Chinawoman's Chance

by James Musgrave

  “Thank you for your concern, Captain. I am being paid quite handsomely by the Six Companies, and yes, I do believe I’ll be able to soon afford to get my parents and my children back into my arms. I do miss them so. The world of the law, as I know you can appreciate, can be quite arid and without humor. My children make my life joyous and exciting, even though the stress can be of a different variety, if you’ve spent any time with young ones.” Clara smiled. She could tell by the concern on the officer’s face that he was a gentle man. He reminded her of her father, Elias. He was the one who steered her toward the law, but it was his spiritual quality as a pastor that reminded her most of Captain Lees.

  “I’m afraid I have little experience with the wee folks, except when I’m called to a home that has family trouble.” Lees took hold of Clara’s hands as the fog rolled in.

  “I love to cook, sew and do all of the family things we women were raised to do. My mother, bless her, does this now for me. I became a Suffragist when I had to compete with men for a job. I realized we women had the right to work in any trade we were qualified to practice. I saw that if the laws needed to be changed, I could do the petitioning to change them. If nobody did it, then I had to do it. I also discovered many women who would help me compete because they had been deserted by husbands also, either through death or divorce, it did not matter.”

  “I agree. These prostitutes, for example. If there were more jobs open to women, then this type of work would soon become less appealing.” Lees squeezed Clara’s hands, and she returned the pressure.

  “Yes! And I know you are under pressure for your legal convictions. My father, who was once a pastor before becoming a lawyer, used to preach the heretical doctrine of soul-sleep.”

  “Soul-sleep? That sounds quite profound. What does it mean?” Lees asked.

  “It means he believed when a person dies, his or her soul does not go directly to God. Instead, it does not exist until the day of the Last Judgement, when all souls are called to argue before their Maker.”

  “That makes some logical sense. How can one even have a Last Judgement unless all souls are there? If God judged each soul or spirit, when the body died, then there would be no need for a Last Judgement at all.”

  “I knew you had the same kind of insightful intelligence as my father. It does make perfect sense, but all the Protestant and Catholic religious leaders did not see it that way. Probably because they couldn’t tell their parishioners they would get into heaven right away, and this caused consternation and perhaps no tithing at all. Therefore, father was excommunicated to the backwater revival tents, where he still likes to preach, from time to time, even as a lawyer.”

  “Jolly good for him,” Lees said, then bent forward and gave Clara a kiss on her left cheek. She could feel the foggy dew from his mustache, and her face reddened.

  “Captain! You must come to the station.” From out of the fog, Sergeant Vanderheiden came running up to them. Lees and his partner made it a practice to share addresses whenever they had to split up.

  “Slow down, Dutch. What happened?” Lees could see by his partner’s face that this was important news.

  “Sheriff Connolly has made an arrest for the eight murders. He’s got him locked up now at Kearney Station.” Vanderheiden was still huffing and puffing, bent over and gasping out the words.

  “I told him to wait until we could compare notes! Who is it? Who did he arrest?”

  “George Kwong. Connolly says he has enough evidence to convict and have him swinging from a rope on Russian Hill.”

  “I must go with you, Captain. George Kwong is now my client.” Clara said.

  “Of course! We must all leave right now. I want to see this so-called evidence for myself. I also want to see what kind of pressure the Sheriff is getting from the mayor.”

  Chapter Five: The White Whale

  Jenny Lind City Hall, Police Department, Kearny Street, San Francisco. February 15, 1884

  It was twenty past midnight when Clara and Ah Toy arrived at the police station on Kearney. As Clara suspected, Andrew Kwong was there, sitting on the long bench in the squad room. Uniformed sheriff officers and city policemen were busy booking new criminals. Mister Kwong stood up and waved. “Missus Foltz! Over here!”

  Clara and Ah Toy walked over and sat down next to him on the bench. The attorney noted that her client’s eyes were red from weeping or, perhaps, a head cold. He spoke with his usual enunciated and perfect English, however, and there was no congestion.

  “They won’t show me anything. My son was arrested in the middle of the night, and now I can’t see him, and they won’t give me any details about how he could have committed these brutal murders. You have to help me!” Mister Kwong grabbed hold of Clara’s dress sleeve with his right hand and pulled as if he could get a response from her by trying to break her arm.

  “Please, Mister Kwong! Let go of me. I’m here now. I understand your problem, and as your authorized counsel, it’s now up to me to find out everything. By law, as George’s Defense Attorney, they must provide me with every piece of hard evidence, and each witness they have that they believe proves your son’s guilt. He is not guilty until they can prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, inside a courtroom and in front of a jury, that he killed these women. I will do my best to counter each piece of evidence and rebut every witness.”

  After Andrew Kwong released her, Clara gently patted his hand. “Please wait here. I’m going to first meet with the arresting officer, Sheriff Patrick Connolly, and then I will meet with your son. Right now, I don’t want you in the room with us, but I will bring you back later when we have to mount our defense strategy.”

  Ah Toy spoke to Andrew Kwong in Cantonese, and he nodded his head and spoke to her vehemently.

  “What did he say?” Clara asked.

  “He said it was the White Whale who did this,” she told Clara.

  Clara wondered who this White Whale could be as she walked over to the desk sergeant. She was asking him about meeting with Sheriff Connolly, when Captain Lees came up to her, grabbed her arm, and spun her around to face him. “I can’t talk to you here, but I’ll meet you later in the afternoon at your apartment. Is that clear?”

  “Yes. I will be expecting you,” Clara said, and she watched Lees turn and dash off to the other side of the squad room.

  “Go down that hall and turn right at the last door. The Sheriff’s expecting you,” the desk sergeant instructed her by pointing toward a long corridor on the right side of the building. “Walk right in. You don’t have to knock.”

  Inside the Sheriff’s Office, Clara felt as if she had stepped inside a menagerie. There were at least fifteen different animal heads peering down at her from the mahogany walls: bears, mountain lions, deer, and one rhinoceros. Connolly was seated in back of his high desk, leaning back, his hands behind his head, a big cigar in his mouth. He wore the uniform of the Chinatown Squad, so she assumed he had arrested George Kwong, her client.

  “We meet again, Missus Foltz! Please, take a seat.” Connolly pointed toward a small wooden chair near a long bench on the side of the room. Clearly this room was not meant for the comfort of visitors.

  “I would prefer to stand right now, Sheriff,” she said. “I’m representing the Kwong family in this case, and I need to see George. But first, I want to know what you have on him. I don’t need the actual evidence right now, but my legal team will need it eventually. I just want to be aware of what we may be up against here.”

  Connolly blew a perfect large smoke ring, then blew a smaller one that pushed through the center of the first. “Your pal Captain Lees did a lot of the work to nail this kid. He got the sworn testimony of Boscombe, the journalist who spotted George Kwong at the scene of the McCarthy murder. I was just putting two and two together. I interviewed a coroner across the Bay in Oakland. Name’s Goodbody, a fine name for a coroner, and he informed me that Georgie boy worked for him for a whole summer. He told me the lad was e
specially interested in how to use the U. S. Army post-mortem field kit that Goodbody used. In fact, when we arrested the lad, we found it hidden under his mattress. George Kwong quit his job suddenly, and he took the kit with him. I asked the Oakland doctor whether his little kit could strip a body down like that of Mary McCarthy, and I showed him the photo of her body. He’s willing to swear in court that his kit could be used for such purposes.”

  “All right. I’ll eventually need to see that. Of course, that does not prove my client used it on anyone. What motive do you have? What witnesses saw him use it, or what reason would he have to kill those women?” Clara was fishing for clues in Connolly’s demeanor. How confident was he concerning all of this tommyrot about George working as a coroner for a summer? Young men need money—especially young Chinese men—and there weren’t many jobs that they were allowed to do.

  “We talked to Miss Benedict at the Methodist Home for Wayward Women. She says Georgie boy had a big row with his girlfriend, Mary McCarthy, and it was a week before she was killed. Oh, and by the by, we won’t be pinning those seven other murders on your boy-o. He may have done them in too, but the mayor wants to hold off.” Connolly took another deep drag on his cigar. “One murder conviction will be enough with a white jury, don’t you think, Missus Foltz?”

  Clara was livid. Without the reality of those seven other crimes, she had little with which to fight. She knew no Chinese court testimony was allowed in a courtroom, they weren’t considered citizens, and she wanted to use that fact to support her client. Also, what evidence could they provide to prove his hatred for his fellow Chinese women? This single murder of the Irish girl was different.

  “This changes things greatly, Sheriff. I want to see my client right now.”

  “Right. Now don’t be getting your bustle in a bunch. I’ll take you to his holding cell.” Connolly stubbed out what was left of his cigar into an abalone shell ashtray on his desk. He led the way down the hall and out into the squad room. “Smith, I’m taking Missus Foltz up to see her client.”

  Clara followed the two men upstairs where the jail cells were located. She could smell the foul odors of urine and feces, and she could hear the grinding noise of old plumbing. George Kwong’s cell was in the back where the Chinese and Negroes were kept.

  Smith opened the door with his key, and Clara stepped inside. It was dark and shadowy, lit by a small gas lamp with a protective shield of wire mesh, and it was sitting on a table next to a threadbare cot. George Kwong wore the blue dungarees issued to all prisoners, and his last name was stenciled above his shirt pocket. He stood up when Clara came in, but she motioned for him to sit back down on the cot.

  “Your father is outside. I’ll soon see to it so he can visit you. How are you feeling?” Clara placed her hand on the young man’s shoulder.

  “I didn’t kill anybody, Missus Foltz! I was in love with Mary McCarthy, but she wanted to do things on her own. She didn’t think she was lovable. We argued about that, but I never threatened her.” Clara could see tears glistening on the young man’s cheeks. “I worked for Mister Goodbody because I wanted to learn a new trade. I don’t know how that post-mortem kit got in my room. Somebody must have placed it there.”

  “All right, George. I’m going to ask you a series of critical questions, and I want you to give me an honest answer. Whatever we share is privileged and protected information. However, if you lie to me, even once, I will refuse to represent you from that moment on. Is that clear?” Clara watched him nod his head.

  “Were you and your father working for Mayor Washington Bartlett or anyone else in city government?”

  “No, the mayor just wanted us to keep the Chinese prostitute murders a secret. He was an old newspaper publisher, and he told us we could make a lot of money by keeping a record of all the details and photos, but we must not publish anything until he gave the word.”

  “When did he tell you this?” Clara wanted to pinpoint the actual progression of this most significant negotiation.

  “After the first murder. Father was ready to publish the story in The Oriental. But then the church officials said to hold off. They said the mayor wanted to see us first. He came down to Chinatown and told us he would put his best men on the case, but he wanted us to keep the murder a secret. When the second murder happened, he again visited us. He said if this story got out into the community, there would be fear and anger generated in the populace, and Chinatown could be invaded by the Vigilante Committee and others. He said his men had to find the killer before we could tell the story, so we agreed.”

  Clara knew this information agreed with what Isaiah Lees had told them at the Italian restaurant. There wasn’t much more she could do until she heard from Lees. She needed to get all the evidence from Connolly before she did her own investigation.

  “I’m going to go get your father so he can talk with you. I’ll meet with you both tomorrow so we can plan our defense strategy. Right now, I need to go home and get some sleep. Everything will be taken care of, George, so don’t panic.”

  “If I were guilty, I would panic, Missus Foltz. Right now, I’m just afraid.” George’s dark eyes were staring at her with a fixed concern.

  “Afraid? What scares you?” Clara took his two hands into her own.

  “I’m afraid that when news gets out that I’ve been arrested for murder, then some person who knows about the other seven killings will try to profit by selling the stories to the press. When that happens, the entire city will be after me. It’s happened before, and the police could not stop them from executing mob justice on the men involved back in 1856.” Clara could feel the young man’s hands trembling. She knew the case about which George was referring. She had to study it for her bar exam.

  James King of William, the editor of the Daily Evening Bulletin, tried to single-handedly clean-up the crime and corruption in San Francisco. One Charles Cora shot a U.S. Marshall named Richardson because Richardson was insulted by Cora’s prostitute girlfriend being at the same theater as his wife. King argued that San Francisco’s most successful prostitutes, like Charles Cora’s mistress, Belle, worked hand-in-glove with gamblers, like Cora, and corrupt politicians to dominate and corrupt city politics. King got many women to write to his paper about the problem and how it affected them and their families. It worked. However, because of the scandal in the press, King himself was gunned-down by another newspaperman, William Casey, about whom King had written a muckraking article concerning Casey’s involvement in the crime and politics of the day.

  As a result, the Vigilance Committee raided the jail and captured both Casey and Cora, who were there to be retried because of a hung jury. As King’s funeral procession wound through the city on May 22, Casey and Cora were "tried" before the executive committee and hanged. Minutes before the hanging, Belle married Charles Cora in his cell inside vigilante headquarters. Afterwards, her fate, as well as that of James King of William’s broad-based reform crusade, hung in the balance.

  During the next three months, the committee hanged two more men and exiled over two dozen others for alleged political crimes. Also, the vigilantes conducted illegal searches, suspended the law of habeas corpus, confiscated federal arms, subverted state and local militias, sought to oust elected city officials, and even imprisoned a justice of the state supreme court.

  In response, the governor of California declared the city of San Francisco to be in a state of insurrection and attempted to crush the committee by force. Certain prominent citizens of San Francisco, including many Irish-Catholic politicians, organized a Law and Order Party, insisting on the rule of law above all else. In their defense, the vigilantes cited the right of revolution.

  A sovereign people, they argued, whose government is not only corrupt but has resisted reform, has the right to rise up and replace that government. They claimed that they had the nearly universal support of the people–the "respectable people of all classes." To protect themselves from prosecution, the vigi
lantes supported the formation of the People’s Party in August 1856, which dominated city politics for the next decade.

  In fact, Clara belonged to the party which evolved from the People’s Party because of their support of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. She spoke for their candidates, including Denis Kearney, who became its leader under the new name of the California Workingmen’s Party.

  Clara understood why George and his father would be concerned. They, too, were involved in criminal activities in Chinatown and were newspaper men who were holding onto a story that would cause violent repercussions throughout the city. Finally, the mayor himself was involved, and he was going to soon run for Governor of California. If Bartlett decided to deliver his story to the press about the seven other murders, then Andrew and his son, George, could easily be seen as the Charles Cora and William Casey of 1884.

  Chapter Six: A Woman on the Hunt

  Montgomery Street, San Francisco, February 15, 1884

  Inside her apartment on Montgomery, Clara was about to fall asleep when she began to think about her defense strategy to keep George Kwong from the gallows. The power of the press was important. She used it to speak out for women’s rights and other issues. What if those other seven murders were leaked—not by Mayor Bartlett’s office—but by Andrew Kwong and his church-supported newspaper, The Oriental? She wanted to discuss this further with Captain Lees when he came by later. She fell asleep thinking about Lees’ dewy kiss late the previous evening, and she smiled.

  Captain Lees appeared at Clara’s door promptly at nine. She let him in wearing her tennis dress, a striped affair with her corset loose and her bustle small. Unlike her peers, Clara did not feel pressured to constrict her circulation in order to affect the narrow waisted, big bustled look. After giving birth to five children, if a man expected a virgin’s hourglass shape then he was delusional. The pleasant smile and fixed look of intelligent interest on the officer’s face was enough for Clara to understand he was not impressed by outward feminine appearances.