Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions Page 8

  The police had left the door to Minnie’s room open. When they walked in, Constance let go of the girl’s arm, and she went over and sat on the bed. There was a silkoline cover over the mattress that would have been pretty once, but it had started to fray. All around the room, Constance saw evidence of Minnie’s attempts to make it a home: the rosebuds painted on an enamel teapot, the lace hung over the window, the picture of a winter scene in Central Park cut out of a magazine and pasted inside a frame.

  But nothing could hide the fact of her impoverishment. Minnie had only a single work dress and sweater hung from a peg on the door, and Constance saw nothing to eat but a box of crackers and a tin of potted meat. There was a sour smell of sickness in the room that Constance now realized came from the front of Minnie’s dress. She would have gone to sit with her on the bed, but in light of that fact, she kept her distance and let Minnie stretch across the bed with a blanket over her.

  “I’m sorry that the detective said those things in front of everyone,” Constance began. “Suppose you tell me what really happened.”

  Minnie slid around on the bed and looked at her from behind a tousled head of hair. “It’s a lie.”

  “What part of it?”

  “All of it.” She rolled over to face the wall and ran her hand idly along it.

  Constance had to remind herself that the girl was only sixteen and probably didn’t grasp the extent of her troubles. It was also true that Minnie didn’t seem to be at her sharpest: she looked to have had a wild time the night before and was probably suffering a nasty headache. Still, the girl had to say something if she wanted to help herself.

  “The police seem to think the two of you were posing as man and wife. Is that right?”

  No answer.

  “I expect they’ll prepare a charge of illegal cohabitation.”

  Minnie’s hand paused in its route along the wall, but she said nothing.

  It was the other charge that worried Constance the most. “I don’t know if they can prove that you’ve had other men in this place, but —”

  Minnie sat up suddenly. “I haven’t! You’ll tell them that, won’t you? Can’t I go to the toilet? I feel rotten.”

  “Go ahead,” Constance said, and Minnie shuffled across the room with Constance’s blanket still wrapped around her, and into the little hall bathroom. Constance stood guard outside.

  Minnie put her head right into the sink and ran water over it. The cold water wasn’t as restorative as she’d hoped it would be, but the sound of the water splashing around gave her the cover she needed. She reached under her dress and pulled out the little fabric-covered parcel she’d managed to extract from under the mattress while Constance questioned her. It was a risk to leave anything in the bathroom, but she seemed to be on her way to jail, and she’d have nowhere to hide it there.

  The ceiling was made of thin shiplap planks that had worked loose in the dampness. She pushed at one and it gave way slightly, yielding just enough room to slip her bundle between the boards. Before she did, she opened it and fingered its contents: A hat-pin with a real pearl on the end, a fragile gold chain with the tiniest possible chip of diamond suspended from it, a silver bracelet, and a comb that she believed to be made of real ivory. There was also a ring holding what she thought might be a ruby or a garnet.

  It didn’t amount to much. But she’d been clinging to those trinkets against the day when she might need to sell them quickly and get away. Apparently that day had come, only she didn’t get away fast enough.

  The lady deputy knocked at the door. Minnie pushed her bundle up between the boards and took a pin out of her hair to draw them closed again. She ran a towel over her head, took a hasty drink of water from the basin, and called, “I’m ready.”

  12

  MINNIE TOOK OFFENSE at the jail’s de-lousing regimen and laughed at the flannel house dress and battered old buttoned shoes she was expected to wear upstairs.

  “Next you’re going to come after my dainties,” she said, lightly, as if the whole situation were a farce. She looked down at her corset, which sat limply on the floor of the shower room. It was stained yellow with sweat, and the lining had worn away, leaving naked a section of boning.

  “I’ll pack it away for you,” Constance said, and rolled it into a bundle with Minnie’s dress.

  “Do you mean that I’m to go bare?”

  “It’s only women on the fifth floor,” Constance assured her. “The sheriff hasn’t been able to persuade the Freeholders to pay for corsets, but I did manage to put in a supply of sanitary aprons when it’s your time —”

  “I’ll be gone before then.” Just the idea of rubberized jailhouse sanitary goods made Minnie shudder.

  Constance settled her into the cell recently vacated by Edna Heustis and offered to bring her lunch.

  “I couldn’t look at food,” Minnie said.

  “You’ll feel better if you try,” Constance said. “What about coffee?”

  Minnie sat gingerly on the edge of her bunk and looked with distaste at the bare toilet next to her. “Is there such a thing as toast?” she asked, resignedly.

  “I’ll find out.”

  Downstairs, Constance passed Sheriff Heath in the corridor. He’d already been out on another call, and his coat was splattered in mud and straw.

  “Horse thief?” Constance asked.

  “Goats,” he said. “I have a note from Detective Courter. That marriage license of Anthony Leo’s looks to be a fake. It’s two months old, and obviously just for show. I don’t think this is his first time to try it with a girl.”

  “That’s quite a trick,” Constance said. Under better circumstances, she might have argued that the couple should be given a stern lecture and left alone for a week or two, so that they might marry and right the situation themselves. But when she tried to imagine Fleurette living in that cheap furnished room, with the lingering stench of gin, and a man who would go so far as to trick her with a false promise of marriage, she knew what she would want. She’d want every lawman in the country kicking down the door to rescue her.

  “What does Miss Davis have to say about it?” the sheriff asked.

  “She refuses to talk, except to say that the police are telling lies.”

  “What did she tell you about this business of her running around with other men?”

  “Nothing,” Constance said. “She denies it all. Who accused her?”

  “A constable heard it from the landlord,” the sheriff said.

  “The landlord? Is that the baker downstairs?”

  “Apparently so. But Anthony Leo says that she’s a good girl, and that if we’d set him free, he’d marry her.”

  “Well, he would say that if it would get him out of jail. I suppose this means we’re back to illegal cohabitation, and they’re both guilty,” Constance said.

  “I don’t know about that. It looks to me like she was conned,” Sheriff Heath said. “I wish she’d tell you if she was.”

  “I just don’t picture this as a white slavery case,” she said.

  “What do you picture?”

  “Well, you read about girls locked in bedrooms or drugged and draped about on chaises, and a man at the door deciding who can go in.”

  “That might be how it is in the Sunday magazines, but this is what it looks like in Fort Lee,” Sheriff Heath said. “This girl obviously had no money and no one to turn to, and Mr. Leo saw an opportunity. We’re going to treat her as the victim until we’re told otherwise. Put her on the witness’s meal plan.”

  Constance didn’t think that an extra sausage with her dinner would be of much comfort to Minnie, but she made a note of it. “Has anyone spoken to her parents?”

  “That’s for you to do. They reported her missing months ago.”

  13

  EUGENE AND EDITH DAVIS made their home in one-half of a plain, flat-fronted clapboard house at the unfashionable end of Catskill. The larger homes had all been turned into summer cottages for New Yorkers,
which left the year-round factory families to make do with what was left. Every house on the Davises’ street was similarly carved into two or three apartments, with front doors added where windows once were, and kitchens tacked on awkwardly in the back, under low roofs that served as porches where one might, in fair weather, climb out a bedroom window and take the night air.

  Some of the houses had little shops on the ground floor offering services to the summer crowd—shoe repair, laundry, tailoring—but they were all closed for the winter. With no one around to pass judgment on the appearance of the place, brooms and shovels sat on porches and gray wash-rags fluttered from second-story windows. The entire neighborhood looked as if it wasn’t expecting company.

  Mrs. Davis had been watching from the window and opened the door before Constance could knock. She was one of those women who was as wide as she was tall, which is to say that it took some effort for her to lean back and take Constance in from head to toe.

  “Ooooh!” she sang out at the sight of her. “You’re taller than my girls.”

  “Is Minnie Davis one of your girls?” Constance asked.

  She stood back and surveyed her again. This time her eyes landed on Constance’s badge. “She was, until she run off.”

  “Your daughter’s been found, ma’am, and she’s safe and well. I work for the sheriff in Hackensack. Might I come inside?”

  “She’s safe, is she?” Mrs. Davis screeched. “I thought she had the devil inside of her.”

  Constance took a step back in shock and looked up and down the street, certain that half the neighborhood had heard her. She could only assume that Mrs. Davis was partly deaf and wondered if she might be only partially sane, too.

  “I couldn’t say, ma’am. I’ve come to ask you a few questions, and to talk about what we might do for Minnie.”

  Mrs. Davis gave a resigned shrug and stepped aside. Constance found herself in a place that was immediately familiar: a seamstress’s work room. If Fleurette had taken in mending from the neighbors, rather than sewing costumes for the theater, her sewing room would have looked just like this. There was an old treadle machine with a pile of crumpled work-shirts to one side and a stack of folded, mended trousers on the other. On the floor were boxes of fabric scraps and a heap of old coats in need of fresh sheepskin. Along every window-sill were jars of buttons and pincushions stuck all over with rusty pins and needles.

  Mrs. Davis dropped into a wooden chair outfitted with a sagging cushion she’d made herself from scraps. Constance pushed a roll of wool batting off an armchair and sat across from her.

  “I take in mending,” she called, as if trying to make herself heard across a great distance. “Washing, too, in the summer, when the city people get here.”

  Constance thought it a strange way to begin, considering she’d come with news of her daughter. “You must’ve been terribly worried about Minnie all this time.”

  “Worried? She done wrong, and she knows it. She was too ashamed to even tell us directly. Couldn’t do nothing but send a letter. And that was only after we went down to the police, thinking she’d fallen in the river.”

  She was still nearly shouting. Constance had to force herself not to draw back.

  “She wrote you a letter?”

  “Her father wanted to burn it, but Goldie snatched it from him. She’s a bad girl, too.”

  “Is Goldie . . .”

  “His other daughter. She’s older than Minnie and should’ve known better. Ada’s the only one of them worth anything, and she’s married and gone. She belongs to my first husband, bless his soul, so that tells you something.”

  She crossed herself at the mention of the man’s soul and sat back in her chair with an enormous, deflating sigh.

  “I take it that you and Mr. Davis were both widowed?”

  “That’s right. He had to raise mine, and I had to raise his. Don’t ever do it. Other women’s children are always trouble.”

  “Is Mr. Davis expected home soon?” Constance entertained an unreasonable hope that Mr. Davis might be easier to talk to than his wife.

  Mrs. Davis sat up straight and patted her hair, which was gray but streaked in black, and of such a coarse texture that it was impossible to see where she’d pinned it up. It seemed to mass together of its own volition at the back of her head.

  “He’ll be along. He works down at the brick factory. Goldie’s at the knitting mill. You’ll hear the whistle shortly.”

  Constance wasn’t sure how to keep a conversation going with Mrs. Davis, but she soon discovered that she didn’t have to. While they waited, Mrs. Davis delivered a monologue about the job prospects available at the various factories in town and which ones were best suited to Mr. Davis’s failing knees and trembling hands. The brick factory was the worst place for him, she explained, but there wasn’t anything left. His fingers shook so that he couldn’t do the fine work required of textile labor, nor was he fit anymore to be a machinist.

  “That’s why we need the girls to work,” Mrs. Davis pronounced. “Because he can’t no more. But Minnie spent every penny she made down at that boardwalk, and still expected me to keep a bed for her and food on the table. I told her I could rent that bed to the girl sitting next to her at the mill and collect more money in rent than Minnie brought home. She told me to go right ahead and try. Have you ever heard of a girl talking to her mother like that?”

  From the little Constance knew of Minnie, it sounded exactly like her. But before Mrs. Davis’s line of questioning could run on much longer, the door flew open and Goldie ran inside. She was the mirror image of her sister: tall and broad-shouldered, with a firm chin, a strong nose, and hair a shade too dark to be considered gold, although it might’ve had more shine to it in the summer.

  “They told me on the corner the police were here. Are you police? Is it Minnie?”

  “You already know what happened to Minnie,” Edith Davis snapped.

  Goldie didn’t even glance at her stepmother. She took Constance by the hand and led her through the kitchen and into a little room behind it that was not much more than a sleeping porch.

  “Go on and tell her your lies!” Mrs. Davis shouted from her chair.

  Goldie pulled a curtain closed and Constance found herself in a room so small that she stumbled over the bed. There were heavy blankets over the windows, giving the place a gloomy, greenish cast. Having nowhere else to sit, Goldie dropped onto the bed, and Constance did, too. In this way they found themselves settled on a ratty chenille bedspread like two sisters sharing confidences. Goldie and Minnie must have done exactly that, Constance thought, before she disappeared.

  “Did you share this room with your sister?” she asked.

  Goldie nodded and jutted her chin at the wall. “That’s her side.”

  The wall above the bed was covered in magazine pictures, some of which they had colored themselves. Goldie had a liking for etchings of scenes from antiquity: Roman palaces, Egyptian queens along the Nile, and statues of Diana with her dog. Minnie preferred the Manhattan skyline and elaborate interiors of theaters, with curtained balconies and gilded ceilings. She had also pinned up a picture of last year’s spring dresses from Paris. It gave Constance a ragged little pain to see that Minnie and Fleurette longed for the same life.

  She thought it better to start by letting Goldie talk about herself, so she said, “You’ve taken an interest in the classics.”

  “I used to have a teacher who read mythology to us, and Virgil. It seemed like another world. I couldn’t believe any of those things really happened right here on this Earth.” She flashed a wide and winning smile, and just as quickly took it away again. Here was a girl who was too pretty to work in a factory, and too poor to study the classics. Constance could imagine her and her sister, sleeping side-by-side, each wondering how she’d ever get out of that room.

  Then one of them did.

  “Minnie must’ve thought New York was another world,” Constance said.

  “She’s more pr
actical. And brave. She just went.”

  “Did she tell you where she was going?”

  Goldie laughed and shook her head, tossing her hair around. “She didn’t have to tell me. Everybody goes down to that boardwalk. I was there, too. I saw her with Tony.”

  “What happens at the boardwalk?” Constance asked, even though she had a fairly good idea about it.

  “Why, the pleasure boats come up the river! Who do you suppose steps off those boats?”

  “People from the city,” Constance offered. She could just imagine how romantic that must be to girls in a small town. An image came to mind of Fleurette at the age of nine or ten, when she kept an album of pictures of fashionable people in pretty places. There was a newspaper drawing she particularly liked of debutantes strolling down the Catskill boardwalk under their parasols. She had a little paint set and she colored in all the dresses, making them as bright as peacocks while the world around them stayed newsprint gray and drab.

  “Yes, people from the city,” Goldie said. “Rich people. Young men handing out cigarettes and offering to buy the town girls a drink. We all go down and wait for them. If we spend our own money in the arcades and shops, there won’t be anything left over. But a man from the city has plenty to spend.”

  “And what does a man like that expect in return?”

  She smiled again, and a little color came up in her cheeks. “Plenty.”

  The rest of it came out easily enough. Minnie hated her job at the knitting mill. For two years she’d been sitting alongside a few dozen other girls, running a hosiery machine all day long. It was a better place to work than one of the silk factories in Paterson: it was cleaner, the wages were higher, and the girls could sit at their stations, rather than stand over a loom all day. But it was monotonous work that gave Minnie little reward, as every dime she earned was supposed to go home to her parents.

  There was no thought of Minnie finishing her schooling. Mrs. Davis told the teacher she was needed at home, and that was the end of her education. She was locked into a life of factory work and house-work.