Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions Page 3

  Now he looked up at her in utter despair. “I wasn’t aware that I was the one who helped you with a prison reform program.”

  “You know I never said that.”

  He sighed and ran a hand across his forehead. “I think we’d best put a stop to these stories. They write anything they please and we never have a chance to answer to it.”

  “It’s fine with me,” she said. “I never wanted to be singled out like this. It doesn’t sit well with the other deputies. None of them have their pictures in the paper every time they catch a man. And not a one of them has to answer to the kind of correspondence I do.”

  “Then don’t answer it, if you don’t like it,” the sheriff said.

  “Oh, it keeps Norma occupied.”

  “There’s a bit here about your salary, too.”

  The question of her salary had come up recently at a meeting of the Board of Freeholders. There was nothing unusual about the sheriff being raked over the coals regarding his expenses, but this was the first time they’d thought to scrutinize the cost of hiring a lady. She was paid a thousand dollars a year, the same as every other deputy. Although Constance hadn’t attended the meeting, she’d heard plenty about it since then. Suddenly everyone in town had an opinion about her wages.

  “Go ahead,” Constance said, miserably.

  “She’s quoting me. At least it resembles what I actually said.”

  “This office is a business office, conducted on business principles. We needed a matron to look after the women prisoners, to take the insane to Morris Plains, and for other duties. There are many cases in which a woman can succeed in trapping a criminal where a man can’t. It is therefore a part of the business efficiency of the office to have a woman under sheriff, and I offered the position to Miss Kopp because of the splendid work she has accomplished in that line.”

  “I don’t suppose my splendid work persuades the Freeholders,” said Constance.

  “Nothing ever does, but don’t bother yourself over it. I hear more complaints every day about the girl troubles in this county. I can’t do a thing about it unless I have a lady deputy.”

  Constance saw her opportunity at last. “Which is why we need to talk about the girl who came in this morning. You were right. She doesn’t belong in jail. But what am I to do about it?”

  Constance knew exactly what she was going to do, but thought it best to give the sheriff a chance to suggest it first.

  “Most of these constables are volunteers. They get almost no training in the law,” Sheriff Heath said. “It isn’t just the girls. They’ll arrest a man simply because he speaks no English and looks suspicious.”

  “What do you do about that?”

  “Oh, I turn them loose. I’m not putting a man in jail just because he’s Polish.”

  Turn them loose? Constance was shocked by how casually he said it. It had never occurred to her that she could simply walk a girl outside and set her free after an officer brought her in. In fact, she was entirely certain that she could not. This was obviously a privilege reserved only for the sheriff.

  “Then what about my girls? Some of them are arrested just because they happen to be female and look suspicious.”

  Sheriff Heath leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed, in the posture of a professor considering a question of philosophy. “How can you be sure there’s no cause?”

  She didn’t bother to point out that he had no way of knowing for certain what the suspicious-looking Pole had been up to, either. Instead she said, “I know you don’t like to go against the police officers, but what if I went around and did a bit of investigating to see if there’s any merit to the charges? So many of these cases should be dismissed without ever going to trial, but there’s no one in a position to say so. Wouldn’t it save an awful lot of time and trouble if some of these girls could simply be released under my supervision?”

  The steam-pipe shuddered in the corner and the sheriff leaned over to knock it, a useless procedure that nonetheless allowed him to feel that he had the upper hand. “They’re doing something like that in California. A girls’ delinquency court.”

  “There’s no need to be as formal as all that,” she hastened to say, knowing that a new court would take years to bring about. “Just give me a chance to look into the charges and go before the judge. Wouldn’t they like to save the taxpayers the expense of locking a girl away in a state home?”

  “They might. But the prosecutor won’t like anyone meddling in his morality cases.”

  “The prosecutor doesn’t like anything I do. But if he insists on putting innocent girls behind bars, I might have to call a reporter I know.” Constance’s feud with the prosecutor’s office went back more than a year, when Detective John Courter failed to do anything about a man who was harassing her family. She went to the papers and shamed him publicly over it. They’d done little but hiss and spit at each other since.

  “Let’s try to stay out of the papers for a week or two,” Sheriff Heath said. “But go on up to Pompton Lakes and see what you can do about that girl. Morris can drive you.”

  4

  IT WAS AN INCONVENIENCE to Constance that she didn’t know how to run a motor car, but having grown up in an era of slow-moving carriages and horse-drawn trolleys, she didn’t believe herself to be suited to it. Very few roads were adapted to the needs of machines and, as a result, they’d become so rutted and pitted that they tended to fill with water in the summer and snow in the winter, turning common by-ways into creeks and gullies. The drivers of automobiles were forever having to go round up a few strong men and a horse to disentomb their machines from the mud. And the autos required constant attention: it was not at all unusual for the sheriff himself to have to stop his wagon and tend to a pulley, a crank-shaft, or some other errant bit of metal and rubber.

  As she preferred not to be made a fool of by an unruly machine, she left the driving to the other deputies and made do with trolleys, trains, and the sheriff’s wagon when someone else was driving it, as was the case that afternoon, when Deputy Morris was at the wheel.

  He was, at that moment, Hackensack’s longest-serving deputy. He’d been at his post well before Sheriff Heath was elected sheriff deputy and had served a distinguished line of sheriffs of both political parties over the years. Morris was one of the deputies who’d been stationed to guard the Kopp sisters’ house when they were being harassed by a wealthy factory owner. He’d become a friend of the family as well as a trusted colleague.

  “It wasn’t much of a town before the powder works opened,” Morris said as they rolled past the train depot in Pompton Lakes. “Now they’ve got rooming houses and a new school, and a carnival in the summer. Lots of girls working here.”

  It did have the look of a formerly shabby town that had been spruced up: the roads had gone from dirt to macadam, electric lighting-wires were strung along the main street, and the druggist advertised fine soap and toilet articles.

  “I wouldn’t think they’d hire so many girls to make gunpowder,” Constance said.

  “They put them on the fuse line,” he said. “It’s textile work, really. No different from the mills.”

  They stopped first at Edna Heustis’s boarding-house, which was neat and freshly painted and bore a hand-lettered sign advertising no vacancies. The landlady who answered their ring was exactly the sort of character Constance expected: a stout, gray-haired woman who wore a striped house dress and answered the door with a rag duster in hand.

  “Which one are you after?” she asked wearily, when she saw their uniforms.

  Constance started to explain their business, but the landlady interrupted. “Edna Heustis does fine. She pays her rent on time and she don’t cause no trouble. I keep a curfew and I turn a girl out if she comes in late even once. I won’t have it. But Edna never goes out in the evenings. I keep an electrical lamp in the sitting room and she’s down here almost every night with some old book. Go and find a bank robber to arrest, that’s what I told the policeman
. There’s no trouble with my girls.”

  It seemed to Constance as though she’d delivered that lecture before. “Thank you, Mrs. —”

  “Or you can come inside and help with the dusting, if you intend to be here all day. It’s Turnbull.”

  “We don’t intend to be here all day, Mrs. Turnbull,” Constance said quickly. “If I may just take a peek into her room, I’ll file my report and we’ll have Miss Heustis back to you right away.”

  She sighed and waved her duster at Deputy Morris. “He stays outside. No gentlemen. Rules of the house.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Deputy Morris said, and sank down on a wooden bench on the porch with evident relief. It was colder in Pompton Lakes than it had been back in Hackensack, but he seemed to prefer the weather to another scolding from Mrs. Turnbull.

  She handed Constance a passkey and sent her up the carpeted stairs to Edna’s room, which was one of four on the second floor. Constance inspected everything closely, but saw only the trappings of an ordinary, well-run boarding-house: a handwritten bathing schedule posted on the bathroom door (Edna had Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights), a coat-rack with an oval mirror, and a mop hanging out of an open window at the end of the hall to dry.

  Edna occupied a tiny room under the eaves. Constance found it to be neatly kept and entirely unremarkable. She felt under the girl’s pillow, reached into the pockets of the dress hanging on a peg, and paged through the books on the shelf. Seeing nothing of a suspicious nature, she went downstairs and thanked Mrs. Turnbull.

  “I’ll hold the room until the end of the week,” the landlady said.

  “Please do.”

  Deputy Morris’s chin had dropped into his collar. Constance closed the door a bit too loudly and he jumped.

  “This arrest was nonsense. We’ll stop at the factory, and then Edna Heustis is going home,” Constance said.

  “And I can go home,” Morris said. “Sheriff’s had me on guard duty three nights in a row. We have a weeper on the third floor. Kept all of us awake.”

  “He’ll settle down.” It was well known to all the deputies that only the men sobbed loudly enough to be heard all over the jail. Women inmates tended to be practiced in the art of crying themselves silently to sleep. But a man on his first night behind bars, overcome by shame and remorse, was guaranteed to keep everyone awake.

  They arrived at the powder works plant in the middle of the afternoon shift. The factory itself was surrounded by several long brick buildings, each one newer and larger than the last. One was under construction at that very moment, and men were running back and forth with wheelbarrows full of cement and lumber. Smoke stacks discharged black billows into the sky. From every building came the rattle and clank of machinery. There were hundreds of workers in their broadcloth uniforms, running push-carts along tracks from one building to the next. It was like a miniature city, entirely devoted to the manufacture of ammunition for the war.

  Constance found Mrs. Schaefer, the girls’ superintendent, in a low-slung office building on the other side of the dining hall. She was a tall, wiry woman of about fifty, with a beaky nose and a thin mouth that was naturally inclined to turn down. She nodded briskly when she saw Constance and seemed to guess at the purpose of her visit. “Edna Heustis? She’s a good worker, but we can’t have our girls getting hauled away by the police.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you knew,” Constance said. “She asked the officer to be allowed to send a note, but there wasn’t time.”

  “Oh, I knew. The girls in the fuse room were gossiping about it all day. What’s she done?”

  “Nothing, as far as I can tell. I believe it to have been a simple misunderstanding with her mother. The police never should have been involved. I intend to speak to the judge myself. Please just hold a place for her. She seems to me to be of good character and a hard worker.”

  “She is,” Mrs. Schaefer said, “but the machines don’t run themselves and her place is sitting empty.”

  “She’ll be back,” Constance promised, and very much hoped that she was right.

  5

  “PRETTY, VIVACIOUS, & VERSATILE” read the bills posted all over Paterson. “May Ward and Her Eight Dresden Dolls—The Most Elaborate Girl Act in Vaudeville, Employing Beautiful Costumes and Special Scenery—Open Auditions February 15. Public Invited.”

  Fleurette pasted a copy of the hand-bill on the front door so that Constance wouldn’t miss it when she walked in. She believed it would bolster her cause to create a sense of occasion, and for that reason had chosen a blue nautical dress with a clever sailor’s collar that she hoped would inspire in Constance the idea of a voyage—one that neither Constance nor her other sister, Norma, would be invited to join.

  The possibility that an actress of May Ward’s caliber would come to Paterson personally to hold auditions was so precisely the sort of thing Fleurette dreamed of that she could not, at first, believe that it had actually happened. The news had been delivered by Mrs. Ward’s husband and stage manager, Freeman Bernstein, who presented himself at her dancing class the previous Wednesday to make the announcement.

  “Girls, I bet you’ve always wanted to go on the stage!” he called out, smacking his hands together as he took long strides across the dance studio. “Will your mothers agree to it? If you’re under eighteen, we’ll have to have their permission. Mrs. Ward intends to give every last one of you her most thoughtful consideration, and we don’t want her to waste her efforts on girls whose mothers aren’t prepared to say their good-byes the very next week.”

  The very next week! Fleurette suddenly considered her age—a few months past her eighteenth birthday—to be a sort of golden ticket that would win her admittance to a realm that she’d only ever inhabited in her feverish imagination: one centered around the theater, carpeted hotel rooms, high-ceilinged restaurants, rumbling black automobiles, and fancy shops, all so far away from the New Jersey countryside that the lowing of the dairy cows and the stench of the chicken coop would never again find her.

  If permission had been required, Fleurette would’ve had no alternative but to forge a signature and hope for the best, a scheme already underway for more than half of her class-mates. It had taken a good deal of wheedling and pleading to simply persuade her (staid, antediluvian) sisters to allow her to attend Mrs. Hansen’s Academy in the first place, and another delicate negotiation, a few months later, to win the freedom to take employment as the school seamstress, thus allowing her to earn her own tuition and buy the odd bit of ribbon and silk. That much her sisters could tolerate. But leaving home to join a vaudeville troupe was, as Norma would have said, not at all on the Kopp family program.

  It was fortunate, then, that Fleurette didn’t need their permission. She required only their money, and this was much simpler to come by, as Constance was the one who earned it, and was favorably disposed toward slipping it to her if she presented her case properly. There was a small fee to enter the audition, and, once that was secured, something extra for the expense of costumes and stage decorations. She knew better than to ask for all of it at once. Today her ambition was fixed, modestly and singularly, on the price of admission.

  Thus the hand-bill posted to the door, and the pretty blue dress, and the apple jumbles timed to come out of the oven as soon as Constance walked in. Her plan went off perfectly: she was in the kitchen letting fly a dusting of cinnamon sugar across the top just as the front door opened and her sister called hello.

  Constance was still standing in the doorway, reading the notice, when Fleurette skittered across the room and helped her off with her coat.

  “Can’t you just see me as a Dresden Doll?” She put an arm around Constance’s waist as she said it, and looked up at her with an expression that she hoped Constance found beguiling.

  “I generally try not to,” Constance said quite truthfully, “and I’ve never heard of a Broadway actress coming all the way to Paterson to hold auditions. Has New York run out of singers and dancers?”


  Norma—who had until that moment been ignoring Fleurette’s preparations for Constance’s arrival by pretending to be fixed on the household ledger-book (which she had recently seized control of, after Constance neglected it too long)—came up behind them and supplied the answer before Fleurette could.

  “It’s not a legitimate audition. It’s a con, and Fleurette would’ve been lured right in. May Ward proposes to charge these girls five dollars apiece for the privilege of standing on the stage and singing a song in her presence. In return, none of them are chosen and all they take home is an autographed picture that can’t cost more than fifty cents to print. The public is invited, just as the bill says, as long as they buy tickets, which the bill fails to mention. It’s a way to make money in the theater without actually going up on stage and doing anything. Close that door before the fire goes out.”

  There was a rather frigid northeastern wind blowing into the foyer, bringing with it a few spiny burrs from the sweet gum tree that overhung the barn. Constance shut the door against the onslaught and unpinned her hat. Fleurette tried to take it from her. “Let me do something with this old thing,” she said. “I could at least have it blocked and put on a new ribbon.”

  “Don’t.” Constance liked her hat exactly the way it was and always resisted Fleurette’s efforts to improve it. She hung it on the very top of the hat-rack, where Fleurette couldn’t reach it. “I’ve never heard of having to pay a fee to audition. Does Mrs. Hansen know about this?”

  “Of course she does,” Fleurette said. “May Ward’s husband came to class himself to invite us. He’s her manager.”