Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions

by Amy Stewart

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  Historical Notes and Sources

  Read More from the Kopp Sisters Series

  Learn More About the Kopp Sisters

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by the Stewart-Brown Trust

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stewart, Amy, author.

  Title: Miss Kopp’s midnight confessions / Amy Stewart.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. | Series: A Kopp sisters novel ; 3

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017007453 (print) | LCCN 2017013822 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544409637 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544409996 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States—Social life and customs—1865–1918—Fiction. | Women detectives—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / General. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.T49343 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.T49343 M57 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007453

  Cover illustration and design by Jim Tierney

  v1.0817

  To Masie Cochran

  “You try to help your prisoners, then?”

  “Certainly. Often a little help is all they need to get back on the road to straight living—sometimes help against others, but very often help against themselves. They come to me often at midnight, after I have gone to bed in my cell. At midnight a woman will tell almost anything if she finds one who is sympathetic to tell it to.”

  —Miss Kopp, Naming Six Requisites for Detective, New York Evening Telegram, March 5, 1916

  1

  ON THE MORNING OF HER ARREST, Edna Heustis awoke early and put her room in order. She occupied the smallest of Mrs. Turnbull’s furnished rooms, nothing more than an alcove under the eaves, with just enough space for a bed and a wash-stand. A row of iron hooks on the wall held the entirety of her wardrobe: two work uniforms, a Sunday dress, and a winter coat. The only decoration was a picture of a sailboat, furnished by Mrs. Turnbull, and for reading material her landlady had issued her a history of the Italian lakes, a guide to Egyptian art, and a general’s wife’s account of Army life on the western plains. Those sat on a hang-shelf, alongside an oil lamp—although Edna preferred to do her reading in the parlor, under the single electrical light offered for that purpose.

  Absent from her possessions were any portraits of her family or mementos of home. She’d left in such a hurry that she hadn’t thought to bring any. She’d been inquiring at factories for weeks, and when the women’s superintendent at the DuPont powder works in Pompton Lakes agreed to hire her on, she dashed home, gathered up only that which she could carry, then slipped out the back door while her mother was occupied in the kitchen.

  Edna might have been a quiet and serious girl, but she’d been raised among boys and had a fine sense of adventure about her. The war in Europe had reached its boiling point, and every American boy was eager to join the fight. If there was work to be done for the war, and women were allowed to do it, Edna was impatient to begin. She left the briefest of notes on the day she left: “Gone to work for France in Pompton Lakes. I have a place in a good house and you needn’t worry.”

  It was true about the good house. Mrs. Turnbull only rented to girls from the powder works and maintained a strict policy about curfews and church attendance on Sundays. She was in many ways a tougher task-master than Edna’s mother had been, but Edna didn’t mind about that. She believed the regimen of living in a boarding-house to be similar to that of the Army, and liked to imagine that the daily making up of her room (tucking in the sheets, folding down the coverlet, stowing her bed-slippers and nightgown, arranging her brush and comb in an even row alongside the basin) might resemble, in some way, the orderliness of military camp life, of which her brothers were so eager to partake.

  But France seemed very far away that morning as Edna stepped into her work dress, washed her face in the basin, and ran down the stairs for breakfast. In the cramped butler’s pantry that served as a dining room, Mrs. Turnbull had put out porridge and stewed apples. Edna sat, as she did every morning, in comfortable silence among the five other girls who roomed there: Delia, Winifred, Irma, Fannie, and Pearl. Their conversation ran along familiar lines:

  First Delia said, “There’s a ladder in my stocking so far beyond mending that I might as well go bare.”

  Then Fannie said, “Albert’s good for another pair.”

  To which Irma replied, “Then it’s a shame she threw off Albert and went with those men from the Navy, who don’t need to supply a girl with stockings before she’ll go to a dance hall with them.”

  Then Pearl said, “Delia, you didn’t go with all of them, did you?”

  And Delia retorted, “You couldn’t expect me to choose one!”

  This kind of talk had embarrassed Edna terribly the first time she heard it. Before she left home, she’d allowed a friend of her brothers’ to pay a little attention to her, but she could never imagine stolid and steadfast Dewey Barnes buying her a pair of stockings or taking her to a crowded and noisy dance hall and then letting her stumble home, as the girls at the boarding-house did, dazed by liquor and cigarettes, with a sort of swollen and bruised look about the lips that they wore like a badge until it faded.

  It wasn’t that Edna disapproved of their feminine vanity, or their wild ways. She just couldn’t do what they did. She didn’t know how to make herself up and put herself on display. Dancing was a foreign language to her: she felt foolish trying to work out the Kangaroo Hop or the Peabody, and never could master Delia’s trick of kicking her heel back when she turned to make her skirt fly up. She practiced with them because they insisted, but more often than not she took the man’s part, maneuvering woodenly while the other girls practiced their flourishes.

  Only once did she allow herself to be dragged along to a dance hall with them, and there she found herself entirely outmatched. Over the whirl of laughter and music, the other girl
s chatted gaily with any man who came into their orbit. They had a knack for making the sort of easy, meaningless chatter that would lead to a turn on the dance floor, then a sip from a bottle secreted away in a man’s pocket, a taste of his cigarette, and a kiss just outside the door, sheltered under a dark and discreet night sky.

  But Edna hadn’t any idea where to begin, and wasn’t sure she wanted to. Every dance step, every smile, every laughing word exchanged with a man was like a piece of machinery that she didn’t know how to operate. Instead she held her friends’ purses, and went home at midnight with all of their keys, rattling them in every doorknob so that Mrs. Turnbull might hear the sound of all six girls returning home at once.

  The others didn’t mind that Edna stayed home from the dances after that, and for her part, she’d grown accustomed to their ways. She was sitting placidly among them that morning, listening with some amusement but relieved, as always, that they didn’t expect her to join in.

  “You remember Frank, don’t you? From the train station?” Delia whispered.

  Pearl leaned in and said, “The one with the walking stick filled with whiskey?”

  “Yes,” Delia said gleefully. “That one. He asked me to Atlantic City for the weekend. How am I going to get away? I’m all out of sisters with birthdays.”

  “What about an elderly aunt in a state of decline?” Fannie offered.

  “What about inviting me?” Irma complained.

  “Oh, Frank would like that, but he’s to register us as man and wife, and who would you be?”

  “I’ll be the sister with the birthday! Or the elderly aunt. Just take me along.”

  They were all laughing at that when heavy footsteps stormed the porch and someone pounded the brass knocker hard enough to rattle their saucers. Every girl leapt up at once, flushed and guilty, as if they had, improbably, been overheard and caught. Mrs. Turnbull, having just come up from her lodgings in the basement, bustled past and admonished them to finish quickly and wash their own bowls.

  But not a single girl moved, and not a single spoon clanked against a dish, as the door swung open and a policeman’s brusque voice demanded to see a Miss Edna Heustis, who was to be put under arrest on a charge of waywardness and taken without delay to the Hackensack jail.

  2

  THE FEMALE POPULATION at the Hackensack jail consisted at that moment of a conniving fortune-teller who, among her more colorful aliases, insisted on being called Madame Fitzgerald; a practical nurse named Lottie Wallau, convicted in the overdose of her elderly patient; and Etta McLean, a stenographer who sold company secrets to her employer’s competitor and lived so conspicuously well off the proceeds that she was easily found out. They were housed alongside Josephine Knobloch, who had been arrested for rioting at the Garfield worsted mill (and could be released if she paid a six-dollar fine, but the strikers were united in their refusal to do so). On a cell block by herself sat an old Italian woman, Providencia Monafo, contentedly serving a sentence for murder. She’d aimed for her husband but shot her boarder instead, and thought it a distinct advantage to live for a time behind the jail’s protective stone walls, where Mr. Monafo couldn’t take revenge.

  Constance Kopp, the deputy in charge of the female section, usually oversaw eight to ten inmates, but in the dark, cold days following Christmas, women—even criminally inclined women—simply weren’t out and about and were therefore less likely to be seen and arrested. It was true among the male population, too: there was always a drop in January and February, when the weather was simply too disagreeable to bother about stealing a horse or knifing a fellow drinker at a saloon.

  It was, therefore, something of an occasion to receive a new inmate. Sheriff Heath announced it from the entrance to the female section. “There’s a girl downstairs. An officer brought her over from Paterson. He insisted on speaking to me —”

  “They all do,” Constance put in.

  “I told him that we have a deputy for the ladies and he must tell it to you,” the sheriff said.

  “I hope she isn’t terribly old,” Etta called out as Constance turned to go. “We could use another hand in the laundry.” All of the inmates did chores, but Constance tended to save the light work for the older women—in this case, Madame Fitzgerald and Providencia Monafo—which left the younger ones to work the wringer and the steam press.

  “I just want a fourth for bridge,” Lottie said. “Madame Fitzgerald cheats.”

  “Don’t bring us any more strikers,” Etta added. “They’re so earnest.”

  If this was intended to incite a response from Josephine, it didn’t. Constance agreed, privately, that strikers tended to be grimly single-minded and didn’t make particularly good company.

  She locked the gate and followed the sheriff down the stairs. Once they were alone, he said, “The girl looks to be about as wayward as my left shoe, but I leave that for you to determine.”

  “I wish it could be left to me.” It irked Constance to put a girl in jail who didn’t belong there, even temporarily.

  As this was a conversation they’d had many times before, Sheriff Heath merely waved his hand in acknowledgment and went back to his office, leaving Constance to contend with the officer.

  It came as something of a relief to Constance that she and the sheriff had developed their own shorthand, and that he so often seemed to know what she was thinking before she said it. She’d never had a proper job before, and hadn’t any idea what it would be like to take orders from anyone, much less a lawman. What if he’d had a temper, or an animosity toward the criminals under his roof, or merely lacked any concern for the welfare of his inmates—or his deputies? Surely such things happened in jailhouses around the country.

  But Sheriff Heath was an even-tempered and fair-minded man who seemed to have run for office for all the right reasons. He campaigned for better treatment for his inmates and believed that by directing charity and education to the poor, crime could be eradicated. Although his office put a tremendous burden upon him—inmates had died in his arms, murderers had gone free, and he was often the first to the scene of every form of human suffering imaginable—he managed to maintain his dignity.

  And—she wouldn’t hesitate to admit it—she admired the fact that he’d seen something in her that no one else had. He saw that she was strong-willed, with a keen sense of justice and a sharp eye, and that she knew how to put her size to an advantage. A lack of physical strength had long been an argument against hiring women officers, but Constance had plenty of that and wasn’t afraid to use it. Sheriff Heath recognized in her the qualities that make a good deputy sheriff, regardless of sex, and offered her a job on that basis. For that she’d owe him a lifelong debt.

  Constance had expected her work for the sheriff to land her in the middle of feminine versions of the same sorts of cases the men handled: thieves and pickpockets, drunkards, brawlers, and the occasional murderess or arsonist. There was nothing stopping her from going after a male criminal, either, and she had, whenever it was called for. She was taller than most of the men she tackled, and heavier than some. Furthermore, it didn’t hurt that Constance had a certain recklessness about her when it came to physical confrontation: she’d been known to hurl herself down a city street and leap on top of a fleeing suspect, with no consideration to the unyielding pavement that would rise to meet them. This habit had left her with a broken rib and more than a few nasty bruises and sprains, but it had also earned her Sheriff Heath’s respect, and that meant more to her than a bloodied kneecap.

  But lately, there’d been less rough-and-tumble and more moralizing. This bothered her, as jail was rarely the best place for a girl gone wrong. The steady uptick in morality cases coming before her was one of the more troublesome aspects of her position as deputy sheriff and jail matron. In the last few months she’d seen a parade of girls brought in under charges of waywardness or incorrigibility: Rosa Gorgio, reported by her own father for keeping late hours with men; Mabel Merritt, caught following a man out
of a drugstore; and Daisy Sadler, arrested at Palisades Park for indecent dress.

  These girls tended to linger in jail for weeks, awaiting trials for which they had neither preparation nor adequate defense. Often their parents were the ones to accuse them. It was not uncommon to see mothers testifying against daughters, and fathers standing up in court and begging judges to take their unruly girls away. It had become all too easy for parents to turn to the courts when their daughters grew too willful and headstrong for them to manage.

  Some of the accused served their sentences there at the Hackensack jail, and others went off to the state prison, but she couldn’t think of a single one who’d been found innocent of the charges and released. Young women were being locked up for months, and possibly years, over offenses that amounted to little more than leaving their parents’ home without permission, or carrying on with an unsuitable man.

  Constance couldn’t help but notice that the unsuitable men were never arrested for their part in the crime.

  And now here was Edna Heustis, huddled in the corner of a bare, windowless interviewing room on the jail’s ground floor. She was wrapped in a floppy quilted coat entirely unsuited to the weather (thrust upon her by one of the other girls as the officer strong-armed her onto Mrs. Turnbull’s porch), and wore no hat. Her hair rested in black ringlets about a pale and heart-shaped face that would have seemed listless but for something sharp in her eyes and a determined set to her pointed chin. She looked to be about the age of the youngest Kopp, Fleurette, although there was no trace of Fleurette’s vanity about her. By the way she held herself, she gave the impression that she was accustomed to hard work, to which Fleurette, Constance would readily admit, was not.

  Officer Randolph of the Paterson police force was sitting heavily in the room’s only chair, resting his meaty forearms across a little table that held the ledger-book. This was where the deputies registered every inmate brought to them.

  “The chair is for the deputy in charge,” Constance said crisply, when he did not rise. This earned the slightest hint of a smile from Edna, and a groan from the officer as he staggered to his feet and pulled the chair out in an exaggerated gesture of chivalry.