by Amy Stewart
After that, I vowed to stay away from him. Sheriff Heath wanted the strictest possible jail sentence for the old man, which meant that we’d have him for a good long while. I couldn’t stand to be under the same roof with him and only hoped he would never be afforded my services as a translator again.
Felix would come up for trial soon for harboring a fugitive, and the Baron would receive a longer sentence for his escape. The Baron had managed to secure an attorney to defend both of them. The attorney made liberal use of the jail’s visiting hours, speaking to each von Matthesius in turn and undoubtedly helping to pass information between them. This caused Sheriff Heath no end of vexation, but there was little we could do about it.
I couldn’t understand why Felix remained so stubbornly silent. The Baron was not a man anyone should defend. He was a fraud and a con artist. He’d taken in sick people under false pretenses, failed to treat them, abused them, and made them sicker. Beatrice Fuller could have died from an overdose of ether. She’d have to start her life over again, if she ever got well.
Why would Felix help a man like that? It was a complicated job, rigging together a system of notes and packages and envelopes of money to hide his brother all over the city. For his loyalty he would get nothing but a jail sentence. He should have turned his brother over to us when he still had a chance at freedom.
The two of them sat resolutely behind bars, having decided, apparently, that they would trade their liberty for familial solidarity. Sometimes a family was like a swamp, everyone mired in the same mud.
AS SOON AS I had an afternoon free, I took the train to Rutherford and knocked on Dr. Williams’s door. I arrived just five minutes before the conclusion of his midday office hours. The door opened immediately—he was on his way out, in his coat and hat—and he nodded when he saw me, as if he’d been expecting me.
“It’s our lady cop,” he said, with a shy and sudden smile. “I saw you in the papers.”
“I’ve only come to ask after Mrs. Burkhart,” I said.
“Well, since you paid the bill, you have every right to. I’m afraid the news is not encouraging.” Dr. Williams had a friendly and open face, and lively eyes that seemed to take everything in, but he delivered his opinions in that flat, matter-of-fact way that doctors had. “She suffers from a cancer that has struck her liver and, I suspect, the other major organs. There are further difficulties that come from all the years she worked at that tannery.”
“Can she be made comfortable?”
“Morphine will make anyone comfortable if they’ll take it. I left her with a good supply and instructions to call the druggist if she needed more.”
“I wonder what her son’s going to do.”
“He’s an anxious and fearful boy. If he were mine, I’d get him work on board a ship, or send him out West. He could use a little adventure, and he isn’t getting it in Rutherford. I suppose the war might be just the thing for him if we go, and if he can manage to stay alive over there.”
I didn’t want to think about motherless, fatherless Louis Burkhart at the Belgian front, but it was the way we were starting to see all young men: soon to disappear, the minute President Wilson decided to send them. “He has an uncle in Brooklyn. They run another shoe store.”
“Then he’ll go there.”
“There is one other matter, if you have the time,” I said.
He nodded, but didn’t invite me in. We stood on the porch, our hands in our pockets.
“I learned some things about Dr. von Matthesius after I spoke to you,” I said. “It has to do with a physician in New York, and I wonder if you’ve heard of him. Dr. Milton Rathburn.”
The wind lifted Dr. Williams’s hat and he pushed it down. “Rathburn. Caters to nervous millionaires, is that right?”
“That’s the one. Have you ever spoken to him?”
“No, the way I’d put it is that he spoke to me. He was making calls to doctors up here, looking for a business arrangement. He wanted to set up a home offering rest cures and take a share in the profits.”
“And you wouldn’t agree to it, but Dr. von Matthesius did,” I said.
“Is that what von Matthesius was up to? He went into business with Rathburn?”
“How do you suppose the two of them met?”
“I can’t imagine. Von Matthesius wasn’t practicing medicine in Rutherford, as far as I know. They could have met in a bar-room and worked up the whole scheme right over there.” He nodded toward the saloons off Park Street.
“Whatever happened, it caused an awful lot of trouble,” I said. “He must have treated a hundred patients—if you can call it treatment—and I only learned what happened to one of them.”
“Is that the girl? The one he tried to marry?”
“Yes. I can’t help but wonder how many more there were, and how such a thing could be allowed to happen right here in Rutherford. Isn’t there anything to stop a man like von Matthesius from opening his house to patients and doing as he pleases?”
Dr. Williams buttoned his collar against the wind. “Putting him in jail is a good way to stop him, but I take it you see that as a temporary situation. There’s a great deal more to be done, Miss Kopp. I’ve long argued that we need medical inspectors in each town, and wouldn’t you know that they’ve gone and put me in charge here in Rutherford. I’ll be going around to check on the other doctors, as well as the hospitals and sanitariums, which is sure to make me popular among my colleagues. I can keep him out of Rutherford, but I can’t do much about the rest of the state or the country. I don’t suppose anyone can. Now, I hope you don’t mind, but I have patients to see.”
“I just can’t bear the idea of him winning his release and going right back to his old ways.”
Dr. Williams looked at me with a regretful half-smile. “Isn’t that what they all do? The bank robbers and the arsonists and the sham doctors? Won’t they all get out and do it again? Did you ever think they wouldn’t?”
Having no answer to that, I offered him another five dollars for Mrs. Burkhart. He refused.
“I’ll look after her,” he said.
I kept holding out the money. “I want to do some good for someone.”
But he waved it off and left me standing alone on his porch, where a brisk wind was being overtaken by a flurry of ice pellets. The ice blew down the street, and someone heard it rattling against a window and lit a fire, sending the bitter dry smoke from a bundle of newsprint into the air, where it stood in defiance against the inevitability of winter.
28
THE NEW YORK POLICE made no progress in finding Dr. Rathburn or Rudy Schilga, the man from whom Reinhold Dietz took his orders. Even if the men could have been found, Sheriff Heath wasn’t sure what charges could be laid against them. The fact that Dr. Rathburn proposed a questionable scheme to Dr. Williams didn’t amount to a crime. Only the charge of aiding an escaped fugitive would put Rathburn in jail, and we needed the testimony of the von Matthesius brothers for that. When asked if they might like to tell the truth about Dr. Rathburn in exchange for their own release, they both decided to plead guilty to whatever charges we might bring against them and be done with it. We could only assume that they were sufficiently afraid of Dr. Rathburn to refuse to testify against him. There would, in the end, be no trial, only a few minutes in front of a judge for each of them.
“The Baron keeps demanding that we release Felix,” Sheriff Heath said on the morning of the hearing. “I suspect he has a piece of business he wants him to attend to. If we let him go he might lead us straight to Rathburn, but the prosecutor doesn’t want to take the risk of releasing him and having him disappear. Neither do I.”
“They’re a strange family,” I said.
“I don’t suppose I’ve ever had two brothers in jail at once before. If we ever run across another von Matthesius, we ought to arrest him on general principle and keep the whole clan locked up.”
The sheriff persuaded a friendly judge to hold the hearing on Christmas Eve in the
hopes that reporters would be too distracted by the holiday to make an appearance at the courthouse. He had no idea what they might say in court and didn’t want every word repeated in the papers. His idea was a good one, save for the fact that it failed entirely. Nothing of consequence was happening on Christmas Eve, and every reporter in three counties turned up.
It was a clear and bright day, terrifically cold but free of ice. The reporters stood around on the courthouse steps, their hands tucked under their arms, arguing the particulars of the case while great clouds of steam drifted from their lips.
We brought the prisoners in together and installed them along a bench in the front of the courtroom. The doors opened and within minutes the room was filled.
Judge Seufert, a frail and elderly man who suffered from near-deafness but was nonetheless a sharp jurist and friendly to Sheriff Heath’s ideas, took his place at the front of the room and called the proceedings to order.
“As I understand it, pleas have already been entered and this is to be a simple hearing. Mr. von Matthesius, please rise.” Both men stood at once, and a ripple of laughter went around the courtroom. The judge pounded his gavel. “Not a sound or I clear you all out. I haven’t the patience today. Mrs. Seufert is home roasting a goose and I’d rather be in my armchair attending to that business than sitting here with all of you. Not another warning.”
The reporters grew perfectly silent. There was not so much as the sound of a pencil scratching on paper.
“Now,” he said, addressing the inmates. “Felix von Matthesius. We’ll start with you. May the stenographer indicate in the record that I shall address each defendant by his full name to stop them from popping up and down like a troupe of puppets.”
A wiry, gray-haired woman in the corner nodded and made her notes. The Baron sat down.
“Felix von Matthesius, you are charged with assisting Herman Albert von Matthesius, an inmate of the Bergen County jail and your brother, with his escape from the Hackensack Hospital, where he had been sent for medical care during the time of his incarceration at the jail, and of harboring said prisoner. How do you answer?”
I could only see Felix from the back. His shoulders slumped and his head hung down. The jail had laid him low.
“Guilty, Your Honor,” Felix said.
“He’s not guilty!” the Baron shouted, jumping to his feet. “Release him! He’s done nothing!”
The Baron’s attorney leaned forward to clasp him on the shoulder, but it was too late. The judge pounded his gavel again. “Is Herman Albert von Matthesius to be called as a witness on his behalf?” he asked the attorney.
The attorney stood and said, “No, Your Honor. Felix von Matthesius has admitted his guilt and begs the court to impose a sentence and allow him to serve it.”
“That’s fine,” the judge said. “Herman Albert von Matthesius will keep quiet or be taken out of this courtroom.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” the attorney said.
The judge leaned over to get a look at Sheriff Heath, Detective Courter, and Courter’s boss, Prosecutor Wright. “Does the prosecutor wish to make a statement?”
Mr. Wright rose and read from a paper in his hand. “The Office of the Prosecutor of Bergen County begs the court to impose the strictest possible sentence upon anyone who assists in a dangerous criminal’s escape from jail.”
Judge Seufert nodded. “The court imposes a sentence of one year, to be carried out at the Bergen County jail commencing immediately.”
The judge looked out over the courtroom with an expression of satisfaction. “This is moving right along. Mrs. Seufert thanks you.” He ordered the Baron to rise.
“You are charged with escaping from the Hackensack Hospital while serving a sentence at the Bergen County jail that was imposed upon you by this court. How do you plead?”
“Herman Albert von Matthesius is not guilty by reason of insanity,” said his attorney, “and the defendant respectfully requests that this court release him to the Morris Plains Insane Asylum for care.”
A roar went up in the courtroom. Prosecutor Wright turned and whispered to Detective Courter, who slid out of his seat and ran out of the room. Sheriff Heath just shook his head.
The judge banged his gavel again, and shouted as loudly as his weak and trembling voice would allow. “Silence!”
It took a few more rounds with the gavel to quiet the room. The judge nearly sent all the reporters out, which Sheriff Heath would have very much preferred. In the end, everyone settled back into their seats and the judge continued.
“Prosecutor, how do you respond?” the judge asked.
“I’ve sent one of my men to round up the county physician, whom we will call to lend his expert opinion to these proceedings,” the prosecutor said.
“There’s no need for that,” the Baron’s attorney said. “I have a medical report completed by a respected physician in Trenton who has examined the Baron’s record and declared him to be insane and unfit for incarceration in the county jail. He recommends immediate transfer to Morris Plains.”
The attorney handed a letter to the bailiff, who passed it to the judge. He waved the letter away without looking at it. “We don’t ask physicians in Trenton for their opinions on our prisoners,” he told the attorney. “Our county physician decides who goes to Morris Plains, and it does not appear that you’ve consulted with him.”
The rear door to the courtroom opened and Detective Courter reappeared. The prosecutor whispered to him and then stood to say, “Dr. Ogden was reached at the hospital and can be here within the hour.”
The judge sighed and looked at his watch. “All right. I don’t see how we can finish this today, but bring him in and let’s hear the prosecutor’s version of events. The court will go into recess until—”
There was a crash in the front of the room and everyone jumped to their feet to see what had happened. Only Sheriff Heath remained sitting, his head in his hands. I slid off the bench and ran around to the side of the room to see Baron von Matthesius rolling around on the floor, kicking at his overturned chair, quaking all over like an epileptic. His handcuffs rattled as he shook and struggled. His eyes were turned up in his head and he had cut his scalp when he fell, leaving a jagged trail of blood behind him as he slithered and rolled around. His convulsions were accompanied by a strange, high-pitched whine that soon gave way to a sputtering cough.
“He’s choking,” his attorney shouted, kneeling down and reaching for him. “Help me hold him.”
The bailiff knelt down and attempted to take the Baron by his shoulders, which only caused him to roll over into the bailiff’s lap and disgorge the ammoniac contents of his innards. The bailiff gave a shout and let go of the Baron, shaking his coat sleeves and letting loose with a string of expletives of the sort not usually heard inside a courtroom. The judge turned his head away and looked as though he wanted to run out himself. The reporters all rushed over to get a better look, and I’m sorry to say that one of them had a camera and was attempting to make a picture of the scene.
Finally Sheriff Heath’s men pulled everyone away from the prisoner, and someone was sent to find a janitor. The Baron lay twisted and unresponsive amid the streaks of blood that he had managed to kick, in a painterly fashion, all around him, laced with all the unmentionable matter that had issued forth from his gut. No one would go near him but his attorney, who, I noticed, had managed to slip on a pair of gloves before reaching in to take hold of him.
The judge ordered all of us out of the courtroom while it was cleaned. Someone found a wheelchair and the Baron was placed in it, limp as a dead cat, and rolled back to the jail to await Dr. Ogden.
The reporters filed out and headed to the courthouse steps to resume their customary duties of cigarette smoking and gossip. The deputies and guards stood around outside the courtroom, awaiting their next order. The Baron’s attorney insisted upon staying with his client, and no one objected as we were all relieved to have him out of the way.
Once the
courtroom was nearly empty and blessedly quiet, and the janitors covered the stench of vomit with that of wintergreen, Sheriff Heath approached the judge, who was slumped over in his seat, looking defeated.
“Don’t even try it, Bob,” the judge said. “There’s nothing to do but wait for Doc Ogden to come down and sort this mess out.”
“But you know he’s play-acting, don’t you? It’s all a trick.”
“Well, it’s some trick,” the judge said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my courtroom. I don’t know how a man fakes an epileptic fit, and I think the janitors will tell you that he didn’t fake the rest of it.”
“But he did it deliberately, can’t you see that?”
I was sitting behind the sheriff and couldn’t see his expression, but I could tell from his voice that he knew he was losing this one.
The judge leaned down and spoke in a hushed, conspiratorial manner. “Have you ever done a thing like that, Bob? Deliberately, I mean? If I ordered you, right now, under penalty of imprisonment in your own jail, would you be able to do a trick like that on command? The sickness, the gash on the head, all of it?” The judge wore an expression of wide-eyed wonderment. He seemed genuinely impressed that a man could do such a thing.
“I suppose I could if I practiced,” Sheriff Heath said, “and Dr. von Matthesius has had plenty of practice. He must have swallowed something—mustard powder, or laundry soap, or some such. Why, he tried it on us and fooled us into taking him off to the hospital. He only wants to go to Morris Plains because it’ll be easier to escape.”
Now it was my turn to put my head in my hands. The sheriff had gone too far. Judge Seufert sat back in his chair and crossed his arms in front of him.
