Reading under Sophie Carter’s watchful eye didn’t turn out to be as bad as I thought it would be. Actually, she was of great help. Her husband had been a prodigious writer. He’d managed to write only five chapters of a projected twelve, but those five were plenty. They consisted of roughly seventy-five pages each, bringing the unfinished manuscript to a hefty 375 pages.
“He would write and write and try to get everything down as fast as he could,” she said. “Then he’d hand it to Joe. Joe’s a genius. He’d rework the manuscript until it shone. Sometimes he’d take out material and advise Tillman to save it for another book. So every book contained the seeds for the next one.” She smiled wistfully. Those days were gone now. The good times were gone.
I could understand why she’d limited me to the Powell notes. Carter had been a voluminous note taker, one who had his own idiosyncratic way of jotting things down and cross-referencing information. Going through it all would have meant hours of work. I would’ve gotten through it on my own, but I got through it faster thanks to Sophie Carter.
Her husband might well have been a visionary when it came to crime and criminal behavior. That I couldn’t say. But after reading those three books, I knew that he was a talented true crime writer of the first degree. His unedited chapter on Powell and the copious notes he’d made of his interviews only served to strengthen that opinion.
The Powell case fascinated Carter because what little was known of Bobby Kelly indicated an almost blind loyalty to Powell. Carter’s research had borne out Jones’s statement that her brother had worshiped Powell since childhood. Kelly even imagined himself as Powell’s “lost” brother. What made Kelly’s sudden vicious attack on Powell even more incredible was the fact that Kelly had no record of violence, armed or otherwise. He was a petty thief who always made sure his victims were nowhere near home when he broke in. Had Kelly carried a hidden rage against Powell for all those years? If so then over what? And what had brought it to the surface? Why had he killed his best friend, as the newspapers said, “in an explosion of anger?”
Carter couldn’t figure out Kelly’s motive. It bothered him. It also bothered him that as far as he could tell, Powell’s killing was premeditated. It had not occurred spontaneously, in any “explosion of anger.” It was not a murder of hot-blooded rage, but cold-blooded precision. Too many aspects of the crime scene underscored that point to ignore it, not the least of which were the out-of-the way setting and the fact that Powell had made no defensive moves. There were no wounds to his hands—scratches, bullet holes or otherwise—to indicate that he’d raised them in a useless but instinctive effort to protect himself.
Carter’s papers also raised questions about Powell’s personality. Powell was a slick con artist who liked “weak” victims: lonely widows he could easily manipulate. Like Kelly, he had no history of physical violence. So on the face of it, it seemed unlikely that Powell would’ve helped plan a murderous armed heist. Nevertheless, something told me he’d done just that. In the months before he died, something had persuaded him to move on to a higher, more complicated level of crime than he’d ever attempted before.
Something or someone. Powell would’ve been part of a team, never the team leader.
I rubbed my eyes and Sophie Carter gave me a sympathetic smile.
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yes, please.”
She soon laid out a warm pot and some scones. I gratefully accepted the tea, but didn’t touch the pastry. If I ate, I’d get distracted. The tea would fill me without waking up my stomach. I sagged back in the chair, sipping my tea, and studied the stack of Carter’s notes.
Was I following another fascinating, but ultimately useless path? No, this had to be right. Too much violent crime had taken place around Katherine Goodfellowe for it all to be coincidental. Somewhere, somehow, an organizing intelligence was at work.
And I had to find it.
Setting aside my cup, I resumed my examination of the papers.
Carter’s notes told how he’d repeatedly asked Katherine Goodfellowe for an interview, but been met with a stone wall of silence. There were no notes about the questions he’d planned to ask or from the interview he finally had with her.
“I see here,” I said, “that he was highly interested in the morgue photos. Why? He didn’t strike me as the kind of man given to morbid curiosity. Did he want to use them in his book?”
“Highly unlikely.” Sophie Carter shook her head. She refilled my cup. “Tillman was an intellectual, not a sensationalist. Such photos would be graphic, and any book that had them would be a very different product than the one his readers were used to.”
A closer read showed that he’d pestered the cops for the pictures and when that didn’t work, he’d turned to the medical examiner himself. It wasn’t clear how far he’d gotten, if at all, in obtaining the photos, but he had turned up one interesting tidbit: Katherine had refused to go to the morgue and identify the corpse. She said she didn’t want to be forced to remember Powell that way, so the law had to find another way to formally identify the remains.
Powell had a record in Chicago. NYPD sent for it. That record included information about Powell’s physical appearance, not only his height, but also such theoretically immutable details as the circumference of his head, size of his feet, length of his arms, his fingerprints, etc. A former cop working as a bounty hunter out of the Windy City acted as a courier and brought a copy of the file, which Carter said did not include fingerprints, to New York.
“Must talk to B.H.,” Carter wrote. The initials probably referred to bounty hunter. And then I saw that Carter had made an appointment to see one “Denver Sutton (BH), at 1 pm on August 7, 1924.” Sutton … Sutton. Where had I heard that name before? With a frown, I remembered. Wasn’t that the name of Mrs. Goodfellowe’s security chief?
It sure was.
All roads lead to Goodfellowe House.
“Just when did your husband go to Chicago, Mrs. Carter?”
“It was in August, early August.”
I looked back at Carter’s handwritten notes. Had he gone to Chicago instead of going to see Sutton, or right afterward?
“Excuse me, Mrs. Carter. I hate to ask this, but on what date was your husband killed?”
“Well, he was found August fifth.”
So he died before he could talk to Sutton. What would he have asked him? I could think of one question right off the bat. Why hadn’t the record included fingerprints? Different police departments followed different standards and levels of inclusion when it came to deciding which information to keep for their records, but one would’ve thought that fingerprints would be one of the standards. There was still some resistance to using them, but every forward-thinking police department had instituted the maintenance of fingerprint files if not as part of a permanent program, then at least on a trial basis.
The notation for Sutton listed a phone number, but no address. Not that it mattered. I knew where to find him.
Carter had made one other appointment. It was with “J. Finnegan & Sons.” His notes didn’t indicate what line of business the company was in, but he must’ve thought it important. He’d underlined the August 1 appointment three times. There was neither an address nor a telephone number. However, that was nothing to worry about. It shouldn’t be difficult to track down a company with that name.
“Mrs. Carter, could I use your telephone, please?”
I had the operator put in a call to Sutton, but received no answer. I had better luck with the other number: The owner turned out to be a merchant of the dead.