by Amy Stewart
Apparently Ida Higgins believed the man to be in love with her and didn’t want to admit that he had set the fire. But he never came to visit her in jail and seemed to have no idea that she had sacrificed her own freedom for his. After weeks of writing letters that went unanswered, she finally grew angry enough to tell the whole story to the prosecutor. She explained that she had seen the man sneak around with cans of gasoline and start the fire, and that she took the cans to hide what he’d done. Following her accusation and the testimony of another witness, the man, who had been jailed for arson before, had been arrested and now resided two floors below.
Because Ida remained in jail only as a witness, she was moved to a quieter cell near mine for the remainder of her detention, and she usually had a chop or a sausage with her dinner. We also allowed her to take a walk outside with a guard. She said she looked forward to taking her walks with me now that I’d returned.
“Are you more comfortable in your new cell?” I asked as I settled back into my own quarters.
“I’d be more comfortable at home,” she said. “I told them it wasn’t me. Why can’t they let me go?”
“Because you’re needed at the trial. You’ll have to testify that you saw the man sneaking around your brother’s place with the gasoline.”
“What do I care about the trial? It’s no business of mine. I don’t want anything more to do with it.”
“That’s exactly why we’re keeping you.”
Then there was the trouble with Providencia Monafo. Sheriff Heath called John Courter over to explain it the day after I returned. The two of them sat in the sheriff’s office looking about as unhappy to be with one another as two men ever have.
Detective Courter cleared his throat and glared at the sheriff. He had an egg-shaped head and wore a tight, stiff collar that made his neck bulge.
“Go ahead,” Sheriff Heath said. “This is your case.”
Detective Courter looked at the space between us for a minute, his lips pressed together. One leg bounced up and down impatiently. There was a kind of smothered anger about him.
Finally he said, “All right. Mrs. Monafo claimed that Saverio Salino went to her apartment in the morning to pay rent and they argued over his sister living there. Then he threatened her and she shot him. She was so frightened, she said, that she ran out of the house and boarded the streetcar. It’s the same car she takes to work every morning, and the driver recognized her. After she rode a few stops, she thought better of it and got off and made her way back home—for reasons of her own that none of us entirely understand. By that time, Salino had dragged himself up the stairs and someone saw him. That’s when we were called.”
He seemed to be waiting for some kind of answer, so I said, “Yes, that’s how I recall it. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is that I have witnesses who heard the shot at eight o’clock in the morning, and Mrs. Monafo boarded that streetcar at seven-thirty.”
I looked back and forth at them, puzzled. “But she confessed. Someone must have the time wrong.”
Detective Courter shook his head. “The streetcar driver was on his first route of the morning and knows exactly what time he started. He has to get out and punch a card in Hackensack, and he punched it a few minutes before eight. Mrs. Monafo was on board. And don’t tell me he mistook her for someone else. You’ve seen her.”
“But the witnesses who heard the shot could have been mistaken.”
The detective paced around the room. “The man down the street sets his alarm clock for seven-thirty every morning and sits down in his kitchen just before eight to have breakfast. He heard the shot from the kitchen. There’s absolutely no possibility that he was up an hour earlier than usual. His wife and children agreed that there had been no change to his morning routine. I have another witness who was walking nearby on his way to open his shop, and his stock boy also tells me that the shop definitely did not open early.”
He walked up to a stack of ledger books on the table under the window and opened the top one, flipping through it casually, looking at the names of the inmates and the pictures we’d taken of each one of them. Sheriff Heath made a move to stop him, the records being none of Detective Courter’s business, but then stayed quiet.
“But why would Mrs. Monafo confess if she didn’t shoot him?” I asked.
Detective Courter looked pointedly at the sheriff, who said, “Miss Kopp has spent the most time with her. Let her try.” Turning to me, he added, “Go and talk to her again about what happened. Find out what you can about her life. See if you can come up with another motive for the shooting. Ask her why she went back. Maybe someone else did it and she took responsibility.”
The detective grumbled something unintelligible and dropped back into his chair.
“John, she can manage it,” the sheriff said, glancing quickly at me.
“We need detectives talking to suspects,” he said. “If this had happened six months ago, you would’ve sent me up to talk to her.”
“And you wouldn’t have gotten a confession,” the sheriff said. “You know that. We’ve always had trouble with female suspects. That’s why I hired a matron. Let Miss Kopp do her job, and if she doesn’t make any headway, we’ll call you right over.”
He looked back and forth between the two of us for a minute and then pushed his chair away and walked out of the room, slamming the door a little too loudly.
Sheriff Heath jumped up to follow him out. “I don’t like this,” he said to me. “Go talk to her.”
IT WAS THE dim, quiet hour just before dinner, when the older women were rousing themselves slowly from their naps. This was when I preferred to sit down with one or the other of them and try to win their confidence. The understanding that they were in jail—and therefore not obligated to cook dinner—dawned on them with a kind of muted relief. They were philosophical at that time and more willing to talk, unlike the younger girls, who preferred to come to me at midnight, when their fears and secrets kept them awake and aflame. The older women didn’t let their lies and treachery deprive them of sleep. They took their secrets to bed like hot-water bottles and snored on top of them all night long.
I found Mrs. Monafo awake and sitting on the edge of her bunk, looking down at her feet. When she first came to us, there had been sores between her toes that looked like they hadn’t healed in years. I’d been persistent with the petroleum oil and the delousing powder, and at last they had started to fade. She was looking down at them, twisting them back and forth to view from all sides, as if she was sizing them up and deciding to what use she might put them. She looked up and saw me standing outside her cell.
“They don’t swell like they used to,” she said.
“They look better.”
“At the plant I’m on my feet ten, twelve hours. Here we do washing in the morning and that is all. My feet get a rest.”
“Don’t tell the sheriff you’re enjoying a nice rest in his jail. He’ll find another job for you.”
“Oh, I don’t say I enjoy it. But there is less to do. What my husband is doing without me—” She shrugged and gave a silent little laugh that turned into a cough.
“Will your husband pay you a visit?”
She pushed out her lower lip and gave the tiniest shake of her head. “He don’t want to come. Don’t like police.”
“Then he should write you a letter.”
“I never see him write.”
She wouldn’t look at me. I opened the door to her cell and sat down next to her. Still she kept her eyes on her feet.
“Why don’t I go and see him?” I asked. “You’ve been here a week. He must wonder. I could let him know that you’re being taken care of, at least.”
“No,” she said quickly. She eased herself off the edge of the bunk and went to the basin, but just stood over it, staring at the wall. Her shoulders slumped like a sack of potatoes. She had a way of shuffling around as if she had no legs at all, only a pair of feet attached to a shapeless
form.
“We’ll send him a letter when it comes time for your trial,” I said. “He has a right to be there.” Detective Courter hadn’t mentioned her husband, and I wondered whether he’d been interviewed.
“Why have a trial, lady? I shoot the boy and I go to prison. What else is there to say?” Her mouth sagged into a defiant frown that she’d probably worn all her life.
“The prosecutor will have some questions for you, even if you do make a full confession. They always do.”
She tilted her head and considered that. “What kind of question?”
I pretended to think about it for a minute. “He might wonder why a man would be shot over a single month’s rent. It’s a small amount of money for such a serious crime.”
“I tell him pay that rent or else! He make threat to me.”
“I’m sure he did. The prosecutor might also ask why you came back after you’d already run off. You were right there when the police arrived.”
“Where would I go so they don’t find me? I make it easy for them.” She groaned and put a hand on her hip, and eased herself back down to the bunk.
She’d confided nothing so far and I didn’t think she was going to. I had to tell her what I knew, or Detective Courter would, and he wouldn’t be so kind about it. “Oh, you did make it easy,” I said. “The only trouble is that the prosecutor has to go around and find witnesses to tell what they saw, too.”
She had the small black eyes of a bird. She fixed them on me now. “Nobody saw.”
“But someone heard.”
She shook her head defiantly. “They don’t hear nothing.”
“Mrs. Monafo. Your neighbors heard the shot. We know they did. Only they didn’t hear it until after you boarded that streetcar.”
Her fingers worked at the seam of her house dress and she crossed her ankles and then uncrossed them.
“This could be good news for you. If they think someone else shot Saverio Salino, they’ll let you go. You can return home to your husband. Wouldn’t you like that?”
She had worked a bit of thread loose and she was pulling on it. The seam was unraveling. I didn’t bother to stop her. She would stitch it back together in the morning.
“You tell them,” she said quietly. “You tell them I shoot Salino. He die?”
“Yes.”
She pushed her chin out. “You tell them I kill him.”
SHERIFF HEATH DID NOT find this to be a satisfactory answer and told me to keep after her. “I don’t want to jail an innocent woman or let a murderer go free. We need an honest confession. It’s one of the reasons I gave for hiring a matron, so see to it that I wasn’t wrong.”
I let her think it over and went to her again the next day. She had been excused from laundry duty over a stiff knee. After I took the other women downstairs to do their work, I went into her cell to talk.
“Lady!” she called when she saw me. “What he say?”
“What did who say?”
“The little detective. When you tell him I shoot Salino.”
“Mrs. Monafo, I told you he wouldn’t listen to anything but new evidence. There’s nothing I can do unless you can tell us something else about that morning.”
She nodded. “He tell me that.”
“Detective Courter? When did you see him?”
“Just now,” she said, looking a little surprised that I didn’t know. “He just come here. I ask for you but he say you went home.”
“I was only down in the laundry.” I should have known that he would find a way to interrogate her when I was away. I tried to keep my face passive. “What did he say?”
She motioned for me to come closer. Even after she’d been subjected to the jail’s rigorous grooming requirements, Providencia Monafo was not the kind of woman I wanted to get very close to. I always had the feeling that something would jump on me if I did: a louse, or a curse.
But as Sheriff Heath reminded me, it was my job to hear confessions, so I sat next to her on the bunk and waited.
“He keep asking about my husband,” she said in a creaky voice barely above a whisper.
“And what has happened to Mr. Monafo?” I asked.
She put a hand to her chest and murmured a little prayer in Italian.
“You can speak to God all day, but you might help yourself by speaking to me right now,” I said, as gently as I could. Already I was beginning to fear that I knew the truth, that it was her husband who shot Salino and she had taken the blame to protect him. Did I have an epidemic on my hands of women serving jail time for men’s crimes?
Providencia’s hands were like rough old claws. When she wrapped them around mine I didn’t dare pull away for fear of getting scratched. “I tell you the truth. It was me who shoot Salino.”
“Yes, but Detective Courter has witnesses—”
She leaned in and gripped me even more forcefully. “Listen, lady. I shoot him. But I don’t aim for him.”
All at once I understood. A prickly chill settled in around my shoulders. I hoped my expression didn’t give me away, but Providencia squinted at me with those coal-black eyes of hers and sat back, satisfied.
“I aim for my husband. Salino come up behind him to pay rent but I don’t see him in time. My husband jump and Salino get the bullet.”
She released my hands with a great flurry of her fingers, the way a soothsayer delivers a spell. We each took a deep breath at the same time, exchanging old air for new and a lie for the truth.
Providencia leaned back against the wall and cast her eyes across her cell as if she were seeing a distant horizon. I followed suit and wondered how different her faraway vision must have looked from mine.
“So you see,” she said, “I tell the truth. I stay in jail.”
“But the witnesses,” I said feebly. “Detective Courter is absolutely sure the shots couldn’t have been fired when you said they were.”
Without taking her eyes away from whatever she saw beyond her cell walls, she said, “I don’t know about witness. I tell the truth.”
“But he wants to set you free, and I don’t see why . . .”
But then I did. Of course I did.
Providencia was terrified of her husband. I sat with my hands in my lap and my head cocked back against the wall and let her tell it to me. He was a drunkard and a gambler. He once held a job at the munitions plant but he’d been stealing gunpowder and selling it. When he got caught, they fired him, and Providencia went to beg the foreman to give him back his job. He refused, but he took pity on Providencia and let her work on the cleaning crew, which was so closely watched that no one had a chance to steal anything. Providencia worked ten hours a day at the factory and spent her nights keeping house and looking after the boarders, which, she said, exhausted her. (I’d seen no evidence of housekeeping or caretaking around her boarding-house but didn’t say it.)
Lacking any sort of employment, Mr. Monafo took to spending all day in the saloons and became a violent and angry drunkard. He bellowed insults at Providencia over their reduced circumstances, caused mostly by his drinking and gambling, and once threw burning coals at her, nearly setting the place on fire. He frightened the boarders so much that two of them moved out. When Providencia told him that he would have to go and find a job to make up for the lost rent, he picked up a chair and swung it at her. She landed on her hip when she fell—which had to be why she shuffled around unevenly—and the chair shattered.
Providencia was tormented in this manner for months before another woman at the factory offered her a gun. It was intended as a preventative measure only, to give her some protection while she packed a few things and fled. The woman who brought it to her told her that if her husband saw her leaving, she had only to wave it at him and he would quiet down and let her go.
“She don’t know my husband,” Providencia concluded grimly. “Nothing will settle him down but a blow to the head.”
“Or a bullet?”
She nodded. “He come for me and I shoot.
What else can I do?”
“You could have called the police.” I knew what a poor suggestion it was but felt obligated to make it nonetheless.
She didn’t bother responding to that. She patted my knee and, groaning, pushed herself to her feet. “I stay here,” she said, with a note of cheer in her voice as if that was all it took to settle the matter. “My husband”—and here she waved her arm triumphantly to indicate the world outside the jail—“he stay out there.”
At last I understood why she had turned back toward home. She might have run out in a terror after shooting Salino, but once she sat down in that trolley car and had a moment to think, she realized that her husband was still alive, and that he’d seen her aim the gun at him. The plain truth was that she was safer in jail. If she tried to run, he would find her. She went directly back to the crime scene with the hope of being arrested.
Even in her rehabilitated state, there was a wildness about Providencia. She never pinned her hair up like the other women, and instead let it crowd around her shoulders like a thicket of briars. She tended to hunch her shoulders forward when she spoke as if everything she had to say was a secret. A black mole sat just above the corner of her mouth, and one cheek was fatter than the other, causing one eye to squint while the other gaped open. She had the air of a mystic or a witch.
“Strega,” she said, standing over me and putting her hands on my shoulders.
“Strega?” I repeated.
“In Italy we say strega for witch.”
How did she know what I was thinking?
“You look at me and think I look like witch,” she said. “I know you.”
I’d had a lot of strange conversations under this roof, but this had to be the strangest.
“I know you,” she said again. “They put you in jail just like me. What did you do?”
