One

Chicago

June 1909

I dropped two boxes onto Detective Whitbread’s desk and handed him a neatly bound typescript. “Those are the last of the identity cards we were working on, and here is a compilation of the results. It includes an analysis of offenses by children who were later committed to juvenile reformatories.”

“Very well. I expect you’ll be off to Woods Hole now?”

“Next week.” I was eager to get home to my family and complete our packing. We’d been spending our summers on Cape Cod for years, and I was yearning to taste the salt of summer breezes there. It was very hot in Chicago that June. “I hope you and your family manage to get away, too.” Whitbread was married to my friend Gracie. I knew she had a hard time getting him to leave the city, he was so devoted to his work. He just nodded absentmindedly and flipped through the pages of our report.

Before I had a chance to make my way out of the detective’s office, a knock came on the door. A uniformed officer stood waiting to speak.

“Sir, there’s been a shooting death on the north side.” He consulted the paper in his hand. “At the Selig Polyscope Company. It’s a place where they make films for the nickelodeons. A Mr. Alden Cabot was found standing over the corpse. Will you be going up there, sir?”

I gasped. Alden Cabot! That was my brother’s name. Surely the police officer was mistaken. Alden was a reporter for the Tribune. He wouldn’t have any reason to be at such a place and certainly wouldn’t have killed someone. As far as I knew, he didn’t even own a gun. Detective Whitbread and I looked at each other, equally shocked by the news.

“I’ll handle this myself,” he said, then stopped to frown at me. “Emily, I know if I don’t take you with me, you’ll just make your way up there yourself. Come on, let’s get going. The faster we get up there, the sooner we can get this sorted out. I’ll arrange for a motorcar to take us.” He turned to his telephone to order transportation.

Whitbread was an earnest policeman. Some might think him pompous, but I knew he was both honest and competent. His integrity was one reason I wanted my students to work with him. Tall and skeletal, with wiry sideburns and a flourishing mustache, he spent much more time out on the streets of Chicago than in his office, where my students and I compiled statistics from boxes of identity cards collected from all over the city. Yet he had a sincere appreciation for the academic study of criminology and kept up to date on the latest theories. Time was that he would have excluded me from a murder investigation, but I had so often managed to get myself included, by hook or by crook, that he knew trying to keep me from a case involving my own brother would be hopeless.

“Alden was supposed to go to Cape Cod with you, wasn’t he?” the detective asked me.

“Yes, we were all due to leave soon. But I want to go with you,” I replied. In the back of my mind a little minx was pulling at me, reminding me that I was expected home. My husband, Stephen, and Alden’s wife, Clara, both did research at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole in the summers. Every year, we all eagerly anticipated the trip, but I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on that with Alden in trouble. I was more annoyed than alarmed at that point. I thought it was typical of my brother to get into some kind of a scrape just when we were all preparing to move our households to the Cape for the summer. A busy newspaper reporter, Alden was not known for being solicitous of other people. Our nursemaid, Delia, would have to manage the packing without me.

When we descended to the first floor, I discovered that we’d be transported via the coroner’s van. It was disconcerting to think the same vehicle would carry the victim’s body back to the morgue, but I accepted a hand from Whitbread to climb up to the high seat between him and the driver. It was a new sensation to sit above the crowds we traveled through, and we were jostled a bit as we moved through the city streets.

The throngs of people reminded me how the city had grown in the years since I’d arrived from Boston to become one of the first women graduate students in sociology at the new university. Our plan was to use the city as our laboratory. More than a decade had passed since then. The city had grown and changed, and so had I.

There were still horse-drawn carriages on the streets but more and more motorcars were taking their place. The streetcars had been electrified and there were many more women riding them, as young women came to the city for jobs. Every day, Chicago became more crowded. I usually felt invigorated by the energy of the city but, by this time of year, I was worn out. The summer was for wading in saltwater pools with my children, eating clams and lobsters, and having adventures on boats. I took a deep breath, feeling a tickle of anticipation for the cool sea breezes of Woods Hole. I was ready to get away from all this…just for a while. This business with Alden had to be a misunderstanding. I couldn’t imagine any circumstance in which he’d shoot someone.

Soon, we were out of the crowded Loop and traveling to more sparsely populated areas. What could have brought my brother so far from the center of the city? Finally, we reached the corner of Western Avenue and Irving Park Boulevard where we stopped in front of a three-story building. It looked like an office building that had a greenhouse dropped on top of it. The top floor was constructed entirely of big rectangular windows. As we climbed down I saw the logo of a white diamond with a large “S” inside in stonework above the doorway. A man who stood nearby, smoking, confirmed to Whitbread that this was the Selig Polyscope Company and, when we entered, we were directed up to the third floor. Two men with a stretcher followed us.

The stairs led to an enormous open room. Despite the sunlight that streamed in through the huge windows, it was unexpectedly cool. Two beleaguered-looking uniformed police officers were trying to hold off a small crowd of men and women in the middle of the room. As I glanced around the immense space, I saw a number of completely different scenes. To the right appeared a whole street, complete with a saloon and fences and wooden walkways before the buildings. But they were only the fronts of buildings propped up with wood from behind. To the left was a parlor or drawing room, furnished with a desk, a lamp, a fireplace, and paintings on the wall. Beside it was an old-fashioned kitchen, complete with a wood stove and a large wooden table. Stores of flour and sugar, and cans of beans, were on the shelves. Beyond the crowd of people in the middle, there was a space that looked like a woman’s bedroom with a four-poster bed and frilly curtains hanging from open windows. Farther away, in a corner, I could see what looked like trees and vines, with a tent set up on an area of sand made to look like a desert. There were even more scenes arranged throughout the huge space, but my attention returned to the crowd of people grouped around the bed chamber. I followed Whitbread as he elbowed his way through.

“Police, make way, please. Police.”

When we got to one of the uniformed officers he seemed relieved. He and Whitbread conferred, while I looked at the spectacle on the bed. Against the gauzy white counterpane, a small man lay back, eyes staring upward. I noticed his shoes were shined and his gray pants had a sharp crease. He wore a crisp white shirt with a well-starched collar under a black top coat. A gold watch chain was draped across the waistcoat on his plump little stomach, and small gold cuff links could be seen in his stiff white cuffs. He had a square face with jowls, clean shaven except for sharply cut sideburns, and his thin black hair was neatly parted in the middle and slicked down. He looked like a very unpretentious little man who’d gotten dressed up in his finest clothes. There was no expression of panic or fear on his face. He looked quite peaceful…except for the ugly hole in his forehead. He’d fallen onto his back and blood dripped down the sides of his head. It was a large, black, crusty hole. His hands were inexplicably folded in his lap, with one wrapped around a tiny little gun with a pearl handle. I forced myself to look at his face again, trying to ignore the gore. I thought he looked mildly surprised.

He certainly didn’t belong in that frilly bedroom. It was a stomach-churning sight, that man lying dead on the white gauze with the pink roses of the wallpaper and the lacy flounces of the window curtains surrounding him. While Detective Whitbread continued to examine the body, I turned to the left and saw my brother seated in a cushioned wing chair that seemed to have been dragged over from some other set. His hands were in metal cuffs.

“It’s all a mistake,” Alden said. “I didn’t shoot him. He shot himself, can’t you see?” Alden was an attractive man, with curly dark hair and vivid blue eyes. He was unconscious of his good looks and had an easy manner that captivated people as soon as they met him. His instinct for reaching out to touch something in people as soon as they met had served him well in his profession.

“Alden, what is this about? Are you working on a story? I thought you’d already started your leave from work.” Despite the charm that worked on everyone else, I always had difficulty understanding my brother. Now that he was a fully grown man, a newspaper reporter, father of two, and husband of my best friend, I expected him to be responsible. That was my mistake. Seeing him sitting there with narrowed eyes and wrinkled forehead, his slight build still boyish, I could tell he was going to turn this around to make it seem like I was in the wrong somehow. He always did that to me and it was annoying.

“I’m working on something, but that’s irrelevant. They’re holding me because I was here when we found the man who was shot. They’re saying I did it, but they’re wrong. He shot himself. I could tell by the way I found him. He was lying on the bed with the gun in his hand. They’ve stopped all the work and they won’t listen to anybody. The man killed himself, that’s all there is to it.” He started to rise, then fell back when a uniformed officer stepped toward him. Looking over at Whitbread, he called to him. “Detective Whitbread, it’s a mistake. You’ve got to let us get back to work or it’ll ruin the shooting schedule.”

“The shooting schedule?” I was horrified. “You mean, in addition to the death of this man, they plan more shooting? Alden, what have you gotten yourself into?”

“No, no, no. Honestly, Emily, for someone who’s a lecturer at a university you’re so ignorant sometimes. This is a studio where they film motion pictures…we shoot film…you see?” He looked at my blank face and clenched his fists, raising his eyes as if imploring heaven to keep him from expiring at my stupidity. “Moving pictures, like they show at a nickelodeon. You’re such a snob, Emily.”

Of course, I’d heard of nickelodeons. I’d seen a moving picture shown as part of a lecture by Professor Frederick Starr about his journey to the Congo, but I had no idea they created such things here in Chicago. Nickelodeons were patronized by working people. They showed mindless comedies about clowns slipping and falling, or melodramas about young women being oppressed by bad men. Simplistic and extremely short, with no words, only popular music in the background, they were not considered theater. They were more like the dubious vaudeville shows that attracted working-class families to spend their hard-earned money. As an entertainment, they were better than saloons, but not by much.

Whitbread joined me, facing Alden. He looked around, then shook his head. “This place is a madhouse.”

“No, it’s not,” Alden said. “It’s a motion picture studio. This is where we film the interior scenes. We do some exterior shots in here as well. And we do others out there.” He gestured to the view through the windows. I could see a large plot of land with a sort of lake in the middle and a few buildings and even streets laid out. In another area, a tangle of bushes might have been a jungle. “It’s one of the largest and most important studios in the country.”

“We?” I asked. “What do you mean by ‘we’? Are you involved in this? Aren’t you here as a reporter?”

“Yes, Mr. Cabot, what is the nature of your relationship to this establishment?” Whitbread asked, waving a hand to indicate the expanse of the enterprise.

A portly man with a flourishing mustache turned from a nearby conversation and took a few steps toward us. “Mr. Cabot writes scenarios for our local producers, Mr. Otis Turner and Mr. Arnold Leeder,” he contributed, pointing to two men who were consulting with cameramen at the other end of the studio.

“This is Col. Selig, the owner of the Selig Polyscope Company,” Alden said. “Colonel, this is Detective Whitbread and my sister, Mrs. Chapman.”

“Pleased to meet you.” The colonel made a gracious bow. He wore a gray wool suit and vest with a small red bowtie. He looked like he ought to be jolly all the time, not like someone who’d just viewed a corpse. It was as if he had to work to maintain a serious composure that was unnatural to him.

So, this was Col. Selig. But that still didn’t explain what Alden was doing here. “Alden, what does this mean? You’re not here as a reporter for the Tribune?”

My brother frowned and I could see a hint of red on the edges of his face. “Emily, I’ll explain all that later. Right now, you need to help me convince the police I had nothing to do with this, then we need to get the studio back on track. I know it’s a terrible thing that’s happened, but it has nothing to do with us…with the studio. I have no idea why he came here to kill himself. You don’t understand the pressure. There are three films that need to be shooting right here…in this space.”

A dead man lay not twenty feet from us, but Alden was only concerned with getting rid of the police. I was confused. I’d expected him to be working on a newspaper story with a deadline but, apparently, that was not the case. I knew his experiences had made him somewhat callous in the face of tragedy, but this seemed excessive. Especially if he wasn’t even here as a reporter.

“Yes, Detective Whitbread, we would be most grateful if you could allow us to resume,” Col. Selig said. “We’re all very sorry for this most tragic occurrence, I assure you.” He turned back toward the bedroom, biting his lip. “We’re terribly shocked this could happen here. But you must understand that few of these people knew Mr. Hyde, and they’re all very anxious to resume their work. We’re committed to releasing three films per week from this studio and an additional two from our California studio. The film exchanges are expecting those stories, you see. Today is Wednesday and we have a lot of work to do to get those films completed, processed, and in their cans for distribution by this time next week.”

Whitbread put his hands on his hips. “Now, look here, a man’s been shot. A murder investigation takes precedence. I don’t care how many films you’ve promised to release, a man is dead.” He turned to my brother. “Mr. Cabot, tell me what you saw.”

I glared at Alden as if that would force him to be truthful. It had worked when he was a child.

With a big sigh, my brother told his story. “I came in this morning to make sure all the props were set up for this scene. It’s one I wrote. Kathlyn Williams plays Missy Snow, and yesterday she caught her foot on a corner of the rug so I wanted to make sure it was fixed before the start of shooting this morning. That’s when I found him, lying on the bed, with the gun in his hand. At first I thought it was Charles Clooney, who plays the evil St. John, rehearsing or something. But when he didn’t answer me, I realized it was a dead man. When I saw it was Mr. Hyde, I was shocked.”

“And how did you know this Mr. Hyde?”

Alden glanced at Col. Selig. “He’s a censor, with the Chicago Film Board.”

“Mr. Cabot, according to my officers, Mr. Leeder over there said he saw you place the gun in the hand of the dead man,” Whitbread said.

“Oh, surely not,” Col. Selig protested.

“He’s mistaken,” Alden said. “I was just bending over Hyde when Leeder came in. He misinterpreted what he saw, that’s all.”

I stared at my brother. No wonder he was in handcuffs. Someone claimed to have seen him putting the gun in the hand of the dead man. Why would anyone say that? What had Alden done? He was denying it, but I didn’t trust him. I shocked myself with my doubt. How had it gotten to the point that I could believe he would lie about something like this? My own brother. But I could, and I wondered what he was up to. At that moment, there was a commotion at the door.

“Good lord, not him,” Whitbread muttered.

I looked across and saw a tall, stout man with a florid face waving away a uniformed policeman at the door, and I recognized Mr. Peter Francis Fitzgibbons. Fitz, my sometime friend and the irrepressible political operative, had arrived.