Quiet Dell: A Novel (47 page)

Emily sat back, momentarily blinded by the flash of Eric’s camera, for he stood just at the edge of the proscenium, shooting the house itself. Suddenly the lights dimmed, a signal it seemed. Eric gave her his camera and stepped nimbly over an empty front-row seat to his place. She trained her unbroken gaze before her.

Judge Southern took his seat on a platform in the center. The jury, all men in dark suits, walked in together. The paneled jury box, swinging door and plush theater seating intact, had been moved from the courthouse and reassembled here. The jurors sat as one group, as though rehearsed; most retained their overcoats, pulling their collars up for warmth.

Emily had stood upon the stage. She’d promised Mason he would see the opera house, and so Grimm had brought them last week to see the cavernous empty theater. Mason stood peering into the balconies, enchanted, while Duty plumped to his haunches and looked off toward the wings. Grimm had switched on the overhead “border lights.” Dozens of red, white, and blue lamps, unseen
by the audience, hung from the ceiling, bathing the stage in tones that duplicated daylight. She remembered panels of scenery, covered in draping. Amazingly, these were now revealed, and the border lights shown down upon them.

Tall canvases depicting forest trees were arrayed behind the assemblage, concealing the wings of the stage. The branches, daubed with pastel leaves, glittered as though dusted with mica. Directly behind Judge Southern was a rendering of a small-town street; the church was just to his right. The “town” seemed nearly lost in trees. How might the branches sparkle so? The illusion of depth was startling. Prosecutor Will E. Morris and defense lawyer J. Ed Law now walked on from opposite wings and seated themselves at counsel tables downstage.

Every seat in the opera house was occupied, yet the house fell silent. Emily heard boots marching. The audience subtly shifted to view stage right. A detachment of state troopers led Powers in. His wrists were handcuffed, his feet manacled. He walked stiff-legged, looking narrowly ahead. The metal dog collar around his neck was attached to a long chain, and the chain hung down his back, for the trooper in charge had just unlocked it from the metal cuff on his own forearm. Powers looked dumpy and unremarkable, despite the armature restraining him. His light brown hair, carefully combed, billowed up to one side. Full, ruddy cheeks, a small bow of a mouth, thin, compressed lips: he was a bit less florid after three months in custody, his short, powerful arms concealed in a standard-issue black suit. White shirt, tie; shoes newly shined. He looked almost bored, like a clerk wandered into the wrong hall, forced to observe mundane proceedings. He sat in a swivel chair near his counsel, his back to the audience, turning only once to survey the hundreds of faces watching him.

Law stood and began declaiming, filing a motion for a change of venue: the community “was strong against” his client; a gang had “mobbed the jail and tried to lynch him.” Powers didn’t flinch. Judge Southern denied the motion. Law demanded the defendant be removed from Sheriff W. B. Grimm’s custody due to “the
shameful way he and his deputies treated my client.” Denied. Morris rose to review the case.

Emily leaned forward to capture his exact words. He recited the facts: investigation of Powers’ matrimonial racket, the subterranean death chambers at the Quiet Dell garage, removal of five bodies from a drainage ditch behind the building, all due to “information received from Park Ridge, Illinois, that Mrs. Asta Eicher and her children had vanished with a Clarksburg man.”

Law was on his feet. “Exception! We are not trying the Eicher case!”

Powers yawned audibly, eliciting chuckles far back in the balcony gallery, and gazed at the ceiling.

“Bastard,” Eric whispered.

Southern trained his withering gaze high over the footlights, reproving the spectators farthest removed from his influence.

Morris stood center stage, stating that Powers was charged with all five murders but indicted and tried for only one: that of Mrs. Dorothy Pressler Lemke, a crime for which the state “demanded the execution of the accused, that he hang by the neck until dead.” Morris glared at the gallery, requiring silence, then called Chief of Police Clarence Duckworth to the stand.

Morris addressed him. “When you went into the Quiet Dell garage of the accused, what did you discover, if anything?”

Law, seated, raised his fist. “Question objected to!”

Southern banged his gavel. ”The objection is overruled.”

“Exception!” Law replied.

Duckworth spoke so laconically that his account seemed indisputable. “I noticed some of the books had Mrs. Eicher’s name on them, and some of the children’s names.”

Law stood, gesticulating. “I move to strike testimony referring to the Eichers’ names.”

“The motion may be overruled,” Southern said.

Morris stepped to the edge of the stage and turned to Duckworth. “Did you have to go outside of the garage to get down to the under compartment?”

“No, go down from the inside, right hand corner.” Duckworth spoke as though directing himself at the scene. “A trapdoor that would let down, but it was open. . . . I entered into the basement with a flashlight, and it was about four rooms . . . over one of the doors I found blood had run down . . . for a distance, very distinctly . . . and we tore off . . . some of the soundproof wallboard, and blood had come through on that in large clots.”

The rustle and general movement of the audience went still.

“I came back upstairs to the garage there and moved a trunk, and on the floor was a large clot of blood. It was a foot and a half square that the floor was very bloody . . .”

Emily gripped her pen, writing. Powers brought Hart upstairs, before he killed him. Why? To make him watch—Grethe’s death, or Annabel’s. She started, for a baby began wailing in the gallery. So much blood, from his head, and then, when he was still—

“We closed the door and nailed it up,” Duckworth was saying, “at about eleven o’clock that night. . . . The next morning we went back with the state police and I directed the sheriff to open up the ditch that led from the garage to the creek.”

Morris never glanced up. “Chief Duckworth, I will ask you to state whether or not you then, or later, asked the defendant anything about the goods . . . as to where he got them, or whose they were.”

Duckworth raised his noncommittal voice, as though to project to the galleries. “He said . . . the things found there belonged to Mrs. Eicher of Park Ridge, Illinois.”

Law bounded to his feet. “I move to strike that out, Your Honor.”

“The motion is overruled,” Southern said.

“Ex-cep-tion,” Law returned.

Morris spoke over him. “Chief Duckworth, you stated that he said he had been to the Eicher family at Park Ridge. Did he tell you when he had been there, or how often?”

Law stood and raised his long arms in supplication. “Objection! I repeat: we are not trying the Eicher cases!”

Morris, his patience exhausted, turned on Law as though instructing him. “These cases are inseparable in the finding of these goods and investigation leading to the discovery of the body for which he is being charged; and it is a part of the
res gestae.
”

Southern was unperturbed. “It may go in.”

“Exception!” Law raised a pointed finger in punctuation.

Res gestae:
“things done.” Secondhand statements could be admitted as evidence only if spontaneously repeated by a witness. Emily knew the case against Powers depended on such evidence; all was circumstantial. The witness must have participated directly in the witnessed event, and speak with no premeditation. Duckworth had certainly participated.

Morris moved on, questioning Duckworth about the removal of the bodies from the ditch, four bodies, a woman and three children, and “one more body found, up nearer the garage, that was brought to the Romine undertaking establishment.”

Morris faced the audience. “I will ask you to state whether or not you are acquainted with Mrs. Charles Fleming of Northborough, Massachusetts, and her husband.”

“I am.” Duckworth spoke into a hush.

Morris looked at the jury. “I will ask you to state whether they . . . identified the body last taken out of the ditch, at the Romine undertaking establishment.”

Law stood. “Question objected to as suggestive and leading.”

“He may answer.” Judge Southern scowled.

Duckworth’s answer was specific. “Mrs. Fleming did.” His words evoked the body and the slab: one sister viewing another.

Morris asked about the search of Powers’ property at Broad Oaks, Clarksburg, and stood unmoving as Duckworth described a large trunk in the Quincy Street garage, “filled with women’s and children’s clothing . . . on top was a Kodak. We . . . turned it over to Dr. Goff, and he had the film in it developed.”

Morris asked Duckworth to identify the here produced photographs. When and where did Duckworth show Powers the photographs, and what did Powers state about them?

“He said he could not deny it,” Duckworth answered. “One was his own picture, and the other . . . Mrs. Lemke, of Northborough, Massachusetts. And the Kodak . . . was Mrs. Lemke’s Kodak.”

And what about the living quarters, above and behind the Quincy Street grocery? How did Duckworth gain entry?

There was no warrant, Duckworth explained, because Mrs. Powers, the defendant’s wife, and her sister, Miss Strother, “own the property and gave me permit to go in it.”

Morris asked, “What goods, if any, did you find there?”

Duckworth was deliberate. “There were two women’s coats, heavy winter coats, a large number of dresses, all kinds of women’s wear, bedspreads, linens, tablecloths, pillow slips, a large number of them.”

Pillow slips. Emily felt a dull pain in her head. Dorothy intended to keep house, and the bedrooms of her new husband’s several properties must be done up in her own family linens.

Duckworth said the piano bench was piled full. Another back room “had been used more for plunder . . . and then there was a dress or two that was found in wardrobes of the house . . .”

Luella and Eva Belle, helping themselves to what they wanted. Dorothy’s clothes in their closets. And the police would not arrest these women; they were “borrowing” what Powers “stored for a friend.” At least it was known. The town would ostracize them, Emily thought, the grocery would fail. They would live, peering from their windows, on their modest rental income.

Morris paused. “I will ask you to state, Mr. Duckworth . . . if there was part of a charred or burned bankbook found in a brush pile near the Quiet Dell garage.”

Law leapt to his feet. “Objected to, suggestive and leading . . .”

“. . . overruled,” Judge Southern finished.

“Exception!” Law tossed his head as Powers looked into the wings, where a stagehand was adjusting an electrical box.

“Describe the bankbook,” Morris commanded.

“Part of it had been burned, and it was very distinctly ‘Dorothy Pressler,’ the name on the book, and ‘Worcester, Massachusetts.’ ”

And what had the defendant said, in jailhouse interviews that followed, concerning any association with Dorothy Lemke?

Duckworth explained that Powers had signed a confession to all the murders on the night of the twenty-ninth, the day “the Lemke body” was found in the ditch.

Forced to shout over the loud murmur of the crowd, Law thundered, “Objection! That confession is inadmissible as coerced and will not be introduced here!”

“Sustained.” Judge Southern banged his gavel once. “Order!”

Morris walked center stage and shouted to be heard. “I will ask you to state, Mr. Duckworth, whether the fifth body found in this ditch, buried there, was clothed in a dress when you saw it at the morgue of the Romine undertaking establishment.”

“It was. I have it in my custody.”

“Do you have it here, today?”

“I do not.” But he had clothing taken from the exhumed body, and stood to open an evidence bag, pouring it out onto the table adjacent to the witness stand: her torn undergarments, stained with blood.

The general murmur resounded. Photographers in the press section stood on their seats, jostling for view. Flashbulbs popped in concert. It was a moment played for effect, but nothing compared to the sight of Dorothy Lemke’s bound, engorged corpse, her domelike bald head shining in the underground morgue, bathed in hot white light. Eric’s photographs were police evidence, but perhaps the jury would see them. Emily sat watching Powers, who glanced vaguely at the bloody clothes and seemed much distracted by the swaying of the ropes offstage.

Law would have his day: he charged on cross-exam that Powers was “the victim of third-degree techniques. . . . You were there on the night of Friday, August twenty-ninth,” Law stated, “at the jail, or about the jail?”

“I was,” Duckworth said, “to ask if he had any statement to make.”

“What kind of statement did you want?”

“What he knew about these five people being murdered.”

“And you were insisting on that, weren’t you, Duckworth?”

“No, not exactly,” Duckworth said. “He made a statement.”

“Who else was there?” Law demanded.

“There was state police there; I don’t recall their names.”

Law peered across the footlights into the front row. “Could not recall their names, now, at all? Do your best now and see if you can. . . . Did you see Sheriff Grimm there, in and out?”

“I don’t recall,” said Duckworth, obliging, contemplative.

Law referred to September’s lynch mob. “You were present, Mr. Duckworth, on the night of September nineteenth, at the county jail?”

“I was.”

“You state there was no demonstration with an object to enter the jail, is that right?”

“No, there was no one came anyways near the jail.”

“They came near enough for the sheriff to seize them?”

“They was seized on disorderly conduct more than anything.”

Law paced the stage. “You say you have not learned of any threats of violence against said Powers . . . that he ought to be hung, drawn, and quartered . . . did not deserve trial . . . haven’t these expressions been common, and you have heard them frequently?”