CHAPTER 47

The next morning, Anna waited for the trolley in front of the Hotel Alexandria. She planned to take the trolley to a stop three blocks from the Courthouse where Wolf had said he’d meet her to escort her to the trial. This would avoid any scandal of being seen together in the morning at her hotel should the press be lurking. The weather was gray and cold, and mist clung to her hair. She stuck her hands into her pockets to warm them, fingering a coin and a button left there from another day. Probing the far corners of her pocket, she found a folded piece of paper. Anna unfolded it and read silently:

Dear Matilda,

You may as well go with me as you have no other option. Am I really so odious?

Her lip curled. It was the note from the man from Mars, the man who had drugged and violated Matilda, the man who had driven her mad. Anna hadn’t thought enough about Matilda because she’d been so caught up in Georges’s troubles. She wanted to exonerate Georges because he was her brother, but Matilda had no one. Matilda needed Anna too.

Anna examined the note, letting the ink words prod at her numb, mixed-up brain. Surely her mind was only dormant, not gone entirely. Surely need could arouse it. She rubbed the note between her fingers. The stationery was thin and plain. Anna would have thought it too plain for the kind of men Mrs. Rosenberg catered to. Rich men always used a better quality of paper. This was paper for the masses. She held it up to the light looking for the watermark.

It was stamped, “Mars Paper Co.”

Anna’s brain began to whir. Mars paper. Was it the paper, and not the man, that was from Mars? Or was the man from Mars, too? Why would a wealthy man use such plebeian paper? He couldn’t use proper personalized stationery to leave notes for wronged girls—not if he were to remain anonymous. Still, why use such bad paper when he could afford a finer grade? Why would he even have it in his office?

Perhaps if he owned the company. It was thin, but the paper company was her only lead.

Anna strode back to the hotel and took the rumbling elevator up to Georges’s suite. “Thomas! Where is Georges’s Brownie?”

The Mars Paper Company stood on Eleventh Street, not far from the tracks. Anna arrived by hansom with Georges’s Brownie loaded with film. The brick factory stood three stories tall, with airy windows on the second and third floors. She dismounted near the factory loading dock where two men heaved bundles of paper onto a wagon. The paper looked dingy, like newspaper without the ink. Anna swung through the front door, making bells jingle, and found herself in a wholesale paper shop. A clerk presided over the bulk sale of envelopes, cheap sheet paper, low-grade stationery, and butcher paper. Anna saw no high-end stationery. Anna’s own writing paper was whiter, a heavier weight, and monogrammed. It was a shame her stationery now had the wrong address—the address to a life she no longer lived. She would have to get new and charge it to Georges.

The Jonquil Apartments did not cater to clerks, so she flounced right past this one. “Don’t mind me. I’m just looking for a . . . you know.” She moved behind the counter and toward a door labeled “Employees Only,” looking for a bigger fish.

The clerk called out, “Hey!”

Anna ignored him. As he moved to follow her, the bells jingled again, and a customer entered the building, splitting the clerk’s attention and he hesitated. Anna slipped through the door into a hallway that smelled like new books. She bolted the door behind her. Light streamed in from a row of high windows that caught the morning sun. She moved down the hall until she came to an office with a name placard, “Mr. Elmer Clark, Proprietor.”

Anna knocked. No one answered so she let herself in. The office ceilings rose fourteen feet, and she could see the exposed steel beams. The office was modestly furnished, but a rather good portrait hung on the wall. It showed a lanky man in his prime, healthy, but not handsome. His suit and facial hair placed him in the 1880s. Was that the man from Mars? If so, he must be old now.

Anna noted a second door inside the office, which she planned to explore next. She shuffled through papers on the desk. Bills, mostly, for papery things like pulp and glue, and one from a physician. A full brandy decanter rested on the desk by two crystal snifters. Anna picked up the decanter, removed the stopper, and sipped from the top. She sipped again, because she was thirsty. She opened a drawer in his desk. She found coins and a five-dollar bill, which she pocketed. She found a good pen and a silver matchbox, which she also took. In the next drawer she discovered three medicine bottles—bimeconate of morphine, solution of podophyllin—described on the label as a liver tonic.

And a bottle of chloral hydrate.

Chloral hydrate. It’s what M.M. Martinez, the proprietor of the Esmeralda Club, had slipped into a young girl’s drink before he and his friends had their way with her. He was caught and fined one hundred dollars. The girl had been sent to reform school.

Anna took the chloral hydrate and emptied it into the brandy decanter.

She heard a toilet flush and spun about just as the second door opened. A tall, spindly man with a jaundiced complexion and yellow eyes emerged from it in a cloud of stink. His fingers were so long as to be grotesque, but his suit was very nice. Anna’s eyes widened. “Jupiter.”

He smiled at her the way men sometimes did; that is to say, there was something obscene about it. “Well, good afternoon, young lady. What are you doing in my office?” He crept closer.

Anna wanted to spit. Instead, she collected herself. “Good afternoon.” She smiled and bobbed a curtsey. “This is a lovely paper company. The paper is so . . . white.” She fluttered her eyelashes and backed toward the door.

“Why, thank you.”

He took ownership of the paper; thus, he must be the owner—the proprietor, as the door plaque said. Anna grimaced. “You probably use it for writing notes and such, even though it’s plebian.”

He frowned. “Well, I do, but . . . Why are you here?”

Anna opened her purse and retrieved the Brownie. She raised the camera and snapped his picture.

“Wait a minute. Who are you?” He looked mad.

“Josephine Singer, I’m with the Herald.”

He gave her a look of disdain. “You’re not with the Herald. You’re a woman.”

“I’m actually a man in disguise.”

His face registered confusion.

“We’re doing an article on the Jonquil Apartments, on the men who drug and deflower young girls. Are you one of them?”

His eyes bulged.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Before he could stop her, Anna turned tail and ran.

Anna took the Brownie back to Central Station to the LAPD darkroom and added the film to the queue to be developed. There was no way Mr. Clark could be Samara Flossie’s Black Pearl. He was simply too old and ugly. But he was very likely Matilda’s man from Mars.