Mysteries of Winterthurn Page 24

  Mr. Rosenwald’s interrogation lasted well into the evening, and became, at times, somewhat heated, as the “suspicious party” sought variously to dismiss the import of the situation, with contempt, and a snort of incredulous laughter; then again, to counter it, with chill sobriety, and a rapid-fire species of logic; yet again, more piteously, to deflect it,—by dwelling upon his reputation (for “reputation” he dared to call it) for upstanding moral behavior, both at his place of work and elsewhere. (When, by their line of questioning, Mr. Shearwater and his deputies hinted that veiled accusations had been made, by other witnesses, as to Mr. Rosenwald’s morals,—his lewd advances to the mill-girls, his particular interest in Eva Teal—it was a remarkable thing to note how furious he become; yet, withal, how frightened.)

  “For it is a matter of common knowledge, is it not,” Mr. Shearwater commented,—not, as it was afterward reported in the Sun, in an accusatory tone, but in a tone of forthright affability—“that Jews will ‘spare’ Jewesses their attentions of a certain sort, while pursuing Gentile girls?”

  This was hotly and rudely denied: and dismissed as “the most contemptible sort of rubbish,”—which, as one might imagine, scarcely flattered the sheriff of Winterthurn County.

  Next, a line of questioning was pursued as to when Isaac Rosenwald had last seen Eva Teal: to which the flushed gentleman applied himself with an inordinate urgency, perched now at the very edge of his chair, and his breathing pronounced in its shallowness. He could not say when he had last seen her, if his inquisitors meant, when had his eyes last alighted upon her: for, like thirty-odd employees in the shop, all of them females, Miss Teal had doubtless come upstairs to the office, sometime on the afternoon of Friday June 7, to receive her paycheck: which was handed over to her (yes, he had ascertained before coming to the sheriff’s headquarters,—Eva had received her wages for that week), not by Mr. Rosenwald himself, but by one of his assistants. For this was the usual procedure. For the office manager had more important things to do than to hand out paychecks; and hear complaints and “sob stories”; and deny advances on the next week’s salary; and the like. Moreover,—

  At this point, Mr. Rosenwald was sharply interrupted, and asked again, a most simple question: Had he seen Eva Teal in his office on the afternoon of June 7?—however “seen” might be construed. Whereupon, his thin cheeks flushed in anger, he allowed that he might have “seen” her; but had not talked with her; and had not,—ah, assuredly!—enticed her into his office, and locked the door, and forced his “lewd” attentions upon her.

  This display of unseemly irony, or brazenness, was met, for a moment, with shocked silence: whereupon Mr. Shearwater, doubtless intending a coarser irony of his own, inquired of Mr. Rosenwald whether it was his penchant to behave thusly with the majority of the young females “under his thumb,” or only with Eva Teal.

  Thus outfoxed, as it were, Isaac Rosenwald stared blinking at Mr. Shearwater; and it was some seconds before his parched lips moved,—to indicate that so despicable a joke, in this context, was not worthy of a reply.

  “If you choose not to reply, Isaac,” Mr. Shearwater amiably observed, “that is your prerogative.”

  As to the actual evening of June 7,—here, it quickly became clear, Mr. Rosenwald’s replies were evasive, and suspicious indeed. For though he had accepted an invitation to dinner with a family named Liebman, of South Winterthurn, and was expected at their home at six o’clock, he had failed to appear: and had evidently (for which he was grievously sorry) caused the Liebmans, Mrs. Liebman in particular, some hours of worry, as the woman had taken it into her head that Isaac had been attacked by thieves, or beaten wantonly in the street: such incidents being more and more common in the city in recent years, as the population of South Winterthurn increased, with the rise of the mills. With a flicker of displeasure, as if he resented most forcibly this intrusion into his private life, Mr. Rosenwald told his questioners that he had been reluctant to accept yet another invitation from the Liebmans, not because he disliked them, but because he believed he might be misleading them as to his interest in their eldest daughter; and, since they were the kindest and most generous persons in the world, and worried inordinately,—excessively, he thought—about his welfare, he shrank from taking advantage of them, or disappointing them. Thus, his reluctance; as to why he had failed to appear,—the shameful truth was, he had forgotten: or had a vague notion that he was expected the following night.

  “You had forgotten the engagement—?” Mr. Shearwater inquired, with a faint crinkling of his brow. “Yet it has been your boast of yourself, several times today, that you are unfailingly scrupulous in your behavior,—whether professional or otherwise.”

  “Yes, I forgot the dinner engagement,” Mr. Rosenwald said irritably, “which I hope, sheriff, is not a capital offense amongst the citizens of Winterthurn! Albeit, if you speak with the Liebmans, as, I suppose you will, they will tell you another story,” he amended, shifting miserably in his chair, “for I was so loath to hurt their feelings, I felt pressed to explain to them that I was taken ill, and went suddenly to bed, to be nursed by my landlady: which of course was not the case, as I spent the evening, until nine-thirty or ten o’clock,—or perhaps a little later—walking restlessly about.”

  “‘Walking restlessly about,’” Mr. Shearwater said neutrally. “And during this space of time you were accompanied by—?”

  “By no one.”

  “Ah, by no one! Yet, doubtless, you were sighted by someone?—over a period of three or four hours, in the midst of the city, that would be difficult to avoid.”

  “I am certain that I was sighted by someone, as I walked about,” Mr. Rosenwald said in a quickened, nasal voice, “but I scarcely paused to take affidavits from witnesses, sheriff!—and very much resent your line of questioning.”

  “Yet it might be, Isaac,” Mr. Shearwater said, “that you will more resent another line of questioning. Therefore—”

  “From about the hour of five-thirty until ten o’clock, or ten-thirty,” Mr. Rosenwald interrupted, “I admit to the sin against Christendom of walking about, alone, in the area of Juniper Park,—and along the river—and back to my boarding house by way of Union Avenue: during which time I admit to the sin of being so asocial as to have refrained from entering any of the taverns in the city, it is the pleasure of Winterthurn’s citizens to patronize,—in astonishing numbers, on the weekend nights especially. Indeed, the predilection for alcohol amongst certain persons,—the predilection to indulge in it, to drunken excess, in the most noisome sorts of ‘neighborhood pubs’—has long baffled me. For even the mill-girls, who have toiled so many hours for their pittance, cannot always resist the temptation to throw it away, as it were, on gin—!”

  “And you do not treat them?” Mr. Shearwater inquired.

  “I—! Treat them—!” Mr. Rosenwald said, with an expression of genuine repulsion. “I hope, sheriff, I can find better investment to make with my pittance.”

  “In any case, you would say that you ‘walked restlessly about,’ from approximately five-thirty until ten-thirty, on the night of June 7: that you were accompanied by ‘no one,’ yet very likely observed by ‘someone,’—albeit you cannot provide us with any names,” Mr. Shearwater contentedly observed, the while the little stenographer’s fingers flew, with, it seemed, a renewed zest. “And though you must know, by way of the newspapers at least, that Eva Teal met her death sometime between the hours of seven in the evening and seven in the morning, you ‘resent the line of questioning’: and perhaps deem it irrelevant?”

  “I am greatly sorry that Eva died; in truth I am stunned by the news,” Mr. Rosenwald said, vigorously rubbing his eyes,—his wire-rimmed spectacles, for the moment, thrust askew upon his forehead—“yet I cannot say that the fact of her death, no less than the precise span of time during which she might have died, has the slightest relevance to me. And that is all I shall say on the subject.”

  This brave, and even somewhat fiery, speec
h failed to evoke in Mr. Rosenwald’s listeners the precise response he wished: yet, so overwrought had the wiry gentleman become, he seemed not to notice, and rubbed at his eyes the more vigorously, while muttering under his breath words to the effect that “such stupidity,—such incompetence—is not to be believed!”

  After a courteous pause, Mr. Shearwater shifted to another subject, and inquired of the “suspect,”—for by now, in the minds of all his interrogators, this severe term was not inappropriate—how he accounted for the fact that several employees at the mill, who begged to remain anonymous, accused him of routinely making lewd and lascivious advances: and of alternately “favoring” certain girls and “bearing grudges against them”: traveling about town with them in cabs, and otherwise: and taking them to the office of an unnamed physician, for an unnamed purpose. “Moreover,” Mr. Shearwater said, in no haste, while Mr. Rosenwald gaped at him with an expression of such incredulousness, one or two of the deputies felt constrained to look away, that they might not burst into ribald laughter, “—moreover, it was reported to our office, by a witness very close to the dead girl, that you did have a personal connection with her, however you conspire to deny it: this selfsame witness feeling obliged to say, with a great show of reluctance, and not a little terror at the gravity of her words, that it ‘should not surprise her if the Jew at the office had lured Eva away to murder her, for being a good Catholic girl and shrinking from his advances,’—or words close to these.” Mr. Shearwater contemplated Mr. Rosenwald, who sat, still, in his attitude of utter shock, the blood slowly draining from his face; and even from his fleshy lips. “Yet I suppose you deem it irrelevant, and unworthy of your time, to comment—?”

  After some minutes, when he had recovered sufficiently to speak, Mr. Rosenwald expressed, in a faltering voice, bafflement,—nay, disbelief—that such vile accusations had actually been made: such cruel slurs upon his reputation,—such slander! If uttered at all, they could not have been made by anyone who truly knew him: but only by someone who envied him his position, and wished him harm. For his relations with the mill-girls, while never less than formal and businesslike, were, in his opinion, unfailingly congenial: why, he was quite certain they were fond of him,—a small clique at least: who could be relied upon to tell the truth, and set the record straight, if the authorities contacted them.

  “As for the notion that I, Isaac Rosenwald, should wish to ‘lure’ a girl away, for any purpose whatsoever,—that I should know, or care to know, whether she might be Catholic!—that is even more preposterous,” he said, with a sudden upsurge of feeling, “and I refuse to rise to the bait of commenting upon it; particularly as the slanderer is anonymous.”

  “So it is a false accusation, as well, that you enjoyed a personal connection with Eva Teal?—a mysterious connection, pursued beyond ‘business hours,’ as it were?” Mr. Shearwater asked.

  “Ah,—that,” Mr. Rosenwald said, in an enfeebled voice, “why, that: but was it Eva Teal, indeed, or—another girl, perhaps—I—But was it—Was it—”

  Thus stammering, and staring with tear-dimmed eyes at the floor, Mr. Rosenwald shifted uneasily in his chair; and seemed incapable of replying, for a full minute or more. Ah, how much the picture of Misery, and Confusion, and Guilt he appeared—! And how intently his listeners regarded him, as if, indeed, he were a rare species of insect,—loathsome, and poisonous, yet, withal, fascinating. One of the deputies here overstepped his position by saying, in a low, challenging voice, that if it was not Eva Teal he recalled, might it have been another of the girls?—the girls of the Half-Acre?

  Fortunately, Isaac Rosenwald did not hear this remark, or did not comprehend it, but drew in his breath to explain, with blanched lips, that the incident alluded to had been a simple one,—or, perhaps, a complex one—that it was “off the record,” in terms, that is, of his position at the mill: that his employers knew nothing about it, as he had not wished to antagonize them by bringing it to their attention. For, as doubtless it had already come out (so Mr. Rosenwald said wearily, with not a little bitterness), relations between him and the Shaws had grown strained of late, for reasons extraneous to this investigation; and, having been “burnt,” as it were, in attempting to intercede with them, on the behalf of certain abused workers, he had grown timid indeed; and feared they might have discharged him some months ago, were it not for the likelihood that Mr. Harrier Von Goeler wished to hire him, to oversee his gloveworks. Thus it was, Mr. Rosenwald said sighingly, removing his glasses that he might polish their misted lenses on his sleeve,—thus it came about, all innocently, that he had escorted one of the girls to the office of a young physician of his acquaintance, that she might be treated for a slight scalp wound incurred in the mill: not knowing,—which is to say, not recalling—whether it was Eva Teal or another of the younger girls.

  As Isaac Rosenwald was to be interrogated tirelessly on this subject, by both the sheriff and his men and other authorities, at later dates, it were well to present the simple facts of the incident, and to abbreviate the telling. It seems that Eva Teal, never one of the more reliable of the workers, had grown drowsy, or fatigued, near the end of her twelve-hour shift; that her hand had wavered, and her head drooped; that, being hasty in her toilet, she had failed to use enough pins to keep her tresses in place,—with the unfortunate consequence that a strand of hair escaped her cap, and caught in the loom, to be torn out, in the space of an instant, with what fearsome shrieking the reader can well imagine. (For though the girls in the mill,—indeed, in all the mills and “sweatshops” of South Winterthurn—were forever succumbing to accidents, negligible and otherwise, each incident might have been the first, to judge by the horrific screams, sobs, curses, faints, and occasional slaps and blows it provoked: and one might well sympathize with the exasperation of the foreman, who had to contend not only with spilled blood, and broken and severed fingers, and mashed hands, and mangled arms, and gouged eyes, and the like, but with the frequent breakdown of the costly machinery, which invariably retarded production: and which never failed to evoke the wrath of the owners.)

  However, Eva Teal was undeservedly fortunate, for her lapse of attention resulted in but a trifling injury,—a bit of hair lost, and a raw spot, no larger than a quarter, on the right side of her head—albeit a fair amount of blood streamed down her smock; and presented a savage and distasteful spectacle. Her foreman was so incensed, he brought her over to the office, that Mr. Rosenwald might discharge her on the spot, and pay her the wages she had earned that week: but, all uncharacteristically (for the “Jewish gentleman” who ran the office was much feared, and generally disliked), Rosenwald took pity on her,—doubtless for her extreme youth, and simplicity of manner, and the commingled tears and blood with which her costume was stained. “It was my fault, sir, and I am very sorry,—it was my fault, and I am very sorry”: thus the weeping girl exclaimed, with the hope of disarming her critic, and winning his sympathy.

  So it came about, that Isaac Rosenwald declined to dismiss the terrified girl; and responded with such unusual warmth as to allow one of his office workers to attend to her, in his own washroom; and to use his towel, which became bloody, and unsightly indeed. When, afterward, she presented a more decent appearance, Rosenwald insisted upon escorting her (in truth, by trolley: for he shrank from paying the fare of a hackney cab) across the river to Pinckney Street, that she might receive proper medical treatment; and an infection be avoided. And all this, remarkably, was paid for out of his own pocket: and even Eva’s weeping gratitude was brushed aside, with some embarrassment and impatience.

  (No report of this curious transaction was ever made, officially, for the Shaw family did not hold themselves liable to pay damages, medical expenses, and the like, if an accident occurred in their mill,—these accidents being invariably the result of slipshod work, stupidity, laziness, or outright sabotage, on the part of covert “agitators”; and Eva Teal would certainly have been dropped from the payroll. And, it may have been, Mr. Rosenwald fe
ared more for his own employment.)

  As to whether it was true that Eva, either alone or in the company of her blushing girl friends, oft-times found excuses to drop by the manager’s office, to wish Mr. Rosenwald a good day, or even to leave a trifling present for him, with one of his assistants, Rosenwald was unwise to deny,—and then to recant,—and again wonder if his memory failed him,—while presenting a picture of extreme unease to his interrogators. For if so many witnesses claimed that it was so,—that Rosenwald had even been heard to call Eva by name, and to smile at her,—why, then, did the gentleman wish to deny it; or to feign a most uncharacteristic weakness of memory?

  Near the end of this initial interrogation,—which lasted for more than seven hours, and left the hapless Rosenwald quite fatigued—it was put bluntly to him that all five of the Gentile girls found in the Half-Acre had been viciously mutilated, as if in anger: and that Eva’s gold cross had been torn from her chain and placed, doubtless mockingly, in her mouth. Were these savage acts to be construed (as a Winterthurn man of science had suggested) as ritual murder, of Jewish origin, performed upon Christians?—for thus Frank Shearwater phrased it, rather more in the spirit of lightsome experimentation than not. Whereupon Rosenwald reacted so extremely,—with such panic, and breathlessness, and a violent tremor of his hand—that he presented a very suspicious figure indeed; nor did his reply, issued in a mere whisper, evoke confidence: “That is preposterous,—preposterous—for everyone knows there is no such thing as ‘ritual murder’!”