The Lusitania Murders

by Max Allan Collins

  His eyes danced at such a grandiose thought. “To be torpedoed,” he said, “would be a good advertisement for my views, don’t you think?”

  I had heard him say much the same thing to the reporters, coming aboard the ship, and it indicated just how prefabricated his “off the cuff” remarks were. Still, the words—in light of German stowaways, sabotage and murder—had a new and chilling effect on me.

  Miss Vance took this opportunity to explain her role as the ship’s detective, and informed the Hubbards of the possibility of a thief or ring of thieves being aboard. She believed he might be a target. Had he brought any valuables along, or an unduly large amount of cash?

  “By the standards of a Vanderbilt,” Hubbard said, “I probably seem a piker—but I admit I did bring along some five thousand dollars in paper money.”

  “Why so much?” I asked. “I can’t imagine you and Mrs. Hubbard giving yourselves over to extravagance, even on a European trip.”

  “Mr. Van Dine, I’m more than just an idea garage, supplying spare parts, lubricating oil and mental gasoline to my fellow human beings . . .”

  I managed not to groan.

  “. . . I am also a businessman. My Roycrofters are expert in fine bookbinding, and creating craftworks in wood, metal, copper and leather. A secondary mission of this trip is to seek quality materials, in particular Spanish leather for our bindery.”

  Was every briefcase in first class crammed with money?

  We inquired if he’d spoken to any strangers on the ship, if anyone had tried to strike up a conversation, and make a friend of him. . . .

  “Why, certainly. Everyone I’ve encountered—scores in these two days. They are, after all, my species!”

  “Your species,” I said numbly.

  “Yours, too! Mr. Van Dine, the fact that you are a human being brings you near to me—it is a bond that unites us! Often in life, all we need is the smile or hand-clasp of a fellow human being, and perhaps a word of good cheer, to get us through a rough day.”

  Miss Vance tried to cut through this Pollyanna blather, asking, “But has anyone pressed too hard? Perhaps, approached you for business reasons?”

  “No.”

  I asked, “Have you observed anything suspicious? A steward, perhaps, whom you came onto in your quarters, but who had scant reason to be there?”

  He glanced at his wife, who met his eyes with a shrug.

  “No,” he said.

  “Would you consider,” I suggested, “removing your rose-colored spectacles, for the duration of this voyage, and report to Miss Vance or myself anything suspicious you might observe?”

  Miss Vance added, “There may be physical danger, either to you and your wife, or risk to your possessions . . . specifically, your business funds.”

  Seeming to take no offense at my “rose-colored spectacles” remark, Hubbard smiled and nodded. “More than happy to cooperate. Do you agree, Alice?”

  She nodded, too. “More than happy.”

  That seemed to sum them up for me: more than happy . . . moving well past joy into the realm of ignorant bliss.

  Right now Hubbard was studying me—perhaps sensing my cynicism, though little I’d said revealed as much. He asked, “Mr. Van Dine, have you heard of Mr. and Mrs. Isador Straus?”

  “The names are familiar, but . . .”

  “They died on the Titanic—Mr. Straus was a wealthy man, in the department store trade; he and his wife had been married a very long time. They chose to stay aboard and meet their fate, rather than be separated, when Mrs. Straus could easily have found a seat on a lifeboat . . . ‘Women and children first’ being the law of the sea.”

  “I do remember,” I said.

  He looked heavenward. “They knew how to do three great things, the Strauses—how to live, how to love and how to die.” He turned his gaze fondly on his wife, and she returned it; they were holding hands, and I suppose I should have found it trite, but there was something genuine and even moving about it, much as I despise cheap sentiment.

  Hubbard said, “To pass from this world, as did Mr. and Mrs. Straus, is glorious—happy lovers, both. In life they were never separated, and in death they are not divided.”

  The hambone was nothing if not a showman, and without another word—not even an aphorism—he rose, as did his wife, and they nodded their good-byes and made their exit.

  TWELVE

  The Art of Friendship

  The next morning, Monday, found the great ship off the Grand Banks, basking in sunshine, riding a gentle swell. According to one of our fellow first-class passengers, Charles Lauriat—a Boston bookseller who considered himself an amateur expert on matters nautical—the Lucy was doing a good twenty knots, maintaining a long, easy stride, though occasionally pulsating in brief spasms from the sheer force of her steam turbines.*

  As was the usual case on a lengthy ocean voyage, the reassuring routine of shipboard life had quietly asserted itself. Passengers plopped into deck chairs with novels (that many were reading Theodore Drieser’s new one, The Financier, was an encouraging sign in such culturally barren times). Away from their sedentary situations, middle-aged men strode the decks like athletes, their stomachs tucked in, their chests thrust out, sucking in the fresh sea breeze, cleansing their city-soiled innards. The sharp, salty air seemed to egg on the appetite, making possible the consumption of the endless cornucopia of food; and people you might ignore on dry land seemed not only tolerable company but witty, worthy cohorts.

  Miss Vance and I did not spend all of our time engaged in investigation. Now and then, on an evening, we could be found doing the tango or the foxtrot, and well. Often, however, we were not available, spending time privately in either her or my quarters, and what was exchanged between us is not germane to this narrative; besides, even I am too gentlemanly to go into detail, however wonderful it might be to record such vivid memories.

  We also on occasion attended the ship’s concerts, where an array of talent performed, ranging from the world’s finest to numerous self-proclaimed artistes with more audacity than ability. Nonetheless, in our self-indulgent, overfed mood, we were inclined to find all of them entertaining, even if not in the way intended; like cattle being fattened for the slaughterhouse, Miss Vance and I were part of a contented lot.

  Perhaps we had become distracted by shipboard foolishness, or lulled into complacency by the knowledge that the stowaways were indeed deceased and nothing further of a suspicious or dangerous nature had transpired, since their passing. In our defense, the final interviews of individuals on Klaus’s list were arranged not at our convenience, but at that of the interviewees.

  Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was, after all, the richest man on the ship, probably the Lucy’s most important passenger, with the possible exception of Elbert Hubbard. We were fortunate that Vanderbilt consented to see us at all, as he had no love for the press, which had been rough on him from time to time.

  But Staff Captain Anderson was able to convince the millionaire to receive us—Vanderbilt was a frequent Cunard guest, crossing two or three times a year—and the interview (with Vanderbilt and his friend Williamson) was scheduled for Monday afternoon.

  The remaining interviews, of course, were with crew members Williams and Leach, but Miss Vance wanted to wait for the reports from Pinkerton on the pair. She knew questioning them at all would be delicate, considering the defensiveness of the two captains; better to limit it to one round of informed interrogation.

  So on Monday afternoon, a few minutes before the appointed time of three o’clock, Miss Vance and I made our way to the starboard side of the promendade deck. There, Vanderbilt occupied the second of the two so-called Regal Suites, the other on the portside of the ship—our side of the ship—being filled by Madame DePage and Miss Vance herself.

  We were approaching the door to the suite when a figure emerged from within, and seized our attention, to say the least. Suddenly we were face-to-face with a brown-haired, blue-eyed young man whose complexion riva
led a fish’s belly for paleness—none other than Steward Neil Leach.

  “Mr. Leach,” I said. “Good afternoon.”

  “Mr. Van Dine,” he said, with a nervous nod. Then he smiled a small, polite, canary-color crooked-toothed smile to my companion, saying, “Good afternoon, Miss Vance.”

  My tone pleasant, conversational, I said, “We haven’t seen you since the unfortunate events of Saturday night.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Terrible. Just awful.”

  Miss Vance said, “Having all of that happen on your watch . . . must have been distressing.”

  “Oh, it was. It was.”

  With a sweet smile, as if commenting on the nice day, she said to him, “You may have been the last to see them alive.”

  His eyes widened. “How is that, ma’am?”

  “Well, you must have delivered their supper. I would think that would, at least, make you the last crew member to see them before . . . the unpleasantness.”

  “I did serve them, yes.”

  Now, that was an interesting offhand admission, considering the likelihood of the cyanide having been introduced into the dead men’s systems, in that manner.

  “But,” he was saying, “I’m fairly sure Mr. Williams looked in on them, later . . . if you’ll excuse me, ma’am . . . sir.”

  He began to move off but I touched his arm. Gently. “Mr. Leach, may I ask why you were in Mr. Vanderbilt’s suite?”

  “Delivering a Marconigram, sir.”

  “I see.” I nodded in dismissal, and moved toward the door of the suite, poised to knock.

  “Sir!” Leach said.

  Miss Vance and I looked back at him—he appeared even whiter than usual.

  “I’m not sure you should be bothering Mr. Vanderbilt,” Leach said, “if I’m not overstepping saying so . . . He’s had some bad news.”

  I frowned. “The Marconigram?”

  Leach nodded. “It’s the second he’s received today, sir—the other came this morning, and I delivered that one, too. This new ’gram was confirmation of the earlier one.”

  “Well?” Miss Vance asked, with an edge in her voice.

  “I believe a friend of Mr. Vanderbilt’s has died . . . a close friend. . . . If you’ll excuse me.”

  And Leach hurried off, apparently having had enough of this awkward encounter.

  I glanced at Miss Vance, as we stood in front of the white door, and my eyes asked her what we should do.

  “We have an appointment,” she said. “We received no word of it having been cancelled or postponed. . . . It would be rude not to keep it.”

  She was right, of course—she so often was—and I knocked.

  A valet in full butler’s livery answered, a tall, distinguished-looking character whose expression conveyed instantly how troubling it was to him, having to share the planet with the likes of me.

  I announced myself and Miss Vance and told the imperious valet that we were expected—we had an appointment. We waited in the hallway while he checked; then, less than a minute later, we were shown in.

  This was the drawing room of the suite, panelled in sycamore, decorated in the Colonial Adam style with inlaid satinwood furniture, the walls draped with tapestries, the windows shaped and curtained as in a private residence, or perhaps in the private apartment atop the Vanderbilt Hotel on Park Avenue. We were shown to a brocaded settee where we sat, and waited.

  I knew something about Vanderbilt, though unlike Hubbard, he had not served as the subject of my writing; but my employer Rumely had provided a file on several of the prominent potential interviewees, and Vanderbilt had been among them. Like anyone in America who occasionally read a newspaper, however, to me Vanderbilt’s story was well-known.

  Alfred Vanderbilt was heir to the world’s greatest fortune—estimated at one hundred million dollars—and head of that fabulous empire of shipping interests and railroads forged by the notorious tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, Alfred’s great-great-grandfather. Though he’d long been a familiar figure at resorts and spas frequented by the wealthy of the world—and especially a habitue of sporting events—Vanderbilt had in recent years developed the reputation of a near recluse.

  As a younger man, he had been the typical playboy, whose love of fast cars and faster women was legendary—a dashing young man with assorted polo ponies and countless memberships in exclusive clubs, but no interest at all in the fantastic enterprise his forefathers had built and his father had passed along to him. He preferred instead to race his thirty-thousand-dollar sports car over Florida beaches like a man demented; or to join with cronies to flee the family’s country home at Oakland Farm in taking wild trips in mixed company.

  Yet Vanderbilt had not grown up into the standard-issue extroverted, partygoing, cigar-in-one-hand-drink-in-the-other lout of his privileged class. He was said to be shy, painfully so, avoiding crowds and reporters, hating being pointed out. He was by all accounts happily married to his second wife, Margaret Smith Hollins McKim—the Bromo-Seltzer heiress—and devoted to their two sons. Many said the breezy young millionaire had matured into a responsible adult.

  Others said that he was suffering from the pall cast over his life by the tragedy that followed the dissolution of his first marriage. In 1901, when he married tall, titian-haired society beauty Elsie French, the wedding cake had been baked in the shape of a trolley, each slice of which contained a precious item of jewelry, so guests would have keepsakes. But within seven years, the trolley of wedded bliss was off its tracks—Elsie had divorced him on grounds of misconduct with one Mary Agnes O’Brien Ruiz, wife of the Cuban attaché in Washington, D.C.

  Vanderbilt had gone on with his life, and he and the Bromo-Seltzer heiress began a courtship which led to marriage only a few years after the expensive divorce. But Mary Ruiz made a nuisance of herself, in the press, in the courts, a spurned mistress who was embarrassingly persistent in her refusal to just go away.

  Then, one day, finally she did—by committing suicide in London. The details of the inquest into Mary Ruiz’s death “by her own hands, while of unsound mind” (off her trolley?) were never revealed to the public; attempts by the press to secure the records of the proceedings were blocked, and hush money had reportedly been lavished on both friends of Mrs. Ruiz and certain officials.

  This was why Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt shunned the press, and the spotlight; the Ruiz suicide was a matter he had never publicly discussed.

  A man entered from the bedroom, but it was not Vanderbilt, or the valet, either (who had politely disappeared): This was Charles Williamson, slender as a knife in his dark suit with a dark red bow tie, a dark-haired fellow whose keenly intelligent blue eyes were the most distinct of his otherwise blandly regular features.

  I knew little of Williamson, though Miss Vance said he was an art dealer who advised Vanderbilt and other prominent moneybags in the purchase of paintings, sculptures and assorted objets d’art.

  He introduced himself, making clear that he knew who we were, and we stood, and I shook his hand. We sat again, but he remained standing before us, his hands behind him, and he frowned, rather like a displeased schoolmaster.

  “You had no way of knowing,” he said, and his voice was a hoarse tenor, “but Alfred has received tragic news. A Marconigram this morning from Mrs. Vanderbilt arrived, saying Alfred’s closest friend, Frederick Davies, has died, suddenly.”

  We made the proper murmurs of sympathy and shock, though I knew only vaguely of the man—he’d been a prominent New York builder.

  Rocking on his heels, Williamson said, “A second ’gram just arrived, from a business associate, confirming the sad fact of Freddy’s passing.”

  I rose. “Well, we certainly won’t impose on—”

  A hand raised in stop fashion. “No. Alfred seems intent on fulfilling this obligation. He promised Staff Captain Anderson he would help you out, on this article of yours.”

  “We could reschedule for another time, another day . . .”

&nbs
p; “No, he would like to receive you. I think he feels the activity might take his mind off the tragedy. But I would ask you to make your stay a brief one, and to avoid any subjects that might be . . . bothersome.”

  “Anything in particular,” I asked, “that should be avoided?”

  Williamson twitched a humorless smile. “You certainly know, even in more unclouded circumstances, that the Ruiz affair is off-limits . . . strictly.”

  I shrugged. “I had no plans to make any such inquiries.”

  Williamson smiled again—this one of a patronizing variety. “Good. . . . I’ll see if Alfred is ready.”

  “Mr. Williamson,” Miss Vance said, good-naturedly, “are you normally Mr. Vanderbilt’s social secretary?”

  His frown seemed an overreaction. “No. I’m his friend, his close friend.”

  “And a business associate?”

  The frown deepened. “Out of our friendship, a certain amount of business has arisen.”

  “You’re an art dealer?”

  “Miss . . . Vance, is it? Do you make a habit of asking questions to which you already know the answer?”

  She smiled beautifully. “No—sometimes I seek confirmation of what I have heard . . . I seldom accept hearsay as fact. To do so can often be destructive, even in seemingly innocent instances.”

  His expression was blank, as he processed this; then he half-bowed, and said, “Yours is a most wise and gracious approach, Miss Vance. . . . I am an art dealer, adviser, commissionaire and connoisseur.”

  “Most impressive,” she said.

  “I merely share my views, my tastes, with my wealthy friends who wish to invest in art. And then I share my connections, so that these properties can be purchased.”

  I said, “I always considered art something more emotional and instinctive than ‘properties’ in which to invest.”

  He seemed both interested and amused. “You know something of art, Mr. Van Dine?”

  “Yes . . . I’m somewhat of a . . . connoissuer, myself.”