Deadly Proof: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery (24 page)

Meanwhile, she hoped that her job auditing Rashers’ books might help. Maybe the answers to Rashers’ death could be found in the columns of numbers written in ink in the large black leather-bound account book laid open before her on the desk. Her father taught her to respect numbers. Not that they didn’t lie. They frequently did––or at least they were frequently used to perpetrate lies. It might be that the seven reams of paper stock that were listed as having been bought last month weren’t really delivered. It might be that they didn’t really cost as much as recorded in the account book. But no one could quibble over what the number seven meant.

On the other hand, words, whether spoken or written, weren’t so concrete. What did the word love, for instance, mean to two different people? Before her marriage to John, she’d said she “loved” him. Later she learned this meant that she was infatuated with the idea of him—not the reality. Once she actually knew her husband—she discovered she didn’t even like him, much less love him.

And when John said in the wedding ceremony that he would “love” her “till death do us part,” was he really lying? Maybe to him, “love” simply meant not humiliating your wife by publicly taking a mistress. Which was what he implied one awful evening when he’d drunkenly confessed to her that he could have bedded a friend’s wife that night but hadn’t, because he was such a good,
loving
husband.

Shaking her head at this memory, she consciously replaced it with the image of Nate, who, after a lingering farewell kiss last night, whispered a fervent, “I love you” in her ear. Older and wiser, she no longer expected that her definition of love was identical to his. Instead, she trusted him and herself enough to spend a life-time with him parsing its meaning together.

“Mrs. Fuller, may I come in? Would this be a good time to go over the employee accounts with you?” asked Franklin Griggs, the shop foreman.

Surprised, Annie looked up. After spending an hour going laboriously through the past six months of income and expenses, her mind obviously was wandering, so she welcomed a break. She said, “Of course, Mr. Griggs. That would be very helpful.” She stood up and discreetly stretched as he walked into the office.

Annie’s first impression of Griggs last Tuesday hadn’t been all that favorable, perhaps because he’d been so obsequious to Catherine Rashers. Jarring behavior in a man of his age and position within the firm. Today, when he welcomed her at the shop door, he’d acted more appropriately—more like a man in his fifties who was in charge of a successful print shop with over twelve employees.

Griggs put down on the desk a large dark green ledger and a folder that contained the contracts for each employee. Opening up the ledger, he pointed out that as foreman he was paid a set weekly wage, as was Florence Sullivan, Seth Timmons and the other full-time pressman, and the apprentices—although all of them were only paid once a month. The three other full-time typesetters, on the other hand, were paid in the traditional fashion for typographic work. Their pay was based on how many lines of type they set each week, which meant their weekly wages varied between $12 to $18 a week, depending on how quickly they completed their work.

Once Griggs left the office to go back on the floor, she calculated what each employee made per week over the past six months. As one of the typesetters had told Nate, Florence Sullivan was making an unusually generous wage for a woman––$22 a week––identical to Griggs’ weekly salary. This meant they both made nearly ninety dollars a month, a very respectable salary.

And it was a good deal more than the typesetter––Orrie Childers––made. When pretty raven-haired Miss Childers showed up at the office door first thing this morning, asking a clearly fabricated question of Griggs, Annie immediately recognized her from Nate’s description. He’d called her a pert little gossip. Miss Childers was one of the three full-time typesetters, and apparently she was the slowest of the three since she seemed to be averaging only $12 a week. Perhaps her propensity to gossip was getting in the way of her productivity.

When Annie looked at the wages of the two full-time pressmen, who were, according to Griggs, paid standard union shop wages, she saw that Seth Timmons made $30 a week, five dollars a week more than the day pressman. This added up to a very substantial monthly amount––certainly more than he would make teaching in one of the city’s primary grades, which was the job he held last spring.

However, it was when she took a good look at the contracts for the five young female apprentice typesetters that she finally understood what Iris Bailor, the WCPU forewoman, meant when she said that Rashers was able to undercut his competitors because he paid his apprentices such low wages.

The two apprentices who were finishing up their first year with Rashers, under the terms of the contract, only averaged two dollars a week in wages and––even though they got free room and board—this was a pitiful amount. A servant, like Kathleen, who also got part of her wages in room and board, made seven dollars a week. The five female apprentices shared one room at a nearby boarding house, and Annie had already discovered in the accounts that Rashers paid that boarding house keeper only a dollar-fifty a girl per week for their lodging and meals. Annie suspected that the meals the poor apprentices got at their boarding house were as unappetizing as the mattresses they shared were lumpy.

By the time an apprentice entered her fourth year working for Rashers under the contract, they were still only making slightly less than six dollars a week—even though by that time they should have achieved the skill level of a typesetter like Orrie Childers.

If other printers paid their apprentices more and had fewer of them, this represented a real disadvantage in terms of their labor costs when competing against Rashers, who was getting half of his typesetting done for half the cost. No wonder he’d been able to charge clients less and still make a profit.

Annie was even more shocked when she read the fine print of the contract. Rashers was taking ten percent of these girls’ wages out of each pay packet—supposedly to guarantee that they would stay for the four full years of the contract. How many of these poor girls actually ended up quitting before the four years were up, never getting that money back?

It would be easy for an employer like Rashers to make the workplace suddenly so intolerable for a young woman that she would decide it was worth it to forfeit the money to get away. Particularly if there were work available elsewhere for significantly higher wages. Then he could sign up a new apprentice who would cost him almost a third less than the apprentice who’d just quit.

She would need to check to see if her speculations were correct about what other printers were paying their workers, but if she were—this certainly did seem like an adequate motivation for a business competitor to want Rashers dead. And what might a young female apprentice do if she suddenly realized how badly Rashers had been exploiting her?

*****

L
aura used the walk up Montgomery Street to Clay to stretch out her tired limbs. She’d put in a good ten hours of work today at the WCPU, maintaining a pace of typesetting at 1000 ems per hour of lean copy. Even more rewarding, Iris praised the job she did composing the layout for the legal brief she was working on and found only one typographical error in the proof she pulled. She enjoyed working on the legal briefs. They gave her something to talk about with her brother Nate, and it felt like good preparation for law school, which was her ultimate goal in trying to get into the University of California. The entrance exam was just a little over two weeks away, and she’d been studying with Kitty and Ned almost every evening, so she was beginning to feel more confident of success.

Crossing the street at Clay and turning towards the Niantic, she felt a pleasant warmth from the sun, which at this time in the early evening was still high enough in the sky for its beams to skim over the top of the tall five-story buildings along Clay. She only wished the day’s heat hadn’t had its usual effect on the dung that littered this busy street. Why was it that on the ranch she was never bothered by the smell of manure, but here in the city she found it offensive?

Wrinkling her nose, she hurried down towards the front entrance of the Niantic. When she had dinner with Seth on Monday, he’d told her that one of Rashers’ dalliances, Miss Von Klepp, was the forewoman at the cigar box factory on the building’s fourth floor. She hoped to be able to talk to her about Rashers, but she didn’t want to explain to Seth why she was there, which was why she was avoiding the side entrance. 

Laura hated the idea of other poor working women finding their names in the papers, which could happen if her brother called them to testify, but she saw how their testimony could undercut Mrs. Rashers’ accusations against Mrs. Sullivan. Seth admitted the reason he mentioned the box factory forewoman to Nate was because he thought this proved that Florence wasn’t romantically interested in Rashers. He’d said to Laura, “It’s not as if Mrs. Sullivan wasn’t aware of the flirtation going on between Rashers and Miss Von Klepp. But I’ve never seen any animosity between the two women.”

Today, Laura was going to test Seth’s theory. Her plan was to introduce herself as a fellow typesetter interested in clearing Florence’s good name. She thought she would just ask if the forewoman or any of the box-factory workers noticed any strangers on the stairwell when they went out to dinner on the Friday night in question. If Seth were right, Miss Von Klepp wouldn’t exhibit any outright hostility, and at the very least maybe she’d offer something Nate could use in the trial—like some mysterious hoodlum lurking on the stairs.

Laura was worried about the coming trial. This would be Nate’s first big case, and as far as she could tell, there was a very good chance he might not be able to keep his client from being found guilty. Besides not being good for his reputation as a defense lawyer, what a terrible burden that would be—to think that you were responsible for an innocent woman going to prison.
If
Florence Sullivan was innocent.

Laura wasn’t so sure about that. Seth was convinced Mrs. Sullivan wasn’t in love with Rashers, but from what Iris told her, she certainly had been. What she couldn’t understand was what would have attracted her to a man over twenty years older. Even if everyone said he was handsome and charming, he would be old enough to be her own father. It was one thing to have a few years difference between a man and a woman—for instance Nate was three years older than Annie and Seth couldn’t be more than ten...

Anyway, Iris thought one of Rashers’ attractions for Florence was his age—that she was looking for a father figure, since her own father had died when she was so young. Laura could see why a young woman might idolize Rashers––she and her friend Hattie had developed quite the grand passion for dear old Professor Thicke at San Jose Normal. But be intimate with him? Laura shuddered at the very thought.

Five minutes later, all thoughts of the inexplicable nature of the attraction between a man and a woman were blasted from Laura’s head as she stood at the doorway to J. P. Austin’s Cigar Box Factory. The noise was deafening. There was the whine of two big steam-powered saws at the back of the room, where men were cutting what smelled like cedar into different-sized pieces of wood. Then there was the cacophonous sound of ten hammers wielded by young men who were nailing the pieces of wood into boxes. Finally, the voices of at least fifty women who chatted while they pasted paper into the insides and outsides the assembled boxes added a garbled soprano melody to the mix. If Laura had to work in this environment, she’d go mad.

“May I help you?” shouted a short buxom blonde who had the pink cheeks and blue eyes of a Dutch doll.

“Yes, please. I hoped to speak with the forewoman, but I wonder if there is somewhere else we could go where I wouldn’t have to yell?”

The Dutch doll, who did indeed turn out to be Miss Von Klepp, led her into a small room with glass windows looking over the rows of working women and shut the door, muting the factory noise to a reasonable level. Laura introduced herself as a typographer for the WCPU, who also happened to be the sister of the lawyer defending Mrs. Sullivan.

To her delight, Von Klepp’s reaction was to shake her hand enthusiastically, saying, “I am so glad to hear someone is helping her. I couldn’t believe it when I found out that she’d been arrested. Is there anything I can do to help?”

Laura, trying to be polite, first expressed how intrigued she was with the work the women were doing on the shop floor before launching into her questions about the night Rashers died. This turned out to be the way to the forewoman’s heart. By the time Miss Von Klepp finished giving Laura a verbal tour of the factory, she’d learned that the standard size box held one hundred cigars and was made from six separate pieces of cedar, fourteen nails, and a muslin hinge. That all twelve sides of the boxes themselves were lined with paper, inside and out, and that they displayed not only a variety of advertisements but also a factory identification, a federal tax stamp, and a notice cautioning against the reuse of the box.

She also discovered that, not surprisingly, Rashers did the printing for the labels the women were so busily affixing to the boxes. This led nicely into her first question about what Miss Von Klepp thought about Joshua Rashers.

Her pink cheeks rounded even more, and she chuckled. “Well, I confess I am sorry that he’s died. He was a right old so and so, and I wouldn’t want to work for him, but he made me laugh. And he gave me a good price on the cost of printing up the labels—which made my boss very happy.”

“Did you know that it was Mrs. Rashers who accused Florence Sullivan of killing her husband?” Laura asked. “Suggested that she played the part of the ‘woman scorned.’”

“No! What a load of nonsense. Not to say that things weren’t complicated between the two of them. When Rashers first started inviting me in for a smoke, she took me aside and warned me that his intentions weren’t entirely honorable. I assured her that I didn’t mind a little fun—livened up my day––if I got something out of it. I do know she felt protective of the girls under her, made sure he was never alone with them.