The Mark Inside

by Amy Reading

  Norfleet made straight for the Los Angeles sheriff’s office, where he saw Under Sheriff Al Manning. He described his three-day stakeout and the information he’d obtained from Furey’s son, and he asked for help in surveying the home until its master returned. Manning promptly assigned two of his best deputies, Walter Lips and William Anderson, and Norfleet took them right to the Furey residence. They didn’t stop, but drove around while Norfleet pointed out the entrances and escape routes. They hatched a plan: Lips and Anderson would disguise themselves as telephone repairmen and gain entry to the house while Furey was gone so they could map the house from the inside. That very evening, they carried out the plan, and afterward Lips met Norfleet back at the station. He told Norfleet that everything had gone perfectly and that he’d left Anderson back at the property on all-night watch. He stripped out of his repairman costume in a hurry, eager to eat and then get back to rejoin Anderson. “And believe me, Norfleet,” he added, “don’t you ever think if Joe Furey shows up there that he’ll ever get away. We’re no suckers!”

  The two deputies followed this routine for the next few days, only one of them reporting back to the station at a time so that the house never went unwatched, yet neither had any news. Norfleet began to grow suspicious. They had warned him to keep far away from the house so that Furey wouldn’t spot him and bolt. But could they have had another reason for keeping Norfleet away? Norfleet just had to find out. One evening, he snuck to the Furey house and spied around, trying to find a single sign of Furey, Lips, or Anderson. He couldn’t see either of the officers on duty. The next morning, he marched into Manning’s office and told him what he’d done. Manning burst into laughter. “Didn’t see ’em! Didn’t see ’em!” he shouted. “Why if you could see ’em, so could everybody else! My God, man! They’re working under cover.” Norfleet cringed. Of course that was true, and he resolved to let the professionals do their job. In the meantime, he had other leads to follow. After all, there was still the intriguing matter of the sealskin coat.

  Jesse Brown had joined him in Los Angeles, and Norfleet suggested to him that they call Sheriff Shay and invite him up from San Bernardino to join the mission to the Stanford Court Apartments in San Francisco, where the package had been shipped. Shay accepted, and the three men took the morning train up the coast. They checked into a hotel, and Norfleet registered under a pseudonym, borrowing the name of E. H. Shaw from a cattleman in Orin Junction, Wyoming. Before casing the apartment building, they made the usual round of calls: to the San Francisco chief of police, to a reporter at The San Francisco Call and Post who’d been sworn to secrecy, to the Oakland police station and district attorney’s office. None of these visits produced any information, and Norfleet could practically feel the money leaking from his wallet. While Brown and Shay busied themselves by questioning law enforcement officers around the Bay Area, Norfleet took the cable car up the hill to the corner of Powell and California.

  Once again, Norfleet was fairly ambushed by luxury. Stanford Court turned out to be an enormous residential hotel built at the top of Nob Hill. The entrance was a circular carriage drive around a fountain that led into a lobby with a grand stained-glass dome. The building teemed with liveried doormen in the public areas and white-capped maids at the apartment windows, and when Norfleet approached the front desk to ask after a resident, he was told that he could not enter the building without a signed order. This would take a bit more care and thought than he had anticipated.

  He watched the doormen for a while, then picked out a particularly friendly one, an older Irishman with a florid nose. Norfleet hung around the building until the man’s shift ended, then called out to him as he passed by, “Say, do you know where a Scotchman could get a little smile?” The man leaned in close to Norfleet and murmured, “I know where an Irishman and a Scotchman could get a smile—if the Scotchman had the money.” Minutes later they were ensconced in a speakeasy, talking like old friends. By now, Norfleet knew not to ask direct questions, so he never did learn the name of the family living in number 506. “All I found out was the license number of the car owned by the people living in the apartment, and that a mother, her daughter and two sons lived there.”

  The next day, with a new set of doormen on watch, he decided to try again to enter the building. He got into an elevator, but the operator asked if he had permission. Norfleet said no and pleaded ignorance, but the operator took his job very seriously. He blew on a whistle, and instantly two security guards had Norfleet by each elbow and were marching him out of the lobby. Norfleet sorted through his options and decided to fall back on his old redneck routine. They crossed the street and continued marching down Powell, past the Fairmont Hotel, then past an alley in which they could see a service elevator that looked to Norfleet like an entrance to a coal mine. He stopped short. “Well, I’ll be dinged,” he cried. “What d’ye know about that? I always heered as how Frisco was a great minin’ town, but I never expected to see a coal mine dug right off the sidewalk.” The guards laughed, relaxing their grip and letting Norfleet lead them farther into the alley. The service elevator opened, and a bellboy came dashing out. Norfleet popped out his eyes. “Why they even got brass buttons on the miners!” he marveled. His guards laughed again. Then Norfleet swung around, his six-shooter in his hand. “Now you better get back to your Stanford Court and attend to your business there if you have any,” he snarled into their frozen smiles. They backed out of the entrance and ran off.

  Norfleet returned to his hotel, temporarily discouraged about cracking the facade of the great Stanford Court. He thought about the mysterious woman living behind lace curtains, a beautiful sealskin coat hanging in her closet. Who was she? It occurred to him that to catch a woman, he might need the assistance of a woman. And there he was stymied, for where in the big city of San Francisco would a lone cowpuncher from Texas be able to befriend a trustworthy and respectable young woman without raising alarms? He decided to sleep on the matter.

  The telephone awoke him the next morning, an unctuous voice asking for Mr. Shaw. Blearily, Norfleet remembered that he’d checked in under a pseudonym. He answered as Shaw and learned that the caller was a reporter looking to interview him about sheep and cattle conditions in the western United States. Norfleet thought to himself, “It would not do to undeceive them as to my identity. That would only bring more publicity down on my head.” Apparently, it didn’t occur to him simply to turn down the interview request. He was by now far too ensnared in the logic of imposture to break character, and, damn it, Norfleet was enjoying himself. And so he gave the interview, his opinions ranging widely from Hollywood starlets to the advisability of women’s clubs. So amiable was he that he was invited to a banquet that very night at the Wool Growers’ Convention. Norfleet himself had grown wool, so he could see no problem with continuing the impersonation a little longer. He ate sumptuously that night and gratefully accepted a cup of coffee after the meal, only to discover that it was rather adulterated. Two cups later, Mr. Shaw was invited to give a speech. Norfleet, ever game, got to his feet—“at least that’s where my friends told me I stood”—and launched into a rip-roaring polemic on the wool industry and the price disparity between raw wool and finished yarn. His fellow farmers cheered. The next day, Norfleet’s speech was printed in all the morning papers with the heading “Wool Grower Pulls Some Wool off the Eyes of His Brother Growers.” The convention goers never did find out how much wool was pulled over their eyes.

  This breezy little side note in Norfleet’s autobiography, a story unconnected to his vigilante quest, seems quite deliberately planted, a kind of literary blute that exists to testify to Norfleet’s growing mastery of himself, his worldly ability to change shape and smoothly match others’ expectations. No newspaper articles with Shaw’s interview or his rousing convention speech have yet surfaced. Norfleet seems to be pushing onto his readers this image of himself as a master of disguise, perhaps even falsifying it to inflate his point. But, like the swindler’s blute, we aren�
��t meant to bend down and squint at the details, because if we did, we might notice how very different this Norfleet is from the rancher at the beginning of the book, the one who lived by cowboy ethics and wouldn’t have tolerated a liar—much less an urban sophisticate with liquor in his coffee—for longer than it took to rope him with a lasso. This Norfleet simply wants us to admire his imposture and move on.

  After recovering from his encounter with San Francisco black coffee the next morning, Norfleet remembered that Jesse Brown was visiting some friends in town, a woman and her daughter. Might their help be enlisted in penetrating the luxury fortress of Stanford Court? Brown agreed to arrange a meeting, and in an Italian restaurant Norfleet met Mrs. Jesse Carson and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Lucille. Norfleet charmed the two women but said nothing of his quest. He allowed Brown to fill them in on the details that night after he left, and then the next day he made a proposition: Would Lucille be willing to act out a role for an afternoon? She eagerly assented, and they devised a character and some lines upon which she could improvise. Gravely, Norfleet asked Lucille if she was capable of flirting. “She lowered her eyes and admitted that if it was absolutely necessary, she could—a little.” She’d be perfect.

  The next day, Norfleet lurked in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel and watched as Lucille, dressed in a little girl’s frock that made her look fourteen years old, disappeared into one of the Stanford Court entrances. She did not appear for quite some time, and Norfleet allowed his excitement to grow; if she was still inside, the chances were high that she was succeeding at worming her way to apartment 506.

  Finally, she came dashing over and told her story. As instructed, she’d pretended to be on an errand from her mother to collect money for a puppy that she was selling to the woman in number 506. She’d flirted with the elevator boy on the way up, and no one had made a move to bar the girl from entering. She’d knocked at the apartment door, and when a little boy and a young woman answered, she gave her spiel about the puppy. The children called for their mother, and a harried-looking woman came into the room. Lucille showed her the slip of paper on which her mother had written the address, and while the woman examined it, Lucille looked around the living room. She saw no photographs of Furey, but she did see a black derby hat on the coatrack and, artfully draped over a chair in the corner, a Hudson seal coat. The woman told Lucille she’d made a mistake, that the address written on the paper was apartment 501; anyway, she said peevishly, she didn’t want any dog because she’d had one that died and she didn’t want to get attached to another animal. Lucille drew her out further. How had the dog died? The woman replied that it was a canine flu. Oh, exclaimed Lucille, she happened to have a remedy for such an ailment. Might she send it to the woman? The woman agreed and said to mail it to her, Mrs. Mabel H. Harrison. Lucille made her good-byes and left. She flirted with the elevator boy again on the way down, telling him sorrowfully that she had not yet sold the puppy. She said that perhaps the Harrisons would buy the dog when the father came home. The elevator boy said that the father was an important stockbroker who worked in New York and came home every six months. The family was expecting him home in time for Christmas. Lucille wrote her phone number on a slip of paper and pinned it to the boy’s cap, telling him she’d split the profits from the puppy if he’d tell her when Mr. Harrison came back.

  Norfleet was overjoyed with the information procured by his new protégée, a girl who was so adept at winning confidence that she could peddle a cure even after the pet had already died from the disease. He remembered that in the suitcase they’d taken from E. J. Ward when they arrested him in San Bernardino, they’d found a checkbook belonging to Furey, in which some of the stubs were made out to M. H. Harrison. Clearly, she was Furey’s mistress, and she was expecting him home any day now.

  That night when he returned to his hotel, Norfleet found a message from one of the contacts that he and Brown had made, informing him that Furey was currently registered at the U. S. Grant Hotel in San Diego. Norfleet took the next train south, stopping in Los Angeles to check on Lips and Anderson’s surveillance operation, and then, when he learned that they’d not yet spotted Furey, continuing on to San Diego. Once there, the tip proved utterly false. Furey was not at the U. S. Grant, nor was he at any of the other hotels. Norfleet hung around for two or three days, taking a quick jaunt down to Tijuana to bet on the horses and augment his expense account, but he made no progress and soon returned to Los Angeles.

  He went right to the police department, though it was late at night, and whom should he see but Under Sheriff Manning in huddled counsel with Lips and Anderson, the very officers who were supposed to be staking out the Furey residence. “If someone had dashed a pan of ice water in my face,” Norfleet wrote, “it couldn’t have struck me with more of a shock than I felt as I entered that place and saw the three of them, heads together, talking in low tones. I knew at once I had been double-crossed.” But he didn’t let it show. Thinking quickly, if not clearly, Norfleet pretended to have tonsillitis. “Hello, boys!” he rasped. “Has anything developed?” The officers replied that nothing was new, and Norfleet made them repeat it over and over, as if his tonsillitis had also affected his hearing. He reasoned that by playing deaf, he might lull them into thinking they could discuss sensitive matters within his hearing. It didn’t work, though he hung around the station for hours. All he managed to confirm, from the contemptuous glances the men threw his way and their references to him as “an old damn fool,” was that they were supremely confident in their deception of Norfleet.

  It would take a few months, but Norfleet would have his revenge on those deputies. On March 3, 1921, the Los Angeles district attorney, Thomas Lee Woolwine, arrested Deputy Sheriffs Walter Lips and William Anderson and stripped them of their badges. The city was stunned. Only a few weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Times had celebrated Lips and Anderson for capturing the two kidnappers of Mrs. Gladys Witherell. Anderson was an officer widely known to the public because he’d killed several rascally bandits in the course of his career. Walter Lips, for his part, had previously served for five years as chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department. Just one year into his appointment as chief, when Lips was given a gold shield set with diamonds as part of a municipal craze for bejeweled badges, Mayor Owen McAleer noted that he’d earned his title the hard way: “Chief Lips entered the department as a hoseman and by his own energy, brains, honesty and carefulness had arisen to the highest appointment in the department.” Both Lips and Anderson were prominent in local politics, and both were said to be candidates for the sheriff’s job, the current sheriff having been ousted the very evening before their arrest. Anderson appeared puzzled by the arrest, reportedly asking as the cuffs were snapped on, “What’s it all about?” The answer: extorting and accepting a $12,000 bribe from Joseph Furey to let him go after arresting him on Norfleet’s warrant in December 1920.

  As Norfleet would later learn, Furey did indeed return to his Glendale home just before Christmas, only to be ambushed by Lips and Anderson. Furey tried to escape out the kitchen window, but the officers caught him after firing a shot in his direction, bundled him into a patrol car, and took him to the Long Beach Hotel. Behind the locked hotel room door, they made their business proposition: he could either give them $20,000 and go home to his wife and son, or they could turn him over to District Attorney Woolwine. Furey counteroffered with $15,000 but told them it would take him some time to raise that much money. Lips and Anderson held Furey captive in the hotel for three days. Anderson accompanied Mrs. Furey to the bank, where she withdrew $2,300. Then one of the officers drove her to the local elementary school. She pulled her son, Marc, out of class, brought him back to the bank, and asked him to sign his name to a withdrawal slip. She proceeded to clean out the little boy’s account, taking $7,700 and leaving $33. On the third day, Lips and Anderson brought Furey to San Francisco, but not before arranging to clear Norfleet out of town with the false lead in San Diego. Less than an hour after he
departed, Furey and the officers checked into the hotel room he had just vacated. Furey got in touch with Mabel Harrison and arranged for her to bring the rest of the money and meet him at the Oakland Cemetery. When Lips and Anderson received the cash, Furey was once again free to leave with Mabel, but the two deputies would have only two months to enjoy their windfall. It would not prove enough time. After their arrest, when the district attorney opened a safety-deposit box that Anderson had taken out under the name of Stafford, it still contained $2,100.