by Ron Hansen
“Wouldn’t two hundred dollars be a lot to loan a man you don’t really know?”
She was flustered. “Who said I didn’t know him?”
“You did,” George McLaughlin said. “Half a minute ago.”
“I have no idea where this is going.”
“We do,” George McLaughlin said. “And we know where you’re going, too.”
“The Jamaica precinct house,” Arthur Carey said.
“I can’t leave here.”
“You have to.”
“But I’m ill.”
“You look fine to us.”
She teared up. “I’ve lost a husband,” she cried. “You ought to be sympathizing with me. You ought to be looking for the killers.”
“We just have some more questions to ask. But at the precinct.”
And just like that her mood changed. “All right,” she said, and in fury flung aside Lorraine’s blanket as she got out of bed. She then gripped the hem of her green satin nightgown and wriggled it up over her head so that she was stunningly naked in front of the men. She was blonde there too. She defiantly smiled at their guilty fascination and uneasiness and then strode down the hallway to the room of Albert’s murder, where she taunted the shocked policemen at the crime scene by ever so slowly getting into her undergarments and dress.
At the Jamaica station house Ruth Snyder was escorted past the glaring group of the Fidgeons, the Eldridges, and the Houghs, including the loutish George with whom Albert had skirmished. She was seated in an interrogation room, where she was grilled for several hours, with each interrogator making wilder suppositions and claiming evidence he didn’t yet have. Still, she impressed the commissioner as “a woman of great calm.” She never requested a lawyer. She requested only food and sleep. And so she was given an Italian restaurant’s dinner of spaghetti, salad, and garlic bread, and was permitted a half-hour nap on an office sofa as McLaughlin interrogated the guests who’d played contract bridge with Albert on Saturday night.
Right after that Commissioner George McLaughlin gently shook Ruth awake and introduced her to Detective Lieutenant Michael McDermott, who’d “be just listening for a while.” And then the commissioner asked, “Mrs. Snyder, is it true that you often stay out all night?”
“Well, I don’t know about often.”
“Who with?”
“With my cousin, Ethel Anderson. Call her and ask.”
“She married?”
“She was. To Edward Pierson.” And then, as if it confirmed her veracity and reputation, Ruth commented, “Eddie’s a Bronx patrolman.”
McLaughlin turned and McDermott took the hint, heading out of the office to telephone the officer and order him to Jamaica. McLaughlin faced Ruth again. “We’ve been told that last fall you went on a tour of Canada without your husband.”
She frostily said, “Who told you?”
“Women at that card party.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“I just need to know who went with you.”
Ruth was tentative. “Mr. and Mrs. Kehoe.”
McLaughlin jotted the name down. “You have a telephone number for them?”
“No.”
“How about an address?”
“Somewhere in Brooklyn.”
She was lying; he’d counted at least three tells in her face. McLaughlin laid his pencil down in frustration and walked out of the office, and Ruth just sat there alone, stewing, for half an hour.
Around eleven o’clock Detective Peter Trumfeller peeked into the room and smiled as he said, “Why, hello, Tommy!” Trumfeller was a wide and happy man with slicked-back hair and windburnt cheeks. He owned a 1925 Ford T-bucket roadster convertible and she’d once cruised with him in it, her scarf and hair fluttering, all the way to West Point and back.
Ruth smiled at him in relief. “Oh, are you coming to take me home to Lorraine?”
Detective Trumfeller walked in and held his hand tenderly to her cheek. She turned into the hand and kissed it as tears filled her eyes. She was getting up to go as his other hand roughly forced her down. Like a lover, the fat detective bent over to find her right ear and say in hushed tones, “These guys know when you’re lying, Tommy. They’ve gone through this hundreds of times and you, you’re just a rookie. They know your stories are all baloney because nothing fits together. You’re torturing yourself with lies. Just go ahead and tell the truth and get the elephant off your chest.”
Ruth was stiff in astonishment and then she lifted the handkerchief in her lap and touched it to each pretty eye. “I’m so very tired,” she said, but only as if she’d had a hard day tilling the garden. “Where’s the police commissioner?”
Detective Trumfeller escorted Ruth past the still-glaring card party to the head man’s office. It was just past eleven o’clock. Cigarette smoke hung from the ceiling. Lieutenant McDermott shook out another Pall Mall but just let it lie on his lip as he watched Ruth walk in. Commissioner McLaughlin swiveled in his creaking oak chair and immediately hung up the black telephone earpiece when he saw her.
She smiled. “Please accept my apologies for keeping all of you up so late.”
The police commissioner jerked his head toward a straight-backed chair and Peter Trumfeller scraped it over for Ruth to regally sit on.
She softly said, “I don’t think I can stand any more questioning.”
McLaughlin nodded toward McDermott and said, “Mac’s been talking to your cousin Ethel’s estranged husband.”
“Eddie,” she said, as if saying it made her happier.
“Well, Eddie says you’ve got a boyfriend.” The police commissioner twisted around and got a notepad from McDermott, and held the notepad up in front of Ruth’s face. The name “Judd Gray” was printed on it. “Was this the man who killed your husband?”
She sighed. “Has he confessed?”
McLaughlin lied and said Judd had indeed confessed; then he invited a stenographer to record their conversation, instructing Ruth so she could make the stenographer’s job easier. “We’ll begin with your name and intent,” he said.
“My name is Ruth May Snyder,” she said, “and I want to make a full and truthful statement about the death of my husband, Albert Snyder.”
The police commissioner coached, “‘And I understand that anything I say may be used against me.’”
She said that.
The headlines for the front page of the New York Times had been firmly set by then: “GIRL FINDS MOTHER BOUND” and “Woman Tells of Quarrel at Card Party and of Strangers in House.” Page two carried the headline “ART EDITOR SLAIN,” but that was the last time an account would focus on Albert Snyder. It was Ruth who fascinated.
TWO
VERY PRETTY
She told them she could not recall when she was first introduced to Judd Gray, but she could, in fact, recall everything: the fierce sun at noon, the torrid heat shimmering off the streets of Manhattan, the horns of jockeying Model T taxicabs, and the shrill whistles of white-gloved police directing the traffic on Madison Avenue. It was June 1925 and inside the hosiery shop there was a faint chemical smell and a gray tin fleur-de-lis ceiling and giant fan blades shoving hot air around as a pretty hairdresser friend named Kitty Kaufman flirted with a stocking salesman named Harry Folsom and Harry joined the flirtation with lame jokes and flattery.
“Are you girls hungry?” Harry finally asked.
Kitty was Jewish and fetching, with hazel eyes and coffee-colored hair combed over to the left like a surge of ocean, and she wore a form-describing silk dress that hinted it could slither off. She was beyond the likes of Harry Folsom but she was ten years married and flattered by his attentions. She gave Ruth a Shall I? glance. Ruth snapped her Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum and shrugged.
“Hey, you gotta eat,” Harry said.
“I guess,” Kitty said. She sought affirmation, but Ruth couldn’t have cared less. She’d inserted a hand inside some fine silk hose that seemed dark as Coca-Cola. She held it up to the full glare of sunli
ght.
“Ruth, you keep those McCallums,” Harry said. “Seriously. My gift. Look lovely on you. And join Mrs. Kaufman and me for lunch.”
“You’re very kind,” Ruth said, as if he wasn’t.
Kitty focused on Ruth in that Say yes way, seeming not so much attracted to him as to the fact that she still seemed attractive.
“Where?” Ruth asked.
Harry folded his gift of McCallum hosiery in a paper bag and became doggish in his eagerness. “How about Henry’s Swedish restaurant? Cooler there because of the ice. Thirty-sixth Street, east of Sixth Avenue. My treat.”
“Smorgasbord,” Kitty said. “You get to have whatever you want.”
“Rarely true,” said Ruth.
Exiting the shop, Harry slanted on his Borsalino hat and inserted himself between the friends so his hands could ride both their backs in their stroll.
The façade of Henry’s Restaurant was a cool, seawater green, and green were the lampshades inside, the cold tessellated floor, the fake ferns and nasturtiums and trellis. Ruth’s late father was from a fishing village in Norway, and Josephine was from a fishing village in Sweden, so she’d grown up with the foods now laid out on cracked ice in Henry’s Restaurant: cold dishes of salmon, herring, lox, whitefish, ham and mustard, jellied pigs’ feet, and hard-boiled eggs. And elsewhere the hot dishes of Swedish meatballs, roasted pork ribs, matchstick potatoes covered with cream, stewed green cabbage, onion and sprats, and beetroot salad in mayonnaise. But Harry Folsom first wanted to slake his thirst, so he ushered them to a booth he called “his” and ordered three Clicquot Club ginger ales from a fat waiter named Olaf, who returned with highball glasses that were just two-thirds filled so there would be room for the first-rate London gin that Harry stirred in from his flask. After hearing Harry’s old pun on his name as he offered them a “fulsome toast,” Kitty joined him in swiftly finishing the highball and then ordering another, and Ruth just watched them, fascinated by Harry’s heavy exertions at courtship and Kitty’s schoolgirlish agreement to be wooed. Harry’s left arm wedged its way around Kitty and he angled toward her, even whispered a few endearments, but he seemed increasingly nervous in his awareness that he was entertaining two women and if he lost one’s interest he’d perhaps lose both.
And that’s when his right hand flew up in a roundhouse wave and he called, “Why, it’s Henry in Henry’s! Hey Judd, join us!”
Ruth turned to see a solemn, handsome man in his early thirties hanging his straw hat on a peg. He was short but trim, athletic, and dapper, with owlish, round, tortoiseshell glasses; flannel-blue eyes; and walnut brown hair so wavy it seemed corrugated. His highly polished brown shoes were probably Italian, his tan Brooks Brothers suit seemed so unwrinkled it could have been bought just that hour, and his chin was square and manly with the deep almond of a dimple. She turned to face Kitty and smiled for the first time that day as the gentleman walked over. She smelled his spice cologne as he shook Mr. Folsom’s hand and was invited into the booth.
“I’m fit only for a solo,” he said. “I was just going to gobble a bite and get back to the office.” He spoke with the lulling, tranquilizing baritone of radio broadcasters.
Imitating a pout, Kitty said, “But Ruth’s feeling left out.”
Judd Gray looked down and found a gorgeous Scandinavian woman of thirty frankly staring at him with thrilling blue eyes that flashed with so much light she seemed candled. Even on such a hot day, a wintery, gray fox fur was flung over her shoulders and she wore a dark cloche hat over her very blonde hair. She was dressed in a navy blue, filmy fabric that betrayed the full, round breasts that were unfashionable in those first days of the boy look. Judd was good with scents and noted she’d chosen Shalimar lilac perfume for the day.
“If I’m not intruding,” Judd said.
Ruth smiled and said, “Please do.”
His thigh slightly touched Ruth’s as he sat and she let hers stay as it was. His closeness to her made his handshake awkward as he affably said, “Hello there. I’m Judd Gray.”
“I thought your name was Henry.”
“It is in the birth register,” the hosiery salesman said.
Judd explained, “I’m formally Henry Judd Gray but I just use the initial H. Harry likes to flaunt his detective work.”
“So it’s Judd,” Kitty said.
“My friends call me Bud.”
Ruth smiled again. “So many choices!”
“I haven’t one for you yet.”
“Mrs. Snyder,” she said. “Ruth.”
Imitating her, Kitty said, “Mrs. Kaufman. Karin. But they call me Kitty.” She shook his hand. “She’s also called Tommy.”
Judd grinned. “Oh. Are you a tom-boy?”
“Kitty calls me that because my friends are mostly men.”
“And why’s that?”
She said with that silky caress of a voice, “Oh, who knows? I guess because they’re so safely predictable in some ways. And unpredictable in others.”
Harry called out, “Olaf! A ginger ale for Mr. Gray.”
“Me too,” Kitty said.
Seeing Ruth’s highball glass was still full, Harry called out, “Three,” and finished his own. And then, out of nowhere, Harry hiked up Kitty’s calf as high as his chest. “Wouldja look at the shapely ankles on this gal?”
Kitty just laughed and swatted his hands off. Judd was sure, then, that these were fast “delicatessen” ladies, and he looked at Ruth so intently her face got hot. “You’re very tan,” he said.
“We just got back from a weekend sailing on the Atlantic.”
“We?”
“The husband, me, and the baby.” Ruth looked at his nicely manicured left hand. “I see you’re manacled too.”
Judd glanced at his gold wedding ring. “Almost ten years now. Isabel. And I have an eight-year-old. Jane. She’ll be nine in August.”
“Mine’s seven. Lorraine.”
“Oh. You said ‘baby.’ I was imagining a child—”
“The size of a shoebox?”
Judd laughed, and the ginger ales were served, again two-thirds full and with a spoon. Harry screwed off the cap on his hammered silver flask. “Shall I?”
Judd shoved his highball glass forward. “Homemade?”
Harry filled the glasses. “Certainly not, old fellow! Shipped from the Beefeater distillery by way of our friends in Canada.”
Judd lifted his glass. “Well, here’s to the Eighteenth Amendment.”
Harry rejoined, “And may Congress prohibit sex just as effectively.”
Kitty giggled, and Harry gave Judd a lewd wink.
Ruth angled her head. “Are you employed, Mr. Gray?”
Harry told the ladies, “Judd sells for Benjamin and Johnes.”
“Sells what?” Kitty asked.
“The Bien Jolie line,” Judd said. “Corselettes and brassieres. I handle the retailers in eastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Our corporate offices are just a stone’s throw from here—Thirty-fourth and Fifth.”
Harry’s hand heavily fell on Ruth’s as he said, “And I’ll make sure his office gets you anything you want, sweetie. How about it, Bud?”
Judd felt forced to say, “Always glad to be of service.”
Kitty already seemed tipsy as she asked, “What kind of fella sells corsets?”
Judd told her, “A fellow who’s fond of the female form.”
Ruth smiled. “You must get asked that question a lot.”
“Oh, did that sound practiced?”
Kitty asked what “Bien Jolie” meant.
“‘Very pretty,’” Judd said.
Kitty frowned. “Isn’t that très jolie?”
“Aren’t you the smart one,” Harry said, and grabbed her torso more tightly to him. Because of the heat, she wriggled away.
“I haven’t any French,” Judd said. “But I’m told the bien makes the jolie more intense.”
“Like ‘very, very pretty’?” Ruth asked.
Judd grinn
ed. “Like you.”
Ruth shied from the sultry pleasure of his gaze.
“And flattery like that is why he hauls in five thousand dollars a year,” Harry said.
Kitty gasped. “Five thousand dollars! Jeepers!”
“It’s just a number,” Judd said, and noticed Ruth’s interest. Judd noticed, too, that Ruth still had not lifted a glass with them, that her first iced drink was sweating onto the homey blue-and-white checkered tablecloth. “Are you a teetotaler, Mrs. Snyder?”
She seemed demure as she said, “I just pace myself. There’s nothing worse than a full day of drinking, then waking up next to some guy and not being able to remember how you met or why he’s dead.”
She shocked them into raucous laughter and the fat waiter took that as an invitation to finally take their food orders. But Harry Folsom noted that the four of them seemed to be having so much fun together that they all should flee the torrid city and head up to his shady porch in New Canaan, Connecticut. Mrs. Kaufman liked the idea, but Judd excused himself to go back to work, and on a glancing hint from Kitty, Ruth said she wanted to catch the train to Queens Village.
Exiting the booth, Judd asked, “Are you taking the Long Island line?”
Ruth said she was.
“I’ll walk you to Penn Station.”
She said nothing as they strolled west to Seventh Avenue. Looking at their reflections in the shop windows, Judd noticed that she would be at least two inches taller than he even without high heels. But she was glamorous, too, and the gin had made him zesty and loquacious, so as they walked down to 33rd Street, Judd filled the silence with chatter and facts about Pennsylvania Station. Did she know it took up seven acres and was the largest indoor space in America? And the enormous waiting room? Judd had heard it was inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla.
She seemed amused. “You know a lot, don’t you?” It did not seem a compliment.
“I have no idea why I’m so nervous around you.”
She wryly said, “Well, I’m ‘very, very pretty.’ Any man would be.”
Walking through the grand entrance, Judd noted for Ruth the Corinthian columns, and then the huge clock framed by a pink granite pair of sculpted females. “Day” was fully dressed in the flowing drapery of ancient Greece and was carrying a harvest of giant sunflowers, while “Night” was shaded by a shrouding cape she held over her head and she was naked from the waist up, the firm breasts inspiring some men there to become clock watchers.