The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  The discovery of the St. Joseph letters added to the despair Myrtle was feeling over two miscarriages, the second in 1926. Jack consoled her in his way, but his expensive gifts could not brighten her darkness. Their friend attorney J. Francis O’Sullivan sensed Myrtle’s melancholy. He had seen Myrtle rise from a dinner table, walk across the room, and sit alone, dabbing a handkerchief to her eyes.

  Myrtle told friends she was losing her husband. He lusted for the prestige and attention that came with money, she said, and she knew his pursuit of wealth would put him in the company of women who would find him irresistible—as she once had.

  Now each time Myrtle heard Jack’s Roadster drive off, even if only for a game of golf at Indian Hills (he said) or for a smoke at the athletic club (he said), she wondered: Was Jack about to cheat on her again?

  III

  Charles Hofman caught Mayme’s eye. From across the table, he read Mayme’s stern expression: This is not good. What do we do? A fine day together had been a fine evening together, at least when Myrtle and Jack were ahead on points. But now the cards turned, with the Hofmans pulling in front. The ill winds of marital strife blew north and south. With digs and icy stares, Myrtle and Jack had taken to sniping at each other.

  At bridge, Myrtle was tough and competitive—and Jack’s superior.

  Everyone knew that, except Jack.

  Jack was Jack, an alpha male. He won on his own terms. He answered only to New York, not to his wife. Then again, Myrtle did not cower, especially at the bridge table. Their problem was communication, subtle misreads. The Bennetts were not synchronized. They did not listen to their partner’s bids. In the center of Myrtle and Jack’s bridge partnership was a hole of uncertainty and mistrust. Myrtle felt alone in the partnership, as if, at the table, the game was three against one. And in her stinging criticisms of his play, Jack heard a wife’s insubordination.

  For much of this night, Myrtle had seemed like a jack-in-the-box, popping up from the table each time she’d laid down her hand as dummy. As Jack played for the partnership, Myrtle held her breath, hoped for the best, and disappeared into the kitchen to prepare his breakfast, still six hours away. She filled a percolator with coffee and water. On the skillet she laid strips of bacon. From their bedroom closet she removed Jack’s business clothes. She would rise early, too, to see him off. She was dutiful that way, a helpmate, the wife Jack wanted.

  In the best case, every hand in bridge is a new moment. Nothing else exists: no past, no future, and no emotion. Strategic breakdowns and miscommunications between partners sometimes lead to feelings of resentment, or worse. Then the largest question rises over the partnership like an evil moon: “Who is in charge?”

  Now, in the Bennett living room, the bidding began on the ultimate hand.

  Jack opened: “One spade.”

  Charles studied his cards: “Two diamonds.”

  Myrtle didn’t waver, going straight for game and the bonus for winning the rubber: “Four spades.”

  Mayme: “Pass.”

  Jack, confident the hand was his to play (and win): “Pass.”

  Charles liked his holdings. Thinking penalty points, he turned the screws on his friend: “Double.”

  Jack played the hand, needing ten tricks to make a four-spades contract. He did not succeed. He came up two tricks short. Myrtle unloaded on him. Jack replied that she had no reason to raise his bid. Myrtle said, “I laid down a beautiful hand, we had the cards.” Jealousy and alcohol and competition tore at the seams of a marriage coming apart, stitch by stitch.

  Charles heard Myrtle call Jack “a bum bridge player,” and Jack’s reply that maybe he wasn’t the only one. Charles thought it uncalled for, all of it. It was only bridge; what the hell did it matter? And where was this argument heading, anyway?

  Jack stood, leaned across the table, and grabbed Myrtle’s wrist, twisting it slightly. He slapped her face, hard, several times. The table nearly toppled. Charles grabbed a metal leg, steadying the table.

  A moment passed. Stunned silence. Jack loomed over Myrtle, still seated in her chair.

  Charles Hofman looked at Myrtle, at Jack, at Mayme. Myrtle’s face was contorted, white with rage: “No man will strike me,” she said. She asked the Hofmans to excuse themselves so that she and Jack could resolve their dispute. But her determination faded in seconds. Moving to the davenport, holding a hand to her cheek, she broke into a sob. Mayme sat beside her and embraced her. Jack folded the card table, slammed it against a wall, and announced, “I’m leaving.” Charles heard him mention St. Joseph, a motel for the night. Myrtle, rising up, said, “Then go.”

  Jack walked away, to a living room closet, and removed a small traveling bag. Charles joined the wives on the davenport, Myrtle sandwiched between him and Mayme. He heard Myrtle say, “Only a cur would strike a woman in front of guests.” Jack stomped between rooms, jeering at her from a distance, their argument recurring.

  Charles Hofman’s passing thought: Has Jack gone mad?

  From the living room to the bedroom and back, Jack smiled malevolently, belittling Myrtle. Mayme wrapped Myrtle in her arms and gave Charles a look. He understood its meaning: the diplomat’s role was now his. Charles approached Jack and told him, gently, that slapping Myrtle was wrong and that he should apologize.

  Jack snapped at him. “Let her alone,” he said. “Myrtle has these brainstorms.”

  Charles tried again: “But…”

  “The hell with you, leave me alone,” Jack snapped. “We’ll settle our own difficulties.” Then he said to the Hofmans, “Maybe you’d better go upstairs.”

  And Myrtle, between sobs, agreed: “Yes, I guess we had better call it an evening.”

  Jack told Myrtle to get his pistol. If the petty thieves and prowlers vandalizing the neighborhood came while he was gone, Myrtle and her mother were on their own. Jack would take his .32 Colt automatic to St. Joe.

  As peacemakers, the Hofmans made no headway. Mayme said to her husband, “Let’s get our wraps.”

  Myrtle went up to Jack, at the living room closet, her manner conciliatory.

  Mayme retrieved her coat from the bedroom, leaving her husband’s cap on the bed. She walked to the front door of the apartment.

  As Jack reentered the master bedroom, Charles tried to play peacemaker once more, throwing his arm around Jack’s shoulder, walking with him around the bed, past an ornately framed photo of Myrtle as a young girl, on a settee, her chestnut hair flowing down her back, beautiful. He asked Jack not to leave. He urged him to settle the argument with Myrtle, to do the right thing. He told Jack he was making a mistake telling Myrtle he was going to leave her tonight.

  Jack did not answer, his thoughts far away. He paced between the bed and the dresser, snapping out clothes for his trip to St. Joe.

  Charles Hofman stepped into the small master bathroom, a door on either side.

  Across the apartment a door slammed.

  Now Charles Hofman saw, through the bathroom’s far door, Myrtle, sobbing still, moving toward him, and toward Jack, her right elbow slightly bent, and in her hand, held slightly below waist level, a gun, Jack’s pistol, pointed obliquely at the floor. In the next fifteen seconds the shape of Myrtle’s life would be determined—and in Kansas City, the Roaring Twenties would come to an explosive end.

  Charles said, “My God, Myrtle, what are you going to do?”

  What she did, a jury would decide.

  FIVE

  Myrtle’s Blur

  In the holding cell at police headquarters, night became morning. Myrtle’s shrieks became elongated echoes. Standing beside her was Mrs. Evelyn Helms, who in June, after years of neglect and cruel treatment, had gunned down her husband. The flash of headlines that followed reported that the Helmses were down-on-their-luck vaudevillians, singers, and acrobats. Evelyn Helms had known hunger, deprivation. Her husband had threatened to leave her. She shot him during a chase in which he
had run from their house and fallen in the yard. She stood over him, gun in hand, and was heard to say, “You will leave me, will you?” She fired once, repeated her question, and fired again. She tried to turn the gun on herself, but there were no bullets left. Myrtle had read about her in the newspapers. Now, it was just the two of them: Evelyn waiting and watching to see if Myrtle might try to kill herself.

  The doctor’s hypodermic injection blurred sights, sounds, time. As Myrtle’s central nervous system slowed, so did her ability to make sense of her world. Police detectives asked over and over, “A bridge game, yes, Mrs. Bennett, but after your husband failed to make the contract, what happened next?” In Myrtle’s confusion, the order of the night’s events altered and merged into a black nightmare. A finesse of the queen of diamonds, her laying cold fatty strips of bacon on the skillet for Jack, the raw sting of his hand upon her face, the pistol’s rubber grip, the intruding newshound from The Kansas City Star arriving to the apartment with police, riding in a patrol car as the Country Club District lights flickered past. Where is Mother? Myrtle smiled lazily now, her tongue clumsy from the sedative, as she peeked through the bars and asked Patrolman T. B. Ruth, “Won’t you give me your revolver? I want to shoot myself, too.” No reply, and then Myrtle asked Patrolman G. R. Woodman, “Won’t you give me your revolver?” They looked at her: she was tall, lovely, out of her mind.

  Sleepiness billowed like heavy fog. Images came and faded: her golf shoes, two-piece dress, a putt, a chip, Jack’s arm around her waist. Myrtle seeking expiation now, explaining to a policewoman: “I shot him. I went into mother’s bedroom and got the gun. I went into the den and he was packing his grip. He said he was going to leave me. I shot him.” Then came sleep, though fitful, with a husband-murderer staring at her. Can you forgive me, Jack? So handsome. Such high times together, they danced, made love. But there were the nights apart, the arguments, their two babies dead.

  Two hours later, Myrtle awakened. Her mother appeared and brought a change of clothes. Myrtle’s blouse had a small rip near the shoulder, a tear in the sleeve. Charles Hofman showed up, too: tense, smoking, fearful. Yes, the bridge game, four spades bid, and with those cards how could Jack have failed? Hofman brought J. Francis O’Sullivan, Myrtle’s friend, Jack’s friend. O’Sullivan and his wife played bridge with Myrtle and Jack, though now he spoke as the attorney he was: “Myrtle, do not talk to anyone about anything, do you understand?”

  Newspapers loved the sensation of the bridge game gone wrong. Myrtle’s friends often saw their names in the society pages connected to mentions of a bridge luncheon or a daughter back from a summer motoring trip. This was different. This was shocking. The Kansas City Star’s front-page headline screamed: DEATH AFTER 4 BID. Gossip became headlines: UNHAPPY FOR YEARS and “She Is in the Death Cell,” the latter a reference to the holding area for those who had threatened to kill themselves and would be closely watched. The Journal-Post decided, “That her husband should strike her before guests, that was a blow of stunning force to the wife. She saw in her husband’s act confirmation of her suspicions that he was growing less affectionate…” The Bennett story made front pages across the nation, and warned of the dangers of America’s bridge fever. The Chicago Daily Tribune headline put it simply: “Slaps Wife in Bridge Game; She Kills Him.”

  Acting as Myrtle’s attorney, O’Sullivan told the judge at the preliminary hearing that Myrtle required medical care in a sanitarium. Jim Page, the brawling Jackson County prosecutor, balked. She must be held without bail, Page contended, and tried for first-degree murder. Page talked big: he would aim for the death penalty.

  Myrtle insisted on one last look at Jack’s body before his aunt Nellie Scyster took it by train to his boyhood home in Illinois. Jack would be buried in the Bennett family plot in Union Ridge beside his mother. Accompanied by a sheriff, Myrtle and her mother spent an hour at the undertaker’s office. She called Jack’s name. She asked for his forgiveness. She touched his face. She wept. “He and mother were all I had,” she said. “And now I have taken him away.” She remarked that Jack fell dead at the same age as her father, thirty-six, a comment that prompted Alice Adkins to cry with her. Myrtle wondered why Jack’s funeral couldn’t be held in Kansas City. Adkins said that was a bad idea. Too many curious people would attend. “I understand,” Myrtle said. “It is all right.”

  Myrtle asked the undertaker to find a different suit for Jack. He hated the brown one he was now wearing. Neither did he like the tie his relatives had selected. Soon after he bought that tie, Myrtle said, Jack knew it was a mistake.

  And the undertaker had neglected to place a neatly folded handkerchief in Jack’s breast pocket. Myrtle knew her perfume salesman husband would not want to go through eternity without one.

  Soon after closing the first issue of The Bridge World, Ely read in the New York newspapers the shocking story from Kansas City. When Myrtle shot Jack, it was, for the Bennetts, a family tragedy. But for Ely, it was the answer to a new editor’s dream: a bridge story with marital strife, hints of infidelity, a mindless bidding system, a botched contract, and, best of all, gunfire. The Bridge World’s next issue would tell that story.

  Because contract bridge lived in the mind, it was difficult to dramatize on paper or in lectures. Even Ely’s imagination and dramatist’s flair could not have created the Bennett story. Husband-wife tumult was an accepted truth in bridge. But this was unthinkable. At the Knickerbocker Whist Club, and at bridge tables across the nation, conversation about the killing and Myrtle’s upcoming murder trial brought as many chuckles as shivers of fear.

  Ely exploited the Bennett story. “Perhaps from the tragedy, which happened recently in Kansas City, when Mrs. John G. Bennett shot and killed her husband, following a technical discussion about the way in which the husband had bid a hand at Bridge, a lesson of the importance of precise bidding valuation will finally be realized,” Ely wrote in his magazine. After Myrtle called Jack a “bum bridge player,” Ely noted, “He bravely controlled himself under this supreme provocation.

  “But the argument waxed acrimonious. Evidently, it was a clash between male and female Bridge inferiority complexes.

  “We shudder at the thought of what would happen if a wily lawyer for defense (well versed in all the fractional distinctions between a Jack and a ten) shall by implication lay the murder at the feet of some of our international Bridge idols!”

  Ely hired one of those international bridge idols, Sidney Lenz, to analyze the Bennett-Hofman hand. In The Bridge World of December 1929, the magazine’s third issue, published eight weeks after Jack’s killing, Lenz wrote, “Tragedies, comedies, and the broadest farce have stalked in the wake of many a Bridge game ever since the vogue became far-flung. It is doubtful if any of these cases have equaled the Bennett disaster in intensity and intricacy.”

  Lenz dissected the bidding and play of the last hand. He decided that Jack’s initial bid of one spade was unsound. Jack should have passed, Lenz wrote.

  Lenz’s story was accompanied by a diagram of the hand featuring each player’s card holdings: “This innocuous-looking deal at the Bridge table resulted in the killing of John Bennett by his wife,” Lenz wrote, adding, “There unquestionably was a good chance to win the contract if Bennett had played just a bit better.”

  Titillated bridge aficionados sought to know every detail about the hand. An accurate reconstruction of card distribution, and the bidding sequence, not only provided fodder for bridge-table discussion, but allowed for a technical assessment of whether Myrtle or Jack had botched the contract.

  Typical of social players, though, neither the Hofmans nor Myrtle remembered the distribution of cards in that hand, only the bidding. Therefore, what Sidney Lenz analyzed in his usual academic manner—and what would be reproduced in magazines, newspapers, and bridge anthologies as the fatal hand for the next seventy-five years—was like so much in salesmanship during the age of ballyhoo. A complete fabrication, no more, no
less.

  With $50,000 posted as bail, Myrtle was released to O’Sullivan. Among the sureties guaranteeing the bond were Charles and Mayme Hofman, who had left Kansas City for a time to escape the newspapermen and the prosecutor’s office. Her nerves shot, Mayme required rest. Myrtle, meanwhile, spent a month in the local sanitarium of Dr. Wilse Robinson, suffering from a nervous breakdown.

  Meanwhile, her friends discussed how they might help. They knew what Jack Bennett was—a sleep-around, a cad. Soon the whispers began: “Get Jim Reed!” In Kansas City there was no more famous attorney, no more famous man, and if any lawyer could make a jury see the truth deep within that bridge game, it was former Senator Reed. Obtaining Reed’s legal representation was a long shot, certainly. Reed represented the rich and famous, and they paid him well. But Myrtle’s friends, prosperous enough, were accustomed to getting their way. What about the senator’s idealism, they wondered, his sense of decency? Wouldn’t Reed want to rescue a good woman driven to righteous rage?