The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  “I can’t go back on a friend,” he complained when he saw his wife.

  “Put on your coat and hat and come with me,” she said flatly. “I’ve told them everything.”

  Back downtown in Inspector O’Brien’s office, his story came tumbling out. Thorn had come out of hiding to confide in him. He wasn’t ratting out his friend—really, he wasn’t!—but his wife had made him come down here.

  When did you see him?

  Yesterday, Gotha explained. He’d been waiting for a customer in Martinelli’s when a man entered, sat in his chair, and uttered a single word: “Haircut.”

  Gotha looked up at the mirror and into the face of the country’s most wanted murderer. Martin had changed his appearance a bit—shed his usual brown derby for a white fedora and shaved off his luxuriant mustache—but there was no mistaking the eyes or the old fighting scar along his nose. The barber clipped in absolute silence, neither of them breathing a word to the other, not even daring to lock eyes in the mirror. After the last clippings were brushed away, his silent customer stood up and pressed some coins into Gotha’s hand. When Gotha opened his palm, it contained a note.

  Meet me at the corner.

  From there, the barber told Inspector O’Brien, they’d gone into the nearest saloon and talked for three hours—and Thorn spilled everything. At the end of it, they’d arranged to meet again.

  When?

  The barber sat under his wife’s gaze and looked down at his shoes, as he was prone to do. He didn’t want to turn his friend in; the man had trusted him.

  Well …

  IT WAS QUARTER PAST NINE that night, getting toward closing time, and the soda fountain at Spear’s Drug Store ruled the busy Harlem corner of 125th and Eighth Avenue. Theodore Spear himself was manning the till, and his clerk Maurice was working the fountain. Like any drugstore, the gleaming bottles and tins of nostrums along Mr. Spear’s shelves—Dr. Worme’s Gesundheit Bitters, Telephone Headache Tablets, Kinner’s Corn Cure—were window-dressing for the real profits, which lay in the slot telephone, in alcohol elixirs that skirted the liquor laws, in sen-sen gum to cover up that elixir breath, and in petty luxuries like Cosmo Buttermilk Soap and Tilford cigars. But on a sweaty July evening, the only part of the store that truly mattered was the soda fountain, with its gleaming chromium faucets and beautifully tinted bottles of orange phosphate, strawberry syrup, and violet presse. Harlem swells and their ladies fanned themselves at the counter seats, and Maurice watched the street scene outside.

  Everybody knew it was too hot to work that day; city after city on the East Coast was reporting relentless heat. Laborers in soiled overalls had been shiftlessly waiting around for hours, escaping the sun under store eaves, and now whiled away the gathering dusk in the light thrown out by the shop windows onto the busy street. A gentleman stylishly dressed for the evening walked down the sidewalk, ignoring the workmen, and exchanged greetings with a friend.

  “Let’s go take a drink,” his friend suggested, which was a fine idea indeed.

  The gentleman demurred. “No, I don’t want a drink. You go along by yourself.”

  What happened next came in a flash: The tall and lanky friend sank back into the gathering dusk, and a workman—a tough in a blue flannel shirt—seized the gentleman’s arm and shoved him into Spear’s drugstore.

  It’s a holdup, Maurice frantically signaled to Mr. Spear at the till.

  In a fluid motion, the thief yanked out the gentleman’s coat lining, gathered up its contents, pushed him down into a chair by the cigar counter, and withdrew his own weapon. A crowd of roughneck laborers came barreling in behind him. But rather than break up the robbery, they also seized the gentleman in a silent, desperate scuffle. Before Maurice and Mr. Spear knew it, the victim was pinned down, yet the drugstore till remained completely unmolested.

  Nothing was what it seemed; the workmen had pulled out revolvers and slapped a pair of handcuffs around the fellow’s wrists.

  “He’s shaved his mustache,” one of them muttered.

  “What’s your name?” demanded a gruff foreman framed by the dusk.

  “I am Martin Thorn,” the handcuffed gentleman announced defiantly to the astonished store patrons.

  The grizzled lurker in the doorway now also appeared transformed. The plain clothes of a slouch cap and dirty overalls no longer disguised a man that the startled druggist and his shop clerk knew from all the newspapers.

  “And I am Inspector O’Brien,” he replied.

  III.

  THE INDICTMENT

  (photo credit p3.1)

  11.

  A CASE OF LIFE AND DEATH

  MARTIN THORN KNEW it was O’Brien all along—why, from the moment he’d walked into Harlem.

  “I’ve thought so for five minutes,” he said coolly.

  The inspector was unimpressed. “Got anything else but your gun about you?”

  “I’ve got a knife.”

  Thorn helpfully reached for an inner pocket before a detective seized his cuffed hands.

  “Just keep it where it is,” snapped Inspector O’Brien.

  Along with the .32 revolver, a closer search of Thorn’s pockets netted the knife and $6. Still in their plain clothes, the “laborers”—top detectives O’Brien, McCauley, and Price, along with the five beefiest backup officers from the precinct—whisked their suspect onto the 125th and Eighth El platform for the next train downtown.

  Surrounded by police, Thorn sat stoically through more than a dozen stops on an elevated steam train that passed the second- and third-story apartments of Manhattan; he could glimpse the ordinary scenes of men and women settling in for the evening, washing dishes and hanging clothes for work. They reached Houston and Bowery just after ten p.m. As the El platform closest to HQ, the rowdy station was an honorary portal into the New York legal system. The lights of the Gaiety Theater and the towering Casperfeld & Cleveland jewelry billboard were among the last glimpses of everyday life a guilty man might ever have. Nightlife swirled below as newsboys clustered around the steel pillars of the station. AN ELECTRICAL EXECUTION, the Evening Post announced. It was not prescience, just the fate of a wife killer up in White Plains, but it abutted a front-pager of the day’s latest news on Mrs. Nack.

  A plainclothes scrum double-marched Thorn down Mulberry Street, so fast that the hindmost officer could barely keep pace. They hadn’t gone unnoticed. Someone—from Spear’s drugstore, or from an El platform on the way down—had called ahead to tip off the New York Herald to a big arrest; the Herald instantly relayed it to the round-the-clock watch post they kept across from the police HQ. A reporter and a sketch artist were waiting in the street to meet the grim-faced men.

  Who’d you get?

  Thorn, still unrecognizable in his new clothes and shaven face, was quickly hustled past them, through the heavy basement door and down a hallway. The reporter jumped up and shimmied his head into the transom, in time to see O’Brien and McCauley disappear with the prisoner up a stairway toward the inspector’s office.

  Who’d you get?

  But he already knew.

  “Pickpockets and petit larceny thieves are not hurried to Police headquarters at night, heavily shackled and guarded,” he noted dryly. There was only one man it could be, and the lights burning brightly through the night in Inspector O’Brien’s window were all the proof anyone needed.

  THORN STARED OUT into the night, his fingers smarting from where they’d been scraped by forensics. Professor Witthaus himself had come in to collect the samples from under his nails; even though nearly two weeks had passed since the murder, they weren’t taking any chance of losing evidence, and his scrapings were now en route to the Loomis Lab to be tested for blood or viscera. The rest of Thorn’s body had been scrupulously measured, too; the station used a Bertillon card system, where each new arrest was mugged for the camera and then a card was filled in with the painstaking caliper measurements of M. Alphonse Bertillon’s wondrous anthropometric system. Everything from the le
ngth of Thorn’s ears and cheekbones to the length from the elbow to the tip of the finger was noted. All that was missing were Thorn’s fingerprints: Bertillon did not approve of such dubious new notions. Just a few weeks earlier the royal governor in India had adopted a new system invented by one of his own administrators, one that annotated whorls and loops, but neither O’Brien nor anyone else in the United States was bothering with such exotic ideas.

  Instead, the inspector worked quietly at his desk, saying nothing for hours, content to let his suspect stew in uncertainty. The clock ticked past eleven, then past midnight; Thorn’s gaze fell upon the piles of letters on O’Brien’s table, all rifled from Gussie’s apartment. The useless tin heap of her washing boiler still lay in a corner of the room.

  So, O’Brien began: Why had he shaved his mustache off?

  Thorn glared back sullenly. He’d shaved it off the previous Wednesday—the same day, that is, that Gussie had been arrested—but he wouldn’t explain why. Asked to account for his movements, he gave a carefully rehearsed story.

  “I at present live in a furnished room at Number 235 East Twenty-Fifth Street. I have not seen William Guldensuppe since I was assaulted by him at the house of Mrs. Nack,” he claimed. “I have been meeting with her two or three times a week ever since, up until Tuesday night. Mrs. Nack spoke to me about leaving Guldensuppe, and buying me a barber shop in the country. She told me that Guldensuppe had been using her badly the last six months, and that Guldensuppe wanted her to open a disorderly house. She agreed to leave Guldensuppe and live with me.”

  They’d still been planning for their future together, Thorn said, when he last saw her on June 29—the night before her arrest.

  “We took an Eighth Avenue car at Forty-Third Street and went to Central Park,” he recalled. “We sat on a bench in the park until about eleven o’clock at night. I told her I had seen in the newspaper that part of a human body had been found in the river, and that it stated it was a part of Guldensuppe’s body. I told her how it was also mentioned in the newspapers that a part of the body found must have been boiled before being thrown in the river.”

  O’Brien eyed him intently.

  “She said,” Thorn continued, “she did not believe it was Guldensuppe’s body, because she did not believe Guldensuppe was dead. She told me that he had not been home since Friday morning, and that she did not know where he was. Mrs. Nack went home after we made an appointment to meet the next day—Wednesday—but I saw in the morning newspapers that detectives were at Mrs. Nack’s house, and I did not go there.”

  The inspector allowed one of his long, disconcerting silences to fill the room. But he was quietly pleased by this alibi. The times were wrong: They couldn’t have discussed Guldensuppe’s identification on the park bench that evening, because that revelation hadn’t hit the streets until the following morning. And he had an even more unpleasant surprise for his suspect.

  “Do you deny,” he pressed, “that you were at Frey’s saloon on East Thirty-Fourth Street on Tuesday morning, Tuesday afternoon, and Tuesday night playing cards with ‘Peanuts’ and Federer?”

  “I don’t exactly deny it.”

  “Do you remember being in Frey’s saloon on Tuesday, June 29, when Federer was reading a newspaper in regard to the reward of one thousand dollars, and how Federer said to you, ‘I guess that’s you, barber,’ and you said, ‘Yes, that’s right’?”

  Thorn could see the darkened city out O’Brien’s window; everyone was asleep but them.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Do you remember being in the saloon on Tuesday, June 29, and going out and coming back with a woman, and having one glass of beer each in this saloon?”

  “Yes.”

  O’Brien paused, readying his knockout.

  “Do you remember being in Frey’s saloon on the night of Tuesday, June 29, and telling Federer that you were going to meet a woman, and it was a case of life and death, and exhibiting to them a pistol?”

  “I cannot say that I remember that,” Thorn answered warily. “I had been drinking a good deal that day.”

  “Do you remember going back to Frey’s saloon about eleven o’clock that same night, and playing pinochle with Federer and Gordon until nearly one o’clock in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember saying to them that by tomorrow night at this time you would be on the ocean?”

  Thorn stared blankly at him. “I do not remember saying that.”

  He didn’t need to; plenty of others at the saloon did.

  The hours crawled onward until four in the morning, when O’Brien finally let his prisoner collapse onto a cot in his jail cell. Thorn had scarcely fallen asleep before he was awoken again, first to stand before a magistrate, then to drag himself back into O’Brien’s office. The inspector was waiting for him, seemingly unaffected by the early hour, and invigorated by the fine day the Detective Bureau was having. And he wasn’t alone.

  That’s him, said Mrs. Hafftner, looking the unshaven prisoner up and down. That’s who rented the house.

  Thorn kept a stony silence as another man was brought in.

  That’s him, said the undertaker’s assistant. That’s who picked up the surrey.

  After they were led out, O’Brien turned his searching gaze back to Thorn. “Looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?” the inspector remarked.

  Martin Thorn fanned himself with his fedora, considering the situation.

  “I don’t fear death,” he replied evenly.

  “HIT HIM!” they roared down the cell block.

  Thorn grabbed the bars of his jail cell and looked down the station’s hallway; a man was being dragged in heavy shackles, shoved and smacked by jeering detectives.

  It was John Gotha.

  “I won’t go in there!” he yelled. He looked exhausted and hollowed out. “I have done nothing, and you have no right to lock me up!”

  “Go on, go on!” a detective yelled. “Hit him with your club!”

  The mêlée continued down the hallway, and Thorn stared as his friend scuffled with the officers; he could hear yelling and the sounds of a solid police beating all the way into the next block of cells, until they finally disappeared.

  The officers slung Gotha into an empty jail cell with a couple of final yells and dramatic groans, then waited a moment. And then, through Gotha’s wan countenance, there flickered a sunny expression.

  Thanks.

  The detectives rolled their eyes. The whole ruse had been at Gotha’s insistence; the lanky barber was still bitterly disappointed that he hadn’t been arrested in Harlem alongside Thorn. That was part of the deal, he insisted. They’d been too busy with Thorn and had left Gotha there feeling like a fool. So now they were giving him the sham arrest that he’d wanted.

  If they knew Thorn like he did, Gotha explained, they’d understand covering up his role as an informant. Gotha worried that their suspect could slip free or get turned loose, and he’d known Thorn too long to believe that any betrayal would go unpunished.

  “I first met Thorn nine years ago,” he recalled. “We were introduced in a saloon, where we played cards together.”

  They were a curious pair at the card table. Gotha was unmotivated and gawky, so tall that colleagues nicknamed him “Legs,” and so unsuccessful in his barbershop trade that his wife had resorted to living in her parents’ basement. Thorn was handsome and talented, and he always seemed lucky with women and money. Gotha couldn’t help a sneaking admiration of his friend’s life. But Thorn had a fierce temper when a card game didn’t go his way, and Gotha was under no illusions about the murder charges against his old pinochle partner. Thorn, he admitted, “would be capable of such an act.”

  For now, his friend would stay in the dark about his betrayal; but as Gotha walked free from his untouched jail cell, he could no longer hide from the reporters.

  ——

  JEFFERSON MARKET COURTHOUSE was less a municipal building than a misplaced Gothic castle, its band
s of red and tan brick spiraling over the Sixth Avenue El and up into a great crenellated clock tower; far below, a heavy iron door swung open day and night to admit a ceaseless rabble that was, as one reporter put it, “old—prematurely old—and young—pitifully young.” That Friday morning in a grand-jury hearing, the assistant district attorney led a procession of witnesses—Mrs. Riger, Frank Gartner, and a nephew of Guldensuppe’s—through their statements, but then stopped short at John Gotha.

  The terrible secrets entrusted to the man had kept him awake and unable to eat for days; reporters and jurors craned to watch the shaken man led to the stand. Martin Thorn was not present for this indictment, but that was of little comfort; John Gotha was clearly a haunted creature.

  “He had the look of a man going to the electric chair,” a Herald reporter marveled.

  Laboring to keep his composure, the hapless barber spoke of drinking with Martin Thorn just three days earlier. “I met him at a saloon between 128th and 129th Streets, on the west side of Eighth Avenue. We had a couple drinks, and I said ‘You made a botch job of that fellow.’ ”

  Thorn had stared at him in terrible silence for a full minute.

  “I know it,” he finally said. “Have you read the newspapers? It is all the woman’s fault.”

  Gotha struggled as he recalled his friend’s next words. “I looked at him, and he said ‘You are the only friend I’ve got, and I’ll tell you all about it. I expect you to keep a closed mouth.’ ”

  “Well, then,” Gotha stammered, “he spoke about Guldensuppe, and said they wanted to get rid of him. He said: ‘We talked the matter over, and decided to kill him. We looked about and rented the house at Woodside. We thought it was far enough out of the way and decided to do the thing on Friday. She bought the oilcloth at that place in Astoria, and bought the cheesecloth at Ehrich’s.’ ”