The Birth of M.E. Meegs (Emmie Reese Mysteries, Story #1)
Page 1
The Birth of M. E. Meegs
…and the Strange Death of Arden Coombs
by
Robert Bruce Stewart
Copyright © 2012 by Robert Bruce Stewart
All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-938710-02-5
Street Car Mysteries
streetcarmysteries.com
To the members of the fourth estate, past, present and future.
Table of Contents
I
II
III
IV
Characters, etc.
I
It was in early February that we received news from Scotland Yard that Harry and I had solved the murder of Arden Coombs. Mr. Noakes, from the British Consulate, delivered the letter himself.
This was just six weeks after a Mr. Leverton, of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, visited the apartment, twice. Both times he spoke with my mother, who was visiting for Christmas. Of course I had no way of knowing there was a Mr. Leverton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency when I wrote of him, so it was all a little embarrassing and I was glad to have missed his calls.
That story had upset Harry more than I could have imagined. I knew he wasn’t at all fond of the Pinks, but it wasn’t until then that I realized the depth of his animosity. Naturally, I couldn’t tell the story as exactly as it had transpired without compromising the privacy of our friends, the Ketchums. But Harry was right to point out that Leverton could just as easily have been an operative for Drummond’s Detective Agency, or Newcome’s, etc.
To placate him I set out to find a story that put the Pinks in a bad light. With the help of a man at the offices of the Eagle, I found just the thing. It had occurred in August, just before Harry had brought me to Brooklyn. Jacob Worth, a prominent political leader of the city, had had his watch stolen while attending the races at Brighton Beach. What made the story so absolutely priceless was that he was in the company of his close friend Robert Pinkerton, “the great detective.” I wrote this up and showed it to Harry and he was overwhelmed by my gift. I suspect the new typewriter he presented me at Christmas was a sort of reward for furthering the cause that clearly meant so much to him, and not the acknowledgement of my development as a writer that he alleged. But if the periodic abusing of the Pinkertons is all it takes to content a husband, enough at least for him to overlook my small indiscretions, it seems a small price to pay.
I’ve strayed a bit from my explanation of Mr. Noakes’s visit and shall go back to the beginning, the birth of M. E. Meegs. It began, at least in part, out of economic necessity. Harry and I were newly married and his business was slow. Harry is an insurance investigator, of sorts, and at that time was working by the job. But the interval between jobs could be long. And we had had a small setback, financially, while visiting recently in Glens Falls.
To be perfectly honest, I was partly responsible for the loss. But nearly every plunger at the track that day was likewise whipsawed by the infamous Searchlight. And I feel justified in pointing out that if you were to tot up my four days of gains against my one day of losses, you would see I am a net winner on the turf. Nonetheless, there is no arguing the fact that the loss in Glens Falls was untimely.
When we returned to Brooklyn, I resolved to take a hand in earning the family’s bread. It had been my goal to become a writer since I was a freshman at college. Now I felt I had both the blessing of time and the incentive of looming poverty. Harry had mentioned a friend who made a living as a writer of dime novels so I thought I would pay the gentleman a visit and ask his advice. I wrote this Mr. Ulmer with just the town as an address and received a very friendly invitation in reply.
Harry was to be away for a week, so I decided this was the time to strike. I left the apartment just after Harry and used the money he had given me to put toward the grocer’s account to buy a ticket on the Long Island Railroad. It was a rather long train ride out to Good Ground and when I disembarked there was no one else about. The directions Mr. Ulmer had sent didn’t correspond particularly well with the configuration of streets before me, so I stopped in a small grocer’s. The proprietor said he knew exactly where the Ulmers’ cottage was and provided me with directions that bore no resemblance at all to Mr. Ulmer’s. After an hour of trudging about various country lanes, I found the Ulmers’ cottage.
I was greeted by the Ulmers’ eleven-year-old daughter, a girl of remarkable poise. Mrs. Ulmer was busily typing a manuscript that needed to make the evening mail and after welcoming me, in a very friendly manner, she returned to work. There were two other children and Mr. Ulmer, who was writing the manuscript just as his wife was typing it. The youngest child, who could have been no more than five or six, had the task of relaying the handwritten pages from his father to his eldest sister, who would quickly scan them for errors, and from her to his mother. The middle child, a little girl of seven or eight, lay on the floor with a large dictionary and would look up words when called upon by her parents or sister.
I had a very pleasant conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Ulmer, during which time neither of them paused from their work for more than a moment. Mr. Ulmer informed me that while the demand for dime novels and the nickel weeklies was quite steady, he wasn’t sure he would recommend the field to a newcomer, as the meager pay per page necessitated the hectic conditions I was witnessing. He told me he had received a letter from a British agent in New York who was looking for news stories of a sensational nature to be sent back to Britain for publication.
“Perhaps you would find that work rewarding?” he offered.
“I’ve never written for a newspaper,” I confessed. “Only short fictional pieces.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” he assured me. “They’d be going to England, or Wales…. The readers there would never know if they were true or not. All that matters is that they be sensational. And short. You know the thing: ‘by telegraph from our New York correspondent.’”
“You mean I could just sort of make things up?” I asked.
“Why not?” Mrs. Ulmer pointed out. “That’s what the papers here do.”
She had a lovely laugh, and the whole household seemed quite happy in its work. Mr. Ulmer found me the agent’s card and offered to sell me his old typewriter for four dollars. It was an ancient thing, but it did seem to work, as long as you typed slowly. Much more slowly than Mrs. Ulmer’s pace. I paid him out of the money Harry had given me to pay the butcher.
Then Mrs. Ulmer asked Celeste, the eldest girl, to walk me to the station so I wouldn’t become lost. It was only after both her parents assured her that they would be extra vigilant during her absence that she agreed to do so.
I asked Celeste if she enjoyed working with her parents and if she didn’t miss playing with other children. It was, after all, a sort of literary sweatshop, though I didn’t use that term. She said the frantic pace I had witnessed lasted only three or four days. Then the family spent several days together picnicking at the beach, reading, and putting on shows for each other.
I inquired about which books she most enjoyed and I mentioned titles I had read as a girl. She wasn’t familiar with any of them. But she had read all of Austen and the Brontës and most of Dickens and George Eliot, and proceeded to mention a dozen others—three of whom were unknown to me. When she asked me which novels I had read, I tried, with increasing desperation, to come up with titles with which she was unfamiliar. I was on the point of
inventing an author when she came to my rescue. She said that if I had been to college, as I had mentioned, I must have read in Latin. I lied shamelessly and told her that nothing had thrilled me so as Caesar’s discourse on the three parts of Gaul.
When we reached a point where the station was in view, she said good-bye and returned to her editorial duties at full charge. We had shared the burden of the typewriter until then, and I found it quite unwieldy carrying it on my own. By the time I reached the station, I was fairly exhausted. When I disembarked at the Flatbush Avenue station, I realized there was no way I could negotiate my way on the street car with my load. I couldn’t bear the thought of walking the ten blocks to the apartment, so instead hired a cab with the last fifty cents of the butcher’s money.
The next day, I visited the Manhattan office of Baily & Sackett. It was only Mr. Sackett, really, in a small office he rented from a larger firm. He greeted me enthusiastically and like Mr. Ulmer assured me my lack of experience would not be an encumbrance. He explained that he would receive my stories and then try to place them in various publications throughout Great Britain. The only one he mentioned specifically was the Pall Mall Gazette. I would be paid for each placement, after he had deducted a small fee for his services. He said I could write about whatever I wished, but to keep in mind that the more sensational the better. As an example, he said a fire in a tenement was all well and good, but a fire in a tenement where a brave fireman climbs through flames to reach a baby mislaid by her mother, and then escapes by balancing the child on his head as he jumps from roof to roof would be much more the thing. He suggested I should aim for between two hundred and fifty and five hundred words, as anything longer would be much harder to place.
I was very excited and rushed back to Brooklyn to begin a story I had already conceived. But first, I needed to purchase a new ribbon for the typewriter, and then spent most of the rest of the day cleaning the well-worn keys. Much of the next morning was given up to the creation of an appropriate pen name. I finally settled on M. E. Meegs. “M. E.” for the phonetic connection to Emmie, and Meegs simply because it sounded like the name of a Fleet Street hack.
This brings me to the story that prompted the visit from Mr. Noakes, of the British Consulate. But before I begin, I need to explain a little about what happened in Buffalo. Put simply, my uncle had been leading a double life, faked his death, twice, and then was gunned down in Toronto. Harry and I solved that case, back in early August, and in a way, I suppose, it led to our marriage. But my original explanation for my uncle’s disappearance was that he had been killed by confederates in a ring of opium smugglers. And that they had then staged a yachting accident while keeping his body submerged in the Erie Canal. When the body had deteriorated enough that the cause of death could no longer be determined, they would make it appear as if it had washed up on the lake shore, several months after the supposed accident.
I must admit, I was genuinely disappointed when it turned out otherwise. But now I was free to write an account of the crime as it should have transpired. In fact, my version was much more befitting of Mr. Sackett’s requirements than the too-prosaic truth.
It took no time to write a story of the appropriate length, and I brought it to Mr. Sackett the first thing Monday morning, August 27th. He was very pleased with it and thought he would have no trouble placing it. I asked what that would pay and he said one and six, in British currency of course. I wasn’t entirely sure what that translated to in dollars, and yet I didn’t want to appear ignorant by asking. So, on the way home, I stopped at the library and learned that one British pound was equal to almost five dollars, and six shillings was another dollar and fifty cents.
II
In the meantime, I had learned that the horses were running at Sheepshead Bay. So, that afternoon, I took the money meant for the laundry and went out to the track in the hopes of winning enough to pay the grocer and butcher. Sheepshead Bay was a huge affair, unlike any race course I had seen before, and I found it not a little intimidating. In my previous visits to race courses, gentlemen I was with had placed my bets for me. I was most confused by the posted notices on the exterior walls of the building I had been told was the betting pavilion. These signs stated emphatically that “pool-selling, bookmaking, or any other kind of gambling” was prohibited. A friendly gentleman assured me this was simply a clever joke on the part of the State of New York, though the humor of it escaped me.
Once inside, I wandered about the pavilion, where there were a number of bookmakers taking bets. They sat on high stools and periodically held up long, narrow slates with the odds they were offering on the horses entered in the next race. Below them, their clerks recorded the bets. As each race was called, there was a mad rush out to the track, then the bookmakers quickly returned, followed by their eager customers. I found the stampedes so disquieting that I stayed to the far side of the pavilion and never saw the actual races. It was through nothing but sheer luck that I managed to parlay my four dollars into six.
There was still one race to run, but I decided I had done as well as I could hope to playing the game blindly. As I neared the exit I was accosted by a man in a large bowler hat.
“No unescorted ladies, Miss.” He said this in a very officious manner, and he gave me quite a start. But then he smiled and added, “Sorry, Miss. I was only having fun.”
Then he introduced himself. His name was Mr. Larabee. I gave my own name as Miss Meegs. He told me he had seen me studying the bookmakers’ stalls and wondered what sort of technique I was using. I confessed to him I was a novice, and had won what little I had through luck and luck alone. He suggested that depending on luck at a race track was not at all prudent. He gave me a brief explanation of what was going on and the arcane legal reasons for the methodology.
All through this conversation, he was distracted by the gestures of several tall men about the pavilion. Every once in a while, he would gesture back. As politely as possible, I asked if he would confide in me what he and his associates were communicating. And he very affably did so.
He and his fellows were trying to find discrepancies in the odds offered by the various bookies. In general, he told me, the odds are against the bettor and the bookmakers knew how to manage their pools. But sometimes a bookmaker eliminates certain horses from his pool by refusing to take bets on those he thinks likely to win. Assuming the bookmaker consistently picked the winners, this was a very lucrative proposition. Success with it inevitably led the bookmaker to offer longer odds on the horses he was taking bets on to attract more customers. And when he did, Mr. Larabee and his confederates pounced. In essence, the bookmaker became the gambler and Larabee & Co. the house.
“The profit isn’t large, Miss Meegs. But it’s a living.” He returned some signals and then added, “There might be a job in it for you if you’re interested.”
“What sort of job?” I asked.
“Well, me and the men you see are all known. The bookies won’t take our bets. When I signal one of those gents, he gives a little sign to someone else, who makes the bet.”
“I’m afraid I’m not interested in a position of this kind,” I said. But not wanting to give offense, I added, “Though it is wonderfully inventive.”
“Thank you, Miss Meegs. But you see, it wouldn’t be a regular position. You could do it whenever it was convenient, like today.” Then he very obviously looked at my left hand. “Is your husband away, Miss?”
There was no point in making a denial, so I told him my husband was away, and that my name wasn’t Meegs. He said that was fine, because his name wasn’t Larabee. In fact, he wasn’t sure he knew the real names of any of his associates. Harry wouldn’t return until late the next evening, so I agreed to meet Mr. Larabee that afternoon so he could brief me on the procedure. He gave me the address of a cottage off of Ocean Avenue, just beyond the track, and told me from now on to only speak to him there.
There was nothing to it, really, for my part. I was given three hundred dollars
to make wagers with and taught a few simple signs. The key thing was to keep in a position where I could see the man giving me the signs, one of the tall men, without it being apparent to the bookie I was doing so. I had some doubts as to the legality of Mr. Larabee’s business, so I was relieved that a policeman was in the cottage eating a hearty lunch. He had to have overheard the entire conversation, yet he never looked up from his newspaper and seemed completely indifferent.
We—myself and my tall accomplice—were positioned near a bookmaker who had just seven horses on his slate, while there were at least ten running in the first race. For the first two races, I received no signs. I made small bets on my own account, but lost both times. In the third race, I received the first sign. I was to bet an equal amount on all the odd number horses. I had been instructed to always bet the entire amount, so I did so. Seventy-five dollars on each horse. We lost. I still had a couple dollars of my own, so I thought I’d stay for one more race. Then a small boy selling news sheets came up beside me and slipped me an envelope. It contained six hundred dollars. There was no sign in the fourth race, and I lost the last of my own small bank. Then, just before the fifth race, I had a sign and bet the six hundred as instructed. We lost again.
I returned to the cottage and found Mr. Larabee handing out envelopes to his associates, and sometimes receiving them in return. Some of these people were the tall men, but some looked like prosperous businessmen. I felt a little sheepish approaching him, not having any envelope to give him. But he said that I shouldn’t worry about that, as they had actually done quite well that day. He handed me an envelope which contained twenty-five dollars. On the way home, I stopped off and paid the butcher, the grocer, and the laundry, and still had eight dollars.
That evening I told Harry about my endeavor and he seemed sincerely pleased. I mean, of course, my literary endeavor. Though I hadn’t received payment yet, I insisted we go out and celebrate, and the following Friday we went out to Manhattan Beach. That was the Friday before Labor Day. We had dinner at the hotel, then saw a show at the little theatre, and afterwards attended the fireworks.