If only because she was the best-looking girl in the lot, Nancy Presser would have stood out from the crowd. But Nancy also had that vague, indefinable amalgam of qualities which, for want of a more specific term, is called personality. After the first mad night and day of the great raid, Nancy was quiet, subdued. She stayed by herself. She had a lot on her mind and she was worried. There was an intensity about Nancy’s silence.
There are women who, sitting silent in a corner, can exude more magnetism, attract more attention than another female who is trying to be the life of the party. Nancy was that kind.
Luck had it that, on the night of the big raid, the questioning of the inmates of Polack Frances’s house was turned over to Harry Cole, the good-looking yachtsman on Dewey’s staff. Now, as I have indicated, Harry Cole is the sort of fellow almost any girl likes to talk to; he is, moreover, a lawyer with the utmost skill at putting people at their ease; and he has had unusual success in persuading criminals, both men and women, to open up and tell all. Later, as a jury lawyer, he was to win an astonishing percentage of convictions. It’s the human warmth about him, largely, I suppose. At any rate, you would have thought that if any man could get the truth out of Nancy Presser, it would be Harry Cole.
Several times in the fortnight after Nancy’s arrest, Cole questioned her. After her medical report came through, showing she was badly infected with both gonorrhea and syphilis, she could hardly maintain any longer that she was a good girl; but she refused to give any information whatever. Cole would talk to her, get nowhere, then send her back to the House of Detention for a few days more. It was boring, but still Nancy kept her mouth shut.
Here was Nancy, the girl who would do any damned thing you'd ask her, who had lived for eight years at the beck and call of any and all men; she was talking to a good-looking man and all she would say was no. Here was Harry Cole, using all his powers of persuasion on a dizzy blonde, and he could not get to first base.
It was, doubtless, a novel situation for both of them.
For the first week after the big raid, everybody in the Dewey office dropped what he had been doing and worked on the prostitution case. There was so much to be done. There were girls and madams coming back and forth from the House of Detention every day. There were defendants negotiating to take pleas. There were numberless other witnesses being hunted, picked up, and questioned.
There were so many girls around the place all the time that Dewey had to take additional quarters on the floor below for waiting rooms. That space was needed, if only to provide separate toilet facilities for the witnesses, away from those of the secretaries and stenographers. Such insulation was not available for Dewey and his men. They had to share the facilities down the hall with all the pimps and other underworld men who came pouring through their office.
This was not a minor matter. “When the medical reports on the girls came in, it appeared that more than two-thirds of them were suffering from venereal disease, and more than half of those had both syphilis and gonorrhea. With some of them the diseases were not in communicable form (though that is a matter of medical opinion) but many of them were practically falling apart. These girls had been charged $5 every week they worked for medical examination by doctors who specialized in that line of business; many of them had health certificates. About all that can be said for the doctors is that they appear to have been confirmed optimists.
One of Dewey’s men always wore gloves when questioning the girls. I expect he had never got over the shock of the pictures he was shown in some college hygiene course. Another of Dewey’s assistants carried, long afterward, a faded and washed-out looking fountain pen. He had a girl sign a statement with his pen one day, then later could not find the pen. His secretary had sneaked it away, taken it home and boiled it. He got it back the next day.
After the first rush was over, things settled down to a more normal basis. A few men were assigned to prepare the prostitution case for trial, and the rest went back to their other investigations. Harry Cole resumed his work on the restaurant racket case. Sol Gelb was put in charge of the case for trial. The main brunt of associating with these women and questioning them was to fall on Frank Hogan.
Hogan was engaged to be married at the time, but for five months his fiancée saw very little of him. Night and day, at his office and at the House of Detention, he was trying to keep a hundred women happy.
The first legal, technical job which fell on Hogan was to get the evidence for specific counts in the indictment. You can’t just accuse a man of being a racketeer. As a matter of fact, there is no such crime as racketeering. You have to accuse him of a specific act, or acts.
The first count in the indictment eventually was to read as follows:
“THE GRAND JURY OF THE COUNTY OF NEW YORK, drawn for the EXTRAORDINARY SPECIAL AND TRIAL TERM OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, by this indictment, accuse THE SAID DEFENDANTS OF THE CRIME OF PLACING A FEMALE IN A HOUSE OF PROSTITUTION WITH INTENT THAT SHE SHALL LIVE A LIFE OF PROSTITUTION, committed as follows:
“The said defendants, in the County of New York, on or about the 22nd day of April, 1935, feloniously did place a certain female, to wit, one Betty Anderson, in a house of prostitution, to wit, in premises located at 1 West Sixty-eighth Street, Borough of Manhattan, City, County, and State of New York, with intent that she, the said Betty Anderson, should there live a life of prostitution; against the form of the statute in such case made and provided, and against the peace of the People of the State of New York and their dignity.”
The time, the place, and the girl were the same in the second count of the indictment, which accused the defendants of “the crime of receiving money for and on account of placing a female in a house of prostitution for the purpose of causing her to cohabit with male persons to whom she was not married,” the sum of money being “not less than One Dollar.”
The third count again dealt with the same time, place, and girl, and accused the defendants of “the crime of knowingly accepting, receiving, levying, and appropriating money without consideration from the proceeds and earnings of a woman engaged in prostitution.”
Thus, in the same act, the crime had been committed in three different ways.
The indictment which eventually went to trial had ninety counts in it, setting forth specific instances of such exploitation of twenty-five different women.
The prosecution was to undertake to show that each of these acts was carried out as part of a conspiracy in which each of the defendants was a member. For it is the law that any conspirator is equally guilty with all others, of every act which is committed as a part of the conspiracy.
This indictment was to be the first one of the sort ever tried in the New York state courts. A racket is not a single crime; it is a complex, a series, of small crimes all rolled into one. Dewey saw this, and knew that to present a full picture of a racket to a jury, a change in court procedure would be necessary. He had a bill prepared and presented to the Legislature which permitted a number of crimes of similar nature to be joined in one indictment, so that the charges could be tried simultaneously. There was nothing new about this. It had been federal court procedure for a long time. But prosecution of that sort had been unknown in the New York state courts.
This bill later became the widely discussed Dewey Law. It was what made possible the spectacular Dewey racket trials. The prostitution case was appealed to the highest courts on the ground that this was unconstitutional, but the appeal was unsuccessful.
Governor Lehman sponsored the joinder of trial bill for Dewey. It lay dormant on the legislative calendar for a long time. Seemingly nothing was being done about it. Dewey was getting worried. He could not understand it.
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the bill was called up one day and put through the Senate without opposition, without a dissenting vote.
It happened that on that day certain Senators were absent, off on some junket or other. Maybe that was just a coincidence. At any rate, I don’t doubt that every member of the Legislature was recorded as voting for the Dewey Law. That is customary with unopposed legislation.
Faced with the task of transforming a motley crowd of girls and madams into a series of counts in an indictment, Hogan went about it in a canny way. He did not figure it out in terms of crowd psychology, but rather sought a method by which a vast number of cases could be winnowed and sifted down to a few, air-tight and copper-riveted. But he might have taken his method right out of the book.
Three madams had confessed on the first night, and by now these had been augmented by a couple more. The idea of giving testimony in exchange for immunity, while firmly cemented in the law’s practice and traditions, was something new for these girls; and it took time to penetrate. The madams caught on more quickly. Indeed, they realized that this prosecution was down their alley. The gangsters were their natural enemies; and now, in a totally unexpected way, they were being given the help of the law in throwing off the parasites who had preyed on them.
Roughly, there were thirty-five madams and sixty-five girls among the material witnesses. The questioners started by getting all the madams in one room at the House of Detention. Among them were the madams who had decided to help, Betty Winters, Molly Leonard, Jennie the Factory.
Then into the room, one by one, were brought those girls who had agreed to be helpful. In the presence of all the others, and encouraged by Hogan, the girls would converse with the tame madams. They would refresh each other’s recollections, and thereby isolate from a confusion of memories some specific date and place in which the crime of compulsory prostitution had been committed.
Anyone who has ever been to an old-fashioned testimonial meeting will know that when people start confessing their sins in public the impulse of other people is to do the same. Something of this sort began happening to the madams.
Then the girls who had confessed began putting the heat on the madams. One by one they walked around among the crowd, identified one madam after another, talked to them.
“You remember me, don’t you?” a girl would say. “I worked for you last April at——West Eighty-sixth Street. Rita was the other girl that week.”
Before long the madams were confessing, one after another; and each one who did so was eager for company.
Now the tables were turned. The girls were brought into the room, and the tame madams were brought in one by one to go through a reversal of the process. Fingered by the madams, the girls too began to talk. Day by day they went to the meeting room. They called it “the school.”
Soon there was plenty of the basic prostitution testimony. It was an open and shut case against the bookers. But the bookers knew it, were confessing, offering themselves totestify. The important thing now was to develop the case as it related to the conspiracy, to the gangsters.
The racketeers’ molls were slow in talking, and even when they aid talk they were not immediately frank. They knew more than the others, but they had more reason to remain silent.
The other girls pointed them out. Mildred Harris, Pete’s wife, was certainly important; the investigators already knew that. So was Frisco Jean Erwin, Pete Harris’s sweetheart; she knew more than she was telling. That Thelma Jordan was the girl friend of Bennie Spiller, who hung out with Little Davie. The madams had missed Cokey Flo Brown, Jimmy Fredericks’s sweetheart; she had been arrested a couple of weeks before and had jumped her bail.
And that blonde, said the girls, that blonde Nancy Presser, she was a gangster’s girl certainly. She and that boy friend of hers, that Little Ralph Liguori, certain knew a bellyfull.
Some of the madams made things tough for Nancy. Up in the cell block they spoke bitterly to her. They called her names. They said she worked in joints to get the lay of them, and to put the finger on so that Liguori could go and stick them up.
Hogan sought out these girls and talked to them especially. He wanted to persuade them to tell the truth. But even after they admitted being prostitutes, they would not be entirely frank. After he got by the first brazen resistance, he saw something else in their eyes. It was a cold, stark fear.
As Thelma Jordan was to say later, when a defense lawyer upbraided her for not telling the truth at first and demanded why she had not done so:
“I was afraid to talk, because I knew what happens to people that talk and who tell things about the members of the combination, about racket people. I know times girls have had their feet burned and their stomach burned with cigar butts because they talked, and their tongues cut, and things like that, and I was afraid of it, and that is why I didn’t talk.”
“Why are you talking now?” her cross examiner was to ask.
“Because I have confidence in the people that are behind me.”
“Who are the people that are behind you?”
“It must be Mr. Dewey and his District Attorneys that are on my side.”
For cross examiners often put their feet in it.
The fear was real, and it was general. As AI Weiner was to say, when asked what he had been promised in exchange for his testimony—A! Weiner, the young booker who had taken over the family business when his father went to prison:
“Well, Mr. Dewey said he would recommend some leniency, and that he would also recommend some sort of a jail where I would not be murdered.”
For that was what all these fellows demanded, before they would plead guilty and testify for the People.
The fear was real, and there was good reason for it. Things had happened to underworld people who squealed. For instance, consider the case of the man who had been arrested during January, three weeks before the Dewey raid, while mailing a package of narcotics at the post office. Under questioning by federal prosecutors, he confessed and agreed to testify for the government. But it seems that news of his confession leaked out. He then was bailed out promptly and was taken to Mulberry Street, and what happened then we do not know. But a few hours later he was taken to a hospital, badly beaten, and shortly thereafter he died. When Tommy Bull was arrested in the big Dewey raid, a slip of paper was found in his pocket, with cryptic pencil notations on it. What they mean, why they were written, we do not know. First there was the date of the arrest of the narcotic man who had been beaten to death. Following this were written the date of his release, the date he was taken to the hospital, the date of his death, and the date of his burial. Small wonder that women feared to talk.
When Thelma Jordan said that she had confidence in the people who were behind her, she was stating the basic principle of successful criminal prosecution. With all the idealistic intentions in the world, no prosecutor will get very far unless he can persuade people to trust him, rely on his protection, virtually put themselves at his mercy. A successful prosecutor must deal with criminals, with underworld people; and they must be sure that they will not be double-crossed. Victims of criminals must be willing to trust him, be sure they will not be betrayed.
Dewey’s basic and most important job was to convince criminals and the victims of criminals that he was a tough guy and a square shooter. And that went for everybody on his staff.
For this purpose, among the hundred women in the House of Detention, no man could have been better than Frank Hogan. There is in every Irishman, I suppose, a touch of the wild Corrigans, the showy Walkers, and the mystic Synges; but you would not know it with Hogan. He is a quiet, mild fellow, and he turns on no neon lights when he goes to work. You can be sitting in a room full of people, who all seem to be talking up and making impressions for themselves; and Hogan will be sitting quietly in the corner, listening. And you would never suspect that a murderer had once confessed to him, after going free for three years, and that Hogan had then comforted the murderer’s bride. You can find out some of these things if you talk to men who work with Hogan, and a little bit more if you pump him. Then if you talk more, he is likely to come out with something, in calm, matter-of-fact fashion, that will make the hair on your neck stand up. For there is in him somewhere also a melodramatic touch of Dion Boucicault. Take the matter of Margaret—
The women were of all types. There were harsh-voiced madams from eastern Europe, with black mustaches. There were blowsy madams and stringy madams, and a thin-lipped spinster from New Hampshire, still under thirty and good-looking, who ran a joint. There was a gentle-mannered, gray-haired woman, who was worried lest news of her predicament come to her son, in military school. Among the girls were blinding blondes, and dark, gloomy girls with soulful eyes. They seemed to come from almost anywhere but New York. Some were rovers. They might work New York this month, Cincinnati next month, and Philadelphia the month after that, traveling around with their pimps. They came from Kansas and Iowa, South Carolina and Michigan, Hungary and Italy, California and Connecticut. And many came from the mine towns of Pennsylvania. Nearly all had felt the pinch and bite of poverty, the blight of underfed slatternly homes. Economically they had bettered themselves, or so it seemed on payday. They were accustomed now to making more money in a week than their fathers, brothers, and old boy friends could make in a month.
Only a few of the girl, came from New York, and one of them was Margaret. She was a small, dark Latin girl, with quiet manners and earnest eyes. With most of the prostitutes, it was apparent that they had come to the logical end of their dizzy ways. However innocent they may have been at one time, there was clearly no white slavery about this business. They were in it because they wanted to be. But Margaret seemed somehow cut from a different piece of goods.
She was among the first girls who admitted they were prostitutes, said they wanted to testify and put their past behind them, start out anew. She was very helpful in the early stages of the work. Clearly she was telling the truth about everything.
Margaret went through grammar school in New York, studied six months in business college, then worked two years in an office. When she was seventeen she quit her job, for she was going to get married. She had a beautiful wedding dress, with white flounces of lace, and a great veil. She had put away linens, and looked at furniture. The flowers were ordered, the cake was baked. Then, the day before the wedding, her fiancé died.
After Margaret’s weeks of weeping, life all seemed changed. She was out of work, and could not find a job. At home she seemed superfluous. She was a girl of eighteen, with no apparent prospect of getting married. That was serious, for those of Margaret’s race marry young, and an unwed girl of twenty is an old maid.
A fearful despondency came over Margaret. She loved her parents and they loved her, but there was a constraint between them. She left home and went to live with a girl friend, still hunting desperately for a job she could not find. Hope seemed gone. One night in a cheap restaurant, after a meager, lonely meal, she broke down, put her head on the table and cried.
“What’s the matter, dearie, can I help?”
A girl was sitting beside her, was speaking to her. Margaret found herself pouring out her troubles, and the girl was sympathetic. She knew a place where Margaret could make some money, she said, and Margaret went with her.
Whether she had an inkling where she was going I do not know. Perhaps she did know, and still did not, for despair paralyzes the human spirit. That night she went to work in a joint.
News traveled fast among the customers, and in her first week Margaret took in $400. She attracted so much business that she was kept over for a second week. The third week she went to the hospital.
Physically she was patched up in a few weeks. Spiritually something much more serious had happened. Margaret felt she could never face her family again, she could never face anyone respectable. I don’t profess to understand her reaction, but it was something old and trite both in fiction and in fact. She was out on her own, hopeless, friendless, emotionally crushed. She went back in the business. A few months later she was picked up in the Dewey raid.
Now that Margaret had given her testimony, told her own personal story, poured forth her troubles, been transmuted into three counts in an indictment, she changed day by day. There was a glint of hope in her eye. All the girls were talking now about “going straight,” making plans for the future. Margaret seemed especially serious.
So many fragments of human life and human problems poured in upon Hogan and burdened him down, matters far distant from the dry pedantries of the law. From a distance one might regard this feminine round-up with emotions of horror, with the feeling that it was a gaudy, bawdy affair filled with salt and gusto, with feelings of pity and sentimentality. But close-up, of course, it was just plain human, a collection of frail, helpless personalities; and it got under your skin.
But the thing that got under Hogan’s skin the most was not the girls at all; it was the letters that came in. Within a day or so after the raid, the mail began coming, from all parts of the country. Fathers and mothers of lost girls, reading in the newspapers about the Dewey raid, had found in it a ray of hope. Perhaps the lost daughter could be found, in a New York brothel!
Day after day the letters came, each containing a picture. Hogan looked at the pictures, sent them back. He recognized none of them. He was finding no lost girls. Then one day a letter came with a New York postmark. Hogan sighed as he looked at it—another family tragedy. He unfolded the picture, glanced at it. It was Margaret.
Margaret broke down in tears when she saw the letter, wept hysterically and bitterly.
“Oh! Mr. Hogan! You won’t tell them! You won’t tell my mother I am here!”
“No, Margaret, certainly not.”
So Hogan wrote a polite little note to Margaret’s mother, returning the picture, and saying he could not recognize it.
But he could not get it out of his mind, and neither could Margaret. She loved her mother, but could not bring herself to face her. Surely her mother had some inkling of what had happened; but to know it for a fact and certainty, that would be too cruel. Hogan and Margaret discussed the situation and a few days later they decided to do something.
Accompanied by a policewoman, a middle-aged motherly person, Margaret went uptown and rented a hotel room. Then she sent her mother a telegram, saying she just happened to be in town, and please come to see her. So the mother came, and Margaret gave her tea and talked to her and heard all the news about the family. Margaret was employed, she told her mother, as companion to a woman who lived in California, and they were traveling. And Margaret’s employer was there with them all the time, and told Margaret’s mother she was so sorry that they must hurry away, but they just had to catch a train that afternoon.
So Margaret’s mother went home happy, and Margaret was happier than she had been for a long time, when she went back that night to her cell in the House of Detention.
Where Margaret is now I do not know, or what eventually became of her. So many of the girls had such good intentions, and so few of them made the grade. But after the big trial was over, a couple of weeks after Margaret had been released, she turned up at the Dewey office to call on her old friends.
Proudly and happily, she displayed a marriage certificate, and proudly she introduced her new husband. He seemed a decent, solid fellow, though somewhat embarrassed as he stood there twiddling his hat in his hands.
I hope that he was as decent and solid as he seemed, that he did not put Margaret back to work. I hope they lived happily ever after.
There is no more obvious or venerable fact of psychiatry or religion than that confession is good for the human spirit.
Day by day now more girls were confessing, and receiving legal absolution in the Grand Jury room. It was as though a cool, fresh breeze had started to blow through the House of Detention. These girls had touched the depths. They were the dregs of society. Yes, they had just about everything possible wrong with them. But they were still girls, and girls who were now hitting the sawdust trail.
They became not unlike a lot of girls in a college dormitory waiting for graduation. They were going to start life anew. Two of them were very good at knitting. They taught other girls to knit. Pretty soon they all were knitting. These two thought when they got out they would start a shop for knitted goods and teach women how to knit. Jennie the Factory spent her time crocheting. She taught some of the girls to do that too. Some of the girls thought they would open tea rooms. Others, as in any graduating class, thought they would just like to have nice positions. Doubtless they dreamed about marrying the boss.
The girls began to look and feel healthier. They were practically on the wagon now, and all were off narcotics. Some of them were getting plump and healthy-looking, although some were getting too fat. They were having a holiday from sin.
With most abrupt impact, all these girls had come in contact with two dozen young men—as high-grade young men as could have been found in New York City. It was a new, doubtless a shocking, experience. For the first time in years they had met young men who were interested in them, not as meal tickets, not for abrupt carnal pastime. That had its effect.
It does not do to think of these girls as strange, outlandish, abnormal creatures. They had little brains. Certainly they were ill-prepared to meet life. They were dizzy blondes and over-ambitious brunettes who did not know what to do in the world or how to do it. They had been through experiences which to cloistered folk might seem the ultimate in self-degradation. Yet the human animal is a strange, varied, adaptable creature. In Japan, prostitution is an almost respectable means by which a girl may pay off her father’s mortgage and collect herself a dowry. In phallic temples of India it may be the function of a priestess to be a prostitute. All that is Oriental. But even among the white folk of the older European countries, a girl of the bagnio is accepted, tolerated as a commonplace, perhaps even as a useful member of society. Maybe these girls did not feel as much besmirched, some of them at least, as some sheltered folk may feel just in reading about them.
All the women, old and young, had such simple, human foibles. Old Jennie the Factory, friendly from the first, had her apartment uptown on the west side in which were four Pekinese dogs, and I do not know how many canaries. To keep Jennie happy, it was necessary for a detective to drop up to her apartment every few days to see that Jennie’s maid was taking proper care of the family.
One day Bobby Connolly came down to the Woolworth Building to be questioned. She just could not seem to make sense or keep her mind on anything. It developed that Bobby had a run in her last pair of stockings. A policeman had to go out and buy her a new pair before the examination could get under way.
The girls thought a lot about clothes. There was a primitive communism among them and when any girl was going out for some special event, she borrowed from everybody and was welcome to do so.
Later on, when the big trial started, a newspaper writer pulled a gag that you could tell the girls were not ladies because none of them wore gloves. After that a team of horses could not have dragged any girl to the witness stand unless she had her hands modestly covered.
Nancy Presser was scared. She could not understand all these things that were happening to her. People were telling her every day, even the girls were telling her, that she ought to open up and tell the truth, tell everything. She did not want to tell everything. She was scared, for one thing, of Ralph Liguori.
One day when Nancy was down at Dewey’s office, her boy friend Liguori called there to see her, for the witnesses were permitted to have some visitors. Ralph said he could not understand how his girl Nancy could have got in a mess like this. Nancy told the prosecutors Ralph did not know anything about this prostitution business.
So he was not detained, and he went uptown with Nancy escorted by a detective and matron, when she went to their hotel room to get some clothes. Nancy got herself only four or five dresses and a few other odds and ends, for life was simple in the House of Detention. She left behind (as later listed by the hotel) two coats, five slips, five blouses, six chemises, two jackets, two skirts, four nightgowns, eleven sweaters, twenty-six dresses, fifteen hats, and four pairs of shoes.
As she rummaged through her things, Nancy chatted with Ralph and got him over next to her. Then, when the cop was not looking, she slipped a little red memorandum book into Ralph’s hand. It was Nancy’s business book, filled with names, addresses, and telephone numbers of her friends and customers. That was one bit of evidence Mr. Dewey would not get!
While other girls grew healthier and happier, Nancy grew pale and wan. When other girls were being questioned in mass, Nancy sat off by herself, refusing to participate. Often at night she poured out her troubles to Jennie the Factory, and old Jennie would tell her she ought to talk. And Jennie would tell Hogan.
“Ach, Nancella,” Jennie would say in a wheedling and endearing tone. “Be a good girl. Tell the gentleman, please. You know me, I'm like a mother to you.”
But Nancy would not. She would still hold back and Jennie would become impatient.
“Nancy, you dirty whore,” Jennie would shout, “you god-dam so-and-so.”
Then Hogan would talk to Nancy, tell her she ought to quit stalling and tell the truth. He knew that she knew plenty. Other girls had told him so.
“But, Mr. Hogan, you don’t understand.” Nancy wou1d say. “You're legit and you don’t need to be afraid. You don’t know how it is with we girls.”
And Hogan would try to reassure her, tell her she would be given protection, tell her she did not need to be afraid of men who were in jail.
“But, Mr. Hogan,” said Nancy, “these people are not all in jail. They got friends outside, friends bigger than them. You think you're keeping things very secret here, but there is girls upstairs flying kites out every day through their boy friends. Those people know what is going on in here. I’ve seen them right outside here on the L platform, shaking their fists at the windows up here.”
So Hogan told Nancy, as the Dewey men told all the girls, about how Dewey prosecuted Waxey Gordon, with more than a hundred witnesses, and none of them was touched.
“Now, Mr. Hogan, I know something about that. When Waxey was arrested and sent to jail, he was through already. But this case is different. These people are big people, and they are not through. Do you realize what you are asking me to do? You are asking me to sign my own death warrant.”
He could not persuade her. Day after day girls were being taken before the grand jury, there to win immunity by testifying. Clearly Nancy would have liked to go too, and tell about the routine details of employment, as other girls were doing. But nobody was being taken to the grand jury unless the investigators were convinced she was telling the whole truth. And Nancy so obviously was not being frank.
Finally Hogan suggested that she go down and talk to Dewey. Perhaps he could persuade her that she would be protected. She agreed.
Nervous, upset, and scared, Nancy was taken down to the Woolworth Building. She had to wait to see Dewey. But as she came into a waiting room she saw a familiar face. It was like meeting a friend in the wilderness. It was that nice Mr. Cole! Nancy went straight to him, talked to him for fifteen minutes, until Dewey was ready to see her. Then Cole and Hogan went in with her to see Dewey.
When Dewey undertakes to persuade anyone, he can be very convincing. He turned on all the lights for Nancy. He talked to her for a long time, assuring her that she would be safe. Cole and Hogan talked to her. Finally Nancy said maybe she would talk. But she did not want to do it while she was staying at that House of Detention. It was decided that she would be taken out to live, under police guard, in a hotel, and that Harry Cole would be in charge of questioning her.
After Nancy had been in the hotel a few days, she was lonely for congenial company. She would like to have Thelma Jordan with her, for they had got to be good friends in the House of Detention. So Nancy and Thelma, who was the sweetheart of the defendant Bennie Spiller, were put in an apartment together.
Nancy and Thelma grew very close to each other during the next few months. They went through troublous times together.
Thelma was with Nancy one day in Dewey’s office, after Ralph Liguori had been picked up and held as a material witness, and Ralph was with them a few minutes.
“Nancy, are you talking?” asked Ralph in a whisper, so their guard would not hear.
“No, I'm not talking,” said Nancy.
“Nancy,” said Ralph, “you better not talk, about me or any of them fellows. Did you read in the papers about that Nancy Titterton that was murdered in the bathtub?”
Cold chills ran through Nancy and Thelma. The mere mention of Nancy Titterton and her fiendish death was enough to send cold chills through any woman in New York that spring. Thousands of them got new locks for their doors.
“Remember that girl was murdered,” said Ralph. “That’s what happens to people that talk.
“Nancy,” said Ralph Liguori, “if you talk, I’ll see that your picture, and all about you, gets in your home town paper.”