The Devil's Gentleman (17 page)

32

W
hen Roland had first come downstairs after being roused by the maid, he had found his father in the company of William Inglis, an old friend and fellow member of the New York Athletic Club who worked as a reporter for Pulitzer’s
World.

In their unflagging efforts to outscoop their rivals, Hearst and Pulitzer’s men kept constant tabs on each other’s stories, and Inglis had managed to procure a copy of Monday’s
Journal
while the ink was still damp on the page. Recognizing the storm that was about to engulf Roland, Inglis wanted to alert his friend but wasn’t sure of his whereabouts. And so—despite the untimeliness of the hour—he had secured a cab and driven out to Brooklyn, where, shortly before 5:00
A.M.
, he awoke the General and showed him the headline naming Roland as the main suspect in the city’s most notorious murder.
¹

At sixty-five years of age, Edward Leslie Molineux had lost none of the firm resolve or fighting spirit that had served him so well on the battle-fields of Cedar Creek and Winchester. He still believed in the motto of his boyhood hero, Louis Kossuth: “It is the surmounting of difficulties that makes heroes.” Less than a half hour after Inglis’s arrival, the two men were in a carriage headed for Manhattan. Reaching 757 West End Avenue around six, they awoke the housemaid and had her fetch Roland from his bed.

When Roland saw the headline, the color drained from his face. “What a horrible accusation!” he cried. “What shall I do?”
²

His father—coolly decisive as ever—immediately took charge. Though dawn was just breaking, they would proceed at once to the residence of Captain McCluskey and demand a retraction of the outrageous charge.

As it happened, McCluskey resided only a few blocks away, at 77 West Sixty-eighth Street. The sky was just showing the first inklings of daylight as Roland and the General, accompanied by Inglis, strode through the frigid streets, arriving at McCluskey’s home just before seven.

Early as it was, McCluskey was already awake and on the job, conferring with a pair of detectives from the central bureau. After a curt introduction, the General thrust the newspaper at the captain, whose face assumed a look of marked displeasure as he read.

“This is newspaper work, not mine,” he said when he was done, then turned to Roland and added: “I don’t want you and never have.” He advised Roland to go on about his business as usual. “Don’t bother about this thing,” he said. “Believe me, if we had wanted you, my men could have found you long ago.”

Barely mollified, the General removed a card from his pocket and wrote out Roland’s addresses both at home and at work, along with his own. “If you need us, you can find us at one of these places,” he told McCluskey, handing him the card. “We are as anxious to get to the bottom of this matter as you, and wish to assist in every way in our power.”
³

With that, the General, Roland, and Inglis took their leave.

Their next stop was the residence of Roland’s friend, Bartow S. Weeks, the prominent attorney and former president of the NYAC who had been the unwitting catalyst of Roland’s resignation from the Knickerbocker. Weeks was immediately retained as Roland’s counsel. Roland then returned home to Blanche, while the General traveled back to Brooklyn, where he paid an early-morning visit to his own lawyer, Hugo Hirsh, who was also put on the case.

By the time the General reached home, the
Journal
had hit the stands. The story set off the predictable furor, particularly in Brooklyn, where Edward Molineux was a revered and influential figure and Roland himself a renowned athlete. Within hours, a reporter for the
Brooklyn Eagle
had arrived at the Molineuxs’ stately Fort Greene home, where he was granted an interview by the General.

With the loyalty and devotion that would never waver in the harrowing years to come, Edward scoffed at the notion that a bitter rivalry existed between his son and Harry Cornish. True, there had been a “difference of opinion” between them “in regard to the management” of the club. When the Board of Governors sided with Cornish, Roland had felt that “there was nothing to do but resign and make his residence the New York Athletic Club.” It was, said the General, “the gentlemanly thing to do, and I supported him in the action.” The whole matter was of an utterly “trivial character,” and to suggest that it would lead Roland to plot Cornish’s murder was more than preposterous—it was libelous.

“He is a bold and fearless young man,” said the General with undisguised pride. “From his childhood up there has never been anything in his life to indicate that he was the slightest bit ugly in disposition or quarrelsome, and certainly never held malice towards anyone. Everyone is interested in trying to find out who the villain is who would be guilty of so foul an act. But anyone who would accuse a man—a young and married man, especially—before the law has acted or the authorities have investigated the matter is guilty of malicious, vile conduct and deserves to be heavily punished.

“They
shall
be punished,” the General continued, sounding every bit the iron-willed commander who, in his army days, had made many a shirker quail. “They shall find out I am a fighting man when the occasion demands. I consider it my duty as a citizen and as a father to leave no stone unturned to clear him or any other unfortunate who is unjustly accused of such a fearful crime.”
⁴

The General’s threats were echoed by the two lawyers he had immediately retained to deal with the crisis. Hugo Hirsh declared that he had every intention of instituting a libel case against Hearst, though he felt that “horse-whipping would be the proper course.”
⁵
Bartow Weeks likewise announced that he would “proceed against the newspaper that printed this story.” Almost sputtering with indignation, Weeks proclaimed his absolute faith in Roland’s innocence. The idea that a man so “above reproach”—so “intelligent and refined”—might commit such a “dastardly” crime was too outrageous to contemplate. Why, it would make as much sense to accuse Weeks himself! “I also had trouble with Cornish over matters relating to the club.
I
might just as well be brought into the case as Mr. Molineux.”
⁶

Later that day, after meeting with McCluskey, Weeks arrived at Alice Bellinger’s home to confer with Roland and Blanche. Though McCluskey had repeated the assurances he had given the General, it was clear to Weeks that the Molineux name was not going to disappear from the papers anytime soon. Not only Roland but his wife as well would be hounded mercilessly by “the reputation-destroying yellow wolves of the press.”
⁷
The only sensible course was to flee Manhattan and seek refuge in the relative privacy of the General’s home in Brooklyn.

Blanche reluctantly agreed. Within days, her apartment—where she had lived as a bride for less than a week—was “stripped and denuded…. My possessions were stored; my trunks packed. The doors of my honeymoon abode closed behind me.”

Though she could not possibly have known it at the time, she would never go back there again. Her retreat to the Molineuxs’ stately dwelling would turn into a seemingly endless imprisonment.

“The long siege,” as she described it many years later, “had begun.”
⁸

33

I
n public, Captain McCluskey stuck to the story he had given the General. The police weren’t after Roland. “The amateur detectives of certain newspapers are not my detectives,” he told reporters on Tuesday afternoon. “Their suspects are not my suspects. If they know who the culprit is, they know more than I do. If I knew who he was, I’d arrest him.”

The situation was different behind the scenes. In point of fact, Roland was still very much a person of interest to the police. Without solid evidence in hand, however, they weren’t about to make an arrest. Though the press had begun to complain about McCluskey’s performance—
POLICE MAKING POOR PROGRESS IN THE ADAMS MURDER CASE
, chided a headline in the
New York Sun
¹
—his men had, in fact, made significant headway. Indeed, the detectives who had been conferring with McCluskey at the time of the General’s early-morning visit—Arthur Carey and his partner, John Herlihy—were there to update him about a major discovery.

They had not only identified the store where the silver match holder had been purchased but had located the person who sold it.

It was the little oval smudge of mucilage—the vestige of the label glued onto the bottom of the holder—that proved to be the decisive clue. Checking the three jewelry shops in the metropolitan vicinity, the detectives had discovered that only one of the stores—C. J. Hartdegen of Newark—used stickers of that precise shape and dimension as price tags.

At first, no one at the store could recall when the holder had been sold. The owner himself, Charles Hartdegen, believed that someone had bought it months earlier. One of his clerks, however, seemed sure that he had seen it in the display window as recently as two weeks before.

Combing through the records, Carey came upon an entry for an item listed as a silver toothpick holder, priced at $5.75, which had been sold on December 21—a week before the death of Mrs. Adams and two days before the poison package was mailed at the general post office.
²
The sale had been made by Miss Emma Miller, a recently hired stenographer who in the rush before Christmas had helped out at the counter.
³

Miss Miller having already left work for the day, Carey and Herlihy took the trolley to her home. She turned out to be a slender young woman, apparently in her early twenties, with sharp features and a correspondingly curt manner.

When Carey showed her the holder, she recognized it at once, clearly recalling the circumstances of its sale. It had been purchased by a well-dressed man, perhaps in his early thirties, of medium build and height, who arrived late in the afternoon when the store was crowded with holiday shoppers. Despite his gentlemanly appearance, he had elbowed aside several other customers in his haste to reach the sales counter.

He was looking, he said, for an item that would hold a bottle of bromo-seltzer. At first, she could think of nothing suitable. Then she remembered the silver holder in the display case. When she showed it to the gentleman and told him the price, he immediately said that he would take it.

Having sat on a shelf for nearly two years, the holder was visibly tarnished, but when Miss Miller offered to polish it, the gentleman waved off the suggestion and told her to wrap it up as it was. She did as requested, and the transaction was quickly completed. The fellow then turned on his heel and hurried away. Altogether, he had been in the store for only a few minutes.

“Can you remember anything else about this gentleman?” Detective Carey asked Miss Miller.

“I believe he had a beard,” she replied. “A reddish beard.”
⁴

The news that the suspect in the poisoning case sported a reddish beard was quickly blazed across the front pages. Roland’s attorney, Bartow Weeks, immediately pounced on it as further evidence of his client’s innocence. “Mr. Molineux is clean shaven,” he proclaimed to reporters, adding with a chortle: “I have a yellow beard—some might call it reddish. Perhaps the police should be looking for
me.
”
⁵

It was certainly true that Roland was clean shaven. But that hadn’t been the case before Christmas, when he still wore the handlebar mustache he had grown the previous spring. The public got a good look at this impressive facial adornment when the
Journal
managed to obtain a series of photographic portraits of the mustachioed Molineux and plastered them across the top of page one.
⁶

Though Emma Miller insisted that “she could not have mistaken a mustache for a beard,” Detective Carey knew from long experience that “witnesses frequently transpose the two.”
⁷
To test her reliability as an observer, he visited her again, this time at Hartdegen’s.

There were several shoppers in the store when Carey arrived, and he waited until they were gone before speaking to Miss Miller. He began by asking her “about the other sales she had made on December 21.” Not only was she “unable to recall the face of any other customer she had waited on,” she could “not even give accurate descriptions of the people who were in the store” when Carey first entered.
⁸

Even more doubtful now about Emma Miller’s characterization of the purchaser of the silver holder as a red-bearded man, Carey began looking for other witnesses who might have seen the suspect enter or leave the store on December 21. He knew, of course, that “Christmas shopping was at its height on that day.” Reasoning that the Newark Police Department might have assigned “extra men to the shopping district,” Carey proceeded to headquarters. Asking around, he was pointed to a detective named Joseph Farrell.

As it turned out, Farrell had an interesting tale to tell.

On the afternoon of December 21, he had just come from a meeting with the mayor, who had asked him to perform a little errand in Irvington. Farrell was waiting for the trolley when Roland Molineux, dressed in a mackintosh and black derby hat, came striding up Market Street. Farrell—who had done some amateur boxing in his younger days—was an old acquaintance of Molineux’s, a longtime fan of prizefighting. Though seemingly in a great hurry, Roland paused to exchange greetings with the detective.

“Did he have a beard?” Carey asked Farrell.

Farrell shook his head.

The two men had chatted only briefly. Roland, who was on his way back to the factory, made a point of telling Farrell that he had just come from a restaurant, where he’d dined with his boss, Morris Herrmann.

Farrell, of course, had no reason to doubt that story, though Herrmann himself would later testify that no such dinner took place on that date. The detective had noticed one thing, however.

When Carey asked if he recalled which direction Roland had been coming from, Farrell said, “Yes. He was walking up from the Hartdegen store.”
⁹