“You going to miss it?” Officer Thrasher buttoned the coat of his uniform. The buttons were polished, but the coat was a little worse for wear now, and so was the policeman. It hadn’t taken long.
Yes, he would miss it, Mick thought. He would remember the harlots and macs, the pickpockets and panel men who had made the job interesting, even the newshawks who had turned him into a celebrity after the Lillie Osmundsen murder six months before. “Maybe. Would you?” Mick asked.
“I’m too bare-ass poor to afford memories,” the officer replied, picking up his hat and heading toward the door. “You coming, or you going to sit around moping?”
The boys were waiting for him at the Arcade. Mick’s cousin Caro had thrown a grand party for him the night before, attended by a large portion of Denver’s upper crust. His uncle, Evan Summers, had declined to attend, but Judge Stanton, who was going out in society a little now, was there. Tonight would be a bruiser, and what with everybody wanting to buy him a drink, Mick wondered if he’d be sober enough to catch the train in the morning.
There was just one more thing to be done, and he had delayed it, put it off because he did not want to give time for a reply. Mick smiled a little to himself as he opened the bottle of ink and dipped in the pen. It would be a short note, nothing fancy. He wrote, Dear Miss Osmundsen. But Beret had told him to call her by her first name, and Mick liked that. He crumpled the paper and pulled out another sheet. It was foolscap, the paper the reporters used, but she didn’t seem the type to demand proper writing paper. He dipped the pen into the ink again and started over.
Dear Beret,
I’ve quit the police force in Denver and am going to New York, where I’ve been hired on as a detective. I’m leaving on tomorrow’s train and should arrive on Thursday. I look forward to resuming our friendship.
Mick
Mick read the letter and grinned. It was short and to the point. She wouldn’t like anything flowery. He folded the paper and slid it into an envelope, which was already addressed and stamped. Then, making sure that Officer Thrasher was gone, Mick went to a cabinet and searched through files until he found the one for the Osmundsen murder. He flipped through the notes and papers and reports to the carte de visite of a woman in a sable jacket, her hands in a matching muff, that he and Beret had found under the mattress in Lillie’s room at Miss Hettie Hamilton’s. He removed the picture of Beret and put it into his pocket.
He wondered if Friday would be too soon to call on her.
Acknowledgments
Some fifty years ago, when I wrote my first nonfiction book about the American West, prostitution was the province of male historians. They emphasized the glitter and naughtiness of the parlor house girls and their affluent clientele, whose cold and haughty wives drove them to the dens of iniquity. The brothels were monuments to ostentation in which good taste played little part. There were grand pianos, rich woodwork, and lavish draperies and furniture, along with mirrored walls and ceilings that showed off the parlor girls to advantage. The women were beautiful and elegant, and many had turned to the sporting life because it was exciting. Or so the historians wrote.
Only after I began researching did I realize how multilayered prostitution in the early West really was. While there were indeed a few exclusive brothels where jewel-bedecked inmates were feted at champagne suppers, far more common were the women at the other end of the spectrum, the “crib girls.” An 1886 newspaper account of a suicide, which I quoted in Cherry Creek Gothic, my history of Victorian architecture in Denver, describes in Dickensian manner the hovel of one such prostitute:
The walls and ceiling were absolutely black with smoke and dirt, excepting where old, stained newspapers had been pasted on them—on the ceiling, to exclude rain and melting snow, and on the walls, to cover up spots from which the plastering had fallen. The floor was rickety and filthy. Around the walls were disposed innumerable unwashed and battered tin cooking utensils, shelves, for the most part laden with dust, old clothing, which emitted a powerful effluvium, hung from nails here and there; or tumble down chairs, a table of very rheumatic tendency, on which were broken cups, plates and remnants of food, were [sic] scattered all over its surface. An empty whiskey bottle and pewter spoon or two. In one corner and taking up half the space of the den was the bedstead strongly suggestive of a bountiful crop of vermin, and on that flimsy bed lay the corpse of the suicide, clad in dirty ratted apparel, and with as horrid a look on her begrimed, pallid features as the surroundings presented. No one of her neighbors in wretchedness had had the sense to open either of the two little windows in the room to admit pure air, hence the atmosphere was sickeningly impure and almost asphyxiating. “My God!” exclaimed Coroner McHatton, used as he is to similar scenes and smells in his official capacity, “Isn’t this awful?”
With the rise of women historians, the depiction of the West’s sporting women changed. Feminist writers emphasized the depravity and degradation of prostitutes, their addiction to drugs and alcohol, the squalor of their lives, their victimization, and the beastly conditions that led to suicide. Often the women started out in high-class houses, then spiraled downward. Some turned to prostitution after they were thrown out by their families because of indiscretions, while others were enticed by white slavers. And then there were women so poor they turned to prostitution as the only alternative to starvation.
The truth is both of these extremes existed, as did a middle ground. In Butte, Montana, some of the prostitutes were widows of miners, and they worked out of cribs during the day, when the kids were in school. In Breckenridge, Colorado, the prostitutes were part of the fabric of the town. The madam, Mae Nicholson, riding on her horse Gold and Silver, led the July Fourth parade. When I lived in Breckenridge in the 1960s, our neighbor was one of Mae’s former girls, a wiry, white-haired woman who fished early in the morning and left her catch on our doorstep for breakfast.
Like that generous neighbor, western prostitutes have always seemed to me to be real women, not stereotypes. So I’ve tried to depict them as such in Fallen Women. The novel is not so much about prostitution as it is a story of family relationships, primarily between sisters, but set against a background of nineteenth-century vice.
In researching the manuscript, I consulted a number of books on prostitution, from Nell Kimball’s Nell Kimball: Her Life as an American Madam to David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise to Max Miller’s Holladay Street. The outstanding book on Colorado prostitution and early western law enforcement and the one I consulted most, however, was Clark Secrest’s Hell’s Belles. I’m greatly indebted to Clark, an old college buddy, not only for this extraordinary body of research but for reading my manuscript for errors. Among his corrections: police call boxes were not in use in Denver in 1885, and the “ladies” in Colorado were not referred to as “hookers” until the twentieth century.
My dear friends at Browne & Miller Literary Associates, Danielle Egan-Miller and Joanna MacKenzie, are not just agents but editors who sent me back to the drawing board again and again, until they were satisfied with the manuscript. It’s my good fortune that Browne & Miller took me on years ago and has shepherded every one of my novels to publication. At St. Martin’s Press, my superb editor, Jennifer Enderlin, with Sara Goodman, were helpful at every stage of the editing and printing process. My friends Arnie Grossman and Wick Downing supported me as only other writers can. And then there is my family—Bob, Dana, Kendal, Lloyd, and Forrest—whose love is infinite. And so is my love for them.
Also by Sandra Dallas
True Sisters
The Bride’s House
Whiter Than Snow
Prayers for Sale
Tallgrass
New Mercies
The Chili Queen
Alice’s Tulips
The Diary of Mattie Spenser
The Persian Pickle Club
Buster Midnight’s Café
About the Author
SANDRA DALLAS is the author of twelve no
vels, including True Sisters, The Bride’s House, Whiter Than Snow, Prayers for Sale, Tallgrass, and New Mercies. She is a former Denver bureau chief for Business Week magazine and lives in Denver, Colorado. Visit her at www.sandradallas.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
FALLEN WOMEN. Copyright © 2013 by Sandra Dallas. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Olga Grlic
Cover photograph © Mohamad Itani/arcangel-images.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-03093-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-03094-8 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250030948
First Edition: October 2013
Fallen Women Page 31