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Authors: Harold Schechter
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free to discuss their doubts with each other. But after all, what doubts could they have about their son’s kindly new employer, the well-to-do, grandfatherly man who had treated them all with such generosity?
Mrs. Budd hesitated for a moment, but her husband cleared his throat and said, “Let the poor kid go. She’s always cooped up here in this dungeon. She don’t see much good times.”
There was one important fact the Budds had neglected to ascertain. Where, Grace’s mother wondered, did Mr. Howard’s sister live?
The old man answered without hesitation. In a nice building on 137th Street and Columbus Avenue, he said.
New Yorkers like to think of themselves as streetwise and worldly. But many New Yorkers are as provincial as any small-towners. Both Delia Budd and her husband had lived their whole lives in Manhattan. But like many working-class housewives of her time, Mrs. Budd rarely ventured out of her neighborhood, and her husband’s world was only slightly less circumscribed, its boundaries denned by the Midtown office building he worked in and his Fifteenth Street home. For that reason, no alarm bells rang in their heads when the little man told them where the party was taking place. The Budds simply didn’t know that Columbus Avenue ends at 110th Street—that the old man had given them a nonexistent address.
By the time they found out, it was already too late.
Mrs. Budd helped Gracie into her dress-up spring coat with fur-trimmed collar and cuffs. A fake pink rose was pinned to the lapel. On her head, the girl wore a gray hat with blue streamers. With her little brown leather bag clutched in her hand, she was the picture of a proper young lady, dressed for a Sunday stroll.
The old man bid goodbye to Gracie’s parents and little Beatrice, who was still munching candy from a small paper sack.
Mrs. Budd followed the pair outside and stood on the front stoop of her apartment building, watching them walk up the street, the bowlegged old man in his dusty, dark suit with her pretty ten-year-old daughter beside him. A few of Gracie’s friends, playing on the street and spotting the girl in her holiday finery, began to shout at her in razzing tones: “Gracie’s a swell! Gracie’s a swell!” The little girl ignored them for a moment before turning her head quickly and sticking out her tongue.
Then, with Mrs. Budd still watching, the couple turned the corner and disappeared.
Before they proceeded on their journey, the old man had a stop to make. At the corner of Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue, he retrieved his canvas-wrapped bundle and thanked the man inside the newsstand for watching it. Then he and the girl continued on their way, the old man cradling his bundle in his arms.
Wrapped inside were a butcher’s knife, a meat cleaver, and a small handsaw—the three items that had come from Sobel’s hock shop and that the little gray man with the kindly eyes and friendly smile liked to think of as his “implements of hell.”
PART 2
King of the Missing
8
He looked like a meek and innocuous little old man, gentle and benevolent, friendly and polite. If you wanted someone to entrust your children to, he would be the one you would choose. FREDERIC WERTHAM, The Show of Violence
There is a type of optical illusion known, in its more pretentious manifestations, as “camouflage art.” These are paintings, generally of wilderness landscapes, that, viewed up close, look like simple, picturesque scenes—a mountain lake with a snow-covered slope reflected on its surface, a field of wildflowers, a forest of birch trees.
Take a few steps back, however, and the picture changes. The mirrored rock assumes the shape of an eagle in flight, the flowers form themselves into a rearing stallion, the boles of the birch trees become the profile of an Apache warrior. The myriad details resolve themselves into a single, unmistakable image, previously hidden from sight—but only when they are seen from a
Mrs. Budd hesitated for a moment, but her husband cleared his throat and said, “Let the poor kid go. She’s always cooped up here in this dungeon. She don’t see much good times.”
There was one important fact the Budds had neglected to ascertain. Where, Grace’s mother wondered, did Mr. Howard’s sister live?
The old man answered without hesitation. In a nice building on 137th Street and Columbus Avenue, he said.
New Yorkers like to think of themselves as streetwise and worldly. But many New Yorkers are as provincial as any small-towners. Both Delia Budd and her husband had lived their whole lives in Manhattan. But like many working-class housewives of her time, Mrs. Budd rarely ventured out of her neighborhood, and her husband’s world was only slightly less circumscribed, its boundaries denned by the Midtown office building he worked in and his Fifteenth Street home. For that reason, no alarm bells rang in their heads when the little man told them where the party was taking place. The Budds simply didn’t know that Columbus Avenue ends at 110th Street—that the old man had given them a nonexistent address.
By the time they found out, it was already too late.
Mrs. Budd helped Gracie into her dress-up spring coat with fur-trimmed collar and cuffs. A fake pink rose was pinned to the lapel. On her head, the girl wore a gray hat with blue streamers. With her little brown leather bag clutched in her hand, she was the picture of a proper young lady, dressed for a Sunday stroll.
The old man bid goodbye to Gracie’s parents and little Beatrice, who was still munching candy from a small paper sack.
Mrs. Budd followed the pair outside and stood on the front stoop of her apartment building, watching them walk up the street, the bowlegged old man in his dusty, dark suit with her pretty ten-year-old daughter beside him. A few of Gracie’s friends, playing on the street and spotting the girl in her holiday finery, began to shout at her in razzing tones: “Gracie’s a swell! Gracie’s a swell!” The little girl ignored them for a moment before turning her head quickly and sticking out her tongue.
Then, with Mrs. Budd still watching, the couple turned the corner and disappeared.
Before they proceeded on their journey, the old man had a stop to make. At the corner of Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue, he retrieved his canvas-wrapped bundle and thanked the man inside the newsstand for watching it. Then he and the girl continued on their way, the old man cradling his bundle in his arms.
Wrapped inside were a butcher’s knife, a meat cleaver, and a small handsaw—the three items that had come from Sobel’s hock shop and that the little gray man with the kindly eyes and friendly smile liked to think of as his “implements of hell.”
PART 2
King of the Missing
8
He looked like a meek and innocuous little old man, gentle and benevolent, friendly and polite. If you wanted someone to entrust your children to, he would be the one you would choose. FREDERIC WERTHAM, The Show of Violence
There is a type of optical illusion known, in its more pretentious manifestations, as “camouflage art.” These are paintings, generally of wilderness landscapes, that, viewed up close, look like simple, picturesque scenes—a mountain lake with a snow-covered slope reflected on its surface, a field of wildflowers, a forest of birch trees.
Take a few steps back, however, and the picture changes. The mirrored rock assumes the shape of an eagle in flight, the flowers form themselves into a rearing stallion, the boles of the birch trees become the profile of an Apache warrior. The myriad details resolve themselves into a single, unmistakable image, previously hidden from sight—but only when they are seen from a
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