Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

by Brad Ricca

  In her later years, Grace watched her city change even further. New York pushed its way even higher into the sky, turning into almost solid steel, impregnable and stainless. Murders came and went in the news. And yet another war—even greater, if that was even the word for it—began and ended, killing millions across the globe. The public forgot her, and Grace became yet another stylish old lady in a Park Avenue apartment with jars of cold cream and stories gone untold. She became someone whom people wondered about when she clicked her wooden door shut. Her family had always been her cases, and, like any family, they were no longer whole. She had made her work the immense adventure of her life.

  On August 1, 1947, Alfredo Cocchi was considered rehabilitated and was released.

  On July 16, 1948, Grace was admitted to the French Hospital. Thirty minutes later, she was dead. She had arteriosclerotic heart disease. She was seventy-eight. Her sister Jessie claimed her body, and Grace was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery on July 19, 1948.

  Grace and Cocchi never met. But if Grace ever leafed through her old report on Sunny Side in her dark apartment, she would have found, on page 61, a list of people who had thankfully escaped the island.

  Grace might have frozen at seeing the name on the upper-right. Her mind might have tried to go back to all those blurry faces. She might try to calculate the math in her head or on a scrap of paper. She might look and search for a birth certificate. There was no possible way it could be him. She would look again. She had written this name down, then typed it, all those years ago. Had she run across this man in one of those low cabins? Had she spoken to him? Had he answered? Or was it all in her head? Grace might have gone through the photographs she still had, looking at the black-and-white faces for someone in the back: pale, smiling, and intangible among the tall crops.

  List of the families who escaped from Sunny Side leaving debts:

  Names.

  Albonetti Cesare

  Pieroni Giovanni

  Baratti

  Pielli Eligio

  Domenicucci Emilio

  Contini

  Ferrara

  Mancini Carlo

  Padroni Enrico

  Augusto Fratesi

  Frantini Luigi

  Romanelli Cesare

  Vincenzo Angeletti

  Laggio Natale

  Santucci Enrice

  Rocchetti Antonic

  Cocchi

  Pirrini Fernando

  Rosa Guardino

  Angeletti Giovanni

  Socci

  Romanelli Enrico

  Pacifico Fratesi.

  Frantini Guiseppe

  Pantozzi Luciano

  Enrico Santucci

  Mrs. Ersille

  Maggio Carlo

  Albonetti Santa.

  In an interview late in life, Grace remembered the first time she met Henry Cruger. Mrs. Felix Adler had introduced them, hoping that Grace would take the case.

  “I shall never forget the despair in the face of that man,” Grace said. “His eyes were sunken in his head and the last vestige of hope had left him. He sat in a chair in a corner of the office, his head bowed, his eyes unseeing.”

  “Mr. Cruger thinks you can find his missing daughter,” Mrs. Adler said.

  “Before I could protest,” said Grace, “she reviewed the case for me. She told of the aspersions police had cast upon the girl who was lost; how they had characterized her as ‘wayward’ when her conduct was unimpeachable. She told of the despair of the Crugers themselves, of the mother in a sickbed frantic with worry, of the sisters and the father himself not knowing which way to turn. Then, when she finished, Mr. Cruger looked up, straight into my eyes.”

  “Won’t you help me find my girl?” asked Henry Cruger.

  “Many times since then I have wished that Mrs. Adler had not come to me,” Grace admitted. “Many times have I tried to forget the horror of that case, the constant worry and fear, the sickening, disgusting things I saw and experienced.” She shook her head.

  “I protested at first,” she continued. “I told Mrs. Adler and Mr. Cruger that they overestimated me considerably. I told them that there was slight possibility I could uncover more than the police had. Mrs. Adler argued with me. Mr. Cruger sat there with bowed head. And when he raised his eyes and looked at me and said again ‘Won’t you help me find my girl’ I knew that I had lost.

  “I am not sorry that I did not turn Mr. Cruger down,” said Grace. “I would do it all over again, under the same circumstances.”

  Epilogue

  SENATOR GOLDFOGLE: What do you mean by that statement, that these things happen all the time in New York City?

  GRACE: I mean to say that it is absolutely a system, and it is a wheel within a wheel. To appreciate the situation, one needs only to see and hear the whole story.

  Hearings Before Committee on Immigration and Naturalization (1910)

  THE CRUGERS

  In 1917, during the course of the investigation into his daughter’s disappearance, Henry Cruger withdrew an excess of $9,009.65 from his company with Alfred Brown beyond his regular salary. After Brown died on October 4, 1918, Henry sued Brown’s estate for $32,000 more.

  The Cruger family eventually moved to 2 Cleveland Court in New Rochelle. Christina did not work, though Helen still did, as a clerk. In 1936, Christina was driving when she ran into a trolley. No one was hurt, but she delayed reporting the accident. Henry died on April 13, 1936, in New Rochelle, without any grandchildren. His wife died in 1938. Helen died in 1972. Henry and his wife’s second child, Catherine, lived only a year until she died in 1895.

  JULIUS J. KRON

  After Grace’s auto accident, Kron took a trip back home to Hungary in early 1923. Kron, the son of a Hungarian Jew, was born in Hungary, on July 7, 1885, in a house that spoke only Yiddish. His father, Mayer, was now living out on the ragged horizon of old Hungary, part of the newly christened Czechoslovakia.

  After the First World War, Hungary was cut into awkward pieces. Count Mihály Károlyi was the liberal pacifist who toppled the house of Hapsburg and took control of Hungary’s first republic in November 1918. When Károlyi disbanded the army, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia all began aggressively expanding their territories into Hungary without fear or reprisal. Károlyi resigned, and the Communist Party of Hungary, led by Béla Kun, filled the void. Kun had a largely Jewish cabinet and enforced his own will through ruthless countrywide acts of violence, known as the Red Terror. Rebel royalists led by Admiral Miklós Horthy made up roving bands of volunteer soldiers who cut through the countryside. Their most feared leader was Pál Prónay, who sadistically hunted, tortured, and killed Hungarian Jews or any perceived Communists that he ran across. If they were women, he would cut off their breasts. In 1919, Horthy assumed control and eventually restored the monarchy as a figurehead. He looked the other way, for quite some time, as Prónay continued his executions across the state. The power in the state was controlled by force, doctored histories, and outright fear. The American papers called them “terrorists.”

  Kron wrote on his passport that he planned to visit Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Serbia “to visit relatives.” But he crossed part of that out and instead wrote “Business for the Kron Detective Agency.” On the bottom of the passport, the type read that the bearer, in signing, does “solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Kron sailed on the S.S. Woodrow Wilson. He stayed abroad for three months.

  By the time Kron returned to America, in the spring of 1925, the exiled pacifist Count Károlyi—still a hero to many—was making a tour of the United States. Though he clearly disapproved of Horthy’s brutal regime, now referred to as the White Terror, Károlyi could not voice his thoughts because his visa was contingent on a political gag order. Károlyi, with his dark mustache and eyes, was always thought of as the man who handed Hungary over to the Bolsheviks. So he toured America, smiling and waving, accompanied by his wi
fe, who was widely regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world.

  Newspaper editorials begged the count to voice his opinions, but he would not. By April, the Károlyis were ready to visit Quebec before heading back to Europe. The count had remarked to a reporter that he would like to retire in Canada. He wanted a garden full of vegetables and a fireplace and to spend time with his wife in a narrow valley among the birches and pines. The countess, with her constant smile and high cheekbones, was Continental and adventurous. And as she boarded that boat to Quebec, Julius J. Kron was within fifty yards of her.

  Kron and his men had been secretly shadowing the royal couple for nearly the entire spring. Kron even followed them across the border—but was kicked out of Canada after they realized he wasn’t a reporter. But he had seen enough. He returned to New York to finish off his report for his client.

  On January 18, 1928, Kron’s name was again splashed across the front page of a newspaper. But it wasn’t the Evening Sun, the paper that had been so generous to him in the past. His name was stamped in black on the Daily Worker. In a glaring article, the Worker ran an exposé with the tantalizing lede NOTORIOUS SPY IN SERVICE OF HORTHY REGIME. The story contended that Kron’s detective agency was part of an elaborate spy mission in the United States on behalf of the Hungarian White Terror. The evidence for the argument was a nearly full-size reproduction of a letter from Kron, written on his bold new letterhead:

  It is with the greatest regret that I must inform you that we are not able to satisfy your claim, for reasons that we ourselves failed to receive the money’s advanced by us on the case from the Hungarian Minister, and at a loss to understand his attitude toward us.

  Yours respectfully,

  Julius James Kron.

  The addressee, Dr. Jacob Novitsky, was not a doctor. He was a notorious self-proclaimed spy. The Worker told a story whereby Kron and Novitsky made forgeries for the Hungarian ambassador to the United States, László Széchenyi, to pass on to Horthy in Hungary, who would use the forgeries as manufactured evidence of his enemies’ Communist ties in order to convict and imprison them. Széchenyi was a well-known man around New York City, having married the former Gladys Vanderbilt. They summered on Long Island.

  The minister apparently promised Kron one hundred thousand dollars, but he didn’t care for the quality of the forgeries, so he refused to pay for them. The Worker reproduced one of the forgeries, which indeed looked poor. The Worker was by no means an objective newspaper, but the evidence was right there on the front page for all to see. Kron might have hoped it would blow over since nobody trusted the Daily Worker. Later that day, a call came into Kron’s office. It was the New York Times.

  Kron admitted to the Times that he had been hired by an editor friend of his to trail the Count and Countess Károlyi when they visited the United States. Kron said he knew his friend was also a close friend of László Széchenyi and that this fact was the only truth of the story; there was no forgery scheme. “I do not deny knowing Count Szechenyi or that I worked for him,” Kron said. “But not on this case. I deny having received a fee from him.” Since the reproduced letter showed that Kron had not been paid at all, his words were true.

  Kron said that though Károlyi had met some shadowy people during his trip, he could not link him directly to the Communists. “I wasn’t able to find anything detrimental to either the Count or the Countess Karolyi all the time they were here,” said Kron. “I don’t consider him a Bolshevik, but I do consider him a radical in the European sense.” Kron was adamant that he had done this for his friend, and for himself, not for any governmental power. At the same time, Kron didn’t disguise his personal views. “Count Karolyi was plotting while he was here to overthrow the present Hungarian Government,” Kron told the Times reporter. The Daily Worker ran three more front pages with photos of letters from Kron complaining about not being paid. The final letter from Kron authorized a Washington lawyer to initiate a lawsuit against the Hungarian prime minister for the lost wages.

  Among his many self-proclaimed talents, Novitsky was a forger of some renown. Some wondered if the allegedly forged maps and lists reprinted by the clanky presses of the Worker were really his attempts at setting Kron up. There was evidence, but it was untrustworthy. But the next time the beautiful countess applied to enter America, she was denied entrance. The State Department would not say why, only that it had proof that she was engaged in questionable activity, probably of the Communist sort. On the floor of the Senate on February 27, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, of Montana, a left-wing, pro-labor Democrat, was furious about Károlyi’s being denied entrance to the States. Wheeler wanted to give the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the secret report of detectives who shadowed the count and his wife. Wheeler said that the report was made by the Julius Kron Detective Agency of New York City.

  Jacob Novitsky would return to the national spotlight during the investigation of the missing Lindbergh baby in 1932. Novitsky was suspected of using his skills at forgery to extort thousands from the Lindberghs, much of it never recovered.

  Julius J. Kron was admitted to the Joint Disease Hospital in Manhattan on November 16, 1934. He suffered from inflammation of the gall bladder. During an operation to remove it on November 24, 1934, he died on the table. He was forty-nine years old. On his death certificate, his occupation read “Detective.”

  He was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, the following day. His death certificate read that he was married to Estelle Kron, who claimed his body. Estelle and their daughters lived in Manhattan at 231 East Eighty-sixth Street. At the same time, Kron had a residence in Brooklyn with a woman named Claire Schwartz, who was first listed in census records as his housekeeper and then later as his wife. They had a son, George, who was sixteen in 1930. Kron’s daughters with Estelle were Sylvia, Lilian, and his eldest girl, named Ruth.

  FRANK McGEE

  Detective Sergeant Frank McGee retired in September 1919 after serving, according to the Evening World, “twenty-six years without a blemish on his record.” He was, however, “hot under the collar” because he was somehow reduced from the first grade to the second grade with a salary reduction of $2,450 to $1,950 a year. McGee’s New York Times obituary said that he couldn’t devote more time to searching for Ruth because his primary secret assignment was to hunt down German spies. He had a wife, Minnie, and a son, Harold, who was a member of the New York Police Department’s homicide squad.

  MAYOR MITCHEL

  The New York City mayor John Purroy Mitchel, after losing a patriotic, anti-immigrant bid for reelection in 1917 to a farmer turned train conductor (and Tammany man) named John F. Hylan, joined the fledgling air service with hopes of flying in the war. On July 6, 1918, eight months after losing his bid for reelection, Mitchel was flying when his plane turned and went into a steep dive. Mitchel, who had failed to fasten his seat belt, was dislodged from his plane and fell to his death in a Louisiana swamp. Mitchel Air Force Base on Long Island is named for him.

  J. J. LYNCH

  J. J. Lynch left the city controller’s office in 1921 to run in the mayoral primary, but lost. A few years before that, his former partner, Thomas J. Morris—now his bitter enemy because of business failings—lay critically ill in his home. Without saying a word, Lynch walked to the home of his old friend, lay down beside him, and gave him the full blood transfusion that saved his life. They never spoke again. Lynch died, leaving a wife and four children, on November 24, 1931, Thanksgiving, at age sixty.

  LeROY PERCY

  Percy was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate to fill a vacancy and served from 1910 to 1913, before being defeated by James K. Vardaman, who ran on a platform whose major plank was white supremacy. On March 1, 1922, Percy stomped through the streets of his beloved Greenville and straight into a rally of the Ku Klux Klan that was denouncing Jews, blacks, and Catholics. Percy stood in the crowd and heard Klan leader Joseph Camp’s speech. Percy ran up to the podium and dismantled ev
ery point of Camp’s speech to booming applause. “Let this Klan go somewhere else!” Percy bellowed. They left Washington County soon after. Senator Percy died in Greenville, Mississippi, of a heart attack on December 24, 1929. His place of burial is marked by an iron knight holding a great sword.

  CHARLES STIELOW

  After Charlie Stielow was finally released, he had another son, Edward, named after his father. Charlie died on August 9, 1942, in Orleans County, New York. He was eighty-four. His daughter Ethel, who wrote the letter that may have saved him, lived until 1987, also to the age eighty-four.

  THE BLACK HAND

  Once they were captured, Black Hand leaders Morello and Lupo were both sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor in Atlanta. After both had their sentences inexplicably shortened (possibly due to prosecutorial deals), they returned to the streets. Morello was caught again, sent to prison, and, when he got out, was killed by a rival gangster while filing paperwork in 1930. Lupo was stripped of his criminal power and ran a small lottery in Brooklyn. When he died in 1947, very few people knew his name. He was buried in Calvary Cemetery, near Joe Petrosino.

  ARTHUR WOODS

  Woods became a full colonel in the army and served as assistant director of military aeronautics. In 1920, he was awarded medals from three different countries: the Distinguished Service Medal, the British Order of St. Michael and Saint George C.M.G., and the French Chevalier of the Legion of Honor (France). At the end of the war, he worked under Secretary of War Newton D. Baker to help returning servicemen adjust to home life. He restored historic Williamsburg with John D. Rockefeller and was one of the first to work on national economic programs to help combat the early days of the Great Depression. He died on May 12, 1942, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

  JOHN LAGARENNE