Girl Waits with Gun (23 page)

A harried, red-cheeked woman in a yellow apron answered the door. A perfect angel of a baby sat on her hip, its face framed in blond curls. I took a step back in surprise.

“Oh,” I said. “We meant to go to the prison. We're here to see Sheriff Heath. Did I . . .” and I trailed off, looking up at the building for some clue as to where I might have gone wrong.

“This is the prison,” she said brusquely. “And it also happens to be my home.”

She looked so affronted by this that I thought she expected an apology from me, but I wasn't sure what I'd done.

Fleurette started to say something. Before she got us into even more trouble, I said, “I'm so sorry to disturb you. We're here on an urgent matter for the sheriff.”

The baby was starting to squirm in the cold air. She closed the door slightly so that he was behind the door and out of the wind. “I know,” she said. “He saw you coming from the third floor and called down. He'll be here soon as he can.”

Again she stared at us. Her mouth was a hard blank line.

Realizing that we weren't going to be invited in, I said, “Where would you like us to wait?”

At that she exhaled a tired and exasperated sigh, looked out at the empty drive that ringed the prison, and pushed the door open. “I suppose you'll come in. The great minds who designed this building seemed to have forgotten about a public entrance or a waiting room.”

We followed her inside. To my surprise, the room was furnished like an ordinary living room, with overstuffed chairs and a fireplace and children's toys strewn about.

“It looks like someone lives here!” Fleurette said.

I turned to tell her to be quiet, but the woman said sharply, “A lot of people live here, most of them thieves and murderers. But you're in the sheriff's living quarters. I am Mrs. Heath.”

Mrs. Heath? I hadn't given any thought at all to the sheriff's wife, but if I had, I would not have pictured such an unpleasant and disagreeable woman. Although I couldn't imagine what sort of woman would want to keep up a home and children on the ground floor of this cold, stone structure.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, trying out a smile that wasn't returned. “I am Constance Kopp, and these are my sisters, Norma and Fleurette.”

The baby squirmed out of her grasp. She set him down and gave me a long look as she stood up. Then she glanced at Norma and scrutinized Fleurette, who was especially pretty in a black velvet riding coat trimmed in rabbit fur. I should have told her to wear something more somber. We were going to a prison, not the opera.

“Bob hasn't mentioned any sisters to me,” she said.

Just then I heard footsteps. To my relief, the sheriff rushed into the room. “I'm sorry about this, Cordelia,” he said to his wife. She gave him no reply.

“Miss Kopp,” he said, nodding at me. “This way, please.”

I looked uncertainly at Norma, who was wearing a forced and unpleasant smile and clinging to Fleurette's sleeve.

“I'm sure Mrs. Heath would enjoy some company this morning,” he said. It was more of an order than an invitation. We seemed to be just another disagreeable duty imposed by the sheriff upon his wife. It couldn't have been easy for her.

I followed him into a bleak corridor. He turned around to slide a metal gate in place behind us and lock it from a key on a large ring he wore on his belt. At the end of the corridor was another gate.

“David.” A deputy appeared to let us in.

We stood in a tiny windowless room with a metal door opposite. It smelled of rust and turpentine wax. The deputy locked the gate behind us and then opened the door. This led us to Sheriff Heath's office.

It was a pleasant room, lined with glass-fronted bookcases and warmed by a small fireplace. I must have been holding my breath, because I let it out all at once as I sank into a chair opposite the sheriff's desk.

He didn't sit at his desk but instead took a chair next to me.

“Are you girls all right? What happened?”

I gave him the most straightforward account I could and presented him with the coat and jewelry. He lifted them out of the pillowcase and examined them slowly. “I wonder what stopped them.”

“I think they heard us. If we'd come home even a few minutes later, they would have had time to pour kerosene all over everything and light quite a bonfire.”

“My deputy rode past yesterday, but he didn't see anything. They must have come after he left.” He sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “I wish we'd caught him,” he said, mostly to himself. “That was our chance. Well, just be sure—”

“Wait,” I said. “That isn't all he's done.” A prickly sort of fear came over me as I realized that the fire at Lucy's had to be connected to what had happened at our house. “You remember the girl I told you about?”

He sighed. “Miss Kopp, I wish you would—”

“Listen! That was the boarding house in Paterson. He set that fire. He went after her first, then he came after us.”

“What makes you think he set that one?”

“He'd already threatened to. She told me herself. She was terrified of him.”

“But Kaufman's family owns that building. Are you telling me he burned down his own building just to scare off a girl?”

“He might have,” I said. It sounded preposterous when he said it like that, but I knew it to be true.

“But you still won't give me the girl's name.”

“I mustn't. I promised her.”

Sheriff Heath stood and paced around the room. He put his hands in his pockets and kept his head down, as if the answers were written on the leather uppers of his boots. “I'll talk to the fire chief. And I'll work on the evidence we've got. I'll send my men around to the jewelers in town, and I know a tailor who might be able to help with the coat. Maybe the matchbox has a fingerprint. Then we'll have a case for the prosecutor.”

“But what are we to do while you're out speaking to tailors? Turn our home into a bunker? Guard it in shifts? Keep one revolver pointed at the road at all times?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and ran a hand through his hair. “No. I'll do that. Take your sisters home and I'll be there as soon as I can.”

Just then the door opened and a guard looked in. “They're ready for you, sir.”

Sheriff Heath nodded and the guard backed out silently.

“Ready for what?” I asked.

“I'm sorry, Miss Kopp. It's a bad day at the prison. We found a man dead in his cell after Sunday services. I've got to speak to the inmates.”

“Oh! I—”

“There isn't anything to say about it. Go home and look after your sisters.”

There was something lost and uncertain in his face. He opened the door and the guard took me away.

WE TOOK OUR TIME
putting the rooms back together, having decided to polish the floors and wash down the walls first. Fleurette read about a way to take the bruises out of furniture by covering them in damp brown paper and applying a hot iron until the dent rose to the surface. It seemed hopeless to try—every table and chair and breakfront was pitted and scratched—but she had a new iron and was eager to put it to use. Norma and I shoved the heaviest pieces back into place, and she ministered to the upholstery and wood. We dusted the books and put away the pictures whose frames had broken, having decided that we'd grown tired of looking at them anyway. The glass globes had been smashed out of every lamp, but they'd grown too stained with smoke to clean, and we were glad to replace them. When we were finished, the rooms were brighter and airier than they'd ever been.

That week the charred body of a magazine illustrator was found in what remained of a home in Harrington Park. A burglar was suspected until the dead man's wife confessed to Sheriff Heath that she'd run off to New York and her husband had threatened to burn the house down if she didn't return. A few days later a woman drank poison on the courthouse steps because her employer would not give her the time off to see her children. The prisoners in Sheriff Heath's jail saw her collapse from their windows and shouted to him to save her. He carried her to his office and she died there, asking the sheriff to take care of her children when she was gone. The next day he resumed more mundane duties, arresting a girl for unlawful cohabitation and serving a foreclosure notice to a widow.

All of this was diligently cataloged in the newspaper. Reporters must have followed the sheriff everywhere. I wondered why they didn't follow him to our house. Perhaps they thought nothing of interest happened this far out in the country.

He drove down Sicomac Road twice a day to pick up a deputy and deposit another one. Sometimes he would park his automobile in our drive and wait for me to join him for a walk around the property. We would circle the barn, then make a wider loop around the house, and he would show me how to look for footprints and tire impressions. We'd walk out to the end of the drive and look up and down the road. If there was any news, he'd give it.

“You were right,” he said one day, after about a week of this.

“About what?” We had just finished making our rounds of the house and barn.

“The boarding house. The fire chief in Paterson believes it was arson. Didn't you say you'd met Mr. Kaufman's sister?”

“Yes, Marion Garfinkel. She mostly runs the place, I think.”

“Then I want you to come with me.”

SHERIFF HEATH TELEPHONED IN ADVANCE
and persuaded Mrs. Garfinkel to arrange a meeting with the two of us. He wanted me along on the grounds that she'd met me before and might be more willing to cooperate in an investigation if one of Henry Kaufman's victims was sitting across from her. She was reluctant to see us but agreed after Sheriff Heath said that he would only offer a private, quiet meeting once, and after that he would simply turn up unannounced with a full force of deputies and wouldn't be able to help it if a few reporters followed along.

“Come first thing in the morning,” she'd said. “Henry never gets in before noon anymore.”

Deputy Morris drove us to the factory but left us at the corner. “It's a friendly visit,” Sheriff Heath said. “I don't want her to see the sheriff's wagon in front of her factory.” He put his badge in his pocket.

Work had already begun for the day. The floor was still dry, but the first skeins were going into the dye troughs, and there would be a lake of pigment sloshing down the drains by the time we left. I was prepared this time with a handkerchief for my nose, but the odor wasn't as strong this early in the morning.

Marion Garfinkel was waiting for us at the door to the offices. “We can use Henry's office,” she said, and led us there, past the clerks at their typewriters. With their eyes on us, she called out, “Girls, I'll be in a sales meeting.”

The odor of stale cigarette smoke and spilled whiskey was even worse than that of the dye vats. Marion groaned and asked the sheriff to help work one of the levers that would open the tall windows.

“He keeps these windows closed because he's convinced someone is listening in on him,” Marion said. “If he'd spend half as much time thinking about the factory as he spends scheming with those friends of his, I wouldn't be here.”

She dropped into the wide leather chair behind his desk and gestured for us to sit. There were playing cards and ashtrays all over the table in the middle of the room, along with brass cartridge casings, which Sheriff Heath regarded with interest but did not touch. He pulled two chairs away from the table for us and turned them to face the desk.

“All right,” Marion said when we were settled. “You've got your meeting. Let's do this quickly.”

“Will your husband be joining us?” the sheriff said.

“He had business at our mill in Pittsburgh. Honestly, he'd rather I took care of this place. He hates dye shops, and he's not too fond of Henry.”

“Will you be taking over for your brother?” he asked.

She made a dismissive little shrug and said, “I hope not. My father thought that Henry would shape up if he was put in charge of a factory and given control of its finances. But to be honest, the elder Mr. Kaufman has grown quite feeble, and the rest of us have been taking over the family's operations. I drew the short straw and was sent here to do something about Henry.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“Well, Henry's got to go, and the only way to get him to leave is to cut off the money. But I need my father's signature for that. We're still working on it,” she said with a tight smile. “Is that why you're here? To hear about our family's difficulties?”

Sheriff Heath held his hat in his lap and fingered the brim. “I don't mean to pry, Mrs. Garfinkel,” he said. “This concerns a criminal matter. We'd like your help.”

She glanced at me over the top of her glasses. “Henry paid his fine. Didn't that take care of it?”

“I'm afraid he has continued to harass Miss Kopp and her sisters. But today we—”

“Forgive me, Sheriff, but I can't be responsible for anything my brother does outside of these four walls. My husband and I are only interested in getting this factory back on a profitable footing and getting Henry—well, finding some solution to the problem of Henry, which, to be honest, has been this family's most pressing problem for longer than I care to remember.” She looked up at the patch of sky just visible through the open window. “Since his fifth birthday, now that I think about it,” she said, mostly to herself.

Seeing an opportunity, I leaned forward and said, “How much trouble can a boy get into on his fifth birthday?”

She turned sharply back to me. “He can set a fire in the cellar and try to push his brother down an air shaft.”

“All in one day,” the sheriff said quietly.

“All in one day. He should have been sent off to reform school, but oh, no. We can't have the Kaufman name associated with a school for troubled boys. No, it's always been so much better to just—”