by Amy Stewart
“I just need to go see about something,” I said. “It isn’t strenuous. If I can sit around the house, I can ride in the buggy.”
“It isn’t the riding that bothers me. It’s whatever else you’ll get up to. I have the worst feeling that you just remembered about another criminal you left standing at the top of a staircase somewhere, and have decided to rush off and get yourself tossed down again.”
“If you’re so worried about it, why don’t you come with me?”
She looked up at me, surprised. “What would I do?”
“You can drive the buggy, to start. You’re the one who said it. I can hardly raise my arm.”
“Where are you going?”
“Over to Garfield to have another look at the room where a man was shot. In fact, it would help to have you along. I’d like to try something, and it would take two people to do it properly.”
She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Dolley tossed her head around but eventually took the bit from Norma and allowed herself to be led outside. “Well . . . I shouldn’t leave. The pigeon loft needs a patch before it snows again.”
“Those pigeons already have better accommodations than we do. No, come with me and do a little detective work.”
Norma’s frown had become so deeply etched in her face over the years that it took a great deal of effort to reverse its direction, but I thought I saw some change come over her. There was a hint of interest in her eyes. She looked down at her barn coat, which was covered in bits of straw and muck.
“I’ll have to change,” she said.
“Don’t bother yourself too much over it. No one will see us.”
She turned and ran to the house. It took me three attempts, but I managed to heave myself into the carriage under the force of one good knee.
26
ON THE WAY TO GARFIELD, I told Norma everything I knew about Providencia Monafo and the death of Saverio Salino. She’d read about the case in the papers, but nothing had been printed about the discrepancy between her story and that of her neighbors, or about Detective Courter’s efforts to get her released and to charge someone else with the crime.
Norma took the matter very seriously and puzzled over it all the way into town. She was deeply interested in other people’s private affairs. This was exactly the sort of mix-up that she liked to spend hours ruminating over.
“Mrs. Monafo herself admits to shooting the man,” she said.
“Gladly. She’s terrified of her husband and eager to take the blame and stay in jail where he can’t get to her.”
“The streetcar conductor is quite certain that she boarded at seven-thirty.”
“That’s what we’ve been told.”
“But the witnesses heard the shot at eight o’clock in the morning, and they couldn’t possibly be wrong about the time.”
“That’s what the detective says, yes.”
We rode along in silence while she thought it over. “Do you not agree with me that John Courter is the most untrustworthy man in public service in Bergen County?”
“We haven’t met them all, but he’s certainly the worst of the lot I’ve had dealings with.”
“Then I don’t like it that we have to rely upon his witnesses,” Norma said, “and I don’t understand why he’s so eager to let this lady out of jail.”
“The witnesses could say something to the papers, and then it would look bad if he’d locked up some poor old woman and left the real killer on the loose. Besides, if he truly believes that Mrs. Monafo couldn’t have done it, he’s no doubt expecting her to say so one of these days.”
“Then he’s in a fix, isn’t he?”
We came to a stop behind a long line of black motor cars that had stalled for no reason that we could see. Dolley hated to be crowded so close to the machines. She tossed her head and stamped her hooves to let us know it.
Norma stood up and tried to get a better look. She sighed and sat back down. “One of them is broken down at the intersection, and now we must all sit and wait. It used to be that you could just make the road a little wider.”
She was right. We used to just veer off into the fields if something was in the road, or else we’d take the lane opposite without worrying about an automobile running into us. Two horse-drawn carriages approaching one another were not much of a threat. But automobiles were driven by people who cared for nothing but going as fast as they could and pushing everyone else out of their way.
After a tiresome delay a constable arrived at the intersection and started directing traffic around the overheated motor car. “Do you know that Fleurette wants one of these, and thinks that she can learn to run it herself?” Norma said.
“No!” The thought of Fleurette in control of a machine on the open road gave me a pain at the back of my neck, which was one of the few places that wasn’t already hurt.
“She thinks she’s going to talk you into buying her a motor car on the grounds that she’ll carry you back and forth to work.”
“Fleurette wants to be my chauffeur?”
“And in exchange, she expects to roam freely about New Jersey and New York, enjoying—”
“Stop,” I said. “I don’t want to know what she hopes to enjoy. I don’t trust her with a telephone, much less a motor car.”
“Oh, she wants a telephone, too, but they’ll never bring the wires down our road, and I’m glad of it. I can’t abide a bell ringing in our house at all hours.”
We arrived at Mrs. Monafo’s boarding-house before I had to hear any more about it. I asked Norma to bring Dolley to a halt across the street and down a few doors. She stood squinting at the brick building, which had only grown more squalid in its landlady’s absence. Now two windows had boards across them. A piece of gutter had broken away from the roof, probably under the force of wind and snow. It hung across the upper floors, looking as if it might drop to the ground at any moment. The walk hadn’t been shoveled, and an overturned garbage can had been rifled through by the neighborhood cats.
“I don’t like to leave Dolley here,” Norma said. “Shouldn’t we have taken her over to the stables?”
I pitched myself awkwardly out of the carriage, landing on my good leg but almost losing my balance as I did so. The ice was starting to melt, but there were still a few frozen patches, and navigating around them wasn’t easy in my condition.
“You can stay here,” I said. “I just wanted to check something.”
“But doesn’t this require the both of us?” Norma asked.
She had the most eager expression I’d seen on her in a long time. I noticed that she’d actually dressed the part of a detective, in a smart tweed suit, leather gloves, and a wool riding cap. She looked more like a woman in law enforcement than I did.
“Then come on inside,” I said. “Dolley will be fine for a minute. There’s no one around.”
She followed me in. The front door was unlocked as it had always been before. I showed her down the back stairs into the Monafos’ basement apartment, where, once again, no one was at home. Norma walked in as boldly as if she owned the place, then took a step back when the stench hit her.
“I’d say that she’s been keeping animals in here, but a barn doesn’t smell this bad.” She folded her arms across her chest as she looked over the dusty and increasingly moldy furnishings and the rubbish that had continued to accumulate since Mrs. Monafo’s arrest. Her husband must have been living there, because empty liquor bottles were adding a note of stale barley malt to the miasma.
Norma was already starting back up the stairs. “If this is how people live, it’s no wonder they go to such lengths to get locked up in that nice clean jail of yours.”
“Go and wait upstairs with Dolley, then. I’ll only be a minute.”
For once, Norma agreed with me. “Shake out your skirts before you get back in the carriage. I suspect they’ve got bugs.”
“I guarantee they do.” That was enough to get Norma up the stairs and across the
street.
Once she was gone, it took only a moment for me to do what I’d come to do. I made sure the door to the apartment was open as it would have been the morning Salino was shot, assuming he’d just come in and not had time to close it behind him. Then I cleared a pile of old papers out of one corner of the room, exposing the brick foundation. I took from my pocket a pinch of wool batting, which I stuffed into each ear.
Then I pulled out my revolver and fired a shot into the corner.
The explosion rang around the room and nearly deafened me in spite of the wool. A haze of smoke settled around me. The crisp blackened odor of the gunpowder momentarily improved the air.
The bullet went into the mortar between the bricks and lodged there. I put the newspapers back where they’d been, pulled the wool out of my ears, and climbed the stairs. Down the street, Norma was feeding an apple to Dolley.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
She turned to look at me, puzzled. “Did I hear what?”
“BUT YOU MUST’VE HEARD IT,” Sheriff Heath said. “It was a gunshot. It would have gone all over the neighborhood.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at me impatiently. Norma was standing in front of the small fire he kept going in his office.
“It’s a basement apartment,” I said. “It’s in the back of the house, and what windows they have are mostly covered in rubbish. Even with the door open, Norma didn’t hear it. Or if she did, it was so faint that she didn’t notice it. I hadn’t told her to expect it, so she wasn’t listening closely. But the neighbors wouldn’t have been listening closely, either.”
The sheriff went over to stand next to Norma in front of the fireplace. “What do you make of this, Miss Kopp?”
Norma never missed an opportunity to say exactly what she made of a thing, but coming inside the jail had put her off and she’d been unusually quiet. “It’s exactly as Constance told it,” she said, keeping her eyes on the fire. “It shouldn’t matter what I make of it. You don’t need me to tell you how to do your job.”
“All this time I thought I did,” the sheriff said with a smile. He insisted on liking Norma. I used to think he was only being polite to her on my account, but I’d come to see that, with very few exceptions, he treated everyone with the same mild courtesy—even the criminals under his watch.
Norma surrendered her place in front of the fire and walked over to the window, which looked out onto the dull and tenebrous Hackensack River. “I will say that I didn’t like leaving Constance alone in that horrible little flat, so if I had heard anything at all unusual, I certainly would’ve run back to check on her. You and Detective Courter could go and try the same thing yourselves if you don’t believe us. You’d have the same result.”
Sheriff Heath rattled the coins in his pocket and thought about it.
“Do you remember when we went there together,” I said, “and you called down to me from upstairs and I couldn’t hear you? I’d forgotten it myself, but I’ve had three days to do nothing but lie around and think about things, and that came back to me all at once. It occurred to me that I should at least try an experiment.”
“But what about our witnesses who heard the shot at eight?”
“I’m not saying they didn’t hear a shot. They might well have. I just don’t think it was the shot that killed Saverio Salino. It could’ve been an engine firing, or someone shooting at a target, or maybe it was another murder no one has bothered to do anything about.”
“Mmmm.” The sheriff picked up his poker and went to work on the fire, shifting the embers around and dropping another log on top. He watched until the bark started to burn and then said, “Well. I’m sure Detective Courter hasn’t gone over to the Monafos’ apartment and fired off a round. I don’t think he’ll be happy to find out that you did.”
“He should thank me for getting rid of a worthless piece of evidence,” I said.
“I doubt he will. But I suppose Mrs. Monafo is ours to keep.”
“I don’t know how you’ll bear it, if she’s half as appalling as that room of hers,” Norma said.
THE STORY OF HOW I’d turned Providencia’s case around pleased her immensely. She walked back and forth cackling to herself and telling it to me in bits and pieces.
“You shoot your gun in my house.” She grinned broadly and shook her finger at me.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“And you keep another lady upstairs to listen!” She screeched delightedly at that. “But she don’t hear nothing.”
“That’s right. And it appears to have worked, although you might have to speak to a judge. I suggest you tell the whole story, exactly as it happened. It’s your best chance. A man was killed, and you must understand how serious that is.”
I could never be sure if Providencia did understand the gravity of the matter. She’d expressed no remorse for killing Mr. Salino. She seemed to regard the fact of his death as a mere outgrowth of everything that had happened to her, rather than a singular tragic event of its own. The poor man appeared to have no family in this country—the sister who’d been staying with him was, as I suspected, not actually a sister—and as far as I knew, there was no one to visit, no one to question, no one to whom Mrs. Monafo might consider making amends, if such a thing occurred to her, and I don’t think it ever did.
In fact, the news that she was to stay locked up put her in such good spirits that she found herself quite active and restless, and volunteered for kitchen duty. Sheriff Heath refused, unable to reconcile his memories of her living conditions with anything he’d like to see happening in his kitchen. He told her that he’d just put a new crew on dinner duty, and that they were all rough-edged men greatly in need of the morally restorative effects that only the slicing of onions and peeling of potatoes could bring about. Providencia accepted this but took every opportunity to remind him that she could make a better dinner from the pigeons roosting on the courthouse roof than the men downstairs did with a leg of mutton.
“That’d be just fine, Mrs. Monafo,” the sheriff would call back cheerfully. “We’ve a nice crop of river rats this year too, if you think you can do something with those.”
That made her clap her hands gleefully. She was enjoying her sentence more than either of us would have liked. Then again, we’d always take a cheerful inmate over a bad-tempered one or, worse, a con artist whose next move we couldn’t guess.
27
I TRIED TO STAY AWAY from von Matthesius’s cell but I couldn’t. A strange dreamlike air hung about the jail now that we had him back. It seemed that he’d been gone for an eternity, that I’d spent my whole life hunting him, and that at any moment he might vanish again, drifting away from the bars of his cell like a curl of smoke escaping from a pipe. I wanted to forget about him, but no matter where I went in the jail, his presence exerted a terrible pull on me. At times I thought I could hear him pacing and scheming like a trapped animal in a zoo.
I finally went to him late at night, about a week after his capture. He was once again at the end of a cell block, isolated from the others. We kept Felix on a separate floor and promised the severest of punishments to anyone who helped to pass messages between them.
The Baron was sitting up on the edge of his bunk as if he’d been expecting me. “La Mademoiselle Kopp formidable,” he said in a perfect Parisian accent. He gestured for me to join him in his cell but I didn’t. I tested the gate to make sure it was locked.
“We never knew you spoke French,” I said through the bars.
“Only for you.”
There was something plain and common about him now. The jail uniform had a way of shrinking him down to size. Someone had shaved his head and his beard, and taken away his monocle. All of his pretenses were gone. His face sagged like crumpled tissue.
“We haven’t found Dr. Rathburn,” I said.
He looked up quickly at the sound of the man’s name, then slumped over. “It’s better for the von Matthesius clan if you don’t. He believes I owe him a great
debt, and he was only keeping me until it could be paid.”
“You had a house with so many nice things. What happened to the paintings and the rugs?”
He made a tsk sound as if spitting the idea away. “People don’t appreciate fine things.”
“Couldn’t Felix get a good price for them?”
But he wouldn’t answer, so I said, “You should have stayed in jail. You only had nine months left. It was far less than you deserved. You’ll have much more time in prison now.”
He gave that dismissive little shrug the French do. “You didn’t have to go looking for me. It would’ve been no trouble at all to simply forget all about the old Baron.”
“You know we can’t do that.”
“No. You do your job, and I do mine.”
“And what is your job, Mr. Baron Reverend Doctor?”
“Not to sit in a jail cell and wait to die.” He coughed and went to the basin to splash a little water in his mouth. We didn’t let him have a cup, not even a tin cup he couldn’t break.
When he finished he walked right up to the bars and said, “You have me. Why don’t you let my brother go free?”
I shook my head. “There’s no leniency after a jailbreak. He had a chance to cooperate and he refused.”
He took a long and noisy breath in. “You would never tolerate your sister going to jail for your crimes.”
That was bait and I knew not to rise to it. “I wouldn’t involve my family in my wrongdoings. And of course I wouldn’t break the law.”
His eyes were locked on mine. “Maybe you didn’t break the law. But you’re guilty, aren’t you, Fräulein? You’re guilty of making it so easy for me to escape. How are they going to punish you?”
The man was poison. I stepped away, quickly, not daring to even breathe the air around him.
Our prisoners came to us with all their horrors in tow: their dyspepsia and weak livers, their gout and catarrh, their boils and fevers, their scabies and lice. Some of it could be scrubbed away or banished with pills. An infected tooth could be pulled, a scrape bandaged. But when they brought in their lies, their devilish intentions, their wickedness and treachery—nothing could scrub that away. It gave me a diseased feeling to be too near it. As soon as I was out of sight of him I scratched at my neck and brushed down my skirts to banish the sensation that the old man’s wrongdoing had taken bodily form and leapt through the bars at me.