by Peter Quinn
“Don’t blame you. I’m thinking of moving back to the Bronx.” She handed him his hat. “You wait here. I’ll have the car pick you up. He’ll take you home.”
The hotel doctor stopped by in the morning. “A slight concussion” was his diagnosis. He recommended going to the hospital for an X-ray. Aspirin and bed rest in the interim. Dunne told the desk to hold his calls and slept most of the day. Late afternoon, he took a walk in the park. There were no messages when he got back. He told the clerk to put his calls through again.
The phone rang as he came out of the shower. He ignored it. It kept ringing. Peeved, he picked it up. “Where’s the fire?”
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to reach Fintan Dunne.”
“Who’s this?”
“Von Vogt.”
He almost hung up. But didn’t. “I’m not dead, if that’s what you called to find out.”
“Florrie told me everything that happened.”
“I remember up until the baseball bat.”
Von Vogt mixed an apology with an explanation. “My neighbors are insular—in a literal rather than pejorative sense,” he said. “They’re not vicious, but sometimes they’re overprotective of each other’s privacy. What occurred last evening was entirely uncalled for. I’ve told them so. Any medical expenses should be sent to me.”
“All I got was a bump on the head.” Clad only in a towel, he felt a chill. “Tell Brophy I’ll add it to my collection.”
“Another thing, Dunne. Those initials.”
“What about them?” He sat on the bed.
“I’d be a liar if I said I remembered for sure to whom they belonged.”
“I’ll settle for an educated guess.”
“I don’t give the past much thought.”
Dunne pulled the coverlet close. He imagined Von Vogt in the living room of that small house on the empty block, black receiver pressed to his ear, looking at the mantle with the pictures of his dead wife and dead sons, all gone, but like the memory of Connie Newberry, never far away, the ghosts of what was, what could have been; a past more alive and vivid than the vacant present; a future that didn’t go beyond a nightly visit to Brophy’s bar. A resident of that same vanished world as Stella Crater, what did he have but the past?
“But I thought all day about those initials. There are probably more, but all I can recall are two. Anthony Mascone. Tony was with us for a good month, but never really had his heart in it. He felt we were wasting our time kicking around a political stink ball that would only hurt the reputations of those who got involved. Tony was smart. Retired a few years ago and moved to Hampton Bays. Last I heard he was pretty sick. The big C.”
“The other?”
“Bud Mulholland.”
“Bud Mulholland?”
“Yeah. His baptismal name was Ambrose. I remember because that’s my brother’s name. He never uses it either. Goes by Frank, his middle name. I’ve got no idea about Mascone’s or Mulholland’s middle names.”
“Mulholland worked with you on the Crater case?” He lay back and stretched out on the bed. His headache from the morning was replaced by a slight buzz.
“He was on the homicide squad. Our paths crossed numerous times. I can’t say exactly when and where he got involved, although I’m sure it was in those early, early days. He’s retired, too. I don’t know where he ended up. Why don’t you see if you can locate him? Ask him yourself.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“I’d ask what you expect to find, but the truth is, I don’t care. Lots of people thought they’d found the missing piece to the Crater case. Nobody did. They all ended up sorry they ever got involved.”
“I appreciate the call. And the advice.”
“An observation, not advice. I wouldn’t waste my breath giving you advice.”
Dunne tucked a pillow under his head. The buzz had turned back into a headache. He stared at the ceiling for a long time after he put down the phone. Ambrose Mulholland. He was angry with himself for not having recalled his first name. But he’d never in any way connected Mulholland to the Crater case before and couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard Mulholland called anything but Bud. Crow could supply the middle name. His body grew warm and limp under the coverlet. No use getting angry. Get some rest, then get moving.
Part VI
Glad to Get Away: An excerpt from Sanford Teller and Richard Blaine, Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself: Myths and Legends of the Great Depression (New York: Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 1967).
The artist Everett Ruess, who disappeared in the southwestern desert in 1934, was remembered as a regional folk hero and creative visionary who fled the encroachments of civilization and embraced the solitary freedom of the untamed West. But the myriad fates of the unprecedented numbers forced on the road by the Great Depression found special resonance in the myths that grew up around the era’s two most famous missing persons, aviatrix Amelia Earhart and Judge Joseph Crater.
Earhart won international fame in 1932 when she became the first woman to duplicate Charles Lindbergh’s feat and fly solo across the Atlantic. She disappeared five years later, in 1937, on the last leg of an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The fact that Earhart and her plane were swallowed without a trace our the Pacific Ocean made it easy for the inevitable theorizers to concoct alternate explanations of the event.
According to one theory, acting on orders from President Roosevelt, Earhart faked her disappearance in order to set up a secret spying operation on the Japanese. (In view of the successful surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor four years later, this putative operation must be deemed a rank failure.) A more widely believed—if equally unlikely—story is that she used the opportunity to escape a marriage she’d tired of and a celebrity she’d come to detest, and start anew.
Inevitably, within days of her disappearance, sightings poured in from around the country. Earhart was spied racing a sporty coupe across San Francisco’s just-completed Golden Gate Bridge; she stared wistfully at the plane traffic at Floyd Bennett Field, on Long Island; in black wig and sunglasses, she gave the slip to a would-be pursuer at Marshall Field’s State Street store in Chicago. Sporadic sightings continued right up until the public mind was redirected by the global drama of World War II.
The gold-medal winner among Depression-era disappearances, however, is New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater. The circumstances surrounding the case have been repeated ad nauseum in newspapers, magazines and books. Among the least examined but most interesting facets is Crater’s status as an embodiment of the archetypal wanderer who isn’t forced on the road by poverty or eviction—á la the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath—but who, in the tradition of Johnny Appleseed, chooses his fate. In this telling, Crater becomes the hero instead of the victim, leaving behind the stifling security of respectability in pursuit of happiness only the vagabond’s life could offer.
Though students of the case almost unanimously agree that Crater was a victim of foul play, there are those who claim his true intent was revealed in the parting words he spoke to the last two people to see him alive, on August 6, 1930. The police report records the scene this way: “He shook their hands and, stepping into the gutter to enter the cab, turned and said, ‘I’ll be glad to get away.’”
The sheer volume of sightings from every part of the country—greater than that for Earhart—is partly accounted for by the substantial reward offered by the New York police and the New York Standard. But there’s more to it than that. Often enough, those who claimed to have encountered the judge expressed no interest in a reward other than their vicarious satisfaction, even delight, in reporting Crater’s happiness at having escaped the grim realities and insecurities of life amid the post-Crash wreckage of the 1930s.
Judge Crater was even turned into something of a legend among the hoboes and vagrants of the Great Depression, his meanderings celebrated in oft-repeated stories and songs. The most widely known of these is the anonymously composed “Th
e Ballad of Judge Joe,” which was collected in July 1937 by folklorist Albert Jenkins as part of a WPA project in an impromptu encampment near a ferry crossing along the Missouri River, two miles below Decatur, Nebraska.
The camp’s two dozen inhabitants insisted to Jenkins that Judge Crater had spent several days with them the previous spring and were quite specific in their description of him: tall gent in a dust-covered brown suit with narrow green stripe. Though faded and worn, his collarless blue-and-white shirt was obviously of good material. On his right hand he wore a gold Masonic ring. His soft brown hat was tilted at a rakish angle. His only possessions were bed roll, package of clean but oft-mended socks and underwear, straight razor and eating utensils.
Though he never identified himself by his last name, he spoke of having been a “somebody” in New York, and they could tell from his “gentlemanly ways” and “excellent speech” that he had indeed been a person of high station. He encouraged them to move west, telling them that’s where the future lay, and after a few days he hit the road, assuring them they’d meet again “in a better time and a better place.”
An itinerant with a banjo played a song he claimed to have learned in an encampment outside South Bend, Indiana. Jenkins subsequently heard variations in camps from Fargo, North Dakota, to Stockton, California, but none differed in any significant way from the version he heard beside the Missouri. It was sung, he noted, to the tune of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More,” which was composed amid the economic depression caused by the Panic of 1857. As set down by Jenkins, the lyrics—expressive of a willful acceptance of the peripatetic circumstances experienced by millions during the Depression—are as follows:
THE BALLAD OF JUDGE JOE
Let us pause in our journey, our voices raised as one,
And all sing of one man’s destiny:
This lone and happy wanderer following the sun,
Oh, Judge Joe, you’re forever free.
CHORUS:
Was a wife, a life left you weary,
Judge Joe, Judge Joe, you’re forever free,
Many days you have journeyed in search of liberty,
Oh, Judge Joe, you’re forever free.
He came at dusk one evening, whistling soft and sweet,
“Happy and unhurried,” said he, “I always travel light”;
A man of noble stature streaked by dust from head to feet,
who greets all men as brothers, no matter black or white.
“I’m on the road now, boys, traveling just like you,
Rid of life’s illusions, lures and burdens;
Rid of bills and debt, and all that’s overdue;
Free at last of sadness and false havens.”
When cold dawn broke, he arose, bundle neatly stowed;
“I’m off today,” said he, “on a journey new;
Lord willing, we’ll meet again down some distant road,
Or maybe even sooner, when frost dissolves to dew.”
New York City
“The luster which already swathes us round
Shall be outlustred by the flesh, which long
Day after day now moulders underground;
Nor shall that light have power to do us wrong,
Since for all joys that delight us then
The body’s organs will be rendered strong.”
—DANTE, Paradiso, Canto XIV
NO DREAMS THAT HE COULD REMEMBER—AND NONE OF THE distressing and exhausting kind that leave you more tired than when you went to sleep—Dunne awoke feeling far better than the day before. He again had the hotel masseur come to his room, and then took a long shower and had breakfast at Schrafft’s, on Madison. He walked down Fifth Avenue to the 42nd Street Library.
Bright sun said spring; temperature, in the low 20s, said otherwise. At the library, he asked for the reverse directories for the Manhattan white pages (the listings done by address instead of last names) from 1925 to 1931. The librarian at the information desk told him that they were kept at the Library’s newspaper division at 43rd Street and Eleventh Avenue. He took a cab there.
Starting with the 1925 directory, he paged to 39 East 38th Street. Sixteen names were listed for that address. Mrs. Mary King, the superintendent interviewed by A.I.M. five years later, on September 7t, 1930, is already in residence, her number listed as Caledonia-9-5517. Twelve of the remaining 15 were females.
The 1926 listings told a similar story, Mrs. King one of sixteen names, 12 females—but only six of the 12 were the same females as the year before. Ditto 1927: Mrs. King, twelve females, five different from the previous year. It wasn’t until he’d read down the column of names a second time that he fixed on two he’d passed over. He ran his forefinger beneath each letter, making sure he wasn’t misreading the entries. The twelfth name in the column was
Richfield, Mary Claire.........Lexington-9-6247;
three above that, at ninth, was
Lane, Merry......................Caledonia-6-9360.
The first time he’d looked, he realized, he’d read Merry as Mary. It was the familiar ring of Richfield, Mary Claire, that made him pause. An instant later it registered: “The Venus of Broadway,” she of the glorified body, who ended up shooting herself with Bud Mulholland’s revolver. Still absorbing what was on the page, his eyes went back up the column. His finger tapped each letter of Lane, Merry. Memory of what had taken place in L.A. recent and distinct: Jeff Wine’s prized photos of the poolside coupling; the unplanned visit to the Silver Moon Tea House: PALM REA ER AND ORTUNE TELLER TO TH STARS.
Neither Merry Lane nor Mary Claire Richfield could have any idea of what lay ahead. But living in New York, in 1927, amid the tide of single young women flooding into the city in search of independence, excitement, and a piece of the new life the Twenties seemed to be bringing into existence, hordes of them drawn by the lure of the booming theatrical business along “The Great White Way” (“The Great White Lie” Crow called it), they must have learned quickly what the men in charge expected of them.
Included in the exhaustive collection of newspaper clippings shipped to Florida had been a file of miscellaneous pieces from various publications that were related or potentially related to the Crater case. One recounted the “Army of Femme Floaters” pouring into the city. The limited number of clerical and sales positions open to them meant supply increasingly outran demand, and nowhere was the competition tougher than on Broadway. They did what they had to do to eat.
Places like 39 East 38th Street dotted the city. Not formal brothels but houses filled with single women where favors could be discreetly exchanged. A few, like Merry Lane and Mary Claire Richfield, would make it to the top, at least for a while. But at what price? “It was a slave market,” said Patti Leroche. Crater was among the buyers.
Merry Lane and Mrs. King were there the next year, in 1928, but Richfield was gone. Right around then, she made her breakthrough in “The Cuddles & Cuties Revue” at the Winter Garden. The turnover in women continued in 1929 and 1930, but Merry Lane and Mrs. King remained. There was no listing, however, for the tenants A.I.M. had claimed to interview, Mrs. Alma Parker, age 78, widow, and crippled daughter, Margaret, age 55. Maybe they didn’t have a phone. More likely, they were imaginary creations designed to reinforce that 39 East 38th Street needed no further investigation. If so, the ploy worked. In 1931, Merry Lane and Mrs. King were gone, as well.
He looked up the newspaper accounts of Mary Claire Richfield’s suicide. Remembered it as happening in the summer of 1929. He was right. The story ran on June 21st with the headline in the Mirror reading: “Venus Vanquished: Gunshot Self-Inflicted.” The picture that ran with it—Mary Claire in a short, flimsy, diaphanous dress—was a reminder that the Venus title was well earned.
No immediate destination in mind, he walked back to Broadway, falling into the rhythm of a comfortable pace, mind and body in sync, not unlike swimming. The more he walked, the better his knee felt, in direct contradiction to what several doctors h
ad advised, their unanimous recommendation to avoid unnecessary foot travel and drive whenever possible. He followed Broadway downtown, turning the accumulation of facts over in his mind, fitting pieces together, forming a picture that, though not yet complete, was more than a wild guess or a highly speculative theory. For the first time, he was certain, he could hand Nan Renard her “pan-pollinating” scoop, the key ingredient in bringing together a “single synchronized effort.” The explosion that resulted would be bigger than either she or Wilkes expected.
Stopping at Child’s, across from City Hall, he had a cup of coffee and called Nan Renard’s office. Left a message: Be at the Coral at nine o’clock tonight. He continued south to Trinity Church, and turned left onto Wall Street. Already wrapped in afternoon shadows, the narrow, gloomy space reverberated with sporadic honks and cast-iron rattle of loose manhole covers as the traffic rolled by. Isolated, forlorn sounds, like the last sad echoes of the wild party that ended so suddenly and so badly twenty-six years before.
He went north at Pearl Street. The recent razing of the tail end of the Third Avenue El had unmasked ancient storefronts and façades for the first time in seventy-five years. Still-standing relics of the vanished city, they looked depressed and doomed, as if they knew their demise was only a matter of time. He got on the El at Chatham Square, which was now the last stop, and stood next to the motorman’s cabin, in the front car, the same spot where, as boys, he and his friends had shoved and pushed, each trying to claim it for himself. The train moved rapidly, curving from the Bowery onto Third Avenue. Rundown flophouses and fleabag hotels lining the route yielded to tenements and commercial buildings. The track ran in a straight line up the rest of the island, a river of wooden ties and steel rails, past the towers of midtown to the Bronx. He was at 42nd Street in fifteen minutes.
Old as it was, and as sure as the city fathers were they could do without it, there was no faster or more efficient above-ground transportation in the city. Downstairs, he bought the evening papers and ducked into the Automat, which was starting to fill with dinnertime customers. He had enough change to pop open the glass door for a chicken salad platter, filled his cup with coffee and sat by the window. He refilled his cup several times, smoked cigarettes and read the papers, filling the time until rush hour was over.