The Man Who Never Returned

by Peter Quinn

  “Appreciate the advice. But I’m going to stick with it till I hit a wall.”

  “Or it hits you.”

  “Whichever. Meantime, I’m asking for your help in two ways. First, I’d like to read the file on the Crater case.”

  “Files. They fill half a cabinet. But technically, the case is still open, and you’re a civilian, so you should apply through the commissioner’s office. But you were a cop—an honest one—and I respect that. What else?”

  “Tell me whatever you know or remember and point me to anyone you think I should talk to. Already have some names and addresses, including Von Vogt’s.”

  “Cross him off right now. He’ll never talk to you.”

  “No harm in trying.”

  In that case, Crow suggested, the best way to start was to drop Von Vogt a note. Be direct. Von Vogt “respected forthrightness.” More important, go to the record room, start reading the files. Too voluminous to knock off in a day. “That way,” Crow said, “you’ll have a better idea of what questions to ask. You won’t waste my time, and I won’t waste yours.”

  Dunne spent the day at a beaten oak table that looked as though it had been in service since the first Dutch settlers brought it from Holland. He used the calendar book, which registered the date of each written report and the identity of the officer who filed it, as a guide. In the early days of the case, as Crow had explained, the cops brought in to assist Missing Persons were assigned to different teams, each with a veteran detective at the head. Every day, they’d be given addresses or potential witnesses to visit and report back on. The lead detective gathered their information into a single report, had them initial their section and then signed the full document.

  Barely into the first overstuffed accordion file, he noticed a discrepancy. The calendar registered an entry by Det. Von Vogt on September 7, 1930, but there was no corresponding report. He presumed it had probably been placed out of order, but didn’t find it among the other reports, which were all correctly filed.

  When Crow came down at four p.m., he seemed unfazed by news of a missing report. Up until the war, the Crater files got quite a workout. Then people lost interest. It was probably fifteen years since anyone took a peek. Wasn’t the first or last time a report was put back in the wrong place. Was undoubtedly in there somewhere. He suggested Dunne quit for the day. He’d thought of somebody else who’d been involved with the hunt for Crater. Dr. Eugene Rossiter, nephew of the late Doc Cropsey, had followed his uncle into the coroner’s office. He’d called Rossiter, who said he had some time this afternoon. Crow was going up that way and offered to accompany Dunne.

  They traveled in an unmarked car across town to First Avenue. Though the sleet had ceased, heavy traffic slowed them to a crawl. As he drove, Crow kept the sidewalks under constant surveillance, moving his head in a deliberate swivel and leaning over the wheel for a better view of a pedestrian’s face, the feral reflexes of a veteran cop sniffing for trouble.

  Dunne told Crow that the reports he’d read so far didn’t differ in any significant way from the newspaper accounts. Crater’s bank statements showed that he’d withdrawn the equivalent of a State Supreme Court justice’s annual salary at the time of his appointment to the bench, a seeming indication he’d paid for his office. (In Mrs. Crater’s telling, the money was used to help members of his family “financially distressed by the Stock Market crash of the previous autumn.”)

  Of the five grand that Crater had received from having his court clerk cash two checks the morning of his disappearance and the two briefcases filled with papers he’d taken from his chambers — not a trace was found. The money, Crow speculated, could have been intended to pay off a blackmailer. The files might have contained information Crater wanted to keep out of the hands of investigators authorized to look into the buying or selling of judgeships. But if they were so private and potentially dangerous why was he so obvious in removing them?

  In the month-long lapse between when he disappeared and when it was reported, there was no telling who’d entered Carter’s apartment, what they’d been after or what they’d removed. If Carter had left the cash behind, who knows who might have taken it. “The year was 1930, don’t forget,” Crow said. “People were scared and desperate. Five grand was a fortune. Even a saint would have been tempted to take it. And if Tammany got wind that Crater removed a bunch of papers from his chambers—and you bet they did—they would have slipped someone into his apartment to see what they contained and, if necessary, seen to their disposal.”

  Though in sync with published accounts of the case, the police reports added another level of detail. Detectives Fitzgerald and Von Vogt made it clear that the carefully coordinated responses of Crater’s judicial colleagues were intended to keep the investigation from going where they didn’t want it to go. No judge would speak with them unless another judge was present. A stenographer recorded their answers. Whether Crater had been done in for reasons unrelated to his position or was hiding in fear of an investigation, his colleagues’ first concern was to avoid any involvement. If a single one had the slightest concern over Crater’s fate, he made no mention.

  Interviewed in his chambers, in the presence of Justices McCarthy and Mandel, Judge Carmen Traglia volunteered that when Judge Crater hadn’t appeared for the opening of the term, he’d attempted to reach him at his summer residence in Maine. Since he was calling in his capacity as presiding judge and not merely as a friend, he had a stenographer record the call (and, yes, he assured them, he’d done so with the consent of Mrs. Crater). He had some difficulty reaching her, but she confirmed that her husband had returned to the city to attend to “private business related to the upcoming election.” Convinced that “despite this lapse, Joe Crater was a superb jurist,” and not wanting to jeopardize his chances in the fall, Judge Traglia simply assigned another judge.

  At this point, the detectives noted in their report, Judge Traglia excused himself to see to some pressing business in his courtroom and left them to examine a wall covered with framed and autographed pictures of himself with celebrities like “Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, John McGraw, Mae West, Jack Dempsey, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Norma Talmadge, as well as the present governor, the present mayor (and two of his predecessors), several congressman and both senators.” It was an unnecessary reminder, Dunne knew, for the detectives to avoid any overt aggression or skepticism in their questioning or risk reassignment to the far reaches of the Bronx or Staten Island.

  “You ask me,” Crow said, “Crater wasn’t murdered by politicians seeking to ensure his silence. In the state investigation of the magistrate’s court, there were plenty of canaries, but none was ever burked or flushed without a trace. Besides, when made to explain his visit to see Mrs. Crater, Detective Luke Ruppert testified he did so at the behest ‘of friends from the regular Democratic organization.’”

  Alas, though memory failed Ruppert when it came to their names, Crow was confident he told the truth and that the party chiefs were genuinely worried about Crater’s whereabouts, which they wouldn’t have been if they’d already had him eliminated. (Ruppert denied entering the apartment before Mrs. Crater returned from Maine but Crow thought he probably had. “Ruppert had spent a decade on the burglary squad, which is probably why his Tammany friends chose him in the first place.” Ruppert did admit that the day before he went to see Mrs. Crater at her apartment, he’d inquired whether a passport had been issued in Judge Crater’s name. But he couldn’t remember if he’d done so on his own initiative or at somebody’s request.)

  It seemed more likely—Crow thought—that whatever happened to Crater involved his insatiable appetite for sex. Blackmail was probably part of it, which would explain additional monies he’d withdrawn from his bank that were never accounted for. (“Joe was generous with his friends, generous to a fault,” was his wife’s explanation.) Maybe he refused to pay any more. Maybe he threatened to go to the police.

  The newspapers had lavished attention on revelation
s of Crater’s liaisons with showgirls and single women (“practiced traffickers in prostitution and prevarication,” wrote Mrs. Crater). Missing Persons not only turned up several female acquaintances of Crater’s that the press had missed, but also obtained information for some of those who’d already been interviewed. Alice Wayne (real name: Mary Jane McGinty), age nineteen, a chorine with The Artists & Models Show who told the press she’d regarded the judge as a “sweet, kindly uncle who took an interest in my career,” confided to Detective Moon she’d consented to have sex in return for Crater’s help in getting a better job, but cut off relations when he demanded she do things she described as “degrading and unsanitary.”

  A visit by Fitzgerald and Von Vogt to Atlantic City established that the judge’s visit there in late July, which he told his wife was “for a very private discussion of confidential matters related to the smooth functioning of the court in the upcoming term,” was for the purpose of bedding several showgirls who were working in the Schumann Theatre Organization’s summer circuit.

  According to the papers, Elaine Dove (real name Edith Woll), a twenty-two-year-old “cabaret performer” who’d been seen on several occasions in Crater’s company, was recovering at the Polyclinic Hospital from “an injury to her knee.” Detective Von Vogt reported the injury was in fact “gonorrheal rheumatism.” Though she denied having had sex with Crater, she stated that “on several occasions she met him at an after-hours joint on West 54th Street, and that the last time she saw him was in the early hours of August 4th and that he’d been by himself. She’d been introduced to him by Sam Hechtman, chief lawyer for the Schumann Theatre Organization, and Patti Leroche, her ex-roommate in the Hotel Plymouth, and swears she knows nothing about Crater’s whereabouts.”

  As the last two people to see Crater alive, Sam Hechtman and Patti Leroche (real name: Bernadette Larocca) had been objects of special interest to the police. Crow described Hechtman as a street-savvy lawyer who’d worked behind the scenes to craft a good part of New York’s entertainment law and then cultivated the judiciary to see to it the law was interpreted and applied in the best interests of the Organization. Thanks in good part to Hechtman’s legal skills, the Schumann brothers managed to keep their empire afloat during the Depression. When things improved, they showed their appreciation by firing him.

  A twenty-five-year-old chorine, Leroche was fifteen years younger than Hechtman. Though neither admitted it, the police speculated she was helping him provide those whose support and cooperation the Organization wished to have—cops, judges, politicians, reporters, suppliers, ticket agents, etc.—with the kind of female company that would keep them satisfied and well disposed. “Technically, since it was favors being traded and not money,” Crow said, “it wasn’t prostitution. But the girls had little choice. If they didn’t work, they didn’t eat. Beauty was a buyer’s market. Despite those who like to paint that time in romantic hues, the truth is Broadway was one big brothel.”

  The cops grilled Leroche and Hechtman several times, but neither wavered from their original statements: On the sultry evening of August 6, 1930, at around 6:30 P.M., Leroche stopped by the offices of the Schumann Theatrical Organization to inquire about a job she hoped to land with a road company of the “Artists & Models” review scheduled to leave on the western circuit. She bumped into Hechtman, a casual acquaintance, who said he was headed to Bobby Duncan’s Café, on West 45th Street. He invited her to join him and she accepted.

  They were at Bobby Duncan’s Café only a short while when Crater arrived. Hechtman knew Crater from the Democratic political circles in which they both traveled. On several occasions he’d helped Crater, a well-known theatre buff, obtain hard-to-get tickets for hit shows. Crater was about to sit at a table by himself when Hechtman asked him to join them. (The waiter staff confirmed this version of events.) Leroche had met the judge “once or twice before” at a local club but had never had a conversation with him. She said that she’d always presumed he was a bachelor and was surprised when he announced he was leaving first thing in the morning to join his wife at their summer cottage in Maine.

  The wilting, oppressive heat, Hechtman remembered in his statement to the police, affected them all. Hechtman noticed at one point that sweat was dripping from Crater’s neck onto the high, stiff shirt collar he favored. He wiped it away with his napkin, but didn’t loosen his tie. Their desultory conversation mostly concerned the glum prospects for the upcoming theatrical season, which would begin after Labor Day. Hechtman and Leroche both thought Crater seemed distracted but not upset.

  At about 9:30 p.m., Hechtman paid the check, refusing to let Crater contribute. They exited the restaurant. Crater looked up and down the street. A tan cab turned onto West 45th from Eighth Avenue, headed west, and Crater hailed it. He shook their hands and, stepping into the gutter to enter the cab, turned and said, “I’ll be glad to get away.” Leroche recalled catching a fleeting glance of the back of the taxi driver’s head; Hechtman didn’t bother looking. As they went on their way, she looked back and saw the cab turn onto Ninth Avenue, quickly slipping out of sight, out of time, out of history, to carry Crater to wherever it was he was going.

  Crow pulled up outside the morgue and stuck his NYPD identification on the dashboard. “That cab was what drove Von Vogt and the others nuts. The way it vanished without a trace.”

  “Were they sure Hechtman and Leroche were telling the truth?”

  “If they were involved in Crater’s disappearance, it doesn’t seem likely they’d meet him in a public place, walk outside and watch him get in a cab, letting the whole world know they were the last to see him alive. They’d have to be stupid or crazy, and Leroche and Hechtman were neither.”

  Instead of the twenty minutes Crow said it would take to get to the morgue, it took forty-five. Rossiter, the doctor whom Crow said had been involved with the hunt for Crater, was in his surgical whites and waiting at the front desk. Over six feet tall, burly and overweight, he had thick red hair streaked with white sidewalls vaguely shaped like horns. He threw his cigarette on the marble floor, squashed it like a cockroach beneath his right heel and exhaled smoke through his nose like a steam-snorting El Toro from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “You should’ve told me you were coming by way of China.”

  Crow mumbled about the traffic and how intolerable it would stay till the city put in a cross-town expressway. “I’m not going to shake hands” he said. “I have got a cold and a slight fever.” When he introduced Dunne, it sounded like an afterthought.

  “That makes two of us.” Rossiter turned toward a pair of swinging doors at the end of the corridor. “I don’t usually talk to private dicks,” he said over his shoulder. “Almost as big troublemakers as reporters. But Crow here called in a favor.” He barreled through the doors, head down, like a bull entering the ring. They followed him into a narrow room with metal shelves and glass jars on one side, folded gowns and sheets on the other. The pungent, medical odor of formaldehyde, invasive and bitter, caused a slight irritation in Dunne’s eyes and throat.

  “Nurse!” Rossiter boomed. “Where the hell is the nurse?”

  The door at the other end opened. A diminutive nurse entered. “I’ve been waiting for you inside. Everything is ready.” Her white gown was tied in the back. Her hair was tucked beneath a white cap that covered her forehead. Only above the mask was her face visible: youthful olive skin, deep, brown eyes, extravagant lashes. She looked directly at Dunne. “I’m an M.D., a pathologist, not a nurse.”

  “A rose by another name.” Rossiter handed her the file. “Nice thing about autopsies, the patients are never late.” He donned a white cap and draped a rubber apron over his neck. She tied it in the back while he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. “I intend to catch the 5:27 to New Rochelle—where I will enjoy the warm embrace of my wife and the cold kiss of a martini—and since the commissioner frowns on taking cadavers home, especially homicides, it’s off to work I go.”

  “Forgot this.” She held out
a mask.

  “Idiocy.”

  “Rules.”

  “Same thing.” He snatched the mask and tied it on hurriedly. “If you want to talk, follow me.” His voice was only slightly muffled. He stalked into the other room.

  The assistant pathologist whom Rossiter insisted on calling a nurse handed them each a set of whites. She waited until they dressed and led them into a white-tiled room with a floor of black and white hexagons, an oversized drain in the middle. Formaldehyde was more oppressive here. There was a row of altar-like marble slabs. On top of the nearest one lay a sheet-covered body. Rossiter and a young male assistant were examining the same file. The “nurse” wheeled a tray of instruments into place that looked more like gardening tools and kitchenware than surgical implements. The overhead fixture, buzzing intermittently like a lazy insect, shed a harsh light.

  Rossiter lifted the sheet. The dead man appeared to be in his forties. Face as white as the tiled walls; in contrast, hair so black it seemed dyed. Lips slightly puckered, a trace perhaps of a final sour taste or thought: lemon, betrayer’s kiss, last regret. He rolled the sheet down to the man’s waist; poked with a scalpel at the puncture wound beneath the right breast, dry crust of black blood surrounding it. “The perfect place to stab a man. Keep the shiv out of sight, bring it up from below, stick it in, jerk it up, bingo. Probably done by a pro. Or one lucky amateur.”

  Crow squared his shoulders, sucked in air with a noticeable inhalation that pasted the mask to his face. He plucked it with his fingers. Sounding slightly out of breath, he crossed himself in a quick, furtive way. “What is it St. Paul wrote? ‘For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality.’”

  “Put a sock in it, Crow. You sound like some fearful Jesuit.” Rossiter continued to poke around the wound and didn’t look up.