The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  In the center of the apartment door was a brass nameplate:

  AUGUSTA NACK

  LICENSED MIDWIFE

  That was rich: New York didn’t license midwives.

  He knocked and heard a faint commotion inside; the door opened to reveal the midwife herself, a dark-haired woman in her late thirties with a curiously sensual presence and the glow of an afternoon of exertions. Ned went into his spiel—wondrously soft, satisfaction guaranteed!—but she didn’t wait to hear out his sales pitch.

  “Give me the soap now,” she demanded.

  Well, it’s a funny thing, Brown said—turned out he had used up all his cakes. But for her he did have two left, because he did need a testimonial for their next ad … “If you could give the soap a trial now, while I wait,” he added, “I’d be glad to let you have one.”

  She regarded the bars; their fragrance brought release from the disorder of the apartment around her, which appeared to be halfway packed for a move; rugs lay rolled up on the floor.

  “All right.” She motioned him over to a black leather chair. “Give me the soap.”

  As Ned heard the water running in the next room, he continued his sales patter—“Let your hands soak in it! You will feel each finger separately caressed …”—and looked hungrily around the room. An object, any incriminating object, anything to set up as a chalk engraving and run in the next edition of the World. On a small side table, he spotted it: a portrait of a muscular beau, blond with a turned-up mustache. He quickly snatched the photo and thrust it into his jacket just before she reentered the room.

  She liked the soap, she said, but she didn’t want to be quoted for his ad.

  Quite all right, quite all—

  “Now you give me the other soap also,” she demanded. “Here is a dime.”

  She hadn’t noticed anything missing.

  It was, perhaps, the sweetest single coin he had ever earned. He pocketed the dime, passed an angry-looking fellow on his way back downstairs—not the man in the picture—and noted the address: 439 Ninth Avenue.

  “IT WAS A GOOD DAY’S WORK, kiddo,” Roeder admitted when young Ned returned to the World Building. “Thanks.”

  He’d gotten his first big scoop.

  As he made his way to the El station that Tuesday evening, bound for home in Flatbush and a well-earned rest, the streets around Ned were strangely dotted with blotches of red—hundreds of them, thousands of them. It was the new issue of the Evening Journal. THE REAL CLEW TO THE MURDER MYSTERY, the front page proclaimed. “Facsimile in Colors of the Oilcloth Which Will Aid in Getting the $1,000 REWARD.”

  It was stunning—not the clue, but the printing. Hearst had outdone himself again: For the first time ever, color was being used on a breaking news story.

  And yet everything else about the competition revealed them as safely clueless. Papers still fixated on Max Weineke, noting that his wife had insurance on him, and that she was a bad mother to boot: “I learned from some neighbors,” a Telegram reporter huffed, “that Mrs. Weineke had gone out and left her babies alone many times.” Rather inconveniently, though, a slender Times reporter attempted to try on one of Max’s suits and couldn’t struggle into it, so it certainly wouldn’t fit the body in the morgue.

  Ah, the Times theorized, that’s because the secret of the crime was that two escapees from the state lunatic asylum had turned on each other—that “Mutilation Maniac” Olaf Weir had murdered his fellow maniac William O’Neill. Weir had been a carpenter with a suspicious talent for sawing. It was a fine theory, save for one problem: O’Neill’s family didn’t recall him having any markings on his chest or fingers.

  As for the police, an afternoon’s rummaging uptown in butchers’ basements and along roadsides had netted but a single find. An abandoned bag—without, alas, a head inside—was scooped up, emptied out for clues, and proclaimed THE DEAD MAN’S VALISE in the newspapers. The Evening Journal lavished a dozen illustrations on its mysterious contents: writing slates, clothes, a thimbleful of tacks, a rolled-up newspaper. All terribly interesting, but none of it was Guldensuppe. The closest anyone had gotten was a chance comment to the Journal by William Pinkerton, musing that the use of dismemberment hinted at the killer’s nationality: “The German seems to regard that as the best means of disposing of a body.” If that was the best they could do, then Ned felt reassured; his find on Ninth Avenue belonged to just him and tomorrow’s World.

  THE COMPETITION’S COLOR PAGE was no gimmick at all.

  Like Detective Carey, the head of Hearst’s Murder Squad thought the oilcloth really was the clue to the mystery. “The solution of the whole matter hangs upon the oilcloth,” the paper declared. Innumerable New Yorkers might lay claim to the body—and without a head, who was to disprove them?—but only one or two could claim that oilcloth. The body was one of two million New Yorkers, part of a constant and fluid population; the oilcloth was tangible, unequivocal, traceable: two sheets from just 6,000 yards manufactured upstate by A. F. Buchanan & Sons between June and December 1896. George Arnold knew Detective Carey had covered Manhattan and Brooklyn but hadn’t made it to Queens or Long Island yet. So Journal men had swamped Newspaper Row saloons, hiring unemployed reporters on the spot as day labor, throwing thirty men into tracking the oilcloth. Thirty reporters—now armed with three hundred thousand color copies of the oilcloth.

  They flooded across the boroughs as Ned Brown took his train home in innocent contentment. And before the sun set, a Journal team at the dry-goods store of one Max Riger had found an oilcloth purchase of Diamond B-3220. The name in the customer-accounts book pointed to just one address.

  439 Ninth Avenue.

  II.

  THE SUSPECTS

  (photo credit p2.1)

  6.

  THE BAKER IN HELL’S KITCHEN

  BY LATE MORNING Ninth Avenue was already getting hot and dusty, the first grim signs of another heat wave. A wagon from the Astoria Model Bakery threaded through the ice deliveries and brewers’ trucks, its horses clip-clopping along the daily rounds to grocers with graham loaves, doughnuts, and raisin bread. The driver was an unshaven and tough-looking fellow, with a flat cap yanked low on his head, sweating as he guided his wagon team around a busy streetcar line and past the drunks staggering out of saloons. He was in the worst stretch of Hell’s Kitchen, a couple of blocks from the hideout of gangster Mallet Murphy—so named after his favorite implement for braining victims. When two men clambered aboard at the corner of Fortieth and Ninth, Herman Nack knew it wasn’t to buy pumpernickel.

  One of them pulled himself up to the driver’s seat. “Mr. Nack?” he inquired.

  “What do you want?” the driver replied brusquely.

  “Captain O’Brien wants to see you.”

  Nack gave him a violent shove, sending the man sprawling off the running board, then took off down Ninth Avenue. The loaded bakery wagon swerved wildly onto Thirty-Ninth, and then onto Tenth Avenue, loaf trays clattering as the driver looked back and swore. The two men were in hot pursuit on bicycles.

  Stop! Stop! they demanded.

  The mad trio flew past tenements and ash barrels, past the Salvation Army crowds on Thirty-Sixth Street, and straight toward the Garfield Drug Company on Thirty-Fourth, where regulars were already congregating for sodas to escape the heat. A patrol cop by the drugstore took chase after them, and in another block one of the pursuing cyclists leapt aboard.

  You’re under …

  Nack slashed him with his horse whip, and the second cyclist vaulted on, trying to wrest control of the vehicle.

  … arrest.

  The cop came crashing in from the other side of the carriage, and the delivery driver roared and struggled desperately until the three men forced him down onto the ground. There the patrolman made his collar—not of carriage-jackers Oscar Piper and Walter McDevitt, who were Hearst reporters attempting a citizen’s arrest—but of delivery driver Herman Nack, on suspicion of murder.

  HE TRIED ESCAPING twice during the
five-block ride to the precinct house.

  “I have absolutely no idea why I have been arrested!” the driver yelled from the back of his own bakery carriage.

  Walt and Oscar thought otherwise, and the officer wasn’t buying it either. The night before, nine coworkers from the Murray Hill Baths—some brought on the sly by the World, the rest sneaked in equally secretively by the Journal—had identified the body as William Guldensuppe’s. Why, all Nack had to do was look at one of that morning’s papers: VICTIM THOUGHT TO BE THEODORE CYKLAM, declared the World.

  Well, perhaps not at that paper.

  Ned Brown’s breakthrough piece for the World had been elbowed aside by Pulitzer’s ace reporter Ike White, a man famous for once identifying a suicide bomber by a single charred button off the man’s suit. Ike’s pet theory this time centered on cabinetmaker Theodore Cyklam; he’d been missing from his job in Long Island since the previous Thursday. Cyklam owned a valise like the one found in the woods the day before, and the contents checked out. He’d owned two writing slates for charting shifts at his factory, and the can of tacks was common to cabinetmakers. And the injured index finger? A banged nail holder, the universal ailment of woodworkers. What was more, Ike tracked down one Diamond B-3220 oilcloth to a Mr. Cunningham, a peddler who also sold the same kind of cord used to tie the parcels. He worked a circuit near Cyklam—and, the World noted darkly, lived just a block from where little Susie Martin’s body had been found three years earlier.

  It was a splendid theory; everything fit perfectly. Except … except that it had no motive. And no witness. And no crime scene. And no time line to put Cunningham and Cyklam in the exact right place at the right time. Ike’s story was beautiful—and useless.

  Ned Brown’s big scoop had been shoved into just a couple of inches of space at the bottom of page 2 under the deeply unremarkable headline ANOTHER IDENTIFICATION. Another indeed; in fact, there had already been a Herald reporter on this exact story. It was not unknown for reporters to tail detectives, for detectives to tail reporters, and for competing reporters and detectives alike to tail one another—anything for a good lead.

  But this was different. The Herald, it seemed, had boozily stumbled into the Guldensuppe story all on its own. Several Murray Hill Baths coworkers had been drinking after work at a Third Avenue saloon, also idly wondering whether Willie Guldensuppe might be the guy in the morgue. They were overheard by reporter Joe Gavan, who dutifully reported the theory to the police, and in that morning’s Herald: “Suspicion pointed to a jealous husband as the instigator of the crime. It was said that the man was a shampooer in an uptown Turkish bath.… This man, it is said, had been living with a baker’s wife.” But Gavan couldn’t identify any of them; police detectives had immediately demanded secrecy to pursue the lead.

  The Journal happily stole their thunder.

  Incredibly, within hours three newspapers had all independently converged on the same victim. But Hearst alone made a personal visit to the Murray Hill Baths, and Hearst alone commanded a Murder Squad to trail Herman Nack’s morning delivery route. The World and the Herald had bobbled and dropped the lead of the year. Not only had Hearst’s Journal nabbed the story, they’d nabbed the man.

  THE DRIVER REMAINED ADAMANT. What did they want with him? He was just an honest immigrant delivering bread.

  Nack was booked at the Twentieth Precinct station house and then quickly sent downtown with his Journal entourage to a building that was, as one police commissioner mused, “that antique and shabby palace, that sepulcher of reputations, that tomb of character, that morgue of political ambition, that cavern of intrigue and dissimulation—the Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street.”

  The Journal men had to be discreet going inside. The headquarters rose up four stories in a lopsided and grimy old marble hulk from Little Italy’s labyrinth of cobbled alleys, tenements, and street vendors, and it was under constant watch by the competition. The World kept an apartment across the street, where reporters and photographers played cards to pass the hours between cases. One World reporter was always posted to the window to watch for colorfully agitated incoming suspects—or, better still, even more colorfully agitated police commissioners. That always meant a good story. Next door the Tribune kept an office that also spied through HQ’s windows; so did most of the big papers, for that matter.

  Their suspect was quietly hustled inside and through a lobby and dingy anterooms crowded with men in blue uniforms. Mulberry Street was a bewildering place, the nerve center for more than 100,000 arrests a year and uniformed officers issuing curt commands from the telegraph offices in the basement all the way up to the Lost Children Department on the top floors. The exterior of the building bristled with wires to every precinct house, firehouse, and hospital in the city; the interior was a constant flow of sour and sharp-looking hard cases—bunco men, badger schemers, wife stabbers. Shuffling newcomers were startled by the yells of “Mug him!” This, they would discover, meant they were to be photographed for the police files.

  But today was different. Nack was not bound for the usual fine-grinding wheels of mugs and glowering sergeants. He and the Journal reporters were led to the private office of Captain Stephen O’Brien, chief of the Detective Bureau.

  O’BRIEN SAT PATIENTLY, letting his man sweat. The chief had more than 250 detectives serving under him, but a case this infamous required intervention from the top. O’Brien was the successor to chop-busting Inspector Byrnes himself—as famed for his honesty as Byrnes was for graft, and newly appointed by Teddy Roosevelt just before that reform-minded police commissioner left for a promising political career. The move had been so sudden that the paperwork for his new rank hadn’t even gone through yet; he was a captain ordering other captains around, a downright comical situation to old-timers. And so the former inspector’s presence lingered; the very walls and floors of the office had been carefully muffled on the old man’s orders, the better to cuff prisoners around while interrogating with “the third degree”—a term the old inspector had coined himself. Captain O’Brien was more subtle than his predecessor but no less ruthless. He’d been on the force for more than twenty years, many of them spent breaking up waterfront gangs. A surly bakery driver was no match for what he’d dealt with.

  Wasn’t he married to Augusta Nack, of 439 Ninth Avenue?

  Yes, the driver admitted, he had been—or rather, he still was on paper. They never divorced, but they’d lived apart ever since the last of their three children had died two years ago. She lived on Ninth Avenue, but he lived over in Astoria now—and he hadn’t spoken to her since.

  Did he know a Mr. William Guldensuppe?

  Nack certainly did. Bill had been their boarder, back when he and Gussie lived together, just as things were falling apart, and she ran off with him. The Journal reporters wrote quickly and eagerly; a sketch artist busily drew Nack’s sullen face and bushy blond eyebrows. The real question now hung pregnant in the air.

  Where was he last Friday?

  “I went to work at two o’clock on Friday morning,” Nack said sullenly. “I got my load of bread and left the bakery at four o’clock. My work was finished by two thirty in the afternoon.”

  And then?

  “I don’t know where I went after that.”

  O’Brien was unimpressed.

  “I guess I was drunk,” Nack sneered—and his alibi for the next day was not much different.

  “I get up at about 1 or 2 and go over the ferry to the bakery. I hitch up and then start to deliver bread. I get through about 4 p.m. Then I go on a spree.”

  “A spree?”

  “Oh, I go to Strack’s and I bowl with the boys and drink beer. I get back to my room in Eighty-Second Street about 10 o’clock. I had a good load on when I went to bed Saturday night. Haw! Haw!”

  And the next day?

  “I was so drunk that I had to stay in bed nearly all of Sunday.”

  “When did you last see the murdered man?”

  “I don’t rem
ember exactly, but I guess it was three or four months ago. I saw him on the street at Ninth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth.”

  Captain O’Brien puzzled over the man before him. A brute, a drunk—yes, yes—a spurned husband with a perfect motive. But Nack didn’t give a damn about his ex-wife, and bachelorhood seemed to suit him just fine.

  “What the deuce do I care?” The suspect shrugged.

  And it checked out: Word came in that not only could Astoria Model Bakery’s owner vouch for Nack’s working and drinking schedule but that on the fateful Friday night the bakery foreman and Nack had actually led Strack’s saloon in belting out an entire set of drinking songs. He’s not it, O’Brien quietly decided. Herman Nack’s story just didn’t fit the case.

  But someone else’s did.

  AUGUSTA NACK WAS READY for the next steamer to Hamburg. She’d spent the previous afternoon with four hired men rolling rugs, packing furniture and bedclothes, and washing the curtains for the next tenant in her six-room flat over Werner’s Drug Store. This was the last day on her $20 monthly lease; she’d given notice to Mr. Werner two days earlier, and with all the quarreling that had gone on in the place, the short notice didn’t seem to trouble him. She’d even had to sleep in the apartment of her upstairs neighbor overnight, as nearly everything short of her portmanteau was packed.

  The visit from the detective now sitting on her sofa was most inconveniently timed.

  “Do you know William Guldensuppe?” he asked.

  Mrs. Nack looked keenly at Detective Krauch, and then at the chair—which should have been readied for storage but was instead seating another detective. Then she shifted her gaze over to the doorway, where yet another detective stood with his back to the door, keeping any movers from coming in and Mrs. Nack from going out.