by Peter Quinn
For the next five days she heard nothing. Finally, she began throwing her clothes into a suitcase. “Wracked by bewilderment and fear, my hands shaking as though with palsy, I fixed upon a course of action: I would walk to town and catch the next train to New York.” Just then, there was a knock at the door. The mailman had a special delivery letter for her. It was from Fred Kipps. “Seeing the stricken, fearful look upon my face, the mailman inquired if I was all right. I assured him I was, but my answer was belied by the trembling fingers with which I took hold of the letter and made a mangle of the envelope.
“‘Everything looks okay,’ Kipps wrote, ‘though I haven’t caught up with the Judge himself. The apartment is in order. I talked with the color [sic] girl who does the cleaning and she tells me she done the dusting that you asked. Last time was two weeks ago. She seen nothing unusal [sic]. Me neither. Nobody seems worried about your husband of them I talked to. I haven’t seen him myself, but they says hes [sic] been seen around.’”
Them I talked to … they says … Kipps gave no names. But it wasn’t hard to imagine the mounting panic among the city’s political chieftains now that Joseph Force Crater, a sachem privy to the inner workings of their powwows and war councils, had left the wigwam. (Another editor’s note recorded that on August 21st, the day Kipps’s letter arrived at Lake Belvedere, Governor Roosevelt bowed to mounting political pressure and authorized a full-scale investigation of the magistrate’s court.) The alternatives weren’t pretty. Had Crater defected to the investigators moving in on the magistrate’s court, offering them an inside look at the Supreme Court as well? Or fearing exposure, made a run for it? Best case, he’d rented a professional party girl and was off playing pattycake (a possibility that grew more far-fetched with each passing day). What mattered to the politicos was heading off disaster before the papers sunk their scandal-mongering jaws into the story and used it to reinforce a frontal attack against the Tammany machine on their front pages.
Kipps came back to Lake Belvedere the day after his letter arrived. “Friends of the judge,” he reported, “advised against asking questions that might arouse the newspapers’ attention and hurt his chances in the upcoming election.” Leaving this bit of information unexplored (which friends?), she spent the next three days “in a state of deluded inertia, expecting my beloved would step through the door the next minute.”
The next person through the door was the postman, on August 25th, who informed her a caller identifying himself as a “colleague of Judge Crater” had telephoned the owner of the general store to request “a message be delivered to the judge directing him to contact Judge Carmen Traglia by noon at the latest.” Without waiting to summon Kipps and the car, Stell “practically ran all the way to the store.” Breathlessly, she called the number the owner gave her.
Judge Traglia, presiding justice of the First Department, answered. “In a cold, formal tone, he said he wished to speak with Joe. Before I had the chance to say more than that I was his wife and sick with worry about his whereabouts, he interrupted me. ‘Your husband, madam, assigned to preside in the calendar part, failed to appear this morning at the opening of the new term.’ As my anxieties of the last weeks began to pour out of me, he interrupted me again.”
Poor Stell. Nothing seemed to penetrate her twin defenses of willful ignorance and invincible innocence. She listened as Traglia ran through an obviously rehearsed script designed to establish: A) this was the first time he’d spoken to her; B) until this moment, he was unaware there was any possibility that Judge Crater would not appear for the opening of the term and C) “until informed otherwise,” he would assume Crater was attending to “private business perhaps related to the upcoming election.”
Dunne pictured Traglia in his chambers with a stenographer listening in to transcribe the call and Sylvester Berind coaching him with hand signals, a finger drawn across his throat to let him know it was time to thank Mrs. Crater for her call, instruct her to let him know as soon as she heard from her husband, and hang up before she could say another word. Job done: ass covered.
As much numbed as despairing after her short conversation with Traglia, Stell confessed “through the blur of the next several days the only comfort I found was in Fred Kipps’s flask.” On the morning of August 29th, twenty-three days after Joe failed to make good on his promised return, Stell roused herself “to do what, with the wisdom of hindsight, I should have done three weeks before.” She and Kipps left for New York in the late afternoon on “a journey through night and torrential rain that took me away from excruciating uncertainty toward a discovery I had dreaded and couldn’t face until now: my beloved might be the victim of foul play.”
Kipps drove nonstop, “face pressed close to the window as the wipers worked furiously to part the curtain of water, and I wept most of the way, crying out at one point, ‘Oh, Fred, if only those wipers could clear away my tears!’ Glancing at me with those hang-dog eyes of his, he said, ‘It’s a hard thing, Mrs. Crater, to know how much hurt a heart can feel, but for what’s it’s worth, just remember, you ain’t alone.’”
Once they arrived, Stell wrote, “I paused as I put the key in the lock of the apartment door, hoping I’d wake from a nightmare and find myself lying beside Joe in the bedroom of our Lake Belvedere cabin.” Instead, she found the apartment as she’d left it; nothing out of place. Fred went around opening the windows to let in fresh air. She got on the phone and began furiously placing calls. To the governor in Albany (the call failed to go through), to the mayor (unavailable), to Judge Traglia (unavailable), to Joe’s law secretary (no answer), to Joe’s campaign manager (he was unaware anything might be amiss and presumed Joe was vacationing in Maine), to several acquaintances (no answers), to everybody, it seemed, but the one party that made the most sense: the police.
The next morning, August 31st, a plainclothes cop appeared at her door. “He introduced himself as Detective Luke Ruppert, and I instantly recognized him as an acquaintance of my husband’s and long-time bodyguard for Joe’s old boss and patron, the Senator.” Sitting across from her, as she struggled to hold back her tears, “Ruppert worried the rim of his hat with his hands and reported that he’d learned Joe was missing ‘through friends concerned about his whereabouts.’” (Were these friends the same “friends of the judge” mentioned by Kipps? Didn’t they have names? And what kind of friends didn’t come forward to offer his wife a single word of comfort or support?)
Detective Ruppert informed her that he was working on his own, without involving the department. (Why not involve the department? was the question Stell should have asked, but didn’t. Wasn’t the time long overdue for the full resources of the police to be called in?) He’d already checked with the hospitals and the morgue. The good news was that her husband wasn’t in either. (Which raised the question—unasked by Stell—just how long had Ruppert been looking into the case?) He was sure the judge had his reasons for being out of touch and, once he showed up to offer them, the explanation would make perfect sense. “‘State Supreme Court justices,’ he told her with an assurance that would soon ring with enduring hollowness, ‘don’t just disappear into thin air.’”
Buoyed at knowing that at last a professional investigator was on the case and that he expected a quick and satisfactory resolution, Stell was taken aback by what came next. The wisest and safest course, he advised, was for her to go back to Lake Belvedere and wait until he summoned her. “‘Don’t want to rouse suspicions before your husband has a chance to get back from whatever business he’s attending to, do you? He’s got an election ahead, so it makes sense to be extra careful.’”
When Fred came to her apartment that afternoon, she told him what the detective recommended and confessed her befuddlement about what to do, whom to trust, where to turn. Once more, she dissolved, and this time “the tears were born not of anger or even of frustration but of a hopelessness bordering on physical paralysis.” Fred waited until the tears ceased before seconding Ruppert’s recommendatio
n. “‘What’s to be gained by staying?’ he asked. ‘You can’t do anything to help that detective, and the more you go asking about the judge, the more likely some lowlife reporter will poke his nose where it don’t belong.’”
She remembered nothing of the return trip to Maine. The day after they arrived, Sylvester Berind, convinced the rumors could no longer be contained, and acting, he claimed, on his own initiative—and without consulting or attempting to notify her—went to the police and filed a formal missing person report for Joseph Force Crater. It was thirty-one days since he’d beamed down his “broad, bright smile” on dear Stell, twenty-eight since he’d entered a cab on West 45th Street. Whoever was behind the disappearance had time enough to take a slow boat to China—and back.
Nobody bothered to get in touch with Stell to notify her that the report had been filed and was splashed across the headlines of every newspaper in the city, almost instantly becoming a story of national and international interest. The police were thrown into a frenzy, the commissioner and mayor both demanding that the NYPD find out what happened to Crater before the press did. Missing Persons raced to follow the tips and supposed sightings of the judge that quickly flooded in, its woefully undermanned ranks augmented by every available detective the department could spare.
Adding to the intensity of the hunt as well as muddying the waters was the bevy of amateur dicks, bounty seekers, thrill seekers, cranks and well-meaning (for the most part) citizens drawn by the excitement around the case and/or by the enticement of the rewards posted by the city and the Standard. It was even speculated that the mob, concerned somebody (or bodies) from its ranks might be involved, was doing detective work of its own.
Unaware of any of this, poor Stell sat in an Adirondack chair staring out the screen door of her cabin, wreathed in her new-found habit of chain smoking. At dusk, she recalled, the hulking figure of Sheriff Abner Scott loomed up behind the screen. He knocked but entered before she could invite him in. Over six feet tall and 250 pounds, he removed his hat and rested his right hand on the handle of his pistol. “His mouth was frozen in a grim horizontal line, no hint of the smile he’d invariable flashed all those times when Joe and I had encountered him in the village. ‘Guess you heard the bad news, Mrs. Crater,’ he said.”
“I nodded. It wasn’t difficult to guess what he was getting at.”
“‘Your husband’s been missing a while, it seems.’ His head moved from side to side in the kind of slow, disapproving shake with which a parent reprimands a child.
“‘Who told you?’ I imagined it must have been the Boston lawyer and his wife trying to be helpful, though I felt a flash of anger at their interference since all I wanted for the moment was to be left in peace.
“‘Told me? It’s on the wireless. Whole damn world knows by now.’
“The continued movement of his head and his cold, reproving tone suddenly left me with a sense of menace. ‘The world?’ I let out an audible gasp. All at once the past month instantly fell into perspective. I’d been played for a fool while the legion of Joe’s acquaintances and allies—it was clear now that, except for each other, we had no friends—covered their tracks and perfected their alibis.
“‘Yep, Mrs. Crater. The world.’ His hand tightened on the stock of his pistol, as though about to lift it from its holster.
“‘But you don’t—you can’t—believe I deliberately withheld that from you, do you?’ I heard the pleading desperation in my own voice, but could do nothing to prevent it. The walls of my nightmare pressed closer from every side.
“His head stopped moving. He raised his hand. The palm was so close I thought he might be showing the hard calluses he earned in the ceaseless work of repairing and maintaining the cabins and cottages of summer folk like Joe and me.
“‘Stop right there, Mrs. Crater,’ he said. ‘It don’t matter what I believe. What I know is your husband went missing well nigh a month ago and you never breathed a word ‘bout it to me or any lawman elsewhere.’
“‘That’s because I was sure it was all a mistake. I thought—I hoped—I expected that at any moment Joe would come through the very door that you just did.’
“‘Reporting your husband missing to the chief lawman here in Lake Belvedere, well, that’s something you didn’t do but should’ve. Could be as you say, you was expecting him home, or it could be you’re an accessory to a crime, or worse.’
“‘No, you can’t possibly believe …’
“The hand went up again. ‘The court will decide what to believe or not. I got no intent to put you under arrest, if that’s what you’re afraid of. But I’m acting under a request from the D.A. down in New York City to make sure you don’t scoot nowhere till they send somebody up.”
At this point, Dunne made a note to himself to check out whether Fred Kipps, the ex-cop chauffeur, and Detective Luke Ruppert were still alive. Beyond that, there’d been nothing that jumped out at him. He kept reading. It was difficult not to sympathize with Stell. It was as if she were walking through her safe, cozy cabin one sunny summer’s day and suddenly went through a hole in the floor, tumbling from her “idyllic interlude of blue skies and summer breezes” into a cross between a hall of mirrors and a torture chamber. She wasn’t the first nor would she be the last to learn that hell is not only real but that you don’t have to die to get there.
She recalled her trip to New York to testify before the grand jury as a blur (one in a seemingly endless series). She was whisked south in a car that was sent to fetch her. Once they reached Foley Square, she was hurried past the battery of Movietone cameras and a swarm of photographers and reporters, their damning shouts echoing in her ears as she took the stand. Did you do it, Mrs. Crater? Did you?
The D.A., an acquaintance of Joe’s, started out his questioning in a kind, patient tone that gradually accelerated into rapid-fire questions and pointed accusations. His hunger to reduce Joe’s disappearance to the machinations of a jealous wife left him agitated and perspiring heavily, “with froth on his lips.” He reminded Stell of a rabid dog. Did you suspect your husband of infidelities? Did you ever see him with another woman? Was he seeking a divorce?
The innuendo was clear, and though there wasn’t a shred of evidence to back it up, the leak in the D.A.’s office supplied enough information that the next morning, as she was escorted out of her apartment for the return trip to Maine, the innuendoes from court were in big black letters on the front pages of the papers at the corner newsstand: A Black Widow Killer? What Has She Got to Hide? Crater’s Mrs. Stays Mum. Did She Take Him for a Ride?
It was testimony to Mrs. Crater’s underlying strength of mind that after this barrage of uncertainty, anxiety and betrayal, after being abandoned and used by those she trusted, after losing the man she depended on for everything, whose faults and failings she refused to recognize, and being falsely accused of a role in his disappearance, she didn’t shatter and collapse into a pile of jagged shards held together by alcohol and tranquilizers. While the evidence that emerged about Joe’s philandering, as well as his shady financial dealings, left no doubt about her infinite capacity for self-delusion, there was more to her than that. She had the mortar of survival—of denial and determination—that allows some to hold themselves together whatever misfortunes or trials come their way.
The next trial (the last before the spotlight moved on and the D.A. and the press lost interest in the Black Widow Theory) arrived in the hulking, panting form of Sheriff Scott as he half-waddled, half-ran from his car across the yard and up the three steps to her front porch. He knocked and this time waited for her to invite him in.
Stell remembered him “pausing to catch his breath as he struggled to get the words out: ‘Reporters … on their way … be here real soon.’”
“Finished washing the few dishes from the dinner I’d prepared for myself, the first time I’d enjoyed eating food in weeks, I was sitting enjoying a cup of coffee and a cigarette. I was glad to see the sheriff. Since my return, he’d
gone out of his way to be helpful. ‘What reporters?’ I asked.
“‘Train of ’em.’ He put his palm over his heart as if about to make the pledge of allegiance.
“‘By train? From where?’
“He took a deep breath. ‘From Boston, New York, all points in between. They hired the whole damn rig, engine to caboose, every last seat, and they’re scouring the village to hire cars to bring ’em out here. Some are already on the way. Do what you want, Mrs. Crater, stay and talk if you care to, but I figured you deserve the courtesy of being forewarned so’s you can decide for yourself. Give you a ride, if you’d like.’
“I was touched by the Sheriff’s concern, a lonesome but welcome reminder the world still held its modicum of decent souls, yet declined his offer and watched as he returned to his car. I walked into the woods and progressed at a steady but unhurried pace till I reached the cabin of the Boston lawyer and his wife. It was dark. A light was on. The lawyer wasn’t there but his wife was in the process of packing their things and getting the place ready to close for the season.
“Though surprised to see me, she greeted me warmly. When I explained why I’d come, she put aside her chore and hugged me. She brewed a pot of tea. We sat and talked for the next several hours, and after patiently listening to my sad saga, she shared with me sorrows of her own, a gesture of solidarity that comes naturally, I believe, among women who’ve known both the heartbreak as well as joy matrimony can bring. I stayed the night in her guest room, and the next morning, after undertaking a scouting mission to the village, she reported that Sheriff Scott had convinced the army of reporters that I’d fled Lake Belvedere and they were crowding on the train to get home.