“I am a lawyer, and investigator,” responded Grace. “And as such am trying to solve the mystery of the murder of Mrs. Brandon. As to the ‘amateur detective,’ it seems to me that Dougherty and some of his associates of the Baltimore police have played this part to perfection.”
She added, “They failed to rope off the premises where the murdered woman was found—didn’t interview Mrs. King, and so forth.”
The next day, Grace was with Detective Dougherty and his men as they were going to question the wife of John Snowden. As the police car rolled to the curb, Grace began to step in.
“You cannot get into this machine, madam,” said Dougherty. Grace didn’t understand. There was plenty of room on the seat.
“Why not?” she said. “I am a member of the New York Police Department.” She flashed her shiny new badge.
“I don’t care whom you represent, madam, you cannot go in this machine,” Dougherty said firmly. “I know that you are a newspaper reporter and that you are writing articles for a newspaper about this case under your own name.” He shut the door.
“You’re not giving that Negro a fair show,” said Grace, quickly. “I’ll get a lawyer for him.”
“That’s your privilege,” Dougherty said. “You can do what you please. If you wish, you may follow me in another machine.”
“I won’t follow you!” Grace said.
“Well, I shan’t be sorry if you don’t,” he replied.
Grace knew that Dougherty and his men had given Snowden the third degree in Baltimore. She knew they had done terrible things to him. But she also knew that the man had scratches on his cheeks and that Lottie’s fingernails had skin under them. There was also the matter of the ice on the doorstep. Grace couldn’t deny that. But she still felt as if he was being railroaded.
The whole town was shaken by the case. Alissa Franc summed up the shock: “We have learned that a woman can be murdered in a little row of houses with friendly neighbors surrounding her on every side, watching her movements, as such neighbors do.
“And we pause to think,” she said.
John Snowden was charged and remanded over for trial. Grace quietly visited him once before she left. She remembered all the other prisoners she had talked to over the years, all staring at her from locked rooms. She left for New York City. The evidence had run its course and she was hailed in the papers for having solved the case of Lottie May Brandon.
18
Her Last Bow
Glasses clinked together as people looked toward the podium in the Café Boulevard on Second Avenue. The ballroom was filled with women in dresses, the “Vere de Veres of the East Side,” all with an eye toward the empty podium in front. The occasion that night, on November 15, 1917, was the annual banquet of the Women Lawyers Association. The keynote speaker was none other than Mrs. Grace Humiston herself, fresh off her latest victory in Baltimore. The specialty of that night’s festivities was further heightened by the recent vote to allow suffrage in New York. Celebrating that moment with rousing speeches were Katherine Devereux Blake and New York Supreme Court Justice Charles L. Guy, among others. They, of course, saved Grace for last. When she finally arrived, the women at the tables pointed with their gloved hands. They greeted her with warm, thankful applause as she was introduced as the hero of the Ruth Cruger case. Dressed in black, Grace seemed to take in the light of the room itself as the clapping grew before finally settling down.
The year had been long for the woman in black. There in that room, layered with white tablecloths and champagne glasses, it was the perfect time for Grace to tell her oft-repeated story of starting out as a nighttime lawyer and of her work founding the People’s Law Firm. She talked about the muggy southern turpentine camps and of Sunny Side, and of the innocent men and women she had worked to set free. When Grace talked, it was always more about the cases than it was about herself. When she spoke of the Cruger case, it seemed like a shadow was crossing her face.
For the association to invite her to speak was a great honor. This was her year, after all. Not only had she solved the Cruger case, but she had been given her own independent bureau within the New York City Police Department for the sole purpose of finding missing girls. She had spawned a deep investigation into police corruption and the madman Cocchi was about to be tried in Italy. Grace talked about the importance of her work with the police department—as the first consulting woman detective in New York—and the ongoing work she was doing in that role. She had just begun writing a series of syndicated newspaper articles about white slavery, wayward girls, and immigration that included case details and advice for parents. Grace was being asked to consult on cases all over the country. In this room of lady lawyers, she was not only one of them, she was the best of them. The applause was strong.
It was a wonderful speech, the ladies agreed, as they smiled at each other over their own clapping hands. Grace motioned to them all. She was not done talking. Not yet.
Grace mentioned Camp Upton, the brand-new army training camp on Long Island near Yaphank. It had been built as the primary staging ground for New York’s brave draftees for the Seventy-seventh Army Division before they left for France and Germany. The camp had just opened in September and was still a busy hive of soldiers, workers, and personnel. Many in the crowd had a brother, friend, lover, or husband who had gone, or feared going, to Camp Upton. They all knew what the camp really was—a jumping point to the trenches of the war.
“At Camp Upton,” Grace said, to the quieted room of lady lawyers before her, “there are six hundred girls who are about to become mothers—who have no husbands.
“It has been reported to me,” Grace continued, over the sudden silence of the crowd, “that seven of these little mothers are dead. I have proved the facts of this in the case of two of them and am going down tomorrow to get the facts in regard to the others.”
The large room with the white tablecloths and crystal glasses became quiet. But there was a familiar anger underneath it all. In a corner of the room, a reporter wrote furiously, checking with others to make sure he had heard that number correctly.
Six hundred girls.