by Brad Ricca
As soon as Grace walked into her office, her phone was ringing. Grace picked it up. It was Kron.
“Mrs. Humiston,” her old friend said. “Hurry back here.”
Grace drove as fast as she could. When she got close to the store, she stopped because of the sea of people who had come out of nowhere. It looked like a parade was going on. She stopped, got out of her car, and ran the rest of the way to the store. There had to be over a thousand people here, draped over one another, looking at something in the center of it all.
When Grace finally arrived at the store, there were reporters and people everywhere. There was a kind of ladder set up over the broken stairs. Grace, under her black hat, pushed her way into the cellar and disappeared from view.
Minutes later, when Ruth Cruger came out of that cellar, into that beautiful June afternoon, she was carried in the air by the men who had spent so long looking for her. Her body was held in a thin cardboard box, closed tight with a belt. A single dark glove lay crumpled on top of the interim coffin. As she was raised up, the men in the street took off their hats.
Their sons, watching their fathers, all did the same.
* * *
Earlier, after Grace had left for her office, the men descended into the silent cellar. Kron scrambled down first into the darkness. A single electric bulb looped down off the uneven ceiling of the basement. It sparked hot white. The brightness lit the scar on his face.
Kron ducked his head so that it missed the edge of the stone ceiling. He palmed his hat and snapped on his unlit cigar. He surveyed the entire room, looking into its webby corners.
Hello? he asked.
The room smelled of damp cement, oil, and wood. There was no furniture. The compactness of the room seemed to freeze everything. McGee and Solan followed Kron in. McGee barely fit. Solan, in overalls, was darting around. He looked at everything with purpose.
As the men moved around and kicked at the floor, it felt like an underground church.
They looked up to see a chute that reached all the way to the first floor. There should have been a flue, but it wasn’t there.
There were pipes and a tin sign and some saws, but otherwise the room was empty except for a huge workbench against the wall. There was a large bag in the corner of the room that looked like quicklime. Kron stepped in slow circles on the planked flooring. They walked into the corner, where exposed brick lay against the bottom half of the wall. These New York basements were forgotten places, with everything stretching up. The down of things was always left behind. The cop started taking off his coat, then his drenched vest.
Solan examined the massive workbench. He motioned, and everyone helped him move it. They pushed it to the side and stared downward. The floorboards were gone. Instead, in the cement floor, they saw a door, set into the ground like a gate.
Kron pulled back the door and stared into a black space. He couldn’t see or sense the bottom. Kron jumped straight down.
It was almost impossible to breathe. He kept going.
Several feet down he saw her.
When they lifted her out, they did so in silence and as delicately as they could. She was tied up. Her legs had been pushed up parallel to her chest, where they were tied around her body. Kron immediately cut the ropes. On her left hand he saw a ring with the initials W.H.S. Kron left to make two calls.
She had a bruise on her forehead.
After Grace came down into the basement to see the girl she had never met, she went back outside, her head in her hands. People took her picture. Henry Cruger had just arrived with Reverend Pattison and came up alongside Grace. He looked in her eyes. One of the diggers walked out of the store and held out his hand to Grace. Inside was a small wristwatch. Grace gave it to Henry. He glanced at it once, turned it over, and read the inscription on the back. He then gave it back to Grace. He whispered something to Pattison, who nodded. Then Henry turned away silently. His shoulders were drooping. As he disappeared against the grain of the crowd, he seemed barely able to walk. He had eyes, but it seemed he could no longer see.
When the late evening editions hit the street, the newspapers reported on the tragic end of the mystery. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle on June 17 ran the story that was being repeated across the country.
RUTH CRUGER’S BODY FOUND IN COCCHI CELLAR
The body of Ruth Cruger was found yesterday afternoon buried under a wooden flooring at the extreme rear end of the cellar, where Cocchi’s work bench stood. A score of police detectives had raked the cellar over a dozen times without finding it. The discovery was made by J.J. Kron, a private detective employed by Grace Humiston.
A big wooden chest containing tools was found to be fastened to what appeared to be the dirt flooring. The dirt, however, covered a wooden flooring; to this the chest had been fastened. When the boards were pried up, Kron and Detective Frank McGee of the Fourth Branch detective bureau, who was left on the case after the other detective had been sent to other work, saw a pit three feet wide and about six feet deep. Kron jumped in before taking a good look, and then discovered that he had landed upon a body, very much decomposed.
The body was that of a girl. It was bent nearly double and the arms and legs were folded over the torso and tightly bound with rope. The skull had been crushed, as if by a hammer blow, and a towel was twisted around the neck.
The coroner removed the body, pressed several dozen witnesses into duty, and held an inquest at the nearest police station that lasted into the night. Further identification of the body was confirmed when her hat was found in the grave and pointed out by her mother at their Harlem apartment. They found a policeman’s uniform as well, though it seemed old. They found Ruth’s ice skates, stained dark with blood. An indictment charging Alfred Cocchi with murder was returned by the hastily summoned grand jury. Testifying were Lagarenne, McGee, Helen Cruger, Peter McAntee, and Dr. L. L. Danforth, the Cruger family physician.
Maria Cocchi was detained as a material witness. Before being taken into custody, she was allowed to go back to her home on Manhattan Street to get clothes and see her two children, who were left in the care of neighbors.
“I am amazed to learn of the discovery of the body of the missing girl in the cellar of my husband’s shop,” Mrs. Cocchi said. “If he killed her, he was not alone in the crime. He is too much of a coward to do anything like that by himself. I hope they bring him back here and if he is guilty I want to see him punished.” The police then took Mrs. Cocchi’s young daughter, who was ill, and placed her in a city facility. When Maria finally broke down, it was because of that fact: “My children’s father is a murderer,” she said. That night, a cable was sent from Police Commissioner Woods to Italy.
It contained two words:
HOLD COCCHI.
12
A Second Guess
“They should have found that body,” Mayor Mitchel said, almost to himself. He turned to face the crowd in front of him. “It is regrettable that the police did not find the body at the time they made their first search,” he said, more loudly. “When a police officer searches premises and there is something that is to be found there and ought to be found and they fail to find it, there is no excuse. They should have found it,” the mayor repeated. The newspapers were reporting that this was just the tip of the iceberg.
“Mrs. Humiston, they say, had some tip,” a reporter said. “Why wasn’t it possible for the police to get that same tip?” “I don’t know,” replied the mayor. “It may have been possible. Perhaps the officers assigned to the case did not do their work well enough.” Someone else brought up Grace’s latest claim in the papers that she knew of at least twenty-two other girls who were missing in the city. It had come out in the paper that Captain Dan Costigan had also searched the shop with his men—but nothing.
“I do not know what girls have disappeared,” the mayor admitted. “If their cases have been reported to the Police Department they will be on record there.”
“Do you think it calls for a shakeup i
n the detective department?”
“I don’t express an opinion as to whether it calls for that or not,” Mitchel said. “That is one of the things which diligent inquiry on the part of the Police Commissioner, which is now under way, will develop.”
From his own perch at Command, Arthur Woods knew that he had to choose his next actions carefully. Like Mayor Mitchel, Woods could only look on as the press denounced the men under his command. People were calling for Woods to be fired. Grace had been right this whole time, thought Woods. Cocchi had taken the girl. Woods shook his head.
Woods called in Inspector Joseph Faurot. He was the detective who had sent the handsome Hans Schmidt, a priest, to the chair in 1906 for killing his pregnant housekeeper and cutting her up into slippery pieces. Woods ordered Faurot, who had been mastering the new science of fingerprinting, to do an in-depth, very public investigation of any police wrongdoing in the Cruger case.
“Spare no one,” Woods growled.
The sad body of Ruth Cruger had been found, but there was still a chance to make some kind of amends. Woods knew that justice for Ruth Cruger would not happen without a great deal of work and luck. For one, they needed physical evidence that Cocchi had killed her, though no one was doubting that anymore. No one knew if Cocchi had even been arrested yet. Woods feared that he might have already fled Bologna. The possibility existed that Cocchi had even gone off to war, in which case they would probably never see him again. Cocchi could be lying in a pile of flowers somewhere in France, with dirt in his ears and mouth. Woods also got in touch with the district attorney, Edward Swann, to see if the case had any connection to the traffic in white slaves. They had the body, but there was much they didn’t know.
Swann kicked the grand jury into action, which he selectively populated with several Italian delegates to avoid community backlash. Swann had been appointed by special election the previous year. He was a Tammany man, tied to the political machine named after the three-story brick building on East Fourteenth Street where Democrats had smoked victory cigars on election night since 1830. But Swann was new to the politics of the city and was also eager to prove himself. He had helped Henry Cruger earlier in his investigation, and now he was eager to do more.
* * *
Early the next day, people walking on the sidewalk of West Eightieth Street looked up quickly when they heard something shatter in the sky. Those who were fast enough thought they saw a pretty young woman jump through a third-floor window and fall into the vacant lot yawning between the buildings.
A beat cop on the street spun around and ran toward the space that had swallowed her. When he turned the corner, he saw a small body, in a dress, lying still on the hard ground. She started to move. She was alive. He took three shrill pulls on his whistle for help. Gray bone was protruding from her crumpled left leg.
“He’s up there,” she gasped, turning her head. She pointed up to the building, to the sky.
“The men,” she said, seeing the cop’s confused look. “One grabbed me by the throat and said ‘I guess you’ll not tell anymore.’”
The cop tried to quiet her as the ambulance arrived. As they pulled her onboard, the woman pulled on his hand.
“Please,” she asked, “tell Mrs. Humiston.” The girl was in a great deal of pain. “Two men had tried to murder me because I gave Grace Humiston information.”
The woman said her name was Consuelo La Rue.
“If you only knew what I’ve had to go through,” she said, on the way to the hospital. “They told me they’d kill me, for what I’d done.”
Grace was summoned at once. When she finally arrived at the Polyclinic Hospital and was ushered into the emergency ward, her face was deadly serious. When she tried to see La Rue, Grace was told that the police were limiting her visitors. La Rue was apparently unable to tell a coherent story, and the doctors were worried about her state of mind. As Grace stood in the hall, Inspector Faurot appeared to speak to the press. He said that he was going to charge La Rue with attempted suicide, even though he admitted there was a mark on her throat as if she had been choked. Faurot also said that he had made another important discovery but thought it best to withhold it until he found substantiation. Grace was furious that the police would not permit her to even talk with La Rue and that they already seemed to be dismissing the girl’s claims. Grace doubted that Faurot had even spoken with La Rue in person.
As La Rue laid in her hospital bed, Captain Cooper stood outside the door, talking with the guards. Grace walked by and stopped.
“I have absolutely nothing to say,” Grace said.
“No one asked you to say anything,” he replied. Only days ago these two people were helping each other. Now they were at odds. Grace knew why. The entire city was blaming the police for failing to find, and perhaps even save, Ruth Cruger. And the police, at least some of them, were blaming Grace for making them look bad.
As the press converged on the hospital, clogging up its thin halls, the assistant district attorney, Alexander Rorke, who had questioned La Rue at the hospital, said that the young lady had maintained a mysterious reserve. The police could not confirm if La Rue had any relationship to Ruth Cruger. A reporter at the hospital finally spotted Grace hanging around the back and asked her if it was true, if La Rue had given her the information needed to find Ruth Cruger.
“To answer that now would do more harm than good,” Grace responded, after a moment’s pause. “I feared for Miss La Rue’s life. She telephoned me that her life had been threatened and I had a private detective searching for her.”
That afternoon, the police reported that an examination of La Rue’s apartments on the second floor of 215 West Eightieth Street revealed a broken mirror and an overturned chair, but no other signs of a struggle. Neither was there any trace of either of her mysterious visitors. There was also a calling card with a name that was found in her room. The name was prefixed with “Count.” In the hospital, La Rue told police that when she had been kidnapped, months earlier, two white slavers were with her, accompanied by the men. She said that she was led to a grave and made to view the body of a girl they said was Ruth Cruger. La Rue said that she was warned the same thing would happen to her if she tried to escape.
La Rue was too badly injured to be questioned any further. So Captain Cooper pulled up a chair and watched over her bedside. Sometime later, one of his men came in and whispered in his ear that Grace wanted to talk to him in the hall. He left La Rue’s bedside and walked into the hall. He regarded Grace, alone.
“I thank you for ordering me out,” she said, referring to the earlier incident.
“I don’t understand your remark,” said Cooper.
“I shall see Commissioner Woods in the morning,” replied Grace.
“All right, then, I have nothing more to say to you,” said Cooper.
Grace got on the phone and complained directly to Woods that she had been ordered from the room by a captain, but Cooper denied it. Governor Whitman, who was in the city for the day and staying at the Hotel St. Regis, showed keen interest in the development of any part of the Cruger case, including the La Rue matter, which he intimated might eventually come before his desk. He didn’t say anything about Grace Humiston, whom he remembered quite well.
Later that night, Rorke revealed that another attempt had been made on La Rue’s life while she was recovering in the hospital. A strange man had been seen in the hallway near her door before cops chased him away. A rock had been thrown from the roof of an adjoining building. The attached note was in Spanish and warned that she would be killed if she talked. The papers also reported that a man with a gun had been detained wandering her hallway in the hospital. The police proceeded to limit La Rue’s visitors in order to protect her against injury or intimidation. Two policemen remained on guard at all times. The police refused to comment further, saying only that her story strongly corroborated rumors that powerful forces were seeking to shield Cocchi, who, the day before, had been indicted in absentia for
the Cruger murder. There was a rumor that Cocchi had supposedly threatened vengeance on anyone connected with his prosecution. Papers reported that Cocchi was a member of the dreaded Camorra and that its agents had made it possible for him to escape to Italy. Some of the papers were now reporting that Ruth’s body had been found folded in two, with her ankles at her face. To New Yorkers with long memories, it sounded eerily like the murder of Benedetto Madonia by the Morello gang in 1903. Madonia was found stuffed in a barrel, unmercifully contorted in the same ugly way.
Grace had heard enough. “This girl is a victim of white slavery,” she told the press. “She offered to help me in the Cruger case and insisted all along that I should dig up the cellar, not because she had actual knowledge of the case, but because of her knowledge of the methods of white slavers. I am satisfied that the gang that made the La Rue girl suffer tried to kill her last night. They knew she was in touch with me, and they were afraid that she would expose them after the Cruger case had been cleared up.”
Grace looked at the reporters. “Not a word to-day,” Grace begged them, ominously. “The publication of the La Rue girl’s story means that two more girls may be killed.”
The next day, a meeting occurred at the DA’s office between Grace, District Attorney Dooling, and Captain Costigan to discuss La Rue. Grace conferred with Kron over dinner that night. Could that girl really have been right the whole time? Kron wondered if Grace had been following up with La Rue after he had dismissed her story. Faurot’s men were digging up cellars all over the city based on La Rue’s testimony. For all the girls who had gone missing in different places across the city, they had apparently never checked the basements.
“Rorke believes as I do,” Grace said, “that the girl’s story is true. To-morrow morning he is going to take up the matter with the Police Department. This is our great opportunity to wipe out one of the biggest gangs of these ghouls. They are going to give me a score of detectives to work on the case,” Grace exclaimed. “We are going to clean out the whole rotten crowd.”