by Amy Stewart
He crossed the street before he saw me. I watched him walk back and forth and pause to rest on a stoop here and there. He was as inconspicuous as a sheriff’s deputy could be on a night watch. He wore an ordinary coat without a badge, and he ducked off the street just often enough that he didn’t appear to be pacing.
I wasn’t needed if he was also on duty, and I knew he’d notice me eventually. A woman out at that time of night was bound to be stopped, even by a deputy outside his jurisdiction. There was no way for me to watch Felix’s apartment if I had to hide from the man already assigned to do it.
The futility of it weighed on me. I was superfluous in a manhunt. The sheriff wouldn’t have sent me to watch a building in a neighborhood like this all night. Of course, he wouldn’t have sent me to New York at all, but there I was.
I stood in the shadows for a minute and watched Deputy English lean in a doorway and make up a cigarette. The orange glow flickered and died and then came to life again. The sound of two men in a loud and drunken argument a block away distracted him. While he had his back turned, I dashed off my stoop and ducked around the corner to Ninth Avenue, and from there to the nearest hotel with a doorman willing to summon me a taxi.
10
THE NEXT MORNING I undertook a thorough review of the Mandarin’s collection of New York and New Jersey directories. It required the better part of an hour to go through them in hopes of finding von Matthesius’s accusers among the Burkharts and Shippers and Youngmans. Louis Burkhart was supposed to be living in Brooklyn, and to my relief I found just one listing by that name among all the Burkharts in the city. It seemed the easiest place to start.
I set off in a high spirit, having acquired my purse full of train tokens and a bracing sense of purpose along with it. There was something fine about having a man on the loose and a list of addresses to call upon about it. If word got out that I had let von Matthesius escape, New Jersey might indeed have its doubts about a lady deputy, but I was kindled up about it at the moment.
I boarded the train and soon found myself on Bedford, a wide avenue lined in brick apartment buildings that seemed to march right into the horizon and vanish. I had no difficulty in finding the Burkhart family—there was a shoe store bearing the name at precisely the address I had—but no one at the shop wanted to tell me where Louis could be found.
“Doesn’t he live here?” I asked a man who introduced himself as Louis’s uncle.
“Not anymore,” he said, without taking his eyes off the sample book of shoe leathers in front of him.
“Would you have an address for him?”
He gave a little snort and shook his head.
“He’s not in any trouble. Couldn’t I leave a note?”
“I don’t expect to see him around here, miss.” The man shut his book and turned his back to me. He straightened a row of metal tins of polish and wax on a shelf. Over in the corner a girl who looked to be about fifteen watched me from behind a curtain of thin blond hair. I took her to be the man’s daughter.
I went at it more urgently. “If I could only speak to him, he might be able to help with an important matter.”
Finally the man turned and faced me. He wore an enormous beard and eyebrows larger than some men’s mustaches. From behind all that wiry hair he glared at me and said in a low voice, meant for me but not for the girl in the corner, “I read the papers. I know why you’re here. He doesn’t want to talk to you people.”
Once again he turned his back to me. If I’d had a badge, I might have persuaded him to answer a question, but as it stood I had no way to compel him. I lost the opportunity to press my case when four children ran into the store, followed by their weary mother. The man busied himself climbing up and down the rolling ladder behind the counter to retrieve shoeboxes for them. He very deliberately ignored me. I stepped out to the street and wondered if I should go off in search of the next victim, Alfonso Youngman. Just then, a hand caught me on the elbow.
The girl from the shop had run out into the cold without hat or coat. I stepped under an awning a few doors down from the shoe store to get her out of the wind.
She kept her arms crossed in front of her and hopped up and down. “He isn’t in any trouble, is he?”
“Not at all. I just want to ask him something.”
She cocked her head and squinted up at me. “What do you want to ask?”
I wasn’t entirely sure but didn’t want to admit it. “I shouldn’t say.”
“But you’re not with the police?”
“I’m helping the sheriff with a case.”
The girl looked over her shoulder and then said, “As long as he doesn’t get into trouble.”
“He won’t.”
“Well, then, he’s at the other shop.”
“The other shop?”
“The other Burkhart Brothers Shoes. In Rutherford. It’s closed now, but his mother still lives above the store.”
“Do you know anything about these other boys? Alfonso Youngman and Frederick Shipper? Were they friends of his?”
She looked around nervously again and bit down on a strand of hair. “I’d better get inside. Ask Louis where to find Frederick. They went everywhere together. I don’t know about the other one.”
With that she turned and ran back into the store. Having no address for Frederick Shipper and an impossibly long list of A. Youngmans to chase down in Brooklyn, the only thing to do would be to go back to New Jersey and find Louis Burkhart. At the corner I took a newspaper and read it on the train, searching for news of von Matthesius and finding none.
ANOTHER RAINSTORM was working up to full strength as the train lurched into Rutherford. It hammered the shop awnings along Park, where women in their good hats gathered to wait it out. The crowds were such that I was forced to the curb and had to splash through the gutter to avoid the half-soaked shoppers. My boots sank into the mud but I pressed on, past the post office and the stationery shop and a tiny storefront where wooden trains for children rolled through a miniature version of the very street I was standing on. I recognized the red roof of the train station and would not have been surprised to see my very own figure, looking through the window of that very shop, carved in wood and carefully painted and dressed in a doll’s tiny clothing.
The shoe store was closed, just as I’d been told, but the Burkhart Bros. sign still hung above it. Through the dusty windows I saw nothing but empty shelves and benches sitting in the darkness. A tarnished cash register stood shrouded in cobwebs.
I rang the bell at the door next to the shop. It took three or four attempts to get an answer, but at last a boy with disheveled brown hair appeared and looked at me through the glass. We eyed each other soberly for a minute, then he pushed the door open.
“Louis?” I said.
“No.” It was more of a refusal of whatever I was going to ask next. He closed the door.
“Louis, there’s nothing wrong,” I said through the glass. “I’ve only come to ask you something.”
He folded his arms in front of him and I saw a resemblance to the girl in Brooklyn, who must have been his cousin. He had the same wide-spaced eyes and long, narrow nose. There was something guileless and childlike about him, although he was almost a man.
We stared uncomfortably at each other and then I said, “I work for the sheriff.”
“He got away.” The boy spoke in a thin and nervous voice. His eyes flickered to the ground and his hands stayed tucked under his arms.
“We’re doing everything we can to find him.”
“Well, it’s nothing to do with me,” he said.
“I’d just like a word. If I could only come in for a minute.”
“My mother’s ill.” We stood looking at each other in silence, and then he opened the door for me.
I followed him up the wide and creaky stairs. There was an odor of mildew on the landing and the residue of a lifetime’s worth of cooking grease and oven smoke. Somebody had just discarded their fish bones and left the em
pty pail on the steps, where the stench lingered.
There was only one door on the second floor, so they must have had it all to themselves. The stairs continued up, probably to rented rooms on the floors above. I waited while Louis went inside and spoke to his mother. I could hear his low voice and a wretched cough in response. Then there was the sound of water being poured into a glass and more hacking and wheezing.
It was unexpectedly warm on the landing. I shook off my wet scarf. At last Louis opened the door and admitted me to a sitting room that was not prepared to receive visitors. An enormous pile of mending and washing covered the settee, and a wooden stand for ironing took up a place in the middle of the room where a table might have been. Along one wall ran a sink and an old black stove covered in pots and dishes. There was a drop-leaf table pushed against the wall and two wooden chairs next to it. I wasn’t sure if I was meant to take one, so I didn’t.
Louis had a wobbly chin and a nervous habit of pulling at his ear. He kept his lips pressed together in a tight white line. Most boys his age were full of swagger and ambition, but any trace of that had been robbed from him. It gave me a sick feeling to realize that he reminded me of the petty thieves and pickpockets who drifted through our jail. There was a sameness to them, a lifelessness, that I feared had already taken hold of this boy.
I began by saying, “Is that your father’s shop downstairs?”
Without looking at me, he answered, “It was until he died. We haven’t been able to manage it without him.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“All right.” He kept his eyes on his feet.
I bent down in the hopes of getting him to look at me. “Louis, I’m trying to find out where Dr. von Matthesius might’ve gone. We’re looking for any of his associates. Don’t you remember anyone who might have visited him at the sanitarium, or the people he kept up a regular correspondence with? Any name at all might lead us in the right direction and tell us where he’s hiding.”
He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck self-consciously. I waited, trying not to shift about too much even as my feet started to expand in their wet boots. I’d learned from my time at the jail that sometimes a witness will blurt out information just to fill an uncomfortable silence. That wasn’t working on Louis.
I heard a cough from the other room and said, “Is your mother able to join us?”
“She’s not fit for company. She’s gone to bed.”
“Has a doctor seen her?”
“Are you a nurse?”
“No, but I’d like to have a word with her if I could.”
I wasn’t sure I did want to have a word with his mother until I knew what was ailing her, but it seemed a mistake not to, after I’d come all this way. I let him lead me through a series of equally dirty and crowded rooms and into a small bedroom that looked over the alley behind Park. Mrs. Burkhart was propped up by a stack of thin pillows. She clutched a handkerchief and pulled the blankets up to her chest when she saw us. Gray hair fell around her shoulders and the skin hung loosely off her face.
“Mama, she wants to talk to you,” Louis said. Mrs. Burkhart lifted a hand but said nothing. I attempted a smile.
“Go on back,” I said to the boy.
He looked to his mother for confirmation and she nodded. After he was gone, she sat up and tried to say something but it brought on another coughing fit. There was a metal cup by her bed and I handed it to her, but she waved it away. Then I remembered that I had a sack of lemon candy in my pocketbook. She grinned and opened her hands when she saw it. We each took one and after a few minutes she could speak.
“Louis was just a boy,” she croaked. “He’s not to blame.”
“Was it very hard on him?” I didn’t want to admit how little I knew about what had happened.
She pulled a shawl over her shoulders and looked out the window. Her nose was red and grotesquely large. Hairs sprouted out of her nostrils like a bristle brush.
“His father wanted him to be a doctor,” she said. “I thought this would start him off right. Let him work as an orderly, see what it was like. I’d no idea what that man was doing.”
She gave me an accusatory look, as if it were my fault for not telling her. “I don’t think anyone knew,” I said lamely.
“He made Louis put the masks over their faces.” There was something terrible in the way she said it.
“A mask . . . Do you mean ether? Or chloroform?”
She nodded. “Just enough to keep them in bed, so their families could be fooled into thinking they needed more treatment. And when they couldn’t pay any longer, it was my little Louis and that boy Frederick who would have to go out and collect from the families. They took paintings and jewelry and even furniture. Grandmother’s bureau, nice old things. Can you imagine my boy going around telling lies and taking from people?”
I couldn’t imagine it. Louis was such a shy and slight boy. “When did you find out about it?”
“After it was too late to do a damn thing.” She started wheezing and took a drink of water. “He thought he’d killed that girl. Thought he’d given her too much. He ran home and told me what he’d done and sat right there on the floor and cried like a little baby. It was the first I knew that anything was wrong.”
Suddenly I could see it. A house full of women too drugged to leave, or even to understand what was being done to them. And von Matthesius could have done anything he wanted with his patients, if they were in such a condition. How had this man been given only a year in jail?
“But he didn’t kill her,” I said, more hopeful than certain.
She shook her head. “She came out of it. And of course by that time it was all over. But you know about that.” Something caught in her throat, and that brought on more coughing and another round of lemon candy for the two of us. I set the bag on the table next to her. She patted it gratefully and waved me off, dismissing me, but I wasn’t ready to go.
“Mrs. Burkhart, has someone called a doctor for you? You don’t look well. I know your boy depends on you.”
“Nothing the doctor can do,” she croaked. “Too many years at the tannery. Made my teeth come loose and now I got a fever all the time and these lumps on my neck.” She pulled the shawl away and I was shocked to see a bulge the size of a pincushion under her ear.
A little potbellied stove kept the room exceptionally warm but she shivered in spite of it. I loosened my collar and wished for a little cool air. The rain fell in grimy rivulets down the window. I was suddenly eager to get back outside so it could wash me clean, too. The sickness and dust was stifling.
“Have you been to see Frederick?” she said, her breath coming out in a shallow rattle.
“I don’t know where to find him. Do you?”
“I thought he was still at the glassworks.”
“The one out on Orient?”
She waved me out again. “Go see him. Leave Louis alone. He’s been through enough. And get that man.” She looked at me with a kind of dead anger in her eyes.
My voice wouldn’t hold steady. “The sheriff has all his men out searching.”
“And you,” she managed to say between coughs, giving me a rather terrifying toothless grin that nonetheless warmed me toward her a little. “You’ll catch him.”
Her pillow slipped and I pushed it back into place. “Get some rest.”
THE GLASSWORKS SAT at the edge of the cemetery, just outside of town at the end of a gravel road. It was nothing but a hulking old warehouse of painted brick with a plume of smoke rising up from the back and dissipating in the drizzle. Men in blue overalls carried crates of glass panes out the front door and into a fleet of wagons.
A boy with a broom in his hand and a pail of broken glass tried to walk around me but I stepped in his way.
“I’ve got a message for Frederick Shipper. Can you send him over here, and be quiet about it?” I slipped a nickel in the boy’s hand. It must have been enough, because he set his pail down and ran off.
/> In a few minutes Frederick strode out into the yard. He was a tall, broad-shouldered young man with thick wavy hair and the kind of inherent good looks that some working men carried around without realizing it: the square jaw, the expansive smile, the blue eyes fringed in black lashes. Half the actors on Broadway would’ve taken his looks over their own. But it would never occur to a man like Frederick that there was money to be made from the features of his face.
When he came close enough for a good look at me he stopped, his feet skidding in the gravel. A few of the other men turned to watch. Fearing that I was about to lose him, I stepped forward and called out, a little too loudly, “Mr. Shipper! I have good news.”
He had little choice but to approach me. Before he could say a word, I leaned over and muttered, “Tell them I recovered a watch and some things that were stolen and just need you to make an identification.”
Frederick groaned but turned back to the yard and said loudly, “Why, that is good news! I’ll have a look, but then I’ve got to get back to work.” Then he followed me across the road and we stood in a patch of wet grass. Behind me was the back of the cemetery, the old unused part that no one ever expected to fill with graves.
Once we were out of earshot, Frederick said, “You look like someone official. Am I in trouble?”
How did I become so easy to recognize? “I work with the sheriff. You know that Dr. von Matthesius escaped two days ago.”
He kept his eyes on the glassworks. “I heard something about it.”
“I’m just looking for names of associates, or friends, or anyone who might’ve come to visit him. Is there someone who might be helping to hide him now?”
Frederick shook his head. “I’ve been pretty busy trying to forget that place. But I never talked to nobody. I was just there to do a job. Help move the patients. Any kind of heavy lifting.” He turned to go.
“What happened to Louis Burkhart?” I asked.
Frederick stopped and turned to me again. This time, he looked me over, starting with my boots and working up to my hat. “Who are you?”