Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

by Brad Ricca

  Since Grace had joined the Cruger case, it had stalled to a slow, frustrating stasis. The police were confident that Ruth had simply eloped. Most agreed that, given the scrutiny that Ruth’s character was receiving in the press, she was probably just too embarrassed to come home and announce her happiness to the world. Cocchi, though probably a dodgy character, was no killer. He had only left town because he feared an Italian witch hunt with his name at the end of it. The papers, having reported on every single cockamamy clue, had now focused their attention elsewhere. The massive headlines about the war in Europe had edged out everything else onto the next page.

  So there Grace was at the store, walking by without trying to look too obvious. Since the store had been broken into several weeks ago, Mrs. Cocchi had refused all interior searches, as was her right. Grace’s eyes darted under her black hat to note the details of the world around her. The store was open but looked empty. There were two signs in the window that said MECHANIC’S HELPER WANTED and SELLING OUT. Cocchi’s absence had clearly caused business to plummet. On the outside, to the left of the front door of Cocchi’s shop, was a narrow stairwell that sank into the ground and served as a separate entrance to the basement. Grace walked near these stairs as unobtrusively as possible to get a better look. The area in front of the basement had a dirt floor and was older, a different color even, than the ledge under the windows. Here was an elevation of about four feet, behind which was the coal vault under the sidewalk.

  Grace knew, like it or not, that all of the evidence they had—all of it—was circumstantial. The police had searched the cellar at least twice with multiple people and found nothing but absence. The rest was gossip and headlines. Why was Cocchi missing? Because he had taken the girl? Because he had been spirited away by the same fiends who had taken poor Ruth? Or because he was afraid of becoming a scapegoat? Was there any kind of clue in the paperwork here that would tell them where Ruth had gone? Or who had taken her to a cab? These questions couldn’t be answered yet. But they needed to be asked.

  Grace paused, considering the possibilities. Perhaps Ruth and Cocchi were the happy couple in this after all? That was a possibility, whether Henry Cruger cared to admit it or not. Grace did not, at least not yet. That version of the truth seemed remote given the facts of the case. When she was hired in March, the first thing Grace did was to lock herself in her office for a straight week to study every scrap of paper related to the case. The second thing she did was hire Julius J. Kron.

  Kron, her comrade in arms from the old peonage days, was now also in the city, working as a private detective with the Martin Donnelly Detective Agency. When Grace contacted him, Kron was wrapping up a case in Detroit. He immediately boarded an eighteen-hour midnight train straight to New York City. The next night, Grace and Kron had dinner at the luxurious Hotel Manhattan on Madison and Forty-second. Kron wore his customary checked dark wool; Grace, her usual black. They picked up menus that claimed “Food will decide the war,” just as they tried to decide between city staples of clam cocktail Manhattan, clear mock turtle soup, or rice pudding. There was also deep-dish apple pie with cream, served on flat plates.

  There, among the white tablecloths, high-backed chairs, and palms, the two partners, now older, talked business, just like the old days. She called him Kronnie. He called her Mrs. Humiston, without any hesitation. Grace told Kron everything she had so far. He was the only one she did that with. “I want you to meet Mr. Cruger, the girl’s father,” Grace said, between sips of tea. “He is a mental and physical wreck. If this isn’t solved soon, he’ll be in a sanitarium.”

  When they left the hotel at eight, Grace gave Kron the bulk of the files she had on the Cruger case. There were hundreds of typewritten pages. Kron took the papers home and studied them all night long, making big blue pencil marks over promising leads. In the morning, he blinked his eyes, took an icy shower, and ate breakfast. Before leaving, Kron kissed his wife Estelle and three young daughters good-bye. Kron stared at his oldest for a few more moments.

  The air was warm outside for late April. Kron’s apartment was in the west eighties, so he decided to walk to Forty-second Street through Central Park. He wanted to get the facts straight in his mind before he reached Grace’s office. Ruth Cruger had left her fashionable apartment house at 180 Claremont Avenue on February 13 to pick up her newly sharpened ice skates at Cocchi’s store on 542 West 127th Street. She was never seen again. What Kron couldn’t figure out was how a girl of eighteen could disappear in broad daylight in such a crowded section of the city. Three days later, Cocchi—who had been cleared of any wrongdoing by police investigators—also disappeared. Walking along, Kron watched kids already playing in the fountain as their parents laughed outside the immobile stone rim. They were holding on for dear life, screaming as their clothes got soaked.

  When Kron arrived at Grace’s office, he found her already talking to Henry Cruger. When Grace introduced Kron, with no small amount of the usual hyperbole, Henry’s eyes pleaded at him from under his bushy eyebrows.

  “Mr. Kron,” he said. “Won’t you find my little daughter? Someone is keeping her—she would never stay away—she would never have gone away.”

  “We hope to, Mr. Cruger,” Kron replied, through his thick Hungarian accent. He continued with a lie meant to make the man—the father—feel better. “Just remember that of all the thousands of girls who disappear every year, over ninety-eight percent are located.” Kron managed a persuasive smile.

  “Yes,” Henry cried, “but where?”

  Kron had no immediate answer.

  Henry again insisted that his Ruth had no love affairs, was quite fond of her family, and would not have stayed away without any communication. Henry repeated his fears that Ruth had been kidnapped by a passing motorist or met with an accident and was in a hospital unable to identify herself. Or it was possible that, since it had been a bitterly cold day, she had stopped in some doorway to warm herself and had come to harm there? Cellars, vacant lots, and flats in the section were searched. When no further clue had been revealed after forty-eight hours, Commissioner Woods, at Henry’s insistence, sent out a general alarm. Since then, there had been countless dead-end rumors and vague tips, and the fear that there was still something waiting for them in all that melting ice.

  Once Henry left, Grace and Kron mapped out a plan. Grace would investigate Ruth Cruger while Kron would try to learn more about Cocchi.

  “Kronnie,” she said, “you are the only man I can trust to dig up the real facts. There is something crooked behind the whole thing.” Kron had sensed that, too. There had to be something that everyone else had missed.

  Grace’s part of the investigation required leaving the office because this was not a legal case. Not yet. They had to be discreet. So Grace put her black hat on and searched vacant lots and old buildings by herself. She spoke with Ruth’s classmates at Wadleigh High School and friends of hers from church. She also talked to Seymour Many and some of the Columbia boys whom the police had already questioned. But Grace had heard enough to support her initial feelings about Ruth Cruger’s character. Ruth had been going out occasionally (and secretly) with some college students, but she was not, as the police were saying, a “wayward girl.” Grace was unsure about much of this case. But she was getting very sure of that.

  That is how Grace found herself at Cocchi’s shop, staring at nothing she felt was probably something. Grace walked casually because she knew no one would look twice at her if she behaved normally. Her black hat shielded her face and allowed her to blend in. Satisfied with her investigation of the store, she moved down the street. A few doors down from the shop, she met a garage man and asked about Cocchi.

  “There’s something phony about that guy,” the mechanic said. “Cocchi kept his shop closed for three days after that girl disappeared.” He thought about it a minute. “Mind you, now, I’m not saying a word, but he put a sign up ‘Closed for Repairs’ and he kept the door locked.”

  The man also s
aid that Cocchi had hired a twelve-year-old neighborhood boy named Herbert Roemmele to work for him before and after school hours. Grace asked if this boy had been working with Cocchi when Ruth Cruger went missing. The man thought a minute and said that was the day the boy was fired. Grace found the boy easily; he lived only a block or so away. Grace didn’t have any children of her own, but her sister did, so she knew how to talk to them. When Grace got to the door of the tenement, she stared up the beetling cliff of dirty windows. After finding the apartment, Grace talked to the boy’s mother, who agreed to let the lady lawyer have a brief interview with her son.

  In the room with Herbert, Grace smiled and asked him if he could draw. When the boy nodded yes, Grace asked if he might draw the inside of the motorcycle store for her. Kind of like a map, she said. Herbert dipped his head and got to work drawing a sketch of Mr. Cocchi’s shop for her, though in his sketch it was disappointingly bare. Herbert drew six lockers on one end, which he said policeman used for their raincoats and lamps. Herbert got more talkative as he drew. He told Grace how on one particular day the giant sidecars were all standing on end and placed to cover up the rear of the store. “Like boats,” Herbert said. That day was in February.

  On that day, Herbert told Grace, everything was normal. Herbert went to the store after school as usual. He remembered that Mr. Cocchi told him he was too busy to be bothered. But that wasn’t out of the ordinary. Herbert remembered playing with Mr. Cocchi’s little son Athos out on the street, but Mr. Cocchi came out and said they were making too much noise.

  Herbert said that Mr. Cocchi was smoking a lot of cigarettes and seemed upset. He told Grace that it was probably because of Mrs. Cocchi. They were always fighting. When Herbert went back to the store after school the next day, several policemen stopped him and sent him to Brooklyn for some nails, which they said were needed by Mr. Cocchi. Herbert heard hammering. “When I came back after school,” said Herbert, “the shop was locked up. He was busy in the cellar.”

  The next day, Herbert again showed up to work.

  “You clear out,” Mr. Cocchi told Herbert. “I don’t need you anymore.”

  On the third morning, Herbert saw Mr. Cocchi’s name in the newspaper. He went down to the store and shouted to Mr. Cocchi, but he could not get in. The door was still locked.

  After raising a ruckus for a few more minutes, Mr. Cocchi came up the outside steps from the coal bin, snatched the paper from the boy’s hands, and ran back into the cellar. In an instant, Cocchi was up again and ordered the boy to buy two more newspapers. When Herbert returned, Mr. Cocchi grabbed them again and hurried back into the cellar.

  “What do you suppose he wanted with three newspapers?” Grace asked.

  “Oh, I think he was building the morning fire,” Herbert said.

  Grace thought that it was beginning to look more and more like Cocchi was the man she wanted to talk to the most. She headed back to her office to look over the evidence again to see what they had missed. Grace remembered her training from Dean Ashley at NYU: look at the facts of the case and then work in the spaces between them.

  When Grace arrived at her office, it was mobbed by newspaper reporters. She thought they might be looking for another statement from her on the Cruger case. They were, but not for the reason she thought.

  There was news.

  * * *

  The reporter wiped his brow under the hot Italian sun. The afternoons were even quieter up here, in Bologna. As the reporter walked up the path to the low building, he started to wonder if this wasn’t just another wild-goose chase. Milt Snyder was a reporter, so he thought in terms of stories and their worth, but he also knew when they just plain fizzled out. At the same time, as the longtime globe-trotting correspondent for the Sun, Milt had done some of the work on the Petrosino story, so he knew never to discount the impossible. So once Milt’s editor caught word of the news, Milt was rapidly dispatched from Rome to verify its truth. The Sun’s motto was “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.”

  As he got closer, Milt shielded his eyes from the sun and saw a man sitting in the June sun amid the colorful bones of a broken bicycle. Milt pushed back his hat.

  Are you Alfredo Cocchi? Milt said in perfect Italian.

  Yes, the man said, surprised. Milt’s eyes focused. There, indeed, was Alfredo Cocchi, on his knees, tinkering with a drive chain.

  When Milt Snyder said his name, Cocchi seemed surprised. Not by the fact that someone had found him or that the person had an American accent, but by the fact that someone was looking for him in the first place. Cocchi told Milt that he had been in Bologna this whole time, living with his father and his brother Arturo at 7 Via Poleso, working in the family bicycle-repair shop. When Cocchi spoke, Snyder looked at the man. It was strange to see the dark face that had been inked all over the papers now grinning and come to life.

  “I am well known here,” Cocchi told Snyder, wiping off his hands and offering his hand. In Bologna, he had not made the slightest attempt to hide his identity.

  Cocchi swore that he knew nothing about Ruth Cruger’s disappearance. He had actually heard that she had been kidnapped and was living somewhere in Europe. Cocchi’s claim called to mind quaint, crooked streets and rambles around dark, silent cathedrals. Whom was she with? And why? Cocchi waved his hands as if the question were a noonday fly. He was astonished that he was even being asked these things. He had no knowledge of them. He seemed genuinely hurt.

  But Milt was a true reporter. He mentioned to Cocchi that, because of the many unanswered questions about the case, the United States might try to extradite him back to New York for trial. Cocchi seemed to be offended by this. He explained to the reporter that he had abandoned a good business and returned to Italy after ten years because his wife was crazy, not for any other reason. Cocchi didn’t understand why this was so hard to understand. The timing with the missing girl was merely coincidental. His wife had become unbearable, Cocchi said. She was excessively jealous and nosy. He referred to her only as Maria Magrini, her maiden name.

  Snyder turned the conversation back to Ruth Cruger. Cocchi explained again, as he had all those months ago to the police, that he had met the girl only once in his life, when she had come to get her skates sharpened.

  “She was a pleasant faced girl,” Cocchi admitted. “But there was nothing extraordinary about her.”

  10

  The Pale Man

  With the news of Cocchi’s appearance in Italy in early June, a significant amount of legal and political machinery began turning its gears to get Cocchi extradited back to the United States so that he could be questioned about Ruth. But since this was Italy—in the shadow of the First World War and the Petrosino murder—officials on both sides were not cooperating. Given the tense political atmosphere, insiders knew that there was little chance of an extradition. Even though Cocchi had been found, the Italian government refused to even arrest him.

  “I have heard from him once,” Maria Cocchi admitted, back in New York. “He told me he was living with his father and brother in Bologna. He said nothing about that girl. I shall be glad if they bring him back. It is like him to run away and leave me.

  “He did it before, while we were betrothed, and left me in Italy,” Maria explained. “Then he sent for me to follow him and we were married. I hear also from my sister who is visited by Alfredo every week. He tells my sister many lies. He told her he sold his machine shop for much money and left me $5000. He did not sell the shop.” This seemed believable. There were rumors going around that Maria Cocchi was already trying to sell the motorcycle store.

  The news of Cocchi’s appearance affected Mrs. Cruger quite differently. “I am overjoyed to learn that this man has been found,” she said. “And now I hope, since the police permitted him to slip through their fingers, they will see that he is brought back here. I have always maintained that Cocchi knows what became of poor little Ruth. The police may congratulate themselves on the finding of Cocchi, but it seems to me they were
very lax.” Stifling back tears, she urged reporters to talk to Mrs. Humiston.

  “Circumstances had come to light,” Grace said, “which made it appear extremely likely that Cocchi knew all about the girl’s disappearance.” Grace revealed that her investigations into the records at the American consul in Italy showed that when Cocchi arrived, he had good clothes and plenty of money. This was “striking, because it has been established pretty well that he had only $15 and was dressed in his working clothes when he dropped out of sight.” Grace said that “if he could be induced to tell where he had obtained money after he went into hiding, the mystery would be near a solution.” Her reasoning was sound. Grace was working the case, not getting caught up in the personalities involved.

  “It isn’t going to be an easy matter to extradite Cocchi,” District Attorney Swann told the press. “All we have against him at present is an abandonment charge preferred against him by his wife. That is not an extraditable offence.” But it might, he added, generate “leads which will enable us to connect him up materially with the disappearance of Miss Cruger.”

  Grace thought about going to Italy herself to look for Cocchi. She would have already been on a boat, she knew, in her younger days, but she felt fairly certain that Ruth herself was not there. There was also the small matter of the war. The Atlantic had already become uncertain terrain, masking the terrifying U-boats that slowly wound their way beneath the waters. Grace knew that if they didn’t find Ruth, then any case they had against Cocchi would fall apart completely. If that happened, Cocchi could live in Italy, free in the sunshine, for the rest of his life. Finding Cocchi didn’t solve the mystery.

  A few days after Cocchi was found in Italy, Grace was in her office thinking about what to do next when she looked up to see Commissioner Woods himself at her door, hat in hand. She didn’t skip a beat.