Girl Waits with Gun

by Amy Stewart

  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.

  31

  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—”

  She seemed all at once to remember to whom she was talking, and she stopped. “What is it, Sheriff? I’m sure we all have work to do this morning.”

  The sheriff was still considering the hat in his lap. “The matter I’m investigating,” he said, “concerns a fire.”

  She groaned and leaned back in her chair. “The boarding house. I know. Our family’s owned a whole row of them for years, and they’ve been nothing but trouble. I’m surprised we haven’t had a grease fire before now. My husband’s planning to sell them all off.”

  “Who told you it was a grease fire?” Sheriff Heath said.

  “Well, Henry said he spoke to the fire chief and . . .” She stopped in midsentence, her mouth hanging open. “Henry.”

  With a sharp look from the sheriff, I stayed quiet. After a minute she began straightening the papers on the desk and said, “But there’s no evidence of that, is there? And who would set fire to his own property?” She said it with the contemplative air of a lawyer considering a legal defense.

  “I understand your brother had trouble with a girl who lived in that building. Miss Kopp said she worked here. Will she be here today?”

  I froze. What was he doing?

  Marion looked back and forth between the two of us, but before she said a word, I could tell our interview was over.

  “I don’t know what Miss Kopp thinks she knows, or what business it is of hers,” she said crisply. “Lucy Blake is no longer in our employ. She left without notice and will not receive a reference. She’d been harassing my brother and, frankly, it’s better that she’s gone.”

  I cringed. I’d kept my promise and never given the sheriff Lucy’s name, but I’d given him too much other information. Now he knew.

  “I’ve been told a child is missing,” the sheriff continued.

  At that Marion rose to her feet and we reluctantly followed suit. “That girl only wanted our family’s money. It was extortion, that was all. If there ever was a child—and I never saw one—it’s probably better off wherever it is now.”

  She marched to the door and held it open. Sheriff Heath followed and took hold of it gently, closing it again. He spoke so softly that even I had to lean over to hear.

  “Someone attempted a bonfire at the home of the Kopp sisters last week. I came by only to ask your brother’s whereabouts on that evening and the evening the boarding house burned. Your cooperation would let us handle this matter quietly.”

  There was a twitch at the corner of her mouth and I thought she might be considering it. But then she opened the door again.

  “Thank you so much for your visit,” she sang out for the benefit of the typists. “We won’t be needing any.”

  32

  “I WISH YOU WOULDN’T have brought Lucy Blake into this,” I said as Deputy Morris drove us back to Wyckoff.

  “I needed the girl’s name,” the sheriff said calmly. “She’s a part of this mess. I can’t help any of you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “She made me swear I wouldn’t go to the police.”

  “But we can help her if she’ll let us,” the sheriff said. “If she’d only come to us when the baby was born, we could have petitioned a judge to have Kaufman declared the father. He would have been made to pay. We’ve done it before.”

  “I don’t think a scared young factory girl would have gone running to the sheriff in the middle of the strikes, even if she had known,” I said.

  “Well. She shouldn’t be so afraid of us,” he said. “And you wanted me to know her name. You always did.”

  He was right, but I wasn’t going to say it.r />
  “Now she’s a missing person,” he continued. “Doesn’t that change things? Wouldn’t she have wanted you to do something if she turned up missing?”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “We’ll take a description from you and we’ll start looking,” he said. “And we’ll bring Henry Kaufman in as soon as I can get the prosecutor to agree on some charges.”

  “Do you mean you have to ask that man for permission before you bring an arsonist and kidnapper in for questioning? What was his name? Courter?”

  “No,” said the sheriff. “It’s worse than that. I have to ask his boss.”

  When we rolled into the drive, Norma and Fleurette were standing outside with one of the deputies. “We have a letter,” Fleurette called to us before we were even out of the car. She was bouncing up and down on her toes the way she did when she was excited. I was beginning to think Norma was right. Fleurette did see this as another installment in a Sunday serial.

  Sheriff Heath rushed over and took the envelope from his deputy. “Did he mail it?” he said, holding it lightly by the edges.

  He had, which the sheriff considered good news, because it meant that he could take it to a man at the post office assigned to work on Black Hand letters and other such threats sent through the mail.

  I read it over his shoulder.

  Madam,

  You make mistake to bring police in. We settle this ourselves. If you insist on prosecuting Henry Kaufman you will be sorry, for we will blow up your home.

  This time we get you, when you run, us shoot you before you pass us in field or street.

  —H. K. & Friends

  Sheriff Heath looked out at the road and my eyes followed his. Anything could come hurling down that road at us. I’d always felt so secluded in the countryside, so isolated. This is where we’d gone to hide. But we weren’t hidden anymore.

  Fleurette crossed her arms over her chest and hopped up and down to get warm. The day had grown gray and damp, and the chill was getting into our bones. Norma put an arm around her and rubbed her shoulders.