The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  Chapter Twelve

  Wednesday, April 26, 1939

  New York City

  John Bone arrived in New York on the morning of April 26 and immediately took a taxi from Grand Central Station to the Gramercy Park Hotel at Twenty-first and Lexington, the hotel being a random choice taken from a guidebook he’d purchased in Washington. He registered and took a moderate-size double room on the fourth floor overlooking the small, fenced square of greenery that gave the hotel its name. He returned to the lobby then had a bacon-and-eggs breakfast in the old-fashioned European-style dining room. His meal over, he consulted briefly with the desk clerk. Following the young man’s directions, he made his way to the Walgreens Drugstore at Broadway and Twenty-third Street on the ground floor of the Flatiron Building, putting him within a hundred yards of Jane Todd’s office in the Tamblyn Building.

  At the drugstore he purchased a pair of black-framed magnifying glasses for reading, a package of twenty Grand single-edge razor blades, a small jar of Dart Household Glue and a bottle of Instant Clairol in black, as well as a four-ounce bottle of Marchand’s Golden Hair Wash, which was essentially a five-percent hydrogen peroxide solution. He went to two more drugstores, buying another bottle of Clairol in each, one blond and one red.

  Carrying his purchases in a brown paper bag, Bone returned to the hotel by way of Broadway, stopping at the Woolworth on the corner of Twenty-first Street to purchase a broad cold chisel from the hardware department, a cheap straw Panama hat, six lengths of coloured ribbon from the sewing department, a $1.88 Excello shirt with a celluloid collar stiffener and a box of small envelopes. This done, he returned to the hotel, stopping at the newsstand to purchase copies of the New York Times, the Herald-Tribune, the Daily News, the Journal-American, the Post, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Bronx Home News and the Mirror.

  Back in his rooms, Bone spread out the newspapers on the table under the window, concentrating on the obituary pages from all the dailies as well as the shipping news from the Times, the Herald Tribune and the Daily News. For the next hour and a half he went carefully through these pages, using the razor blades, mucilage and his notebook from Washington to assemble a collection of eleven possible obituaries, as well as a list of passenger liners due to arrive in New York on that day, Thursday and Friday. Cross-referencing his clippings with the telephone directory in his room he then matched addresses and telephone numbers with the names of the deceased given in the obituaries, as well as gathering listings for the offices of the relevant shipping lines, jotting the information down in his notebook.

  Bone’s plan for creating several new identities for himself was simple, straightforward and involved very little risk. It was also a method he had used to good effect on several occasions in the past, including the Karageorgevic contract, several jobs in Romania and Bulgaria and, more recently, the Sandino affair in Nicaragua. In Bone’s experience the best prospects were usually Catholic. A Catholic funeral service took much longer than a Protestant or Jewish one, and if there was going to be a special, and longer, requiem mass, the obituary invariably mentioned it. Such a funeral could easily take as long as four hours from beginning to end, which often meant that the dead person’s home was empty and vulnerable for that period of time.

  The first funeral on his list was set for the following morning with a requiem mass at the Church of St Andrew on Duane Street, just off Foley Square near City Hall. Interment would take place at Holy Cross Cemetery in Queens. The dead man’s name was Harold E. Moss, a forty-two-year-old lawyer survived by a wife but apparently with no children. The only Harold E. Moss listed in the telephone directory lived at 410 Central Park West, which according to the map in Bone’s guidebook put it roughly at 101st Street.

  The next morning Bone ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant then returned to his room. He pressed the magnifying lenses out of the reading glasses then put the frames in the side pocket of his suit jacket along with the collar stiffener from the shirt and one of the envelopes from the stationery box, which he’d already addressed to Mrs Harold E. Moss. He put the straw hat back into the Woolworth bag, then returned to the lobby and went out through the revolving door onto Lexington. He walked up a block to avoid using the doorman, then hailed a cab and took it to Central Park, travelling up the east side on Fifth Avenue. He got out of the taxi at East 100th Street, then crossed Fifth Avenue and used the public telephone there, calling the directory number for Harold Moss. He let it ring eleven times then hung up, assuming that the apartment was empty. Bone continued on, entering the park by the children’s area at the Transverse Road, putting on the empty eyeglass frames and the straw hat as he strolled casually across the North Meadow Playground, exiting just below the pool at West 101st Street.

  The address he wanted was a sixteen-storey building on the south-west corner of 101st and had the name Edith painted on the green-and-white-striped awning over the main door. A uniformed doorman was standing behind a narrow counter just inside the main entrance, an array of darkly varnished pigeonhole letterboxes behind him.

  ‘Help you?’ said the doorman.

  ‘I’m here to see Mrs Moss.’

  ‘She’s at the funeral.’

  ‘Then perhaps I can leave this card for her.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Bone took the envelope out of his pocket and handed it to the doorman. He glanced at the address, turned and popped it into the box marked 601. There were already half a dozen other envelopes stuffed into the pigeonhole.

  Bone reached into his pocket and took out a dollar bill. He handed it to the doorman. ‘You’ll see that she gets it?’

  ‘You bet,’ said the doorman, folding the dollar and putting it into the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. ‘Soon as she gets back.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bone. He turned away and left the building. The rear entrance to the Edith was down a service alley that ran behind the apartment block, connecting West 101st Street to West 102nd. In the central air shaft he found a row of battered garbage cans and a heavy, dark green metal door with the address of the building splashed across it in rough strokes of white.

  The door was equipped with an impressively large pin tumbler lock but there was no shielding metal flange across the door and the jamb. Bone took out the celluloid collar stiffener, eased it between the frame and the door, then slowly sawed the strip back and forth, easing it down on the lock catch, pushing it out of the strike box in the frame until it popped open. Had the door been fitted with a flange he would have used the cold chisel in his other pocket to bend it back out of the way and if the door had been fitted with a more efficient lock he would have simply gone to the next address on his list, hoping for better luck there.

  As it was, he put the collar stiffener back in his pocket and opened the door. He found himself in the rear stairwell, which smelled faintly of garbage. He paused, listening for a moment, hearing nothing but the buzzing of a large bluebottle fly and a distant echo of rattling pipes coming from below. Reasonably confident that his entry had gone unnoted, he eased the door closed behind him, leaving it barely ajar. The garbage cans were empty and the smell in the rear vestibule was faint, which meant the refuse had already been picked up. It was unlikely that the rear door would be used in the next hour or so, and even if it was, whoever used it would conclude that it had been left open by accident.

  There was almost certainly access to a service elevator in the basement but Bone ignored the possibility on the off chance that there was some sort of in-use indicator behind the doorman’s position by the front door. Instead he climbed the stairs, walking up six flights to ease the stairwell door open an inch or so. He found himself looking out into a small public hall tiled with black and white squares of marble. On the opposite side of the hall were a pair of elevators, a short corridor leading away to the left and to the right three doors numbered 602, 603 and 604. Four apartments to each floor, with 601 at the end of the short corridor to his left.

  The locks on the three doors
that he could see were the same pin tumbler types as the rear door of the building and just as easy to slip. There was no reason to think that 601 was any different. Bone took the collar stiffener out of his pocket, pulled open the stairwell door and stepped across the open space and into the corridor. A few seconds later he was inside apartment 601, the door closed safely behind him.

  Once again he paused, listening, his nose tilted to taste the air. Silence except for the steady thump of a large clock somewhere and the muffled sound of traffic moving down Central Park West. No smell of cooking in the air, nothing but furniture oil, floor wax and stale air. Bone glanced at his wristwatch, marking the time and giving himself a thirty-minute maximum limit within the apartment. He did a quick survey of the rooms, walking softly, keeping to the sides of hallways on the off chance that someone in the apartment below could hear his footsteps.

  Directly in front of Bone was the living room, connected to the dining room by a pair of glass-paned pocket doors. Across a narrow hall from the dining room was a small kitchen with three rooms beyond – a pair of bedrooms, each with its own bath and toilet, and a small study sandwiched in between. The living room, dining room and one of the bedrooms looked out onto Central Park while the study, the second bedroom and the kitchen were windowless. The foyer and the hall were floored with diamond-patterned parquet, the kitchen with dark blue battleship linoleum and the rest of the rooms in highly polished blond oak.

  The living room and dining room were both overdone in Louis XVI gold and tapestry. A large, ornately framed portrait of a plain, middle-aged woman wearing a gauzy pale blue evening dress hung over a marble mantelpiece in the living room. The mantel itself was cluttered with lacquer objects and a japanned bowl filled with carnations that were beginning to rot.

  The hall leading down to the bedrooms and the study was hung with botanical prints in colours chosen to match the pastel stripes of the wallpaper behind them, while the bedroom overlooking Central Park was done up like the boudoir of a nineteenth-century English duchess in reds and greens and corals, a massive gilt pier mirror on one wall reflecting a delicate lady’s bed piled high with pillows, its head lovingly swagged with ornate draperies. Definitely a woman’s room, presumably occupied by the person depicted in the oil painting over the fireplace.

  The second, smaller bedroom had clearly been decorated for a man’s taste. Instead of oriental carpeting the wood floor was covered with a large rag rug. The furniture was brown, varnished and Victorian. A dark suit jacket had been hung carelessly over the back of a narrow-seated chair and there was an expensive-looking pair of black shoes beneath it. The bed had been stripped down to the ticking but a wallet, a ring of keys and a pair of glasses had been left on the bedside table. All accessories unnecessary for the dead. Bone picked up the key ring. Three Yales, a motor car ignition key, a thin brass safe-deposit key and a second brass key with SEARS-ROEBUCK stamped on it that probably belonged to the inner cash box of a safe. A small skeleton key that probably fit a desk. Bone slipped the key ring into his pocket then checked the wallet.

  A driver’s licence in the name of the deceased, fifteen dollars in assorted small-denomination bills, several business cards – all from lawyers and tucked away behind a slit in the satin lining of the billfold – and a small, deckle-edged snapshot of a young woman in a bathing suit, sitting on a beach with a line of sand dunes behind her. The young woman was definitely not the person in the living room portrait. He slipped the wallet into his pocket with the keys. Bone did a quick check of the closet and the adjoining bathroom but found nothing of particular interest. There was a prescription pill bottle of nitroglycerine tablets for Harold Moss’s heart in the medicine chest above the sink and a matchbook from the Stork Club in the pocket of one of the suit coats in Moss’s closet. Bone checked his watch then went to the study.

  Another man’s room, the walls a rich Napoleonic green, had a modern-looking oriental carpet on the floor and two brass-tacked green-leather club chairs facing a small gas fireplace. The mantel was set with a pair of decorative marble urns with a portrait above, smaller and more plainly framed than the one in the living room, but showing the same woman, this time dressed in riding clothes, one arm raised and resting on another mantelpiece, the mirror above it reflecting the interior of what appeared to be the drawing room of a large house in the country. There was a small couch, a drooping palm tree in a pot, leaves grey-green with dust, a large roll-top desk in darkly varnished oak, a wooden office swivel chair and, in the corner, half hidden behind the palm, a steel safe on brass casters.

  Bone sat down in front of the desk and rolled back the top. Five minutes later he had a picture of the life led by Harold Moss and his wife. She was a Whitney of one branch or another and controlled most of the money. Presumably Moss had been brought in to breed a new line of Whitney heirs but had failed. Moss, an attorney, had no real practice of his own beyond a sinecure at one of the Whitney charities, spent most of his time in New York while his wife, Deirdre, lived at a more substantial residence in Connecticut. Bone opened all the drawers in the desk, finally discovering the combination for the safe pencilled on one of the file drawers’ side panels.

  He fished the key ring out of his pocket, knelt in front of the safe and entered the numbers on the rotating lock. There was a solid clicking noise as he turned to the last number and he gripped the nickel-plated handle, turning it sharply. The safe opened. Deeds, insurance policies, Moss’s will but not his wife’s, an envelope of cash and two morocco-bound ledger books for the household accounts.

  Using one of the small keys on the ring, Bone opened the box welded to the upper-left-hand side of the safe’s interior and found what he was looking for – Moss’s passport, up-to-date, the most recent stamp showing that he had gone to England the previous spring.

  Under the passport there was a bundle of letters done up with a frayed black shoelace, four more deckle-edged photographs, several multi-coloured tin boxes of Ramses prophylactics and a small black leather case containing a glass-and-steel hypodermic syringe and a green vial containing a sweet-smelling white powder. The label on the vial was from the same doctor as the nitroglycerine tablets in the medicine chest. There was nothing on the vial to identify its contents but Bone presumed that the powder was either heroin or morphine. Prescribed or not, Harold Moss was a drug addict.

  Bone flipped through the small collection of photographs. All were of the same woman as the picture in Moss’s wallet. Pretty, young, in one of the pictures wearing a tennis outfit, in the other three light cotton dresses. Bone checked a few of the letters. ‘My Dearest Darling,’ ‘My Own Darling,’ ‘Cherished Darling.’ Letters from the woman, Allison, to Moss, all of them pledging love eternal and describing the length and breadth of their passion and desires in rich, almost embarrassing detail.

  The daughter of one of Deirdre’s friends, a secretary from Moss’s workplace, a chance shipboard meeting on the way back from England? The letters were all postmarked Long Island and the dates ranged from the previous May up until three weeks ago. For a moment Bone found himself wondering if she was going to be at the funeral, holding back her tears in deference to the widow, and he also thought briefly that the kindest thing might be to remove the bundle of letters, the syringe and the prophylactics from the safe. Why cause Moss’s wife unnecessary pain at her husband’s weakness and infidelity? He slipped the passport into the pocket of his jacket along with the wallet then put everything else back into the metal-skinned lockbox. He was no more than a fleeting, ghostly presence in the life of Deirdre Moss and the death of her husband and he was here for a single purpose, with no place or right to interfere in the unravelling of their separate destinies.

  Bone closed the safe and spun the combination dial. He allowed himself a brief, sour smile as he stood up. The sympathetic thought for Deirdre Moss’s feelings was as telling and as alien to him as his failing night vision and the slight arthritic ache he sometimes felt in his hands. Ten years ago such an emotiona
l twitch in the middle of an assignment would never have occurred to him. He checked his watch again. Twenty-three minutes. It was time to go. He returned to Moss’s bedroom, put the key ring back on the night table and then left the apartment. Half an hour later he was back at the Gramercy Park Hotel, consulting his notebook and planning his next move.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Saturday, April 29, 1939

  New York City

  Despite pack ice in the Gulf of St Lawrence, the Empress of Britain arrived in Montreal as scheduled, shortly after midnight on the twenty-seventh. After breakfast the passengers began leaving the ship but not before Holland and Thomas Barry had settled themselves in a small room behind the Customs table in the dockside embarkation shed. Carefully observed, both Ridder and Sheila Connelly went through Customs without incident, collected their baggage and then took separate taxicabs to Windsor Station. They both purchased through-tickets to New York via Albany and the Twentieth Century Limited, Ridder taking a drawing room to himself while Connelly, still travelling as Mary Coogan, chose a less expensive section sleeper in the same car. Holland and Barry watched as first Ridder and then Connelly changed pounds for American dollars at the Bureau de Change in the station. Following the exchange, Ridder, moving awkwardly on his two canes, went to the Restaurant de la Gare for lunch while the Irish courier sat herself down on one of the wooden benches in the large, echoing waiting room.

  ‘Now what?’ asked Barry.

  ‘We follow them,’ Holland answered.

  Shortly after one in the afternoon their train left Montreal, travelled to the border crossing at Rouses Point, where everyone’s passports were looked at again, and then continued on to Albany, where they arrived late in the evening. They dined in the station restaurant and an hour later transferred to the Twentieth Century. At no time during the entire process did Ridder or Connelly exchange so much as a glance.