Death in Saratoga Springs (3 page)

“Let's test that theory,” said Pamela. “Karl Metzger, the German butcher, might help us. I know him from St. Barnabas Mission. He worked for years in Crake's plants on West Fourteenth Street until he opened a small shop nearby. As the union's business agent, he protested against dangerous working conditions, low wages, arbitrary hiring and firing, and other abuses in Crake's plants. The management ignored him. The union then began a strike.”

“I recall the strike,” said Harry. “Crake fired the union members and hired scabs, mostly penniless Italian immigrants willing to work for low pay and in poor, unsafe conditions. The strike collapsed. What happened to Metzger?”

“Crake's thugs harassed Metzger's employees and spread false rumors that his meat was bad. The police closed his shop. Crake blackballed him from the New York meatpacking business. Destitute, he came to St. Barnabas Mission. I found part-time work for him and his wife, Erika.”

“Metzger owes you a favor, Pamela, and should be hungry for justice. Pay him a visit.”

Friday, February 16

 

T
he next morning, Pamela met the Metzgers in their tiny room near the mission. They seated her at a table and served her coffee and German sweet bread. Karl had a broad smile on his face and could hardly contain himself. “We have good news, Mrs. Thompson. A friend has found summer work for us at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs. I'll be cutting meat; Erika will do laundry.”

“Congratulations. Is your friend a meat cutter or in the laundry?”

“Neither,” Erika replied, smiling. “He's a bellboy at the hotel.”

“Jason Dunn,” added Karl. “He used to work with me in Crake's meatpacking plants on Fourteenth Street. During the strike he got a job in a restaurant and then in a hotel. He's been at the Grand Union for a year. We've kept in touch.”

Pamela congratulated them, wished them well, then turned to Karl. “A client of mine needs information about Crake's plants. Can you help?”

He frowned at Crake's name, but he finished his coffee and said, “I'll try.” He told her that the plants operated at full capacity from dawn to dusk six days a week. At night, they shut down, and a small shift of workers cleaned and repaired machinery and tools, and did other maintenance. The main entrance was locked. Workers and deliveries used a service entrance in the rear. Since the strike and the union's collapse, only a few guards were needed to protect the plants.

“How shall I get inside?” asked Pamela.

“Contact the head manager, Mr. Jeffrey Porter.” Metzger warmed to his topic. “Porter's a heartless bastard, but smart and efficient. Pretend you're an important person. He will guide you himself and tell you that the noise, stench, and offal are the signs of profit and progress. The Italians will smile and look happy at their work. You may see enough to judge for yourself.”

 

Monday morning, Pamela and Harry took a cab to the pork-processing building, a large, brick, three-story, boxlike structure. Passageways connected it to several other buildings belonging to Crake's company, but it was the one closest and most convenient to his secret room. Disguised with a beard, Harry posed as a philanthropic businessman and Pamela's escort.

In a letter to Porter she claimed to be a social worker and needed to see where her clients worked or might find work. She assured him that she wasn't squeamish and knew the difference between a packing plant and a music hall. Mrs. Helen Fisk, an influential patron of St. Barnabas Mission, supported her request for a tour.

Porter's office was in a corner of the building's ground floor and consisted of a suite of rooms, all of them clean, well-lit and well ventilated, and fully insulated from the noises, sights, and smells of the adjacent factory floor. A female clerk in a spotless white frock showed them into Porter's private office. He wore a dark gray suit and tie, his hair slicked back and parted in the middle, and he sat at a gleaming gray writing table. Neat stacks of business paper lay before him. A white telephone was off to one side. Uniform rows of gray file boxes stood on white shelves covering the gray walls behind him. There were no colorful flowers or bright pictures in the room, only unrelieved grays and whites, in striking contrast to the gore throughout the rest of the building.

For a moment, Porter scrutinized his visitors with steel gray eyes, then greeted and seated them in simple upholstered chairs. He gave them a brief description of the company, the largest and most modern meatpackers in the New York area.

Pamela made a sweeping gesture over the room. “Does the strikingly efficient appearance of your office make a statement about your industry?”

“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Thompson.” He pursed his lips and waved a hand toward the files. “This office expresses the rational spirit that governs the modern meatpacking process. We are among the leaders. Efficiency in the service of profit, that's our motto. I'm proud of our packing plants and happy to show you through one of them. You will see the most productive meat processing east of Chicago.”

 

Porter took them to the stockyard adjacent to the main plant. More than 500 hogs had come in by train overnight. As Pamela and Harry arrived with their guide, men were forcing the hogs up a chute into the third floor at the western end of the plant. The visitors watched from a gallery as hogs entered the building and were hoisted by their rear legs onto a moving overhead trolley. Amid ear-splitting squeals and shrieks, swarthy men in blood-soaked aprons slit the animals' throats as they passed by. Blood flowed in rivulets to drains in the floor. Other men dropped the still-twisting and turning animals into a large vat of boiling water.

Pamela tore her eyes away from the carnage and exchanged glances with Harry. His face was pale. Through gritted teeth, he murmured, “This is like war. The hogs are losing.” Nearby, Porter gazed at the scene, detached and calm, his mind apparently fixed on the process.

A machine scooped the hogs from the vat and sent them through a scraping machine to remove their bristles. They were hooked up to yet another trolley and passed rapidly between two lines of men.

With a hint of awe in his voice, Porter said, “The proprietor, Captain Jed Crake, a remarkable man, has personally put on an apron and performed most of the tasks that you are observing. Watch closely. This is a crucial moment in the process. Each man has a specific task in the second or two as the carcass goes by him: One severs the head, and it falls through a hole in the floor; another slits the body; a third widens the opening; and a fourth pulls out the entrails, which fall through a hole in the floor; and so it goes on until the carcass is completely stripped of its ‘waste' parts. It's then cleaned and sent on to the chilling room, where it hangs for twenty-four hours.”

He led them to the floor below. In one room, men were scraping and cleaning the entrails for sausage casings; in another, they were boiling and pumping away grease from scraps to make soap; in a third, a stamping machine was pulverizing bones for fertilizer; and so on.

The stench was unbearable. Pamela held a perfumed kerchief to her nose, but to no avail. Her stomach was roiling dangerously. Harry stiffened. Even Porter began to wilt. He quickly moved his visitors on to the cutting room, where giant men with huge cleavers neatly dismembered the carcasses into hams, forequarters, and sides of pork.

The smells, the noise, the violence of the scene excited Pamela. She recalled Jed Crake's powerful body and imagined him wielding a cleaver and splitting a carcass with a single blow. The butchered pieces slid down chutes to the ground floor for pickling, smoking, boxing, wrapping in oilcloths, or packing in barrels. Porter explained, “The finished products will be trucked out the doors into refrigerated boxcars and carried away to meat shops throughout the Northeast.”

At the end of the tour, Pamela and Harry stood for a minute in the doorway gulping breaths of fresh air. Porter seemed unfazed.

He turned to them. “In the process you witnessed, I challenge you to find a single unnecessary movement by man or machine or a wasted second. Every bit of the hogs we buy is turned into money for the company. To borrow the tired saying: We use everything but the squeal. We apply a similar process to cattle, sheep, and chickens in adjacent buildings.”

Pamela asked, “How can the workers sustain the fast pace that you set?”

Porter seemed to relish the opportunity to reply to her question. “To reduce fatigue and inattention, we calculate the capacity of workers for different tasks and rotate them accordingly. To avoid accidents, the workspace is kept clean and well lighted, and tools in good condition. The discipline here exceeds, by far, that of an elite regiment in Napoleon's army. If a man faints, the men around him pick up his work until a replacement is brought in.”

Pamela and Harry thanked Porter quite sincerely for an instructive tour, then retired to a nearby coffee shop. They ordered only strong tea. It would be hours before their stomachs could take food.

While waiting, they sat still and reflective, then Pamela said, “We've just witnessed a preview of how American industry will develop in the near future toward division of labor and the mechanization of production. But that aside, have we come any closer to figuring out how Crake disposed of Ruth's body—assuming that we rightly suspect that he killed her?”

Harry stroked his beard, then nodded. “Crake knew personally that the packing process could destroy a human body as thoroughly as an animal's. But he also realized that the process was tightly controlled and he couldn't easily slip a cadaver into it.”

“Could he nonetheless have bribed or persuaded Porter to help him try?”

Harry shook his head. “Such a vulgar, irrational idea would repel Porter.”

“Then perhaps Crake found an opportunity in the night shift when the plant would be largely dark and empty.”

“That's possible. We must contact the night manager at the time of Ruth Colt's disappearance.”

 

Through Mr. Porter, Pamela and Harry arranged to meet Mr. Emil Schmidt at seven that same evening at the service entrance for a glimpse of the night shift. He brought them into his small, cluttered office, brought out glasses, and offered them schnapps. “Against the cold,” he said. Harry accepted; Pamela took a cup of hot tea instead.

Schmidt was a thin man in his mid-fifties with a wary look in his eyes. There was also alcohol on his breath, but he was sober enough to ask, “Why would you come here on a cold winter night to watch men clean a packing plant?”

Pamela explained her interest in the conditions of the working poor. “With this experience I'll better understand them and can be of more help.”

The wariness in his eyes disappeared. “I've had a taste of poverty. Good luck.”

“Tell me about yourself,” she asked in a kindly voice, suspecting that he drank to banish loneliness.

“I came from Germany as a young man and worked as a mason. During the war, I served under Captain Crake in Sherman's army. Afterward, we kept in touch at meetings of the G.A.R. A dozen years ago, I went to work for Crake and became night manager here.”

“Would you show us what goes on here at night?”

“Follow me,” he said. “We'll visit the hog building you saw this morning.”

From the gallery on each level they watched crews mopping the floors, mechanics greasing gears and repairing the trolleys, and cutlers cleaning and sharpening the knives and other tools. A mason and his assistant were fitting new bricks into a worn section of the floor. About a hundred men appeared to be at work under the insistent gaze and prodding of several foremen.

“How long is this shift?” she asked Schmidt.

“The men will finish here about midnight and work in the other buildings until five in the morning.”

“When the buildings are empty at night, do watchmen patrol them?”

“Yes, they look out for fires and for thieves who would steal the knives and other moveable equipment. I'm here as well. There is also a pair of guards at the service entrance as long as it's unlocked.”

“Who handles special deliveries during the night shift?” asked Harry.

The question seemed to surprise and annoy Schmidt. “Why, I do,” he replied, testily, “and I take them to their proper destination.”

“Are there many?”

“A few.”

Harry seemed to be fishing for an indication that Crake brought Ruth Colt's body here, concealed as a special delivery, in the early-morning hours after the cleaning crew had left and the building was empty.

Schmidt might have suspected the drift of Harry's questions. He looked increasingly uncomfortable, his replies short.

At a wink from Harry, Pamela declared their visit at an end. She thanked Schmidt and remarked how she wished that other workplaces in the city were as clean and well organized as Captain Crake's.

Schmidt mumbled a thank you and a good-bye.

Suspicions had also grown in Pamela's mind. “Mr. Schmidt knew more than he was willing to admit.” She and Harry walked in the dark toward their carriage on Fourteenth Street. A bitter cold wind gusted from the west. She shivered.

“He owes loyalty to Crake, who keeps him on the job. I sensed that the foremen didn't respect him. They smirked and rolled their eyes when his back was turned. He probably tipples through the night.”

Pamela added, “I can imagine Crake arriving in disguise with Ruth's body. He forces Schmidt to help him. They wait until the watchmen have settled down with a bottle of whiskey. Then he and Crake find a place to hide the body. Crake warns him never to tell anyone what happened.”

“That's a plausible scenario. I'll take you home, get a little sleep, then return here at five with one of my spies. When Schmidt leaves the plant, I'll point him out and the spy will keep track of him. I fear he will go to Crake and they'll talk about us. He'll become alarmed and react.”

“That's unfortunate, Harry. Our investigation of Crake was supposed to be secret. Nonetheless, we must confront Mr. Schmidt.”