American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  Emory had always had a crush on Wesley, who reminded him of the cleft-chinned movie actor Bryant Washburn.

  “I agree with Mr. Cates and what he said about upholding the law,” Emory began, nervous but determined to put his point across. “And my initial vote will reflect that fact. But should I then find myself on the wrong side of the sentiment in this room, I promise not to be an obstinate holdout. You all seem good and decent fellows and will not, I trust, hold this principled stand against me.”

  “On the contrary!” exclaimed the normally soft-spoken chemist Fogleman. “We commend your stand. At least I do.”

  “My only wish,” contributed Hampton Womack, a barber at the National Midway Shaving Parlor, “is that I shouldn’t miss the vaudeville show at the Grand Opera tonight. I’m taking my mother for her birthday and they’re box seats. See?”

  Hampton had taken the tickets from his wallet. In the process of drawing them out, a key was disturbed. It dropped upon the table with a little clink.

  Emory knew this key. He had one just like it. Hampton and Emory exchanged a look. But Emory wasn’t the only man in the room scrutinizing Hampton and his key.

  A long moment passed, a moment that would ultimately determine whether or not Mrs. Wimbish had the right to punish her husband and his secret lover for what she discovered them doing on that day—for what they had, no doubt, been doing for quite a number of days or weeks or even months. Not in a guest room on the fifth floor of the O. Henry Hotel but in the Wimbishes’ own colonial revival in the still fashionable Gilded Era neighborhood of Fisher Park. There was wrong there, one would suppose—adultery is always wrong, is it not? But did the act warrant the kind of visceral revulsion that had induced legislators the country over to exact such sharp penalties of moral retribution? Did it warrant such repugnance and distaste among the “upstanding” citizens of Greensboro that, even decades later, homosexual men of that town would find themselves rounded up and sentenced to highway gangs in what became infamously known as “The Gay Scare of 1957”?

  Earl Stutts was the second man to lay his key on the table, and he placed it there deliberately. Earl was a butcher at Nicholson Meat Market. Like the other key, his was imprinted with the number “505.” It had also been painted yellow. The O. Henry Hotel painted all of its keys—a different color for each floor. “To help guests remember what floor they’re on,” was the manager’s explanation. As if simply having the room number on the key wasn’t enough.

  Hampton slid his key across the table to keep company with Earl’s. The two keys were quickly joined by a third key—this one from Captain (retired) David Bishop, a recruiter for the U.S. Navy. If the other men in the room hadn’t been making such concerted efforts to keep their faces solemn and unrevealing there might have been a few private smiles, given that some of the men were quite familiar with the legendary penchants of certain of Uncle Sam’s sailors.

  In quick succession, identical keys were produced by Bob Weaver, then Dean Tuttle, then Jesse Cates, then Horace Fogleman. Emory hesitated, waiting for just the right moment to unite with his brothers in their mutual admission. That time came after Wesley dropped his own key upon the jumble. The two men smiled at one another and shrugged. To have worked in such close proximity and to have never known…

  To Emory, the world had suddenly become a very strange place. Strange and really quite fascinating.

  Eleven keys now taken from wallets and pulled from pockets and detached from key chains to be put upon the table, each bearing the room number 505. Eleven men now revealed to be members of the 505 club, Tracy Sprowl, its president and CEO, in absentia. The only man left in the room who had not joined his fellow jurors in this joint avowal of secret fraternity was the insurance salesman for the Gate City Life Insurance Company, Albert Sykes.

  Every eye was now on Sykes.

  “I don’t have a key like that, I’m afraid,” he finally said. “Nor have I any inclination to possess such a key. But I know what it all means. You see, gentlemen, I’m a good friend of Marcellus Teague, in whom Mrs. Wimbish deposited her nearly fatal bullet. Well, to be perfectly honest, we were once very much more than friends, if you understand my meaning. Marcellus knew, as did Mr. Wimbish, that should Mrs. Wimbish be acquitted, charges would in very strong likelihood be swiftly brought against my friend and his paramour Mr. Wimbish under the statute that our friend Shube here has just reminded us of. It was important to the two men that Mrs. Wimbish be found guilty so as to destroy her viability as witness in the other matter. And it was important to find the right men to do it—men who would not be put off by what Mrs. Wimbish saw.

  “No, I don’t have a key, gentleman, nor will I ever have need of one, since I anticipate no future need to break the heart vows that I have made to a gentleman with whom you are all quite familiar: Elliot Curry, the jury clerk for the Superior Court of Guilford County. Mr. Curry has put his job on the line by handpicking, with Mr. Sprowl’s assistance, the jury pool from which we were all selected. And if you will all be so good as to keep this rather large secret to yourselves so as to save his job and preserve his liberty—because he’d be certain of a conviction for the grave crime of clerical malfeasance—then Mr. Curry and Messrs. Wimbish and Teague and I will be forever in your debt. Now, Foreman Tuttle, shall we have that vote?”

  There was a vote. It was unanimous; Mrs. Wimbish would be required to pay for her crime of passion with her liberty. Subsequently, the keys were reclaimed, hands were shaken and cheeks kissed (and not just in the duple-Continental way).

  It wasn’t until the landmark Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 that sodomy laws were invalidated in the fourteen states that had not yet seen fit to overturn them on their own. One of those states was North Carolina.

  Emory Jones did not live to see that day. Nor did he ever pay another visit to Room 505 (though a good many of his fellow jurors kept up the practice for many years thereafter). He kept the key, though. He put it in the drawer with the clippings of all of his favorite magazine advertisements. Many of the handsome male models in the ads were smiling, rident with celebratory youth. Now and then, Emory Jones found himself smiling, too, knowing that he wasn’t alone—that there were others quite like him.

  Like a certain good-looking divorced coworker named Wesley Lowermilk, with whom Emory became—let us put it in the safe vernacular of the day—very good friends.

  1924

  DOUBLE FAULTED ILLINOIS AND D.C.

  One of the two teenagers was fourteen. The other was sixteen. One was the son of a millionaire Chicago financier; the other, the offspring of a sitting United States president. One died quickly, within a matter of minutes. The death of the other boy took eight days.

  Bobby Franks died on Wednesday, May 21, the victim of cold-blooded, premeditated murder. Calvin Coolidge Jr. died less that seven weeks later on Monday, July 7, the victim of an era that had yet to experience the medical miracle of antibiotics.

  The deaths of both of these young men came, indirectly, from a love of tennis.

  “Bobby, you want a ride home?” Dickie Loeb stuck his head out of the passenger-side backseat window of the blue Willys-Knight touring car he and his friend Babe Leopold had just rented. Babe owned a Willys-Knight touring car himself, but both nineteen-year-old Babe and eighteen-year-old Dickie thought it would be better to rent a car for what it was they needed to do. So Babe picked the car he liked best: one exactly like his own.

  “Cal. Hurry up. It’s getting late. Let’s play.”

  “Have you seen my socks?”

  “What am I? Your valet? Let’s skidoo.”

  “I’ll play without my socks.”

  “Whatever suits you, Cal. Get your racket. Or have you lost that, too?”

  The younger of the two Coolidge boys found his racket and raced his brother out to the White House tennis court.

  “I’d just as soon walk, Dickie.”

  “Come on, Bobby. Get in. I wanna ask you about that tennis racket you were
using at our court last week. I was thinking about getting one just like it for Tommy.”

  Tommy was Dickie’s brother and one of Bobby’s best friends. Bobby and Tommy both playing with the same kind of racket: that sounded to Bobby like a swell idea.

  Babe held the door open for Bobby to climb into the front seat. Bobby didn’t know Babe. Dickie introduced them.

  “I have to stop playing, John. I’ve got a blister.”

  Calvin sat down on the court and pulled off his shoe. The big toe on the right foot was inflamed and tender to the touch. He put the shoe back on. He thought no more about it as he hobbled inside. He had other things to do, other things to think about. For a sixteen-year-old, life is a busy, crowded place.

  The idea was to hit Bobby in the head with a chisel and knock him out. Babe and Dickie had seen it done this way in the movies. Then once the boy was unconscious, they’d take him to a place Dickie had come across during one of his bird-watching rambles. There was an inconspicuous culvert-drain pipe there. There the two teenagers would strangle the unconscious boy, each pulling on different ends of the rope to share in the responsibility for the crime. Once the killing was finished, Babe and Dickie would stuff Bobby’s body into the pipe.

  Unfortunately, the first blow didn’t quite do the trick. The result was nothing like what generally happened when Charlie Chaplin did it to Mack Swain in the movies.

  “What’s wrong, Calvin? Why are you limping?” The President of the United States set his paperwork aside and motioned the younger of his two teenage sons into his office.

  “I’ve got a blister. I think it’s gotten infected.”

  “Let me have a look at it.”

  President Calvin Coolidge examined his son’s foot. It was in bad shape; a serious blood infection had set in.

  “Stay here. I want to get Dr. Boone’s opinion.”

  Dickie Loeb struck Bobby again, and then again, holding his hand firmly over the boy’s mouth to muffle his screams. Babe Leopold cringed. Dickie was putting strong force behind each of the blows, but Bobby was still conscious, still struggling for his life. “This is terrible,” Babe muttered. Then the words came with more volume, with even more horror: “Oh, Dickie! Oh, Dickie, this is terrible!”

  Blood flowed freely from the growing wound on Bobby’s head, the spot where Dickie was concentrating his assault. The back of the front seat was now bathed in blood.

  Finally, Bobby stopped squirming. He stopped screaming. He began to moan. Bobby Franks was, at long last, losing consciousness. With Babe pushing and Dickie tugging, the boy was brought over the seat and into the back of the car. Dickie stuffed a wad of cloth into Bobby’s mouth.

  Bobby, as luck would have it, was now bleeding all over the rental car.

  Calvin was delirious with fever. He imagined that he was a young boy again. He was leading his toy soldiers into battle. Dr. Boone, now attending the teenager at Walter Reed Hospital, watched as Calvin played out his fevered fantasy with weakened hands. His body was tense, battle-ready. And then Calvin Coolidge Jr. relaxed.

  “We surrender,” he said in a hollow whisper.

  “No, Calvin,” replied the doctor. “Never surrender.”

  But the second son of the president wasn’t listening. He had lapsed into a coma.

  Dickie Loeb wrapped the boy—who had been his young friend, his neighbor, his second cousin, his tennis companion, and was now his murder victim—in a blanket and put him on the floor.

  “Is he dead?” asked Babe.

  Dickie looked up at his partner-in-crime. Babe’s face wasn’t handsome like Dickie’s. The eyes were like a lemur’s, and the lips too fat for the size of his mouth. Babe didn’t have Dickie’s personality, either. Dickie made friends with everyone. He had charm. It masked his sociopathy.

  Was the deed done? Was that thing which the two had planned to do—Babe and his friend, his lover, his idol, Dick Loeb—was it finished at last?

  The sun was bright on this warm spring afternoon in Chicago. There was approval in the air. Had they actually pulled it off: the perfect murder? An “inferior” life brought to an end simply because they—two Nietzschean Übermenschen—wished it so?

  “Let’s see if he’s still breathing,” said Dickie, with casual, biology-lab curiosity.

  At 10:00 in the evening, the other attending physician at Walter Reed, Dr. John Kolmer, prepared the patient’s father for the inevitable: the second son of Calvin Coolidge, thirtieth president of the United States, was slipping away. The president’s son was dying from an infected blister he had acquired while playing tennis on the White House tennis court with his brother.

  Racked with grief, giving voice to a species of parental anguish that defied his famously solemn, quietly wry character, Coolidge jumped from his chair and took his dying sixteen-year-old child into his trembling arms. Through a voice raw with pain and emotion, Calvin Coolidge invoked his religious faith in his address to his son. He cried, “I will soon join you in the Great Beyond. Tell Grandmother.” He placed into his son’s hand a medallion that had belonged to his mother—a woman who had succumbed to tuberculosis when the president was only twelve.

  Babe and Dickie drove the rented, blood-drenched car around until night fell. While they waited for the imminent cover of darkness, they stopped to have hot dogs and root beers with the lifeless body of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks lying cocooned on the floor of the car. Babe tried to get a better hold on his emotions. Dickie made jokes.

  Richard Loeb was cool. He was calm and collected. He and his friend Nathan Leopold had just committed the perfect crime, notwithstanding all the blood that they would have to figure some way to get rid of before they returned the vehicle to the rental agency. (Who knew that there would be so much blood?)

  And notwithstanding the fact that Babe’s eyeglasses (there were only two others sold in the Chicago area that had the same hinge) had fallen from his coat not far from the remote culvert where they deposited the naked, hydrochloric-acid-doused body of their young victim. It would be a matter of only a few hours before the body would be found—and the eyeglasses as well.

  Calvin Coolidge Jr.’s body was brought back to the White House. It lay in state in the East Room, attended by an honor guard. When the wake was over, the boy’s father went downstairs, wearing his dressing gown. He stood next to his dead boy for a long time, smoothing down his hair with a tender hand. He was later to say that the power and glory of the presidency died with his son.

  It was most difficult, from that point forward, to get himself even to look at it—the tennis court.

  The Loebs had a tennis court, as well, and this is where Bobby Franks had come to play. There were no courts at the prison in which Richard “Dickie” Loeb spent the remaining eleven and a half years of his life (his sentence of life imprisonment made possible by what was generally considered the finest trial speech of Clarence Darrow’s long and illustrious legal career.) On January 28, 1936, Dickie Loeb died in the Stateville Penitentiary of wounds incurred when he was attacked in the shower by a razor-blade-wielding fellow prisoner. Nathan “Babe” Leopold, the model prisoner, lived to see his freedom. He was released from prison in 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico, married a widowed florist, and became a lab and X-ray assistant.

  His remaining years clouded by depression, “Silent Cal” Coolidge suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of sixty on January 5, 1933, in his Northampton, Massachusetts, home. His surviving son, John, died on May 31, 2000, at the age of ninety-three, having outlived his younger brother by almost seventy-six years.

  It is not known if John ever picked up another racket.

  1925

  ACROPHILIC AND AGORAPHOBIC IN PENNSYLVANIA

  Tillman Hopper, the oldest of the three, was regarded as the “almost normal brother.” He left home at eighteen, lying about his age to get into the Great War, and enlisting, as luck would have it, literally one month before the signing of the Armistice. Mustered out with swift military expedience, he moved
to Scranton and took a job with the Scranton Button Company, first stamping out shellac buttons, and then coating Braille sheets with shellac to protect the pips from recklessly indifferent speed-readers. During this period, Tillman taught himself to read Braille and sat up late at night in the darkness of his boardinghouse lodgings laughing at jokes from a Braille humor magazine similar to Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. It was called, with journalistic brilliance, Captain Billy’s Biz Whang.

  In late July of this year, with the sudden emergence of the latest craze of this half-cocked decade, flagpole sitting, Tillman spent a delightful Sunday afternoon in neighboring Wilkes-Barre standing next to its downtown flagpole and conversing with “Shipwreck” Gail Hoyt, a young woman of about Tillman’s age from Galveston, Texas, who was perched upon the top of the pole. The two had a long and lively conversation that ended with a jesting proposal of marriage by Tillman and an equally fatuous riposte of feigned interest on the part of the impetuous daredevil flapper, Miss Hoyt.

  When ordered to come down from the flagpole later that evening by the city fathers due to the fact that William Jennings Bryan had just passed away and an American flag would have to be flown at half-mast upon it to respect his passing—this coupled with the fact that Shipwreck Gail was wearing an ape suit to commemorate with devil-may-care frivolity the recent verdict rendered in the Scopes “Monkey” trial (which had been Bryan’s unintentionally harlequin courtroom valediction)—Gail shimmied monkey-style down the pole and joined Tillman for a late dinner in Scranton.

  Gail was famished; there hadn’t been any food up on that flagpole.

  Over hamburgers and Coca-Colas, the two discussed other stunts for which Gail had become semi-famous, including dancing the Charleston on the wing of an airborne Curtiss Jenny biplane and playing tennis with famed wing walker Lillian Boyer, also while buzzing the clouds.