Deadly Proof: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery

by Locke, M. Louisa

  “Nate, that reminds me,” said Annie. “I happened to mention to Miss Minnie Moffet the other day that I was working for Catherine Rashers. She said the widow is an old customer and they are working on a black silk for her right now. I could ask her if there was any way they could discreetly ask the servants if anyone actually saw their mistress during the crucial times.”

  “Are you sure you should get those two sweet ladies involved?” Nate asked, amazed at Annie’s suggestion.

  “Nate Dawson, when did you ever think of Miss Minnie as sweet!” Annie laughed at him, and he had to admit she was right.

  Then she said, “I can assure you, they will be delighted to help. They are a lot more wide awake to the realities of life than you would think possible, and if Catherine Rashers has something to hide, you can be sure they will wrinkle it out.”

  *****

  Seth listened quietly from his seat in the corner of the parlor as Laura asked her friends a series of quick questions about the roots of the U.S. Constitution in English common law. Kitty Blaine’s attempts to answer kept dissolving into a fit of embarrassed giggles at Ned Goodwin’s constant stream of puerile jokes about Henry VIII and his wives. Goodwin didn’t even seem to care that he had the wrong Henry.

  Agreeing to sit in on this study session had been a very bad idea.

  Not much impressed with Goodwin when he attended classes with him at San Jose, he could say after today that he positively disliked him. A braggart in a hundred-dollar suit who just liked to shoot his mouth off. He dropped the name of his “father the judge” every chance he got. No wonder he wasn’t taking this study session seriously; the oral entrance exams for the university were probably just a sham for a well-connected fellow like him.

  Damn shame he was wasting Laura and her friend’s time, though. Maybe Miss Blaine didn’t care either. Laura said her friend was a serious scholar...but the way the girl was blushing and carrying on at Goodwin’s teasing made him wonder. With a carriage sitting outside waiting at her pleasure and a diamond pin at her neck, she might see going to the university as just a way to pass the time until she got hitched to someone like Ned.

  But not Laura. He knew how set she was on getting a university degree. He’d heard they were especially hard on women. And no doubt she’d probably volunteer that her ultimate plan was to study law. That alone could get her disqualified––given all the hard feelings after those two women, Foltz and Gordon, fought the law school all the way to the state Supreme Court. And won.

  “Seth, would you please explain why Henry II was considered the father of English common law? And Ned, do be serious,” Laura said.

  Seth did as he was asked, but he was glad to hear a knock on the parlor door as he finished his recitation. Laura had mentioned they would break at seven for supper. He would come up with some excuse and slip away. He never planned on coming today anyway. When Laura showed up on the stairs of the Niantic on Thursday, he saw it as a chance to make some excuse to bow out. Problem was, Orrie turned up and insisted on walking all the way to Kearney with the both of them, so he didn’t get an opportunity to say anything.

  Then he decided to send a note at the last minute telling Laura he couldn’t come, but on Saturday he got a letter in the mail from her. She must have gotten his address from her brother. She asked him to come at four to help out with her brother’s defense of Mrs. Sullivan, stay on for the study group. Clever of her. Knew he wouldn’t be able to say no to helping out.

  As the little maid, Kathleen, came into the room, he stood up and offered to take the heavy tray from her. She smiled and told him that what would help the most was if he could clear off the books on the table by the front window.

  As he went over and started to pile the books up, Laura appeared at his side and said, “Thank you, Mr. Timmons. I promise we will get to the science questions after we eat. Ned is really quite strong in that area. You will stay, won’t you?”

  Damn, was he that easy for her to read? Too bad he couldn’t say the same about his ability to understand her. He didn’t know why it was so important that he be part of this study group. Maybe she was trying to be kind because she didn’t think he’d be able to pass without their help. If so, it was damned condescending of her.

  He nodded noncommittally and took the stack of books and put them on the top of the upright piano. He looked over and saw Laura with Kathleen, so easy with the young maid, thanking her for the sandwiches she’d brought, and he knew he was being unfair. Neither she nor her brother, and Mrs. Fuller for that matter, had been the least bit snobbish with him this afternoon. It had been a long time since he’d felt so comfortable in the company of others. He was glad Nate Dawson was the one defending Mrs. Sullivan. A straight shooter.

  And that Mrs. Fuller was a real nice woman. Some history there, he could tell. She wasn’t that much older than Laura, but there was something about her eyes, made her seem as old and wise as the hills. And he could tell she paid attention to what he was saying about it being a man who killed Rashers.

  Not Laura, who seemed determined to see Rashers’ death as the work of a woman. Didn’t she realize that would just undermine her brother’s defense of Mrs. Sullivan? Too wrapped up in proving a female could do anything a man could do—including murder. Seemed a shame to drag a poor working woman like the factory forewoman or Orrie Childers into things. Laura sure didn’t like the Rashers’ typesetter––huffed up like an angry cat when Orrie showed up on Thursday.

  Not that Orrie didn’t worry him. Before Rashers’ death, she didn’t give him or any of the other men working there the time of day—although he knew that after work she had a couple of young men on a string. All her attentions at work had been directed at impressing Rashers. Now that he was dead, she flitted all over the place, making up to Griggs, teasing the other two male typesetters, and joshing with Dunk until the boy could hardly do a decent day’s work.

  Laura would just label her a flirt, but he knew Orrie came from very difficult circumstances. While Mrs. Sullivan didn’t like her much and thought her typesetting skills mediocre at best, she’d once told Seth that she felt sorry for the girl. Father abandoned the family, couple of older brothers who were in and out of the county jail, and a mother and younger siblings who were dependent on her income to survive. Orrie had been working since she was eleven.

  As Florence Sullivan had said, “Not surprising that she would want a bit of fun out of life.”

  But surely she hadn’t been pinning her hopes on a real future with Rashers?

  Griggs was another one whose behavior changed after Rashers’ death. He was a good foreman. Kept the work going, knew when to lean a little on a worker to get the production back up to speed, but he was never mean. But he was no Rashers. He wasn’t even a very good compositor—not like Florence Sullivan. Yet now he was strutting around like he owned the company. Even got into an argument with one of the lawyers they did legal documents for—something about a missing legal brief. Griggs was also hitting the bottle in his desk drawer earlier and earlier in the day.

  Seth recognized the signs. He’d been there––for years after he got back from the war and Andersonville. He’d good reasons for trying to blot out the memories—not that it helped. Just made everything worse. At least he’d never convinced himself that drinking made him more of a man. Not like Goodwin, who’d sauntered over earlier when the girls were occupied with looking something up and offered him a sip from the flask in his coat pocket. Seemed to think Seth would be impressed. What did Laura see in him?

  He looked over at her, fresh like a summer rose in that pink dress, flower in her hair, letting that good-for-nothing whisper in her ear.

  Yes, coming here today had definitely been a bad idea.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Monday, morning, July 19, 1880

  “A properly conducted printing office is as much a secret as a Masonic lodge...Any employee in a printing office who willingly disregards this rule...would lose his position at once.�
�� San Francisco Chronicle, October 22, 1880

  Annie sat back in the desk chair in Rashers’ office and rubbed her temples, trying to eradicate the headache that was taking root there. The result of three hours of close reading of columns of numbers written in fading ink.

  Resting her eyes, she thought about yesterday. She loved having Nate come to Sunday dinner, the one meal she always tried to take with her boarders. Watching him discuss city politics with Mr. Stein, while fielding a series of questions about his family from Mrs. Stein, Annie could see the skills that made him a good family lawyer. But his ambition was to become a criminal defense lawyer.

  Last year, he’d almost decided to leave his uncle’s firm in frustration with his limited opportunities there. Then his uncle brought in Able Cranston as a senior partner. One of the only reasons Nate felt confident about suggesting they marry this summer was the increase in his income that came from acting as Cranston’s co-counsel. This first case on his own, however, seemed to be sapping his confidence.

  She could see he was worried that the recalcitrance of his client and the negative press meant there was a very real chance he wasn’t going to be able to achieve a not-guilty plea. She sympathized, knowing that every time she gave someone financial advice, there was the risk that if she turned out to be wrong, not only could she lose that client, but that the negative word-of-mouth could quickly dry up future income. Over time, one guilty verdict might not matter, but not if it was his first big solo case. And not if it was in defense of a woman, particularly if the public decided she was innocent and it was his fault she’d been found guilty.

  She wished Laura had been a bit more sensitive to the delicacies of the case Nate had to build. Her absorption in the story of Florence’s seduction and the question of whether or not another woman might be similarly involved was understandable. However, given the desire of Mrs. Pitts Stevens to avoid comparisons to the Laura Fair scandal, this wasn’t an angle Nate wanted to pursue. For him, an angry business competitor, a disaffected worker, or even a stranger looking for valuables was a much stronger defense.

  Which was why Annie came in early this morning, even though she had completed the work for the audit on Friday and written up the formal report this weekend. She wanted to go back over the last six years of the account books to satisfy a question the audit raised.

  Looking at the sheet of paper in front of her, she nodded her head. Her suspicions had been correct. Four times in the past six years, Rashers built up what seemed to be an excess amount of liquid capital. He did so by reducing his costs while at the same time increasing his charges on certain clients. For instance, in the fall of 1878, he switched to cheaper paper stock for two months––at the same time temporarily increasing the per page price for printing for his oldest customers. She’d looked through the files and found letters between Rashers and these customers in which he justified the temporary rise in prices as necessary because of increased costs—blaming the local unions for pushing up wages or the east coast paper mills for gouging western printers. But the actual accounting figures showed he was lying.

  Customarily, when a business increased its reserve capital it was in order to make an expensive purchase—like a new machine—or because the owner needed the money for a personal expense—like a new house. But in Rashers’ case, these short periods of stockpiling money were followed by a period when the margin of profit was severely curtailed. This period of narrower margins came as he took on new customers who he charged significantly less per page than he was charging his long-time customers. She couldn’t prove at this point that these new customers were lured away from printers who were subsequently driven out of business by Rashers. But she suspected that if she went and asked any of them—she would find that this was so.

  Ultimately the increased business he got with these new customers helped maintain the firm’s healthy financial status, and invariably what he charged went up so that all his clients were billed the same. Nothing he’d done was illegal. In fact many would simply say it demonstrated that he was a very clever business man. What interested her the most, however, was that the pattern had started again four months ago. Two months of increased income and a growing bank balance, then for the past two months a series of new customers who were getting a discount on their charges, which began to drain some of that savings. What she would like to do was find out which firm was losing these customers because that printer might be feeling pretty angry and desperate right about now. The question was—angry and desperate enough to kill Rashers?

  *****

  An hour later, as Annie stood at the door of the office looking out over Rashers’ busy shop floor, she saw Mrs. Rashers enter the firm through its formal front door, accessed from the Sansome Street entrance to the Niantic. The foreman Griggs had opened up this entrance for Annie this morning and then went to unlock the wide service door at the back of the shop for the regular workers.

  He told her that once the main shift ended at five-thirty in the evening, he locked the front door to the shop but left the back, which accessed the Clay Street entrance, open for Seth and Dunk to use to go in and out for their dinner hour. Their shift ended at midnight, which was when the night porter made his rounds of the building, locking up shop doors. The front entrance to the building was locked up at ten, which was when the day porter went home.

  Seth was supposed to find out if the porters noticed someone leaving the building after six-thirty who was either a stranger or a worker who would normally be gone by then. Personally, Annie thought this was a hopeless task. But she guessed that if Nate could demonstrate during the trial how easy it would be for someone to get into the shop, kill Rashers, and then slip out of the building without being noticed, this could establish reasonable doubt.

  As Catherine Rashers made her way towards the office, she was intercepted by Griggs, who evidently had been watching for her from his cubby hole in the supply room. Annie couldn’t make out what they were saying over the general clatter of all the small presses in operation and the noise of the large steam press in the rear of the shop, but she saw that Griggs had a small bouquet of flowers that he was presenting to the widow. She didn’t know whether to be amused or disgusted with the way the foreman was courting his new boss. More importantly, she wondered how Catherine Rashers felt about his behavior. Her stock mannerisms that were designed to express girlish delight seemed a little forced today, and there was a brief glimpse of pure irritation on her face when the pretty typesetter, Miss Childers, darted over to join the conversation.

  Annie saw some movement across the room and noticed that Seth Timmons had come in the back door to start his shift and was watching the same tableau. He caught her eye and smiled. He really was a handsome man when he smiled; no wonder Laura was attracted to him.

  Laura said she was not interested in any sort of romance...with anyone, that she would be entirely too busy getting her four-year degree and then going on to get a law degree for anything of that nature. And Annie certainly didn’t want to discourage that attitude, given her own regrets about her early marriage to John Fuller. She just worried that Laura wasn’t being completely honest with herself about her feelings towards Seth.

  “Well, Mrs. Fuller, I was delighted to get your note that you had completed the audit,” said Mrs. Rashers, who’d finally extricated herself from Griggs and Miss Childers.

  Annie stepped back to let her into the office and closed the door behind them, saying, “I am certainly glad to report that the company looks to be in fine shape. I have the written report here. If you have the time, I would like to go over it with you, see if you have any questions.”

  For the next half hour, Annie stood next to Mrs. Rashers as she sat at the desk and pored over the report. When they got to the end, Annie, who felt she must mention the specifics of the contracts for the female apprentices, said, “I think that you may find, if you are planning on selling the business, that potential buyers would question whether or not these low labo
r costs are sustainable.”

  “Yes, my husband insisted that the girls got a good value out of their time with the firm. But Mrs. Richmond did suggest, given the increased scrutiny by the press that the forthcoming trial is generating, the unique elements of those contracts could be misconstrued by some members of the public. Certainly the typographical union could try to make us look bad. They hated my husband. I will talk to my lawyer about how best to handle this––if the subject comes up.”

  Annie nodded, wondering if the widow had any sympathy for the girls at all. It appeared that what she was most concerned about was the firm’s reputation. Maybe she was re-thinking the wisdom of her insistence on the police arresting Mrs. Sullivan. An unknown assailant looking for valuables would be of much less interest to the press.

  “Mrs. Fuller, do sit down. You are giving me a stiff neck. I am concerned that these three new clients are being charged less than the others.” Mrs. Rashers pointed at the three names that had prompted Annie to spend the morning looking back over the books.

  Pulling a chair up beside Mrs. Rashers, Annie said, “I had the same concern, so I did some research back over the books for the past few years. From what I learned, I believe these customers were recently wooed away from another printer. Your husband probably intended to raise their prices back up to comparable levels in the future.”

  “How much in the future? It seems to me that this is draining the firm of income.” Mrs. Rashers frowned.

  Annie debated briefly with herself. Then she said, “I didn’t see correspondence that indicated that he had promised these firms any sort of discount for a specific period of time. However, he wouldn’t have wanted to raise the prices too quickly.”

  “Hmm, yes. I can see. You wouldn’t want to send them back to their original printers. Do you know who they were with previously?”