Conspiracy of Silence

by S. T. Joshi

  “Maybe.” I patted her hand gently. Then:

  “What about this Eva Dailey? Maybe I could talk to her. She must know something.”

  Lizbeth’s face froze, and she turned away from me.

  “Well, that might be difficult. . . . You see, Eva killed herself about three months after Uncle Frank died.”

  Chapter Three

  Now I had something to go on.

  If what Lizbeth had told me was even roughly accurate, then one obvious scenario became immediately evident: Eva had killed Frank Crawford (somehow), perhaps out of jealousy (maybe Frank had in fact been fooling around with his own sister-in-law), perhaps merely out of his apparent disinclination to commit himself to her; then, out of remorse, she had taken her own life.

  Problems with this scenario still abounded. It seemed incredibly risky to have done the deed at a time when so many other people were at Thornleigh. In any case, if James Crawford had actually set up the party and Eva was just a last-minute addition on Frank’s part, she would have to have worked pretty fast to seize the opportunity to knock off her hoped-for fiancé.

  And then there was the overriding matter of why James—I got the impression nobody ever called him Jim or Jimmy—had decided to take the rap for her. He too had acted quickly, wasting no time in telling the cops he was responsible. What could have possessed him to do that? Was that his bizarre way of protecting the family name? How was it any less scandalous to admit to killing your own brother—and spending much of the rest of your life in prison—than to allow his resentful sweetheart to serve time for the act?

  Well, some of these points were queries for another day. Right now I had some fairly concrete leads to follow, and the best place to start was the police station in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.

  As I headed out in my well-used Chevy roadster, across the George Washington Bridge into the wilds of New Jersey, I felt I was heading back into a past that had already come to seem ancient. This case would take me into an era that, after seven years of a depression, already seemed as remote as Thebes or Babylon. In 1924 I was barely out of Johns Hopkins, looking out upon a world that seemed to have endless possibilities. I didn’t waste any sympathy on the sudden and unexpected death of our sainted president, Warren G. Harding, the year before—it turned out he had the good luck to die before the Teapot Dome scandal dragged him into its clutches. My pal Henry Mencken was riding high, lambasting all and sundry with cheerful vitriol—nothing like the dour, furiously anti-FDR curmudgeon he had now become. Sinclair Lewis was still basking in the glory of his best-selling novels, Main Street and Babbitt. Fitzgerald had yet to publish The Great Gatsby, Dreiser hadn’t come out with that behemoth called An American Tragedy (who ever heard of a two-volume novel?), the world had never heard of John Thomas Scopes, flat-chested flappers were everywhere . . . and so were jobs.

  Casting my mind back to that spring of 1924, I remembered that Doug Fairbanks Jr. was working on that Oriental extravaganza called The Thief of Baghdad—and (as Mencken told me) had to hire the poet George Sterling to write captions, for of course there were no talkies. Valentino was still alive and causing ladies to swoon, Chaplin was riding high, even though trouble was looming with his ill-advised fling with the sixteen-year-old Lita Grey; and everyone was singing “Everybody Loves My Baby” and “Riverboat Shuffle.”

  Not everything was a song and dance, of course. After five years, people were already beginning to have second thoughts about Prohibition. It wasn’t merely the fact that the Mob had quickly taken over the bootlegging business; it was that corruption on every level—from federal judges to state legislatures to police officers to Prohibition enforcement agents—was turning just about everyone into overt and unashamed lawbreakers. More and more people were coming around to thinking that that high-pressure arm-twisting group, the Anti-Saloon League, was as bad as the Mafia. Even though evading the Volstead Act had become a kind of game for many, the 18th Amendment had turned the country into something not far from a police state.

  As for me, I kicked around New York City for a couple of years before deciding that I didn’t like any boss except myself—and sometimes I didn’t like him either. Silent Cal Coolidge was about to come up with that priceless gem of homespun wisdom—“The chief business of the American people is business”—but he also would thank his stars he got off this planet before he and his successor, Let ’Em Starve Hoover, reaped the harvest of their “rugged individualism” and let the country and the world into the worst depression in history. Wall Street had been given a license to engage in legalized gambling, and that’s just what it did—but no one seemed to mind so long as the money kept rolling in.

  Well, there was no use being bitter. I may not have my secretary anymore, but I still had a job, which was more than I could say for those luckless guys selling apples on the street. In 1924 nobody thought it would ever come to that; and the Crawfords of the Crawford Tire and Rubber Company had no reason to think that their palatial life at Thornleigh wouldn’t go on forever.

  Pompton Lakes proved to be a town—maybe even a village—not far from Wayne. If it had more than three thousand people, I’d be surprised. Thornleigh was well north of the town proper, on a slight acclivity overlooking the body of water that gave the town its name; but I wasn’t interested in the house just yet. The town itself seemed a mix of nouveau riche and down-and-out. I suspected that any recent population growth had occurred in the latter.

  The police station lay conveniently in the center of town, and I had little difficulty finding it. I had no idea how the police chief would react to my request to examine police records of a decade or more ago, but I figured there was no harm in asking.

  The sergeant, after learning what I wanted, led me blandly into the chief’s office. The door to his office announced him as one Frederick Taber.

  Taber looked at my card, then met my gaze with the blankest expression I’ve ever seen. “What’s your interest in this case, Scintilla?”

  I said: “I’m working on behalf of Miss Lizbeth Crawford. She thinks she has some evidence to exonerate her father, James Allen Crawford.” This was a bit of a stretch, but it made my case for examining the files a bit more compelling.

  “The matter was pretty well settled, I thought,” Taber offered.

  “Miss Crawford doesn’t seem to think so.”

  Again that blank look from Taber.

  I went on: “Do you remember anything of the case?”

  For the first time, Taber’s face showed something that could be called an emotion. What was it?—nervousness? fear? doubt? suspicion? Whatever it was, it took him a while to say: “Well, can’t say as I do.”

  “You don’t remember a murder case involving the most prominent family in town?” I said incredulously.

  That made him angry. “No, I don’t remember, mac. I wasn’t here!”

  Quietly I said: “Where were you?”

  Maybe that remark sounded sarcastic, although it wasn’t meant to be. Taber got even madder when he said: “I wasn’t the police chief at the time! I wasn’t even in the area. I transferred here from Connecticut five years ago. It wasn’t my call!”

  I needed to calm the guy down. “OK, OK, Mr. Taber. I’m not blaming you for anything. I just want to see the records. There’s no harm in that, is there?”

  Taber seemed embarrassed by his outburst, and he looked a bit sheepish. “Sure, there’s no harm. Go ahead.”

  I told him I’d like to see the records both for the death of Frank Crawford and the apparent suicide of Eva Dailey. He shrugged and pointed to a file cabinet where, he said, all that I could want would be filed under each name.

  The Crawford file seemed awfully thin. The police had been called to Thornleigh on the evening of March 19, 1924, about 10:30 p.m., when a telephone call—it was not clear from whom—had come to report the death of Frank Crawford. The family physician, Dr. Granger, who was conveniently at hand, had declared that Crawford had died about an hour before. James Allen Cr
awford had immediately stepped forward to claim that he had strangled his brother to death.

  There was a statement by James, taken down the next day. It was short and to the point, and read as follows:

  “I, James Allen Crawford, being of sound mind and without coercion from any party, declare that I willfully and deliberately killed my brother, Frank Crawford, on the evening of March 19, 1924. I had learned that he had been making advances toward my wife, Florence Bisland Crawford, and was so enraged by his behavior that I came to believe his death would be the only means to cleanse the family of this taint. I am remorseful for what I have done, but I believe I have protected the honor of my wife and of my family. I am prepared to face whatever criminal penalties may fittingly be imposed upon me for my actions.”

  This didn’t tell me much that I didn’t know already; but it seemed a bit odd that whoever had examined the body—if there had in fact been anyone aside from Dr. Granger himself—had made no mention of any marks or bruises around Frank’s neck. And there were other things in the record that struck me as more than a little curious. Or maybe I should say things that were not in the record.

  I looked up to Taber, who had been hovering nearby like a mother hen.

  “I don’t see any autopsy on Frank Crawford. Surely the medical examiner performed one?”

  Taber shrugged. “I told you, Scintilla, I wasn’t here. I had nothing to do with the case.”

  I looked down at the papers again. “I see that the police chief was one Myron Franklin. Your predecessor?”

  Taber nodded.

  “Where he is? Can I talk to him?”

  Taber got that fearful-nervous look on his face again. “I guess you can. He’s retired now.”

  “Still in the area?” I asked.

  “Yeah, he lives right in town.”

  “Got his address?”

  Taber sighed and trudged back to his office. “Yeah, I’ll get it for you.”

  In the meantime I decided to look quickly at the record for Eva Dailey. It too seemed to shed little light on the matter. She had been found dead in her apartment here in town on June 6, 1924. An autopsy had been performed on her body, and an overdose of sleeping pills was found in her stomach. No note, but suicide was the obvious assumption.

  But there was one bit of new information:

  Eva Dailey had been five months pregnant.

  It seemed likely enough that she had been carrying Frank’s child. Did he know? Had she told him? She had probably known of her condition back in March, and it was hard to believe she wouldn’t have used that bit of information to pressure Frank to do the decent thing and marry her. But if so, why the hell had she killed him (if she had)? Had he simply refused to take responsibility for her and her child, and had she killed him in a rage? How, exactly, could she have done that? In the absence of an autopsy on Frank Crawford, the cause of his death remained a mystery. James had said he had strangled his brother, but given the incredibly cursory examination that the body had undergone, there was no particularly compelling reason to think that was the case. Women tend to resort to pills and poison rather than guns or knives—or their hands. Could Eva have somehow poisoned Frank and then taken her own life by similar means less than three months later?

  I jotted down various points in both reports, then waited for Taber to come back—which he did grudgingly—with that address I wanted.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking it out of his hands.

  “Don’t mention it,” Taber replied. And that remark was sarcastic.

  Myron Franklin definitely lived in the down-and-out part of town. The house, as I pulled up in front of it, would have been more fitting in the Ozarks of Arkansas. To note that it needed a lick of paint and a new roof was the kindest thing one could say about it. Not that its neighbors were much better. It was hard to believe that someone who had been a police chief, even of a postage-stamp-sized village like Pompton Lakes, would have to spend his final years in a place like this. It was exactly people like him that the Social Security Act that FDR had signed last year were designed to help, though they would still have to wait a couple of years for the benefits to kick in. And yet, I had to laugh a bit ruefully when I saw the Packard 426 Roadster in the driveway. Whatever pathetic remnants of cash Franklin had had on hand must have gone into this expensive toy, although even this gewgaw seemed a bit the worse for wear.

  I thought it would be best not to announce myself ahead of time, so I just went up to the door and knocked.

  It took a while for Franklin to answer. I gathered he wasn’t used to guests.

  The cold, hard look he gave me convinced me I was right. Myron Franklin was short, paunchy, and, I’m sorry to say, apparently not accustomed to taking baths. Either he hadn’t shaved in days or didn’t even bother anymore, leaving a perpetual salt-and-pepper stubble unevenly covering his cheeks, chin, and neck. His jowls sagged, he had bags under his watery eyes, and his slack-jawed expression was at once pathetic and vaguely menacing.

  “What d’ya want?” he said truculently.

  I felt it best to be both polite and official-sounding. “Mr. Franklin, I’m Joe Scintilla, a private investigator.” I offered him my card, but he did no more than glance at it and refused to take it. “I’ve been hired by Lizbeth Crawford to investigate the death of her uncle, Frank Crawford, back in 1924. She believes her father isn’t guilty of the crime.”

  Did I detect an undercurrent of fear worming its way into Franklin’s gruff countenance? He said nothing for several moments, then burst out:

  “What’s that to do with me? The guy confessed!”

  “I know that,” I said quietly. “But it’s possible that he was shielding someone. There are some oddities in the case that we need to get to the bottom of.”

  I suspect it was that “we” that made him curl his lip in disdain.

  “What’s that to do with me? The case is long over. What possible new evidence could turn up now?”

  “Mr. Franklin, may I come in and just discuss the matter with you for a few minutes?”

  He again stood there, saying nothing. His hand was on the doorknob, and I could sense that he was on the verge of slamming the door in my face. But the poor sometimes have an innate respect—or fear—of their social and financial betters, and I think Franklin also knew that I wouldn’t drop the case no matter how much he tried to stonewall me. So, with a crestfallen look that instantly earned my pity, he backed away and let me walk in.

  He vaguely waved me to a Morris chair that, like everything else in the place, had seen better days. It took some effort to sit in such a way that the coils weren’t poking into my back or posterior. Franklin sat in a couch across the room—about as far away from me as he could manage. The place was ill-lit, so he was virtually swathed in gloom.

  I figured there was no reason to waste time on inessentials, so I got right to the point.

  “Mr. Franklin, why was there no autopsy performed on Frank Crawford?”

  I thought Franklin was about to erupt out of his seat and come over and throttle me—but he had neither the physical nor the emotional energy for that. After tensing up for a second in both rage and fear, he almost collapsed into himself and said in little more than a whisper:

  “Scintilla, you don’t understand. . . . Do you know what it was like dealing with those Crawfords?” He passed a hand over his face, as if to wipe imaginary sweat off his brow. “They were the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful family in town. And me . . . well, even though I was police chief, I came from the wrong side of the tracks, and”—his hand swept the room with a gesture of self-contempt—“as you can see, I’ve gone back there. There was no way I could have stood up to them.

  “Anyway, that brother of his, James Crawford, confessed right on the spot. Just came right up to me and offered me his wrists as if I was supposed to slap the handcuffs on him then and there.” Franklin smirked bitterly at the memory. “I didn’t, of course. There was no need. He wasn’t going anywhere.”

/>   Franklin leaned toward me, and even at a distance of twenty feet it seemed as if his fat, untidy face was inches from my own.

  “Scintilla, he confessed. My work was done. Why the hell should I make extra trouble for them . . . and myself?”

  “Where was the medical examiner?” I asked.

  “He didn’t come,” Franklin said shortly. “The family already told me there was a doctor on the scene, and remember—I had to handle this whole matter with kid gloves. I was shaking in my boots, Scintilla! . . . I just think they were trying as hard as they could to avoid scandal. Keep it out of the papers. Sure, I had to take James Crawford into custody, but his trial was just a formality . . . it was over in five minutes. Even yellow journals like Hearst’s New York American couldn’t milk much out of the story. We didn’t even take the body to the morgue—just let the family turn it right over to their undertaker.”

  I stared at him. “Isn’t that . . . highly irregular?”

  “Of course it is!” Franklin exploded. “But so what? Who was going to report us to the authorities? We were the authorities! If a family like the Crawfords, with the kind of pull they had, didn’t want strangers handling the precious corpse of one of their own, who were we to complain? If I’d tried to do anything, I’d probably have found myself demoted to a flatfoot pounding the beat in Paterson. No thanks, guy!”

  I mulled things over for a bit. Things were getting stranger and stranger. OK, I didn’t usually hobhob with American royalty of the Crawfords’ sort, but it struck me as incredible that such sloppy and careless police work could have passed muster. On the other hand, I had to admit, from my years of dealing—usually in an adversarial role—with the cops, that they’ll take the easy way out whenever they can. I couldn’t blame Franklin for not making waves in the case, especially when he had a culprit fall into his hands with no effort expended on his part. If James Allen Crawford wanted to rot in jail for a crime he may or may not have committed, who was Franklin to stand in his way?