The Last Hanging: A Will Haviland-Abigail Carhart Mystery

by M. G. Meaney

  "Thomas, he does not speak English much," Elena Jenks informed the minister. Her voice was deep and warm, if wary, here at home, unlike its strained reediness at the execution. Haviland nevertheless continued conversing with the lad for a few moments before turning his attention to the peddler's widow.

  "Katrina, take Thomas," Mrs. Jenks ordered. A rail-thin, brown-haired 12-year-old in a faded green and red check dress over torn green leggings came forward. She glanced furtively at the two fancily dressed, if wet, visitors, grabbed Thomas by the hand and yanked him away, over his protests.

  "Come in. I was sewing," Mrs. Jenks said uneasily, puzzled at this rainy day visit to her dim fourth-floor walkup on Hester Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

  She led them down the hallway to the kitchen-living room. They threaded their way past Katrina and Thomas playing in a used fruit box on the green oval living room rug. With them, another black-haired girl of about 8 was coloring with a pencil on an empty oatmeal canister, and a boy of about 5 was staging a fight among clothespins. Elena Jenks shoved aside bolts of cheap cotton — Abigail noted — and gestured for them to sit on a small green-patterned sofa. Mrs. Jenks herself had a dozen straight pins lined up along the sleeve of her white blouse, whose round collar featured a lace band with two lines of black piping. Her slender brown skirt was accented with a black fringe at the bottom. Abigail noted the collar and fringe, creative touches worth introducing in her shop. Elena would have been striking, with black hair pinned on top with bangs across her forehead like a theater curtain rising to reveal her bright blue eyes, sensuous lips and light complexion. Events and responsibilities, however, had left her drawn and tense.

  "Tatus?" Thomas inquired again, before being thrust back into the box by his sister.

  Mrs. Jenks walked the few steps to the kitchen and put a black kettle on the fire. Then she perched on a frayed dull-maroon armchair opposite the visitors, placed her chafed hands in her lap and awaited their news.

  "We...I... all of us," Haviland began uncertainly, "made a terrible mistake. The boy they hanged, he was not the one who killed your husband."

  Elena Jenks looked quizzically at first while she translated the phrases, then she grew stricken, her hands clutching below her chin, as if warding off a blow.

  "The German boy? I was there. I saw them hang him. There was the judge, in the court. They said he did it."

  "We were wrong." Haviland explained about the order book. "Did your husband have his book of orders, the day he came to Paulding?"

  "I could not say for sure, but he carried it always. It was very important for his business. He did not tell me he lost it."

  "Did he ever rip out pages?" Haviland asked.

  "Never," the widow said. "He said you would never know when something would be of use. But why did they not look into this before? I told them it was missing when I..." She looked at her hands, unable to take herself back to the day she identified her dead husband's belongings.

  "Uspokoić się!" she snapped at the children, whose talking had filled in her silence. They quieted, clustered on the floor between Mrs. Jenks and her visitors. Abigail was eyeing Thomas; he had still not cleaned the oatmeal off his hands and was playing perilously close to her light green muslin dress.

  "I suppose they thought that Hopfner had tossed it away and they had just been unable to find it," Haviland speculated weakly.

  "They would look harder if the mayor's son was arrested, I think," Elena Jenks said, with a bitter smile. "The tea is ready. Please come. It will be quieter a little."

  She spread a red cloth, imprinted with a river scene, on the bare kitchen table and fetched tea cups and saucers from a small pantry.

  "Is your husband in that photo?" Haviland asked as she poured the water over the loose tea in the cups. He had noticed a small framed photograph on the wall, amidst a child's drawing of big buildings, an 1883 New York Central Railroad calendar and a small embossed cream-colored decorative fan.

  "Yes," she said, taking it down. "It was made three years ago, just before we come to America. He is with his mother and father and two sisters." Though the others looked grim in this farewell portrait, Zife smiled broadly, a robust young man in a hand-me-down too large suit and vest who appeared eager to set out into the great world to own his destiny. His shock of black hair struck out on its own. Beneath thick raised eyebrows his dark eyes happily peered from the photo, seeming to glimpse a great future ahead. An attitude fit for America.

  "Was that the whole family?"

  "No, two brothers were here already, Paul and Stanley. They saved and we saved, and we came. They helped us. They live downstairs, and they help me and the children since ..."

  She stood abruptly, went to a window behind her — the white and red ruffled curtains could not conceal the air shaft it opened onto — took up a vase of five daisies from the sill and placed it on the table.

  "I like flowers," she explained, sitting again.

  "My husband and I," Mrs. Jenks resumed, "came like the others" — nodding toward the street outside crammed with immigrants picking over peddlers' carts of fruits, cheeses, fabrics, tools and kitchenware — "we came for a better life. We lived in a small village in Poland, Jaroslav. There was not enough work for everyone. My husband had six brothers and four sisters, but three brothers and one sister died as children. Two brothers got pneumonia, and another brother and sister died in a fire in the school that killed many children. My husband then was 15, just out of school. But there was nowhere to go. Few were coming to America then. Now everybody comes. I'm not so sure now it is a good idea."

  She stroked the petals of one daisy.

  A thumping from upstairs took the visitors' attention. It sounded like someone walking with a crutch or tapping on the floor with a cane. Then a voice came from downstairs, seemingly a mother yelling at a child in Polish.

  "How are you managing?" Abigail inquired, having looked over the dark, cluttered but clean three-room apartment. The one bedroom — with three beds — lay at the other end of the entry hall, whose white plaster ceiling was chipped. This kitchen-living room, presumably also used for sleeping, was crammed with children, bolts of cloth, noises and smells, of cabbage and ham and unflushed toilets.

  "I sew for a factory around the street," Elena Jenks said matter-of-factly. "I take in wash. I do mending. Paul and Stanley, they help."

  "It must be hard," Abigail observed.

  Elena Jenks nodded, then asked if they would like a second cup of tea, or more cake. Her guests accepted.

  Abigail changed the topic.

  "Your husband traveled so far to sell. Why?"

  "You saw all the carts, the sellers outside, all the shops too? So many sellers around, so he found places where there were not so many. He took the train to a different station each day — Paulding one day, Rye the next, then Harrison, Greenwich, Mount Vernon. He had customers in all those places, and more. He thought, too, he would be safer there. Some parts of the city, they are dangerous. Maybe he would have been safer here."

  Thomas had tired of the box, escaped from his sister, clambered onto Haviland's lap and was happily stirring the minister's tea. "Tatus," he was saying. "Tatus."

  "Did he have any enemies around Paulding?" Abigail asked, thinking that for most peddlers you could list any shopkeeper who sold the same type of merchandise as a natural enemy, like cats and mice.

  Elena Jenks shook her head.

  Haviland put in: "The day or two before, did he mention anything, or anyone? Was there anything out of the ordinary?"

  Abigail pulled back from the table, expecting Thomas to topple the teacup momentarily.

  "He did not talk of people," the widow said. "Business was good or it was not. He told me what he sold — four sweaters, five pairs of pants, seven ties. Then, I knew how the day went, not with people. I did not know them, so why would he tell me? An odd thing happening, that he would tell, but not much of the people. The children, th
ey left little time for talking."

  Abigail turned to find the black-haired 8-year-old feeling her dress.

  "Nice," the girl smiled up at her.

  "Muslin," Abigail informed her stiffly.

  "The reason I ask is the snowstorm," the minister was explaining. "It came on suddenly. There was nearly a foot of snow on the ground and a blizzard when ... What I'm saying is that it seems unlikely that some robber would have been lurking about in such weather, although Theodore Hopfner was there. He said he was going to meet some people — he wouldn't say who or where — and got caught in the storm. If that is true, then someone your husband knew took advantage of the snowstorm. That is why it is important to know if anyone, whether in Paulding or even around here, disliked him enough to have been involved."

  Mrs. Jenks looked down at her tea, then at the daisies. Again she shook her head.

  "My husband, he loved America. He loved his customers. Selling is a good way to learn about America, he said. You talk to the people and you learn. To have a good day in the business and to come home and play with the little ones and talk with his brothers about America and Jaroslav, that made him happy. He wanted to open his own shop someday, for ladies' clothes. More interesting than men's, he said. I would have helped run it with him. But now ..."

  She looked past her visitors to a pile of fabrics and partially sewn dresses on a chair pulled back against the far wall. Abigail noted that the fabrics were of cheaper but more durable cottons and wools than those she carried, but in bright colors — tan, lilac, sea green.

  Elena Jenks turned back to Haviland.

  "I would like the customer book back, please."

  "That is not possible right away. You see, I turned it over to the constables. It is evidence, in case they arrest someone. It might help convict the one who did this, so they must hold onto it."

  "But how long will that take? Do they know anything yet?"

  She added, with a hint of brittleness, "How will they know this time it's the right one?"

  Haviland's face flushed. "It will take time," he said. Little did she know how much time, since Stillwell had all but dismissed the diary and seemed likely to let the matter drop.

  The widow now leaned forward and told Haviland earnestly, "I depend on you, I and my four children, to find the one who really killed my poor husband and their father ..."

  "Tatus," piped Thomas.

  "He should not be allowed to walk around and laugh when my husband cannot. Please find him, and return the order book to me. You will promise this?"

  Haviland, locked by her sad eyes, had no choice. He covered her hands with his.

  "I will, I promise you. I will."

  "Smell pretty," the 8-year-old remarked to Abigail as they stood to leave.

  "Thank you, again," she replied, a little flattered.

  "Tatus! Tatus!" Thomas cried as he resisted removal from Haviland's lap. "Tatus!"

  "No, Thomas, no," his mother said.

  Thomas lowered his head and stood forlornly as Haviland and Abigail donned their raincoats.

  "What is this Tatus?" Abigail asked.

  "It is nothing," the widow said dismissively.

  "But it must mean something," Haviland interjected.

  Mrs. Jenks wrung her hands nervously. Her visitors waited.

  "Daddy. It means Daddy."

  * * *

  "You won't be able to show your face on Hester Street again until you solve the murder of Zife Jenks — again," Abigail said outside but her words were swallowed up in the street din of shouted sales pitches, arguments and bargaining in various languages from throngs at pushcarts lining the street and store stands under dripping sidewalk awnings. A woman questioned the price of a cabbage here while children pulled at her dress for attention. A man tried on a jacket there as the seller smiled encouragement. Abigail and Haviland edged along the sidewalk through the river of immigrants flowing past them and crowding around the merchandise.

  The minister was absorbed in his thoughts. He said at last, "Why would someone come out in a snowstorm to kill a peddler who had no enemies?"

  Abigail said, "I fear Charlie Stillwell is about to find himself with a rival, all because of a peddler from here." But her visit to the Jenks walkup and the talk with his widow had touched her and interested her in the case as well. She had already been curious enough to meet Haviland here after calling on a dress manufacturer earlier in the rainy day. Jenks tallied the day in sales. So did she. He wanted to open a ladies' clothing shop one day because women's clothes were more interesting than men's. She agreed. Men always wore basically the same thing in boring blues, browns and blacks, give or take a dark green here or tweed there. And she could not help but wonder how Elena Jenks and the four children living in that, well, hovel, when Zife Jenks was alive and working, how they would fare now. Were his brothers in a position to be that generous? Would she make that much sewing those cheap dresses?

  Their thoughts were disrupted when a 12-year-old boy, face hidden by a cap, knocked Abigail off balance as he rushed past obliviously carrying bolts of green, gray and dull red cloth, presumably to or from his employer. Abigail stepped on her dress hem and toppled onto Haviland. He extended his arm instinctively to steady her. The cap turned around briefly when she cried out. The dark, dirty face looked suspiciously at this out-of-place man and woman. He mumbled something, but it was swallowed up by the rattle of a passing cart and the quibbling of sellers and customers. The cap turned back and bulled onward.

  "I am so taken with my own thoughts that I have quite forgotten about your safety, Mrs. Carhart. The crowds can be quite rough. Please take my arm and we'll negotiate it better together."

  He held out his right arm, which he had quickly removed from her waist after she regained her balance. Hesitantly, she slipped her left arm through his and they resumed their walk in the drizzle, he limping slightly, and negotiated the roiling stream.

  "Will you try to find the murderer on your own?" she asked seriously.

  "I will try again to persuade the constable to do so. It is his place."

  "And if he will not?"

  "I don't savor the prospect of another Brooklyn," he said, leaving the question unanswered.

  CHAPTER 6

  As Haviland hung his charcoal gray raincoat on the coat tree in the parsonage entry hall and bent to receive a sloppy greeting from Pulpit, the shadow of a thin man in a bowler darkened the frosted glass in the doorway. The knocker clapped twice. A shudder of fear spilled through the minister. His training had prepared him to proffer smooth and sympathetic support to his flock during the emotional ravages of life's turning points, to say the right words, extend the well-timed hand or just listen while the sufferer grieved or lashed out or wept. But it had not prepared him for this.

  He reluctantly opened the door to Thomas Hopfner.

  Even the happily gregarious Pulpit sank back at the weary sadness etched into the lined, unshaven face, smoky eyes and yellow, out-of-line teeth.

  "I heard," Hopfner explained unnecessarily. He removed his bowler, but held onto it, stepped inside uninvited and clicked the door shut behind him.

  "Come into the parlor please, Mr. Hopfner," Haviland said evenly, but the nervous click started up deep in his throat.

  "Go, Pulpit," he told the black and white springer spaniel, and the dog clip-clopped off like a horse along the wooden floors.

  "What will happen now?" Hopfner asked after Haviland had explained the potential significance of the order book, though he put forth his conclusions far more tentatively than he had with Constable Stillwell.

  "The constable has already questioned the Leatherman at length to try to learn more about the finding," Haviland informed him so as to emphasize the constable's attentiveness.

  "Did the Leatherman kill the peddler?"

  Much as Haviland would have liked to hold open that hope, he told the hanged man's father: "No. I do not think he did."

&
nbsp; "Then what is being done to find the one?"

  "The constable is working on it, I'm sure." Click. "There's no telling how long it might take." Click. "These investigations sometimes take weeks, or months, but they will find him, I am sure," Haviland lied, trying to keep Hopfner at the terse "What's next" level of questioning. Click. Click.

  "They — you — arrested Theodore quickly enough," Thomas Hopfner said, more tensely. He clutched the bowler in his lap more tightly. His gritty overalls, smell of perspiration and sawdust, muddy work boots and straggly blond hair savage and out of place in the hushed, ordered serenity of the olive-green parlor.

  Haviland moved from behind his desk and took an armchair next to Hopfner's.

  "There is no way to tell you how devastated and sorry I am for this fearful mistake. It is the most horrendous error I can imagine. It all seemed so clear at the time, and yet, if we had questioned more..." Click. Click. Click.

  "If you had believed my son, Reverend. You did not, even though he told the truth." The carpenter's chafed, stubby hands trembled now, though still gripping the bowler like a life preserver. "Hannah, my wife, has dreams every night. She wakes up crying in the dark, and there is nothing I can do for her. Nothing." He said this despairingly, for he considered it a husband's duty to shield his wife from the bad things, yet he was impotent against this, the worst thing.

  "Constable Stillwell will do all he can," Haviland offered meagerly.

  Hopfner looked off in the distance, toward the doctor of divinity degree framed on the wall behind the desk, along with Haviland's .44-caliber black-barreled Civil War revolver and an Abigail Carhart sketch of the church and parsonage he had purchased at a fund-raiser. Hopfner's eyes lingered on the gun. Then, he whirled about, suddenly seething with energy, and glowered up at the taller man.

  "What will you do?" he demanded hoarsely.

  "I ... well, there is not a lot that I ... People will know, they already know, that Theodore did not do it, that he was innocent."

  "They don't believe it, won't believe it, not until the real one is caught. You did too good a job the first time."