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Authors: Paul Collins
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haven’t the slightest doubt?” a
Journal
reporter pressed.
“No! It is the lady. I know it.… I remember her well because she was a fine looking lady, and better dressed than most people who come to my store.”
Captain O’Brien maintained his disquieting gaze at Mrs. Nack. “This woman has identified you as having purchased oilcloth from her,” he said evenly. “Which would seem to connect you to the murder of William Guldensuppe.”
“That is impossible,” the midwife shot back. Guldensuppe, she maintained, was still alive.
She didn’t know where Willie was now, she didn’t know this Mrs. Riger, she didn’t even know any stores in Astoria. But as she spoke, word passed among the detectives that a new piece of evidence had arrived at headquarters; it had just been fished out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard after it camebumping up against the USS
Vermont
. And as they stood up to leave, Captain O’Brien coolly swung open the door for Mrs. Nack.
There,in the middle of his hallway, were two severed human legs—sawn halfway through, then snapped off.
“Do you know those?”
he gloated.
They were hideous objects—rotted from five days in the river, and still nestled in an opened bundle of oilcloth. O’Brien waited for Mrs. Nack to faint, to shriek, to break down. But the midwife merely turned to him with a look to freeze the marrow.
“How should I know?” she asked coolly.
7.
THE UNDERTAKER’S NEIGHBOR
WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST wheeled into action—literally.
Jumping onto a bicycle, Hearst sped up the fifty blocks from Printer’s Square to Mrs. Nack’s apartment building at Thirty-Fifth and Ninth. He marched past the peppermint-stick displays intoWerner’s Drug Store looking for the owner, and he was in luck: Franz Werner’s indispensable assistant was vacationing in Larchmont, so Werner himself was in charge.
Didn’t Mrs. Augusta Nack’s lease run out today?
Indeed it did.
The young millionaire made the landlord an offer on the spot: He’d pay handsomely to rent out Nack’s apartment—right now. Werner was delighted, and Hearst quickly conferred with the Wrecking Crew, which had finally caught up with him. Because he was such an upstanding new tenant, the publisher decided to post staff to all the entrances as complimentary doormen. Another group of Hearst reporters was sent out to the neighborhood hotels with instructions to take over every pay-phone booth. By the time Pulitzer’s men caught on to the Nack arrest and arrived, they found a cordon of Wreckers around 439 Ninth Avenue that, as it so happened, allowed only the police and fellow Hearst reporters into the building.
It was only the latest indignity for the
World
men. The morning’s triumphant Cyklam story was already being dethroned, and the kindof grandstanding that Hearst was doing here was exactly what Joseph Pulitzer would not and
could
not do. His eyesight and his nerves shot, overthe past few yearsPulitzer had increasingly taken to isolating himself in his Fifth Avenue mansion. All the day’s papers were read to him, so that his presence remained constant and ghostly; nitpicking commands were brayed by telephone, telegraph, and memos. And with the
Journal
savagely attacking the
World
’s circulation, the messages from Pulitzer were getting harsher.
“We must smash the interloper,” one memo commanded.
Other newspapers were looking endangered as well. The
Times
had briefly gone bust the previous year, and over at the stately
Sun
—the paper whose respectability the
Times
still only aspired to—an even more dire drama was now unfolding. It was being whispered that editor Charles A.Dana, after having helmed the
Sun
for more than fifty years, had stopped coming to his office in the previous week. Only imminent death could be keeping the old man from his desk in the middle of the year’s biggest crime story. New York newspapers without Dana were nearly unthinkable—indeed, Pulitzer himself had trained under
Journal
reporter pressed.
“No! It is the lady. I know it.… I remember her well because she was a fine looking lady, and better dressed than most people who come to my store.”
Captain O’Brien maintained his disquieting gaze at Mrs. Nack. “This woman has identified you as having purchased oilcloth from her,” he said evenly. “Which would seem to connect you to the murder of William Guldensuppe.”
“That is impossible,” the midwife shot back. Guldensuppe, she maintained, was still alive.
She didn’t know where Willie was now, she didn’t know this Mrs. Riger, she didn’t even know any stores in Astoria. But as she spoke, word passed among the detectives that a new piece of evidence had arrived at headquarters; it had just been fished out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard after it camebumping up against the USS
Vermont
. And as they stood up to leave, Captain O’Brien coolly swung open the door for Mrs. Nack.
There,in the middle of his hallway, were two severed human legs—sawn halfway through, then snapped off.
“Do you know those?”
he gloated.
They were hideous objects—rotted from five days in the river, and still nestled in an opened bundle of oilcloth. O’Brien waited for Mrs. Nack to faint, to shriek, to break down. But the midwife merely turned to him with a look to freeze the marrow.
“How should I know?” she asked coolly.
7.
THE UNDERTAKER’S NEIGHBOR
WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST wheeled into action—literally.
Jumping onto a bicycle, Hearst sped up the fifty blocks from Printer’s Square to Mrs. Nack’s apartment building at Thirty-Fifth and Ninth. He marched past the peppermint-stick displays intoWerner’s Drug Store looking for the owner, and he was in luck: Franz Werner’s indispensable assistant was vacationing in Larchmont, so Werner himself was in charge.
Didn’t Mrs. Augusta Nack’s lease run out today?
Indeed it did.
The young millionaire made the landlord an offer on the spot: He’d pay handsomely to rent out Nack’s apartment—right now. Werner was delighted, and Hearst quickly conferred with the Wrecking Crew, which had finally caught up with him. Because he was such an upstanding new tenant, the publisher decided to post staff to all the entrances as complimentary doormen. Another group of Hearst reporters was sent out to the neighborhood hotels with instructions to take over every pay-phone booth. By the time Pulitzer’s men caught on to the Nack arrest and arrived, they found a cordon of Wreckers around 439 Ninth Avenue that, as it so happened, allowed only the police and fellow Hearst reporters into the building.
It was only the latest indignity for the
World
men. The morning’s triumphant Cyklam story was already being dethroned, and the kindof grandstanding that Hearst was doing here was exactly what Joseph Pulitzer would not and
could
not do. His eyesight and his nerves shot, overthe past few yearsPulitzer had increasingly taken to isolating himself in his Fifth Avenue mansion. All the day’s papers were read to him, so that his presence remained constant and ghostly; nitpicking commands were brayed by telephone, telegraph, and memos. And with the
Journal
savagely attacking the
World
’s circulation, the messages from Pulitzer were getting harsher.
“We must smash the interloper,” one memo commanded.
Other newspapers were looking endangered as well. The
Times
had briefly gone bust the previous year, and over at the stately
Sun
—the paper whose respectability the
Times
still only aspired to—an even more dire drama was now unfolding. It was being whispered that editor Charles A.Dana, after having helmed the
Sun
for more than fifty years, had stopped coming to his office in the previous week. Only imminent death could be keeping the old man from his desk in the middle of the year’s biggest crime story. New York newspapers without Dana were nearly unthinkable—indeed, Pulitzer himself had trained under
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