mrs. pattengill didn’t take well to the rigors and deprivation of an inmate’s life. She told anyone who would listen that she liked a hot lunch and a cold supper, but in jail it went the other way around, and she was quite taken aback that the kitchen couldn’t reverse its meal schedule on her behalf.
She liked a vinegar rinse in her hair twice a week and a cream for her complexion every night, but neither was supplied. To her astonishment, she was not allowed to telephone a friend and ask that these niceties be delivered.
“I’m starting to understand why they don’t issue us mirrors,” I heard her call to Providencia Monafo, who lived in the cell next to her. “I’d rather not know what a sight I am these days.”
“That is not why you don’t have a mirror,” Providencia returned.
“Then is it because there are spirits that live inside the mirrors?” Mrs. Pattengill asked, with an attempt at gaiety in her voice. She was under the mistaken impression that Providencia was a spiritualist who had been arrested for fortune-telling, having either forgotten or chosen to disregard their conversation on the subject during the jail tour.
“No, they don’t give you a mirror because you might break it into pieces and slash at your neck.”
That was enough to put a stop to further conversations between Mrs. Pattengill and Providencia, which had surely been Providencia’s intention. I thought about chiding her for tormenting her new neighbor, but it occurred to me that she might well know best how to keep Mrs. Pattengill in line. There was no reason not to let her try.
I didn’t take Cordelia’s warning about Mrs. Pattengill seriously. The woman seemed to have no powerful friends or influential connections. She wrote no letters and had no visitors. She was quick to express her displeasure over the condition of her cell, the flavor of the food, the quality of the clothing, and all the ordinary inconveniences of jail life, which were, of course, considerable. It was always too hot or too cold. The men who lived on the four floors below us made noise day and night, and she groused that it interfered with her tranquility to hear them shouting at one another, arguing with the guards, coughing, spitting, groaning, snoring, and banging at the bars of their cells when they wanted attention.
“I was required by law to tolerate sleeping alongside one man who grunted and moaned and snored all night long, but I’m wholly unprepared to put up with eighty of them at a time,” she told me. “It’s unseemly.”
I made light of her complaints, which seemed insubstantial and even understandable from a woman in her position. I reminded her that we did all we could to treat our inmates decently, but that we couldn’t possibly provide all the comforts that she’d been accustomed to before her arrest. I was never strict with her, but I didn’t indulge her, either.
It was a pleasure, in those ever-shorter days near the end of October, to return to the routine duties that my position required. I went to see a few new probationers recently placed under my care. A girl had been arrested for sharing a hotel room with a man whom she claimed was her brother. I had to go to a great deal of effort to prove that they were, in fact, brother and sister. Once I did, the hotel’s house detective accused her of drunkenness, on the strength of two bottles of beer ordered by the brother but never opened. The entire business was ridiculous and I had no trouble in getting the girl freed. I would’ve rather not put her on probation at all, but Judge Seufert insisted, it being his opinion that the more girls under my supervision, the better, for the general welfare of the town.
Also under my care was a married woman accused of blackmail. Her method was to go into New York with a man, and then, once they’d crossed the state line, she’d threaten to summon a police officer and have him brought up on a white slavery charge. Her husband (a ruinously loyal man if there ever was one) came to her defense, and the men who’d fallen for the scheme were too embarrassed to give their testimony publicly. She, too, was released to my supervision, obliging me to stop in at unexpected times and see to it that she was at home and behaving as a wife should.
My inmates had troubles of their own, but it wasn’t the sort that elicited any sympathy from me. Ruth Williams, the actress accused of a little light house-breaking to pay for her supper, had managed to incriminate herself without ever saying a word, much less stepping outside her jail cell, and was now in more trouble than previously believed.
It came about like this: the room she’d once rented had been sitting empty owing to some repairs to the building, and when it was rented again, the new occupant tripped over a loose floorboard and found a cache of valuables hidden underneath. This led the tenant, naturally, to test the other floorboards and to investigate the deep recesses of the wardrobe, as well as the undersides of drawers and the backs of picture frames. All yielded valuable trinkets: ivory combs, ruby bracelets, engraved cigarette cases, and gold watch-chains.
Fearing that she would be accused of having stolen them herself, the woman turned everything over to her landlady, who went directly to the police. With so many additional counts of burglary against her, Ruth was now facing a substantially longer jail term.
“Have you ever heard of an honest landlady?” she asked despondently, as I tried, without much enthusiasm, to console her. Ruth had managed to make herself appear, even to me, like an artist devoted to her craft who happened to be down on her luck and forced through circumstances to lift a piece of silver or two. The picture now emerging was one of an inveterate porch-climber, fleet of foot and light of fingers. Her greatest acting role was in convincing the police otherwise, but now that game was up, too.
“Couldn’t you put me into some kind of program of reformation?” Ruth asked, appealing to me with wide wet eyes.
“What sort of program?” I asked, mostly to pass the time. I enjoyed the ramblings of criminals, and the way they ambled around the case assembled against them, kicking at it and looking for any hole through which they might escape.
“Why, just what you’ve done for the other girls!” Ruth said. She could hardly be considered a girl: it had also emerged, through further interviews with the landlady, that Ruth was not twenty-six but thirty-four. (“Twenty-six is my professional age,” she’d said in her defense.)
“Those other girls had been wrongly accused, or given sentences that far outweighed the crime,” I told her. “In your case, the police seemed to have underestimated you.”
Ruth felt she’d been paid a compliment and smiled brightly at that. “They always do.”
As I waited for word from Geraldine—the waiting is always the most maddening part, and in this case it depended upon a pair of attorneys having the opportunity to secure incriminating photographs—I waited, also, for John Courter to make his next move. If he knew that I’d been to the asylum, he might also know that I’d been to see a lawyer. I thought he might send me some message, or drop a hint during one of his campaign speeches about what he expected from me in exchange for his silence. But he continued as if nothing had happened, making the same fiery speeches as before, and campaigning largely on what he believed to be Sheriff Heath’s incompetence, even though Sheriff Heath was not his opponent in the race.
Sheriff Heath continued to go out and give a speech almost every night. Mr. Ramsey was hardly bothering to campaign against him, or if he was, it didn’t make the papers. He ran his brickworks downriver from the jail, put in an appearance at a few club luncheons, and ran perfunctory notices in the paper stating his qualifications: “Success in Business—A Builder Looking to a Bright Future—Prosperity and Opportunity for All Americans.” It was perfectly innocuous and free of controversy.
But that was the congressional race. As for Mr. Courter in the sheriff’s race, Sheriff Heath had assured me that no one wanted a man running the jail who had no ideas about it other than to insult his predecessor—something no sheriff had ever done in Bergen County, owing to the deeply seated spirit of fraternity that had, until now, existed among lawmen.
William Conklin, for his part, ran against John Courter for the office of sheriff in the gregarious, back-slapping way that was his nature. He rode up to one of Mr. Courter’s speeches in an ice cream wagon, cranking a hand organ that piped out a little tune, and luring Mr. Courter’s audience away with scoops of vanilla and chocolate. He judged a Beautiful Baby contest for the newspaper and posed for pictures with each infant. I heard from Francis that he also popped in at any club that put on a good supper, where he ate his fill, shook hands, and passed out mocked-up ballots with his name printed on every line.
“It’s the only name you need to remember on November 7,” he said, all over town.
The campaign was, therefore, in every way, a fight between two men who weren’t even running against each other. It was Sheriff Heath vs. John Courter, and the men actually opposing them for their respective offices seemed content to sit back and let someone else do the squabbling.
If it seemed strange to me that Mr. Courter would attack the sheriff rather than run on his own merits, it didn’t seem at all strange to Cordelia Heath. One afternoon I was summoned downstairs to see the sheriff and nearly walked in on a noisy argument between the two of them. I didn’t want to listen, but I couldn’t help it: the door to his office was open and both their voices were raised. Even the guard at the end of the hall could hear them. He looked at me sheepishly when I rounded the corner.
I stopped short just before the doorway, then backed down the hall so they wouldn’t see me.
“Forget about Courter,” Sheriff Heath was saying. “He’s not running against me. Let Bill Conklin take him on, if that’s what he wants to do.”
“Bill can’t be bothered, and you know it,” Cordelia said. “Mr. Courter isn’t out smearing his reputation. He’s going after you.”
“What of it? I don’t know why you want to involve yourself in the sheriff’s race at all. I’m out of this office in November either way. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Cordelia made an unhappy little snort and said, “I don’t think you see what’s happening here, Bob. Mr. Courter attacks you because it’s working for him, and that means John Ramsey doesn’t have to. The voters hear it either way, and they’ll remember it on Election Day. You’d say something about it if it was coming from Mr. Ramsey, wouldn’t you?”
“But it isn’t,” Sheriff Heath said, “and I think it’s awfully decent of Ramsey to—”
Cordelia smacked something down on a table—I was still lurking in the hall and didn’t see what it was, but it gave me a start—and very nearly shouted her husband down. “He’s not being decent. He’s letting Mr. Courter run you down and he comes out smelling like a rose. They’ll both win. It’s a trick, and you’re a fool to fall for it.”
There are certain arguments that married couples have with each other over and over, to no useful end. I could tell from Cordelia’s tone that this was one such well-trod line of dispute. I saw no reason to let it continue, so I took a few silent steps back, coughed once or twice, and stomped rather noisily into the sheriff’s office. Never had he looked so relieved to see me.
“A telephone call came for you while I was away,” he said to me, in a tone meant to indicate to his wife that he was getting back to business. “It was John Ward. You haven’t found yourself in need of an attorney, have you?”
Cordelia sensed right away that something was amiss. She was watching me quite sharply.
“I can’t imagine what he’d want,” I said, as casually as I could. “Are you sure the call wasn’t meant for you?”
Cordelia gave a high and nervous laugh. “I don’t know what use either one of you would have for a divorce attorney.”
Sheriff Heath kept himself composed, as he always did. He came around from his desk and took his wife’s elbow, in a manner that anyone would describe as courtly, and escorted her out.
“I don’t want to bore you with the running of my jail, dear,” he said, in a voice that was truly gentle, “but you do recall that every attorney in town has need of the sheriff’s office from time to time. We handle all manner of criminal and civil affairs here.”
Mrs. Heath wasn’t happy about it, but she allowed herself to be sent away. When she was gone, the sheriff turned to me as if nothing had happened.
“I suppose he might have a job on offer for you,” he said.
I tried to make light of that. “I have no need of a divorce attorney, nor do I have need of another job. I’ll be in Paterson tomorrow, so I’ll call on him then.”
If Sheriff Heath suspected anything, he didn’t let on.