SUNDAYS WERE ALWAYS a bit slow at the New York World, and Ned Brown just about had the place to himself. Walking along a vast Park Row newsroom so crammed with rolltop desks that it was nearly barricaded, he read panel after panel on walls placarded with exhortations:
ACCURACY, ACCURACY, ACCURACY!
And:
WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? HOW?
And:
THE FACTS—THE COLOR—THE FACTS!
These continued around the perimeter of the room, so that in every direction a reporter looked, the World credo was shouted at him. But on this day the room was quiet; only the stale cigar smoke hinted at last night’s fury in getting the June 27 Sunday World out.
From the windows between the placards, Ned could see out over the rooftops—over every rooftop, in fact—clear out to the East River. The teeming city below had nearly doubled in size over the last generation; it vaulted upward with newly invented elevators, and outward with hurriedly built elevated railways. Towering above it all were the eighteen-story offices of the mighty New York World, the crowning achievement of Joseph Pulitzer.
A lanky Hungarian immigrant, Pulitzer had enlisted in the Union army, ridden cavalry in Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, and then drifted into New York at the end of the Civil War. On the very site of this newspaper office had once stood French’s Hotel, and Pulitzer, then a penniless veteran, was thrown out of it. Two decades later, in an almost operatic act of revenge, a wealthy Pulitzer returned from out west and razed the hotel to the ground, erecting on the spot the city’s tallest building: his building. He’d lavished two miles of wrought-iron columns to support the world’s largest pressroom and placed his offices on the soaring top floors beneath an immense 425-ton golden dome. The reflection of its gilded surface could be seen for miles out to sea; for immigrants coming to America, the first sight of their new land was not the Statue of Liberty but Pulitzer’s golden beacon. Inside, his sanctum was decorated with frescoes and leather wainscoting; one of his first visitors, emerging from the elevator and into his office, blurted: “Is God in?”
But when Pulitzer had bought the paper from Jay Gould in 1883, the World was scarcely godlike at all. It was an arthritic operation with a circulation of twenty thousand, and it bled money. Pulitzer fired the old staff, bought a blazingly fast new Hoe press, and dragooned the best reporters and editors, pushing them mercilessly to reinvent the era’s drab uniform columns into bold headlines and sensational woodcut illustrations. No longer would shipping news and market results count as front-page stories; as much a showman as a newsman, Pulitzer unapologetically courted women and immigrant readers with a heady mix of bombast, sentiment, and attention-grabbing promotions that rode on the latest fads. When Jules Verne was on everyone’s nightstand, Pulitzer ordered daredevil reporter Nellie Bly to travel around the world in eighty days; she accomplished it in seventy-two. In the midst of the craze over Martian canals, Pulitzer even considered mounting a giant billboard visible to “readers” on Mars. Rather more pragmatically, the rags-to-riches immigrant seized the moment when the newly built Statue of Liberty lacked a pedestal: a flag-waving World campaign among housewives and schoolchildren raised more than $100,000 to buy one. And Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses” inscription? That came from a World contest.
The facts—the color—the facts! Circulation had risen fifteenfold since he’d bought it, making the World one of the largest dailies in the world. The paper itself had swollen, too, its immense three-cent Sunday edition becoming a thing of sensational beauty. Pulitzer had created the world’s first color comics section, featuring the antics of a bald tenement kid with ears like jug handles: the Yellow Kid. His popularity inspired competing papers that year to scoff that the World was comic-strip journalism—yellow journalism, they called it. Perhaps, but it was an absolutely brilliant hue of yellow. Past the day’s front-page grabber from the East Eleventh Street pier—BOY’S GHASTLY FIND—the paper was bursting with an exposé of a Chicago diploma mill, an account of a Maine aeronaut taking flight with a giant kite, fashion tips for women, and ads for everything from Hoff’s Malt Extract to Dr. Scott’s Electric Hair Brush. A thick periodical section promised “More Reading Material Than Any Four Magazines” and was fronted by a thundering headline on unregulated “baby farm” orphanages: NOTHING SO CHEAP IN NEW YORK AS HUMAN LIFE!
At the front of the newsroom was the ringmaster for this printed circus: the city editor, who regularly bellowed from a wooden platform for more copy. But today it was just the substitute editor enjoying the luxurious lull of Sunday afternoon.
And then the phone rang.
Ned Brown was motioned over. A second oilcloth-wrapped body part had been found up by the Bronx and was due to arrive at the Bellevue morgue any minute. Ned was to run over and meet up with Gus Roeder, the World’s crack morgue correspondent.
“Do whatever Gus tells you,” the editor snapped. “The Journal’s probably got forty guys there already.”
The competition! The newly launched Evening Journal had been nipping at the paper’s heels for months, and here the emptied World offices would get caught flat-footed on the story. It could be a new victim, or a second helping of yesterday’s East River find; either way, it was sizing up to be another front-pager, and the editor knew they’d have to grab it.
“If the pieces fit, it’s the same stiff,” he declared, and hurried his rookie to the door. “If it’s part of a different stiff, then the guy with the red oilcloth has murdered them both.”
RUNNING FROM THE EL STATION to the Bellevue morgue, Ned Brown was a sight: A short and stringy bantamweight, his blond hair swept up in a pompadour like his boxing heroes, he sprinted along Twenty-Sixth Street while dodging newsboys and Sunday strollers. The nineteen-year-old NYU student had been angling for any news assignments he could get over the summer. Today was his break, his first real story.
Gus Roeder was waiting for him when he flew into the morgue. So were Deputy Coroner Philip O’Hanlon’s findings on the river bundle, the result of several hours of painstaking autopsy. Gus—a dour, red-faced German with a thick accent—bustled into the crowd of reporters to listen to Dr. O’Hanlon, while Ned went to examine the arms and shoulders found by the pier. By the skin he could immediately see that the victim was probably fair, about thirty-five years old; judging by his soft hands, he was not a manual laborer.
But who was he, and who had done this?
“At first,” O’Hanlon admitted to the gathered reporters, “it looked to me as though it were the fore section of a body prepared for photography so as to show the position of the heart and lungs, as might be done in a medical college. But I do not believe so now.”
Observe: not only did the torso still retain all its organs, the body contained no trace of any preservative. On the contrary: inside the broad chest of a powerfully muscled man, the tissue of the lungs was still spongy and the heart was filled with blood—the very blood that had stopped flowing after a knife was plunged between the victim’s fifth and sixth ribs.
What?
The reporters looked closely at the body. The flesh stripped away from the chest—and, perhaps, an identifying tattoo along with it—had also quietly hidden two previously undetected stab wounds on the body. A casual observer would not spot them among the gore—but O’Hanlon had.
“They must have been inflicted before death,” he flatly stated.
Making incisions around the stab sites, the deputy coroner found that blood had entered into the surrounding tissue—that is, it was pumped into them. That only happened in the living; a stab or incision made on a dead man created different internal damage than one on a living body. He’d also looked inside these stab wounds. A stab will typically show threads of clothing driven into the wound; but this one had none. So the victim, O’Hanlon concluded, had been alive and naked when stabbed.
“Both wounds were made with a long-bladed knife,” O’Hanlon continued, “and both cuts were downward, as a man would strike while standing. One was above the left collarbone, and the other above the fifth intercostal space. The latter penetrated the heart … this alone would cause instant death.”
Only, Dr. O’Hanlon realized, it hadn’t. True, the fatal wound had been driven deep into the heart at a nearly perpendicular angle—plunged into the victim from above, possibly while he was sleeping. But the victim was a powerful man, and the assortment of nonfatal wounds—the other stab wound under the collarbone, a glancing cut to the left hand, blood under a fingernail, and boot-shaped bruises on the arm—these told the story of a horrific struggle. The victim had cut his hand in trying to grab the attacker’s knife, the deputy coroner theorized, and had made an attempt to stand up and fight back in a terrifying but already doomed final effort.
“That he was knocked down I think is proved by the imprints of the boot,” O’Hanlon theorized. “He struggled to his feet and was standing erect when someone, who I think must have been very muscular, stabbed him in the collarbone with a big knife. The blood under his nail shows that he struggled hard, or else that he clasped his hand to his bosom after he had been stabbed.”
And with that, the deputy coroner—and the headless torso—had told their story.
The morgue doors slammed open. From outside, orderlies heaved in another load of cargo: a red-wrapped parcel that took two men to carry. Without the preserving cold of the East River, and after a spell sitting in a summertime forest, it was offensively rank. The morgue keeper ignored the smell to unwrap the bundle and lay it out: the midsection, male and muscular and circumcised. A mass of reporters watched as the two segments were pushed together on the marble slab.
They fit perfectly.
AT SIX P.M. on June 27, the body had its first claimant.
Bellevue was hardly the place to spend a Sunday evening, but Miss Clara Magnusson’s friends and neighbors had been urging her to visit ever since the story in the previous night’s Telegram. She lived just three blocks away, yet it had taken until now for her to make the journey over to this dismal place; her neighbor Gustav accompanied her to help with the identification and to provide a steady shoulder. She explained that her brother-in-law, Max Weineke, had been missing for a month: he was a thirty-four-year-old Danish scrap-metal dealer, and the descriptions of the morgue’s find had her friends on East Twenty-Eighth Street wondering. Coroner Tuthill led the two over to the marble slab, and to the legless and headless segmented man who lay nude upon it.
There was a scar on Max’s back, she recalled, and that would surely identify the body. But as she watched the attendant turn the body over, her heart sank; it had been sawed through exactly where the scar should be.
It’s him, her neighbor Gustav decided. He was sure of it. Max had been a moody fellow—industrious, but he drank a bit at times—and … well, there’s no telling what could have happened to him, really. He’d had $30 on him when he disappeared—more than a week’s pay—and that right there was enough motive for a man to be killed.
And yet the body did not seem quite right. Max had been missing for more than a month, but this body was fresh. Then there was the matter of those strong but supple hands—so soft, so smooth and pampered. These were not the hands of a scrap-metal dealer. And there was a scar on the left hand—and an old fingernail injury where it had been partly cut away—that neither of them recognized or could account for.
For Bellevue’s superintendent, it was the scar on the finger that did it. “If they had only been able to account for the scar on the finger.” He sighed. “I should have thought the body was that of Weineke beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Gustav and Clara stepped back out into the fading evening light, leaving just as much of a mystery as when they’d arrived.
WHILE THIS PUZZLING DRAMA played out, the morgue had received another visitor. A few among the reporters took notice: Art Carey?
They hadn’t seen Byrnes’s exiled protégé in ages. The detective was energized, back in his element. He walked briskly around the body—the segment he’d unwrapped earlier that afternoon now reunited like a jigsaw with its top half—and examined the matching red-and-gold oilcloth of both segments. He’d come to know it well, though maybe not as well as the newspaper reporters who’d scooped him on finding the fabric wholesaler. In fact, the newspapermen had been ahead of the police force all day.
I knew it was a murder all along, Captain Hogan had blustered earlier, claiming that he’d blamed it on medical students out of a concern for public safety—keeping the citizenry, you see, from panicking. The reporters were incredulous. Was Hogan joking? It took a Telegram reporter to actually get the first crime scene’s facts right, since the patrolman’s report claimed that the bundle included the abdomen but no organs—a patent falsehood to make it sound like a med-lab cut-up. And the police hadn’t done anything since; it was a Herald reporter who had fetched the coroner the night before and escorted him to the morgue, and a World reporter who started knocking on doors even later that night to interview groggy oilcloth dealers around the city. The police hadn’t secured the crime scene at the pier, hadn’t assigned any extra men to the case, hadn’t even admitted it was murder until the coroner telephoned and insisted they do something.
Well, Hogan ventured, the murder had probably been committed among a ship’s crew, and so maybe it was out of their jurisdiction.
Wait, a Herald reporter had asked. Didn’t the hands lack the kind of calluses a sailor would have?
Hogan didn’t really have an answer on that one.
In fact, there was a lot the police didn’t have answers for. They’d already been on the defensive all weekend, even before this case; one of their captains had led sweeps of women guilty of little more than walking along Broadway after midnight, filling the courts with the tragic injured respectability of sobbing baker’s assistants and late-shift shopgirls. When one cop was asked for his evidence, he’d scarcely sputtered, “I saw her walk up and down the street a few times” before being cut off by a magistrate’s bellow of “Discharged!” Reporters had been having a field day with it; a new murder was the last thing the department needed that day.
But Carey was different: He knew this was a homicide case, and he was making it his case. He even had his own pet theory. The murder, he mused aloud to a reporter, might have been committed in Long Island or Brooklyn. The killers—for it would have required more than one to cut up and dispose of the body so quickly—had taken a ferry and dumped the first piece. But then they’d panicked. Maybe they thought that they’d been seen. That’s when they went back and fetched the larger piece with a wagon, drove over the Washington Bridge, and dumped it onto the loneliest stretch of road they could find. Of course, this was just a hunch—half a hunch, really. And as for who did it, or who the victim was … well, there was no way to tell yet.
Taking one last look at the body before he headed back to the World Building with Gus, though, young Ned Brown wasn’t so sure about that. When he examined the headless corpse’s hands, an unnerving sense of recognition crept over him. Those well-muscled arms and smooth fingers—they were like something he’d seen somewhere before.
But where?