The Man Who Never Returned

by Peter Quinn

  Whispered voice again: “Always do as I’m told, Fin … Fin.”

  On the way to Florida, Roberta had spent most of her time reading a book by Freud about dreams. She couldn’t stop talking about it. He never really started listening, but promised he’d get around to reading it. “I enjoy hearing about your dreams,” she’d said.

  He told her about the ones he thought she’d enjoy. This one he wouldn’t.

  The clock next to the lamp indicated 3:15. He shut off the light, drifted back to sleep, sure of the answer he’d give Wilkes in the morning.

  Part II

  The Crater Chase: An Excerpt from Louis Pohl, “Judge Crater, Please Call Your Office,” in Where in the World? A Collection of Unsolved Disappearances (San Francisco: The Conundrum Press, 1974).

  The appropriate point from which to begin any chronicle of the disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater is the Great Wall Street Crash of October 1929. Historians and economists continue to argue about the exact relationship between the stock market’s swoon and the prolonged worldwide economic paralysis that followed. But people alive at the time would always connect the onset of the Great Depression and the bursting of the effervescent illusion of a “New Era” of perpetual prosperity with the debacle that unfolded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

  The party was over, and as hosts and guests made a frantic scramble for the exits, the trickle-down theory—that the good fortune of the rich will seep southward through all levels of society until it slakes even the parched and thirsty throats of the poor—was turned on its head. Misery proved more fluid than prosperity. The effects of unemployment, bankruptcy and foreclosures poured rather than dripped down the economic ladder in a soaking, unstoppable deluge that swept all before it.

  Among the first casualties of the pour-down reality of mass poverty was another booming Jazz Age activity, political corruption. (The relationship between a pumped-up bull market and unbridled greed among public officials has been a recurring theme from the Gilded Age to the present.) Slowly at first and then with swift and spreading anger, the public no longer deemed the venality and self-enriching peculations of local pols as a predictable and forgivable case of skimming off the cream, but as a felonious attempt to deprive their constituents of much-needed milk.

  The change in the moral weather was signaled early on by the reaction to an incident in the Bronx that, had it occurred two months before the Crash rather than after, might have barely registered with the public. Instead, it set in motion a series of events that would lead to the resignation of New York’s mayor and inflict wounds on the city’s Democratic machine from which it would never fully recover. It began with a dinner held in a local restaurant in honor of a Bronx magistrate who’d also been leader of the local political clubhouse. The festivities were in full swing when a gang of hold-up men forced their way in and relieved the company—including judges, cops and reputed members of the mob—of wallets, watches and assorted valuables.

  The outraged guest of honor made several urgent calls—none to the police—to report the robbery and seek recovery of the stolen items. Mirable dictu, all the loot was returned to its rightful owners within twenty-four hours. When news of the loot’s speedy return leaked out, an official inquiry into the magistrate’s conduct revealed he’d managed to accumulate a small fortune on a judicial salary of little more than $10,000 a year. Though the magistrate was removed from the bench, his demise only began a swelling chorus of complaints and allegations. Governor Roosevelt, his presidential ambitions hanging in the balance, could no longer resist the rising public outcry and authorized a sweeping investigation run by a stern and incorruptible blue-blood.

  Just as the inquiry was about to begin—in August 1930—State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater bid two dinner companions good night, entered a tan-colored cab on a midtown street and was never seen again. (Despite an exhaustive search, neither the cab nor its driver could be found.) No sooner was his disappearance announced than Crater was assumed to be a key player in the unfolding political scandal. It was rumored the bosses had him killed to ensure his silence, or that he ran away in fear of being exposed for buying his judicial post and using to it solicit bribes. His defenders were few. A former law secretary to a state Supreme Court judge who went on to a distinguished career in the U.S. Senate, a graduate of an Ivy League law school with a successful private practice, Crater was routinely referred to as a buffoon and a hack.

  The theory that Crater was a victim of political intrigue has enjoyed wide currency but remains only one theory among many. In those early days of what would become the Great Depression, what is certain is that Crater became a kind of Rorschach test for the American public. The ever-dwindling number who clung to President Hoover’s assurances that prosperity awaited around a soon-to-be-turned corner tended to believe Crater wasn’t dead at all. He was off on a month-long “whoopee party” in Chicago; or on a fishing trip deep in the Adirondacks; or in Montreal having a good laugh at all the wild speculation about his “disappearance”; or closeted with two hookers in an East Side penthouse until the investigations were over and everybody went back to the everyday business of getting rich.

  For those concerned with the wave of gangsterism and lawlessness that had followed in the wake of Prohibition, Crater became yet another victim of the rampant, uncontrolled crime. Somebody thought he’d stumbled across his bullet-riddled body in the Ramapo Mountains, but it turned out to be only a bootlegger from Brooklyn. In Perth Amboy, New Jersey, the police disinterred a corpse from the Jewish cemetery on a tip that mobster Waxey Gordon buried the murdered Crater there as a favor to New York Mayor Jimmy Walker. The corpse proved to be the man that the cemetery authorities had insisted he was: a ninety-year-old, much-loved Hungarian rabbi who’d died peacefully in his bed.

  As the slump deepened and factories closed and foreclosures spread, reports of Crater sightings poured in from across the country. Crater was on the road, hitchhiking, riding the rails, roasting a potato with the legion of footloose unemployed in makeshift Hoovervilles from Albany to Seattle. He was the well-mannered, well-spoken gent in a dusty, tattered suit who knocked on the back door of farmhouses from Ohio to Nebraska and offered to sweep the yard in return for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.

  He stood on breadlines in Chicago, San Francisco and Detroit, one nobody among millions. Shoulders hunched, hat pulled down, identical tesserae in a mosaic of misery, he smiled sheepishly and, before vanishing back into the crowd, thanked his benefactors with the cryptic remark, “You know, I was somebody once, back in New York.”

  Crater was all the things people were feeling—hopeful, fearful, doomed—as they wrestled to make sense of events they couldn’t control. And while his unsolved disappearance might have been a source of pride to those who did him in (if he was done in), it caused endless embarrassment for the New York Police Department and its 18,000 members. It was one thing when the neighborhood milkman went missing. But, to paraphrase Lady Bracknell, while losing track of an ordinary citizen might be tragic, losing all trace of a justice of the New York State Supreme Court smacked of pure carelessness, or worse, gross incompetence.

  Along with frustration at the false leads, blind alleys, mischievous miscues and deliberate didoes, the harried contingent of detectives assigned to the case soon felt the sting of public ridicule. Quipped comedian George Burns from the stage of New York’s Palace Theatre, “These cops call themselves detectives? They couldn’t find a rabbi in the Bronx.” A headline in the New York Standard announced to the world: “THE FINEST ARE FLUSTERED.”

  The police could only feel relief when the attention of populace and press was drawn away from Crater by new crimes and new sensations. They weren’t alone. Among his friends, acquaintances and patrons in political circles, Crater was somebody best consigned to public oblivion. The governor who’d appointed him to the bench was soon off to bigger things and didn’t want the tin can of judicial corruption tied to his presidential
bandwagon. Crater’s fellow justices on the Supreme Court didn’t need his ghost trailing behind them, with all his suspect baggage. Those said to have been his partners in various shady business deals, his putative lovers, and the rumored recipients of his judicial favors waited anxiously for the investigation to cease. In the end, however pleased or pained some must have felt about Crater being gone, they were all eager he be forgotten.

  New York City

  “I rose, and cast my rested eyes around me,

  Gazing intent to satisfy my wonder

  Concerning the strange place wherein I found me.”

  —DANTE, Inferno, Canto IV

  FRESH FROM THE SHOWER, DUNNE WRAPPED HIMSELF IN ONE OF the hotel’s plush terrycloth robes, rubbed his wet head with a towel, and massaged his gums with a pasteless toothbrush. He answered the knock expecting the coffee and toast he’d ordered. Instead, a woman in a fur coat and wide-brimmed fur hat that hid her eyes held up a copy of the Herald Tribune.

  “Compliments of the management.” She handed him the paper.

  He scanned the front page, hoping he wasn’t about to be asked to buy a subscription.

  “Mr. Wilkes gives this hotel an inordinate amount of business, but they consider the Standard too spicy for the clientele and provide this bromide instead.”

  He slid the toothbrush from his mouth. “Miss Renard?”

  “Why not invite me in?” A briefcase hung from both hands in front of her coat. “Or do you prefer to conduct business in the hallway?”

  He stepped aside. “I didn’t expect …”

  “A detective’s job is to expect the unexpected, no?” She brushed past, removed her hat and flung it on the sofa. “Where can I hang this?”

  “I was expecting room service.” He helped her take off her coat and hung it in the closet next to the door.

  “Sorry, but that’s not my line of work.” Briefcase in hand, she crossed the room and sat in a winged chair. Her hair was drawn into a precisely braided coil at the back of her head. Winter sun, full of morning intensity, poured through the window and illuminated her face. Less makeup than the previous evening hadn’t diminished her looks. A sly slant to her wide eyes, which he hadn’t noticed the night before, made him think of Lauren Bacall.

  Dunne tugged negligently at the sash around his robe, tightening it, aware without looking of bald ankles, hair beginning to disappear from legs, and bare, archless, corpse-white feet. He moved behind the sofa. “Give me a minute to get dressed.”

  “Take all the time you need.” She lifted the briefcase onto her lap. “I’ve plenty to keep me busy.”

  He did a proper job of brushing his teeth, completed a quick reshave of neck and chin, slapped on bay rum, squeezed a small measure of hair cream in his palm and rubbed it into his black-and-gray-streaked mop. Leaning toward the mirror, he examined his hairline. Not even a slight retreat. He put on a starched white shirt and his best pair of charcoal slacks, and stood sideways to the dressing mirror: waistline firm as hairline.

  Room service had delivered his breakfast while he was getting dressed. Miss Renard poured him a cup from the silver pot. She sat next to him on the couch, lowering herself with a graceful half-curtsy.

  “How about you?” he asked. “I’ll send for an extra cup. Want some breakfast?”

  “I don’t drink coffee. I ate breakfast two hours ago.”

  He smeared marmalade on a piece of toast. “Wilkes wants an answer, I suppose.”

  “He’s sure he’s got it.” She smoothed her skirt with a caress of her pale, slender hand. “Once nine-thirty passed, Mr. Wilkes said, ‘If Dunne were going to decline, he’d have done so by now.’ He sent me to work out the details.”

  “A mind reader that good should’ve solved the Crater case by himself.”

  “He’s an uncanny judge of character. I’ve never known him to be wrong.”

  “First time for everything.”

  “Not this time. Shall we?”

  “Shall we what?”

  “Shall we get to business and work out the details?”

  “How about we start with you telling me what Wilkes is really up to?”

  “Good question, Mr. Dunne. More than he let on.” She retrieved her briefcase and opened it on the writing desk. “He wanted to make sure you’d take the job before he let you in on all that’s involved. Have a look. It’ll give you a better idea of our plans.” She removed a Bristol board covered with a plastic transparency, the same one he’d seen on the table in Wilkes’s room. “Did he show you this?”

  “Not exactly. Came across it by chance.”

  “With Mr. Wilkes, nothing is by chance.”

  “Sounds like God.”

  “Mr. Wilkes has more money.”

  “God doesn’t have a bad back.”

  She managed a grin, tight and small. “You’re irreverent.”

  “Been known to get me in trouble.”

  “Not with me.” She lifted the transparency, leaned the board against the wall, and took a step back. “Do you know what it is?”

  “Looks like a cover for a magazine, but I never heard of Snap.”

  “With good reason, as it doesn’t exist yet. This is a placeholder. Mr. Wilkes has hired some of the industry’s top art directors to come up with as striking a design as possible. When he believes in a project, there’s no limit to what he’ll invest. He has big plans.”

  “He ever have small ones?”

  “There’s nothing small about Mr. Wilkes.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  She shot a peevish sideways glance. “He intends to launch the first issue in conjunction with a television production. It’s never been tried before.” She went back to looking at the board.

  “And your part in all of this is what exactly?”

  “You heard Mr. Wilkes. My role is ‘various and invaluable.’”

  “Everything from astrologer to zookeeper?”

  “And more.”

  “But not room service?”

  Hands on hips, her elbows jutted out like half-folded wings. “I resent that.”

  “You like my irreverence, remember?”

  “But not cheap, vulgar insinuations.”

  “Insinuations are my business, cheap and otherwise. I need to be sure what I’m getting into. That includes knowing what your involvement is.”

  “I’m the project manager.”

  He reached in his pant’s pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”

  “Mr. Wilkes doesn’t approve.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  He lit a match from the long, elegant book embossed with the hotel’s initials, SP, on the cover. She leaned her cigarette into the flame. The ends of their cigarettes almost touched. “What’s a project manager do?”

  She stood back. Right elbow resting in left palm, she levered the cigarette to her lips, sucked lightly, lifted her chin, and spouted smoke above his head. “Everything.”

  “For instance?”

  “Look, if you want to understand the job he’s trusted me with, you need to understand Mr. Wilkes. Like the late Mr. Hearst, he was born to great wealth and, again like Hearst, refused to settle for a life of idle enjoyment. In expanding the empire his father left him, Mr. Wilkes has avoided the humiliating setbacks Hearst suffered during the Depression. He accumulated capital the way a general builds reserves of men and weapons, waiting for exactly the right moment to throw his forces into the fight and win not merely a battle but the war.”

  She foraged in her briefcase, removed a business-sized envelope with scribbling on its front and laid it in front of her on the desk. Her voice tightened, taking on the slightly artificial tone of someone still uncomfortable speaking to an audience of strangers. Her manner aped Wilkes’s: the same faraway, impersonal gaze.

  Wilkes had already outdone Hearst, she said, and had little regard for other competitors, except for Henry Luce and his burgeoning Time-Life empire. “Consider the numbers.” S
he looked down at the envelope. “In the last three years, magazine ad revenues have gone from $600,000,000 to $790,000,000, a rise of close to $200,000,000. In that same period, Time magazine’s ad revenues went from $32,000,000 to $43,000,000, and Life’s from $97,000,000 to $138,000,000. In other words, with those two magazines alone, Luce is collecting almost a quarter of the industry’s ad revenues. The man prints money as well as magazines.”

  “I do my magazine reading in barber shops and doctors’ offices. Mostly old issues of National Geographic. They don’t go stale like the weeklies.”

  Cigarette held in the slender vise of her fingers, she waved her hand dismissively, leaving a crooked trail of smoke. “The point is, Luce’s competitors are intimidated and unimaginative.” The discomfort was gone from her voice. She was relaxed and emphatic. “But not Mr. Wilkes. He knows that despite pretensions to statesmanship, Luce is really a showman. That’s how he got Life off the ground, with articles like ‘How to Undress for Your Husband.’ He was brought up on indecency charges for a piece he ran depicting the birth of a child. That’s why Fleur Cowles failed with Flair. Maybe the most beautiful magazine ever, but all high style and none of the sizzle that moves the masses.”

  Hearst, she continued, had no self-control. Ruled by his passions for architecture, art, and Miss Davies (his sole interest in extending his newspaper empire into Hollywood had been to advance her career), he earned the mockery heaped on him in Citizen Kane. Luce, on the other hand, had too much self-control. His magazines came on an average of one a decade. He had even less of an understanding of Hollywood than Hearst, and though not beyond purchasing television stations, he did so defensively, unable to get past his contempt for what he believed is TV’s “innately trivial and superficial nature.”

  Dunne interrupted again. “Still haven’t told me what a project manager does.”

  “First you must understand the project itself. Since you’re working with us now, I’ll let you in on some privileged information. Mr. Wilkes is negotiating to take control of the DuMont Television Network before it goes under. Don’t ask for the details. It involves technical stuff about VHF and UHF, sub rosa talks with the studio heads, political intrigue at the FCC. His lobbyists are working to make the feds see the necessity for a third network—one he’s tentatively named ‘The Red, White and Blue Network.’ It’s the kind of complex dealing that gets his juices flowing like nothing else.”