Girl Waits with Gun (20 page)

When we rounded the corner on Fifth Avenue, a gust of wind caught us and made the going more difficult. The avenues were like canyons, the buildings funneling wind straight through them. I tucked the camera under my coat and buttoned up the collar.

Mr. Hopper only looked back once to make sure that I could keep up. I could.

The hotel for ladies, called the Mandarin, was located across the avenue, along a shabby block in the Thirties. It was just an ordinary six-story building with a pair of glass doors and a green canopy above them. A doorman stood outside under a brass gas lamp.

We walked swiftly past the hotel to the next corner. There Mr. Hopper stopped and told me he would wait for me. He pushed his hat back and looked down at me.

“All right, miss?”

His disposition was not unkind. He had deep brown eyes and a younger, softer face than I had first realized. He was probably the sort of man who terrified people without meaning to.

“I'm just fine,” I said, and I meant it. I strode confidently back to the hotel. The doorman tipped his hat and opened the door.

The lobby was about what I'd have expected for a small hotel catering to a female clientele. The tiled floor was covered in red Oriental rugs. The walls were paneled along the lower half and papered in a pattern of green and gold ferns along the upper half. There were old gas lamps on the wall that matched the one outside, and a mahogany desk staffed by a porter and a prim older woman dressed in a smart blue velvet dress with brass buttons down the front. To the right was a sitting room where the guests could meet their male visitors.

I presented myself at the desk and did what Mr. LaMotte asked. He was right. There was no trouble about getting a key to go and inspect a room before reserving it. There was a room available on the sixth floor with rear-facing windows, the woman told me, and one on the fifth floor with a view to Fifth Avenue. I didn't need that one but she seemed to want me to consider it, so I took the keys for both.

The porter came around the desk to accompany me upstairs. I tried to make some excuse as to why I preferred to go on my own, but just then I was rescued by a mother and her three daughters emerging from the elevator and demanding the porter's assistance with their luggage. I smiled, ever the gracious guest.

“Please don't worry about me,” I said. “I won't be but a minute.” Before he could say anything I dashed up the stairs and out of sight.

I took a look at every floor as I went, and they were all the same—red carpets, oak paneling, and gold-striped wallpaper. It looked like a clean and decent hotel. On the sixth floor I found the room and let myself in. There was not much to see, just a brass bed topped with a white coverlet, a nightstand outfitted with a mirror and washbasin, and a small desk furnished with an ink blotter and writing paper. In one corner was a stand for luggage and a coat rack.

The layout of the room seemed not at all unusual to me, but I stood in the corner and took a picture. Then I pointed it at the window and took another one while I looked across the alley at the blackened brick coated with decades of coal dust. The gap between the hotel and the building across from it was nothing more than an empty space where people might have tossed their garbage or the contents of their chamber pots. I wondered what the mysterious witness had seen, and what had been hurled into that dark place.

There were only a few windows on the building opposite, just the sort of small utilitarian windows that would be placed in a stairway to illuminate it. I didn't know what about that view might have interested Mr. LaMotte. I had six pictures left, so I took two looking down, one to the left and one to the right. Then I held it straight out at eye level and did the same thing, and then I pointed it up at the rooftops and once again took a picture in each direction.

I stopped on the fifth floor to see that room, too, even though I had no particular reason to. I could see why the lady at the desk offered it to me. It was a much larger room, more like a suite, and it must have fetched a higher price. It was furnished with a larger desk and two overstuffed chairs arranged around a small tiled fireplace. A pair of wide floor-to-ceiling windows looked across to Fifth Avenue. I went to the windows and the sight of the avenue from above made something catch in my throat. If I wasn't looking down on the busiest place in the world, I was a few blocks from it. A river of people moved below me, identifiable only by their hats and scarves. An endless parade of buildings marched up to Central Park and down in the other direction to Wall Street. New buildings were going up all around, each in a race to get closer to the clouds, with their scaffolding silhouetted like bare tree limbs against the October sky.

There, in that room, I felt like I was at the center of something. I was someplace that mattered. And that made me feel like I was someone who mattered.

I liked that room very much. I wanted to rent it on the spot.

I returned the key and inquired about the rates for the room on the fifth floor. The woman behind the desk smiled and handed me a rate card. “I thought that one would suit you,” she said.

Mr. Hopper was waiting where he said he would be. I assured him that I'd had no trouble getting the pictures, and we walked back to the studio in silence. When we arrived, he opened the door for me, but he did not go inside.

“Good day, Miss Kopp. I'm on to my next job. I'll leave you to yours.”

With that he disappeared into the street.

Mr. LaMotte took the camera from me and set it in his darkroom. He returned with a fat envelope in his hands. “Your wages, miss,” he said. “Take them with you. I've got to close shop and attend to matters of my own.” He turned and started rummaging through a desk drawer.

I thanked him and tucked the envelope under my coat. I started to leave, but I couldn't resist asking him. “Mr. LaMotte?”

He looked up as if he was surprised that I was still there. “Yes?”

“What did the lady see?”

“Lady? What lady?”

“The one in the hotel.”

He shook his head and came around the desk, peering up at me kindly. “Miss Kopp. I'm going to give you a piece of advice that will serve you well if you continue in this line of work.”

“Line of work?”

“Whatever you want to call this little investigation you're conducting.”

I reddened. “All right.”

“The less anyone knows, the better. If you have nothing to tell, you won't have to worry about being questioned.”

“I see.”

“I mean it. Put up a barrier between your witnesses, your victims, your investigators, your prosecutors, your attorneys, and your friends and enemies at the newspaper. Don't let anyone know a single thing they don't have to know. And do your best to keep them from talking to each other.” He made a series of chopping motions with his hands. “You see? Walls. I am putting a wall between you and the lady in the hotel. If you don't know about her, you can't tell anyone if they ask.”

He turned back to his desk. Without looking up at me again, he said, “The fewer people who know what that lady saw, the better. My girl photographer in particular does not need to know.”

I'm not your girl photographer,
I thought. But I didn't say it. I took my pictures and left for the train station. Mr. LaMotte followed and locked the door behind us, hurrying off in the other direction with still more envelopes under his arm.

I COULDN'T LOOK
at the photographs on the train. There were far too many people on board, all jostling for seats and all rushing to get home in time for supper, just as I was. I clutched the package and held on as we roared out of the city and back into Paterson. The train rattled and shook and swayed on its tracks, racing toward the station like a runaway horse.

In Paterson all the passengers had to get off and switch cars. I stepped out in the middle of the crowd and waited for it to disperse. Once the platform was empty, I took a seat on a bench and opened the envelope. Inside was a stack of over a hundred prints. Mr. LaMotte's name was printed nowhere on the prints or on the envelope. The only mark was the name
Ward
in light pencil.

The pictures had been taken over several weeks in the summer, from a vantage point just across the street from the address in question. I could see time passing on the face of the building. As the weeks wore on, the geraniums in the window boxes on the third floor leafed out and bloomed. Then the windows opened, and bed sheets came outside to dry.

I was near the bottom of the pile when I heard a muffled cough behind me and jumped up. Sheriff Heath had been looking over my shoulder.

“What are you doing here?” I felt like I'd been caught doing something wrong.

“I'm an officer of the law, Miss Kopp,” he said. “I don't have to account for my whereabouts. But you do. I thought you were home looking after your sisters. Fleurette told me where you'd gone. She said she was frightened to be left alone.”

I pushed the photographs back in their envelope and tucked it under my arm. “She wasn't frightened—she just wanted to come along. Norma is perfectly capable of watching Fleurette for an afternoon. I had business in the city.”

“What kind of business?”

“It doesn't concern you.”

He frowned, but it was the false frown of someone who was only pretending to be hurt. “I have something for you,” he said, reaching into his vest pocket. “Mr. Kaufman has paid his fine.”

He handed me a roll of bills. I put the money in my handbag and dropped down to the bench again, suddenly exhausted. “Well. His debt is paid. This takes care of it.”

He sat next to me. The train had pulled out of the station and we were alone on the platform. “I hope so. He wasn't happy about paying the fine, but he had little choice. It was due and I could have arrested him.”

“That must have been a pleasant visit.”

“It was not. His sister was there this time.”

“So you've met Mrs. Garfinkel?”

He nodded. “She was not at all pleased to see me. She wants to keep her family's name out of the papers. She handed me two hundred dollars and said that she hoped this would be the end to Henry's legal troubles.”

“Two hundred! But the fine was only fifty. You don't mean—”

He nodded. I stared at him, then reached for the roll in my handbag.

“Miss Kopp! I didn't take it.”

“Of course you didn't.”

He smiled and put his head down, then looked over at me from under the brim of his hat. “A sheriff can always find a way to put extra money in his pocket. I'm not that type of sheriff. Now, let's have a look at those pictures.”

I thought about what Mr. LaMotte had said about putting up walls between the parties in an investigation. But I didn't want to argue about it, and I was fairly certain that the photographs held no clues anyway. I handed the envelope to Sheriff Heath and told him where I'd gotten them.

He thumbed through the pictures. In one of them an old woman with a cane stopped at the entrance but did not go inside, in another two boys ran upstairs for dinner, and several showed the same man returning home from work in a bellman's uniform.

“I don't recognize any of them,” he said. “This doesn't have anything to do with that boarding house fire you were asking Morris about, does it?”

“I shouldn't say.”

The sheriff sat still for a minute, looking at the empty train tracks. A piece of waxed paper from the delicatessen next to the station had rolled onto the tracks, and a gray rat ran out from under the platform to inspect it.

Finally he handed the envelope to me. “Well, may I drive you home, Miss Kopp?”

THE SHOPS IN PATERSON
were due to close at any minute. Shoppers were dashing across the street with parcels in their arms, ignoring the line of motor cars shuddering and wheezing as they lurched in a slow and unsteady line. Green window shades came down at the bank as we rode past, and the grocer brought in his cart of onions from the sidewalk. A newsboy pushed the last of the evening edition into the hands of men rushing from their offices to catch the trolley home. The windows in the library went dim. Darkness chased us out of town.

The sheriff drove along in silence, his lips moving but no sound coming out. I stayed quiet as he seemed to be puzzling something out. By now it was almost completely dark. He said he wanted to pull over and check the headlamps before we drove into the country.

I got out of the car when he did. It felt good to stand along the side of the road with grass under my feet and breathe in the sharp, cold night air. I felt as though I had lived someone else's life all day, and now I was returning to my own.

Sheriff Heath bent down and squinted at the headlamps, then walked around to my side of the car and leaned against it, his hands in his pockets.

“This girl's afraid of the police, but she'll speak to you,” he said. “A stranger.”

“You're a stranger too,” I said.

He looked out along the tops of the trees. “We always have trouble getting women to talk to us.”

“They don't have any trouble talking to me.”

“But that does us no good if you won't tell me about it,” the sheriff said.

A black motor car took a bend in the road a little too fast and kicked gravel and dust at us. It was enough to spook me and I stumbled back into the grass. He took my elbow.

“It just caught me by surprise,” I said, brushing off my dress. “But that reminds me. It's Fleurette's birthday soon. Do you think we could take her to town for the day?”

He thought about it for a minute. “Just keep an eye on her, and take your revolver. Don't go to Paterson. I don't want you running into him.”

I agreed.

“Then go ahead. We'll drive by the house while you're gone.”

“Doesn't the sheriff have better things to do than watch for prowlers in the countryside?”