The Man Who Never Returned

by Peter Quinn

  As it turns out, the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner quickly dispelled the excitement. According to Dr. Linda DeMarco, the Office’s Deputy Chief, the bones proved to be those of a malnourished adult male who probably perished in the cholera epidemic that struck the city in the 1840s. At the time, the site was well outside the city and was home to immigrant squatters who erected crude shanties. It later housed an icehouse, which probably helps account for the relatively well-preserved condition of the bones beneath.

  Dr. DeMarco speculated that the man was quickly interred by friends and family anxious to avoid contagion (the cause of cholera was still unknown) and, unable to afford formal interment in a graveyard, still wished to avoid consigning him to potter’s field.

  Dr. DeMarco refused to offer a guess about how many unmarked graves are within New York City. “It could be negligible or it could be significant. The truth is, no one knows for sure,” she said. What is known is that the burial sites of the city’s original Indian population were shown no respect by early setters who plowed them up or paved them over. The graves of the early settlers as well as of negro slaves, in turn, were often shown equal disrespect by the generations of ruthlessly energetic developers and builders who followed.

  Murder and mayhem, never in short supply, have undoubtedly made their own contributions to the city’s supply of unmarked graves. There’s an enduring legend, for example, that many of the looters killed during the infamous Draft Riots were secretly buried in basements and cellars by relatives who wanted to prevent the police from identifying them and seeking restitution from their families.

  The time-honored tradition among mobsters of fitting rivals and enemies with “concrete overshoes” and depositing them in the city’s waterways is well known. Other victims have been tucked under construction sites, empty lots, abandoned buildings, garbage dumps, parking lots, etc.

  Dr. DeMarco ventured that it is her personal opinion that the number of hidden graves in the city is probably small. But students and chroniclers of organized crime insist the number is substantial. It is also a matter of conjecture how often, in the interests of saving time and money, developers’ construction crews ignore or destroy remains they stumble across.

  When brought to the attention of officials, remains are hardly ever identified or claimed. With rare exception they are taken to the potter’s field on Hart’s Island off the Bronx and reinterred. Such is the case with the remains discovered last week on the West Side.

  Whether Judge Crater is among those consigned “to sleep with the fishes” or beneath the city’s streets remains unknown. Yet, unlike most of them, he hasn’t been entirely forgotten. For the city’s history buffs and mystery mavens, he remains an object of curiosity. If the interest of the living brings some comfort to the dead, Crater continues to have an ample portion.

  EPILOGUE

  Playa de Oro, Florida

  “And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.”

  —T.S. ELIOT, “Little Gidding”

  Dunne exited the train amid a happy confusion of laughter, chatter, hugs, handshakes as passengers reunited with spouses, friends, children. They made their way to the parking lot and pulled away. He was the only one left on the platform. A negro taxi driver approached. “Need a ride, mister?”

  “I’m waiting for someone.”

  He handed Dunne a card. “If someone doesn’t show, call.”

  He put the card in his pocket. Roberta’s reply to his letter had been one line: Let me know when you’re arriving.

  Didn’t expect a line-by-line response to the four-page letter that he’d worked on for several days, writing and rewriting, trying not to excuse but explain—to himself as well as her—all he’d done and failed to do over the last several months. He hated writing. Always had. Thoughts that seemed clear and logical became garbled, disjointed, inane when translated onto paper. But aware that however awkward his written words might be, they’d be far less awkward than if he tried to speak them, he soldiered on.

  In the end, he laid it out as best he could: ambivalence about retirement and relocation; irrational resentment at not being talked out of it; inability to make an honest reappraisal. Instead, driven by restlessness and seduced by his own overconfidence, he’d allowed himself to be sucked into the Crater case, and manipulated and directed like a marionette.

  He was honest about what had transpired with Nan Renard—all of it—but played down the seriousness of the poisoning. He wanted her back, but not out of pity. He understood now that what he saw in Nan—or what he thought he saw, the balance of integrity and toughness, of intelligence, poise and beauty—was what he’d always loved in Roberta. Nan had the freshness of youth. But Roberta was for real, and Nan Renard wasn’t. Maybe she had been once. Maybe she could be again, evolving into a person capable of trusting and being trusted. But for now she was like one of those reproductions in Madame Troussard’s, a wax replica with a hollow core.

  Every time he tried to compose a concluding paragraph, out came a gush of overwrought, sentimental clichés, so he ended by dashing off some lines about his stupidity, regret, embarrassment, his love for her, his desire to come home and see if he could repair what he’d broken. He ended that he’d wait to hear from her. A botch of a letter but the best he could do. He mailed it special delivery. Whatever her response—if there was one—he knew that he didn’t want to stay in New York.

  While he waited, he tied up loose ends. Called Jeff Wine in L.A. and asked him to check out the Silver Moon and see if Merry Lane was still fortune-telling there. When he paid a visit to the offices of Wilkes Communications, the place was in an uproar. The News and Mirror had run stories that morning reporting Walter Wilkes’s bad back had turned out to be a highly aggressive form of prostate cancer. He was under treatment at an undisclosed locale in California with the experimental drug Laetrile.

  Nan Renard’s replacement as project manager, the assistant editor she’d sent to pick Dunne up when he returned from Florida, stood behind a table littered with a disordered shuffle of proposed covers for the August 6th inaugural cover of Snap. They all featured the same mushroom-shaped pillar of fire that accompanied the atomic incineration of Hiroshima; only the headlines varied: “1945: Hiroshima/ 1955: Where Next?”; “Is an Atomic Pearl Harbor Ahead?”; “Are We Ready for Atomic War?” etc. Written across each was some higher-up’s short critique: “Crap.” “Trite.” “What idiot came up with this?”

  Trying not to appear unnerved by the published reports about his boss, which no one had yet denied, he did his best to live up to his new role by being curt and dismissive. “The Crater project was an inane undertaking from the outset. Mr. Wilkes feels he was willfully deceived into pursuing it. If Nan Renard hadn’t quit, she’d have been fired.” He handed over a check. “Your room at the Savoy Plaza is taken care of. This should cover any other expenses. Consider yourself lucky to get anything.”

  Dunne handed it back without looking at the amount. “Consider yourself lucky I don’t shove it up your ass.”

  The next day when Pully called with the news of Bud Mulholland’s suicide, neither the deed nor the method—a single bullet to the heart—came as a surprise. Pully invited him to dinner and suggested the Coral. He didn’t object to Dunne’s preference for Cavanaugh’s.

  “A shame about Mulholland,” Pully said. “I always appreciated his bluntness. But I don’t imagine losing him will slow the Agency down one bit. Believe me, the worst is still to come.”

  They followed dinner with cigars, puffing away as they walked up Third Avenue. The familiar and furious rattle of the elevated train periodically passed overhead. Pully knew cigars. They savored the rich taste; the lavish smoke wafted into their nostrils; true scent of destiny, it rose into the night and vanished, like the souls of dead comrades.

  He spent the next few days playing tourist, attending a play, riding the Circle Line a
round Manhattan on a foggy day when the city appeared and disappeared in the gray drizzle. He caught Gene Krupa at the Copa. The weather stayed wet and drab, the usual prelude to spring. In the evenings, he strolled through the park. As ever, the young were the first to twig to the change of season, kissing and embracing, minds uncluttered by the past, focused on what was to come.

  Soon as Roberta’s note arrived, he packed and got ready to leave. On his last morning, Jeff Wine called back. He’d gone to the Silver Moon. “You should have warned me about the wonderfully hospitable staff they have there. Only after threatening some unfriendly persuasion and waving a twenty could I get the old piss pants who runs the place to tell me anything.”

  “What’d he tell you?”

  “Merry blew town. No forwarding address. Daughter or niece or somebody like that came by and collected her. Off they went. Sad, when you think about it, what the future once held for her and how it turned out.”

  Crow drove him from the hotel to the station. “I’m not going to ask about how you got poisoned or why Mulholland shot himself. My guess is they’re connected some way, but I don’t care. Some cop, eh? I should be jumping all over you, demanding answers. But like I told you from the start, the Crater case is a curse. It’s never done anything but spread misery and death in its wake. I’m glad you’re going home. I was afraid for a while you’d become one of those nut jobs who ruins his life trying to find him.”

  Dunne asked Crow if he wouldn’t mind driving across 38th Street, between Fourth Avenue and Madison. Crow shrugged. “Sure,” he said. He didn’t ask why. The brownstone at No. 39 as well as its companions had been demolished. The foundation for their replacement, Murray Hill Mews and its 66 deluxe apartments, was already poured. If the excavators had come across a body they hadn’t called attention to it. Time is money—nowhere more so than in New York’s construction trade.

  He shook hands with Crow in front of the station. “Ulysses goes back to Penelope, like he should. Let Crater rest in peace, wherever he may be,” Crow said.

  When Crow was gone, Dunne ducked into the nearby Franciscan church. During the war, with soldiers and sailors passing through Penn Station at all hours, the friars had begun hearing confessions around the clock, and they’d kept up the practice when peace came. The penances they imposed were so lenient that the place had come to be called “the-two-Hail-Marys-for-homicide church.” Dunne made his confession but didn’t feel forgiven when he came out, only reminded that though love doesn’t always make us faithful, it always makes us suffer for our unfaithfulness.

  Sitting alone on the platform with his luggage, he reached into his pocket for the card with the taxi’s number, and took it out along with his notebook. Pages of scribbled notes. Dates. Names. Addresses. Phone numbers. Let them rest in peace, all of them. Stella Crater with her precious illusions. Allie Von Vogt, wanting only to be left alone. Patti Leroche, trying to make a new life in Brooklyn. Merry Lane, wherever she was. Anna Resnick Mulholland, a whole lifetime ahead to wrestle with what she’d become.

  What use would it be to them for the past to be resurrected and for the world to learn the truth about Judge Crater’s disappearance? Soon enough, after the circus played out, the world would forget Crater and turn its attention to whatever new scandal, war, homicide, championship, police action, earthquake presented itself. Those few directly connected to the case would be left to nurse old wounds, bloodier than ever.

  He dropped the notebook in the trashcan and walked to the phone booth at the end of the platform, pushing away the thought of Roberta sitting beside Felipe as they drove to the beach. As he dialed the number for the taxi, her convertible entered the parking lot.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said.

  “You look terrible. Get in.”

  He got in.

  The radio was on. News of the latest atomic test in the Nevada Proving Ground. Army, navy and civil defense participating. He played with the dial. Knew what he wanted: Nat King Cole singing “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup”; instead, Tennessee Ernie Ford rumbling through “Sixteen Tons,” followed by Leo Durocher shilling for a brand of cigarettes he probably didn’t smoke.

  “Mind if I turn this off?” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  Words that came into his head arrived like a just-remembered lyric, but they weren’t from a song:

  “‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity/ What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?’”

  They rode in silence. Give it time. She’s sitting next to you. That’s a start.

  Pace yourself, Fin.

  Author’s Note

  “To disappear enhances –

  The Man that runs away

  Is tinctured for an instant

  With Immortality.”

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  “A NOVEL,” A SAGE CRITIC ONCE OBSERVED, “IS A PACK OF LIES IN pursuit of the truth.” Based on the still-unsolved disappearance of New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, who entered a taxi on August 6th, 1930, and was never seen again, The Man Who Never Returned is a novel. When facts fit the purposes of the pursuit, I use them; when they don’t, I alter, invent, lie. This is what novelists do. Sue me.

  The real-life Judge Crater, like the fictional character in my book, was only forty-one when Governor Roosevelt appointed him to fill an interim vacancy on the State Supreme Court. A Protestant from Pennsylvania and a graduate of Lafayette College, Crater attended New York’s prestigious Columbia University Law School (F.D.R.’s alma mater). According to his wife Stella, Crater’s parents had been violently opposed. “‘New York is a wicked town,’ his mother protested. ‘It is a den of iniquity.’”

  Crater graduated from Columbia in 1916 and got married the following year. To supplement his salary as a law clerk, he started to teach law part-time at City College as well as lecture at NYU and Fordham. He enjoyed teaching but one day informed Stella that “there are many things I would like you to have out of life and mere teaching will not provide them.”

  Though his education and background qualified him for entry into the city’s white-shoe law firms, he chose a different path. Undeterred by the city-bred, street-wise heavily Irish/ Jewish mix that ran the Tammany machine, he told his wife with pragmatic bluntness (and with a refreshing lack of idealistic bluster), “I have decided that the best way to get ahead is to go into politics.”

  Crater joined the Cayuga Democratic Club on the West Side. Along with proving a loyal and hardworking party regular, Stella reported, he “volunteered his services for any matter concerning elections which arose in the courts.” This brought him to the attention of Tammany sachem and State Senate majority leader Robert F. Wagner.

  In 1919, Wagner was elected to the State Supreme Court. (New York’s Supreme Court is the highest court of original jurisdiction but the ultimate arbiter of the law is the Court of Appeals.) He chose Crater to be his law secretary. Crater stayed until 1926 when Wagner made a successful run for the U.S. Senate. J. Joseph Huthmacher, Wagner’s biographer, described Crater as a “brilliant young lawyer” who was responsible for writing many of Wagner’s significant judicial decisions.

  Franklin Roosevelt, who’d been elected to a two-year term as governor in 1928, appointed Crater to fill an interim term on the State Supreme Court in March of 1930. Stella Crater—admittedly not the most reliable source when it came to a candid appraisal of her husband’s abilities and actions—maintained that F.D.R. told Joe he had it in him “‘to go all the way to the United States Supreme Court.’”

  F.D.R.’s re-election as governor was widely recognized as a prelude to a 1932 presidential run. But allegations of rampant corruption in the New York City’s magistrate’s court and demands for a state-run investigation threatened to complicate those plans. Reluctant to antagonize the big-city bosses, whose support he needed, and wary perhaps (justifiably, as it turned out) that the investigation might lead to damaging revelat
ions about the anything-goes regime of Mayor Jimmy Walker, F.D.R. hesitated.

  In August, Roosevelt finally bowed to growing public outrage and agreed to an investigation headed by Judge Samuel Seabury, who harbored his own ambitions for the presidency. News of Crater’s disappearance, which broke almost simultaneously with Seabury’s appointment, threatened not only to expose an even higher and more damning level of judicial corruption, but had the potential to derail F.D.R.’s presidential ambitions.

  My interest in the case dates back to childhood. My father, who attended Fordham University Law School and once heard Crater give a lecture there, was admitted to the bar in 1930. He spent his career in Democratic politics, serving as a New York State assemblyman, a U.S. congressman and a justice of the State Supreme Court. Whenever the elevator in our Bronx apartment building stopped on a floor where nobody was waiting, my father would say, “Judge Crater must have pushed the button.”

  I don’t remember precisely when my father explained to me who Judge Crater was, but it must have been in the early 1950s (I was born in 1947), because I understood the reference as long as I can remember, and it frightened me. If Crater could suddenly vanish so completely, why not my father?

  The Crater case stayed with me over the years. In 1974, I visited my father in his chambers on Foley Square. At one point, a note of sadness in his voice, he remarked apropos of nothing, “I’m told these were Judge Crater’s chambers.” Though he hadn’t yet been diagnosed with the lung cancer that would kill him, the melancholy reference to Crater indicated to me that he suspected his own imminent demise.

  While a speechwriter for Governors Carey and Cuomo, I made frequent forays to the State Library, in Albany. Mostly, I focused on researching speeches, except when I digressed and followed my promiscuous fascination with the history of New York City and wandered with aimless delight through the microfilms of old newspapers. At one point, I stumbled on the accounts of Crater’s disappearance and briefly considered writing a book about it.