A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (24 page)

Anyone who saw Henry Judd Gray on Sunday seemed to remember him. At five minutes to six in the morning, an old man named Nathaniel Willis walked up to the bus stop at the major intersection of Springfield Boulevard and Hillside Avenue in Queens Village and saw a man in a gray fedora and herringbone overcoat buttoned up to his chin as if it were below zero. Swaying as he stood on the corner, that man asked, “Any idea when the bus gets here?”

“Seems to be late,” Willis said, and then he noticed Officer Charlie Smith, a member of the New York City Police Department, sweeping out his traffic booth. Willis kidded him about cleaning house so early in the morning. The officer ignored him as he collected the night’s beer bottles from the sidewalks and streets, stacked them on a curb thirty yards away, crossed to his booth, and took his handgun from its holster. Willis thought he saw Judd flinch. And then, not four feet from Judd, Smith half-turned in an official way, with his left hand on his hip and his right arm and revolver extended, and fired, his right hand jerking up with each of five ear-ringing shots at the beer bottles. He smashed all five. Woke the neighborhood.

Judd Gray remarked to Willis, “I would hate like hell to face him in a firing squad.” He meant it in the friendliest way, the innocent jest of an ordinary fellow just waiting for a bus, but his throat was so tight with tension that he squeaked like a juvenile, and so he was stared at by both men and later recalled.

Willis and Judd and a janitor got on the same westbound bus and Willis noticed the limp of the man in the finely tailored clothes as he edged down the aisle. Judd got off near Jamaica Station on Sutphin Boulevard with the intent of riding the Long Island Rail Road west into Manhattan, but three policemen were standing just inside the station entrance, holding coffee mugs and seriously conversing. Judd looked to the street.

A teenage Yellow Cab driver with a face like an altar boy’s was waiting outside the Jamaica railway station when a soused man in a herringbone overcoat fell into the taxi’s back seat. In an evasive maneuver Judd soon realized was pointless, he told the driver to go to Columbus Circle at 59th and Broadway. Otherwise nothing at all was said, though Paul Mathis remembered that as they crossed over the East River the passenger rolled down the window to feel the cold and sobering air on his face. The final fare was $3.50 and Judd tipped him just a nickel. Mathis scowled at him in the rearview mirror and said, “Thanks a heap, pal.”

Judd simply clutched his tan, Italian-leather briefcase to his chest, floundered outside, took a southbound bus to 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, and walked east to Park Avenue and Grand Central Station. There his hunger overwhelmed him and he went into a railway diner for his first real meal since lunch on Saturday. Waitress Becky Sinclair recalled a hungover man in owlish spectacles confessing, “I’m ravenous,” and ordering enough breakfast for three. But he hunched over his food with a fork in his hand and finally did not eat, just swishing coffee in his mouth before he wearily paid and walked out. It was eight o’clock.

About that time on Sunday, Haddon Jones was entering room 743 in the Onondaga Hotel. He fully twisted the white porcelain bath handle labeled
Hot
and let the faucet gush as he jerked the coverlet, blanket, and linens around, swatted the pillows, and yanked a bath towel off its rod. On a hotel envelope, he penciled a note:
Bud: Perfect. Call when you are ready. Had.
He tucked the left edge of the note into the frame of the bathroom mirror so Judd couldn’t fail to see it, noticed that bathwater was nicely wetting the floor, and turned off the faucet. Exiting the room, he tossed the blue “Do Not Disturb” sign inside, then locked the door with the hotel key. Haddon left the Onondaga without being seen, got some gas for his Studebaker, and whistled “Blue Skies” as he drove home.

At eight thirty, Judd boarded Pullman car 17 of the New York Central Railroad’s train number 3, which was heading for Chicago. Though he was the only passenger in the car, Judd examined his ticket, properly took chair number 1 in the sleeper compartment, and found in his overcoat pocket the pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes that Ruth left for him in the kitchen. Sash weight + Albert + lucky strike. He finally caught Ruth’s joke but found it not funny. He lit a cigarette.

Colonel Van Voorhees, the New York Central’s chief conductor, walked down the main aisle ahead of the Pullman conductor and took Judd’s ticket from him. Looking at it, he asked, “Are you going through to Syracuse with us, or do you intend to stop at Albany?”

“I’m going through to Syracuse,” Judd said.

“Well, the Pullman won’t go there. You’ll have to change to a coach.”

“Right.”

The conductor so seriously stared at him that Judd forced a smile. “I’m memorizing your face,” Colonel Van Voorhees said. “That way I can keep your railroad ticket and wherever you are in this car afterward, I’ll remember you.”

“Nice to know,” Judd said.

Twenty minutes after the train left Grand Central Station, he got up to flush the packets of sleeping powders and poison down car 17’s toilet, but he found in the lavatory mirror that there was a handprint of Albert’s blood on his vest that was just concealed by his overcoat. And he felt so condemned by it that he kept the poisoned rye whiskey just in case suicide seemed the only option later.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Returning to his seat, he folded a
New York Times
to the section that carried the crossword puzzle and only then noticed that his Cross fountain pen was there but his mechanical pencil was missing. Wondering about that was too
tiring for him. And in his fuddle and exhaustion, the puzzle was too hard for him and he discovered he could neither read nor sleep, so he just stared outside at the cool and misty countryside.

In Queens Village then, Assistant District Attorney William Gautier was inviting a gum-chewing teenage stenographer into Lorraine’s bedroom to record Mrs. Snyder’s initial statement. Ruth smiled in kinship as she told the girl, “I was a stenographer once. At
Cosmopolitan
magazine.”

Sitting prissily on a too-small, straight-backed chair, the girl asked, “Where’d you learn?”

“Berg’s Business College.”

“Me too!”

Attorney Gautier interrupted to say, “Shall we continue?”

The girl flipped open a stenographer’s pad and Ruth got more upright on the child’s bed, shifting to pillow her spine. “Where do I begin?”

He prompted, “You went out into the hallway …”

“Then a giant man with a mustache grabbed me,” she stated. “He looked like an Italian. He whispered, ‘If you yell, I’ll kill you.’ Then he hit me a whack over the head and I know nothing more until morning when I came to and called my daughter.”

About the time Judd’s train was rolling through Ossining, a hearse was taking Albert Snyder’s remains to the Harry A. Robbins Morgue at 161st Street, Jamaica. When Judd was outside Poughkeepsie and saw the Hudson River lazing along below the railroad tracks, Ruth’s jewelry was being discovered underneath her mattress. Judd frantically yanked down the window and got up to fling the briefcase containing the chemist’s gloves, chloroform
bottle, and bloodstained Croton wristwatch out into the weather, poking his head outside like a scamp so he could watch the Italian leather briefcase splash into the green water, rock on it awhile, and sink. Ruth’s Moroccan leather address book was found in a Windsor desk. And as Judd changed railway cars in Albany, Queens police found a freshly bloodstained pillowcase in the basement hamper and weekly twenty-dollar canceled checks made out to the Prudential Life Insurance Company, seeming to communicate that Mrs. A. E. Snyder would be the beneficiary of a great deal of money.

At five p.m. in Queens Village, police detectives conveyed Albert Snyder’s widow to the Jamaica precinct house. She discovered that Milton and Serena Fidgeon and their bridge party guests were gloomily there for questioning. She accepted their sympathy for her great loss. And then Commissioner McLaughlin courteously invited the widow into his office. Agitated but not grieving, she would be there, off and on, for eight hours.

In Syracuse, it was snowing. Judd arrived in his room at the Onondaga Hotel and found Haddon’s note on the bathroom mirror. He tore up the note and his Pullman ticket stub and threw them in the wastebasket, which he’d later regret, then telephoned Haddon at home.

Mrs. Jones answered. She said Haddon had spent his day dismantling the two-tone Studebaker’s hood, fenders, and doors for painting and was “too pooped to pop,” so he was napping. Judd said he envied him. She hoped Judd was still coming over.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Judd said. Rooting around in his Bien Jolie sample case, he found a fresh quart of Scotch whisky that he’d forgotten was there and he filled a water glass twice with it as he took a hot bath, and filled the glass once more as he paced room 743 and
hatched a plot to hire a car and kill himself in a fatal wreck off the highway to Auburn or Lake Skaneateles. At five forty-five, when he was telephoned in his hotel room, Judd was freshly attired but spent. He hadn’t slept in thirty-four hours and was focused on the half-pint flask of rye that she’d poisoned with bichloride of mercury tablets. Hearing the hotel’s room phone ringing, he thought of Isabel for the first time that weekend, and he was tentative as he lifted the telephone earpiece. “Hello?”

But it was not his wife. “Would you still like to come over for supper?” Haddon asked.

He had a mental stammer and finally said, “I have forgotten your address.”

“Two hundred seven Park Avenue.”

The hint had failed. “Will you come and get me?”

“My Studebaker’s still laid up,” Haddon said, and he heard Judd sigh. “But I’ll have a friend drive me down.”

The friend was Harry Platt, another insurance salesman and a fat, gray-haired, half-bald man with circular spectacles. He’d joined Haddon in the elevator lift up to Judd’s room on the seventh floor and Judd affably invited both of them in for a highball. Harry would testify that Judd was “nervous and excited.” After introductions and getting out of their overcoats and hats and slouching down on the sofa with Scotch whisky and seltzers, Judd swiveled a desk chair around and straddled it and said, “I have some ’fessing up to do.”

“Ho boy,” Haddon said, and turned to Harry.
“Cherchez la femme.”

“What is that? Is that French?” Harry asked.

Judd interrupted. “The fact is I’m in deep trouble. Real deep. And I need your help.”

Haddon’s face wrinkled with concern as he said, “Count on it, Bud.”

“Had, I told you I was going to Albany to meet a lady.”

“Oh yeah,” Haddon said. “That sweet morsel Momsie.”

“Right. But there was a telegram for me, written in code, which advised me to continue on to her house in Queens.”

Harry asked, “Am I adult enough to be hearing all this?”

“Please, no jokes,” Judd said. “This is very serious. I did as I was told—the kitchen door was open—but while I was in the house, waiting for her, there was a burglary. Seemed like Italian thugs. Didn’t know what to do so I hid in the closet for I don’t know how long. Hours. Hiding behind the dresses hanging on the hooks as the Italians ransacked the house. But then the family got home from a party and got caught in the middle of it.”

“The
family
?” Haddon asked. “Wasn’t she intending to see you alone?”

Judd delayed his story as he considered amendments. Haddon and Harry watched him lift his highball and swallow some. Judd finally settled on, “There must have been some miscommunication. I could hear the ruckus from my hiding place. She was assaulted and her husband was slugged and bound. And I couldn’t do anything to help them.”

“Why not?” Harry asked.

Haddon intervened. “Well, for criminy sakes! Was he supposed to jump out of the closet? Wouldn’t the husband figure out Bud’s been having a fling with the wife?”

“I guess so,” Harry said. “Caught between a rock and a hard place, you were.”

“Cowardice was forced on me by the situation. I just hoped they weren’t too badly hurt. After things quieted down—golly, it must have been just about sunrise—I hightailed it out of there. Caught a bus to Grand Central Station and then the train to Syracuse.”

Haddon frowned. “Were the husband and wife okay?”

Judd had forgotten elements of his tale; he’d have to rehearse
it some more. “Oh, sorry. I’m so ashamed to admit it that I left out the worst part. I huddled there in the closet until I heard not a peep in the house, then I screwed up my courage and investigated. The wife had fainted and her wrists and ankles were tied with clothesline, but she seemed otherwise unharmed. I thought it better to let her sleep, to let her think I hadn’t gotten there rather than to have to confess my fear and weakness. But I found the husband lying on his bed, unconscious, and maybe I got too close as I listened for a heartbeat because I got his blood on me. And then I ran out. Calling the police was out of the question. The jealous husband versus the philandering salesman caught in his house? I saw no way of defending myself against their accusations.” Judd watched their faces with interest as he finished his whisky.

“Was there a heartbeat?” Haddon asked.

“Well, I’m no doctor,” Judd said, and filled his own and his friend’s glass with more Scotch as he figured out the right thing to say. “A faint heartbeat, I think.” Harry finished his highball and held out his glass. Judd poured. “Seltzer?”

“No, thanks,” Harry said.

Judd raked his hair with his hand. “But what if the husband winds up dying from his injuries? Then it’s murder, and I’ll be the principal suspect, won’t I? Italian burglars will sound like some thugs I made up from whole cloth. Even if I’m just called in for questioning, my poor mother will be horrified, my wife and child humiliated, if not lost to me. I’ll probably be fired from my job. To be frank, I’m in such a fix that I have been entertaining thoughts of suicide.” Judd held up the half-pint of rye. “I have poisoned this. And I’m prepared to drink it.”