The Queen

by Josh Levin

  After Sherwin made detective, his life got a lot more sedate. He and Kush still answered the occasional in-progress call, and they still tussled with burglars now and then. One time, they went to make an arrest and found their suspect hiding in a closet. The man charged out, completely naked, and Kush hit him on the head with a portable radio. Sherwin and Kush talked about that one for years. But naked guys didn’t jump out of closets on the average Monday afternoon.

  Sherwin believed in the work he was doing but he wasn’t always stimulated by it. The job could be relentless and dispiriting. Most days, the detectives added a bunch of new reports to a caseload that was already overwhelming.

  After work, the thirty-five-year-old police officer would go back to his two-bedroom apartment and do laundry. Some days, he’d head out to a religion class; he was studying to be a Catholic, so he could share a faith with his fiancée. He’d wake up early, before 3 a.m., to go for a run at Northwestern University before work. With the sky pitch-black and nobody else around, he had time to indulge the half-formed ideas bouncing around his head. The morning after his visit to the tidy apartment on South Clyde Avenue, Sherwin’s mind kept wandering back to Linda Taylor. He’d gone to her home on August 12 expecting to investigate a burglary. He’d left a half hour later thinking he needed to investigate the burglary victim.

  * * *

  Lamar Jones couldn’t remember the last time something interesting had happened to him at work. The dental clinic at Great Lakes Naval Training Center was an assembly line, a fifty-chair operation that treated a hundred thousand recruits and seven hundred thousand cavities each year. The twenty-one-year-old knew what each day would bring, and he knew what would happen the day after and the following week. But August 12 was different. That afternoon, a few hours after she’d met Jack Sherwin at 8221 South Clyde Avenue, Linda Taylor drove up to the naval base in North Chicago to get her teeth cleaned.

  From the moment Jones saw her swagger into the room, he wanted to get close to her. She was self-assured and beautiful, an older woman with the smoothest skin he’d ever seen. The other sailors noticed her, too. They each took a shot, sauntering over all cool and casual, but she turned up her nose at each “Hey, baby.” She treated Jones differently. She joked with him and flirted. He left work that day feeling better than he’d felt in his entire life. Out of all the guys in the clinic, he was the one she’d chosen. Her name, she’d told him, was Linda Sholvia.

  Jones had grown up on the South Side of Chicago. His mom had struggled to raise six kids on her own, and he’d fought his own battles in the neighborhood. As gangs like the Blackstone Rangers and the Cobra Stones rose to power in the 1960s, DuSable High School—the alma mater of Nat King Cole and Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor—became a prime recruiting ground, and occasionally the setting for violent confrontations. But Jones had made it out, joining the navy and setting himself up for a better life. When he started dating Linda Sholvia, that life looked better than he could’ve possibly imagined.

  Although Jones never saw her doing any work, his girlfriend seemed to have an endless supply of cash. She didn’t try to hide her wealth, draping herself in furs and driving a fleet of luxury vehicles. Jones considered himself street-smart—he’d had to be, growing up where he did—but this woman and her money made him drop his guard. On Saturday, August 17, less than a week after they met at the Great Lakes clinic, the couple got married at Chicago City Hall.

  The new Mrs. Jones spoiled her husband, giving him a couple of new cars and $1,000 right after they got hitched. She was generous, cosmopolitan, and well educated, a thirty-five-year-old Haitian woman with a degree from a Caribbean university. She was poised, too, sometimes even arrogant, commanding respect every time she walked into a car dealership or bank.

  The honeymoon phase of their marriage didn’t last as long as their brief courtship. After Jones got transferred from the dental clinic to Great Lakes’ security unit, an assignment that required him to gear up like a police officer, he and a colleague decided to play a practical joke. They knocked on the door at 8221 South Clyde, hiding in the shadows so Linda wouldn’t know who was there. As soon as she opened the door, Jones’s friend shoved a badge in her face. She flew into a rage, slamming the door and screaming that she hated cops. If Jones knew what was good for him, she shouted, he’d never pull anything like that again.

  Linda said a lot of crazy things. Just after their wedding, she told Jones he was her eighth husband, and that she’d killed the first one, shooting him in the chest. She said another of her husbands had worked for Greyhound and been crushed to death in a bus accident. Maybe she was telling the truth, or maybe she was just trying to scare him. Either way, he wasn’t sure what she was capable of.

  Everywhere Jones looked, something was a little bit off. That degree from a Haitian university had been awarded to Linda Taylor, not Linda Sholvia. His wife had four different names on her mailbox at 8221 South Clyde, and she’d get letters addressed to all of them. She had a sister named Constance who seemed more like her adult daughter. Jones also suspected that Linda’s two small children weren’t really hers.

  He wasn’t even sure she was from Haiti, or that she was thirty-five years old—on their marriage license, she’d given her age as twenty-seven. Jones thought she was black, but he wasn’t absolutely sure—her light complexion allowed her to pass as white one day and Asian the next. When she took off her clothes and slipped into bed, he noticed a long scar near her navel—what he thought was an incision from a hysterectomy. One night, he woke up before dawn and saw that his bride’s skin wasn’t so smooth—she had a thousand wrinkles on her face. After he caught a glimpse of her without makeup, she locked herself in the bathroom for an hour. When she came out, she looked like a whole new person.

  * * *

  On the morning of August 13, the day after he’d first stopped by Linda Taylor’s apartment, Sherwin grabbed six new burglary reports from his pigeonhole. But before he and Kush started on all the new stuff, Sherwin took a detour to 8221 South Clyde Avenue. For the second day in a row, he rang the bell outside, got buzzed into the front hallway, and knocked on the door of a first-floor apartment. When the door swung open, Sherwin saw an older woman staring back at him. It took him a moment to realize that this, too, was Linda Taylor, her face untouched by makeup and her body draped in a housecoat.

  Once more, Taylor told him what had been taken from her. She said, again, that an enterprising burglar had stuffed her jumbo-size refrigerator through a narrow kitchen window. She spoke with a confidence that verged on arrogance, as if she couldn’t bear to waste her time explaining something so obvious.

  Most burglary victims thanked Sherwin for showing an interest in their cases. But Linda Taylor didn’t seem grateful to see a police officer making these trips to South Chicago. She didn’t defer to Sherwin’s expertise, and she didn’t bow to his authority. She hadn’t asked for his help, and she didn’t need it.

  Sherwin had been a Chicago police officer for twelve years, a detective for three. He’d been the lead investigator on hundreds of burglary cases. This didn’t look like a burglary, and it didn’t feel like one either. There was only one reason to think the place had been knocked over: Linda Taylor insisted that they were standing in the middle of a crime scene.

  Taylor hadn’t told Sherwin anything new, but going back to her apartment hadn’t been a waste of time. Seeing her face again had jogged the detective’s memory. That afternoon, Sherwin placed a call to the Michigan State Police. He told the sergeant who answered the phone that he might know the whereabouts of Connie Jarvis.

  Chapter 2

  Covert

  In March 1972, two and a half years before Linda Taylor would tell him about her missing end tables and elephant figurines, Jack Sherwin went to a house just northwest of Taylor’s apartment on South Clyde Avenue. The woman who answered the door at 1651 East Seventy-Eighth Street told the burglary detective that she’d lost more than $8,000 worth of jewel
ry and furniture. When he pressed her, she refused to say what exactly had been taken. Sherwin suspected that she’d made the whole thing up—that she was running an insurance scam.

  Sherwin hadn’t let it drop. He’d called the woman’s insurance company, reporting the likely fraud. He’d also gone from door to door on her street until he found a witness who’d seen someone loading furniture into the back of a truck. That vehicle, Sherwin discovered, belonged to a man who lived across the state line in Covert, a small town a hundred miles away on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.

  The Chicago detective had then called the Michigan State Police. He’d told the state troopers he had a lead on a woman named Connie Jarvis who’d staged a theft in her own apartment. He’d asked the troopers to go to Covert to check out the man with the truck. But by the time he’d picked up the phone, the man and his truck had left town. When the Michigan State Police told Sherwin they’d struck out, he knew it was time to end his chase. His bosses in Chicago didn’t like him to pursue cases outside the city—he had enough burglaries to solve on the South Side.

  A couple of years later, Sherwin thought back to that old, futile investigation. Linda Taylor was using a different name, living in a different place, and sporting a different head of hair. But she was the same woman Sherwin had met in 1972. He was sure of it. Thanks to a random assignment, a report that could’ve gone to any burglary detective in the district, he’d found himself standing in front of Connie Jarvis again.

  When Sherwin called Michigan back in 1972, the state troopers had sent him everything they had on Jarvis. He’d put that report aside, probably lost it in one of his massive piles of paper. In August 1974, he got the report for a second time. When he reread that Michigan case file, he learned the full story of her life in Covert—the people she’d met, the lies she’d told, and the chaos she’d left behind when she ran away.

  * * *

  The first thing Linda Taylor had done when she got to Michigan in October 1971 was go shopping for a new house. Her real estate agent had been easy to find: Ed Hedlund advertised on the front cover of the South Haven, Michigan, city directory, right above a septic tank–cleaning service and Fidelman’s Mai-Kai Cocktail Lounge and Dining Room. When she called him on the phone, Taylor introduced herself as Dr. Connie Walker, a heart surgeon from Chicago.

  A cherubic man with glasses and a small pompadour, Hedlund had started out in the real estate business in the 1940s. In the early twentieth century, South Haven had been a major destination for Midwestern tourists, attracting boaters and bathers who poured in from Chicago on luxurious steamships. The tourist trade dwindled after the Depression, and at first Hedlund made his living selling foreclosed resorts and farms on the cheap. Now he built and sold homes throughout West Michigan’s Van Buren County.

  Taylor told Hedlund she’d just arrived in the state and wanted a new place to live. The “new” part was important. The house had to be spotless, never lived in. It also needed to be close to the highway, so she could tend to her patients at a moment’s notice. The Chicago heart surgeon came on strong. She bragged that her husband owned a cab company, and she wore hats so large they entered the room before she did. She also showed off her medical bona fides, flashing hospital ID cards and driving a car emblazoned with the physicians’ symbol and the name “Afri-med.” The vehicle’s interior included a two-way radio, in case of surgical emergencies.

  The real estate agent, who was white, had grown up on a farm in Covert in the 1930s and still owned land there. Just a few miles outside South Haven, the township prided itself on its history of racial harmony and equality. Despite making up just 10 percent of the population before World War II, blacks had won elected office in Covert as far back as the 1860s. In the decades since Hedlund’s childhood, the town’s demographics had changed. Between 1940 and 1970, the number of black residents increased eightfold while the white population declined, transforming Covert into a majority-black town.

  Hedlund himself now lived in South Haven, which was about 90 percent white. He’d just built a house in Covert, though, at the corner of Seventy-Seventh Street and Twenty-Eighth Avenue. What sounded like a big-city intersection wasn’t much more than a wide-open field with a few residences dotting the landscape. Dr. Walker told Hedlund it was perfect. She put down $400 in cash, promising to pay the rest in full in just two months. The Chicago heart surgeon moved in and parked her Cadillac in the driveway.

  * * *

  Taylor didn’t live by herself in Covert. Not long after she got settled in, she called a nineteen-year-old named Charles Bailey. She wanted him to make the trip from Chicago and join her on the opposite shore of Lake Michigan.

  Bailey had met Taylor in Chicago a couple of years earlier, through his aunt Francie Baker; she knew Taylor as Dr. Shfolia, reader of the unknown. Taylor placed an ad in the city’s leading black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, advertising herself as the daughter of a spiritual adviser called the Great Black Herman. She charged $100 per session to commune with the spirits, draping herself in a long black robe and escorting her customers to a room strewn with masks, dead birds, and a lot of paper currency. As candles flickered, she shared the kinds of secrets that anyone would pay to know: the dates when loved ones were going to die, and who was going to kill them.

  Taylor had a feeling, she told Aunt Francie, that Francie’s nephew Charles wouldn’t live much longer. Taylor called the teenager and said he needed to come see her right away. On the phone, she told him that members of his family were plotting his demise. Without having met him, she was able to describe the clothes Bailey was wearing—information, he’d later learn, that she’d pried out of his aunt an hour before.

  Impressed, confused, and worried, Bailey got in a taxi and headed across town. When he got to Taylor’s house, he found her standing out front in defiance of the Chicago winter, a $100 bill dangling between her fingers. She told Bailey to take the money, and to let the cab driver keep the change. He did as she instructed, then followed Taylor inside. As he stepped through the door, Taylor turned the bolt behind him. “Now you’re safe,” she said, tucking the key inside her shirt.

  Taylor’s house in Chicago was nothing special on the outside, a stubby, two-story brick building on the corner of East Seventy-Eighth Street and East End Avenue. Inside, it looked like a palace, loaded with expensive furniture and the softest, thickest carpets Bailey had ever felt beneath his feet. Bailey thought Aunt Francie was a sucker—he didn’t believe in voodoo or whispered messages from the spirit world. He had faith in something more tangible: Taylor’s money. Just like the women who leaned in close to hear Dr. Shfolia’s incantations, Bailey would learn to obey Taylor’s commands.

  The nineteen-year-old moved into the house at 1651 East Seventy-Eighth Street, helping out with the cooking and looking after Taylor’s three young kids. When her husband, Willie Walker, a black cab driver from the South Side, came over on Fridays, Bailey parked the man’s 1969 Cadillac Seville and went upstairs to mind the children. And when the three-day-a-week spouse put on his shiny shoes and walked out of the house on Sundays, Bailey took his place in bed with Taylor. They’d watch television together for hours—the news, Johnny Carson, and anything with Bette Davis, though Bailey couldn’t understand why Taylor wanted to look at that ugly woman.

  Taylor’s taste in movies wasn’t the only thing he found puzzling. He thought it was strange that his aunt called her Dr. Shfolia while others knew her as Dr. Whoyon. She’d told Bailey he could call her Connie. Bailey, who was black, also couldn’t figure out how the dark-skinned Walker was the father of the three kids who lived with Taylor, given that one of them was white. He thought that Taylor, who he believed was some combination of Irish, Italian, and Gypsy, was probably their grandmother rather than their mother. Sometimes a couple of the kids would disappear for a while, or new ones would come to stay. Taylor had brought home the youngest of the three children, a beautiful black baby boy, without any advance warning—she certainly hadn’t bee
n pregnant. The infant got added to the brood, with no explanation given.

  For Bailey, it was profitable not to ask questions. Taylor, who dressed in fox fur, silk, and satin, took her young assistant on shopping trips, telling him to buy whatever he wanted. As a guest in Taylor’s house, Bailey drank expensive liquor and ate breakfast in bed, the food served to him by a maid. Late at night, he snooped inside her closet, which he unlocked using a key she usually kept pinned to her bra. She kept two purses in the closet, each of them loaded with money. He’d grab $100 at a time, knowing she’d never notice that he’d pinched such a small amount.

  Taylor stored her mail in that closet, too, including checks inscribed with a bunch of different names. She’d gather up those checks, wrap a rubber band around them, and head over to a nearby currency exchange, or to Gateway National Bank at Seventy-Ninth Street and Stony Island Avenue. She’d walk into the bank with her head held high, and men in suits would trip over themselves to help her. Taylor liked to bring Bailey along when she ran her errands, but she made sure he knew who was in charge. If he asked questions about the people she was meeting, she’d tell him to “leave it alone.”

  She could be a lot of fun, momentarily. Taylor would laugh so hard she’d make herself cry, and she loved to wrestle, jumping on Bailey’s back to catch him by surprise. Out of nowhere, she’d say she wanted to have a party. Twenty minutes later, she’d bottom out, and the party would be over before it started. The key to living with Taylor, Bailey found, was figuring out how to avoid upsetting her. She loved being in control and hated being disrespected. When Bailey asked for money, she’d huff that he had everything he needed, then demand that he leave. Later, she’d apologize, saying, “I wasn’t fussing at you.”

  Taylor heard everything. She had a scanner in the house, to listen to the police frequencies, and she treated Bailey like a human security system, making him check the doors after every boom or crash. She popped Excedrin constantly—extra strength, in the green bottle. When she ran out, Bailey went to the store to buy more. She trusted him more than anyone else. At least that’s what Bailey thought. She’d ask him to keep his eyes on the other members of the household, to let her know whether they’d answered the door or made any phone calls.