Fingy Conners & The New Century

by Richard Sullivan

  ...

  Detective Jim Sullivan picked up the telephone at Headquarters.

  “Police Headquarters, Detective Sullivan here.”

  “It’s you,” barked the familiar voice on the other end.

  “Yeah, I’m busy. There’s a fresh body waitin’ for me over on William Street that’s gettin’ cold,” replied Jim.

  “Listen Jimmy, yous gotta get that girl of yours to accept Mary’s invitation to come over here and have lunch wit’ her.”

  “Fingy, let’s you and me just look the opposite way while we let them two be. Let the girls have their fight. I swear it’s the only real fun Hannah’s had all year. They enjoy being enemies a hell of a lot more than they’d ever enjoy being friends. And really? I don’t see friends in the cards. No way, never. And you don’t neither, so don’t you be shittin’ me.”

  “Mary’s got her mind made up and I won’t have a fuckin’ minute’s peace until she gets her way. I’ll give yous fifty bucks.”

  “Okay. I’ll make sure Hannah shows. When…?”

  Fingy hung up without saying goodbye.

  ...

  “Well, I don’t care. I’m not goin’ over there Jim. She’s a horrible woman. I won’t give her the satisfaction of me accepting her apology.”

  “Well you already did, according to her. Over the telephone she says you accepted her apology.”

  “I did no such thing! What a horrible woman! See what I mean? There’s a perfect example of her connivin’ and lyin’. I told her I wouldn’t see her and that her telephone call could stand as an apology as far as I was concerned. I tell you, she and that Fingy are two peas in a pod. They deserve each other. My brother told me things, Jim. Dave’s there all the time. He sees. He hears.”

  “Oh, God Hannah. Let’s not start. Let’s at least leave your brother out of it for once, okay? Aren’t things already crazy enough? Just go over there. Think of it as an opportunity to get some new dirt on her. I’ll give you ten dollars if you do.”

  “I wouldn’t do it for twenty!”

  “Okay, I’ll give you twenty.”

  “Where ever did you get twenty extra dollars? Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Are you on the take? Jim!”

  “Oh, Christ. Hannah. No. Just go. Slip five bucks to the maid and you’ll get some good dirt outa her, I guarantee it. That’ll keep you in ammunition for a while.”

  “Just what do you take me for, Jim?” asked the insulted wife.

  “Somebody who likes to eat fancy food almost as much as she likes to dig up dirt,” replied the knowing husband.

  Hannah was speechless as she tried to counter with an effective retort, but she came up empty.

  “Well, all right. I do like meself a nice luncheon. I’ll telephone her.”

  ...

  Mary Conners heard the bell at the West Ferry St. entrance. She got up from her perch on the settee and removed the throw pillow from the armchair intended for Hannah. She didn’t want her guest getting too comfortable.

  The maid led Hannah up the staircase and knocked on the open boudoir door. Hannah purposely did not wear her best dress. She tried not to look around the richly decorated room. She didn’t want to give Mary Conners the satisfaction of seeing her awe and wonder at such a display of wealth and luxury.

  She couldn’t help but glance around a bit here and there, though. There was a beautiful English tea service that had been purchased from an antiques dealer in London during Mary’s most recent shopping trip. A silver tray was set sky-high with a mountain of triangular crumble cakes and a large bowl brimming with clotted cream. And strawberries. Fresh strawberries. It was January. Where in the name of God does a body ever find strawberries in January?

  “Can I offer you a scone?”

  Mary nodded toward the plate of treats, the signal for the maid to pick it up and offer the selection to Hannah. As she sat Hannah took one smelling of ginger and lemon and butter while eying another studded with chunks of chocolate. A huge vase of yellow hot house roses, all perfect buds, at least two dozen, filled a vase on the side table. The sun reflected their golden color onto Mary Conners’ face, softening her harsh features a bit.

  “And how are the children, Mrs. Sullivan?”

  Hannah knew she was being steered into asking Mary to call her Hannah, so she didn’t take the bait.

  “They are wonderful, Mrs. Conners. All excited about the Exposition. Jim Junior is convinced the place will be brimming with beautiful girls, so he’s got his eye on a position there.” Hannah knew she was spouting and tried to pull herself back. Don’t volunteer so much, she admonished herself.

  “I should think a position in the New York State Building would be an ideal place for an industrious young man like your eldest, Mrs. Sullivan. I’m sure the Alderman could help him with that.”

  “Yes, they’ve already spoken, and the Alderman suggested that very thing,” said Hannah, knowing Junior full well had his heart set on the fun of working at the beer garden as a sort of last youthful fling before buckling down to serious adult business.

  “How about little Billy? He must be excited too.”

  Fingy and Mary’s boy, William J. Conners Jr., had a heavy load to bear, even at age six. Fingy had already lost his eighteen year old progeny Peter upon whose shoulders he had intended resting everything. A football injury at the military academy he attended in Michigan turned into pneumonia, and he died before his parents could reach him—or so the confusing story went. Now, after that boy’s death, it was all on little Billy’s shoulders. And somehow, even at his tender age, Billy knew.

  “Oh my, yes. He is fascinated by electricity, electric lights, electric motors. So the promise of the industrial buildings already has him excited,” Mary said. My husband took him to the architect’s office and the man had there a small scale model he had built of the Electricity Building, with all its little engines and whatnot and that’s all that little Billy can talk about these days. My husband is having the man build another one exactly like it for Billy to play with.”

  Hannah thought to herself, that must have cost him an arm and a leg. And with all the time constraints, how could the Exposition architect possibly humor Fingy like that?

  “That’s nice,” Hannah replied.

  “Mrs. Sullivan, I hope you will accept my apology. I have been feeling poorly as of late and it has unfortunately affected my good humor. I know you’ll understand.”

  Hannah nodded sympathetically. “Do you mean about your going through the change of life? Oh surely, of course.”

  Mary Jordan Conners spit her scone just about halfway across the room.

  “What I mean, Mrs. Conners, is we all have to face it at some point. As for me personally, I can’t wait until My Old Friend stops visiting.”

  Once she’d stopped choking, Mary Conners blurted “Mrs. Sullivan! I never! That is the rudest, most presumptuous thing anyone has ever said to me!”

  Inwardly Hannah was giggling like a five year old clutching a giant sack of stolen Halloween candy, but she maintained a poker face.

  “Mrs. Conners, I meant no insult. We are both women, after all. If we can’t talk about it with each other, then who can we? We aged females need to stick together.”

  “Mrs. Sullivan, I’ll have you know that I am still quite in my prime!” She darted her eyes toward the door, then stood abruptly. “I just remembered that I have another engagement I must attend to.”

  She rang her little bell and the maid instantly appeared.

  “Will you please show Mrs. Sullivan out?”

  The maid nodded.

  Hannah quickly took one more big bite of her ginger scone and a fast gulp of her tea as Mary moved toward her to herd her out.

  “Oh, that’s too bad. Well, goodbye Mrs. Conners. It was lovely of you to invite me. I’ll have to have you over to our place on Hamburg Street sometime soon—maybe after they finish dredgin’ the river. Right now it stinks somethin’ awful, them stirrin’ up things from the bottom the way they are. Can�
��t hardly keep my lunch down, some days.”

  “Goodbye Mrs. Sullivan,” dismissed Mary Conners, as the maid escorted Hannah out and down the stairs to the Delaware Street entrance. The maid held the door open.

  “You keep me posted about what’s going on around here, Jennie,” whispered Hannah to the maid, “especially when it involves my brother.” She slipped Jennie a five dollar note with her telephone number folded inside.

  With the other fifteen she had left from Jim’s bribe, she made her way downtown on Main Street to have a nice lunch by herself at the Hengerer’s department store Tea Room on the seventh floor. She was starving—she hadn’t even been welcomed at the Conners’ long enough to finish a single crumble cake.

  9-11

  By mid-afternoon on September 11 the horizon had blackened ominously. Huge masses of heavy coal-black clouds were rolling in over the lake from the southwest. The light dimmed eerily over the Erie, the sky colored deep ebony, the water an unexpected lovely translucent aquamarine glowing between erupting frantic white wind caps.

  The initial zephyr, preceding as it did the same hurricane that had just wiped Galveston clean off the face of the map and reportedly claimed ten thousand souls there, slowly began picking up. Early in the evening the Alderman was attending a meeting of the directors of the Pan-American Exposition downtown at the Ellicott Square while Detective Jim Sullivan was at Police Headquarters a few blocks away working the graveyard shift. From the top floor of Headquarters there was usually a clear view to be had out over Lake Erie. However, things did not look so good even when there had still been enough light in the sky to see. But now it was pitch dark. Doors were slamming with powerful force throughout the police building, sounding not unlike gun blasts, unnerving the men.

  Windows on upper floors had been left open in the heat of the late summer day, and a sort of vortex inside the structure had been created. A great commotion was heard suddenly overhead as a scuttle on the roof was torn from its fastenings and was hurled about the rooftop like a toy, creating a great clamor. The patrolmen on reserve feared that the building was collapsing. Immediately after the scuttle was unleashed there came a series of crashes of breaking glass in various parts of the building. The panes in a few of the interior office doors shattered upon their slamming, so powerful was the gale’s force. The men were sent running around through all the upper floors, and the basement too, making sure all the windows were tightly secured.

  Jim had placed a phone call to Hannah a little after 9 o’clock, but the operator could not secure a connection. He then asked her instead if she might try his brother’s number.

  “Hello? JP?” answered Annie’s panicked voice.

  “No Annie, it’s me, Jim. I couldn’t get though to Hannah so I had the operator try you.”

  “Is JP there with you Jim?”

  “No, Annie. Isn’t he home yet?”

  “No, and I’m here all alone with the kids, and they’re frightened because of the terrible noise of the wind and all the shaking.”

  “The shaking? You mean, the house is shaking?”

  “Yes! The wind gusts are furious here! I’m scared, Jim. That building across the street that the Pennsylvania Railroad was building is gone! It’s been torn to pieces. The wood and scantling are flying though the air like straw!”

  “Oh my God,” gasped Jim.

  Hamburg Street runs east and west, lining up perfectly with a very broad west-east corridor created by the Buffalo river. The river for a quarter mile runs straight out from the end of Hamburg street, funneling cool lake breezes toward the Sullivan homes during balmier times, but delivering devilish blasts of destruction during a tempest. Beyond its most western point where the river turns south, wide-open Lake Erie lay about a thousand yards beyond that, with nothing at all to obstruct its winds. The south bank of the river accommodates the siting of many dangerous industries, including the massive Buffalo Union Furnace Ironworks, with all its behemoth derricks towering precariously many stories overhead, the structures allowing for the direct delivery of material to or from waiting ships in the river. The plant’s myriad assortment of towering smokestacks, offices, out-buildings, stockpiles of raw materials, mounds of refuse, and various vehicles were all being assaulted by the winds. Across Hamburg Street from the Sullivan houses, a brand new building had almost been completed for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Building materials had been piled generously about the grounds; metal sheeting and lumber, empty nail barrels, crates, wheelbarrows and scaffolding. These paraphernalia were now being widely redistributed over half the ward by the gale.

  The Alderman’s house was nearest to the corner of Hamburg and South Streets and the river. The two-story structure was receiving direct blasts of wind off the lake. Next to the Alderman’s house stood Jim and Hannah’s house, taller than the Alderman’s again by half, so that their upper story could expect to be rattling even more strongly than what Annie was describing, Jim thought to himself.

  “Where could he be, Jim? That Pan-Am meeting was supposed to be over by now,” worried the alderman’s wife.

  “Annie, I’ll go track him down. I’ll go over there to the Ellicott Square right now and see what might be keeping him.”

  “Please, Jim. Send him right home. The noise is terrifying. The children are crying and I’m frightened. And I don’t want him out on the streets with tree branches breaking off all about as they are.”

  “All right, Annie. Are Hannah and the kids okay? I can’t get through to her.”

  “I’m standing at the parlor window as we speak and she’s waving at me now.” Annie parted the drapes and exchanged hand signals with Hannah across the way. “I’ll run over there through the side yard and tell her you called.”

  “Be careful Annie. Tell Sophie you’re leaving the house so she can watch you to make sure you get over there safely.”

  “Okay Jim. You be careful too.”

  “All right Annie, I will. Me and JP will be home as soon as possible.”

  Annie told Sophie she was going next door. “Keep the kids here in the downstairs parlor and out of the dining room, away from the windows, and don’t let them go upstairs no matter what. Do you hear me?

  “Sure, tak,” said the Polish girl.

  Annie signaled Hannah through the parlor window that she was on her way over. The blast that slammed Annie as she stepped from the shelter of her house nearly lifted her off the ground. She crouched low and scuttled between the houses almost like a crab. Hannah flung open the door and Annie shot in. It was a challenge to shut the door behind her, the wind was so fierce.

  “Jim just called. The girl couldn’t get through to your telephone. He’s going to leave headquarters now and go look for JP at the Ellicott Square.”

  “Did he say he was coming home? He has to come home!”

  “I’m sure he’ll be coming back with JP, Hannah.”

  “I certainly hope so. Isn’t it terrible Annie? Isn’t this the same storm that just destroyed Galveston?”

  “Yes, but we’re two thousand miles from there, Hannah, so it must have weakened considerably by now, wouldn’t you think? I would think so…although it certainly doesn’t seem like it. I’m hopeful we won’t get much more than a good fright from this.”

  “Oh, poor Bridget Mulroney!” remembered Hannah.

  Bridget was one of the Island women Hannah had befriended recently. They met at church during one of Hannah’s afternoon visitations. Shanty-Irish Bridget indeed lived in a shanty, right on The Beaches at the end of Michigan St. where she squatted with her common-law husband and her children. Her poorly built tiny hovel would be taking the full blast of the gusts, as well as the wicked tides. “The Beaches” was the name given to the strip of sandy real estate sandwiched between the lake and the canal. It was connected to the rest of the city but by a single bridge, at Michigan Street. Some 1.5 miles long and a couple hundred yards wide at its widest, it was an island in more ways than one. None of the shacks had electricity. The Ce
ltic Rowing Club’s house was just about the most well-built structure on that shore, and that was little more substantial than a typical summer vacation cottage. Kerosene lamps would be the only light on the Island during the storm, as dangerous as those lamps might prove to be with the winds so fierce. The Island was an idyll on a warm summer’s day, but a veritable death trap during a storm.

  Michael Regan had left work to go to his home on Louisiana Street earlier in the afternoon but with the worsening conditions had made his way back to Headquarters after supper. The director of the Yacht Club at the foot of Porter Avenue had called him about 8 p.m. telling him a number of boats had slammed into the pier, which itself was now underwater, and were sinking, and what could Regan do about it?

  “What can I do about it?” he blustered. “We’re police officers, sir, not the United States Navy! The entire city is suffering in this storm, and you want officers who have families waiting for them at home to come over there to put themselves in jeopardy so as to rescue rich people’s yachts? Tell your people they should have taken them out beyond the break wall when they heard the storm was coming! Now let us go about our duties of trying to keep the citizens of this city safe, sir!”

  “Sully, have you called home to Hannah yet?” Regan asked as soon as he ran into Jim.

  “I did Mike, but couldn’t get through. So I called Annie and she was in a tizzy because JP is still at that Pan-Am meeting at the Ellicott Square. I’d like to go over there now and send all those men home if they haven’t left already.”

  “Yeah, sure, go on, get outa here.”

  It was just 2 blocks east and one north to the Ellicott Square building, but with the horses terrified and debris flying, it felt like a mile. At Seneca and Main streets a man was standing over a fallen horse, furiously beating the poor beast. The horse had been shocked by a downed electric wire and lay stunned in the street, still attached to the wagon he’d been pulling.

  “Hey you, Stop that nonsense!” Jim shouted. “That poor horse is suffering enough as it is without you havin’ to…”