Fingy Conners & The New Century

by Richard Sullivan

  “All right, Detective Sullivan, you’ll see. I’ll show you. It’ll be ready in fifteen minutes and then you can just eat your hat.”

  “I might just be forced to, if that pie you made for last Thanksgiving was any preview.”

  “Papa!”

  “Just kidding honey. How’s your Ma. Is she asleep still?”

  “Yes. She’s got nothing left in her to throw up, but I’ve been making her drink water and I got a little apple cider in her.”

  “Atta girl.”

  “Pa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I organized the desk and some bills are due, can you write some checks and I’ll mail them out tomorrow?”

  “What bills are those, Nell?”

  “Frontier Telephone and Dr. Buswell.”

  “Oh. Sure, honey, right after supper, so long as my hat doesn’t start repeatin’ on me right away.”

  “Oh, Pa. You’re terrible!”

  The next morning, Nellie managed to get her mother to eat some oatmeal. Hannah sat up in bed for a bit and tried to read the newspaper, but soon enough wanted to go back to sleep.

  “Take Zeke out, Nellie, please.”

  “Ma, I was gonna walk up to Elk Street to mail some bills. Pa wrote out some checks last night. I’ll take Zeke along with me.”

  “Don’t let him pull on the leash. If you make him mind, he will heel. Trouble is, you spend so little time with him, he’s not used to you being in charge. He’s a good guard dog, Nell. Nobody will bother you with Zeke by your side.”

  Nellie prepared to set out for Elk Street. Hannah was already asleep again and snoring. There was an envelope sitting in the cubby, sealed shut, with the name Dr. Marcy on it. Nellie didn’t know any Dr. Marcy. So she looked the name up in the City Directory. She found it, and added the address to the envelope, attached the heavy leather leash to Zeke’s collar, then headed off to the post office.

  Signed, Sealed, Delivered

  The troubled man approached the desk at Police Headquarters where Detective Sullivan sat nose to the grindstone, head down.

  “Are you a detective?” asked Dr. Marcy.

  “Yes I am,” said Jim looking up at the excited visitor.

  “Oh, it’s you, Detective Sullivan. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  “Yes. How are you, Doctor? Can I help you with something?”

  It’s that idiot Marcy. Just my luck, Jim said to himself.

  “Well, I hope so. I’ve received a terribly threatening letter from a crazy woman, and I’d like to file a complaint against her and have her arrested.”

  Dr. Marcy was sweating in spite of the spring chill.

  Jim took the letter and began reading, finding the penmanship somewhat familiar. The oft-heard phrase “if it takes the rest of my life” rang a bell, right before he saw the signature, Hannah Nugent.

  Captain Michael Regan recognized Dr. Marcy from across the room and approached from behind Jim to pay his respects.

  “What’s the problem here, Sully?”

  “Well, Captain. I’m afraid it’s quite serious. The good doctor here has received this alarming letter threatening his life from one Hannah Nugent.”

  “Whoa. Your wife, Hannah Nugent?

  “Yep. ‘Fraid so.”

  “Oh my Lord,” whistled Regan. “Don’t that beat all?”

  “That’s your wife, Detective?” shouted Dr. Marcy, as everyone turned to look.

  Jim sighed deeply and nodded his head in resignation.

  “Oh, there’s no mistakin’! That’s her all right,” Jim said, still reading. “Jeez, wait! This part right here sounds pretty grisly if you ask me, Captain. Listen: ‘Someone should pull off your penis by tying it to a dray and stampeding the horses.’ Yeah, I’ve even gotten that from her once or twice before myself. Ouch!” Jim grimaced as he crossed his legs tightly.

  “Well, she doesn’t exactly threaten my life,” he said, backtracking, “but she…”

  Both men interrupted.

  “Oh, no! Make no mistake, Doc. She’s threatenin’ your life all right. Her words might not say that exactly, but here, between the lines...believe me. I live with the woman. She’s cuckoo. It’s all indicated right here in black India ink—and as I said, right between the lines. Plain as day.”

  Again, Regan whistled and stood there, rubbing his chin, shaking his head back and forth mournfully.

  “Didja know she hit Detective Sullivan here with a cast iron skillet once and damn near took off his arm, Doc?” offered the Captain.

  Dr. Marcy just froze there, stupefied.

  “Oh, yeah, boss. Oof! That was a close one. And that butcher over at the Broadway Market, when he tried to sell her that bad pork? The meat cleaver incident? I won’t soon forget that.”

  “Thank God for them quick-thinking polacks and krauts over there! Them people—they recognized all the signs right away—you know, because it’s part of their national disposition after all. They tackled her before she could do any serious damage.”

  “Well, she did break some of his fingers, didn’t she?”

  “Well, yeah, but she didn’t chop none off, thank the Lord.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. I remember now.”

  Feeling the policemen were getting a bit off track, the doctor brought them back to the matter at hand.

  “Well, what should I do about this?” he pleaded. “Getting a terribly threatening letter like this? It’s illegal!”

  “Look. No return address, Sully. She’s one smart girl, that one.”

  “What do you need a return address for, detective? You’re married to her, you said,” cried the alarmed doctor.

  “Oh, Dr. Marcy! Have you never heard of double jeopardy! A man can’t testify against his own wife!”

  “Sully, that’s spousal immunity yer thinkin’ of,” corrected the Captain.

  “Oh yeah. I meant to say spousal immunity.”

  “Well, the Captain here said he knows her also, so he can be the one to testify. Right, Captain Regan?” countered the doctor.

  “Well, Doc, I can’t say for certain that I recognize the writing here as being that of Detective Sullivan’s wife,” he said, turning the letter upside down and inspecting it every which-way.

  “She signs her name as Nugent, Sergeant. You must recognize that name! It’s not a common name!”

  “It’s Captain, not Sergeant.”

  “Oh, yes, forgive me. Captain. For some reason I always become flustered whenever anybody threatens to kill me.”

  “Yes, of course, Doctor Marcy. I do too,” said Regan. “And I do know that name. Nugent. Nugent. Oh, now I remember. This here Hannah Nugent’s brother is…”

  Regan raised his eyes to the ceiling and tapped the letter against his temple as if in deep thought.

  “Yes, that’s right. Hannah Nugent’s brother David Nugent is married to Fingy Conners’ niece. Have you ever heard of Mr. Conners, Dr. Marcy? William J. Conners?” inquired the Captain.

  A sudden gloom overcame the good doctor’s expression.

  “Uh…Fingy Conners? Uh, well, um. Yes. Yes I have.”

  “Yeah, them two, they’re very close, closer than any brother and sister that I happen to know, I can tell ya that much. The Nugents. Quite the…unusual…family, I’d have to say. Uhh…and there certainly are strong rumors out there about Fingy Conners, you know, I have to admit that. But I’m not convinced they’re entirely all that true. Right Sully?”

  “No. I mean, yeah. I always assumed they were true. You know, if they print it in the newspaper, some of it’s bound to be true, right?”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, boss. That’s how we know how to sort truths from lies. The newspapers. Hey, remember the guy they found in the Hamburg Canal, eyes poked out, arms chopped off, with mud snakes living inside his chest where they’d cut his heart out?”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember that one. Nasty situation. That wasn’t Fingy Conners, though, was it? I thought it was that mass murderer from up
there in Toronto, that guy who killed all them people in that crazy house near the Chicago Exposition, back in…’95...wasn’t it?”

  “No, ‘93.”

  “Yeah, ’93.”

  “Hmm. Say, I got an idea,” piped up the Captain.

  Dr. Marcy looked hopeful.

  “What we can do for you Dr. Marcy, is we can take you over to see Fingy Conners right now and you can show him this here letter and demand that he do something to keep that family of his in line, or else you’ll be pressin’ charges against ‘em.”

  “Isn’t Conners that fella that beats everybody up?” gulped the doctor.

  “What? Oh, no. Not everybody. No, you just have to be very stern with him. Hold your ground like a man. He respects that. You just tell him in no uncertain terms that you have had it with his crazy family and their shenanigans and you expect it all to stop, every bit of it. His ears’ll prick up to that kind of reasoning, I promise you—he’ll listen but good.”

  “Yeah, I hafta agree with the Captain here, Dr. Marcy. Fingy’ll listen hard to whatever you got to say. And he never forgets a face,” Detective Sullivan concurred.

  Dr. Marcy seemed to need a few moments to consider.

  “Well,” he finally said, “maybe I shouldn’t bother him right now. He’s a very busy man I hear, running those newspapers and all. Maybe I’ll just write him a strongly-worded letter later on.”

  “Well, if you insist,” said the Captain, looking disappointed. “But how about if we just keep this here letter at Headquarters as evidence, you know, in case anything does happen to you? You certainly want to be able to prove she threatened you if something does...well...occur.”

  “Uh, certainly. You’re the police. You know best. You keep it, and please, um… well, I have appointments at the hospital now, so I have to go. Good day, gentlemen. Thank you.”

  “You bet, Dr. Marcy. And thank you for coming in to inform us of this menace. We’ll take care of it. You, sir, are a fine citizen.”

  And as Marcy exited, without saying another word Sullivan went back to his papers and Regan returned to logging calls into his telegraph blotter.

  ...

  Zeke met Jim at the entry door with his deep bark and his lethal tail whipping around wildly. Jim’s knees ached too much to stoop down to receive kisses, so he cuffed Zeke’s ears affectionately instead. He held the door open while the dog anointed a bush near the front gate, then together they mounted the stairs. After putting his things down, Jim went right into Hannah’s room to check on her, Zeke nudging him along at the backs of his knees with his wet nose as he walked. A chewed stocking lay on the floor at the foot of Hannah’s bed.

  “Hello there, honey, I’m home. How you feelin’ this afternoon? Any better?

  “Yes, dear. I am feeling a little better. How was your day?

  “Oh, not bad at all. Except…well...there was this one troubling incident down at Headquarters…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, this poor doctor came in, all upset, sweating, white as a ghost, holding a letter he’d received in the mail from a raving lunatic. Some crazy woman. I mean a real nut case, threatenin’ him and callin’ him every disgusting name in the book.”

  “Well, what did you do?”

  “Well, I told Dr. Marcy that I would do my best to track down the horrid sort of woman who would write such a vile letter, making all those accusations about his character…uh, well, wait a second…let me...”

  The Detective fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the four-page letter, sorting though the leaves.

  “Oh yeah, here it is, see? She’s threatenin’ in this part to have wild horses pull his penis off… and then there are these foul insults about his mother being a prostitute…”

  Hannah went even whiter than the deathly pale she already was.

  “Ever hear of somebody named ‘Hannah Nugent’, dear?” asked the detective.

  “Oh my God. How…? Nellie!” she called. “You come in here right this minute!” Hannah laughed for the first time in more than a week.

  The Pennell Inquest

  The inquest into the deaths of Arthur Pennell and his wife Carrie convened on April 10th, 1903 and was presided over by Justice Murphy. The intent was to shed some light on whether the incident was a murder-suicide or an accident.

  Arthur Reed Pennell’s stenographer Wallace G. Omphalius read a statement five typewritten pages in length from notes dictated by Pennell on his final day of life. The Buffalo Express stated that in view of the facts established at the previous Burdick inquest, much of the statement “is not to be taken seriously, for its falsity is apparent.”

  In it, Pennell had stated that Burdick was murdered by an unknown woman who was invited to his house at midnight. He denied any knowledge of or complicity in the crime. He assailed Burdick and charged him with intimate relations with other women. He defended himself by insisting his relations with Mrs. Burdick were purely platonic and that he merely acted as no more than her legal adviser. He touched on the subject of the Ellicott Square offices, quarters he claimed were leased for his business but were in fact yet another love nest for himself and Alice Burdick.

  It was Mrs. Burdick herself who gave him the lie about this through the letters they exchanged that she had saved and hidden away and that were read aloud to the court at the Burdick inquest. Pennell claimed in his statement that there were no meetings between the two at the Ellicott Square, thereby shining the light of untruthfulness over the entirety of his five-page manifesto.

  The version of the Pennell statement that was read in court was but a copy. The original of the statement, with evidentiary additions made by the dead man and revealing revisions penned in his own handwriting, did not appear in evidence despite its availability. For whatever reason the copy statement, which disclosed much less about the man’s state of mind and intent than did the original, was admitted in its stead.

  A portion of this statement was devoted to a diatribe assailing the discoveries about Pennell’s and Alice Burdick’s misadventures made by detective James Boland of the Mooney-Boland Detective Agency:

  “In reference to the alleged statements of a New York Detective Agency, whose main business seems to have been to give their clients’ secrets to the public, I desire to say that, without knowing what arrangements were made with them by any person, any statements on the part of such agency tending to reflect in any way upon myself or any other person involved are unqualifiably false and have no basis in fact. They are made up of those unfounded statements of this class of parasite which have become of such doubtful value that even in the courts it is now almost held that the presumption is against their credibility.”

  About the newspapers’ coverage of the Burdick murder Pennell wrote:

  “Finally, it may be said that the crime is as great a mystery to the writer as to any one. Terrible notoriety and publicity has been brought upon people, more especially women, who have entirely undeserved it, and great wrong has been done to all concerned, especially to the family which has and must suffer most. For that we must thank the spirit of yellow journalism, which does not hesitate to violate every principal of truth, honor, chivalry, justice and sanctity in those efforts to make news and sell papers which makes that style of journalism one of the sickening things of modern civilization.”

  ...

  Thomas Penney, the former Buffalo district attorney and currently the attorney for Fingy Conners and all of Conners’ enterprises, attended the inquest. Penney claimed to be acting as attorney for the Pennell family, regardless of the fact that no family members were called in for testimony nor were any present in court. Penney had in fact sent the late Arthur Reed Pennell’s brother, J. Frederick Pennell, back to Maine before the inquest convened in order to keep him from having to be questioned.

  During the inquest, Thomas Penney himself maintained an odd and aggressively obstructive stance, compelling those present to question why, at an inquest no less, he would be so protective
of his late client and fellow attorney in death, and raising the curiosity of what questionable collusions the two advocates may have shared that might be revealed directly or indirectly by undesired testimony here.

  Things took an adversarial turn as District Attorney Coatsworth questioned witnesses who had seen Pennell the day of his death.

  Dr. E. G. Danser, the medical examiner, was the first witness. Dr. Danser testified that on the evening of March 10th he was called to the quarry on Kensington Avenue to take charge of the body of Arthur Reed Pennell. He said he found the body on the floor of the quarry under the automobile. The skull was crushed and the dead man’s brains had been entirely expelled out onto the ground.

  The body, especially the head and the face, was horribly mangled. Nearly all the bones in the body were broken. He said that when he arrived at the quarry that Mrs. Pennell had already been removed to the Sisters’ Hospital.

  Frank Jerger was the next witness. Jerger testified that on the afternoon of March 10th he saw Pennell’s electric Baker “come down Kensington Avenue from the west, going east. I was at the barn in the yard. After I first saw it, it went straight up the avenue about 1,000 feet, then came back and went north on Bailey Avenue. Then it came back and went south on Bailey about 1,000 feet to the land of the Equitable Land Co., turned around and came back up again. He remained in the area I judge at least an hour, and he went as slow as the wheels would move along all the time that he was there. That was a little after 4 o’clock. It wasn’t just raining at the time, it was pouring down. That’s how I remember that it was the same wheel.”

  At this point in the inquest Attorney Thomas Penny insolently interrupted, “I object to a lot of the testimony that is not relevant to the issue here.”

  Justice Murphy, surprised by this peculiar and thoroughly unwarranted outburst, replied, “You have no right to object at all.”

  Mr. Penney countered, “But I think, your Honor, that we have at least a common law right to enter objections here to a lot of irrelevant testimony.”

  Judge Murphy shot back, “I think I am quite capable of conducting this inquiry, Mr. Penney and deciding what is relevant and what is not. We are going to find out all about this case. There is a question here as to whether his death was accidental or suicidal and I am going to take this man’s story.”