A Fever in the Heartland, page 18
Gentry got hot towels and tried to clean up Madge’s wounds. From her face to her legs, Stephenson had gnawed at her body. Many of the bite marks were open and still oozing blood at a slow trickle. As he watched Gentry tending to Madge, he offered an apology of sorts.
“I’m three degrees less than a brute,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You’re worse than that,” she replied. She would not look at him.
After Gentry left the room, Stephenson fell asleep again. Madge took hold of his gun, the pearl-handled revolver. In a halting fashion, she waved it around, pointing it at him. She wanted to kill him now, to kill him quickly, to show the bastard that he could not get away with this. She thought of the shame this would bring her mother, and the web of Stephenson’s connections. She thought how hard it would be to get people who answered to the Grand Dragon to believe killing him was an act of self-defense. Still, she wanted him dead. She aimed the pistol at his puffy face and tried to pull the trigger. Her mind was in a cloud. She was badly dehydrated. What she desired most was to still the screaming pain and protect herself from further predations. The quickest way to do that, she now decided in the foggy logic of trauma, was to turn the gun on herself.
She went to the bathroom and stared into the mirror at her misshapen and nearly unrecognizable face. In less than a day’s time, she had been transformed from a lively twenty-eight-year-old into a bloodied and bruised mess. Her face was smudged. Her tongue was swollen and still bleeding after Stephenson had chewed it. The mark of his teeth was on her breasts and her hips. She aimed the gun at her temple, to get it right with just one shot. Then she heard the turn of a doorknob. It was Gentry.
Shorty arrived at midmorning. Madge said she needed to get medication, bandages, disinfectant, and a hat. She had no money, no purse. Shorty gave her $15 and took her outside to his car. Madge found a store not far from the hotel and bought a black hat for $12.50. She asked the teenage chauffeur to drive her to a drugstore for makeup to cover her wounds. He reminded her not to try anything. She was too exhausted to think of an escape plan. Her only way forward was a way out—suicide. At the pharmacy, she bought a box of bichloride of mercury tablets, and hid it under her coat. The compound is a highly toxic poison and household disinfectant, extremely corrosive to the body’s internal organs, made by the Indianapolis-based company Eli Lilly—where Madge had briefly worked. The pills were the cause of the death of Olive Thomas, a silent film star, by suicide or foul play, in 1920—a case that was widely publicized.
Back in room 416, Madge pleaded with her captor to let her get some rest in the chamber next door. He refused.
“You’re going to lie down right here by me.”
When Stephenson nodded off again, Madge rose quietly, grabbed the box of pills and crept into the bathroom. She laid out eighteen tablets of the poison. She took three pills and went into a seizure of gagging. She forced herself to take another three. The poison inside her burned like embers of hot coal. It was a torturous way to die. She passed out briefly, snapped back to life, stumbled around in a half-conscious state. Steve rose and left the room without saying anything. Late in the afternoon, when Shorty walked in, he knew something was wrong because Madge had a look of horror and despair, her face pale but for the marks where Stephenson had chewed her. She’d been spitting up a lot of blood into a cuspidor.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Where’s your pain?”
“Everywhere.”
She pointed to the spittoon of blood. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes.”
“I took poison.”
“What kind?”
“Bichloride.”
She begged him not to tell his boss. Shorty left the room immediately. A few minutes later, all three men returned. Stephenson was furious. If Madge died, there would be an investigation, an autopsy, multiple levels of law enforcement asking questions and conducting forensic work, perhaps too many people to control the situation.
“What the hell have you done?”
He screamed at her. She responded in a weak voice.
“I asked Shorty not to tell.”
“Why’d you take it?”
“I wanted to die.”
“You’re a fool.”
He ordered a quart of milk from room service and told Madge to drink it.
“What are you going to do?” she asked him.
“We’re taking you to the hospital. You can register as my wife. Your stomach will have to be pumped out.”
He was thinking aloud, sketching a plan on the fly. He said he would tell the hospital that she had meant to take aspirin, but had swallowed poison by mistake. As to registering Madge as his bride—that was an old ploy for Steve, giving him immunity. He’d battered his first two wives and nothing came of it. As his wife, he thought, Madge could never tell the authorities about him. Anyway, who would believe her word against his?
“I’m not going to be your wife,” she said, a flicker of her old self. But Stephenson made it clear: the only way Madge could get emergency medical help was if she agreed to be married to the Grand Dragon. In extreme pain, she was defiant.
“I refuse.”
Stephenson snapped his fingers, turning to Shorty.
“Let’s get out of here.”
New plan: he would take her back to Indianapolis. She said she didn’t want to move. What strength she had left was ebbing out of her. He pressed on with the only way out that made sense to him.
“We can drive on up to Crown Point and get married,” he said suddenly.
“I’ll never marry you.”
She asked again if she could call her mother. She wanted to say goodbye.
Stephenson looked around for the guns and loose baggage.
“Pack the grips,” he said. They left Hammond just before five p.m.
* * *
—
In the car, with Shorty driving, Steve at his side, Gentry guarding Madge in the back seat, the Grand Dragon started to sweat. He knew he needed to keep her alive to avoid a murder charge. He told Shorty to stop the car and remove the license plates. If they were pulled over, he would explain that the plates had been stolen overnight in Hammond. The car had never been in Hammond for the night, but Steve was making it up as he went. He ordered his driver to stop at a store and get milk and ginger ale. Madge couldn’t hold it down. She choked and coughed. She vomited all over the back seat, infuriating Steve. He threw the milk bottle out the window.
The car started up again for Indianapolis, following back roads. Steve and Gentry began to drink from one of the whiskey bottles in a side compartment. Twilight settled over the fields surrounding prim little towns, places where the Old Man was revered. They drove south, passing Logansport, where Steve had ordered that flaming cross to frighten into submission the family of his now crushed foe, Patrick O’Donnell. As darkness fell, they passed by Kokomo. The Klan had opened a fifty-bed hospital—the fruition of the funding drive started on the Fourth of July, 1923. Steve could close his eyes and remember that day, the multitudes shouting his name, the pastors blessing him, the men waving from cornfields with their three-fingered Klan salutes, the women blowing him kisses through their hoods, the children feeling the pulse of true power, learning the ways of their parents and grandparents.
Madge’s life was slipping away in the back seat. It was unclear if she would live to see Indianapolis. “I need to see a doctor,” she said at one point. “Please, take me to a hospital.” They drove on, approaching the city, Monument Circle’s exclamation point coming into view. Over and over, she begged Steve to get her some help. Her pain was excruciating. She moaned and screamed. Steve told her to shut up, that whining was not going to do her any good.
“Just drop me off,” she pleaded. “Anywhere on the side of the road. Please! Just drop me off.”
In the hours since she’d taken the poison, Madge had come around to a different view—now she wanted to live. The suicide attempt had been a terrible mistake. She felt deep regret at an impulsive act. Her hope was that someone would pick her up on the roadside; it was a chance, perhaps the only one, to fend off death. He promised to stop at the next little town before Indianapolis. But as lights came into view, he told Shorty to step on it. He was only toying with her.
“Drive fast,” he said, “but don’t get pinched.” He drifted into his own thoughts, then said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I’ve been in a worse mess than this before and got out of it.”
In Irvington, an hour before midnight, the car pulled up at the Stephenson compound and parked at the big garage. The dogs in the kennel, his many German shepherds, started barking loudly, prompting a neighbor to turn on a light. As they drove up, Steve had spotted two people at the front door of his house; he ordered Shorty to investigate. When his young underling came back, he had some unsettling news: it was Madge’s mother and another woman at the door, distraught, demanding answers, looking for the missing girl. Shorty sent them away, told them he didn’t know nothing about anything. He said the master of the house was gone. Out of town. You’re trespassing.
But this news sent another jolt of fear into Stephenson. Once again, he went to his backup plan, and directed his words at Madge.
“You will stay right here until you marry me.”
He’d kidnapped her, raped her, ripped her body with his teeth. Now he asked her again to pay an ultimate price: marry him or die. She refused.
The men dragged Madge up to the loft above the garage, the place where Stephenson had attacked Lucille Fuller. He turned to go. In his parting shot, he told Madge that she had been in an auto accident—that was the story, and she damn well better stick with it.
“You must forget this,” he said. “What’s done has been done. I am the law and the power.”
She passed out again. In the middle of the night, a neighbor heard blood-curdling screams coming from the Stephenson compound. The prisoner of the Grand Dragon’s garage was awake. On Tuesday, March 17, Klinck came into the room and told her it was time to leave. To move was to activate a thousand points of pain. Klinck shoved her into the back seat of a Cadillac and drove the few blocks to Madge’s house. One of the boarders, Eunice Shultz, was making lunch when the door opened. Without saying a word, Klinck carried Madge upstairs and dumped her. As he rushed out, he said his name was Johnson from Kokomo, in response to a question. He mumbled something about a car accident and left. The boarder went upstairs to the bedroom and knocked on the door. She gasped at the sight inside: a young woman she knew well but now barely recognized, filthy, her clothes ripped, soiled, and bloodied, her hair matted and greased. Madge’s face was bruised and purpled, with indented circle marks on one cheek. She moaned and cried.
“I’m dying, Mrs. Shultz.”
17.
A Vigil in Irvington
1925
A young attorney, Asa Smith, was getting dressed at home in the bathroom upstairs when his wife summoned him. A Mrs. Matilda Oberholtzer was on the line, sounding panicky and desperate. Smith remembered the name. He’d helped her on a property matter a few years earlier. He knew Madge as well, from their mutual friend Ermina Moore. Matilda told him the story of Sunday night, the four calls from Stephenson, the strange man who came to the house late and fetched Madge, the empty bed in the morning. She spoke in a whisper, from a cloakroom, trying to keep it from her husband, who was ill. He asked her to repeat some of the details, and as she did, she let her suspicions spill out. She had a horrible feeling about all of this. Smith knew a private detective who worked the bootleg racket and had an office downtown. He’d pay him a visit.
Smith had his own thoughts about D. C. Stephenson. He hated the Klan, hated the way they waved the flag while hiding their faces, hated that a secretive order had taken over the Republican Party, and now controlled Indiana from the Grand Dragon’s office just off Monument Circle. While fighting Germans in the Great War, crawling to within six yards of an enemy machine gun nest, Smith had been doused with mustard gas. He was unconscious for three weeks and lost part of his vision. He wasn’t a hollowed-out man like so many of the Lost Generation of the 1920s. But when he returned home he was a different man, shell-shocked, not the same in body and soul, prone to bouts of isolation, memory loss, and insecurity.
Smith’s family was from Wabash, a short drive up the road from the capital. They were lifelong members of a Methodist church there, one of the many where the minister took a bribe from the Klan. Smith had little tolerance for hypocrisy in high places. Those churchmen speaking the one hundred percent Americanism language—he was disgusted by it. He wrote a letter to his minister and told him to remove his name from the rolls. And it was shameful that Governor Ed Jackson was a sealed-for-eternity Kluxer. Smith thought he was an idiot—“not such a bad guy, just an ignoramus,” as he put it. Jackson had asked Smith for his support as one of the few Republicans in the state who had not bowed before the Invisible Empire.
“I can’t, Ed,” Smith told the governor. “It’s on account of the goddamned Ku Klux Klan.” Smith’s grandfather had been a surgeon in the Union Army, and his father, as a young soldier, had fought against the slaveholders, part of General Sherman’s march through Georgia.
Monday afternoon, Smith was at the private dick’s office when a second call came from Mrs. Oberholtzer. She’d just received a telegram, sent from a hotel in Hammond. It was a message supposedly from Madge—she was on business, nothing to worry about. “We are driving through to Chicago. We’ll be home on the night train.” While this news was a relief of sorts—at least she knew her daughter was alive—it made no sense. Madge had not packed a bag or told her parents of travel. It wasn’t like her to take off somewhere overnight without planning, without notification. She was due at work. Smith picked up Ermina Moore and Mrs. Oberholtzer and went to Union Station. They walked the platform, checking with clerks and travelers, questioning strangers while showing a photo. Nothing. Nothing.
Smith drove the women to the Stephenson mansion, just past eleven p.m. on that Monday. Matilda and Ermina knocked on the door. They waited ten minutes. These were the people on the porch whom Steve had seen when he pulled into the garage.
As the sun rose over Indianapolis on Tuesday, the day cold and bright with frost in the air and the previous night’s snow still on the ground, Madge’s mother went back to Union Station, this time with her husband. Weakened by flu, George could barely stand. They searched all morning, poking around the grand station with its stained-glass rose window and 185-foot clock tower. The wind was starting to gallop. At the lunch hour, Mrs. Oberholtzer called her residence to see if there was any news. Eunice Shultz picked up. The boarder was breathless: Madge was home! Upstairs in her bedroom. Shultz had summoned a physician, Dr. John K. Kingsbury, a family friend who lived just a few doors away in Irvington.
Kingsbury got to the Oberholtzer home before the parents. By then, Madge had been cleaned up some, but still looked battered and disheveled, dried blood on her clothes and in her hair, fresh blood on the pillowcase and sheets. Her black dress was slightly open at the front. The doctor took her hand, checked her pulse. She was cold to the touch and her heart was racing. She was very pale. He noted pockmarks, which looked fresh, on either cheek, in a field of bruises. One of the indented marks was the size of an egg. There was a deep laceration on one of her breasts, and a fist-sized bruise on the other. Other cuts and odd-shaped incisions were visible on her legs, around her groin. One contusion was nearly a foot long and six inches wide. She’d been spitting up blood into a pan.
The doctor felt along her arms, her rib cage, along her legs, below her knee, looking for signs of broken bones.
“How did you get hurt?”
She looked at him blankly, her face chalk-white. In his opinion, she was in a state of profound shock. She shook her head slowly, closed her eyes.
“When I’m better I will tell you the whole story.”
The doctor prodded her gently. He wasn’t sure how long she would live. Tell him now, if she could. She gave him a rough outline of what had happened. He asked if she’d been offered any medical help. No, Stephenson had refused. She was his prisoner. The doctor posed a few follow-up questions about the wounds, particularly the open cuts on her breasts and cheeks. How did he do this?
“With his teeth,” she said.
“His teeth?”
“I’m going to die,” she told the doctor. “I’m . . . going . . . to . . . die.” He did not try to convince her otherwise.
Madge’s mother arrived. George was feeling feverish again, and his wife did not want him looking in on his daughter, not just yet—fearing exposure of his illness. When Mrs. Oberholtzer walked into Madge’s bedroom, she was staggered by the stricken look on the face of the boarder, Mrs. Shultz, and the first glance at her daughter. A mother can be instinctively strong when a child is in serious peril, but this mother could not hold up. She broke down in tears and fell to the floor. When Mrs. Oberholtzer recovered, she moved to the bedside, stroked her daughter, and ran a cloth over her wounds.
