American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  Lots of finger-pointing, Billy went on, but the crucial questions had not been answered: Why did Otis need the insurance money? Why did the building reek of gas? Why would Otis have been so determined to brand organized labor as bomb-makers and murderers? Why would he have blown up his own building?

  That was where, Billy suggested, Otis’s scheme to bring water to the San Fernando Valley fit in. It provided a motive. And once this missing piece was in place, logical answers fell into place, too. Look at it this way, the detective suggested.

  Otis needed the insurance money because the valley development had dragged on and expensively on. It had drained him. The $100,000 would help handle his cash-flow problem for the short term, especially if he put off rebuilding the offices that had been blown up. Or maybe he’d never replace the building. The paper, after all, had not missed a day’s circulation, despite the destruction of its presses and offices.

  But what if the houses in the San Fernando Valley were never built? What if a new Socialist mayor and city council put an end to his scheme? What if a new administration prohibited water’s being drained off from the city’s aqueduct to irrigate the valley? Well, Otis and Chandler would stand to lose a fortune. Maybe they’d be wiped out, ruined. One hundred grand of insurance money would sure come in handy. It was a fortune—enough to keep the Times going for a year or two.

  But, Billy raced on, as if following a well-marked trail, what if there was a way of pocketing $100,000 and at the same time ensuring that the project would go forward? Would Chandler and Otis be interested? Well, if people believed that labor was capable of planting dynamite and killing innocent people, it sure would make a lot of people angry. Who’d vote for the Socialists, a party aligned with murderers? If Alexander and his cronies were reelected, then the aqueduct would be built, the San Fernando Valley would get all the water it needed—and Otis would reap his millions.

  “That motive enough for you?” asked Billy, full of triumph.

  MacLaren started to respond. But before he got very far, Billy was interrupted by a tap on his back. The detective turned to see Harold Greaves of his Chicago office standing behind him.

  Greaves held a long box under his arm.

  FOURTEEN

  ______________________

  THREE DAYS LATER George Nichols took the train to San Francisco to rent costumes for D.W. As it happened, Billy was also on his way to San Francisco. But the detective did not take a direct train. He didn’t dare. First he needed to lose the man who was following him.

  Billy had noticed the tail the morning after his dinner with Mac. He had been leaving the hotel, on his way to police headquarters, when he suspected he was being watched. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a man in a brown suit and a brimmed hat. Quickly he improvised a plan. Looking back into the lobby, he recognized one of the ladies who had been seated at Griffith’s table. Abruptly he turned and went to speak with her. The talk was all contrivance, Billy introducing himself and asking that his greetings be conveyed to Mr. Griffith. Still, Billy did his best to let it go on a few awkward moments longer than necessary. When Billy finally exited the hotel, he saw that the man in the brown suit was still there. Now the detective had no doubts: He was being watched. He only wondered for whom the man was working. Otis? Labor? Billy instinctively clutched the package his agent had delivered more tightly under his arm and continued on his way. The detective hoped what was inside would help him discover who was so very interested in the progress of his investigation.

  At headquarters Greaves, his Chicago operative, joined him, and together they met with Police Chief Galloway. Greaves was a tall, hulking presence, by nature terse and blunt, and he had no trouble intimidating witnesses. He towered over Billy, but his manner around his boss was always deferential and often obsequious. From Billy’s perspective, Greaves was a conscientious agent, particularly valuable when a hardcase needed to be persuaded, but despite his talents Billy found it a struggle to be in the man’s presence. That morning Billy focused his attention entirely on the police chief.

  With great ceremony, Billy opened the carton he had been carrying. Inside was the unexploded bomb that had been recovered in September from the Peoria train yard. The chief looked and didn’t understand; for an uneasy moment he thought another bomb had been found in his city. Billy calmed his fears but offered no further explanation. Instead, no doubt enjoying the mystery he was creating, he asked the puzzled chief to please produce the device that had been recovered from the home of the M&M secretary. The chief immediately dispatched an aide.

  Billy waited with a building sense of anticipation. The course of his investigation was, he felt, about to be determined. As he had worked it out in his mind, there were only two possibilities. If the bombs were similar, then the culprits were part of a larger, nationwide terrorist conspiracy: labor versus capital. If not, then all his suspicions about Otis would have to be explored. Either way, the case was about to take a dramatic turn.

  As soon as the device was delivered to the room, Billy began his inspection. There was an alarm clock manufactured by the New Haven Clock Company and a No. 5 Columbia dry battery. He picked up the clock and held it close to his eyes. Soldered to the alarm key was a tiny piece of grooved brass. Wires ran from this piece of brass to another brass plate fastened to the battery board by a simple screw and nut. When the current ran between these two contact points, the dynamite would explode.

  He then turned to the Peoria device. He looked at the clock and the battery. With great care he examined the brass plate grooved to fit the winding key, the soldering technique, and the screw fastened to the battery board. When he was finished, he paused, more for effect than to work things out.

  There is one essential difference in the two devices, he explained at last. Nitroglycerin was the explosive component in the first bomb. The Los Angeles bombs were primed to ignite dynamite—a powerful and rarely fabricated 80 percent charge. Other than that—

  “Identical,” he announced triumphantly. The two bombs, he said, were made by the same person. It wasn’t simply that the alarm clocks and batteries were manufactured by the same companies. The wiring, the soldering, the brass plates—it was as if the bomb-maker had left his signature, Billy told the chief.

  The chief was impressed. But at the same time he realized they were no closer to identifying the person who had made the two bombs. And without this vital information, they could not discover who had planted them, and why.

  I really don’t see, Mr. Burns, how we’re farther along in this investigation than before, the chief demurred. He was clearly growing impatient; so much for the great detective.

  Billy listened without interrupting. He seemed to be enjoying the moment. Then he spoke. “Let me inform you of something we have been fortunate to keep secret. A little pinch of sawdust taken as a sample in the railyards in Peoria came in very handy,” he revealed.

  It was Harold Greaves who had originally followed the sawdust trail, but it was Billy who told the story. Along with the unexploded bomb, an empty nitroglycerin can had been found last September near the train yard. “Knowing that nitroglycerin could not be transported on railroad trains,” he began (according to an account he wrote years later), “we felt that it must have been manufactured within easy reach of where the explosion took place.” Days after the explosion, teams of Burns’s operatives fanned out around Peoria.

  They found one distributor, then another, and another. It didn’t take them very long to discover that the nitroglycerin could have been bought from any of more than a dozen sources. How would Burns’s men determine where the bomb-maker had made his purchase?

  “One of the essential features which go to make up the efficient detective,” Billy often lectured, “is the vigilance over small details.” At the train yard, such vigilance, he explained, had resulted in the discovery of another clue. A pile of sawdust lay near the abandoned can. Dutifully, it had been gathered up and sent on to the agency office in Chicago. It was this
mound of sawdust, Billy told Chief Galloway, that had provided the first big break in the Peoria bombing. He was now confident it would also help him find the man who had blown up the Times Building.

  Harold Greaves had been ready to give up. For weeks, Billy told the chief, his operative had been traveling in an expanding circle around Peoria and had little to show for his efforts. It wasn’t that his investigation had produced no results. Rather, his search had been too successful. He already had a long list of names of men who had purchased nitro. But he had no definitive way of knowing which of them, if any, had used the explosive to build a bomb. It would take months, years perhaps, to investigate all the suspects. And it was just as likely they all were innocent.

  Frustrated and exhausted, weighed down by the growing enormity of the challenge, Greaves went off to interview still another nitro distributor, this one in Portland, Indiana. Fred Morehart was a garrulous man and glad to have company, even if it was the laconic Greaves. Without much prodding, Morehart confirmed that he had sold several crates of nitro to a stranger a month or so before the Peoria bombing.

  The buyer had introduced himself as J. W. McGraw. Said he worked for G.W. Clark & Co. in Peoria, and they had some hard rock that they wanted to blast. Nitro, McGraw explained, would do the trick better than dynamite. Morehart was reluctant to sell explosives to a man he didn’t know, but McGraw pointed to the ring on Morehart’s finger. I’m a Knight of Pythias, too, he announced. That assuaged some of Morehart’s suspicions; members, after all, joined the fraternal order to work for universal peace. Then moving quickly to seal the deal, McGraw took a thick roll of bills out of his pocket and peeled off three twenties as a down payment. The final payment would be made, McGraw promised, when the crates of explosives were delivered.

  The delivery arrangements struck Morehart as odd, but he went along with them. According to McGraw’s instructions, Morehart was to load his wagon with the explosives and drive to a road intersection two hundred miles away. McGraw would be waiting there with his own wagon.

  A few days later Morehart met him at the designated junction. McGraw, Morehart explained, seemed familiar with the proper method for handling the explosive and with the laws concerning its transport. That helped to assuage Morehart’s doubts, and he carried the nitro out of his transport crates and loaded them into the other wagon. “I got my money, and that was that,” he told Greaves. “Never saw McGraw again.”

  But Greaves was curious. The delivery arrangement was not only irregular but, to the detective’s mind, furtive. He asked More-hart for directions to the intersection where the nitro had been transferred from one wagon to the other.

  Two days later Greaves was standing at the spot. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he began walking around, eyes to the ground. Lying amid the tall grass by the side of the road he saw something. Scattered like rubbish were the papers that Morehart had used to wrap his cans of nitro. When the cans were put in McGraw’s wagon, the papers apparently had been discarded. Greaves knelt down to get a closer look at one of the wrapping papers and saw that the remnants of a coarse sawdust still remained in the folds. Greaves collected the sawdust, filling two glass vials he carried with him; a detective, he had been tutored, must always be prepared to preserve evidence.

  In Chicago, the sawdust from the Peoria bomb and the sawdust gathered from the roadside were placed under a microscope. They were identical. Greaves had identified the bomb-maker—J. W. McGraw.

  As he concluded his story for the chief of police, Billy began talking much too quickly. That was his habit; when the thrill of a new chase loomed, words would gallop from him. His men, Billy went on rapidly, had immediately checked out the company McGraw had claimed to work for in Peoria, only to find that it didn’t exist. But Morehart, he said, had provided “a good description of McGraw”: mid-thirties, chubby, medium height, bushy mustache, dark eyes. “Next was to get his signature. Greaves hunted through the various hotels in the town around Portland and finally came to a register in Muncie, Indiana, with the name J. W. McGraw upon it. Greaves made a tracing of this signature.”

  I’m certain, Billy continued, that the bombings in Peoria and Los Angeles involved the same man. We found where he bought the nitro. And now we are going to find where he bought the dynamite.

  “Then,” Billy announced with confidence, “I will be one step closer to finding the elusive J. W. McGraw.”

  Just as D.W. learned that San Francisco was the place to rent costumes, Billy quickly discovered that the unique 80 percent dynamite used in the Los Angeles bombs would also likely have been purchased up north. The Bay Area was dotted with companies that manufactured the explosives needed for construction work. San Francisco, he decided, would be his destination, too.

  Accompanied by Greaves, suitcase in hand, he took a taxi from the Alex to the train station. He bought two tickets to San Diego. Both men boarded the express, traveling south down the California coast, and entered a first-class compartment. Greaves hoisted his boss’s suitcase into the baggage rack above Billy’s seat, and the two men settled in. But as the train was about to depart, Billy stood and announced that he was going to the lavatory.

  Billy walked into the facilities and then immediately walked out. He kept on walking, leaving the train and heading into the crowded terminal. As the train pulled away, he was already in a cab, driving downtown. It was the start of a long, circuitous trip to San Francisco, but Billy was confident he had lost the man in the brown suit. And that he was on his way to find J. W. McGraw.

  FIFTEEN

  ______________________

  AS BILLY BEGAN his manhunt up north and D.W. motored to Santa Monica to scout oceanfront locations for Enoch Arden, Darrow settled in. To his great satisfaction, the lawyer had recently signed a long-term lease on the apartment he had previously been renting month to month. When the nearly penniless Darrow had returned to Chicago resigned “to begin all over, be a slave to that irksome law work,” he had moved into an inexpensive apartment in an unfashionable neighborhood near the University of Chicago.

  His seventy-five dollars a month got him nine rooms and views from the large bow windows looking straight out toward Lake Michigan and the trees of Jackson Park. He had the walls connecting a string of boxy rooms demolished, creating a grand sunlit space that he lined with shelves to hold his book collection. This imposing room served not only as his library but also as a place for entertaining. Sitting in his favorite wicker rocker adjacent to the fireplace, a glass of dry Italian wine in his hand, Darrow was a convivial and eclectic host. He enjoyed the challenge of vigorous ideas, and he deliberately pushed conversations until they became, to his amusement, heated debates.

  One evening each week the Evolution Club would convene in his apartment. Other nights groups of instructors and professors from the university assembled in his book-lined sanctuary and discussed great issues. The victimization of the working man. The rapacity of capital. The existence of God. Often renowned thinkers, activists, politicians, and journalists appeared and took part in the give-and-take. Jane Addams, Harold Ickes, William Jennings Bryan, Joseph Medill Patterson—all were guests. Yet Darrow, cantankerous and often mischievous, always remained the focus of attention. Robert Hutchins, the scholarly, liberal-thinking president of the University of Chicago, remembered, “When I think of Clarence Darrow, I see a tall, majestic man debating with our faculty members, opposing their views, defending their rights, holding long, quizzical, deliberate conversations with them in the dark red library of his apartment on East Sixtieth Street, plumbing and challenging them, taking their measure.” These evenings in his apartment brought Darrow great pleasure.

  His days, however, were less satisfactory. As a partner in Darrow, Masters and Wilson, he handled a diverse caseload—tax problems for International Harvester, corporate reorganizations for William Randolph Hearst and his newspapers, and for the city of Chicago, zoning matters. He avoided great causes and instead focused on using his lawyer’s license
and his celebrity to make money. The routine was numbing, but Darrow persevered. After two years he had paid off nearly $15,000 of his debts. And he finally felt confident enough in his financial future to sign a long-term lease on the apartment he had grown to love—his sanctuary, his stage.

  Life, a weary and resigned Darrow tried to persuade himself, could be measured out in small pleasures, not great passions. And he tried not to think of Mary Field or wonder about her days and nights in New York.

  SIXTEEN

  ______________________

  THE GIANT POWDER WORKS was housed in a red-brick warehouse just a short walk from Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. The busy, well-established concern specialized in fabricating powerful explosives for the building trades. When Billy walked through the company’s front door, he had already been in the city for a day, working his methodical way down a list of firms that sold sticks of 80 percent dynamite. So far he had nothing to show for his effort. He had found no records of sales to a J. W. McGraw. Nor had he found any suspicious purchases in the weeks before the L.A. bombing.

  But he wasn’t discouraged. He had spent most of his adult life knocking on doors and asking questions. He still enjoyed the hunt. He always “played the game hard,” he told his operatives. In this case, however, the stakes had increased in importance. He felt as if the entire country were watching, waiting for him to solve the mystery. He was determined to get his man. And if the L.A. bombing was in fact tied to the one in Peoria, he was on the trail of a much larger, possibly nationwide conspiracy. He could not even begin to guess at how many people might be involved.