by Amy Stewart
“You’ll be all right.” The sheriff stood and shook out his coat. “It just so happens that witnesses in the custody of the sheriff are entitled to a decent breakfast. Get yourselves washed up, both of you, and we’ll go.”
There was a water closet in the hall. Sheriff Heath took Reinhold there while I washed my face in the rusty water from the bathtub. When we were as clean as we could make ourselves, we stepped out into the cold and quiet street at the one hour when it was truly empty, when even the pickpockets were asleep. The street lamps were still lit, faintly amber in the bluish light around dawn. Not a single shop was open.
Sheriff Heath allowed Reinhold to walk with his hands cuffed in front of him, concealed in the folds of his coat. He kept hold of the boy’s elbow on one side and I took the other. We must have looked like an odd trio, this boy who was just a little younger than Fleurette walking arm in arm with a woman of thirty-six and a man of about the same age. We could have been mistaken for his parents, if only he resembled either one of us.
It was just before seven in the morning. Von Matthesius was expected at the Borough Hall subway station at ten. I was eager to get there and didn’t want to linger over breakfast. Reinhold, however, claimed to be faint from hunger and the sheriff insisted that we stop.
Near Astor Place was a lunchroom that opened early to feed truckmen and hack drivers. We took our seats at the counter and were quickly furnished with eggs and rolls. Reinhold asked for corned beef hash and the sheriff indulged him and even ordered a corned beef sandwich to be wrapped up and put in his pocket. As we blew on our coffee, Reinhold looked back and forth between us.
“Do you always take a lady along to chase after people?” he asked the sheriff. “Wouldn’t you rather have another fellow? What if I’d been hard to catch?”
“Oh, you don’t want Miss Kopp chasing after you,” Sheriff Heath said. “She nearly choked a man in Times Square recently.”
“He deserved it,” I said.
Reinhold sopped up the rest of his hash with a roll and chewed it thoughtfully, looking me over. “Doesn’t your husband want you home at night?”
“I haven’t got one,” I said, “and I can’t imagine a husband who would approve of overnight trips to East Side flats with the two of you.”
“Then you won’t ever marry, or else you’d have to give this up.”
I drank the last of my coffee and said, “I might be giving it up anyway, depending on how the day goes.”
“The sheriff must not be married either,” he said as Sheriff Heath paid the bill and led us out into a bright, windy morning, “because I know a wife wouldn’t stand for the two of you running around together all night.”
“That’s enough, Mr. Dietz,” the sheriff said, pushing him against the wall of the lunchroom to handcuff him again.
“Ow!” the boy cried. The sheriff might have been a little rough.
“He didn’t mean anything by it,” I muttered as we turned toward the subway station.
“Course he did,” the sheriff said, without looking at me. He bought two newspapers and we took them on the train.
“Don’t I get a paper?” Reinhold asked.
“It’s just something to hide behind if we need it.” The sheriff passed a paper to me and rattled his to signal that he didn’t want to be disturbed. Reinhold looked around, restless as a little boy, and rubbed his wrists against his knees.
“Couldn’t you take these off while we’re on the train?” he said with a child’s whine in his voice. “You know I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t know anything about you, Reinhold,” the sheriff said mildly, not looking up from his newspaper. “You fell asleep during our interrogation last night. I didn’t find out anything I wanted to know.”
“That was an interrogation?” He tried to maneuver the sandwich out of his pocket. “I thought you and me were just talking.”
“I’ll give you a little advice, son. When a sheriff’s asking you questions, you’re never just talking.”
I pretended to study my newspaper, but there was nothing on my mind but my fugitive. The train swayed and shook on its tracks, and when we went under the river the pressure in my ears was so fierce that I couldn’t hear anything for a minute. I felt like I was in a trance, the world suddenly hushed, this enormous piece of machinery carrying men in their good suits and women in their fur collars alongside the three of us, three people who’d slept in our street clothes and waited all night for another chance at catching our man.
I became suddenly aware that I had no idea what we’d do if von Matthesius wasn’t there. I bent down to Reinhold and said quietly, “Where’s tomorrow’s meeting place?”
Sheriff Heath glanced at me over Reinhold’s bowed head. I could tell he already knew the answer.
“Nobody’s told me nothing about tomorrow,” the boy mumbled. “This is the end of the line.”
24
THE TRAIN LURCHED into the Borough Hall station. Sheriff Heath took Reinhold’s arm and I followed them onto the platform. Before we went up the stairs, he pulled me aside but kept Reinhold as far away as possible without letting go of him. He spoke right into my ear in a low voice.
“Reinhold doesn’t know which entrance von Matthesius prefers. We’ve got plenty of time, so let’s walk around the station and decide which one we’ll each take. I’m going to keep Reinhold with me. If you spot von Matthesius first, you’re just going to have to chase him down. I don’t want you pulling out your revolver with all of these people around.”
I nodded. “Couldn’t we call in the police and have a few officers nearby?”
“Not now. I’m afraid they’ll scare him off. He’s probably already suspicious about Reinhold not making the meeting last night. Besides, the police won’t recognize him like we will and I don’t want them grabbing the wrong man. You and I are going to have to do this ourselves.”
We climbed the stairs and emerged into the frigid wind that had whipped up in front of Borough Hall. A steady stream of black motor cars raced past on Court Street. We were just a few blocks from Atlantic Avenue, in that part of Brooklyn where the streets made unexpected turns and dissolved into a mess of oddly arranged intersections and sidewalks that didn’t lead where you expected them to. All three of us stood for a minute and tried to get our bearings.
“Oh!” I said, once I’d picked out a few landmarks around me. “I used to take dancing lessons around the corner.”
“Dancing! You?” Reinhold Dietz said in surprise, earning him a sharp poke in the back from Sheriff Heath.
“Everyone took dancing,” I said. “It was just down Court, on the other side of Atlantic. My uncle worked there. He played the piano.” I hadn’t had much reason to be in Brooklyn since I was a girl. It was a strange feeling to be standing on a street I’d passed almost every day twenty years ago. What would that girl think if she could see me?
There were two entrances to the station in front of Borough Hall, one facing Court and the other Boerum. The sheriff took us over to the other entrance, and from there we circled the block to make sure we weren’t missing another way out.
We had to be standing on the busiest street corner in Brooklyn. The trolley rattled in its tracks, mothers walked small herds of children to school, and peddlers pushed their carts of apples, hot buns, and the best of whatever they’d picked up on the street the night before—battered pots and pans, strips of fabric, dirty glass bottles and jars, and fat tallow candles, all half-burned. A girl of about eleven pulled a wagon filled with potted red geraniums. From some window high above us, a child dutifully practiced at the organ. There were bells clanging and engines growling and the chatter of a thousand people all around us, in every direction, block after block. At home in Wyckoff we could see straight to the horizon without a single person in our line of vision, but here there was no horizon, just more of Brooklyn, and more beyond that, until it dropped straight off into the water.
Somehow, in the middle of all of it, we were
to find and capture a fugitive.
“All right,” the sheriff said when we’d circled the block and come back to where we’d started. “We’ll stay here on the Court Street side, and you go to the other entrance. Don’t cross the street, but keep your eye on the corner and look around the side of Borough Hall as well. We don’t know whether he’ll be coming in or out of the station, so just stay close. Mr. Dietz doesn’t seem to think he’ll be early. Roam around for a while so you don’t attract too much attention, but by nine-thirty you should be at your post and stay there.”
Reinhold was fidgeting in his cuffs. “Say, Sheriff, they’re a little tight this morning. Couldn’t you just loosen them?”
“Not now, son,” the sheriff said. He took me by the arm and leaned closer so Reinhold couldn’t hear. “Are you ready for this?”
In truth, my heart was racing, a vein in my forehead was pounding, and I was sweating under my collar in spite of the cold. I might have been starting to see spots. A woman who faints would have gone looking for a bench right about then.
But I wasn’t the type to faint. “I’m the one who took Felix, remember? We’ll get him.”
He held my elbow for just a second longer and looked closely at me.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Be careful,” he said, although he couldn’t possibly have meant it. We didn’t catch crooks by being careful.
“I certainly will not.” Reinhold heard that and smiled.
“You’ll be free before lunch,” I told the boy, and went to stand at my post.
No hour ever passed so slowly. I would’ve never guessed that a life in law enforcement was mostly spent waiting, that catching criminals requires not just clever thinking and a quick step, but a willingness to stand still while the rest of the world moves about, and that what was required was not strength or grit but the ability to get into place and stay there, and to ignore the desperate rising certainty that something more urgent might be happening, somewhere, and that if only one could leave one’s post and tear down the street in pursuit, some kind of prey would surely leap up and allow itself to be caught.
For an hour I had to fight the urge to grab hold of something, to wrestle anyone down to the ground. A policeman at his post could be a very dangerous creature. If I’d so much as seen a pickpocket lifting a handkerchief, I would’ve torn him apart. So far the criminals were leaving this block of Brooklyn alone. It was well for them that they did.
Sheriff Heath asked me to move around, so I shifted my position from the top of the stairs at the entrance to the subway, to the hack stand at the corner, to the doorway of a little printing shop that seemed mostly to print announcements and proclamations issued by Borough Hall. If I stood at a particular point near the hack stand, and if Sheriff Heath happened to be walking toward Court Street at the same time, I could see him pacing as well, his hand on Reinhold’s elbow.
I wondered what they talked about in their hour together. Sheriff Heath would undoubtedly be attempting to set the boy straight and convince him to stay away from Rudy and to take a legitimate job or enroll in some kind of course. He would have admonished him for hitting Reverend Weber. Whenever I had a glimpse of Reinhold, his head was down and he was nodding slightly as if he was listening. I had my doubts as to whether an hour-long sermon from the sheriff of Bergen County would turn his life around.
At last the hands of my watch reached nine-thirty and I took my post at the top of the stairs. Every man, woman, and child who walked in and out of the station got my full scrutiny, as did everyone passing by on the sidewalk and anyone I could see getting in or out of a motor car. I reminded myself that von Matthesius would have made himself as unremarkable as he possibly could. He would wear an ordinary suit and a plain hat. He would make himself hard to spot.
It wasn’t easy to watch every face. Men had the maddening habit of walking in groups of three or four, clustering together and hiding behind one another so that I couldn’t get a good look at each of them. They wrapped scarves around their necks. They pulled their hats down over their heads. They looked away at exactly the wrong moment.
Half a dozen looked enough like von Matthesius to make me want to run over and knock them to the ground. Every time, I saw that I had the wrong man only a moment before I jumped.
Then I turned and saw him coming up from the dark, climbing the stairs out of the station, in a gray overcoat too big for him and a hat down over his eyes.
I’d been picturing that man’s face every day for six weeks and I knew it in an instant. As soon as he stepped foot on the pavement I slipped in behind him, twisting one of his arms behind his back and kicking the back of his knee to throw him down. He fought harder and faster than I was prepared for. When he spun around, his elbow hit me directly in the face and knocked me back. More people were coming out of the subway station all around us and we were both about to lose our footing.
I only had hold of his coat and feared he would shake himself loose and run. “You’re under arrest!” I shouted, hoping to attract Sheriff Heath’s attention or at least get some help from the men around me.
Von Matthesius’s eyes connected with mine for only a second before he looked over my shoulder, at the brick-lined stairway descending into the subway station, and threw his weight against me. I lost my footing and fell, but I took him with me, and the two of us rolled halfway down the staircase. We would have tumbled all the way to the bottom if not for the train passengers climbing up at the same time.
I hit the stairs first and he landed on top of me. A blinding white pain in my ribs made me lose my grip on him and he struggled to his knees, looking around for a way out. His feet found their purchase and he was about to run when I grabbed his pants leg and pulled him down again. His face hit the sharp edge of the stairs and he let out a high shriek.
I was dimly aware of the shoes and trouser cuffs gathered around us, but no one reached down to stop me—or to help me. I climbed over his backside in what had to be the most undignified position a woman had ever been seen in on the streets of Brooklyn. One of his hands was pinned underneath me and the other flailed around and tried to grab me. I wanted to reach under my coat to free my handcuffs, but I couldn’t get to them.
“Sheriff! Clear the way!” came a voice above me, and Sheriff Heath was on the stairs. His foot landed heavily on von Matthesius’s shoulder, eliciting another groan. I rolled off him and sat on the step, panting, fumbling for my handcuffs. One of the Baron’s hands was still groping around to get hold of me when I locked the cuffs on it. Sheriff Heath pulled his other arm around. Once we had him chained, we dragged him to the top of the stairs and pulled him to his feet.
The Baron’s head was turned away from us, but the crowd of onlookers took a good look at him and gasped. Blood was running freely from his mouth, the result of a hard fall on an unyielding staircase that split his lip and knocked out a tooth.
He spit the tooth out along with a small and viscous pool of blood, stared down at it, and mumbled, “Ich möchte ihn behalten.”
I turned to the sheriff, who was staring at me with a kind of fierce and terrible wonder. There passed between us a feeling that no one can understand who hasn’t hunted and captured a criminal. No matter what else had happened between us, we were one person at that instant. We’d done something together that few people ever do. I didn’t want to say anything that would pull us out of that moment, but time hadn’t stopped and the crowd was pressing in on us.
“He wants to keep the tooth,” I said.
The sheriff laughed and shook his head. The spell was broken. “There’s no harm in it. Go ahead.”
I picked it up with a handkerchief and pocketed it. With great effort the three of us started walking, the Baron and I each groaning over our own injuries. The crowd around us had grown so large that I couldn’t see past it. We each held on to the old man, but neither one of us could stand to look at him. He was a dirty and deceitful creature and now that we’d caught him, we were both disgust
ed with him, and disgusted with everything he’d cost us—our time, our reputations, possibly even our livelihoods. He was a trophy we didn’t want. It was like winning a raffle only to find that the prize was something monstrous and disgusting—a catch of rotten fish, a pig dead of scours.
Sheriff Heath looked around and said, in a voice loud enough for all of them to hear, “Herman Albert von Matthesius, you are under arrest by the Sheriff of Bergen County, New Jersey.” By then we’d attracted the attention of a few police officers, who ran over to offer their help in getting us all back to Hackensack.
I would’ve expected Reinhold Dietz to disappear, still in his handcuffs, the minute Sheriff Heath let go of him. But he stood by, just behind the crowd gathered around us, and waited with a kind of trusting patience. The sheriff handed me his keys and I released the boy, smiling down on him as I did.
“You did a fine job,” I told him as he rubbed his wrists. “You helped us catch a dangerous criminal. You’d make a good cop if you’d set yourself to it.”
“That’s what the sheriff told me,” he said, and tipped his cap at me. He was across the street and out of sight before I could say another word to him.
25
GIRL DEPUTY SHERIFF “PINCHES” A MINISTER
Jersey Woman Wrestles with Husky Prisoner in Front of Brooklyn Borough Hall
BROOKLYN—Miss Constance Kopp, who once hid behind a tree near her home in Wyckoff, N.J., for five hours waiting to get a shot at a gang of Black Handers who had annoyed her, is now Deputy Sheriff of Bergen County, N.J., and a terror to evildoers.
Armed with a pistol, handcuffs and other accessories, she came over to Brooklyn yesterday and made an arrest in a manner at once neat and thorough. She stepped up to a husky, well-dressed man in front of Borough Hall and tapped him on the shoulder.
Norma put the newspaper down. “You didn’t get all those bruises from tapping a man on the shoulder.”
I groaned and shifted the pack of ice under my arm. “Of course not. It was nothing like that.”
