The Man Who Never Returned

by Peter Quinn

  “My client thinks otherwise.”

  “Otherwise, Fin, all you have is the probability of waking ghosts best left in peace.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I appreciate the advice.”

  “But you’re not going to take it. I knew you wouldn’t, but I felt it must be said.”

  As Crow turned to walk back to his car, a small boy in a shiny yellow rain slicker and coonskin cap was being dragged along by a stout woman wrapped in a thick blue coat who had the plodding gait of a prison matron or nanny. “Stop dawdling.” Her exasperated tone edged toward furious.

  The boy pulled his hand away and crashed into Crow. He said in a loud but good-natured way, “Hey, Daniel Boone, easy does it.”

  “Daniel Boone? Don’t you watch TV? I’m Davy Crockett, you jerk.”

  “Watch who you call a jerk, you little putz.” Crow seized his arm, squeezed hard and let go. The boy ran to the woman, wailing, and hugged her legs. She wagged a finger in Crow’s face. “How dare you! I got a good mind to call a cop!”

  “Call the marines, for all I care. They’re all brats. An entire generation of spoiled brats. They’re going to turn out rotten, all of them, just wait and see.”

  Over the next several days, as he read through the files, Dunne couldn’t help but feel the mounting frustration and eroding morale of the detectives as they tracked down the calls and letters, everyone certain about Crater’s whereabouts, the newspapers all the while yammering away about “police incompetence” and the politicians hammering on the commissioner to wrap up the investigation before it blew up into another scandal.

  Judge Crater is relaxing on a yacht parked off Southampton, Long Island. He’s held against his will at a sanitarium in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The mob has him prisoner in the back-room of a candy store on Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn. He’s spied sipping cocktails at the Clifford Inn on the Jersey Shore on the same day that a town clerk in upstate New York sees him hop a Montreal-bound freight train.

  Soon he moves west, driving with the top down in a DeSoto Six Convertible Coupé through Whiting, Indiana, and strutting out of a theater in Des Moines, Iowa, after watching the film Cimarron with a woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to its star, Irene Dunne. He shacks up in San Francisco with a curvaceous brunette at the Hotel Robins on Park Street, under the name Joseph Owens, Jr. Simultaneously, he travels south, dining in Augusta, Georgia, plays golf outside Jacksonville, Florida, and rents a villa in Havana, Cuba; and north, to Niagara Falls, where he rides between two “swarthy, foreign-looking types” in the front seat of a Buick sedan with Pennsylvania license plates, and to Minot, North Dakota, where he hides out at his brother’s place; and east, sailing first class on the Ile de France and setting up residence at 9 Padre Avenue in Seville, Spain.

  Or maybe he never leaves the city. Maybe he’s in Room 1630 at the Dixie Hotel, or in a suite at the Concourse Plaza Hotel in the Bronx, or sleeping off a bender in the Holy Name Mission on Bleecker Street. The files bulged with carbon copies of letters to police departments around the country asking them to follow up leads or to supply more information, and with reports on the endless footwork of following up on Judge Crater sightings in and around the city.

  Finally, about a month after the hunt started, an official directive was issued (probably in response to the detectives’ pleas) authorizing them “to file without further action communications concerning the Crater investigation that you deem to be from persons of low mental condition, or pranksters, or utterly lacking in material relevance to the resolution of the investigation.”

  The relief this provided, welcomed as it undoubtedly was, didn’t save them from the manipulations of the many cranks, pranksters or people of ill will who were clever enough to couch their anonymous tips in credible terms. Off the detectives went to Brooklyn, Hoboken, New Rochelle, by subway, car and foot (and occasionally bumming rides with reporters who never seemed to lack for automobiles), through hotels, asylums and reeking basements. More than once the tip was from wives or girlfriends out to embarrass husbands or lovers by sending the police to knock on doors and interrupt wayward mates in the middle of trysts with other women.

  In the first week of November Detectives Moon and Von Vogt followed up a letter from “Tommy the Cabbie” who claimed he not only knew the taxi driver of the cab that picked Crater up the night he vanished but had been told by that same driver that Crater was in a private room in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington Heights where “the one in charge is being paid a bundle” to let him stay. “I don’t want no trouble,” he wrote, “because I got a family but I was raised to do right and help out our polise [sic].”

  The one in charge was a tall Irish nun. A tight virginal smile turned into an indignant grimace at the suggestion she or any of her sisters might be complicit in hiding someone from the law, never mind Judge Crater. She expressed her intent, the detectives noted in their report, to call the commissioner, whose niece happened to be a sister on the hospital staff, to express her shock and displeasure. Taking note of the fat, cigar-chomping janitor who stood in the background smirking, Moon and Von Vogt grilled him. He vigorously denied knowing anything about Tommy the Cabbie and his letter.

  The more time Dunne spent with the reports, the more the personalities of the three detectives came through. Detective Edward Fitzgerald’s signature had a florid, artistic quality that didn’t seem to match his subdued, straightforward prose. Once, when the commissioner’s office dispatched him to Albany to interview “noted criminologist Dr. Algernon Vandeleer”—who turned out to be the resident of an old folks home eager to sell the department his newly invented device “to disclose the perpetrators of all crimes”—Fitzgerald’s frustration rose to the surface. “Assignments of this sort,” he noted at the bottom of the report sent to his higher-ups, “will continue to guarantee an unsuccessful conclusion to this investigation.”

  Plodding, competent and quickly dispirited by the internal confusion and external pressure that were part of the case, Detective William Moon typically got right to the point. “Acting on anonymous letter received 10/16/30 checked out 15 Highland Place, Yonkers. Boarding house run by Angela Baldasari. Widow. Gives age as 71. English poor. Five boarders, all elderly Italian men. She’s got no idea why anyone would report Crater as being on the premises except as a stupid joke.” The reports got even briefer and more pointed when Moon accompanied Dr. Rossiter on the search for Crater’s remains.

  The stalwart of the squad was Detective Alexander Von Vogt. Tucked in the files was a letter from the chief inspector to the commissioner complaining that the newspapers were libeling his men and himself when they pictured the Crater investigation as being conducted by a band of hapless amateurs and/or lackeys of corrupt politicians. Defending the integrity of the investigation, the chief inspector wrote that the lead detective, Alexander Von Vogt, “is as respected an investigator as the police department possesses. He consistently displays a degree of originality in matters which he handles that takes him from the beaten path usually followed by detectives and as a result, not infrequently, secures results where others fail.”

  Filled with sharp observations about the physical and emotional characteristics of those he interviewed, Von Vogt’s carefully typed reports were usually two or three times as long as the other detectives’. They revealed an educated man able to dismiss one would-be tipster as “purveying the usual persiflage of an inveterate imbiber” and describe another as “filled with the illusory excitement of a recent benedict.” (When Dunne inquired, Crow was glad to provide the definitions of persiflage: frivolous, insignificant talk; and benedict: a newlywed.)

  Von Vogt came across as honest, smart, seasoned and blunt. In a letter he wrote to Stella Crater, he reported that a headless torso with only the right leg appended had washed ashore on Jones Beach. The coroner judged it to have been in the water for well over a month. On the leg were the remnants of a blue silk sock attached to a Brooks Brothers blue garter “badly faded
through the effect of the water.” Another important feature, he added, was the “male appendage had been circumcised.” Could she please confirm “whether or not your husband owned such garters and whether he was circumcised or not.”

  His obvious unfamiliarity with Stella Crater’s delicate sensibilities and the steadfast, impenetrable defensiveness she maintained in all matters pertaining to her husband indicated Von Vogt had never met her. This was confirmed in the follow-up letter he sent when, unsurprisingly, she didn’t respond to the first. In it, he apologized for not being with his partner, Det. Fitzgerald, when he’d interviewed her during her return to the city. “I’d just lost my wife,” he wrote, “and needed time with my young sons.”

  If moved by Von Vogt’s explanation, Mrs. Crater kept it to herself. For Von Vogt’s part, the files indicated the time he took to be with his boys was exceedingly brief. Instead, he threw himself into his work, inching away from grief not through isolation but through grinding away at the Crater investigation. Yet the fact of Von Vogt’s being a widower at age forty-six helped explain how he came to be pilloried in the press and ended up in a desk job at the Police Academy on Hubert Street.

  The parts of the story that weren’t in the files or newspapers were supplied by Crow. “Allie was one of the best detectives the department ever produced,” he said. “He did the work of four while he was on the Squad. Sure, he could be thick the way Krauts tend to be, but he was as upright as sunlight and never demanded anything of anybody he didn’t demand of himself.”

  Allie Von Vogt was raised by German immigrant parents on Park Avenue in the Bronx (a poor cousin to the prestigious, wealthy avenue in Manhattan). Despite the aristocratic preface of “Von,” his old man was a carpenter. An only child, Allie did very well in school but to his parent’s great disappointment dropped out of the engineering program at City College to marry his girlfriend, who gave birth to the first of their three sons six-and-a-half months after the wedding. He entered the police department that same year, in December 1914.

  With the war raging in Europe, Crow reported, the Prussian ring to Allie’s last name led to him taking much good-natured ribbing, which became decidedly less good natured after the U.S. entered on the side of the Allies. Anything and everything smacking of the Kaiser and his Huns became suspect, causing thousands of German Americans to anglicize their names and sauerkraut to be dubbed “liberty cabbage.” Von Vogt, however, stayed Von Vogt. He was a loyal American, he maintained, and his name had been passed on by his father, an honest, hard-working naturalized citizen who lived by the laws of his adopted country.

  By dint of diligence and intelligence, Von Vogt rose quickly, becoming one of the NYPD’s youngest detectives. When Prohibition arrived, he requested a transfer to Missing Persons with the intent of staying away from the grafting uncorked by the illegal booze industry and its attendant rackets. His wish granted, he made a name for himself through the intensity and quality of his work. He was the clear choice to head the Crater investigation, and the volume and thoroughness of the reports he filed were proof that no one else, whether assigned on a short- or long-term basis, might have matched his efforts.

  The trouble started about three months into the case when, with public interest cooling, the newspapers paid belated attention to the squawking of an inmate in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta who claimed his ex-wife, a former department store model by the name Connie Newberry, had been Crater’s longterm mistress until he dumped her. According to her ex, a convicted counterfeiter, embezzler and bigamist, Connie had bragged to him about using her mob connections to have Crater quietly strangled in the back of a taxi and his body hidden in a shallow grave in the Adirondacks.

  Accustomed to jail-house braggadocios eager to retail pumped-up allegations and outright fabrications to bargain for reductions in their sentences, the police were slow following up. The Standard, on the other hand, hoping to stoke renewed interest in the case, dispatched a reporter to Atlanta. Next day, it touted a decisive break: Mistress and Murderer: Crater Culprit Identified. Tipped off about what was coming (the police speculated it was by her ex who knew that if she went on the lam it would only help prove her guilt), Connie Newberry disappeared from the room she shared with a cosmetics model in the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West.

  In a flash, the Standard and its competitors ploughed up all the dirt they could on Connie Newberry, and luckily for them, her life yielded a bountiful crop of lurid stories and speculation. Born Estelle Ludgemann, she was the daughter of Herman Ludgemann, a German-Swiss immigrant who settled in Hartford, Connecticut, and worked as a watch salesman. He perished in a hotel fire in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1904, when Estelle was six. At the time, he was hailed in the local papers as a hero for having vainly attempted to save his bedmate, who was registered as Mrs. Ludgemann. Except she wasn’t. Burned beyond recognition, her body was never identified.

  Connie Newberry worked in the small bakery her mother operated until she headed for New York at sixteen, where she landed a job in the Ziegfield Follies as a chorus girl. After two years, at age eighteen, she struck gold and married a successful furrier twice her age. That marriage ended in an acrimonious divorce. In 1919, at age twenty-one, she married Maxfield Newberry, the twice-divorced, forty-year-old scion of an old New York family. Charming and well-dressed, a former captain of Princeton’s equestrian team, and a lawyer who served as a major with the Seventh Regiment and had been decorated twice, Max Newberry was a playboy alcoholic who, upon learning he’d been cut out of his mother’s will, blew his brains out.

  Connie’s next marriage, in 1926, was a six-month affair with an up-and-coming stockbroker who as well as turning out to be a counterfeiter and embezzler also proved to be a bigamist. Off he went to the Atlanta Penitentiary, leaving Connie single, broke and faced with doing what she had to do to stay afloat. This included a stint in a traveling burlesque show in which she starred as “The Jazzy Jezebel.” (Although she vigorously denied it, the Standard suggested she had a featured role in a cheaply made indecent film—a “naughty flicker”—that, though never publicly distributed, was widely circulated at stag clubs and bachelor parties.)

  It was after returning to New York and getting work as a department store model that she was introduced to Joseph Force Crater, who set her up in an apartment on Jane Street in the remote reaches of the West Village. A year or so later, either unduly nervous about a potential disclosure scotching his chances for appointment to the bench or, more likely, tired of the arrangement, Crater cut off their relationship.

  Feasting on the cornucopia of salacious details in Connie Newberry’s background, the Standard dubbed her “The Jilted Jezebel.” The Graphic ran grainy, blurred stills from the blue film, inviting readers “to contact the police if you’ve seen this woman.” Meanwhile, the editorial writers accused the cops of being deliberately derelict in trying to track her down because the politicians, afraid of all the secrets she might reveal, had ordered them to go easy. Von Vogt took up their challenge and within a few days located Connie Newberry at her sister’s apartment in Sunnyside, Queens.

  Maybe if Von Vogt hadn’t been so recently widowed he wouldn’t have fallen as completely and quickly for Connie Newberry as he did; and maybe if she weren’t feeling so abandoned and vulnerable, she wouldn’t have reciprocated so strongly. “It was obvious to us all,” Crow said, “that Allie had ceased seeing things objectively. If he’d left well enough alone, it would have all come out in the wash. But he couldn’t help himself and wouldn’t let us help him either. Off he went in a barrel over Niagara Falls.”

  He insisted on being present when the police commissioner conducted his own interview of Connie Newberry and was seen holding her hand as they left. In an act of uncharacteristic indiscretion, he snapped back at the press, striding into the Shack—the reporters’ den behind police headquarters—and announcing that the speculation about the “Jilted Jezebel” was “unmitigated dog crap.” Instead of backing off, the newspaper
s counterattacked, scoffing at what one editorialist called “love-struck, bleeding-heart investigators,” and demanding the D.A. begin an immediate inquiry into why it had taken the cops so long to locate and interrogate Connie Newberry.

  As accusations flew back and forth, Miss Newberry slipped out of her apartment and vanished. The sniping from the press blended into a symphonic howl. Speculating that she’d fallen in the clutches of the people behind Crater’s disappearance, the Standard blamed the “incurable corruption and invincible incompetence of the NYPD.” The News and Mirror repeated the rumor that she’d gone off to join Crater wherever he was hiding. The Times lamented “the growing sense of insecurity felt by law-abiding citizens in this city and across the country.” Stunned and chagrined, Von Vogt was taken off the case and stuck behind a desk at headquarters.

  At week’s end, she telegrammed the NYPD that she was in Havana and on her way home. Panicked at seeing every detail of her life—from her father’s death to the painful particulars of her marriages—paraded before the public, afraid of being indicted by the D.A. for a crime she had nothing to do with, and upset and guilty over the criticism directed at Von Vogt, she used a friend’s passport to flee on a cruise ship to Cuba. Now, however, realizing her flight had only made matters worse, she voluntarily returned.

  It didn’t take long before it was established to everyone’s satisfaction that her ex-husband was a self-serving windbag. The newspapers moved on. Vindicated in his assertion of Connie Newberry’s innocence, Von Vogt was put back on the case. Yet his brief stint as the “love-struck detective” left a permanent taint. He saw Connie Newberry a few times after she returned, and though he made it clear he didn’t hold her rash decision against her, she was done with New York and left to start over again on the West Coast. “To paraphrase Dante’s lament for the lovers Paolo and Francesca,” said Crow, “‘Love to a single end brought him and her.’”