Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit

by Amy Stewart

  William Conklin was not running unopposed. As I have said, the Republican candidate for sheriff was John Courter, a detective in the county prosecutor’s office, where he made it his business to oppose Sheriff Heath’s programs generally and to thwart my efforts to carry out my duties in particular.

  His campaign was something of a farce. He had little to say about how he thought the jail ought to be run or how the business of the sheriff’s office ought to be conducted, and instead went around raising false flags and making inflammatory speeches on subjects that had little to do with the actual obligations of the office he sought.

  There was no real contest between the two. A sheriff must show restraint and dignity, keep a cool head, and avoid rushing to judgment. Sheriff Heath won his election because he demonstrated those very qualities, and everyone, even the editors of the local papers who were so quick to stir up controversy, agreed that William Conklin would succeed Sheriff Heath in office quietly and capably. The Hackensack Republican stood alone in its support of John Courter.

  I’d never had much of a reason to follow local elections before. My sister Norma had an opinion about every single man running for office—even the tax assessor could not escape her scrutiny—but I’d always found the whole business dull, and the names and faces interchangeable. What did it matter to me, back in the days when I was merely the eldest of three unmarried women living in the countryside?

  Now, though, I was a deputy sheriff, and it mattered a great deal.

  i could’ve taken my fellow directly to a booking room, but I stopped instead to present him to Sheriff Heath personally, like a cat dropping a mouse at the doorstep. It is irregular to take an inmate to the sheriff’s office, but he looked up with interest when he saw us lingering in the corridor.

  “What did this one do?” he called from behind his desk. He wore a wide mustache that tended to hide his smile, but I couldn’t miss a certain fondness in his expression. He liked to see any deputy make an arrest, but I think he took particular pride in seeing what his lady deputy could do.

  “Stole his lunch and quite a bit more from Mr. Giordano.”

  Sheriff Heath gave a whistle. “And he waited until the Tuesday lunch hour to rob the place? Nobody told him how fond my deputies are of those Italian sausages.”

  “I’ll get him booked,” I said, and started to lead him away.

  “Hand him off to a guard,” Sheriff Heath called. “You’re taking a lady to the asylum this afternoon.”

  That stopped me.

  “One of mine?”

  He shuffled the papers on his desk. “It’s a lady in Rutherford. The judge gave the order this morning. Anna . . .” He found the notice and read it over. “Anna Kayser. Go on upstairs and make your rounds. You’re leaving at five.”

  3

  it would’ve been improper to ask about Anna Kayser in front of my inmate, so I did as Sheriff Heath instructed and turned my man over to a guard so I could make my rounds. I had charge of the female section at the Hackensack Jail, where at that moment we had in custody a dozen female inmates, if one didn’t count Providencia Monafo, an old Italian woman jailed for murder who’d been contentedly serving her sentence for over a year and seemed more like a permanent resident than an inmate.

  I was a resident of the jail myself: I slept among them, in a cell just like theirs, on most nights of the week, it being too long a journey from Hackensack to our farmhouse in Wyckoff for me to go back and forth every day. I’d made the cell quite comfortable, with a blanket from home, a stack of books, and a comb, brush, and whatever toiletries I might require to keep myself presentable.

  I admit, with a certain pride, that I enjoyed a better night’s sleep in my jail cell than I ever had at home, in spite of the groans, coughs, murmurs, and occasional tears from the inmates all around me. Here I was in command. I was rewarded not only by my salary, but by the camaraderie of my inmates, who made for lively company and whose fortunes, I hoped, would take a turn for the better under my influence.

  Some of my inmates were, in fact, habitual criminals, which meant that they had enjoyed something in the way of an outlaw’s career prior to their arrest. Lady criminals tended to possess an independence of spirit that I appreciated, even if I objected to the ways they had put their talents to use. But some were victims of circumstance, forced to act through poverty or desperation.

  A grandmother, Harriet Janney, was of the latter type. She came from a prominent family in Newark and was only stirred to criminal action to save her granddaughter, who’d been living with her father in Hackensack. Mrs. Janney sought to return the girl to her daughter (the child’s mother), who had run off to Portland, Oregon, under circumstances that remained somewhat murky.

  Mrs. Janney fled with her granddaughter to the train station, but that’s where they were caught. The father had spotted the pair leaving his house and followed them to the station, picking up a constable along the way and ordering Mrs. Janney arrested. I felt sure she’d be discharged from our jail with little more than a warning, but there had been some delay in putting her before a judge, so she sat in her cell, at the opposite end of the same block occupied by Providencia Monafo.

  I put the two of them together because I knew there would be no bickering between them over the light housekeeping duty shared by cell-block mates: daily sweeping and mopping, dusting of the windows and cell bars, and a weekly airing of the bedding. My younger inmates saw it as an indignity that domestic work was to be part of their jail sentence, but older women tended to be resigned to housekeeping and to take it up without a great deal of complaint. When I walked down Mrs. Monafo and Mrs. Janney’s cell block, I was pleased to see it mopped and dusted.

  “Am I permitted to write a letter to my granddaughter?” Mrs. Janney asked when I stopped at her cell.

  “You may write to the girl’s father, and hope that he’ll pass your message along,” I said, “but you should know that the sheriff reads the letters.”

  Mrs. Janney laughed at that. She was one of those stout and sturdy women who couldn’t be intimidated, even by her jailer. She’d lived too long, and seen too much. “I’m not going to plot a conspiracy with her. I only want to wish her a happy birthday. I promised her she’d be in Portland when she turned eight. She must think I’ve let her down.”

  “I’m sure her father’s explained it in whatever manner he believes best,” I said, “but I’ll bring you some letter paper tonight.”

  From her cell, Providencia Monafo made a little snort and said, “Letter from jail? You frighten the girl. Give her nightmares of her grandmother in a jail cell.”

  Providencia had a way of sounding as if she knew things she couldn’t possibly know, including the feverish dreams of an eight-year-old girl.

  “Let’s give Mrs. Janney time to decide for herself,” I proposed, although the poor woman had almost certainly been frightened away from her plan by Providencia’s dark prognostications.

  I leaned into Providencia’s cell and saw that she was content, as always. In her time behind bars she’d accumulated a few decorations, including a bundle of silk flowers and a small painting of a Roman church left behind by another inmate. She didn’t read (she couldn’t, as far as I knew, and when I offered to teach her, she feigned disinterest) and instead passed her days muttering over solitary games of cards. She didn’t bother to make friends, as the other inmates came and went more frequently, but the weeks rolled quietly by and she seemed to appreciate the serenity.

  She did have a way of seeing right through me, and it still unsettled me, after all this time. “You polished your buttons,” she said when she saw my uniform, which I had labored over that morning. “You’re going to be inspected.”

  I’d been told that the candidate for sheriff on our side, William Conklin, would be dropping by to meet the deputies any day now, but how did Mrs. Monafo know that?

  “Maybe I’m the one who’s going to make an inspection,” I offered.

  Providencia eyed me shar
ply from under her tangle of black hair. “Do the bottom one again.”

  I looked down and saw it covered in mud from my wrestling match with the Polish thief. I nodded distractedly to Providencia and went on to the next block, where I’d housed three inmates who were all serving time for their association with the men who actually committed the crimes. It is a poor defense for a woman to claim that she was simply caught up in the criminal affairs of her husband or (even worse) some other man. As a result, there wasn’t much that I could do for them except to encourage them to find a better path for themselves once they were released.

  Their crimes were remarkably similar, which was why I kept them together: they were less likely to inspire in one another fresh ideas.

  The first was Grace Faletti. Her husband had taken up with five other men who made their living by holding up pay buggies. Such robberies generally went quite smoothly: the bandits would wait at a crossroads where buggies were forced to roll slowly by. This made it a simple matter to step on board uninvited. One man might hold the gun on the driver while another ransacked his pockets, but generally the gun wasn’t even necessary. Drivers of open buggies who carried their fares around in their pockets understood that occasionally they’d be relieved of a day’s earnings. They tended to turn the money over with little fanfare.

  But a robbery just outside Teaneck had gone wrong, and the driver was shot. The bandits, being none too clever, left the man for dead and ran to their boarding-house, only a mile away, where Grace Faletti waited for them. The men set to quarreling, which delayed their departure, and a pack of bloodhounds led the constables to the boarding-house.

  “I tried to tell them” had been Grace’s only attempt at a defense. She didn’t bother to explain which part of their foolhardy plan she tried to warn them about, but it didn’t matter. This was a murder case, and she was to be held as an accessory and witness for the duration. She might not testify against her husband, but she’d certainly be expected to tell what she knew about the others.

  Next to her was Ida Smith, and next to Ida was Louise Wilson. The two girls, both eighteen, had gone with two boys in a hired car to New York. The boys (one of whom was Louise’s brother) had been drinking all day and were in such a violent temper that they argued with the chauffeur over the charges until all three men were in a fistfight while the automobile careened down the road. The machine ran into a ditch. Its occupants suffered only bruises and scratches, but the boys took it into their heads to rob the chauffeur and run off, dragging the girls, complaining, behind them. The police were convinced that this wasn’t the first time the boys had tried a scheme like that, and expected the girls to help build a case against them. So far, Ida and Louise were standing pat.

  “Any news of the trial?” Ida asked when she saw me.

  “No, but I wouldn’t necessarily be told. I thought you were to see a lawyer yesterday.”

  “My parents were here! I saw them from the window. They spoke to my brother, but they didn’t want to talk to me or Ida,” Louise said mournfully. “I waited all day to be called down. Finally the guard told me they’d left hours ago. If they had a lawyer with them, I never saw him.”

  This was why I didn’t like to have family members in the same jail together. Although they were kept on different floors and weren’t allowed to see each other, matters between them could get complicated quickly. But I didn’t want Louise to be overlooked, and felt it incumbent upon her brother to make sure that she was taken care of.

  “I’ll go to see your brother and find out if there’s an attorney on the case,” I said.

  “What about me?” called Ida.

  “You have a letter from your father,” I said. “Answer it.”

  The younger the inmate, the less likely she might be to correspond with her family and own up to her mistakes. I thought it a valuable character-building exercise, and kept a close eye on the letters coming in and going out to make sure that my girls weren’t hiding from their relations. They would need them someday—they just didn’t know it.

  The next two inmates in the female section had each acted alone. An urbane young woman named Nancy Fyfe had been arrested for driving an automobile recklessly while wearing apparel that, in the opinion of the police officer, would distract her attention from driving: a floppy hat, a veil, and a scarf. She shouldn’t have been in jail for long over such a minor infraction, but there was some delay in persuading a friend to wire her the money for the fine, so there she sat.

  Next to her on the cell block was an actress named Ruth Williams. She’d been arrested for breaking into homes in Fort Lee to steal jewelry and silver. She was found in possession of a diamond bracelet worth fifty dollars that had been reported as stolen to the police, so her conviction was almost certain. She claimed that she was out of work and only broke into houses so that she might have enough to eat, but no judge would be sympathetic to that story. All robbers needed the money.

  I had been encouraging Ruth Williams to look into stenography as a more respectable line of work than actress turned house-robber. Ruth was no girl of eighteen with aspirations for the stage: she’d put in her time behind the footlights and looked a bit worn around the edges after so many years in pursuit of success. When she first came in, I praised her for sidestepping the usual traps that a woman in her situation might fall into, namely, that of allowing men to set her up in an apartment or to favor her with just enough jewelry, trinkets, and free dinners to keep her going.

  “Oh!” she said, laughing, the first time I ventured into that line of discussion. “I did plenty of that, too, until there were younger and prettier girls to take my place. I might as well try my hand at stenography. I’m starting to look the part.”

  Since then, she’d applied herself to the courses, and was in fact working her way through a little booklet when I walked into her cell block.

  “If I were anywhere but a jail cell,” she said, without looking up from her book, “this would be too dull to bother with. But in here, it helps to pass the time. I might learn a little French, if you have a phrase-book.”

  “Je vous en ramènerai un,” I told her, “et je vous aiderai à pratiquer.”

  “You speak so beautifully,” called Nancy from the next cell over. “Ruthie only needs enough French to allow her to run off with a Frenchman. Have you a special course for that?”

  “We could start with greetings and pleasantries,” I offered.

  “How do you say, ‘Have you a large apartment in Paris, or a small one?’” Ruth asked.

  She was one of those women who was graced with bold and beautiful features: enormous eyes, a wide expressive mouth, and high cheekbones. Even in a plain jail uniform, she was beguiling. Ruth was the kind of woman who could make charming inquiries into the nature of a man’s real estate holdings and get away with it.

  “I believe the custom is to wait for the gentleman to offer that information,” I suggested, to the laughter of both of them.

  “I’ve been waiting fifteen years!” Ruth cried. “I’m going to have to ask the questions myself before I rot away.”

  “You’re not rotting,” I said, and moved on to the next block, which was occupied entirely by strikers from a shirtwaist factory. I’d been sent to watch over the strike, ostensibly to protect the girls from harassment, but found myself obliged to arrest them instead, for throwing rotten eggs at replacement workers. It was the first time I’d seen anything resembling violence at a labor strike, but I’d been warned by the sheriff to make arrests quickly to send a message. The last thing he wanted was a union riot on his hands.

  The girls had only been charged with disturbing the peace, and could’ve been released if they’d paid their fines. They refused to do so in hopes that public sentiment would turn in their favor if they were kept in jail long enough. I could see no evidence that their tactics were working and expected them to serve out the month.

  “Miss Kopp!” one of them called when she saw me.

  “Have you any new
s of the strike? We asked the guard who looked in on us this morning, but he told us to buy a newspaper if we wanted to know.”

  “But we can’t buy a newspaper, because we’re locked up in here,” said another.

  “He was having fun at our expense, you see,” said a third.

  “Yes, it appears he was,” I said. “The strike is over, and I believe your friends have gone back to work.”

  “Without us?” they cried in a chorus.

  “I don’t suppose the factory agreed to our demands,” said Marie, the eldest and most experienced of the group.

  “They did not,” I told her. “I’m sorry it went that way for your cause. Are you entirely sure you wouldn’t rather pay your fines and be released? Couldn’t you do more good out there than in here?”

  “Oh, we have work to do right here in this jail. We decided that you should form a union,” Marie said, “and we’ll help you to organize it.”

  There was a policemen’s union in Hackensack, but the deputies didn’t belong to it. “I don’t believe anyone has ever seen the need for a union,” I said. “Sheriff Heath looks after us.”

  “There won’t always be a Sheriff Heath,” said another, ominously.

  The girls were a quick study on the inner workings of the jail. I would have to remind the guards to keep their voices down.

  “We do just fine,” I said.

  4

  the journey to deliver Anna Kayser to the insane asylum was delayed by a couple of hours owing to the late arrival of Deputy Morris, who was to drive us.