The Interpretation Of Murder (25 page)

    Outside the Jefferson Market jail,
Betty Longobardi had five words for Jimmy Littlemore. 'Let's get out of here.'

    Littlemore was not so eager to leave.
He led Betty toward Sixth Avenue, with its river of men and women streaming
north on their way home from work. At the corner, a few steps from the ornate
courthouse entrance, Littlemore stopped and wouldn't budge. Over the
earthshaking roar of an elevated train, he told Betty excitedly about his
eventful day.

    'She said you were going to get
killed, Jimmy,' was Betty's reply, which struck Littlemore as less appreciative
of his achievements than he had hoped.

    'She also said we should ask next
door,' he answered. 'It's got to be the courthouse. Come on; we're right here.'

    'I don't want to.'

    'It's a courthouse, Betty. Nothing
can happen in a courthouse.'

    Back inside, Littlemore showed his
badge to the clerk, who told them where the records office was but expressed
the opinion that nobody was likely to be there at this hour. After climbing up
two flights of stairs and working their way through an empty maze of corridors,
Littlemore and Betty came upon a door marked records. The door was locked, the
room behind it dark. Breaking and entering was not the detective's ordinary
modus operandi, but under the circumstances he felt justified. Betty glanced
around nervously.

    Littlemore jimmied the lock. Shutting
the door behind them, he switched on an electric lamp. They were in a small
office with one large desk. There was a rear exit. This was unlocked; it opened
onto a more capacious storeroom. Here they saw cabinet after cabinet of labeled
drawers. 'There are no dates,' said Betty. 'Only letters.'

    'There'll be a calendar,' said
Littlemore. 'There's always a calendar. Wait till I find it.'

    It did not take him long. He returned
to the desk, where there were two typewriters, blotters, inkwells - and a stack
of leather-bound ledgers, each more than two feet in width. Littlemore opened
the first one. Every page within represented a day in the life of the New York
Supreme Court, Trial Term, Parts I through III. The pages that Littlemore
flipped through all indicated dates in 1909. He opened the second ledger, which
proved to be the calendar of 1908, and then the third. Leafing through its
pages, he quickly came to March 18, 1907. He saw dozens of lines of case names
and numbers, set down by a practiced hand in pen and ink, often crossed out or
overwritten. He read aloud:

    
'Ten-fifteen
a.m.,
day
calendar, Part III: Wells v. Interborough R. T. Co. Truax, J.
Okay, Wells.
We've got to find Wells.' He rushed past Betty back to the storeroom, where in
a drawer marked
w
he found the case of Wells
v.
IRT: a
paper-clipped set of three pages. He looked through them. 'This is nothing,' he
said. 'Maybe some subway accident. They never even got to court.'

    He went back to the ledger.
'Bernstein v. same,'
he read.
'Mensinub v. same. Selxas v. same.
Boy, there's at least twenty of these IRT cases. I guess we have to look
through them all:

    'Maybe those aren't what we're
looking for, Jimmy. Isn't there anything else?'

    'Ten-fifteen
a.m.,
Trial Term:
Tarbles v. Tarbles. A
divorce?'

    'Is that all?' asked Betty.

    'Ten-thirty a.m., Trial Term, Part I,
Criminal Term (January Term continued). Fitzgerald, J. People v. Harry K.
Thaw.'

    They stared at each other. Betty and
Littlemore recognized the name at once, as would anyone else in New York and
nearly anyone in the country at that time. 'He's the one - ' said Betty.

    ' - who murdered the architect at
Madison Square Garden,' Littlemore finished. Then he realized why Betty had
stopped: heavy treading could be heard down the hall.

    'Who is that?' she whispered.

    'Turn off the light,' Littlemore
instructed Betty, who was standing next to the lamp. She reached under the
shade and fiddled nervously with the buttons, but the result of her efforts was
to switch on another bulb. The footsteps stopped. Then they resumed; they were
now undoubtedly approaching the records office.

    'Oh, no,' said Betty. 'Let's hide in
the storeroom.'

    'I don't think so,' said Littlemore.

    The footsteps grew close, halting
just outside their door. The knob turned, and the door swung open. It was a
short man in a fedora and a cheap-looking three-piece suit, the inner breast
pocket of which bulged as if he were carrying a gun. 'Ain't there no men's
room?' he asked.

    'Second floor,' said Littlemore.

    'Thanks,' said the man, slamming the
door behind him.

    'Come on,' said Littlemore, heading
back into the filing room. The case of People
v.
Thaw occupied a good
two dozen drawers. Littlemore found the trial transcript: there were thousands
of pages in four-inch sheafs, bound by rubber bands. The transcript was
illegible in places, with uneven letters, no punctuation, and whole sentences
of garbled words. For the date of March 18, 1907, there were only fifty or
sixty pages. Littlemore, flipping through them, quickly came upon several
sheets of paper that looked different from the others: cleanly typed, organized
into separate paragraphs, well punctuated. 'An affidavit,' he said.

    'Oh, my gosh,' Betty replied. 'Look!'
She was pointing to the words
grasped me by the throat
and
whip.

    Littlemore hurriedly turned back to
the affidavit's first page. It was dated October 27, 1903, and began,
Evelyn
Nesbit, being duly sworn, says -

    'That's Thaw's wife, the showgirl,'
said Betty. Evelyn Nesbit had been described by more than one infatuated author
of the time as the most beautiful girl that ever lived. She married Harry Thaw
in 1905, a year before Thaw killed Stanford White.

    'Before she was his wife,' said
Littlemore. They kept reading:

    I reside at the Savoy Hotel, Fifth
Avenue and Fifty- ninth Street, in the City of New York. I am 18 years of age,
having been born on Christmas Day, in the year 1884.

    For several months prior to June
1903,1 had been at Dr Bell's Hospital at West Thirty-third Street, where

    I had an operation performed on me
for appendicitis, and during the month of June went to Europe at the request of
Henry Kendall Thaw. Mr Thaw and I traveled throughout Holland, stopping at
various places to catch connecting trains, and then we went to Munich, Germany.
We then traveled through the Bavarian Highlands, finally going to the Austrian
Tyrol. During all this time the said Thaw and myself were known as husband and
wife, and were represented by the said Thaw, and known, under the name of Mr
and Mrs Dellis.

    'The snake,' said Betty.

    'Well, at least he married her
later,' said Littlemore.

    After traveling together about five
or six weeks, the said Thaw rented a castle in the Austrian Tyrol, situated
about halfway up a very isolated mountain. This castle must have been built
centuries ago, as the rooms and windows are all old-fashioned. I was assigned a
bedroom for my personal use.

    The first night I was very tired, and
went to bed right after dinner. In the morning I had breakfast with the said
Thaw. After breakfast Mr Thaw said he wished to tell me something, and asked me
to step into my bedroom. I entered the room, when the said Thaw, without any
provocation, grasped me by the throat and tore the bathrobe from my body. The
said Thaw was in a terrific excited condition. His eyes were glaring, and he
had in his right hand a cowhide whip. He seized hold of me and threw me on the
bed. I was powerless and attempted to scream, but the said Thaw placed his
fingers in my mouth and tried to choke me.

    He then, without any provocation, and
without the slightest reason, began to inflict on me several severe and violent
blows with the cowhide whip. So brutally did he assault me that my skin was cut
and bruised. I besought him to desist, but he refused. He stopped every minute
or so to rest, and then renewed his attack on me.

    I was absolutely in fear of my life;
the servants could not hear my outcries, for the reason that my voice did not
penetrate through the large castle, and so could not come to my succor. The
said Thaw threatened to kill me, and by reason of his brutal attack, as I have
described, I was unable to move.

    The following morning Thaw again came
into my bedroom and administered a castigation similar to the day before. He
took a cowhide whip and belabored me with it on my bare skin, cutting the skin
and leaving me in a fainting condition. I swooned and did not know how long
after I returned to consciousness.

    'How horrible,' said Betty. 'But she
married him - why?' 'For his dough, I guess,' said Littlemore. He leafed
through the affidavit again. 'You think this is it? What Susie meant us to
find?'

    'It must be, Jimmy. It's the same
thing that was done to poor Miss Riverford.'

    'I know,' said Littlemore. 'But this
is an affidavit. Does Susie seem like somebody who knows about affidavits?'

    'What do you mean? It can't be a
coincidence.'

    'Why would she remember the day, the
exact day, this affidavit got read in at the trial? It doesn't add up. I think
there's something else.' Littlemore sat down on the floor, reading the
transcript. Betty sighed impatiently. Suddenly the detective called out, 'Wait
a minute. Here we go. Look at the Q here, Betty. That's the prosecutor, Mr
Jerome, asking questions. Now look who the witness is, giving the answers.'

    At the spot indicated by the
detective, the transcript read as follows:

    
Q.
What is your name?

    
A.
Susan Merrill.

    
Q.
State your business,
please.

    A. I keep a rooming house for
gentlemen in Forty-third Street.

    
Q.
Do you know Harry K. Thaw?

    
A.
I do.

    
Q.
When did you first meet
him?

    A. In 1903. He called on me to engage
rooms. Which he did.

    
Q.
For what purpose did he
say?

    A. He said he was engaging young
ladies for work on the stage.

    
Q.
Did he bring visitors to
his rooms?

    A. Mostly young women of fifteen
years and on. They said they wanted to get on the stage.

    
Q.
Did anything unusual happen
at any time when any of these girls called?

    A. Yes. One young girl had gone into
his room. A little later, I heard screams and I ran into the room. She was tied
to the bedpost. He had a whip in his right hand, and he was about to strike
her. There were welts all over her.

    
Q.
What was she wearing?

    A. Very little.

    
Q.
What happened next?

    A. He was wild and hurried away. She
told me he had been trying to murder her.

    
Q.
Can you describe the whip?

    A. It was a dog whip. On that
occasion.

    
Q.
Were there other occasions?

    A. Another time there were two girls.
One of them was undressed, the other was partly dressed. He was whipping them
with a lady's riding whip.

    
Q.
Did you ever speak with him
about it?

    A. Yes, I did. I told him these were
all young girls and he had no right to whip them.

    
Q.
What explanation did he
make for doing it?

    A. He made no explanation at all. He
said they needed it.

    
Q.
Did you ever inform the
police?

    
A.
No.

    
Q.
Why not?

    
A.
He said if I did he'd kill
me.