He sighed and ran a hand across his forehead. “I think we’d best put a stop to these stories. They write anything they please and we never have a chance to answer to it.”
“It’s fine with me,” she said. “I never wanted to be singled out like this. It doesn’t sit well with the other deputies. None of them have their pictures in the paper every time they catch a man. And not a one of them has to answer to the kind of correspondence I do.”
“Then don’t answer it, if you don’t like it,” the sheriff said.
“Oh, it keeps Norma occupied.”
“There’s a bit here about your salary, too.”
The question of her salary had come up recently at a meeting of the Board of Freeholders. There was nothing unusual about the sheriff being raked over the coals regarding his expenses, but this was the first time they’d thought to scrutinize the cost of hiring a lady. She was paid a thousand dollars a year, the same as every other deputy. Although Constance hadn’t attended the meeting, she’d heard plenty about it since then. Suddenly everyone in town had an opinion about her wages.
“Go ahead,” Constance said, miserably.
“She’s quoting me. At least it resembles what I actually said.”
“This office is a business office, conducted on business principles. We needed a matron to look after the women prisoners, to take the insane to Morris Plains, and for other duties. There are many cases in which a woman can succeed in trapping a criminal where a man can’t. It is therefore a part of the business efficiency of the office to have a woman under sheriff, and I offered the position to Miss Kopp because of the splendid work she has accomplished in that line.”
“I don’t suppose my splendid work persuades the Freeholders,” said Constance.
“Nothing ever does, but don’t bother yourself over it. I hear more complaints every day about the girl troubles in this county. I can’t do a thing about it unless I have a lady deputy.”
Constance saw her opportunity at last. “Which is why we need to talk about the girl who came in this morning. You were right. She doesn’t belong in jail. But what am I to do about it?”
Constance knew exactly what she was going to do, but thought it best to give the sheriff a chance to suggest it first.
“Most of these constables are volunteers. They get almost no training in the law,” Sheriff Heath said. “It isn’t just the girls. They’ll arrest a man simply because he speaks no English and looks suspicious.”
“What do you do about that?”
“Oh, I turn them loose. I’m not putting a man in jail just because he’s Polish.”
Turn them loose? Constance was shocked by how casually he said it. It had never occurred to her that she could simply walk a girl outside and set her free after an officer brought her in. In fact, she was entirely certain that she could not. This was obviously a privilege reserved only for the sheriff.
“Then what about my girls? Some of them are arrested just because they happen to be female and look suspicious.”
Sheriff Heath leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed, in the posture of a professor considering a question of philosophy. “How can you be sure there’s no cause?”
She didn’t bother to point out that he had no way of knowing for certain what the suspicious-looking Pole had been up to, either. Instead she said, “I know you don’t like to go against the police officers, but what if I went around and did a bit of investigating to see if there’s any merit to the charges? So many of these cases should be dismissed without ever going to trial, but there’s no one in a position to say so. Wouldn’t it save an awful lot of time and trouble if some of these girls could simply be released under my supervision?”
The steam-pipe shuddered in the corner and the sheriff leaned over to knock it, a useless procedure that nonetheless allowed him to feel that he had the upper hand. “They’re doing something like that in California. A girls’ delinquency court.”
“There’s no need to be as formal as all that,” she hastened to say, knowing that a new court would take years to bring about. “Just give me a chance to look into the charges and go before the judge. Wouldn’t they like to save the taxpayers the expense of locking a girl away in a state home?”
“They might. But the prosecutor won’t like anyone meddling in his morality cases.”
“The prosecutor doesn’t like anything I do. But if he insists on putting innocent girls behind bars, I might have to call a reporter I know.” Constance’s feud with the prosecutor’s office went back more than a year, when Detective John Courter failed to do anything about a man who was harassing her family. She went to the papers and shamed him publicly over it. They’d done little but hiss and spit at each other since.
“Let’s try to stay out of the papers for a week or two,” Sheriff Heath said. “But go on up to Pompton Lakes and see what you can do about that girl. Morris can drive you.”
4
IT WAS AN INCONVENIENCE to Constance that she didn’t know how to run a motor car, but having grown up in an era of slow-moving carriages and horse-drawn trolleys, she didn’t believe herself to be suited to it. Very few roads were adapted to the needs of machines and, as a result, they’d become so rutted and pitted that they tended to fill with water in the summer and snow in the winter, turning common by-ways into creeks and gullies. The drivers of automobiles were forever having to go round up a few strong men and a horse to disentomb their machines from the mud. And the autos required constant attention: it was not at all unusual for the sheriff himself to have to stop his wagon and tend to a pulley, a crank-shaft, or some other errant bit of metal and rubber.
As she preferred not to be made a fool of by an unruly machine, she left the driving to the other deputies and made do with trolleys, trains, and the sheriff’s wagon when someone else was driving it, as was the case that afternoon, when Deputy Morris was at the wheel.
He was, at that moment, Hackensack’s longest-serving deputy. He’d been at his post well before Sheriff Heath was elected sheriff deputy and had served a distinguished line of sheriffs of both political parties over the years. Morris was one of the deputies who’d been stationed to guard the Kopp sisters’ house when they were being harassed by a wealthy factory owner. He’d become a friend of the family as well as a trusted colleague.
“It wasn’t much of a town before the powder works opened,” Morris said as they rolled past the train depot in Pompton Lakes. “Now they’ve got rooming houses and a new school, and a carnival in the summer. Lots of girls working here.”
It did have the look of a formerly shabby town that had been spruced up: the roads had gone from dirt to macadam, electric lighting-wires were strung along the main street, and the druggist advertised fine soap and toilet articles.
“I wouldn’t think they’d hire so many girls to make gunpowder,” Constance said.