Reckoning, 1927
HE HAD BEEN WAITING for that morning, dreading it, aware it couldn’t be stopped. An hour ago he was eating breakfast and now here he was, chasing her through Eden Park. The sun, strong for the season, bludgeoned through his fedora and inflamed his bald head. His silk trousers whisked against his skin. He heard the swish of his wingtips through the grass, the rasping of his breath. On the road nearby a brigade of cars clamored in the rush hour traffic. The throaty engines, the blaring of horns, the people determined to be someplace else. Exhaust fumes burned in his nostrils. Somewhere behind him were his own blue Buick and his driver, abandoned. He’d learned she wanted to kill him. His brain had wandered to a shadowy land, somewhere between sanity and madness.
For two years he had not been right. Friends and associates would attest to the difference, a stark split between then and now. He had long referred to himself in the third person, but such declarations became more frequent; there seemed an odd detaching, as if part of him had crept outside of his skin. With the slightest provocation—just a single, specific word—his face purpled and his features knotted into a ghastly cartoon. He spoke of a halo hovering above his head, whispering to him, marking him wherever he went. He described shooting stars only he could see, their tails imprinting bright, lingering bolts inside his closed eyes. He rambled incessantly about love and betrayal and revenge. He embarked on nationwide searches, hoping to validate every suspicion that tumbled through his mind. He announced, with unwavering conviction, that people from all corners wished him dead: gangsters in St. Louis, a certain woman federal official in Washington, D.C., and—worst of all—his wife, Imogene, who had razed his world to the ground. His Little Imo, his truest and sweetest, his Prime Minister, his centipede, his monkey, his gem; how would he ever forget those old, dead endearments from their past? He just wished to talk to her, he’d insist. Maybe he could stop what she had set in motion. He had little time left.
And there she was, finally, close enough to touch.
She sprinted faster, her black silk dress like a waving flag. He accelerated, everything but the sight of her falling away. They were even now, face-to-face beneath a gazebo, the autumn air just beginning to darken the leaves. He heard her voice, a sound that once upon a time made him mad with a boundless and wild joy. Between them rose a glint of silver and cream: a pearl-handled revolver.
The crack of the bullet shook the birds from the trees.
THE HOUSE SEEMED OUT of a Bavarian fairy tale, rambling and turreted, laced with gingerbread cornicing and columns arched like sharp, imperious brows. It was the finest house in Price Hill, the finest neighborhood in Cincinnati, perched high above the Ohio River and its basin of residents and commerce: the downtown business district, the black families in the West End, and the German immigrants in Over-the-Rhine, where Prohibition forced breweries to sell root beer in the hope of surviving the law. Already he envisioned what his “dream palace” would become. A Roman garden, a baseball field, a heated pool, a library stocked with books—presidential biographies, the epic poems of Homer and Milton, tomes of mythology and obscure science that would testify to the surprising depths of his mind. In this house he would once again become someone new, a superior version of himself. In this house the world would come to know his name.
George Remus would be forty-four years old that November of 1920, and had spent the first half of his life gathering momentum for the second. He was the embodiment of the new decade, a harbinger of its grandest excesses and darkest illusions. He endeavored to become the best in the country at his chosen profession—a profession that could not have flourished so dramatically in any other era, nor become so swiftly obsolete. As America reinvented itself Remus would do the same, living in rabid service to his own creation, protecting it at all costs.
The cornerstone of this creation, the fulcrum that would allow him to pivot and rise, was Augusta Imogene Remus, formerly Augusta Imogene Holmes. Imogene, as she preferred, was thirty-five, with dark hair and eyes and a voluptuous figure better suited to the bustles and billowing sleeves of decades past. They’d met five years earlier at his office in downtown Chicago, where Remus had been one of the city’s preeminent defense attorneys and Imogene a “dust girl,” sweeping the floors and tidying his desk.
She’d confided in him about her divorce, which had been plodding along painfully for years as she and her husband separated ten times before finally going to court. Remus could commiserate. He, too, had suffered marital strife. Lillian—his wife and the mother of his teenaged daughter, Romola—once filed for divorce charging “cruelty,” “pure malice,” and a habit of “coming home early in the morning.” They had subsequently reconciled, but their union remained tenuous.
Imogene saw her chance.
Remus accepted her as a client and promptly fell in love. He told Imogene everything, sharing long-buried tales of his past, the quirks and compulsions that shaped him now. He recounted his first memory: the journey from Germany to Ellis Island in 1883, when he was six years old, traveling with two sisters and a mother so beleaguered that, when questioned by immigration officials, she couldn’t recall the names of four other children who’d died. In America they reunited with Remus’s father, Franz (since anglicized to Frank), and settled in Chicago. Remus remembered his father coming home drunk from the corner saloon and evolving, week by week, into a mean and abusive alcoholic; he vowed that he would never drink a drop of alcohol.
When Frank developed rheumatism and could no longer work, Remus quit the eighth grade to take a job at his uncle’s pharmacy on the city’s West Side, earning $5 per week. As his father’s rages worsened, Remus moved into the pharmacy, sleeping on a cot in the stockroom, going for months at a time without seeing his parents and siblings. He called himself a “druggist’s devil boy” and in this role experienced a valuable revelation: He could sell anything to anyone under any circumstance, no matter how outrageous his claims or unorthodox his delivery.
At age nineteen he bought the drugstore from his uncle for the charitable price of $10, and during his years in the business he peddled all manner of dubious concoctions: Remus’s Cathartic Compound, Remus’s Cathartic Pills, a Remus “complexion remedy” containing mercury, Remus’s Lydia Pinkham Compound—presumably Lydia’s own legendary cocktail, for the relief of menstrual pain, wasn’t sufficiently potent—and his specialty, Remus’s Nerve Tonic, consisting of fluid extract of celery, sodium bromide, rhubarb, and a dash of a poisonous, hallucinogenic plant called henbane. Although he’d never finished his courses at the Chicago College of Pharmacy, he convinced his customers to call him “Doctor Remus.”
When he switched careers and became a lawyer, he brought this salesmanship to his practice. He used the courtroom as an arena, leaping and pacing and prowling the length of the jury box. During the cross-examination of his clients he tore at his remaining rim of hair, sobbing and howling with abandon. Poignant episodes from history lent drama to Remus’s closing arguments; one judge was moved to tears by his description of Abraham Lincoln’s stint as a bartender. Detractors derided him with a nickname, “the Weeping, Crying Remus,” but admirers coined one of their own: “the Napoleon of the Chicago Bar.”