Girl Waits with Gun (41 page)

“You've paid a visit to Mr. Kaufman's place of business, haven't you?” he asked.

I did my best to keep my face composed and said, “I have never paid a social call on Mr. Kaufman.”

There was the sound of stifled laughter from the reporters, which the judge quickly suppressed with his gavel.

Mr. Joelson tried again. In a booming, staccato voice, he said, “What was the purpose of your visit to Mr. Kaufman's factory?”

In an equally loud voice I replied, “To collect the money owed to me for the damages to my buggy.”

“And was that all?”

“To make a polite request that he refrain from harassing my family.”

“And what was the result?”

“This trial is the result.”

The courtroom erupted in laughter. Even the men on the jury wiped their eyes and shook their heads. The judge pounded his gavel and ordered a break for lunch.

I left with great relief for Attorney Lynch's office, where coffee and sandwiches had been brought in so we could discuss the case in private. A pretty young secretary passed the basket of sandwiches around while Attorney Lynch said, “That went as well as we could've expected. Joelson has decided he needs to offer no defense on his client's behalf as long as he can continue to get you girls on the witness stand saying that you never saw Kaufman do a thing. He wants to convince the jury that the evidence is entirely circumstantial. It's exactly what I would do if I were him.”

“But it won't work, will it?” I asked.

Attorney Lynch pushed a corner of his ham sandwich into his mouth and shrugged, chewing thoughtfully. “I don't predict the future, Miss Kopp. I just make the case.”

NORMA TOOK THE STAND IN THE AFTERNOON
and answered the same questions that had been put to me, giving answers even briefer and more terse than my own.

“Did you see the man who threw the bricks through your window?”

“No.”

“Did anyone get a look at him?”

“No.”

“Not one of you could provide even the most general description?”

“No.”

“Isn't that odd, for three such observant girls?”

“We were asleep.”

That was the longest answer she gave. Attorney Lynch had asked her to try to soften her expression on the witness stand, but Norma frowned at Mr. Joelson and did not cast a particularly kind look upon me or Sheriff Heath when she left the stand, as if to suggest that we were equally responsible for taking her away from the farm for a week and getting her involved in a federal trial at Newark.

Fleurette took the stand late in the afternoon, looking remarkably cool and unruffled despite the long day in a hot and crowded courtroom. She'd been preparing for her role as if it were a stage debut, and I worried that she might get it in her head to improvise. But she answered Attorney Lynch's questions with a calm composure I don't think she possessed a year ago. Her hair had been carefully rolled into neatly sculpted curls, and she'd powdered her nose and arranged herself in her chair so that she sat perfectly straight, making herself as tall as she could.

“When did you first become aware that you were the target of a kidnapping plot?” Attorney Lynch asked.

“In August,” she said. “We received a letter delivered by brick mail.”

A few people in the courtroom tittered at her choice of words.

“Do you mean that the letter was tied to a brick and thrown through the window of your family home in Wyckoff?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Were there other threats?”

“Yes, a few more, some sent by post.”

“And what was done to protect you against those threats?”

Fleurette paused and found me in the crowd. She gave me a long and searching look.

“My sisters learned to shoot a gun,” she said, with a note of wonder in her voice, as if she hadn't entirely considered it before. “And on two occasions Constance went to meet the men who were threatening me, to try to stop them.”

I shivered. She was looking at me as if she were seeing me for the first time.

“That must have been very dangerous.”

She thought for a minute and then, in a quiet voice, she said, “I think it was.”

AFTER THE JURY WAS DISMISSED
for the evening and we turned to leave the courtroom, I saw Marion Garfinkel sitting in the back row next to a white-haired man. He had one gnarled hand locked around the brass handle of a cane. As we passed by, she rose and introduced her father.

“Mr. Kaufman,” I said. “How do you do?”

He didn't reach for my hand and I didn't offer it. Sheriff Heath had been standing right behind me, and with a nod to his deputy, Norma and Fleurette were escorted out of the room. Henry Kaufman and his attorneys had already left by a side door. We waited until the rest of the spectators had filed out and the four of us were alone.

“Mrs. Garfinkel,” Sheriff Heath said. “We weren't expecting you. I'm sure better seats could be arranged for you and your father tomorrow.”

“That's fine, Sheriff,” she said. “I don't think we'll stay for the rest of the trial. I just wanted my father to hear for himself what Henry did to these girls.”

She turned pointedly to her father, who gave a tremulous nod and spoke in a raspy, uneven voice. “I'm afraid I've misjudged my son's character, miss,” he said. “I thought I knew the boy. It's a terrible thing to see your own child grown into someone you don't recognize.”

“I suppose it would be,” I said, not wanting to imagine it.

“We could add a witness to tomorrow's docket if you'd like to testify,” Sheriff Heath said quietly to Mrs. Garfinkel, but she just shook her head.

“I couldn't. He's still my brother. But we won't hire an attorney to appeal the charges, and we won't pay his fine. If he's convicted, he should see the inside of a prison cell. Isn't that what we've agreed to?” She put a hand on her father's shoulder and he nodded, his head down. He wore a fine linen suit—I could see where Henry Kaufman got his taste for good tailoring—but something about him seemed shabby and defeated. I couldn't look him in the face but stared at his ears, which were red and overgrown and laced with tiny blue capillaries.

“Then we have some hope of seeing justice done this week,” Sheriff Heath said. “I'm glad to see you've come around to our way of thinking.”

“Yes, I realize . . .” Marion looked at her father and her voice trailed off.

We stood awkwardly for a minute, none of us knowing what to say to the other. Finally the sheriff nodded and took my arm to leave. We'd gone down the hall to join Norma and Fleurette when I heard footsteps and turned to see Marion rushing after us, having left her father in a chair outside the courtroom. When she reached us she put a hand on arm and said, “The girl. Lucy. Are she and her boy—will they be—”

“They're fine,” I said. “They have a comfortable home. Lucy's a good mother.”

Marion's hand tightened around me. “Of course she is,” she said, with an uncharacteristic quiver to her voice. “Could you tell her—”

“I don't think I should,” I said quickly. “Lucy wishes to leave things be.”

She let me go and turned to look at her father, who was already nodding off in his chair. “Then I'll tell you,” she said, without bringing her eyes back to mine. “If that boy ever needs a family . . .”

“He doesn't,” I said. “He has one.”

THAT NIGHT
, we gave in to Fleurette's pleas and took our supper in the enormous dining hall that ran the length of the building. The waiters had rolled a wide green awning out over the sidewalk and set out tables for anyone who preferred the dust and noise of the street to the hushed wicker fans cooling the restaurant. We settled indoors, although Fleurette suspected that the circus performers would prefer to dine in the fresh air. She kept her eyes on the sidewalk all evening, hoping for a glimpse of them. We did see five petite but sturdy women sweep through in identical scarlet gowns, their hair arranged in a theatrical style of braids and curls held together with sparkling glass combs. Fleurette suspected them of being trick riders or magician's assistants. “Or they could be acrobats,” she said. “Did you see the way they walked? Just the way they would on a tightrope.” Norma and I ate our roast chicken in silence as Fleurette chattered on about her plans to run a tightrope across the meadow and begin practicing as soon as we got home. I think we were both grateful for the distraction. It was exhausting to relive the events of the last year in the courtroom, and even the notion of Fleurette dancing on a wire high above the ground seemed soothing by comparison.

There was a ladies' parlor on the second floor and a sketch room hung with paintings of sailboats and pastoral scenes of horses on mountaintops. A few young women had brought their sketchbooks and were working at copying the paintings, but we had no interest in it and instead settled in the parlor, where Fleurette had insisted that we take a cup of tea before retiring.

“We never get to sit in the ladies' parlor at home,” she said as we settled into dainty armchairs arranged around a little beaded lamp on a table. There were three other groups of women seated in their own tight circles around the room, none of whom appeared to be circus performers, to Fleurette's disappointment.

“We sit in the ladies' parlor every evening at home,” Norma said. “What else would you call it?”

“But there aren't other ladies there,” Fleurette said. “At home it's only us.”

Norma looked around at the others, all speaking in a genteel hush to their own friends. “I don't see what difference it makes,” she said. “We don't wish to talk to any of them, and they don't seem to take an interest in us.”

Of the three of us, Norma was the only one who was impervious to the charms of a hotel. Fleurette liked the opportunity to dress up and be seen, and I just liked living in a clean, modern building, with twice the comforts and none of the chores we faced at home.

Fleurette took as long as possible to finish her tea, but after several conspicuous yawns, Norma convinced her that it was time for bed. We had just begun to climb the stairs when I heard Sheriff Heath's voice from a room down the hall. I told the two of them to go on and I went back to look for him.

He was just coming out of a smoking lounge at the opposite end of the hall from the ladies' parlor. He had his hat in his hand and carried the same brown coat he wore everywhere. There was a long red carpet between us and a series of tiny tables and settees.

“I didn't know you were staying here,” I said as he walked toward me.

“I'm not,” he said. “I was due home hours ago. Mr. Lynch kept me out too late.”

“Are you all in there planning tomorrow's strategy?”

He shook his head. “We're playing cards. Don't tell Mrs. Heath.”

“I didn't know the sheriff was allowed in card rooms.”

“Well,” he said, considering that. “It's a respectable enough card room. There are only lawyers and judges at the moment.”

“Is our judge there?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “But don't worry. We have a good judge. The trial's going just fine, everyone says so. And now we know that Mrs. Garfinkel won't be paying his fine, so it looks like he'll spend a little time at the state prison after all.”

“The state prison? The same one George Ewing hated so much?”

A waiter came rushing by with a cart covered in a white cloth, and the sheriff and I backed into an alcove off the hall to get out of his way. He gestured to one of the little velvet settees. I sat down and he settled in across from me.

“That's the one,” he said. “And by the way, I'm bringing Ewing in with me tomorrow. We still expect him to testify against Kaufman. If I tell him that Kaufman's going to serve his sentence in Trenton, that will be all the more reason for Mr. Ewing to do everything he can to stay with me in Hackensack.”

I leaned back and regarded Sheriff Heath in the dim light. We'd been talking about catching and convicting Henry Kaufman for so long that it hardly seemed possible that it was all about to end.

“I hate to admit it,” I said, more to fill the silence than anything else, “but I do feel sorry for the elder Mr. Kaufman. It must be a terrible thing to watch one's son on trial.”

“And one's daughter,” he said. “Although I couldn't tell how much Mrs. Garfinkel had told her father about the kidnapping charge.”

“Nor could I. Will she go to jail, too?”

“I won't know for a few more weeks. We're still working on charging the men who helped her. I'd rather put them in jail than Mrs. Garfinkel.”

“So would I,” I said.

We sat in silence for another minute or two, but as there was nothing to look at in the alcove besides one another, I began to fidget and then realized that Norma and Fleurette would wonder why I'd taken so long. I rose suddenly, knocking my head on the low ceiling above us, and backed out into the hall. Sheriff Heath followed. He walked with me to the wide central staircase, where I would go up to our room and he would go down. The situation must have struck us both as odd, because we laughed at the same time and then the sheriff said, “Tomorrow, Miss Kopp,” and jogged down the stairs, two at a time, waving over his shoulder as he crossed the carpeted lobby with its blazing chandeliers and went out into the warm blue night.

OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS
, the trial proceeded just as we'd hoped it would. Mr. Kingsley's handwriting analysis was accepted by the judge as thoroughly scientific. Mr. Kaufman's only hope—that he could persuade George Ewing to confess to the threatening letters and gunshots in exchange for some sort of bribe—fell apart when Mr. Ewing took the stand and gave a simple and truthful account of his role in the attacks against us. He acknowledged that he'd been in the car on the day of our buggy accident and that he'd been with Mr. Kaufman and some other men on a few other occasions, but said that he hadn't written any letters except the last ones, which contained his signature, and had never taken a shot at our house or thrown a brick through our window. He said that Mr. Kaufman had coerced him into writing those final letters with the idea that they would shift the blame for the entire mess. He added that when he was caught, Mr. Kaufman threatened him harm if he didn't take responsibility for everything.