Fingy Conners & The New Century

by Richard Sullivan

  The green Baker runabout was the same automobile in which Pennell had often taken his paramour, Mrs. Alice Burdick, joy riding. It too was dead.

  With the news of this startling event spreading like a wildfire through the city came the deduction that Mr. Pennell, hounded by the association of his name with the murder of Ed Burdick, and worry over the disgrace that had been thrust upon him, had taken his own life and that of his devoted, perennially forgiving wife.

  There was nothing remarkable found in Pennell’s pockets to support the idea that he had intended self-destruction. No inkling had been given to any of his friends or associates, or so they claimed, that he’d formulated any such exit scheme. His automobile veered suddenly and accidentally, it was theorized—perhaps as he reached for his hat blown off by the wind—and leapt over the curb and into the quarry before its intended path could be regained. The Baker landed upside-down and the Pennells were delivered there horribly mangled.

  Arthur Reed Pennell carried $215,000 insurance on his life, all of which was made over to his plain-faced spouse, the woman who clung to him though all his troubles, forgave him time and again for his indiscretions with Alice Burdick as well as with the other women who’d preceded her, and had promised, even after her good name had been dragged collaterally through the scandalous mire of the Burdick investigation, to stand by him.

  The unwavering devotion of Mrs. Carrie Pennell elicited much comment.

  She was a member of a well-known New Haven Connecticut family and recently had come into an inheritance of $150,000. Her husband’s small legal practice, which he paid little attention to between his dalliances with Alice Burdick, could not support his wife in addition to his mistress. He was said to be an excellent chauffeur, often seen zooming along Delaware Avenue and through the parks. He had never had any accidents. He loved his Baker and was known for chasing children away who might approach to lay their dirty fingers on it.

  “The only thing unusual about their going out last night,” said their maid Lizzie, “was that usually Mrs. Pennell told me the hour at which they would return. But yesterday it was Mr. Pennell who gave the order.”

  The Pennell home had been thoroughly searched by the police after the Burdick murder, and the prominent attorney had been watched for several days afterward. He continued his schedule and business as normal and to live together with his wife to all appearances as usual. After his death the police searched the papers and belongings in his office in the Austin Building, located just a block over from Police Headquarters, directly across Franklin Street from St. Joseph’s Cathedral. They also then once again keenly plundered the Pennell home on Cleveland Ave.

  The four insurance companies that held Pennell’s policies sought to have his death ruled a suicide so that they could deny a payout to his heirs.

  The matter went to court.

  March 14, 1903

  Hannah and Annie had together devoured the police statements given the press and the quoted testimonies of all the witnesses at the Burdick murder inquest featured daily on the front page of all the city’s newspapers. When they got together to add it all up and talk about it, they were troubled by all the blatant contradictions and discrepancies, and discussed these in great detail.

  Jim was very short tempered when it came to the case. He’d snapped at Hannah when she cornered him about the inconsistencies she’d noticed. He had not confided in Hannah his own many personal doubts and qualms.

  The Sullivan wives really heated up after the police so viciously went after Mrs. Paine and Miss Hutchison. In fact, all of the city’s females suddenly felt frightened and newly vulnerable, especially upon learning the police had no logical reason whatsoever to target either of the two women.

  But when Jim slipped and told Hannah about Police Station 14’s midnight raid on the Burdicks’ Ashland Avenue home, all hell broke loose. He tried to take it back. He weakly attempted to paint the raid as justifiable, not that he thought it was, but anything to avoid getting Hannah riled up again. But it was too late. The cat was out the bag. Incensed by the police’s targeting of women, she sallied forth.

  “Jim Sullivan! You dare defend to your own wife that such actions of the police, as illegal and terrorizing as they were, should be condoned simply because men with badges committed the act? How do you feel so above it all that you believe something like this cannot or will not ever happen to me or to our children? Do you even hear yourself when you blather such nonsense? How do you not possibly feel for that poor family? Those children? Awakening to the crash of fifty nightsticks pounding on the outside walls and doors in the middle of the night. The terror they must have felt! I would have had heart failure if it happened to me! Did your police brothers suspect the old lady had a gatling gun waitin’ for ‘em mounted at the top of those stairs? That those little children were a mortal threat to the well being of the neighborhood and therefore the house needed to be attacked under the cover of blackness at the midnight hour and its women carted off as if having conspired treason?“

  Jim was trying his damndest to keep the lid on his temper. Hannah wasn’t quite done.

  “When will this damnable police nonsense end, Jim? Why don’t you get your brother to find you some honorable position with some firm or company that doesn’t run roughshod every single day over the good people of this city?”

  That did it.

  “That’s enough from you now, Hannah! What do you expect me to do anyway? Exactly what, Hannah? I am fifty years old! Should I apply for a position in one of Fingy Conners’ enterprises, or with the murderous railroads, for Christ’s sake? What honorable company do you have in mind exactly? How naïve can you be? Show me where the goodness and where honor lies in this dirty world, Hannah, and I will go seek it out. I will stop being a police officer and give up my security and my pension that provides for my wife and children should I die or become injured so I can more honorably sell brushes door-to-door or file papers at the Catholic Diocese office, or, or..?”

  Hannah didn’t respond.

  Jim continued.

  “Every day I catch criminals and put bad people in jail, Hannah. Every single day! People who otherwise would be following you or my own children on the streets waiting for their next opportunity to brick you. Hannah, you talk about your books of psychology and what they supposedly reveal about people, but you have no concept of the inherent illnesses of the mind! I am not trying to make fun of your knowledge, or of you reading German books by crackpots like that Freud fellow. Perhaps you understand something in these characters that I do not. But you do not have a complete picture, nor do you intend to. You are satisfied picking and choosing your specific points of contention, disregarding other facts that figure into the case.”

  “That, right there!” she retorted, “That’s what I am angry about! I asked you a pointed question regarding that police assault on those poor Burdick women and you clouded it in a puff of smoke to divert me away from the issue. I’m talking specifically about the police invading a private home in the cold dead of night that contained only grieving women and children who had only that day returned from traveling across the state to bury their dead father. There is no justification for that, or their terrorizing tactics! An army of police pounding on the side of a house at midnight with their clubs, terrorizing the women and girls asleep inside who were already thoroughly terrorized over a murderer having entered their home while they slept, slaughtering, brutally bludgeoning their beloved father while they were mere yards away? That police invasion was lunacy! It isn’t just the Burdicks who are injured now; the entire neighborhood hates the police for doing this. Are we next, they must all be wondering? There was no threat, no danger, from anyone, toward anyone! It’s yet another case of the police having neither evidence nor clues, so as to make some show of their authority they just close their eyes and throw a net out there and drag in whatever poor soul happens to get caught up in it. It’s shameful, and pathetic, and damned lazy! The police were the thugs and the h
oodlums in this case, how can you stand here and defend that?”

  She had him.

  He paused to choose his words carefully as he seethed.

  “Hannah, there are bad cops, I agree. And sometimes I have had to do questionable things myself for no better reason than because I have been ordered to in order to keep my job so I can keep my family together. A few times I have stepped over the line just to get a bad man off the streets, I admit, that being to attend to the greater good. We do not live in a perfect world where everything is clearly illuminated as to its absolute goodness or badness. But I will ask around tomorrow and see what was the reason behind that invasion. Because...because, yes. You are right. That does seem insane no matter which way you look at it. I don’t blame you or any other woman for being terrified over that. I will try to find an answer, even if the answer does not put your mind at rest.”

  “My mind can never be at rest, Jim, just so long as nonsense such as this is allowed to go on and the police act as hired Hessians for whatever bosses happen to own them at the moment. I came to the conclusion back in the nineties with the Sheehans’ and Fingy Conners’ murdering of people and your brother’s police exam scandal, that the only way to put a stop to this criminal behavior is for women to have the vote.”

  “Oh, God. Hannah! Not again!”

  “Don’t you ‘Hannah’ me, Jim Sullivan! If half the people in line at those voting booths had been women with babies in their arms, there would have been no Sheehans and no Fingy Conners! There would have been no police clubbing women over their heads just because they demanded to vote their own mind. The only solution to stop all this corruption of our police and the politicians and the terrible things that endure in this city and in this country is for women to have the vote. I promise you, this world will become immediately more peaceful the very day that happens.”

  “Well, good luck. Because it won’t ever happen.”

  “Jim Sullivan, how dare you say that to me! Negro men have the vote, but white women do not? Is that right by any stretch of your imagination? All citizens have the same rights, supposedly, but in reality half are forbidden to vote! The half that I and your daughter happen to belong to!”

  He remained silent. He knew he wasn’t going to prevail.

  “The world is changing before your eyes, Jim, and women will no longer sit back and watch dangerous decisions being made in their names and the names of their children by bad men. That invasion of the Burdick home is deplorable in every imaginable way. Police men invaded a private home. Male medical students invaded the home of that poor Negress a while back and tried to kidnap her to conduct medical experiments on her like she were some dog in the street! Male students dug up Mrs. Carey’s grave at Holy Cross Cemetery and carted her body off to chop it to pieces in their dissection room. Then, male doctors insisted that the body was not hers despite her own husband and sister standing right there in front of them testifying otherwise! How preposterous! Men are defiling women and destroying this world! Your beloved martyred President McKinley allowed the lie of the Maine being blown up by the Spanish at Cuba! That was a fabrication now well known! How many thousands of our precious boys died in the resulting war because they heard the cry ‘Remember The Maine!’? How many of our own sons, yours and mine, and our nephews will die in the next? I’m glad that lunatic shot McKinley! He deserved it for sending innocent boys off to die!

  “Hannah! This is insanity. Take ahold of yourself, God damn it! Where the hell is all this coming from?”

  “Oh, Jim, every women knows that! Everything that men do when it comes to war is just insane. I’m just disgusted with it all! I didn’t give birth just so that my precious boys could go off and die for some politician’s lies!”

  And with that Hannah stormed out of the kitchen and into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her with a force that shook the whole house. Jim leaned against the sink, exhausted.

  He audibly exhaled.

  He thought for some minutes there, motionless, as the faucet dripped. She’d asked him twice now to fix it. He ruminated and worried. This conversation began with the Burdicks and ended with a government conspiracy. Jim feared that Hannah might be becoming unstable once again, that she may indeed have inherited the frightening traits of her mother. This certainly wasn’t the first time her frustration was the cause of an explosion between them.

  But right then, he needed to get to work for the four o’clock shift. The supper Hannah had been preparing was sitting there uncooked. He made a cheese sandwich. Young David came in from school.

  “Pa! I got an A!” David produced a drawing of a house and a tree and a yellow sun in a clear blue sky that was an idealized representation of their own home, although theirs rarely knew a sky above that was not murky with smoke and soot.

  “That’s very artistic, Davey. An A! I’m proud of you, son.”

  David beamed at his father’s praise.

  “Where’s Ma, Pa?”

  “Your mother has a headache, Dave, so try and be quiet. She went in to lie down for a few minutes. You go change out of your school clothes and wait for her to get up.

  “OK!” said David as he darted joyously out of the room.

  Jim had to leave for work soon.

  When he finished his sandwich he went to check on Hannah. He knocked gently at the door.

  “Hannah, I gotta go to work now. The kids are comin’ in.”

  She rose from the bed and melted into his arms.

  “I’m sorry, Jim. I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. I read too much. Way too much. Too many terrible stories in the newspapers.”

  “Don’t fret. We’re a family and we love each other. I won’t let anyone or anything hurt us. I promise. I know that Burdick thing scared the hell out of you. I understand that. Completely. I really do.”

  “I didn’t make you your dinner…” She was on the verge of tears.

  “I had a nice sandwich, honey. It’s okay. I put a flame under the chicken pot. Check on it, will you? Just don’t worry so much about what all goes on out there in the big scary world,” he said nodding out the window, “because everything’s just fine in here. Just fine. Hear me? Little Davey got an A for his drawing. He’s proud as hell and chompin’ at the bit to show it to you.”

  Hannah smiled a weak smile, wondering what might be wrong with her, blowing up over things she could not change or control.

  “I’ll wait up for you,” she said.

  “Don’t, honey. You and the kids need your sleep. Everything is fine. I promise. You and me. We are fine.”

  He smiled and kissed her on the forehead as if she were a misguided child, and descended the stairs to the front door. Zeke followed him but Jim sent him back up the stairs.

  “You keep an eye on yer mother,” he commanded. The dog understood.

  Hannah walked over and lingered in the window watching Jim head up toward Elk Street, worrying how much damage she may have just caused.

  After feeding him his supper she went next door with little David to visit his cousins. The Alderman was who-knows-where.

  “He’s downtown at the Iroquois, Hannah. Some Democratic nonsense-excuse to eat and drink and smoke cigars and shout their anger over matters Republican,” clarified Annie.

  As usual Annie and her girl Sophie had the household composed. It occurred to Hannah that she never spoke much to Sophie.

  “Sophie, where are you from, dear?” ventured Hannah.

  “Poland,” Sophie responded.

  “Yes. No, I mean, what city?”

  “No city. Country. Village. In north. Pogódki. Fifty kilometers of Gdansk.”

  “Oh,” Hannah smiled. “Is it nice there?”

  “No. It’s lonely.”

  Hannah had never heard of Gdansk.

  She refocused her attentions on Annie.

  “I fought with Jim again.”

  Annie said nothing. She only sighed.

  “I was screamin’ like a banshee at one point, about that po
lice attack on the Burdick family and suddenly I realized just how badly turned around I’ve been by that story. I wish Jim had never told me about it. I have bad dreams over it now, cops rushing up the stairs in the middle of the night with clubs, hitting me, shouting.

  “I realize now there are really only two kinds of cops, Annie—the bad cops, and the ones who look the other way.”

  Annie showed no reaction.

  “And Jim is lookin’ the other way. Which means, in my gut, I know somethin’ like this is bound to happen again, because nobody’s even talkin’ about how insane this was, much less apologizin’ to the family for it, or tryin’ to make up for it in some way. If no one talks about it, if nobody admits it was wrong, then they must all believe that this kind of thing is acceptable. That’s what’s frightened me so deeply, Annie, and that’s what set me off on him. I would have told him that, but he was already gone to work when it finally dawned on me.”

  “So? What do you expect Jim to do about it, Hannah? Realistically, I mean? He’s just one man,” said Annie, spooning apple sauce into baby Mildred.

  “Realistically?” Hannah shrugged. “Nothing. What can he do? Fight the entire department? He’d lose his job—if one of the bad cops didn’t decide to shoot him beforehand. I mean, if the newspapers haven’t even reported this outrage, what does that tell us? You can’t tell me with all them neighbors around there packed in so tight that somebody didn’t tell someone they knew at one of the newspapers about it. People are whisperin’ about it only now, as if it’s only some crazy rumor. I should feel safe being the wife of a police detective, Annie, but I feel the opposite. I know too much to feel safe.”

  Hannah paused a moment, then said, “We women need to have the vote Annie.”

  “Hannah,” grunted Annie, straining to hoist the toddler into her lap, “I’m surrounded by children who need me twenty-four hours a day. I don’t even have time to think, much less parade up and down the state with Mrs. Cady-Stanton.”