The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

Now, confronted with these serious claims, Charlie realized that this could be his big story, an exposé, exactly the kind of story he needed to get him back into the newspaper game. If he investigated and found out that the charges were true, somebody ought to clean house at the camp and throw out whoever was playing dirty. But who could do that? It couldn’t be the camp commander, who might be in on the scheme, and it definitely wasn’t a job for Sheriff Norris, who had no jurisdiction. It had to be somebody in the government, didn’t it? But how would he get word to the right person?

Charlie had no answers, but he knew someone who might. Using the long-distance line, he tracked down Lorena Hickok—Hick, her friends called her—who had been the top female reporter for the Associated Press when Charlie was working for the wire service in New York. Hick had left the AP the year before and gone to work as a roving chief investigator for Harry Hopkins. Hopkins was head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, one of FDR’s most important New Deal programs, and responsible for funneling half a billion dollars into federally funded, state-run work projects. FERA’s money was government money, big money, and that kind of funding always invited fraud and misuse. Hopkins, who was no dummy, was understandably eager to make sure it was going where it was supposed to go. So he had hired Hick as an investigator-at-large and ordered her to travel around the country, assess the operation of the programs, and report back to him.

Charlie had caught up with Hick late one evening the week before, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where she was staying. As a political reporter during the Tammany Hall bribery scandals of the late 1920s, she’d had plenty of experience investigating bribery and kickbacks. She had listened to Charlie’s abbreviated version of Mata Hari’s allegations, asked a couple of probing questions, and told him point-blank that he ought to drop whatever else he was doing and start following up on the tip.

“I’ve seen a few instances of that kind of monkey business in the FERA programs,” she said in her gritty, cigarette-roughened voice, “and there’s no reason to think the CCC is any cleaner. Sounds like you’re onto something, Charlie my boy. Handle it right, and you’ve got yourself a story—a big story.” Helpfully, she added, “If you latch onto something, give me a call. I know somebody who hates this kind of dirty dealing, who could maybe pass the word to the top.”

“Oh yeah?” Charlie asked. “Who would that be?”

He’d heard that Hick was a close friend of Mrs. Roosevelt’s, and everybody knew that the First Lady liked to stick her nose into all of her husband’s New Deal programs. “Eleanor Everywhere,” people called her. If she got interested in Camp Briarwood, he would really have a big story on his hands. Maybe it would even win a Pulitzer, every newspaperman’s dream of glory.

“Never mind who.” Hick chuckled. “That’s my business. You let me know what you’ve got, and I’ll take it from there. But you be careful,” she cautioned. “It’s no secret that there are bad guys who have their hands in Uncle Sam’s pockets. We don’t live in a perfect world.”

Hick’s response had convinced Charlie that he had to go ahead. But this wasn’t an investigation he could handle by himself. He needed somebody who had legitimate access to the camp and who could do some surreptitious on-the-scene investigating. And luckily, he knew just the person: Ophelia Snow, who worked part-time in the quartermaster’s office out there and knew her way around the camp.