Devil by the Tail Read online

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Winthrop.” Quinn finished pasting a label on the file she’d created for Ned Handish, deposited it in her desk, and greeted the lawyer with a smile. “It’s good of you to come out in this heat to consult with me.”

  “Not at all. I trust the day finds you well, Mrs. Sinclair. Or should I use your moniker?”

  “You make me sound quite scandalous.”

  “A shade unconventional.” His brow corrugated, as if the distinction was problematic. “It would be different if you sought publicity, but you’ve kept your little hobby discreet. You are being extremely considerate of your late husband’s family by not employing the Sinclair name in your business. I hope you won’t think me forward when I say your deportment has been the epitome of gentility and good form.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Winthrop.” It was not as charming a speech as he seemed to think it was. “Have the Sinclairs made any offer of settlement?”

  “Not yet. Their attorney advises me that your father-in-law is disposed to put the matter to rest, but his wife–”

  “Let me guess. Indisposed?”

  “Adamantly.”

  Quinn had hoped the lawyer could negotiate a fair settlement by simply citing the law. She should have known better. The Sinclairs had disapproved of her from the start and when their son died without leaving a will, they set about to obstruct all efforts on her part to acquire a share of his estate. “My mother-in-law is and always will be opposed to anything that could conceivably make my life easy. Do please sit down, Mr. Winthrop. Will you have a glass of fizzy water? Orange and lemon, or I have cider.”

  “Thank you, no.” He ensconced himself in the client chair, plucked at the smart creases in his trousers, squared his shoulders, and placed a leather portfolio on Quinn’s desk. “Business before pleasure.”

  Quinn didn’t see how a glass of seltzer could hinder their discussion, but she followed his lead and sat down. “Is there no way to force the Sinclairs to sell the hundred acres Thom owned in DuPage County?”

  “Unfortunately,” said Winthrop, “Your husband’s name does not appear on the deed their attorney showed me.”

  “But it does! I’ve seen it.”

  “Do you think the document could have been tampered with?”

  “Geneva Sinclair hates me, but I can’t believe she’d stoop to forgery.”

  Winthrop steepled his fingers under his chin and contemplated the ceiling. “I know you don’t want to further antagonize the Sinclairs, but I think it’s time I file a lawsuit. The elder Mrs. Sinclair impresses me as a woman who wouldn’t enjoy being summoned to court to testify before a jury and suffer the indignity of having her veracity questioned.”

  “She’d rather be flayed alive.”

  “Then with your permission, I’ll draw up the complaint tomorrow.” He opened the portfolio. “Now shall I tell you what I’d like you to do in the Elfie Jackson case?”

  “Yes. And thank you for trusting me, this agency, with the investigation. I know you could have gone to the Pinkertons, but I’m sure we can do the job as well if not better and you’ll find the cost of our time less dear.”

  “Actually, I had in mind a barter arrangement.”

  “Barter?”

  “That’s right. I’ll conduct your lawsuit at no cost and you conduct a search for character witnesses for Miss Jackson, if there are any. No need for cash to change hands.”

  Quinn stifled a spurt of exasperation. She had paid him a fifty-dollar retainer just two months ago. “Won’t my fifty dollars cover the filing of the lawsuit?”

  “I’ve had three lengthy meetings with your mother-in-law and the Sinclairs’ attorney already, and two cable exchanges with your father-in-law in France.”

  “Even so, that’s a very lot of money for three meetings and no results. I’ve been counting on that money to hire a receptionist and buy a horse and buggy. Can’t you just write Geneva a letter saying I’m going to sue and see if she relents?”

  “As you’ve said, the lady is resistant. She and her attorney will delay as long as they can. Of course if you prefer, I can submit a bill for additional communications and pleadings. Another fifty should see us through the initial phase.”

  “No. We’ll barter.” Quinn made a mental note. Garnick & Paschal’s fee for three witness interviews, regardless how long or how short, would total no less than fifty dollars, possibly more. “Tell me about Elfie Jackson.”

  “Age twenty, intelligent enough in a rustic way, but no schooling to speak of. She cohabited with Burk Bayer in Rock Island for about two years. He worked in one of Mr. Frederick Weyerhaeuser’s sawmills. Last spring Weyerhaeuser dispatched him to Chicago to procure logs coming in by schooner from Michigan and Wisconsin. Elfie followed. The two continued as before until Bayer informed her he was leaving to marry Miss Delphine Kadinger.”

  “How did Bayer meet the lady?”

  “Kadinger buys and sells finished lumber. He runs a couple of steam barges, which Bayer enlisted. Kadinger subsequently invited him to his home.”

  “Did the fact of Bayer’s cohabitation with Elfie, even if it was never solemnized by clergy, not constitute marriage?”

  “It would if there were mutual agreement. Elfie believes they are man and wife, although she asserts no breach of promise to marry, which would be legally enforceable. Bayer claims she was just a live-in cook and laundress, well paid for her services.”

  “And Delphine believed him?”

  Winthrop shook his head. “How an intelligent, cultured girl like Delphine could fall prey to a mongrel like that boggles the mind. I’ve heard it said she was wayward, but Kadinger should have taken steps to protect his only daughter from such a cad.”

  “How long from the time Bayer jilted Elfie to the time of the wedding?”

  He pulled a sheet of densely notated stationery from his portfolio and scanned it. “Approximately six weeks. Bayer moved out of the house he and Elfie had shared in mid-April. He took a room in the Tremont House where he lived until the day of the wedding on June first. Elfie went to the hotel once or twice to try and dissuade him.”

  “Obviously to no avail,” said Quinn.

  “If she was as hysterical on those occasions as she was when I saw her, she would have caused quite a disturbance.” He went back to his notes. “The newlyweds made the Kadinger family mansion at the north end of Wabash their temporary residence while a new house in Hyde Park Township was being built. On the night of July fifth, while Bayer was away on business in Rock Island, the house caught fire. Both Delphine and her father perished. The only survivor was a housemaid named Rhetta Slayne. The evidence pointed to incendiarism and the police concluded that Elfie was the culprit.”

  “Why?” asked Quinn.

  “Jealousy, of course. Have you not been reading the Chicago Tribune?”

  “I don’t read the Tribune. I don’t like…” she almost said the way it reviles the Irish, but Winthrop didn’t know she was Irish and it served no good purpose to test his liberality. “I don’t like their style.”

  “Nor do I.” He flourished a page of newsprint and for the second time today, an emphatic finger jabbed at an offending article. “Read this.”

  Elfie Jackson could not foresee the betrayal that awaited her in Chicago any more than the barbarian witch Medea could foresee Jason’s breach of faith when she debarked in Corinth. Cast aside by the man who’d promised to marry her and forced to watch in helpless fury as he married another, Elfie so nearly duplicated Medea’s ghastly vengeance that the sorceress might well be a phantom in her delirious brain.”

  It read like a sensation novel. Quinn wondered if all newspaper reporters entertained literary ambitions. “Who is this Medea? What did she do and what does it have to do with the Jackson case?”

  “Medea was…it’s hard to explain. If you knew anything about Greek mythology, you’d understand.”

  Quinn knew the names of the Greek gods and goddesses, the Romans, too. She’d had six years at St. Xavi
er Academy for Women and this prig made her feel as if she’d failed some test of basic literacy. “Did Medea set somebody’s house on fire?”

  “I take it you didn’t attend Médée, the play at the Opera House in January?”

  “No.”

  “It would be helpful if you go to Booksellers Row tomorrow and see if you can find a book on Greek mythology. Suffice it to say, half the city’s eligible jurors and their wives were in the audience at the Opera House for that performance. They know about Medea and it bodes ill for Elfie Jackson.”

  “A myth won’t matter if we can establish an alibi for her at the time of the arson.”

  “If she has one, he’ll have been a buyer of bawdy services.” Winthrop crimped his mouth. “Where’s that scrofulous scamp Garnick? He’ll be able go into the brothel where the police found Elfie living and talk to the hookers without arousing suspicion.”

  Quinn bristled. “Mr. Garnick is my partner and friend. If you are implying that he is in any way morally degenerate, or a frequenter of brothels, I must ask you to apologize.”

  Winthrop’s straw-colored eyebrows skewed up. “I merely assume he is the more suitable one to inquire whether Miss Jackson had a liaison on the night of the fire.”

  “Maybe he is,” said Quinn. “Garnick and I will discuss the matter and decide which of us is likely to get more information from the women.”

  “Surely you’re not thinking of going to a bawdy house yourself?”

  “I will if I think it useful. Where is it?”

  “One-fifty-five North Fifth Avenue.”

  “Annie Stafford’s place,” said Quinn. “She’s notorious.”

  “With good reason. Her house is a cesspit of harlotry. My sources tell me it’s a rabbit warren of women offering…” he broke off, the word trapped behind pinched lips.

  “Horizontal refreshment,” said Quinn, enjoying his scandalized expression. She was tempted to ask the names of his sources. His prudishness irked her, although to be fair, he had been hired by an alliance of Christian ladies whose sensibilities regarding brothels must give him pause. She said, “I’m a detective, Mr. Winthrop. If I were too delicate to make inquiries in disreputable places or too frightened to venture into the criminals’ territory, I would not have entered the profession. Besides, the women may feel more comfortable talking with another woman.”

  “Very well. If you must.” He appeared to resign himself. “The prominence of the Kadingers makes it a difficult case at best and Elfie’s stay in a brothel makes it all the more difficult. Whatever you do, be discrete.”

  “Of course. And do you think you can set up a visit for us with Miss Jackson in her jail cell?”

  “There’s no reason for you to meet her in person. She’s half out of her mind. I was at pains to coax a coherent word out of her.”

  Quinn didn’t press. Garnick played cards with a police captain who almost always owed him money and didn’t mind paying with favors instead of greenbacks. He could get them in to see Elfie. “Did anyone have a grievance against Mr. Kadinger?”

  “Rolf Kadinger was a hard businessman, exacting and tight with a dollar. He was sued twice in the last year, once by an Irish saw filer named Murphy who alleged Kadinger cheated him out of his wages, and once by a builder, Mosley, who claimed Kadinger shorted him on a shipment of lumber. You can probably find others who didn’t like the man’s politics or the wages he paid.”

  “What about the housemaid who got out of the house alive? Rhetta Slayne.”

  He referred to his notes. “The fire fighters questioned her. She was distraught, coughing from smoke inhalation and crying for her mother. She told them who was still in the house and they sent her on her way.”

  “Maybe now that some time has passed she’ll recall more about that night. What’s her address?”

  “She lived with the Kadingers. Didn’t say where her mother lived and the firemen didn’t ask.”

  “The police haven’t tried to locate her? How do they know she didn’t start the blaze by accident and run away because she felt guilty?”

  “That will be something for you to pursue. The more suspicion we can spread around, the better. Loggers, servants, strumpets, if there’s a plausible culprit other than Elfie. A jury will presume the killer was someone of that ilk. Talk to as many people as you can find who’ll give her a good character. Something exculpatory may turn up. We have ten days until the trial.” He replaced his notes in his portfolio and smiled. “When it’s over, I shall take you to dinner at John Wright’s restaurant to celebrate.”

  After he’d gone, Quinn massaged the tightness in her jaws. If Garnick thought her in danger of succumbing to Winthrop’s charms, he couldn’t be more wrong. The man’s arrogance made her face ache. Barter! For mercy’s sake. He had money, a goodly amount of it hers. From the look of him, he was probably one of those shirkers who paid some starving Irish immigrant to go to the war in his stead. She’d like to tell him to go boil his shirt, but she’d always been able to hold herself in. She would bide her time. One of these days when she didn’t need his business, she’d put a flea in his ear.

  She picked up her pen and began to record her notes for the Elfie Jackson file. Maintaining a detailed file for each case was one of the more constructive lessons she’d learned from the Pinkertons. She wrote down the names of people to be interviewed and their connection to the defendant. Elfie topped the list. Besides the girls at the brothel, there was the maid Rhetta Slayne, the men who sued Rolf Kadinger, and the hotel manager at the Tremont. Maybe he could tell her something about Elfie’s set-to with Bayer and whether the girl had made threats of any kind.

  She fanned away a mosquito humming next to her ear and thought about Burk Bayer. The man had uncanny good luck. Not only was he the heir to his wife’s fortune, he’d been conveniently elsewhere at the time of the fire. She appended his name to her list and lastly, the unknown Tribune reporter who’d made a feast of the similarities between Elfie and that mythical witch.

  Like Medea, Elfie’s fidelity to the man she called “husband” was her be-all and end-all. Alas! Having dwelled in Annie Stafford’s den of iniquity amongst the most dissolute daughters of sin in this city, her flesh must now be defiled and her soul deformed beyond even the enormity of murder.

  What a stinkard. Was he infatuated with his own rhetoric or did he have other reasons to write so unfavorably about Elfie?

  Chapter 3

  From the office window, Quinn watched Garnick drive around the corner and park his rig, a modified buckboard with a makeshift enclosure for the passenger seat and an awning that sloped like a shanty roof. When she first met him, he was hiring out as a hackney driver. He still took fares when there was no detecting to do, which had been most days since they opened the agency in April. It was both inconvenient and annoying that Winthrop wanted to barter, but if she and Garnick did an exceptionally good job, maybe the lawyer really would shower them with cases and refer others to the agency.

  Garnick jumped down and rewarded his big sway-backed horse, Leonidas, with an apple.

  Quinn tucked her witness list into her reticule and went to meet him. “Any luck tracing Jack Stram?”

  “Naw. He’s drawn the bottom pair a few times at Cap Hyman’s over the last month. None too sporting about it, from what I heard. The last time he visited, Cap’s lieutenants assisted him into the street, hind end first.”

  “As it turns out, Cap’s bride figures in our other case.”

  “Gentle Annie? How’s that?”

  “The police found Elfie Jackson living in her brothel.”

  His eyes glinted with amusement. “When it comes to gambling and prostitution, Chicago’s still a small town. A lot of our local vice has consolidated since Cap and Annie tied the knot and Roger Plant retired from sin and moved to the country.”

  “So it would seem. I don’t know if Elfie was working or just hiding out with someone she knew. Tomorrow morning before everyone’s gotten drunk and gone hunting for love,
I think I’ll pay Mrs. Hyman a visit and make inquiries.”

  He looked doubtful but didn’t argue. “Hair-trigger Block should be quiet early in the day but take your derringer. And when you put your questions to Annie, best not get over-audacious. Whoever it was dubbed her “Gentle” had a right ironic turn of mind.”

  “I’ll be careful, and while I’m there I’ll ask if she’s seen Jack Stram. With Florrie gone, he may be seeking a new companion and Annie’s brothel is probably the closest to her husband’s gambling establishment.”

  “I’m sure Cap and his boys recommend Annie, ‘specially to the sports who’ve been wily enough to win a buck in spite of Cap’s stacked decks and loaded dice. Out of one pocket, into the other. It’s all in the family.”

  Quinn wanted to keep an open mind, but she hoped Elfie wasn’t one of the girls who sold her favors for a dollar. “Let’s head over to the Tremont. Elfie went there to see Burk Bayer after he threw her over and they may have had an altercation. I’d like to find out if anyone heard what they said. I’ll give you the rest of the story on the way.”

  The late afternoon streets bustled with traffic, everyone seemingly inured to the putrid exhalations that hovered over the city. The day scavengers paid by the Board of Health to cart away the night soil couldn’t remove it fast enough and the heat and humidity exacerbated the stench. She held a handkerchief over her nose and they drove along in silence. It wasn’t just the smell that inhibited her from speaking. She was ashamed to admit that Winthrop had proposed barter. She should have conferred with Garnick before she agreed to the deal.

  He said, “This air makes me queasy. Those corpses His Honor ordered dug up out of their graves are sure taking their revenge. I hope the unholy smell is whiffing up the mayor’s hateful snout, same as the rest of us.”

  Quinn didn’t want to think how much of the fetor emanated from City Cemetery, where Mayor Rice had directed that thousands of bodies of Confederate prisoners of war be disinterred and hauled away for burial in a mass grave. The operation provoked a good deal of bitterness from Garnick. She said, “It must have been hard seeing so much death all around you. How did you keep your spirits up?”