yourself?”
IT WAS DARK by the time I left his studio and bitterly cold. I was in desperate need of a hot meal and a good night’s sleep. When Mr. LaMotte became aware that I had nowhere to go but home for the night, he telephoned the Mandarin, the hotel for ladies where he’d sent me to take the photographs last year. They’d hold a place for me if I came right over.
I took a large and comfortable room on the fourth floor with a fireplace and a reading chair, and a view down Fifth Avenue. It had been a year since I’d first visited the hotel, but I thought often about its quiet and civilized charms. There had been more than one night when I wished I could trade my bedroom in Wyckoff for a suite of rooms at the Mandarin.
I leaned against the window-sill and looked around with the uneasy satisfaction of a child who had succeeded in running away from home. Here was my bed, with its curved headboard that reminded me of a sun rising, and its coverlet of red Oriental silk. The fireplace was a modest tiled affair with a brass curtain and grate, and next to it sat a sturdy leather chair and footstool. Nowhere did I see the fussy floral chintz that one might expect in a room furnished just for women. Instead everything was simple and generously proportioned, as if the decorator knew that women might like a vacation from dainty straight-backed chairs and busy patterns of mignonettes and bluebells.
From the window I could look down along Fifth Avenue at the tops of carriages and automobiles forming a river of black below me, in endless motion from one end of the city to the other. Along the wide sidewalks, hats of every color and style bobbed along, from the brown tweed worn by newsboys to the black bowlers and silk top hats of men rushing home from the office and then back out again for the evening. They were accompanied by women’s wide brims tied with ribbons in crimson, navy blue, and emerald green. It was a pageant that went on every day and night, but I wasn’t accustomed to it and found it dazzling.
I sat down on the bed for just a minute, but I must’ve dozed off, because when I looked at the clock it was nearly eight and I was afraid I’d missed dinner. Downstairs, I found the dining room to be overly crowded with small round tables, each of them occupied. There was a lively chatter among the several dozen women in residence, and the pleasant ringing of glass and silverware, and a friendly glow from the brass lamps on the wall. At one end of the room was a row of tall windows that must have looked out over the street, but they were curtained against the cold. I could smell coffee and some kind of roast and warm sweet bread, a fragrance I could live on.
But there was no table for me. A girl rushed past with a tray of dishes and asked me to wait. Just then, three women at a table in the corner called out to me. “Make it a foursome,” one of them said, waving me over. “We get so tired of hearing each other’s stories. Come and tell us yours.”
They all looked to be about my age, and were dressed in the plain and business-like attire of office girls. Two of them wore glasses, and all three kept their hair in the kind of simple knot that suggested they had better things to do than fuss over their appearances. I decided I wouldn’t mind some company, although I wasn’t so sure about telling my story.
“I’m Geraldine,” said one as I thanked them and took my seat. She had black hair that shone like lacquer and gold-rimmed spectacles that sat easily on a rather prominent nose. “This is Ruth, and that was Carrie who called you over.”
Ruth wore cherry-red lip-stick and a polka-dotted dress of navy blue and white. She gave me a wide smile and shook my hand, then Carrie took it and pumped it vigorously. “Nice to know you,” she said. “Where are you in from?”
“I’m just down from Hackensack,” I said. “I’m Constance.”
“Well, Constance,” Carrie said, “we’re all here because we were lucky enough to be living on the third floor of a building that caught fire last week.”
“And you escaped! Did everyone get out?”
“Sadly, no one was even singed,” said Carrie with a sigh. “It was the dullest fire in New York’s history. There’s smoke everywhere but no death or destruction.”
“Carrie’s a reporter,” Ruth said. “She’s been trying for years now to get off the social desk and do some crime reporting. I think she set the fire herself, just to have something to write about.”
“I wish I had,” Carrie said. “I would’ve done the job right.”
“Are the two of you in newspapers?” I asked Ruth and Geraldine.
�
�I’m a lawyer,” Geraldine said, “and Ruthie here does the filing at an accounting firm down the hall from my office. She’s the one who found me the apartment. And now look at us! Living in a hotel while they clean up the mess.”
“I hope someone else is paying for the rooms,” I said.
Geraldine dropped her chin and looked at me over the top of her glasses. “Never rent an apartment to an attorney.”
“Geraldine has us all fixed up,” Carrie added. “And because of the high cost of our rooms here, ours will be the first apartments to be cleaned and made new again. We’ll be back in a week.”
“And she does mean new,” said Ruth. “New curtains and carpets, and new electrical wires, done right this time.”
“Oh, was that the problem?” I asked. I’d grown accustomed to thinking of fires as being set by arsonists and had forgotten that some of them were accidents of faulty wiring.
There was a menu card on the table. I picked it up and Geraldine said, “It’s what you’d expect. It starts with radishes and celery, which we won’t eat. Then there’s tomato soup, salad, roast beef, and the usual cakes and pies. The apple is best, but have you ever had a bad apple pie?”
The merits of apple pies were debated around the table as the waitress set a dish of radishes and celery in front of us, along with a little bowl of mayonnaise. I waited to be sure that no one else was going to eat it, and then I did.
“You must be starving!” Geraldine said. “Aren’t they awful?”
I shrugged. “That’s what the mayonnaise is for.”
“What have you been up to today, Miss Constance?” Ruth said, leaning forward. “You’re to be our entertainment this evening, but we’ve yet to learn a thing about you except that you come from Hoboken.”
“Hackensack.”
“Aren’t they the same?” Ruth said.
I hadn’t planned to tell them anything about what had happened. But as soon as I sat down I became possessed of an inclination to be like them, to be one of those solitary women with interesting jobs and apartments that get only slightly soiled in a fire. I felt more than a little guilty about this urge to be alone, to leave Norma and Fleurette and our ramshackle home in the country in favor of a sparse little flat and a purse full of train tokens, but something about the Mandarin brought it on and I gave in to it. If an interesting story was the price of admission, I had one for them.
“I work for the sheriff of Bergen County,” I said. “Or at least, I did. I’m hunting for a prisoner who escaped under my watch.”
The soup arrived just then and no one noticed. There was a delighted, electric silence around the table. I smiled at them and picked up my spoon.
At last Carrie spoke. “Either you’re telling the truth, or you are quite insane. I can’t decide which I’d like better.”
The soup was hot and salty and I only wished there were more of it. “Oh, I’m telling the truth,” I said as I scraped the bowl. “Just look at the Times.”
Ruth gave a little gasp and reached under Carrie’s chair, but Carrie got there first. She rattled her copy of the newspaper. “Show us,” she said, thrusting it at me.
I found the headline and folded the pages back. They read it as I finished my soup. The empty bowl was replaced with a scoop of cold creamed chicken on a pineapple ring. I looked around for some salt and, finding none, ate it anyway while the three of them passed the paper around.
“But they don’t mention you anywhere!” Ruth said, turning to her dinner at last.
“The sheriff is trying to keep my name out of it. My sisters and I got into a bit of trouble last year and we’d rather not keep turning up in the crime pages. Besides, if the Board of Freeholders finds out that it was the lady deputy who let the prisoner escape, they might . . .”
“Might decide they don’t care for lady deputies as a general matter,” Geraldine said.
“Oh, I don’t think anyone cares much for lady deputies,” Carrie said. “We haven’t even made up our minds about them in New York. I can’t imagine what they must be thinking out in New Jersey.”
“What kind of trouble did you get into last year?” Ruth asked.
“No, no,” said Carrie. “I think we should hear about this fugitive first.”
“I want to know how you got hired on as a deputy,” Geraldine said.
“I’m not quite a deputy. I’m the ladies’ matron at the jail—or I was. But the sheriff has been promising me a badge.” With that, I did become the evening’s entertainment. I carried the conversation through the roast beef and the apple pie (which was good, but not extraordinary, and served to remind me that city-dwellers can make an awful fuss about simple food), past the coffee, and into the final clearing of the table. It was ten o’clock by the time we looked up. There was no one left in the dining room except a foursome playing bridge in the opposite corner.
“Well, Constance the Cop,” said Carrie when I was finished, “I know one thing. You absolutely must let me write a profile of you for the Sunday papers.”
“Carrie!” Geraldine said. “Haven’t you heard a word? She doesn’t want to be in the papers. Not everyone wants their name in print.”
“But you’ll be famous! And it’s a corker of a story. We’ll have an artist sketch the best scenes. I can just see a drawing of the three Kopp sisters with their revolvers.” Carrie tapped on the table and looked off into the distance, picturing it. “ ‘Lady Cop Makes Trouble.’ That’s our headline.”
“Am I making trouble for the sheriff or the criminals?” I asked.
“Both, at the moment. You’ll be famous either way.”
“You’ll be famous,” Ruth said to Carrie. “You just want a big story about something other than club luncheons.”
“Club luncheons are the very opposite of a story,” Carrie returned, “unless they’re interrupted by a charging elephant or an alligator in the fountain.”
“An alligator?”
Carrie sighed. “It happened in Florida, and some other lucky reporter was there to tell about it. The luncheon was held at a hotel, and someone thought it would be charming to stock the fountain with baby alligators. They devoured all the goldfish and then waded out for a taste of the consommé. Every Daughter of the American Revolution jumped on her chair and shrieked. That never happens in New York.”
“They might find a rat,” Ruth offered.
“They’re accustomed to rats. No, what I need is a girl sheriff with a gun.”
“And someday I’ll need a reporter,” I said, pushing my chair back and rising to my feet. “You can be sure that you’re the one I’ll want. But I’ve got to get some sleep if I’m to catch my fugitive tomorrow.”
Carrie begged to be allowed to follow me as I searched for von Matthesius, but the other two persuaded her to let me go about my business on my own.
I felt as though I’d traveled a thousand miles in one day. I said my good-byes to the three women and exchanged addresses. Ten minutes later I was back in my room and asleep in the terrible dress I’d been wearing all day and the pair of stockings with the hole at the ankle.
By two I was awake again and staring at the clock.
What was I doing, dozing in a comfortable hotel room while my fugitive was at large? Henri LaMotte’s advice seemed misguided as I thought back on it. Why shouldn’t I station myself at Felix’s apartment and watch out for him? It was the only real lead I had, and I couldn’t be so sure that a deputy was posted there for the night. How could I know where Sheriff Heath was sending his men?
I slipped out of bed in the half-darkness and went to the window. Fifth Avenue looked like a dream, with the fuzzy outlines of black taxicabs swimming through a purple mist and coming to a stop under the ochre lights of the street lamps. There were people out, but they, too, were cloaked in black and moved silently and furtively, as if they were somewhere they shouldn’t have been. And who would be out at two o’clock in the morning, other than escaped prisoners and their accomplices?
Downstair
s, I dodged a drowsy bellman charged with enforcing curfew and ran down the block, where I found a motor cab waiting in front of another hotel. I was soon rushing uptown and westward to Sixty-First Street.
“I can’t let you out here, miss,” the driver said, looking doubtfully down the street from Ninth Avenue. “There’s all kinds out and about at this time of night.”
“That’s why I’m here.” I handed him his fare and jumped out before he could argue with me.
I tied my scarf twice around my neck against the cold and pulled my sleeves down over my wrists. Steam escaped from boiler room vents. Even in those decrepit old apartments, the inhabitants were warmer than I was.
There were a few orange lights in windows upstairs along the block, but none at all in the building I had come to watch. The street was as quiet as a city street could be, which is to say that there was a constant rumble of engines and the clatter of wheels on stone, along with an occasional shriek of a cat and the cry of a baby that wasn’t being attended to.
The door to Felix’s building was locked. I circled the block and looked for the alleyway I’d seen from the roof. I even pulled on a few blind doors that looked like they led nowhere at all, which might have meant that they led right into the empty space I was looking for. But I found nothing.
The shop windows up and down the street were dark and many had their shutters drawn down. I walked past a German bakery and a butcher with empty hooks in the window, and then a tiny shop no larger than a closet that sold knives, and next to it a druggist offering stick candy and relief from corns. In the half-light of a city that never went completely dark, the shops looked like set pieces in a theater, waiting silently behind the curtain for the lights to come up and the actors to step out in their costumes and take the parts of shopkeepers and pushcart drivers.
I rounded the corner and resigned myself to watching Felix’s building for the rest of the night. Just as I settled onto a dark stoop across the street, Deputy English stepped out of a shadow and came walking toward me. I turned away and backed into the doorway.