Rafferty's Last Case, page 23
“I fear you are right, Watson. But it is a terrible thing to behold. The mayor is locked inside himself and cannot find the way out. It will kill him in the end.”
MURIEL ST. AUBIN APPEARED for her interview with us fifteen minutes late, at quarter past two. There was no doubt as to her identity or her social status when she walked into the lobby. She wore a long mink coat, a dazzling pearl necklace with matching earrings, and she inspected the lobby as though she owned every inch of it before spotting us.
“It is kind of you to join us here,” Holmes said as we rose to greet her. “I trust it was not an inconvenience for you.”
“No, I was already intending to do some shopping downtown when you called. I am looking for some new furniture and that is always a trying task. So much of it is poorly made these days, like everything else, don’t you agree? Besides, I wanted to examine the great Sherlock Holmes in the flesh. You are not quite as tall as I imagined you would be, but perhaps Dr. Watson is to blame for that. Now, I take it you have some news to share regarding my son’s murder?”
“I have no great revelations to pass on, Mrs. St. Aubin, but we are getting closer to the truth every day.”
“Mr. Rafferty made similar statements, and yet here we are with the murderer still on the loose. I must say, I expected more of you, Mr. Holmes, given your renown.”
“Uncovering the truth, Mrs. St. Aubin, is a journey and there are always steep hills along the way. We are climbing now, steadily, and I assure you we will reach our destination before long. You can be of great help in this regard. We have learned from Mr. Rafferty’s notes all that you told him, but there are two matters I wish to explore in further detail. The first concerns your son’s accommodations.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your son was living, I believe, at the Piedmont Apartments at the time of his death.”
“He was.”
“And you told Mr. Rafferty, if I am correct, that you went to your son’s apartment afterwards and discovered it had been searched, presumably by the police. You also reported you found no possessions missing, except possibly for some photographs from his darkroom.”
“Yes. What are you getting at?”
Holmes responded with a question of his own. “Do you know how your son made a living, Mrs. St. Aubin?”
“I am aware of Mr. Rafferty’s claim that Danny was a blackmailer, but I am under no obligation to believe that.”
“I am afraid you must, Mrs. St. Aubin. Blackmail seems to have been your son’s full-time occupation, and he was quite good at it.”
“So you say.”
“It is true, I assure you. The evidence of his crimes is irrefutable, and I am convinced he was murdered because of his activities. The fact is he blackmailed many people, including some very prominent citizens of St. Paul. I suspect he even arranged to have secret photographs taken at this very hotel to entrap his victims.”
Mrs. St. Aubin suddenly appeared quite alarmed, the color draining from her face. “Well, that is certainly a shock. Who was in these photographs?”
“That is not a matter I am prepared to discuss. I can only say they were photographs no respectable person would wish to be seen by the public.”
“You mean bedroom photographs?”
“Yes.”
At this point, I thought Mrs. St. Aubin might lodge another strong objection to the idea that her son was a criminal, but instead she lowered her head and said, “You have proof of all of this, I suppose, including the photographs?”
“Let us just say we continue to gather evidence. Watson and I have already talked to several of your son’s victims.”
“I see. It is terrible to hear of this, but I suppose I cannot claim complete surprise. I must ask myself where it all went wrong. I fear I failed Danny.”
“No, Mrs. St. Aubin, your son failed himself, but that does not mean he deserved to be brutally murdered. And you can be of great help to us in finding his killer. I believe he must have kept incriminating material he gathered as part of his blackmail schemes. Yet I doubt he would have filed away such documents in his apartment, where the police or even one of his victims could have discovered them. Do you know if your son had a safe-deposit box?”
“I don’t think so. He told me more than once he didn’t trust banks.”
“Could he have left the material for safekeeping at your home?”
“No. He had no more confidence in me than he had in the banks.”
“What about entrusting the material to a friend? Was there one in particular he was close to?”
“My son had many people he called friends, but I have no reason to believe he was truly close to any of them. He was always his own best friend and no one else’s.”
“I see. What about the young man named Johnny Riordan, who used to work for Bertram Abbey? I know he called you once asking about your son. Did Mr. Riordan happen to mention where he was living?”
“No. I gave him Danny’s address, that was all. I have not heard from him since. Does he have something to do with Danny’s murder?”
“Possibly. Now, there is another name I am interested in. Have you ever heard of a Mrs. Bertha Coddington?”
The mention of her name elicited a long stare from Mrs. St. Aubin. “Why in heaven’s name would you bring her up?”
“So you know her.”
“I know of her, Mr. Holmes. She is a disreputable character as far as I am concerned.”
“Be that as it may, I have been told she has been of service to some of the city’s most prominent families. I should very much like to speak with her. Do you know how to reach her?”
“No.”
“But you could find out, could you not?”
“Why would I do such a thing?”
“Because you want to find out who killed your son, and Mrs. Coddington may have vital evidence in that regard.”
To my surprise, Mrs. St. Aubin grasped at once the implications of Holmes’s statement. “Are you claiming that my son impregnated the O’Donnell girl? If that’s true, what could it have to do with his murder?”
“It may have much to do with it or it may not, but it is a matter that must be investigated if we are to find our way to the truth.”
“Very well, I will see what I can do. Now, if that is all you want of me, I must be going.”
After Mrs. St. Aubin left to hunt for furniture, I said, “What do you make of the lady?”
“I am not quite sure. There can be no doubt she is a strong and highly intelligent woman and that she wants justice for her son. But I also think she is hiding something from us.”
“Why do you say so?”
“Call it an impression, Watson. For example, when I mentioned the blackmail photographs, she seemed especially interested. I wonder why. And I cannot believe she had no inkling of her son’s illegal activities. She is very much a member of this city’s upper class, and it was among just such people Mr. St. Aubin plied his terrible trade. She must have heard rumors, at the least, of what her son was engaged in.”
“Yes, but no mother ever wishes to believe ill of her child.”
“Mrs. St. Aubin, however, is not just any mother. She strikes me as an exceptionally clear-minded woman who harbors few illusions. I think she knew all too well what her son was doing but nonetheless felt compelled to defend him. Blood runs thick, even where there is doubt.”
Holmes paused, looking up at one of the long clerestory windows that brought daylight into the lobby, and said, “There is a bright blue sky today, Watson, but when it comes to this case we are in a London fog, stumbling along and trying to find our way. However, I have seen a shaft of sunlight.”
“Ah, you must have a new idea.”
“I do, and it concerns what Mr. St. Aubin did just before his death. We know from the letter to his mother that he believed he was in jeopardy. Yet he also wrote, as I recall, that ‘if things work out as I expect they will, I will be fine.’ This suggests he had a blackmail scheme in the works designed to protect him from all harm. In order for such a plan to work, however, he had to be certain that whatever incriminating material he had gathered would be safe while he arranged to collect his ransom, which I believe is what he set out to do on the night he was murdered. And so we are back to the question I posed to Mrs. St. Aubin. Where or with whom would he keep this essential material?”
I suddenly saw what Holmes was driving at. “You are saying he gave it to that fellow he met just before his death.”
“Bravo, Watson! Yes, and that young man to whom he handed an envelope at the corner of Seventh and Robert Streets must have been his friend and perhaps co-conspirator, Johnny Riordan.”
“Then it is more imperative than ever that we find Riordan.”
“It is, but I suspect Grimshaw will be looking for him as well. Mr. Riordan is a loose end, and loose ends are usually cut away.”
21
The Politicians
Montgomery Meeks told the story of his life in many different ways, depending on his mood of the moment and the gullibility of his audience. In one version, he hailed from a prominent Main Line family in Philadelphia and attended Yale, only to rebel against what he saw as a life of feckless wealth by heading west to carve out a career in politics. Meeks told others he had sprung from poverty in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York before clawing his way out to a better life. In still another account he claimed he and his parents had been members of a traveling circus in the Midwest, an experience that prepared him for a career in politics because, as he liked to say, “it’s the biggest carnival of all.”
The truth, with which Meeks never enjoyed a steady relationship, was far more prosaic, at least as it regarded his childhood. He’d actually been born only a few hundred miles east of St. Paul in Waukesha, Wisconsin. His Scotch-Irish father had fought with the legendary, black-hatted Iron Brigade in the Civil War and then returned home to operate a family drugstore. He eventually began sampling several of his products, including laudanum, to mask the pain of a war wound. He married late and was forty by the time Meeks was born in 1885. The boy was named Montgomery after a beloved comrade of his father killed on the first day of fighting at Gettysburg.
Meeks was just two when his father died and was raised by his strict mother, who was very German and very prim. She extolled a virtuous life of hard work and dedication to God and believed that smoking, swearing, and what she called “self-abuse” were all major way stations on the road to Hell. Meeks disagreed. By the time he was fifteen he had enthusiastically taken up all of those vices and several others. Handsome, cunning, and a wizard with words, he became known in high school as the boy who could talk his way out of any problem and into bed with any girl. He was just seventeen when he fixed his first election, removing and replacing enough ballots from a locked box in the principal’s office at his high school to ensure that a friend became senior class president.
He left home a year later, much to the dismay of his mother, who had wanted him to take over the drugstore. But the dull, predictable life of a shopkeeper in Waukesha held no appeal. Instead, Chicago beckoned. A friend found Meeks a job selling Collier’s encyclopedias door to door, a task at which he excelled. Part of Meeks’s territory was in the infamous First Ward just south of the Loop, where vice flourished under the watchful eyes of “Bathhouse” John Coughlin, an alderman, and saloonkeeper Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna.
Meeks found both men fascinating, and he soon quit his job selling overpriced knowledge in favor of running numbers for the two local kingpins. His intelligence, audacity, and unfamiliarity with ethics made him a rising star in the political machine, and by age twenty-six he was working at city hall as an assistant to the mayor. Opportunities for graft came with the job, and Meeks took his share of boodle on the theory, as he once told a friend, that “when it comes to politics, well-crafted dishonesty is always the best policy, because the last thing people are interested in is the ugly truth.”
In time he became a highly regarded fixer for Chicago’s Democratic Party, keeping wayward members of the political flock in check through bribery, flattery, and threats. At election time he also helped round up reluctant voters by the careful application of money to their wallets. His work for the machine proved increasingly lucrative, and he bought a fancy townhouse where he entertained many women.
Smooth, charming, and always impeccably dressed in the latest fashion, he was regarded as among the city’s most eligible bachelors. He viewed marriage, however, as a particularly unpleasant form of imprisonment and never seriously considered it. He found it especially thrilling to link up with married women, who as he put it “are always discreet and usually grateful.” Still, he kept a pistol by his bed in case an outraged husband paid him a visit in the dead of night.
By 1918, Meeks had every reason to believe that he was permanently ensconced as a Chicago operative. Then trouble arrived in the form of a group of reformers who began digging into the workings of city government and were shocked to discover rampant corruption. Meeks figured the reformers, who were mostly high-hats from the North Shore, would quickly fade back to their ballrooms after discovering Chicago politics were no more subject to improvement than human nature. But the do-gooders proved tenacious, and a grand jury that the machine somehow hadn’t been able to fix began issuing indictments.
As the jury’s investigators began to worm their way ever deeper into the corrupt core of Chicago politics, Meeks decided it was time to take an extended “vacation” rather than wait around for a possible indictment. His travels ultimately took him to Guatemala, a nation conveniently lacking an extradition treaty with the United States. When he returned a year later, with a nice tan and a pile of money he’d made trading coffee, he found that the situation in Chicago remained dicey and so determined to take his talents elsewhere.
It was said he ended up in St. Paul on the advice of a friend, who described the city as ripe with opportunity for graft. Meeks, however, claimed he was drawn to St. Paul “out of dedication to the sacred ideal of public service,” an observation always accompanied by a knowing wink. Whatever attracted him to St. Paul, he quickly found the city to his liking. Its government was loose and tribal, and while outsized boondoggling was frowned on, there were plenty of opportunities for well-managed thievery. Better yet, from Meeks’s viewpoint, the city was a tenth the size of Chicago, and that made it easy for him to become a big player in local politics. All he needed to succeed was a good candidate to back for mayor, and before long he found one.
* * *
TALL, RUGGEDLY HANDSOME, and unburdened by the weight of any profound ideas, Richard O’Donnell seemed tailor-made for a career in St. Paul politics. The son of a prominent lawyer, he grew up in one of the city’s better neighborhoods, attended good Catholic schools that served as nurseries for the city’s Irish political class, managed with some difficulty to earn a law degree, and made friends with the “right” kind of people everywhere he went. He was gregarious by nature, good at storytelling, backslapping, and drinking, and he saw politics as a profession that required no particular skill other than avoiding scandal.
He’d met Meeks in 1922 during his first foray into politics as a candidate for city council. Meeks attended a neighborhood event where O’Donnell gave a short speech, and afterwards the two men struck up a conversation. Meeks’s first words were, “I believe I could make you governor one day, Mr. O’Donnell, if you would let me help you.” A week later, Meeks was running O’Donnell’s campaign.
Although he lacked Meeks’s calculating guile, O’Donnell had an instinctual feel for the art of politics, and he knew how to project an image of rectitude and strength. His good looks—he had a fine head of black hair, warm brown eyes, and a pencil mustache always kept impeccably trimmed—enhanced his political aspirations, as did his oratorical skills. He had a gift for coating platitudes in honey, and his rich baritone made even the most jejune ideas sound profound.
After serving one term on the city council, O’Donnell ran for mayor in 1924 and won easily. He was reelected two years later. While O’Donnell became the public face of the city, Meeks operated behind the scenes. He made complicated deals, doused political fires, settled old scores, and saw to it that lucrative contracts were awarded to the right people. At the same time, he carefully cultivated the press, leaking embarrassing news about political enemies while deftly deflecting reporters away from any stories that threatened to cast the mayor in a bad light.
O’Donnell was popular with the electorate, and his political prospects appeared bright. By 1927 he was laying the foundations for a run at the governorship, with Meeks guiding the way. Then trouble struck, and all of their plans suddenly threatened to disintegrate into family scandal. Margaret’s pregnancy was the problem, and it caused O’Donnell to regret, not for the first time, that he’d ever had children. O’Donnell was thirty when he married a secretary at his law firm he’d foolishly impregnated. He hadn’t wanted to marry but knew he had no choice. The alternative was a scandal that might well lead to his banishment from the firm. His new wife’s name was Kathleen Doherty, and she was beautiful but also tempestuous and demanding, or so O’Donnell told his friends. After their son, Paul, was born, Kathleen wanted another child. Two miscarriages followed before the successful delivery of a daughter.
O’Donnell worked long hours and drank for more hours after that, and when he appeared at home it was as though he was merely a boarder, seen in passing. He was content to view his children, six years apart, as untidy pets best cared for by Kathleen. The children did not turn out well, and O’Donnell blamed Kathleen, who seemed to enjoy conflict for its own sake and was forever stirring up turmoil. It did not occur to O’Donnell that his refusal to play a role in the family drama lay at the heart of the problem.
His son, Paul, was extremely intelligent but something of a ne’er-do-well from the beginning, lacking motivation or discipline. While still in high school, he discovered alcohol, and by the time he graduated near the bottom of his class, he seemed destined for a life of disarray. O’Donnell was relieved when at age eighteen Paul left home and became a wanderer, supporting himself by odd jobs and, it was said, playing high-stakes poker aboard trains. But alcohol was his real passion, and those who knew him believed he would drink himself to death by the time he was forty.
