11.
A CASE OF LIFE AND DEATH
MARTIN THORN KNEW it was O’Brien all along—why, from the moment he’d walked into Harlem.
“I’ve thought so for five minutes,” he said coolly.
The inspector was unimpressed. “Got anything else but your gun about you?”
“I’ve got a knife.”
Thorn helpfully reached for an inner pocket before a detective seized his cuffed hands.
“Just keep it where it is,” snapped Inspector O’Brien.
Along with the .32 revolver, a closer search of Thorn’s pockets netted the knife and $6. Still in their plain clothes, the “laborers”—top detectives O’Brien, McCauley, and Price, along with the five beefiest backup officers from the precinct—whisked their suspect onto the 125th and Eighth El platform for the next train downtown.
Surrounded by police, Thorn sat stoically through more than a dozen stops on an elevated steam train that passed the second- and third-story apartments of Manhattan; he could glimpse the ordinary scenes of men and women settling in for the evening, washing dishes and hanging clothes for work. They reached Houston and Bowery just after ten p.m. As the El platform closest to HQ, the rowdy station was an honorary portal into the New York legal system. The lights of the Gaiety Theater and the towering Casperfeld & Cleveland jewelry billboard were among the last glimpses of everyday life a guilty man might ever have. Nightlife swirled below as newsboys clustered around the steel pillars of the station. AN ELECTRICAL EXECUTION, the Evening Post announced. It was not prescience, just the fate of a wife killer up in White Plains, but it abutted a front-pager of the day’s latest news on Mrs. Nack.
A plainclothes scrum double-marched Thorn down Mulberry Street, so fast that the hindmost officer could barely keep pace. They hadn’t gone unnoticed. Someone—from Spear’s drugstore, or from an El platform on the way down—had called ahead to tip off the New York Herald to a big arrest; the Herald instantly relayed it to the round-the-clock watch post they kept across from the police HQ. A reporter and a sketch artist were waiting in the street to meet the grim-faced men.
Who’d you get?
Thorn, still unrecognizable in his new clothes and shaven face, was quickly hustled past them, through the heavy basement door and down a hallway. The reporter jumped up and shimmied his head into the transom, in time to see O’Brien and McCauley disappear with the prisoner up a stairway toward the inspector’s office.
Who’d you get?
But he already knew.
“Pickpockets and petit larceny thieves are not hurried to Police headquarters at night, heavily shackled and guarded,” he noted dryly. There was only one man it could be, and the lights burning brightly through the night in Inspector O’Brien’s window were all the proof anyone needed.
THORN STARED OUT into the night, his fingers smarting from where they’d been scraped by forensics. Professor Witthaus himself had come in to collect the samples from under his nails; even though nearly two weeks had passed since the murder, they weren’t taking any chance of losing evidence, and his scrapings were now en route to the Loomis Lab to be tested for blood or viscera. The rest of Thorn’s body had been scrupulously measured, too; the station used a Bertillon card system, where each new arrest was mugged for the camera and then a card was filled in with the painstaking caliper measurements of M. Alphonse Bertillon’s wondrous anthropometric system. Everything from the length of Thorn’s ears and cheekbones to the length from the elbow to the tip of the finger was noted. All that was missing were Thorn’s fingerprints: Bertillon did not approve of such dubious new notions. Just a few weeks earlier the royal governor in India had adopted a new system invented by one of his own administrators, one that annotated whorls and loops, but neither O’Brien nor anyone else in the United States was bothering with such exotic ideas.
Instead, the inspector worked quietly at his desk, saying nothing for hours, content to let his suspect stew in uncertainty. The clock ticked past eleven, then past midnight; Thorn’s gaze fell upon the piles of letters on O’Brien’s table, all rifled from Gussie’s apartment. The useless tin heap of her washing boiler still lay in a corner of the room.
So, O’Brien began: Why had he shaved his mustache off?
Thorn glared back sullenly. He’d shaved it off the previous Wednesday—the same day, that is, that Gussie had been arrested—but he wouldn’t explain why. Asked to account for his movements, he gave a carefully rehearsed story.
“I at present live in a furnished room at Number 235 East Twenty-Fifth Street. I have not seen William Guldensuppe since I was assaulted by him at the house of Mrs. Nack,” he claimed. “I have been meeting with her two or three times a week ever since, up until Tuesday night. Mrs. Nack spoke to me about leaving Guldensuppe, and buying me a barber shop in the country. She told me that Guldensuppe had been using her badly the last six months, and that Guldensuppe wanted her to open a disorderly house. She agreed to leave Guldensuppe and live with me.”
They’d still been planning for their future together, Thorn said, when he last saw her on June 29—the night before her arrest.
“We took an Eighth Avenue car at Forty-Third Street and went to Central Park,” he recalled. “We sat on a bench in the park until about eleven o’clock at night. I told her I had seen in the newspaper that part of a human body had been found in the river, and that it stated it was a part of Guldensuppe’s body. I told her how it was also mentioned in the newspapers that a part of the body found must have been boiled before being thrown in the river.”
O’Brien eyed him intently.
“She said,” Thorn continued, “she did not believe it was Guldensuppe’s body, because she did not believe Guldensuppe was dead. She told me that he had not been home since Friday morning, and that she did not know where he was. Mrs. Nack went home after we made an appointment to meet the next day—Wednesday—but I saw in the morning newspapers that detectives were at Mrs. Nack’s house, and I did not go there.”
The inspector allowed one of his long, disconcerting silences to fill the room. But he was quietly pleased by this alibi. The times were wrong: They couldn’t have discussed Guldensuppe’s identification on the park bench that evening, because that revelation hadn’t hit the streets until the following morning. And he had an even more unpleasant surprise for his suspect.
“Do you deny,” he pressed, “that you were at Frey’s saloon on East Thirty-Fourth Street on Tuesday morning, Tuesday afternoon, and Tuesday night playing cards with ‘Peanuts’ and Federer?”
“I don’t exactly deny it.”
“Do you remember being in Frey’s saloon on Tuesday, June 29, when Federer was reading a newspaper in regard to the reward of one thousand dollars, and how Federer said to you, ‘I guess that’s you, barber,’ and you said, ‘Yes, that’s right’?”
Thorn could see the darkened city out O’Brien’s window; everyone was asleep but them.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Do you remember being in the saloon on Tuesday, June 29, and going out and coming back with a woman, and having one glass of beer each in this saloon?”
“Yes.”
O’Brien paused, readying his knockout.
“Do you remember being in Frey’s saloon on the night of Tuesday, June 29, and telling Federer that you were going to meet a woman, and it was a case of life and death, and exhibiting to them a pistol?”
“I cannot say that I remember that,” Thorn answered warily. “I had been drinking a good deal that day.”
“Do you remember going back to Frey’s saloon about eleven o’clock that same night, and playing pinochle with Federer and Gordon until nearly one o’clock in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember saying to them that by tomorrow night at this time you would be on the ocean?”
Thorn stared blankly at him. “I do not remember saying that.”
He didn’t need to; plenty of others at the saloon did.
The hours crawled onward until four in the morning, when O’Brien finally let his prisoner collapse onto a cot in his jail cell. Thorn had scarcely fallen asleep before he was awoken again, first to stand before a magistrate, then to drag himself back into O’Brien’s office. The inspector was waiting for him, seemingly unaffected by the early hour, and invigorated by the fine day the Detective Bureau was having. And he wasn’t alone.
That’s him, said Mrs. Hafftner, looking the unshaven prisoner up and down. That’s who rented the house.
Thorn kept a stony silence as another man was brought in.
That’s him, said the undertaker’s assistant. That’s who picked up the surrey.
After they were led out, O’Brien turned his searching gaze back to Thorn. “Looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?” the inspector remarked.
Martin Thorn fanned himself with his fedora, considering the situation.
“I don’t fear death,” he replied evenly.
“HIT HIM!” they roared down the cell block.
Thorn grabbed the bars of his jail cell and looked down the station’s hallway; a man was being dragged in heavy shackles, shoved and smacked by jeering detectives.
It was John Gotha.
“I won’t go in there!” he yelled. He looked exhausted and hollowed out. “I have done nothing, and you have no right to lock me up!”
“Go on, go on!” a detective yelled. “Hit him with your club!”
The mêlée continued down the hallway, and Thorn stared as his friend scuffled with the officers; he could hear yelling and the sounds of a solid police beating all the way into the next block of cells, until they finally disappeared.
The officers slung Gotha into an empty jail cell with a couple of final yells and dramatic groans, then waited a moment. And then, through Gotha’s wan countenance, there flickered a sunny expression.
Thanks.
The detectives rolled their eyes. The whole ruse had been at Gotha’s insistence; the lanky barber was still bitterly disappointed that he hadn’t been arrested in Harlem alongside Thorn. That was part of the deal, he insisted. They’d been too busy with Thorn and had left Gotha there feeling like a fool. So now they were giving him the sham arrest that he’d wanted.
If they knew Thorn like he did, Gotha explained, they’d understand covering up his role as an informant. Gotha worried that their suspect could slip free or get turned loose, and he’d known Thorn too long to believe that any betrayal would go unpunished.
“I first met Thorn nine years ago,” he recalled. “We were introduced in a saloon, where we played cards together.”
They were a curious pair at the card table. Gotha was unmotivated and gawky, so tall that colleagues nicknamed him “Legs,” and so unsuccessful in his barbershop trade that his wife had resorted to living in her parents’ basement. Thorn was handsome and talented, and he always seemed lucky with women and money. Gotha couldn’t help a sneaking admiration of his friend’s life. But Thorn had a fierce temper when a card game didn’t go his way, and Gotha was under no illusions about the murder charges against his old pinochle partner. Thorn, he admitted, “would be capable of such an act.”
For now, his friend would stay in the dark about his betrayal; but as Gotha walked free from his untouched jail cell, he could no longer hide from the reporters.
JEFFERSON MARKET COURTHOUSE was less a municipal building than a misplaced Gothic castle, its bands of red and tan brick spiraling over the Sixth Avenue El and up into a great crenellated clock tower; far below, a heavy iron door swung open day and night to admit a ceaseless rabble that was, as one reporter put it, “old—prematurely old—and young—pitifully young.” That Friday morning in a grand-jury hearing, the assistant district attorney led a procession of witnesses—Mrs. Riger, Frank Gartner, and a nephew of Guldensuppe’s—through their statements, but then stopped short at John Gotha.
The terrible secrets entrusted to the man had kept him awake and unable to eat for days; reporters and jurors craned to watch the shaken man led to the stand. Martin Thorn was not present for this indictment, but that was of little comfort; John Gotha was clearly a haunted creature.
“He had the look of a man going to the electric chair,” a Herald reporter marveled.
Laboring to keep his composure, the hapless barber spoke of drinking with Martin Thorn just three days earlier. “I met him at a saloon between 128th and 129th Streets, on the west side of Eighth Avenue. We had a couple drinks, and I said ‘You made a botch job of that fellow.’ ”
Thorn had stared at him in terrible silence for a full minute.
“I know it,” he finally said. “Have you read the newspapers? It is all the woman’s fault.”
Gotha struggled as he recalled his friend’s next words. “I looked at him, and he said ‘You are the only friend I’ve got, and I’ll tell you all about it. I expect you to keep a closed mouth.’ ”
“Well, then,” Gotha stammered, “he spoke about Guldensuppe, and said they wanted to get rid of him. He said: ‘We talked the matter over, and decided to kill him. We looked about and rented the house at Woodside. We thought it was far enough out of the way and decided to do the thing on Friday. She bought the oilcloth at that place in Astoria, and bought the cheesecloth at Ehrich’s.’ ”
“Thorn told me that he reached the house early and went upstairs and waited for Guldensuppe and Mrs. Nack to arrive, as she was to bring him. While waiting he took off all his clothing but his undershirt and socks. He did not want to get them bloodstained. About eleven o’clock he said he saw Mrs. Nack and Guldensuppe come up to the front gate. They entered the house.”
The witness paused; the packed courtroom was dead quiet. Then, Gotha recalled, clad in underclothes and with a revolver in his hand, Thorn had hidden himself behind a closet door in an upstairs bedroom. He could hear the two talking downstairs.
“Go and see the rooms upstairs,” he heard Gussie tell her boyfriend. “I think you’ll like them.”
Thorn cocked his pistol.
Guldensuppe’s heavy footfall came up the stairs, step by step, growing closer. He could hear his rival whistling, walking room to room, looking out windows. Then, as the slit in the ajar door darkened, the hinges on the closet moved.
He fired point-blank into the face. The masseur had a moment of recognition—his hands flew up—but they never made it. Guldensuppe crashed to his knees, then slumped backward onto the floor.
Gotha swallowed hard, and what he said next made the jury gasp.
“He was not dead. Thorn dragged him into the bathroom and put him in the tub.” Thorn slit his throat until a final breath came out of the hole he’d made. “I heard a snore,” was how he put it.
The assistant DA stopped Gotha for a pregnant moment. “Are you positive”—he leaned forward—“that Thorn said Guldensuppe was ‘snoring’ or breathing when the razor was drawn across his throat?”
“Yes,” Gotha said quietly. “He told me the man was ‘snoring’ when he cut his throat.”
And Thorn kept cutting.
“He nearly severed the head from the body with the razor,” Gotha told the jury. Then Thorn went downstairs to Mrs. Nack, who was waiting patiently for him.
“I know,” she replied. “I heard.”
“He told her,” Gotha continued, “to go away and come back at five that evening.”
With hot water running at full blast, Thorn finished sawing off the head, then sliced away the chest tattoo. He sawed and bundled the legs, the midsection, and the chest—terribly strenuous work, really—then mixed up a basin full of quick-drying plaster and dropped the head in. When it was set into a smooth ball, he washed the tub and floor clean, lit his pipe, and waited for Mrs. Nack to return. They quickly carried their parcels out to the surrey and from there drove it onto the Tenth Street ferry.
“As the boat neared the slip the passengers walked to the front of the boat,” Gotha explained. “Thorn remained behind with the bundle, and at a signal from Mrs. Nack that everything was all right, and as the boat was entering the slip, it was tossed from the stern.”
The head went overboard as well. But ever the barber, Thorn now had second thoughts—not about the murder, but about his victim’s hair. He fretted that he hadn’t shaved off Guldensuppe’s telltale mustache. But he wasn’t really that worried, because the block of plaster sank instantly.
“They can’t find it,” he boasted to Gotha, adding dismissively, “I don’t care.”
But the bundled arms and chest were different: They didn’t sink.
“I saw by newspaper reports that it was recovered fifteen minutes after I had dropped it from the boat,” Gotha recounted Thorn saying. “Great God, what a fool I was! In the first place, we selected the house in which there was no sewer connection, and in the next place I permitted myself to be persuaded to hurry off to dispose of the bundles before having weighted them. If I had examined the house and seen where the drain led to, it never would have happened that way. I was a fool [in] every way.… I must have been blind, but the woman led me to do some things that I should not have done.”
Among those things, Thorn didn’t include the murder itself. No, Gotha’s friend was angry at the way they’d murdered. “I should have weighted the bundles I threw into the river, but Mrs. Nack said no.”
After disposing of the other portions uptown, Nack and Thorn parted. He pawned the dead man’s clothes and watch for money to hide out, first in the Maloney Hotel, and then for $3 a week in an apartment on Twenty-Fifth Street.
The witness was spent, his story nearly told. The grand jury didn’t need enough evidence to convict Thorn, just enough to determine that he could be tried—and now they’d heard plenty. They conferred while Gotha waited miserably on the stand.
“Mr. Gotha, I do not want to detain you, because I can see that you suffer,” the jury foreman said in a kindly tone. “You should leave the city and take a long rest.”
Gotha still looked terribly shaken, and he couldn’t help it. His explanation before he was led away was simple and appalling: The murderer’s parting words in the saloon still haunted him.
“Thorn said to me,” he choked out, “ ‘I wish to God I had not told you all this.’ ”
In that farewell in the saloon, a realization had crept over John Gotha—one that brought his anguished confessions to his wife, to Inspector O’Brien, and now to this grand jury. From the moment he became Thorn’s sole confidant, he’d also become a marked man. Gotha had been horrified by his friend’s insistence that they meet the next evening, because he’d instantly understood what it meant.
He was to have been Martin Thorn’s next victim.