Devil by the Tail

by Jeanne Matthews

  “Whatever you’re cooking smells delicious,” said Quinn.

  “Streak o’ lean and apples. There’s enough for two if you want some.”

  “Sure. Lou said I could also find eggs.”

  “I’ve got a basket right here. Scrambled do you?”

  “Scrambled would be great.”

  “You’re the detective who came to talk to Jemelle.”

  “I am. My name is Quinn. What’s yours?”

  “Minnie Franklin.” She swiveled her head around and smiled. Without the make-up and revealing décolletage she looked twelve years old.

  Quinn’s brain transmitted a direct order to her mouth to smile. What her muscles did felt like a spasm. It would have to be Minnie. God certainly wasted no time testing her resolution to be open and frank and say what she meant. “You look awfully young, Minnie.”

  “Not really. Nineteen last month. The bread and butter’s in the cupboard. Slice yourself off a hunk. The eggs’ll be ready in a jiff.”

  Quinn brought the bread and a small crock of butter to the table and sat down. “Shall I cut a slice for you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Minnie scooped the bacon and apples and eggs out of the pan onto plates and set one down in front of Quinn. “Most of the other girls don’t come to the kitchen this early and I don’t drink coffee, but you can brew a pot for yourself if you like.”

  “Maybe later.”

  They ate for a while in silence. Quinn couldn’t stop herself from staring, but Minnie didn’t seem to take the stares amiss.

  “Sissy told me Jemelle made up a story about Elfie Jackson and you and Mr. Garnick made her fess up. I could never be a detective. You must put a lot of people’s backs up. Lou said you were in trouble when you came in last night, everything all burned up and no place to go. Are you scared?”

  “I am, a little. Last night I was petrified. Don’t you get scared doing what you…I mean, meeting so many strangers?”

  “You mean like what happened to Jemelle? That wouldn’t have happened here at Lou’s. All of her customers are real nice.”

  Quinn couldn’t bring herself to ask how nice Garnick was. So much for that line of inquiry, but she had other questions. Stram had been to Lou’s the night after she and Garnick took Jemelle’s statement. Maybe Minnie or one of the other girls had overheard a snippet of their conversation, the name of a friend or a clue where Stram may have gone to hide out. “Did you see the man who beat Jemelle? He visited her night before last.”

  “No. Sissy’s been the parlor hostess for the last few days. You’d have to ask her or Lou. Lou doesn’t miss much around here. She keeps out the bad eggs and lushingtons. That’s why everybody likes working here. I’m learning a lot from Lou. Not next year, but maybe by the year after, I’ll have enough money saved to open my own house.”

  “That’s remarkable. You must have a very generous clientele.”

  “Most of them.”

  “Do any city aldermen visit Lou’s place? Alderman Tench, perhaps?”

  “Oh, yes. He comes in at least once a week to see Mary Gladys. If you come back for tea around four, she’ll probably be here.”

  “I’ll do that. Thanks for the breakfast and the information, Minnie.” Quinn took her plate to the basin and washed it.

  “Will you be with us for another night?”

  “No.” Had that come out sounding too emphatic? “I mean, I don’t know. My life is pretty unsettled at the moment.”

  “Well, when you see Garnick be sure to say hallo from Minnie. It was wonderful seeing him the other afternoon. He hadn’t been around since way back the end of last year. I thought maybe he’d moved back to Tennessee, but I guess he’s found himself another woman. I hope she’s sweet and brave.”

  “Why brave?” asked Quinn.

  “Lou says a lot of men who soldiered in the war get crazy in their sleep and not to stay with anybody all night even if he pays. Garnick was so nice I did it anyway, but I hope never to hear such horrible nightmares again if I live to be a hundred.”

  Chapter 20

  Madam Lou may have catered to the hoity-toity, but she wasn’t above promoting her business to the hoi polloi. Her white-and-gold barouche carriage with “Lou’s Mansion” painted on the doors in lurid purple seemed designed to attract customers and smack her critics in the eye at the same time. She made the conveyance and its liveried driver available to her girls to take them wherever they wished to go, at whatever hour, at no cost. Quinn needed to get to the Chicago Bank where $33 was on deposit, $20 in the joint account of Mr. Garnick and Mrs. Thomas Sinclair, the unmatched names a scandal in and of itself. She jettisoned whatever squeamishness remained and climbed aboard behind a buxom girl in a bright red dress who introduced herself as Hannah Mae. It was a bright, clear morning. Quinn didn’t bother to hide her face as the carriage paraded through the streets eliciting a mix of foul-mouthed shouts from corner puppies and derisive stares from the respectable citizenry.

  The barouche stopped in front of the bank and Quinn informed the driver she would have no further need of his services today. She strode into the bank, produced her Widow’s Certificate as proof of her identity, withdrew ten dollars, and departed with as much dignity as she could muster. She hailed a hack to the Tremont where Garnick often went to catch up with his old pals, but Leonidas wasn’t among the horses out front. Again she wished she knew how to direct the driver to Garnick’s cabin, not that he’d be there at this hour of the day unless Leonidas had gone lame or the cabin roof had collapsed.

  She thought about paying a call on Captain Chesterton. Even if he didn’t know where to find Garnick, he needed to know that last night’s fire was no accident. But “Chez” didn’t respect her detective skills. He’d give little credence to her opinion unless it was supported by a man, preferably one of the fire fighters. She needed to get started hunting for a new place to live, but how could she sweet talk a potential landlady with her thoughts in a whirl over Garnick? It was his habit to show up at the office every morning by ten, even when there was nothing to do. She decided to go to the scene of the disaster and hope he’d be there.

  The blackened stone chimney towered over the devastation like a tombstone. Quinn asked her driver to wait while she walked the perimeter of the rubble. In daylight, the loss appeared more stark. More utter and complete. Garnick wasn’t here. Unless he was so out of patience with her he’d packed up and gone South, he’d know about the fire by now. He’d be here. She began to worry.

  The trash barrel, what remained of it, had been pushed jam up against the building. The staves had burned and the metal ribs encompassed empty space and at the bottom, a pile of ashes and debris. She stirred it about with a stick. Was that tiny brown lump an unburned plug of tobacco or the stub of a cigar, and could it have ignited such a hot, hellish blaze? Perhaps, if fed by a few oily rags.

  The fire started between the time she and Winthrop left for the Opera House and the time she returned, less than three hours, all in daylight. People traveled past the office at all hours. Even now several passersby had gathered to look at the destruction, one of them the elderly Italian woman who lived across the street. She had come into the office once to hire the investigatori to find her cat, Tenero. Her English was sketchy, but she was almost always peeping out from behind the curtains of her upstairs window. Quinn approached her in a calm voice so as not to upset her.

  “Hello, Mrs. Baroni. Did you walk past here last night?”

  Her face, wrapped in a woolen headscarf, looked like a dried apple. She eyed Quinn askance, as if she’d never seen her before. “You’re not the same ragazza worked in there.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m Mrs. Paschal. I helped you find Tenero, don’t you remember?”

  “You changed your hair.”

  “Somewhat. Did you see what happened last night?”

  “È bruciato. Burned up.”

  “Was anyone lurking around the building before the fire?”

  “Lotta p
eople watching. Fiamme, fumare.” She gesticulated to illustrate the motion and height of the flames.

  “What about before the fire, Mrs. Baroni. Did you notice anyone acting suspicious before the fire broke out?”

  “Garnick.”

  “Garnick was here?”

  “On that big cavallo of his. He waved at me.”

  “He wasn’t driving the buggy?”

  “No. A cavallo.”

  Quinn’s worry ratcheted up a notch. What would Garnick have been doing at the office at that time of day? Was he leaving on a trip? Had he left her a message? She glanced back at the charred wood and ashes. “Did you see anybody else, Mrs. Baroni? Anyone smoking a pipe or a cigar?”

  “Smoke very bad.” She covered her nose with the end of her scarf and made a snuffling sound.

  “Yes, but did you see anybody smoking a cigar?” Quinn mimed to get the meaning across.

  “No. I gotta wash my curtains today. Puzzare di fumo.”

  Quinn thanked her and walked around the devastation again. The cast iron stove lay on its side under the chimney. A bronze hasp from her Saratoga trunk glistened in the sunshine and a blob of melted glass, the remains of her inkwell, marked the spot where her desk had stood. The only person she could recall smoking tobacco was Jemelle. Had she seen Fen Megarian’s article in the Tribune? If she had, she would’ve been livid.

  “Hey, you!” A tuber-nosed man in a felt bowler and loud plaid coat bore down on Quinn, shaking a walking stick above his head. “What have you done to my property?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You’re one of the tenants, aren’t you? Where’s Garnick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, he signed a paper guaranteeing he’d maintain the place and leave it in the same condition it was in when he moved in. I should’ve known better than to rent to a pair of quacks. Detectives! My eye and Betty Martin! What the dickens did you do here?”

  Quinn caught hold of the cane he brandished over her head. “Mr. Garnick and I are not responsible for this fire. We lost our personal property and place of business and it was almost certainly arson.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised. You think I don’t read the newspaper? You conduct yourselves in such a way as to invite criminal trespass. You can be sure I’ll prosecute to get back my money or see the both of you in jail.”

  “Do what you must, sir, but a man who doesn’t have sense to purchase insurance oughtn’t to be in the rental business.”

  She left him spluttering and returned to her waiting hack.

  “Where to?” asked the driver.

  She had to find another place to live before the end of the day, but she was angry and worried and in no fit state to present herself to a choosy landlady. Moreover, a nascent plan had begun to form. “Take me to the Chicago Tribune building.”

  As if spurred by the anger in her voice, the driver took out at a precarious speed that only added to Quinn’s aggravation. When she alit in front of the newspaper offices, the temptation to shoot Megarian afflicted her so powerfully she almost asked the doorman to hold the derringer for safekeeping. Instead, she balled her hands in her pockets and concentrated her energy on flushing out the little toad who had so disrupted her life. She joined a group of men on the elevating machine and rode to the second floor.

  The newsboys parted as Quinn stormed across the floor. “Fen Megarian!”

  He looked up, pen paused in mid-air, and grinned like a gargoyle.

  “How’d you like my article, detective? Theme, plot, setting, characters. The stuff of drama, eh?”

  “I call it the stuff of a smutty mind, the handicraft of a Judas. You are a despicable, unscrupulous snake, but I’m not here to enlarge upon your character. I have business to discuss.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re about to become an adjunct member of Garnick and Paschal.”

  “Oh, I am, am I? What’s the salary?”

  “You will waive the salary and do exactly what I tell you to do or as God is my witness, I’ll go to your boss with a plot, a setting, and a cast of voluptuous characters that will curl his hair.”

  Megarian hopped off the desk and squared up to Quinn. “What are you rattling about?”

  “Your visits to the prostitutes you so blithely disparage in your articles, Mr. Megarian.”

  “That’s a calumny. I write what the bosses want. The Tribune has a policy of speaking out against the brothels and crusading to shut them down.”

  “I’m sure it does. And anyone as committed to telling the world how vile and iniquitous they are has probably done a good deal of research. You say you went to Annie Stafford’s house to find out what she’d told me and where I might be found. I bet if I asked her, she’d say you stayed to mingle limbs with one of her girls. And don’t think I didn’t see the lecherous look on your face when you followed Sissy into the parlor at Lou Harper’s.”

  “You ought to be ashamed. I’ve never heard such raw talk from a lady.”

  “Like you wrote in your article, I’m undaunted. No shock or repulsion.”

  “See here, it’s no crime for a man to visit a sporting house. Plenty of gents patronize Lou’s Mansion.”

  “Is that the excuse you’ll give your employer?”

  His brow puckered. He lowered himself into a chair and appeared to consider the risk. “What is it you want?”

  “I want the Chicago Tribune – you – to set up an interview with a certain member of the city council. It should happen very soon, first thing tomorrow morning will suit me.”

  “Who?”

  “Henry Tench.”

  He opened his mouth in a round O and snapped it shut like a fish. “What makes you think he’ll agree to an interview?”

  “If he doesn’t, you’ll publish a story about his illicit doings with the brothels and skinning houses.”

  “That’s not news. Everybody knows some on the council take a taste.”

  “Not Tench’s voters. Not the businessmen who are trying to civilize this city and turn it into a hub of industry and respectable commerce. Not churchgoers. Not the moral crusaders at the Tribune.”

  “It’s one thing to denounce vice and corruption, altogether another to lay it at the feet of a powerful councilman. Anyhow, voters and landowners care more about exterminating Irish squatters and their droves of geese and goose dung than they care about prostitution.”

  Quinn positively ached to clobber the man. “The Irish can’t be exterminated, Mr. Megarian. The English have given it their best effort. As for Mr. Tench’s cozy arrangement with what your article calls ‘the most depraved and degraded creatures of the city’, the voters and landowners have wives and although wives can’t vote, they can make life unpleasant for husbands who condone prostitution. Does that persuade you?”

  Megarian dropped his chin on his chest, leaving the question to hang fire.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m listening.” His head came up. He was wearing that triumphant grin she’d seen when he took her photograph. “I don’t believe you could say anything to my editor that would cause him to sack me. My stories stoke interest and sell papers and his morals, if he has any, ebb and flow with the profits.”

  Megarian didn’t know the Sinclairs had ostracized her. For all he knew, they doted on Quinn and applauded her decision to become a detective. All she had left was the bluff. “A telegram from my father-in-law, the Envoy Extraordinaire to France, would overcome your editor’s reluctance to sack you soon enough.”

  The grin disappeared. “I’ll set up a meeting.”

  “Good. Tell Tench to be in the garden at Lou’s Mansion at ten o’clock in the morning and just so you know, I’ll ask the questions.”

  Chapter 21

  Quinn was growing increasingly worried. Garnick wouldn’t have left town without leaving her a message. Maybe that was why he’d been at the office early last night, but anything he may have left for her was ashes now. It
seemed a long time ago, but her thoughts harked back to the sniper who’d taken a shot at them that first day Handish walked into the office. Garnick had been sitting on the driver’s bench, a perfect target. Did he have enemies she didn’t know about?

  Again she reproached herself for not knowing more about his life outside of their shared interests. He’d mentioned a Confederate corporal he served with and was captured with – Bradley. They had talked about starting a carpentry business after the war, but Bradley didn’t survive Camp Douglas. Apart from the vet who’d treated Leonidas for colic and the shucker at the oyster depot Garnick liked, she couldn’t name a single person he spent time with. Like her, he seemed disconnected, whether because of personal temperament or long habit or providential intervention.

  Chesterton! He and Garnick kidded and made jest, but they appeared to like each other. They played cards together, probably swapped yarns together over a mug of beer. It was possible Garnick had told Chesterton where he was going. Anyway, she wanted to give the policeman the facts about the fire. About the arson. And she’d make sure he knew of her plan to meet with Tench. Even if the captain took bribes from the council, he couldn’t turn a blind eye if something…untoward happened to her. Since the fire, Garnick’s caution about her ending up in a gunny sack at the bottom of the Chicago River had become more concerning. But since the fire, she’d become more willing to take risks if it meant bringing the guilty devil to justice. If Fen Megarian were willing to take on the council and use his position with the Tribune to back her up, she’d feel a lot safer.

  On the off chance Chesterton would be amenable to letting her in to see Elfie, she bought a couple of cheese sandwiches and some fruit and walked to City Hall. As luck would have it, Chesterton lounged on a bench outside the door to the jail, eating his lunch.

  “Good afternoon, Captain Chesterton.”