Read Online The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins - Free Book Online

bakery at four o’clock. My work was finished by two thirty in the afternoon.”
    And then?
    “I don’t know where I went after that.”
    O’Brien was unimpressed.
    “I guess I was drunk,” Nack sneered—and his alibi for the next day was not much different.
    “I get up at about 1 or 2 and go over the ferry to the bakery. I hitch up and then start to deliver bread. I get through about 4 p.m. Then I go on a spree.”
    “A spree?”
    “Oh, I go to Strack’s and I bowl with the boys and drink beer. I get back to my room in Eighty-Second Street about 10 o’clock. I had a good load on when I went to bed Saturday night. Haw! Haw!”
    And the next day?
    “I was so drunk that I had to stay in bed nearly all of Sunday.”
    “When did you last see the murdered man?”
    “I don’t remember exactly, but I guess it was three or four months ago. I saw him on the street at Ninth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth.”
    Captain O’Brien puzzled over the man before him. A brute, a drunk—yes, yes—a spurned husband with a perfect motive. But Nack didn’t give a damn about his ex-wife, and bachelorhood seemed to suit him just fine.
    “What the deuce do I care?” The suspect shrugged.
    And it checked out: Word came in that not only could Astoria ModelBakery’s owner vouch for Nack’s working and drinking schedule but that on the fateful Friday night the bakery foreman and Nack had actually led Strack’s saloon in belting out an entire set of drinking songs.
He’s not it
, O’Brien quietly decided. Herman Nack’s story just didn’t fit the case.
    But someone else’s did.
    AUGUSTA NACK WAS READY for the next steamer to Hamburg. She’d spent the previous afternoon with four hired men rolling rugs, packing furniture and bedclothes, and washing the curtains for the nexttenant in her six-room flat over Werner’s Drug Store. This was the last day on her$20 monthly lease; she’d given notice to Mr. Werner two days earlier, and with all the quarreling that had gone on in the place, the short notice didn’t seem to trouble him. She’d even had to sleep in the apartment of her upstairs neighbor overnight, as nearly everything short of her portmanteau was packed.
    The visit from thedetective now sitting on her sofa was most inconveniently timed.
    “Do you know William Guldensuppe?” he asked.
    Mrs. Nack looked keenly at DetectiveKrauch, and then at the chair—which should have been readied for storage but was instead seating another detective. Then she shifted her gaze over to the doorway, where yet another detective stood with his back to the door, keeping any movers from coming in and Mrs. Nack from going out.
    She hesitated. “Yes, I know him. He is my man. At least he
was
until Friday morning, when he came from the bath and made me give him fifty dollars. Then we quarreled over a woman, and he went away.”
    Detective Krauch watched her carefully as she spoke. She was not exactly a Gibson girl anymore, but she had dark eyes and the presence to fluster one observer into describing her “pleasing, yet repellant, appearance.” Her man, she claimed, had been wooed away by the wanton widow of a grocer. She’d caught them in the parlor mirror the week before when they thought her back was turned. Why, just that very day that grocery hussy had come by to collect more of his worthless possessions.
    “I gave her a bit of my mind,” she snapped, “and told her she had stolen William from me.” So now she was putting her own goods in storage and heading back to Germany and her mother, and—couldn’t she just leave now?
    No, they informed her, she could not.
    For the detectives knew two things that Mrs. Nack didn’t. First, that Detective Krauch had been watching her apartment, and neither the mistress nor anyone else had come up her stairs that morning. And now they also knew that she wasn’t going to be making it to her Hamburg steamer that day.
    ——
    SITTING IN CAPTAIN O’BRIEN’S OFFICE at the Mulberry Street