And the thing in front of them was Edwina. She loomed across the passage, blocking their path of retreat completely. Her great wrinkled head was held low. Her trunk was curved menacingly forward, and the huge pink ribbon flapped behind her left ear like a monster butterfly.
In the passage behind Edwina, I caught glimpses of the other elephants, patient and bored, and of the men who had been ordered to bring them out into the arena to quiet the audience. The men were yelling at Edwina, who was holding up the whole parade. But she paid no attention.
She just stood there, perfectly still, staring at the clowns while the clowns stared back at her.
As we surged around the corner, the blue clown glanced over his shoulder at us and whispered something in his brother’s ear. The red clown was still staring at Edwina. Suddenly he took a step toward her, and the sound of a revolver shot echoed down the corridor.
Instantly Edwina sprang into life. With a scream, she reared up on her huge hind legs. She plunged forward. A swift blow from the side of her head sent the blue clown sprawling to the floor. She trumpeted. The red clown fired again. Edwina’s trunk lunged at him, knocking the gun from his hand. It coiled around his waist and jerked him up into the air.
We were all streaming forward. Zelide, with a courage that impressed me, ran straight up to Edwina, shouting:
“No, no, Edwina. Do not keel him. Put heem down, Edwina. Do not keel him.”
Even in her frenzy of pain and fury, the elephant seemed to recognize Zelide’s voice. With a great shake of her head, she lowered her trunk and dropped the limp body of the red clown at the aerialist’s feet. She stood quite still then, the blood seeping from her thick, grey hide.
The crowd poured around me and leaped on the clowns. Two men picked up the dazed blue clown and pinioned his arms behind him. Two others jumped at the panting red clown. Someone grabbed up the gun.
Everyone was shouting. Someone had seized my arm. I turned around. It was my policeman. The look of stunned incomprehension was still on his face, but this time he pulled out a pair of handcuffs and snapped them over my wrist.
“I said you’re under arrest,” he spluttered. “All this craziness … clowns, roses. To hell with it. I’m here to get Lieutenant Duluth and his wife and I’m going to get you.”
I grinned at him. The other policeman and Mr. Emmanuel Catt had the two Roses safely under control. I was certain of that. I was perfectly ready to be arrested now.
It was all over but the shouting and a couple of explanations.
As the policeman started leading Iris and me away, I took one last glance over my shoulder at Edwina.
She had relapsed into her ancient, tolerant apathy. Although the blood still trickled from her side, she seemed no more worried by the two revolver shots than I would have been by two gnat bites. Zelide was patting her trunk. Very gently, Edwina lifted its tip and curled it around the world-famous aerialist’s wrist.
I had no idea what Edwina had against the Rose brothers or what they had against her. But one thing was only too clear. In this last round of their remarkable battle, Edwina, the elephant, was very definitely—the winnah!
CHAPTER XVII
We never knew how Madden’s circus managed to restore order after the havoc we had wrought with its gala opening. While the Stadium was still rocking to its foundations, the policeman hustled Iris and me out through a side exit into a waiting police car. He wasn’t trusting us at all. With me handcuffed to his left wrist, he sat in the middle of the back seat and tucked Iris in on his right. He ordered the driver to take us to headquarters.
My elation at having seen the Rose brothers captured was beginning to subside. It was pleasant to know that Right had triumphed, even though the issues at stake were still so vague, but our road to victory, paved as it was with good intentions, had been constructed in a most unorthodox manner. I had walked out on a couple of corpses; I had held back vital information; I had posed as a civilian; I had broken virtually every canon of an officer and a gentleman. I had also exhibited myself on the front pages of the newspapers.
Even with Mr. Catt, Hatch, and Bill as my champions, I doubted whether the police were going to be fond of me. My commanding officer loomed large in my thoughts, too. In the light of my week-end activities, would I strike him as the serious-minded type of lieutenant junior grade who merited promotion?
As our car reached headquarters, another automobile had just drawn up in front of us. Out of it emerged one policeman handcuffed to the red clown and another handcuffed to the blue clown. The Rose brothers, apparently, had received no serious injuries at the trunk of Edwina. Trailing out of the car after them came Mr. Catt and Madame Zelide, whose unseemly feathered tights were partly concealed under a theatrical cape. They all progressed, chattering, up the steps into the building. A more subdued group, we followed. As we entered the bleak vestibule, we were in time to see the others disappearing through a swing door.
Our policeman, swaggering, presented us to another man in uniform behind a high desk and said: “Lieutenant and Mrs. Duluth. Murder suspects. I got ’em.”
From his expression I could tell that I was not the only one thinking about promotion. He conducted us into a small, empty room where he unhandcuffed me.
“The Inspector’ll send for you when he’s good and ready,” he said. “Got to turn in my report.”
“O.K.,” I said. “Listen, do something for me. Know Williams and Dagget, a firm of private detectives here?”
The policeman nodded suspiciously. “Sure. Why?”
“Call them. Tell them what’s happened. They know all the dope. Get them to come right around.”
The policeman was reluctant but finally consented. He left us then, locking the door behind him.
It was a horrible little room with a single bench running along one wall and with barred windows. Iris and I sat down on the bench. Iris slipped her hand through my arm.
“Give me a cigarette, darling.”
I lit two with one of my last three matches. My wife inhaled dreamily. “Clowns. Murderers. Roses,” she quoted. “Darling, wasn’t it fun?”
“I suppose so,” I said, thinking of the way my commanding officer’s nostrils dilated when he was mad.
“And Edwina routing the Roses like that. Peter, we’ve got the laugh on Hatch. We saved Zelide.” She paused. “Exactly what did we save Zelide from?”
“The Rose brothers,” I said. “Remember?”
“Oh, I know that” said my wife testily. “I mean what was it really that the Rose brothers had against Zelide and Linda and Eulalia? And how did Edwina fit in? And what was poor Eulalia doing mixed up in a circus murder? And who actually was Gino Forelli? And … I’m bursting to know what it’s all about and here we are locked up in this miserable room and…Peter!”
That last word came out in an explosive cry.
“What’s the matter?” I said, my commanding officer’s nostrils still busy dilating in my mind.
“Mr. Catt’s essay.” My wife was pulling the forgotten Crimes of Our Times out of my pocket. “We may be arrested for murder, but at least we can find out who we murdered and why. Page eighty-four. Quick.”
Iris’s enthusiasm infected me. She reached page eighty-four. We started to read. Now that Zelide was safe and the Roses were under lock and key, Mr. Catt’s leisurely style was no longer exasperating. In fact, it cast a queer spell of its own.
As we read on, I even forgot the dilating nostrils.
From: Crimes of Our Times, edited by John L. Weatherby, copyright, 1943, by Featherstone Press, N.Y.C. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher
MURDER AMONG THE ROSES*
by
Emmanuel Catt
* I am presenting here—and I think this is the most logical place for it—the unabridged text of Mr. Emmanuel Catt’s illuminating essay on the Rose murder. Perhaps I should advise the reader that Mr. Catt is at present working on a sequel to his study which covers the final phases of this remark
able case. Serious students of crime will doubtless find in Mr. Catt’s treatment far more psychological penetration and literary distinction than in my own highly personalized narrative: P.D.
I am obsessed by this crime. I feel about it very much the way the late Mr. Edmund Pearson must have felt about the butcheries in the Borden household. Probably even more so, for, whereas Mr. Pearson could study his divine Lizzie only obliquely and from afar, I had literally a ringside seat at the Rose murder and I was close enough to the people involved to obtain intimate peeps behind the scenes such as are seldom vouchsafed to theorists in crime.
And, apart from my personal obsession, there are other reasons why I feel it my special duty to keep this affair constantly before the public eye. For the Roses are veritable fleurs de mal whose evil shoots have by no means withered, but will—if one dare look into the crystal of the future—one day burgeon again into poisonous blossoms of deeper and bloodier red.
I hereby serve warning on an apathetic public—and on certain individuals to be specified later—that we have not heard the last of the Roses. Their account with society is by no means settled.
Though not altogether surprised, I have been disappointed by the almost universal indifference to my favorite murder. Though it has been written up, with the usual gross exaggerations and inaccuracies, by the sensational magazines and Sunday supplements; though the original tragedy was accorded a headline in the Philadelphia papers, the final apprehension and sentencing of the criminals rated only a few brief paragraphs, while the psychological undercurrents of the story—fraught as it was with the whole gamut of human emotions—have never attracted the pen of any serious analyst except myself.
The public has remained listless. The intellectuals have yawned. Even my late friend, Mr. Alexander Woollcott, self-confessed connoisseur in the nicer points of murder, would have none of my Roses. He insisted that the case was too flamboyant; that it lacked light and shade; that the characters in the drama were wholly wanting in contrast and subtlety. Bluntly, he attributed my own excessive preoccupation (and here one may snatch a faint whiff of professional jealousy) to the fact that I myself was present when the murder was committed.
That is true. I was present—and surely this is the very apogee in the career of any criminologist—I was an actual eyewitness to what I myself consider one of the most interesting and one of the most cunningly conceived murders of the past century.
I was a witness, in company with some three thousand other persons, when the handsome young aerialist, Gino Forelli, professionally known as the Purple Rose, crashed to his death in the Circus Arena in Philadelphia, on June 4, 1936.
That there were so many witnesses to his death—so many thousands who could think and talk of it as their own individual tragedy—might be superficially assumed to have secured for the case a wide and lively public interest. But here we run into a peculiar quirk in mass psychology. When people, even children, go to a circus to witness spectacular and dangerous feats, there is in their subconscious minds a thrilling expectation, nay, almost a hope, that they will witness some spectacular disaster. So, when Gino Forelli, by his spectacular death, gratified the latent expectation in those thousands of people, he gave them a thrill, certainly, but it was only the exaggerated and yet quite logical intensification of the thrill they had expected when they paid their entrance money. And, even if they had read later that their own private accident was, in fact, a murder, it would not have excited or titillated them as such because it had failed to stimulate those peculiar cerebral reflexes which are normally stimulated by murder.
Also, the locale itself militated against its popular acceptance as a memorable murder. The circus, unlike the stage and screen, is not a mirror of normal life or normal people. It sets out to provide the abnormal spectacle, the abnormal thrill. Consequently, murder in a circus, where anything outrageous may be expected, is far less piquant than murder in, say, a country vicarage.
Again, the circus is a world peopled with puppets and grotesqueries. Its “uglies,” such as the clowns, the dwarfs, the freaks, are too ugly to approximate even the least favored of our neighbors. The “beauties,” as typified by the fair equestriennes, the pard-skinned lion tamer, the dazzling aerialist, are deliberately presented as too heroic, too fair and good for human nature’s daily food. They are embodiments, not people, and their personalities are definitely subordinated to their acts. The private life of the actors, unlike those of screen and stage stars, are not an object of curiosity even to the most avid circus-goers. Who cares about the man or woman behind the tinsel? All of us, young and old alike, know that they are mere marionettes, here today and tomorrow jerked relentlessly away.
Some of my more snobbish friends have suggested another reason why the Rose case has never—to descend to a vulgarism—“caught on.” While they condescendingly concede to the circus a certain entertainment value, they insist that its artistes are neither socially nor temperamentally interesting as murderers or murderees. They shrug aside the circus folk as little better than vagrants whose lives are so squalorous and vulgar anyhow that no one cares if they murder each other any more than one cared about the mutual massacrings among the Chicago bootleg gangs.
I must remind these snobs, who think that murder, to be interesting, must confine itself to the upper-income brackets or the social register, that blue blood—and Boston’s best blue blood at that—was represented in this affair by one of the persons most deeply involved. Miss Eulalia Crawford, had she not been what newspapers repulsively refer to as an “elegant socialite,” might have made any case memorable by her beauty, her outstanding personality, and her talent as a puppet designer. In this field she has achieved a reputation second only to that of the admirable Tony Sarg. Miss Crawford provided more than a mere snob appeal.
But, a truce to these ratiocinations. There is at least one quite definite reason why the Rose homicide never obtained the attention it merited. It is a sort of unfinished symphony. Nor is it unfinished in the same sense as those great unsolved mysteries such as the Ross kidnapping or the Elwell murder which have always captivated popular imagination. For, in the case of the Roses, the actual criminals were known and apprehended. They were even sentenced, albeit inadequately. But they never faced trial in the accepted sense of the word. And they certainly were never tried for murder. A murder trial, with its wide publicity, its fanfare of photographers and reporters, stamps the lineaments of a case, and of its participants, indelibly on people’s minds. It lifts even a minor killing out of the humdrum rut and, whatever the verdict, it manages to catch up the threads and tidy off a case to the public satisfaction.
The Roses were never tidied off. One day, as I have already hinted, they may themselves gather up the loose threads of the case, and do a little tidying off on their own account.
Now, to my story. And since I was an eyewitness to the first act in the grim drama of Gino Forelli’s death, I ask the reader to pardon undue egotism and to allow me to narrate the events as I saw them.
I shall never forget the evening of June 4, 1936. I was staying in Philadelphia, where I had the good fortune to dine with that eminent bibliophile, the late Mr. A. Edward Newton, who was one of the few men in America—and certainly the only one in Philadelphia—who knew how to serve a dinner worthy of the name. The meal was the more pleasant in that it was to be followed by a visit to the circus, a form of entertainment for which I retain my childish passion. An abundance of Pol Roger 1926 also played its part, and I recalled the fact that a clairvoyant gypsy once told me that three words beginning in C—which is incidentally the first letter of my name—were to prove important in the shaping of my destiny. The words were: Crime, Champagne, and Circus.
This was indeed the night for my three C’s—the night when they were to convolute around me and finally to coalesce in a weird and dramatic pattern.
My gypsy might—for I am notoriously susceptible—have added a fourth fatal C: Charmer. And there was one present that night i
n the person of Mrs. Phoebe Gilkyson, a delightful Philadelphian whose emballement for the circus was almost equal to my own.
As the car purred through the mellow summer evening towards the Arena in North Philadelphia, my host’s daughter, a gifted psychoanalyst, raised the interesting point as to whether adult enjoyment of the circus is merely a relic of atavistic infantilism or whether it springs from the sadistic impulse, latent in all of us, which makes us relish dangerous and spectacular feats because subconsciously we hope to see injury and suffering. Since I have already touched on this latter point, I reintroduce it merely to show that Miss Newton, like my gypsy, was gifted with a certain clairvoyance.
There is no need for me to describe the circus arena with its tawny jungle sights and sounds; its garish lights; its freaks; its frolics. The very smell of the sawdust was as exhilarating as the Pol Roger which I had enjoyed at dinner.
Nor need I describe the earlier acts which were, as I remember, in the old tradition, and neither better nor worse than usual. Let me hasten to my climax.
The finale of the evening was the aerialist act known as The Flying Roses. Though it was a three-ring circus, their trapezes were set up in the center only. However, in order to avoid the appearance of emptiness, each of the two side rings was left with a circle of elephants, sitting immobile on inverted tubs. But all eyes, side and center, were strained towards The Flying Roses. The two girls in the act were billed as Mesdames Lina and Zelide. The three men—named for the color of their scanty tights—were the White Rose, the Red Rose and the Purple Rose, the last-named (Gino Forelli) being the star.
There is always a thrill when the aerialists climb up to the dizzy heights whence their performance emanates. And all good aerialist acts are so arranged that the thrill is a mounting one, a steady crescendo of excitement. At first, while the net beneath is still spread, the two girls give graceful exhibitions whose chief appeal is to the aesthetic senses. Then they perform more difficult feats in conjunction with the White and the Red Rose. Meanwhile our star, the Purple Rose, keeps discreetly in the background.
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