by Brad Ricca
That Sunday, as the police cooled their heels and the broad strokes of New York City ran in slower lines, churches all over the city said prayers for poor Ruth Cruger, either on wooden altars or in the quiet space of individual thoughts. She became a communal wish in the gray, white air. The new Washington Heights Baptist Church on 145th and Convent raised this prayer particularly loudly. Made of Hurricane Island granite and white Georgia marble, the church was the cornerstone of the neighborhood and rose from the sidewalk like the very mind of God Himself cut and hammered down into architecture. The Crugers attended every Sunday.
Known as the mother of New York churches, it could seat a thousand parishioners. When it was full, it looked like a neighborhood version of the afterlife. There was a sliding oak wall at the back of the altar that could be pulled back to reveal a shimmering wall of blue stained glass. People came from far away just to see its mechanical baptismal font, which would slowly rise from the flat floor from a secret underground chamber.
The first-floor Sunday schoolroom was one of Ruth’s favorite places in the world. The Christian Endeavor Room was where Ruth could sit with the children. The double set of sliding doors concealed the infant room. Ruth would play with the littler girls, reading Bible stories, and standing and smiling when their parents came to claim them, lifting their small bodies high into the air. Ruth would smile among all the bright, white children. She would teach them about the poor widow from Luke 21: 1–4 who put only two tiny coins into the offering cup yet gave more than all the rich combined.
But on this Sunday, those same girls in dresses and ribbons came in with their heads bowed in the disbelief of early despair. They slowly gathered in the rectory and got on their knees in silence. Some were crying. Many were crying. The Reverend Pattison, a tall, handsome man, entered the room and sat among them. The reverend often commended Ruth and was sometimes seen encouraging her. He had personally baptized her a year ago last Easter. As he sat with his flock, they all prayed for Ruth’s safe return.
In another part of the church, behind closed doors, the Mothers’ Committee drafted an official resolution that served as their own kind of prayer. They condemned the “appalling condition of city streets where it is not safe for our girls and boys to go unprotected.” The resolution was adopted with the hope that all of the “mothers of New York unite to get better protection for their children.” Later, under the direction of the same committee, the girls in the church sat in long rows, preparing ten thousand circulars with a photo of Ruth to send to police commissioners and hotel managers. The committee got movie-screen projectionists all across the country to flash her grainy picture on the screen before Charlie Chaplin’s Easy Street. The mothers of the committee wanted to cover the country with Ruth’s smile. They ordered her photo sent to conductors, brakemen, and drivers. These women who met behind closed doors represented a powerful community. Their actions were the measurement of how much they loved Ruth Cruger. And the idea of her.
* * *
Later that night, when Henry was out, the phone rang in the apartment. His wife Christina paused, then picked up the receiver. She heard only a faint buzz on the other end.
“I saw your daughter,” the voice on the line said. It was a woman.
Mrs. Cruger listened, waiting for the woman to speak again.
“At Manhattan and 128th Street at about 4 o’clock Tuesday afternoon,” the woman said. Mrs. Cruger wrote it down in the pad by the phone that was already covered with numbers.
“She was a slender girl,” the woman on the line said. “Wearing a long brown coat such as the newspapers say your daughter wears. The collar was turned up about her face, but I could see she seemed dazed. She was crying.” For Mrs. Cruger, who listened with doubt, this last word still cut sharply. The woman went on: “A man about forty years old, not at all foreign looking, had her by the arm and was urging her along and arguing with her almost angrily. They passed out of my sight north on Broadway. I did not think anything of the incident until I read of the disappearance of Miss Cruger in the newspapers.”
Mrs. Cruger asked for her name, but the line was already dead.
When Henry came home, his wife was shaking when she told him about the call. Henry went to his notebook and checked the numbers. In the absence of his daughter, numbers were the only things he could trust. He respected their complete lack of disguise. And he was sure they could help find his daughter. The time given by the caller was a full half hour after Ruth had supposedly left in a cab with a mysterious stranger at 125th and Lenox, which was the story the detectives had told him. The caller didn’t mention a cab, but her description of the man was eerily similar. Was it the same man?
Henry knew that finding a forty-year-old man in a coat in New York City was probably an impossible task. Henry tried to rethink his approach. If there was a connection between the two stories—if the man seen pushing Ruth along was indeed leading her toward a cab—then Henry needed to find the cab driver from the story the detectives had told him. That driver, Henry hoped, might be the only person who could determine who the mysterious man was and where he and Ruth had come from. Henry was settled. He had to find this cab driver. He had to find this chauffeur.
The next morning, Henry took a series of cab rides all across Harlem, following the route his daughter had supposedly taken. Henry sat in the back, his eyes on the street as the city passed him by, all legs and coats and hats. The jingling horses of the old days were all but gone. He saw the black girders of the elevated train frame the sky. They held up great signs for Howard Clothes (“The Gentleman of Good Taste”) and Maxwell House (“Good to the Last Drop”). He passed a middle-aged woman with a chalkboard held around her neck with burlap twine. It read BEGGAR’S PERMIT BADGE 2622. BLIND. There were two horizons in the city now—the burnished steel above and the uneven brick and wood below. When Henry saw police on the sidewalk, he slumped his face down into his collars. But he watched them all, though their smiles hurt him. He was searching for form and repetition and anomaly. Henry Cruger, the accountant and father, had, of necessity, become a detective.
Ruth had not been seen in four days. Later that day, the New York Times reported that Police Commissioner Woods had taken a “personal interest in the case.” Woods promised that “all detectives of the Fourth Branch who could be spared be sent in search of her.” But every day was counting down to a worse and worse conclusion. The papers—and there were nearly twenty daily papers now—reported that Henry Cruger had hired his own private detectives from the Martin Donnelly agency. They hit the hospitals and came up empty. Henry still kept riding in cabs. He knew that if she had reached the subway, she could be long gone. But he couldn’t think about that. All he could grasp right now was Harlem.
Every paper in the city was now devoting space to Ruth Cruger. Twice a day, Henry went downstairs and purchased every rag he could get his hands on. He pressed them to his chest as he maneuvered up the stairs before unlocking, then locking the door. He read the papers, one by one, studying the different accounts. The Evening World had the best coverage by far, and he liked the reporter there, so he was shocked when he opened the New York Times and read the name of the mysterious chauffeur he had spent so much time hunting for. The Times identified the witness as Henry Rubien, a Turk cabdriver who had a stand at 125th and Broadway. Rubien had told the detectives that he had picked up the mysterious couple on Manhattan Street and took them uptown to the subway station at Lenox Avenue and 125th. The words replaced each other in a blur as Henry read as fast as he could.
“I had seen her often in the neighborhood,” Rubien said. “But I did not know her name. When she entered the taxicab, I recognized her as a girl who had passed my stand. When I saw the pictures of Ruth Cruger in the papers, I knew it was she.”
Henry Cruger hurriedly put on his cuffs, ran for the door, and found himself on the sidewalk. He passed fruit carts and newsstands to get down to Broadway to the exact same taxi stand he had been riding from. Henry asked fo
r Rubien’s cab. Someone pointed him out, and Henry had to look twice. Rubien was one of the men whose cabs he had been riding in all week. When their eyes met, Rubien looked almost relieved.
The air on the street was cold, so they got into his cab and Rubien started driving. As Henry Cruger sat in the backseat and watched the back of this familiar head, he heard a different story than the one he was hearing from the police. Rubien said that his cab was hired at 3:15 on Tuesday afternoon at 127th and Broadway. A young man, alone, stepped off the curb and hired the machine from the stand at 125th Street and Broadway.
“The man directed me to drive a block to 127th and Manhattan,” Rubien said. “Right across the street from Cocchi’s shop.” Rubien said he then saw a girl about 150 feet away. “The man then jumped from the cab,” said Rubien. “He took her by the arm and rather roughly urged her into the car, telling [me] to take them to the subway station, which he did.” The girl, who looked unsure of her feet, carried a bundle with her. Rubien couldn’t rightly see what it was without being nosy. He said that the girl and the man spoke to each other with great familiarity. Rubien dropped them off uptown at the Lenox Avenue subway at 125th Street.
Rubien told Henry that the girl looked just like the photos in the newspaper and that she wore “a dark coat” and a “wide black hat.” When Henry asked why he never said anything to him all the times he had been riding in his cab, Rubien replied that he had been cautioned by the police to keep silent. There was silence now again.
“It looked as if she had been crying,” Rubien said.
Henry was becoming increasingly certain that the suspicion in the pit of his stomach was leading him toward the truth. Henry asked if the man who had called the cab was Alfredo Cocchi, the Italian motorcycle shop owner.
The driver shook his head. It was not.
Henry asked again.
The cabbie knew Cocchi. He was a good man. It was not him.
After a pause, Rubien said that he overheard the two people talking about how the girl had been quarreling with her parents about a student from Columbia. A boy. Henry straightened in the seat. Rubien described the mysterious man as being under six feet in height and under thirty years old. He had a roundish face, was good looking, and wore nice new clothes.
Henry wondered if he was sitting on the same side that his daughter had been, barely a week ago. And he wondered, more than ever, what she was thinking about in that moment.
When Henry reached home, there were more reporters gathered at the stoop of the apartment. So he stood and talked to them, even though he was tired. After talking to Rubien, and for the first time in days, he felt as if he had some answers, ones he could build on to form a statement of fact. For the first time, Henry felt like he had something of value to say.
“My girl has been kidnapped,” Henry said to the reporters. “This talk about her having gone away voluntarily is an unwarranted insult to her and to us. It is nothing more than a screen for police shirking.” Henry knew that the detectives wouldn’t care for his statements, but turnabout was fair play. The thought that his daughter—his lovely daughter with her smile and voice that was getting quieter in his head—had most assuredly come to harm after leaving that oily little shop was just too much to bear.
At home, Mrs. Cruger had been in no condition to talk to the press. She was shut behind her bedroom door. Every night, she would awaken everyone in the house by crying out for her missing daughter. But in hearing the news from her husband about Rubien, she finally agreed to speak. “My daughter would never go off this way unless she were drugged,” she said. “I am certain that she is under restraint somewhere. If she is alive and at liberty she would have communicated with me long ago.” Henry was very proud of his wife for saying this.
That night, in his chair and with his daughters and wife quiet and enclosed in their rooms, Henry watched his missing daughter stare at him from framed photographs on tables. Henry once again read the evening editions, trying to find some hope. As he read the paper, Henry was surprised to see that Mrs. Cocchi, the wife of the motorcycle man, had published a letter. It read:
Alfred: I believe you are innocent and all your friends do. Please come home. Remember our happy married life—nine and a half years and the children.
Henry could sometimes be filled with hate, a killing hate—for that woman, her Italian husband, the cops, even the people he had seen on the street who weren’t his daughter or didn’t know who she was. This hate galvanized him. But it did not last. Henry would then try to fall asleep, waiting for that half a second when he woke, when his daughter was still in the room with him, seated in the other chair, smiling about something or other. Or even being mad at him. Henry wouldn’t care. As long as she wasn’t crying, like Rubien said she had been. Anything but that. All he knew was that no one could ever know or understand what it was like to have his daughter taken from him. No one. There, in that room, Henry felt as if something had been pulled from him and something else had come to take its place. He could feel it standing in the corner. He tried to ignore it, breathing hard and fast.
To Henry, this whole mystery had swept over his family like the city itself: immense but suffocating, unrestricted but demanding. Henry felt as if they were only beginning to grope their way out of the short routines they had carved out for themselves, which ran from hallways to streets to buildings. Now, the larger city in his mind was filled with impossible hope and miserable fear—with nothing in-between.
* * *
The next day, Arthur Hale Woods, the police commissioner of New York City, was reading a newspaper on the second floor of the central office. Downstairs, his men were claiming that that they might be getting close to solving the Ruth Cruger mystery. Privately, they were telling him that they were fairly sure she had just run away from home like so many others before her. Case closed, they said. But Woods saw the headline PRETTY GIRL SKATER MISSING and wasn’t so sure that “case closed” would be enough.
Woods placed the newspaper back on his monumental desk. By now, Ruth had been missing for a week. The police were deploying a massive public effort to cast their net over the entire Atlantic seaboard. Some of the papers even suggested that Ruth had been kidnapped and sent into the city’s serpentine underworld of white slavery. Henry Cruger believed that his daughter had been drugged with a vial needle before being forced into that cab and onto parts unknown. Mr. Cruger publicly criticized the police with great furor. “The Fourth Branch Detective Bureau is not doing the work that should be done,” Henry told the Times. On his desk, Woods had two crystal inkpots and a black candlestick telephone that wound its way to a box on the wall. There was a brown wooden intercom for communicating with his secretary. He thought about Mr. Cruger’s words.
Woods, tall and thin, straightened his tweed jacket as he rose from his chair. Even at forty-seven years old, he still kept his hair short on the sides, just like in the old days, though it was now only peppered with black. At his new bride Helen’s insistence, he had finally shaved his mustache, even though he thought it just brought out the bags under his eyes. Best not to argue with the niece of J. P. Morgan, he would tell her.
On the long table next to his desk lay a street map of New York City, dimpled with push pins. Smaller maps were hung on the walls. Woods had been commissioner since 1914, after being promoted by Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, the “boy mayor” of New York who had been elected at age thirty-four. After Woods’s small inauguration in his office, the mayor, tall and thin himself, pulled his new police commissioner aside and said, “You big fool.” Woods promised that he would cut vice, clean up the gangsters, and kick the deadly Black Hand gangsters straight out of New York. These words were big talk from a former Groton English teacher.
The commissioner’s office was located on the second floor of the police central office, located in a new white building at 240 Centre Street. They jokingly called it the White House. The building was huge, humming with electricity, and had its own dispatch center. In the bas
ement was a gun range with special interrogation cells just for the detectives. The old Italian Squad had occupied the first floor. Sometimes, Woods would go up to the observation deck that looked out over the whole block. He could see the bar called Headquarters down on the first floor of the opposite street. Over on the other side, Woods saw the canvas tents of the Italian gun dealers who sold pistols and blackjacks to his own policemen.
Two weeks after his first day as commissioner, Woods, the mayor, and New York corporation counsel Frank Polk were walking through the lunchtime crowd in the Park Row Plaza outside City Hall. It was early spring, just past one o’clock on a sunny day, when an old man with a sunken face emerged from the shifting crowd. He pointed a pistol at the mayor. Woods was about two jumps away, but somehow made it in one. Woods slammed the old man to the ground—but not before the man’s gun fired in a quick blast of smoke and fire. People scattered and screamed.
The mayor sat up and patted his suit, looking for blood. He was unscathed. But Mr. Polk had been shot in the left cheek of his mouth. As Woods held the would-be assassin down, the mayor, who had also pulled his gun, towered over him.
“Why did you try to shoot me?” he asked.
Later that day, when cops ransacked the old man’s apartment, they found a steamer trunk filled with letters and anarchist pamphlets. The would-be assassin’s name was Mike Mahoney. A blacksmith by trade, he had been out of work for a very long time. Before his arraignment, the cops took him into a room at Central, where 250 detectives—all of them masked—looked him over to see if they recognized him. None of them did. They feared a more insidious conspiracy.
“We are dealing with strange forces,” they all agreed.
Before that moment on the plaza, Woods’s voice as commissioner was almost inaudible. There were rumors that people at police headquarters didn’t even know what he looked like. But now—after jumping to stop an assassin—Woods had the power to start enacting some of his more radical ideas. He could run instead of walk.