by Amy Stewart
There were only two other inmates under my care: Ida Higgins, who’d been accused of setting fire to her brother’s house over some family dispute we hadn’t yet worked out, and a grandmother charged with neglect after her grandchildren were found locked in a barn and eaten up with lice. The grandmother was senile and possibly insane. She often mumbled to herself but had nothing to say to the rest of us. If we couldn’t get her to tell us something soon, she’d almost certainly be committed to the asylum at Morris Plains and her grandchildren left under the permanent care of an orphanage.
Both she and Ida were snoring quietly in their cells. I was in danger of nodding off myself when Sheriff Heath called to me from the top of the stairs. He’d developed the habit of announcing himself before he entered the female section, which I thought strange considering that there had always been a man working on this floor before. But there he stood, modestly, his eyes on his shoes, so I excused myself and went to see him.
He carried his coat and hat. “Come and help me with a lady in Garfield.”
I could tell from his tone that he didn’t want to discuss it within earshot of the inmates. I put the girls back in their cells. “Do your cleaning,” I told them.
“We clean every day,” Martha protested. “I might like a little dust for company.”
“You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?” Mary called after me. That made Martha laugh.
“Did they give you cigarettes in Newark?” I asked.
“No. That’s why I had to leave.”
I let the girls have their joke and followed Sheriff Heath down the stairs and out to the garage. His mechanic had the wagon out and ready for us.
“We’re just going over to Malcolm Avenue.” He opened the door for me and ran around to the other side. “A lady shot her boarder.”
“What for?” I asked.
“Something about the rent.”
“Are you sure I should go along?” I hadn’t been out with him on a case since the Harold Meeker arrest, two months ago.
He settled in behind the steering wheel and looked at me from under the brim of his hat. “Do you imagine I enjoy having lawyers tell me how to run my office?”
“You are a lawman. You’re expected to follow the law, not just enforce it.”
“This is a murder. It’s the first one involving a female shooter this year. A lady deputy might get a confession where a man wouldn’t.”
He wasn’t asking my opinion, but he did wait and watch me.
“She might.”
“Besides, she’s already been arrested. That makes her my inmate. You have charge of the women, so you should come and collect her. That’s how I see it.”
That suited me just fine, so I didn’t say another word. There rose up in me the peculiar thrill that goes along with a ghastly crime: a woman accused, a fallen victim, and reporters writing their lurid headlines. It was like being on a horse at the moment it broke into a gallop. I was in motion again, at last.
When we reached the corner of Malcolm and Clark, we found two police officers waiting for us on the front lawn of a run-down brick lodging-house. An upstairs window was broken and boarded over. Weeds sprouted from the roof. It looked like the kind of place where people were shot over the rent money.
On the front steps, a man’s shoes sat marooned in a pool of blood. Tufts of clover and dandelion around the steps were smeared with it as well. The officers stood with their hands on their hips, staring down at the mess as if they were reading tea leaves. One of them, Stevens, was a man of about sixty who started working in Hackensack law enforcement when it was nothing but a volunteer protective league equipped with target rifles and draft horses. I hadn’t met the younger officer and took him to be a new recruit.
“Where is she?” Sheriff Heath asked.
“Down in the basement, talking to the detective,” Stevens said. “They just took the victim to the hospital.”
“I take it those are his shoes,” the sheriff said. “Is he still alive?”
The officer shrugged. “For now. She got him in the shoulder, and he sure did bleed. Looks like a goner to me.”
Sheriff Heath sighed and nodded to me. I pulled a notebook out of my handbag. We had to be prepared for the possibility of a confession while she was under our supervision.
“What’s the name of the victim?” I asked.
“Saverio Salino,” the younger officer said. “Are you the new stenographer?”
“This is Miss Kopp,” Sheriff Heath said. “She’s the ladies’ matron at the jail.”
“There’s a lady working at the jail? Inside, you mean?”
Officer Stevens interjected. “They’ve a lady police officer over in Paterson now, too. Looking after dance halls and the like. The mayor doesn’t like to see paint on the girls’ cheeks and she goes around with a handkerchief rubbing it off.”
“If we can get to business,” Sheriff Heath said.
“Salino worked at the munitions plant with Mrs. Monafo,” Stevens said. “She rents rooms to some of the young fellows who work over there.”
“Is that the shooter?” I said. “Munafo?”
“Monafo,” the younger officer repeated, spelling it. “Given name is Providencia.”
“Spanish?” the sheriff asked.
Officer Stevens shrugged. “Italian, more like.”
“They don’t like the war over there, but they come over here and make bullets and bombs,” Sheriff Heath said. “What else do we know?”
“She claims Salino had a sister living with him but refused to pay any extra rent,” Stevens said. “They got into a fight over it and he threatened to beat her up. That’s when she shot him. She got scared and ran right out of here and jumped on a streetcar. Then I guess she thought better of it and came back.”
“She came back?” the sheriff said. “Why?”
“Maybe she had nowhere else to go, or maybe she knew we’d finger her anyway. By the time she got back, Salino had dragged himself up the stairs, and there he lay, in full view. Someone saw him and telephoned.”
“Where’s the sister?” Sheriff Heath asked.
“Nobody’s seen her.”
“How do we know she was really his sister?” I asked.
“Who?” the younger officer said.
Stevens punched him in the arm. “Who do you think? She’s asking if the sister was really his sister, or maybe she was a lady friend.”
The officer rubbed his arm. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You don’t think of much, do you?” Stevens said.
Sheriff Heath was looking restless. “We’d better go meet our prisoner. Who’s down there with her?”
“John Courter.” Stevens made a sympathetic face when he said it.
Sheriff Heath reached up and shifted his hat. “We’ll manage. Let’s go, Miss Kopp.”
It was a popular saying around the Hackensack jail that no sheriff could keep the peace without disturbing it in equal measure. While Sheriff Heath possessed an agreeable and well-mannered disposition, he had more than his share of enemies. Since his election, he’d criticized the Board of Freeholders over the expensive but poorly constructed new jail he was given to run, feuded publicly with the county physician over medical care for the prisoners, and exposed the negligence of Detective John Courter in the newspapers.
This last dispute had been the most costly. A sheriff needed friends in the prosecutor’s office if he wanted to see his cases tried and cleared. But Detective Courter refused to cooperate in any investigation involving the office of the sheriff, and contrived to lose evidence and miss court dates if it would put Sheriff Heath in an unfavorable light.
I was the cause of the trouble between them. When Mr. Courter refused to prosecute the man who was threatening my family, I aired my complaints against him in the newspapers. Since then he’d kept up a steady and persistent feud against the sheriff. I hadn’t seen him in months and wasn’t looking forward to doing so again.
The sheriff jump
ed over the doorstep to avoid the victim’s shoes and the blood stain. He held his hand out to me, a gesture I generally refused on the grounds that I needed no help in getting around, but he took a firm grip on my elbow before I could say anything and pulled me across.
We stood together in the dim, wood-paneled entrance to the boarding-house. A staircase to the right led up to the second floor, and to our left was the door to a parlor apartment. An old gas lamp of yellow glass and tarnished brass swayed above us. A set of pigeon-holes on the wall were marked with the names of each tenant. Saverio Salino occupied a room on the third floor. Mr. and Mrs. Monafo lived in the basement.
I followed Sheriff Heath down to the end of the hall, where a narrow door opened into a makeshift stairwell. Although we could hear Detective Courter talking, there seemed to be no lights on below. He turned around to me.
“Can you see down there?”
“Of course.” I wished he wouldn’t be so careful with me.
He paused and tilted his head in the direction of John Courter’s voice. “I guess I’d better do the talking.”
“Please do.” I couldn’t think of a single civil word to say to that man.
At the bottom of the stairs the sheriff knocked on the door jamb and, without waiting for an answer, entered the shabbiest apartment I’d ever seen. The concrete floors were covered in overlapping rugs that looked like they’d been discarded once, pulled out of the garbage for someone else’s use, and cast off again before being rescued by the Monafos. Mice had chewed holes through the rugs long before President Cleveland took office and returned again at some point during Mr. Roosevelt’s tenure. The walls had been papered with what might have once been a pattern of red and white roses, but now looked like a patchwork of grease stains and nameless filth interlaced with the permanent ochre of tobacco smoke.
The room—and it was only a single large room with a boiler in the back—was incoherently crowded with furniture in the manner of people who could not afford a single nice thing and instead collected every broken and rotten thing that came their way. There were wooden chairs with three legs, pillows leaking their stuffing, tables with holes burned through the top, and a sagging iron bed whose posts were nearly rusted through. In one corner stood an old coal stove and a metal trough for a sink. Judging from the odor of spoiled milk, I gathered that the Monafos had no means of cooling their food. There was also no toilet, which suggested the possibility of an upstairs water closet shared with the boarders, or a privy out back.
In the middle of this mess stood John Courter, his hands in his pockets, looking down on a heap of scarves and rags that contained within it Providencia Monafo. Between the two of them, on a spot of bare floor, was another stagnation of blood. It had begun to attract flies.
“I hope this is the scene of the crime,” I said.
The detective might have been expecting the sheriff to come and take her away, but he wasn’t expecting me. He took a step back when he recognized me.
“Can’t you leave your lady friends at home, Sheriff? This is an official matter.”
“Miss Kopp is the matron at the jail,” Sheriff Heath said stiffly. “She comes along when we have a female to transport. Is Mrs. Monafo to be placed in my custody?”
But Detective Courter hadn’t unhitched himself from the topic. “It’s not my business if you have a girl running a sewing circle at the jail, but this is a murder. I called for a deputy.”
Last year I threw a man against a wall when he made me angry. I’d been trying not to do that anymore. Still, something about Detective Courter made me want to knock him around. The sheriff paid him no attention at all and I endeavored to do the same.
I knelt down in front of the woman. “Mrs. Monafo, we’ve come to take you to the Hackensack jail on the charge of shooting Saverio Salino. Have you anything to say before we go?”
She pulled a scarf away from her face and looked out at me. She was older than I’d expected, with loose folds of skin that wobbled about her chin as she moved, and pale, shriveled lips. A shock of gray hair fell across her eyes.
“I shoot him to protect me.” She spoke English with the Italian cadence common to the immigrants who worked in the factories. “He make threat to attack me and then to kill me, and he say my husband never know what happen.”
Detective Courter jingled the coins in his pocket. “I’m pretty sure your husband would’ve noticed a dead wife, Mrs. Monafo.” He was one of those men who spoke loudly to immigrants on the assumption that they only understood English if it was shouted at them. “I’d like to know the whereabouts of that husband of yours. If I don’t find your fingerprints on the gun, I’ll be wanting to have a look at his.” He patted his coat pocket, where I supposed he had the gun tucked away.
Providencia Monafo gave a feeble shrug. Sheriff Heath nudged my shoulder and I said, “The detective is here to take your statement.” I made sure each word came out slowly and clearly. “Mr. Salino may die at the hospital.”
What I was trying to let her know, without saying so directly, was that if she confessed to shooting Salino, she might also be confessing to killing him. Sheriff Heath had a similar case go badly last year, when a man confessed to beating a night guard before he knew that the guard had died from the injuries. The confession was thrown out because the man had made it without realizing he was confessing to murder. That man went free. Sheriff Heath didn’t want Mrs. Monafo to be acquitted for the same reason.
My warnings didn’t seem to matter. She jutted out her shaky chin and said, “I shoot him. If he die, they bury him. It don’t matter to me.”
The detective smiled, his mustache stretching and wiggling as he repeated her statement to himself and jotted it down. He closed his notebook and nodded. “Now I’ve you two as witnesses to the confession. I hope you enjoy Mrs. Monafo’s delightful company. She’ll be in your custody for a good long while.”
“That’ll be fine,” I muttered, and reached into the pile of filthy rags that Mrs. Monafo had wrapped around herself. I took hold of an arm and pulled her to her feet. She was only five feet tall, the same as Fleurette. She cackled when she saw the way I towered over her.
“No wonder they make you police,” she said.
4
PROVIDENCIA MONAFO CARRIED with her to jail hundreds of minuscule inmates of the six-legged variety, all latched to her skin and gulping down what was to be their final meal. We kept a separate prisoner entrance for this very reason. Inside, a brick- and concrete-lined hallway led to a tiled shower room that was furnished only with a metal chair and a wire bin.
The chair was for me. I sat just outside the range of the shower and ordered Mrs. Monafo to disrobe and stand under the stream of hot water. To my relief, she obeyed. I didn’t particularly want to get into a struggle over the removal of her clothing. She scrubbed herself with naphtha soap until I told her she could stop. Then I handed her a towel and a cotton gown of the sort issued to hospital patients, and offered my chair to her. Once she was seated, I told her to hold the towel to her face while I combed her hair with mercurial ointment. The more tenacious inhabitants of her scalp came away in drifts, clinging to loose hairs that I dispatched into a jar of alcohol as I worked.
The ointment tended to raise blisters, so I sent her back to the shower for another assault with the soap and hot water. When she was finished I combed her hair again with petroleum oil to smother whatever stowaways remained.
The wire bin was for Mrs. Monafo’s clothing, which would be taken directly outside and burned behind the garage. The hospital gown and towel would go into a bucket of hot water and borax that very night. I issued Mrs. Monafo a new set of underclothes and a house dress, along with a cap for her oily hair and a pair of knitted slippers. I assured her that we’d find her a more serviceable dress in the morning.
This was the method by which every inmate entered the Hackensack jail. It had become an ordinary matter to me. In fact, I took a strange satisfaction from it. I might not ever see these women
cleansed of their crimes and misdeeds, and I might not keep them from misfortune and misery, but I could rid them of vermin and send them to sleep in a clean and quiet bed. For some of them, it was the first night they’d spent free of torment—of one kind or another—in years.
Mrs. Monafo had little to say to me that afternoon. I found it best to leave the women alone at first and to wait for them to come to me if they had something to confide. I put her in a quiet cell at the end of a block and brought her the usual Monday night supper of molasses, bread, and coffee. There was a little mutton stew left from lunch, so I spooned that into a cup as well. She sniffed it dubiously.
“Do you like to cook, Mrs. Monafo?” I asked.
She looked in my direction but didn’t answer.
“The inmates do all the cooking here. It’s a new program of Sheriff Heath’s. Our cook used to make his living as a second-story man, but we’ve found he has a talent for stews and chops as well. Perhaps you’ll cook for us one day.”
She blinked and said nothing. Even in her clean cotton house dress she had the look of a bundle of rags about her. Sometimes the vestiges of a woman’s old life hung on for weeks, and sometimes she never shed them at all.
I WOULD LET Mrs. Monafo rest for a few days and not bother her with the inmate work program. As jail matron I had charge of the women’s duties, which were really nothing but a routine of cooking, laundry, and cleaning, and therefore familiar to them. It was the belief of Sheriff Heath and some of the other more reform-minded sheriffs in the state that the criminal mind could be rehabilitated by imposing order upon a disordered life. According to this line of thinking, women committed fewer crimes precisely because their days were filled with domestic duties.
But we always had a woman or two who managed to stay at home and do the cooking and cleaning while still finding time to commit a monstrous crime. Some of them stitched their drunken husbands into the sheets while they slept and beat them with broom handles. Some of them poisoned their mothers-in-law with spoonfuls of sugar laced with arsenic. Some of them set their houses on fire. They did all of this without ever leaving home.
