Girl Waits with Gun (38 page)

She lifted her eyebrows and her lips moved, but no words came out.

“Your attorney remembers Henry asking about adopting a baby,” I said. “Was it Henry's idea?”

Still Marion said nothing.

“You can make your statement here, or we will take it at the courthouse,” the sheriff said.

“I have no statement to make.”

“A forthright confession will help you avoid the scandal of a trial. Ask your attorney if you don't believe me. Although he tells me he isn't taking any more criminal cases.”

She took in a long, trembling breath and smoothed the papers on her desk. “It might have been Henry's idea, but he wasn't involved. I couldn't trust him to keep it quiet.”

I caught myself nodding in agreement. Marion was shrewd. Of the two, she made the better criminal.

“I thought it was best for the child,” she continued, so quietly that I had to lean in to hear. “That girl couldn't have raised him on her own. She would have kept coming back for money. She would have dragged us through the courts eventually.” She looked up at us defiantly. “I'm expected to clean up after my brother, so I did. And surely you agree that I did that baby a favor.”

I wasn't surprised to hear her say that. But I couldn't picture her sneaking into a building and grabbing the child.

“You had help,” I said. “Someone created a commotion inside that building and scared off the unionists. They ran off in the middle of the night, and they never reported the baby missing. You couldn't have frightened them like that yourself.”

She tilted her head to one side, and then the other, as if she was weighing her options. Finally she said, “My brother has some rather unsavory friends. But useful.”

Mrs. Garfinkel walked out of the office slowly, shakily, with me on one side and Sheriff Heath on the other. She murmured a few words to one of the secretaries who was just walking in. There were two automobiles waiting outside: one to take her to jail, and another to take us to pick up Lucy Blake.

THE ARREST OF MRS. GARFINKEL
mattered little to Lucy, who urged us not to press charges at all but to just return her child to her and let her get as far away from the Kaufman family as she could.

“Kidnapping is not a crime we can overlook, Miss Blake,” the sheriff said. “But we expect Mrs. Garfinkel to make a full confession and avoid a trial. We should be able to keep it out of the papers. I can't guarantee that Kaufman will leave you alone, but he doesn't know where you live and we'll make sure he doesn't find out.”

The hearing was conducted later that morning exactly as Sheriff Heath said it would be. A judge greeted us in closed chambers and heard testimony from Lucy and Sheriff Heath. (I was introduced only as a friend of Lucy's and had no objection to that.) The letter from Lucy's employer was read aloud and found suitable. Prosecutor Wright stepped in long enough to say that charges had been read against Marion Garfinkel and that she would be detained until arrangements could be made about her bail. The judge heard it all and signed the order before him authorizing the orphanage to release the child to his mother.

Lucy chatted happily as we drove back to the orphanage, describing the sitting room the sisters had agreed to turn into a nursery where little Bobby could spend his days while she worked. She said that they had made substantial donations to their church's building fund years ago and had already written to the minister's wife to ask for help in securing clothing and shoes for the child. Sheriff Heath said he thought his wife might have a few things she could send over, and I offered to have Fleurette sew anything else the boy might need.

We were in high spirits when we arrived. Sheriff Heath and I stood in the lobby while Lucy ran upstairs to collect her boy.

The sheriff held his hat and ran his fingers around the brim. “I owe you an apology, Miss Kopp,” he said.

“I don't think you do,” I said.

“No, you did this all on your own. You went to New York and found that photographer. I missed John Ward's name on the pictures, but you remembered. And whatever made you think of going around to the orphanages—well, you put it all together very quickly. You make a good detective.”

I laughed. “It appears that you and Norma agree on something. If there are any positions for lady detectives, please be sure to tell me,” I said.

“What's that?” he said.

“The Kopp sisters need to find jobs or husbands, and soon,” I said.

“Who says so?”

“Our bank balance says so.” Lucy's feet appeared at the top of the stairs and I ran toward her. “Just don't send any suitors my way,” I called back to the sheriff. “I'm trying the other route first.” Lucy descended to the landing with her little boy in her arms, and they both fell against me at once, all light and laughter.

“YOU'RE NOT TAKING A JOB IN NEW YORK!”
Fleurette said, dropping the roll she'd been buttering.

“Not yet,” I said. “I just wrote to them and asked about the position.”

“And what did they say?”

“They sent an immediate reply and said they were quite desperate for extra help this spring and wondered if I'd like to come for an interview right away. I'm going tomorrow.”

Fleurette stared at Norma in horror. We had decided not to tell Fleurette of our financial difficulties or of Francis's pressure to sell the farm. We didn't want her to be angry with him.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Wrap presents behind the counter?”

“Oh, not at all,” I said. “They're hiring store detectives.”

WHEN MR. WANAMAKER
first opened his store in New York, he made much of the fact that shoppers could wander freely through the sales floor and handle the goods themselves, an idea that was still quite novel back in 1896. His was a glittering bazaar of velvet gloves and leather shoes and miles of ribbon and lace and tailored suits for men and every other convenience a city-dweller might want, straddling two blocks on Broadway and employing a few thousand clerks and stock boys.

He believed that prices should be written on paper tags and affixed directly to the merchandise so that his customers could see for themselves what each item cost. “If everyone is equal before God,” he liked to tell his managers, “then everyone should be equal before price.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Wanamaker and his Christian principles, the openness of his store invited thievery. To combat this problem, some of his clerks had become detectives, strolling around the sales floor in ordinary dress, posing as shoppers but keeping their eyes on the slim fingers and gaping pocketbooks of a new breed of genteel downtown thief. Even women stole from Wanamaker's, which meant that women had to be employed as detectives to monitor the gloves and lace and undergarments. The job was simply to walk the sales floor, as unobtrusively as possible, wearing one's own clothes, looking like an ordinary shopper. I saw no reason why I couldn't get hired to do a simple thing like that.

I WAS FIFTEEN MINUTES EARLY
for my interview with Mrs. Langdon, the ladies' sales manager at Wanamaker's. I wore a wool dress of dark green that Fleurette had just finished for me. It seemed like a smart dress for a store detective—nicely tailored but comfortable, of an ordinary fabric and color that would not call attention it itself. Fleurette had declared it to be a dress for a woman who had important things to do.

I approached a girl selling scarves at a counter near the entrance and asked her where I might find Mrs. Langdon.

“Oh!” she said. “Is Annie all right?”

“Annie?”

“One of the girls. She's been missing and Mrs. Langdon said that her mother was coming in to talk to her. I thought you might have been Annie's mother.”

I looked down at my suit and my high leather shoes. I did look matronly.

“I'm here to interview for a position,” I said.

“You are?” The girl looked up at me, puzzled. She wore smooth ringlets of brown hair around a perfectly round face that seemed to wear a perpetual expression of surprise. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.

“Won't your husband mind?” she said.

I hadn't time to explain myself. “Perhaps I'll ask at the perfume counter.”

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” the girl said quickly. “Her office is upstairs and straight to the back. Through the white door without a sign on it.”

I made my way past the scarves and the perfume, past the last of the winter gloves and a collection of lace for spring, past a table of sewing notions stocked with pearl buttons and a shelf of leather-bound books sold by the set. At last I reached the white door upstairs, and behind that door was Mrs. Langdon, seated at her desk.

Here, at last, was someone who wasn't eighteen. She wore a neat bun of perfectly white hair, and a crisply starched white cotton blouse to match. Everything in her office, in fact, was white: the walls, the rug, and even her furniture, all painted the color of flawless new snow.

She raised a tiny hand as I walked in to indicate that I should not interrupt her writing. I waited while she scratched her paper and blotted it, and then she turned to face me.

“I'm sorry, my dear,” she said. “I'm conducting an interview at two o'clock, and I was just going out to look for the girl. Can someone else help you?”

“I . . . I am the girl,” I said, realizing at once how foolish I sounded. “I mean, I am Constance Kopp. You wrote to me. About the detective position.”

She made a little gasp that caught in her throat. She rose from her chair, not taking her eyes off me, and walked right up to me. Mrs. Langdon was a petite woman of hardly more than five feet in height, so when she stood in front of me, she looked directly at the button fastened across my breastbone. I took a step back so that she could look me in the eye, but she stepped forward again. I wondered if she was nearsighted. Then she walked around me, slowly, the way one takes in a statue at a museum.

I held my breath. Was this the interview?

She circled back to her desk. There was no other chair in the room, so I remained standing. “I'm sorry, my dear,” she said briskly, giving me one last appraisal over the tops of her spectacles. “You won't do at all. We're looking for someone—unobtrusive.”

“Unobtrusive?” I said. “I've worn the most ordinary dress, just as you asked.”

She shook her head slowly. “It isn't your dress, my dear. It's—well, we can't have a store detective who stands head and shoulders above all the other shoppers. You'll be noticed. The thieves will have no trouble describing you to each other. They do talk, you know.”

I didn't know. “But my size could be an advantage,” I said, trying to sound cheerful and not at all desperate. “I can see above the other ladies. And if you're trying to catch a pickpocket, surely it would be a help to have a detective with some strength. If someone tried to run away I'd have no trouble keeping hold of them.”

Mrs. Langdon gave a small, polite laugh. “My dear. We aren't hiring a police officer. I'm not looking for someone to make a scene on the sales floor. We want more of a”—and here she paused to consider her words—“a gentle presence. Watchful, but polite. Discreet.”

It hadn't occurred to me that I'd be turned down after I'd come all this way. Wasn't I polite and discreet?

I let my silence hang in the air for just a second too long. Mrs. Langdon rose and opened the door.

“I don't think we're what you're looking for, my dear,” she said, looking up at me with pale blue eyes. “You're better suited for something more rough and tumble.”

Rough and tumble?

She patted my arm and gestured through the open door. “You'll find it.”

“A GENTLE PRESENCE?”
Norma said, outraged. “Are you sure that's what she said?”

“She thought I would stand out,” I said. “She thought I would be too conspicuous.”

“Isn't that what a store detective should be?” Fleurette asked. “How else will the thieves know to stay away?”

“It doesn't work that way.” I was tired of talking about it already, and embarrassed that I'd lost a job that should have been handed to me easily.

In an effort to change the subject, Norma tossed the newspaper at me. “It appears that Sheriff Heath has won over another criminal with his kindness and hospitality.”

SAVED OF PRISON TERM BY SHERIFF

G
EORGE
E
WING OF
H
ACKENSACK
, a former convict who was indicted for using the mails to defraud victims throughout the county, was saved from being returned to state prison by Sheriff Heath of Bergen County, who said he thought the convict could be reformed.

Ewing was released from state prison after having served his part of a sentence for theft. He returned to Bergen County and led a good life, said the sheriff. Then he relapsed into his old ways and was arrested.

The sheriff took such a kind interest in him that when the case came up yesterday he appealed to the court, saying that if the prisoner were sentenced to prison he would probably never be reformed. Judge Haight then sentenced Ewing to five months in the Bergen County Jail.

“But that's good news for us!” I said. “It means that he's agreed that he won't claim responsibility for Mr. Kaufman's crimes. We can go forward with the case.”

“What makes you think he won't change his mind?” Norma said.

“He agreed to tell the truth if we kept him here in Hackensack, and we've done that.”

Norma raised an eyebrow at me. “A criminal has made a promise to tell the truth, and now our case against a violent and unpredictable madman depends upon him. Are you suggesting that we take this to be good news?”