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.”
In one famous case, Remus defended a husband accused of poisoning his wife. Throughout the trial he kept the poison in question on his table, in full view of the jury. During his closing argument Remus raised the bottle aloft and swiped it slowly across the air, so that the jury got a clear look of the skull and crossbones on its label.
“There has been a lot of talk of poison in this case,” he said. “But it is a lot of piffle. Look!”
As the jury gasped, he swallowed the poison and continued with his closing argument, aware that they all expected him to drop dead. When he didn’t, the jury returned with an acquittal. Only later did Remus reveal his trick: Drawing on his pharmaceutical background, he had first ingested an elixir that neutralized the poison.
* * *
—
In this same way he sold himself to Imogene Holmes. He would handle her divorce, and she needn’t worry about his fee; in fact, she could quit her job as a dust girl and money would be no concern. He would pay the rent on her apartment in Evanston, north of Chicago, and spend more time there than he did at home with his wife. He would give Imogene allowance money, $100 checks to spend as she wished. He would rescue her from “the gutter” and “make a lady out of her.” He would adore