Careless People (40 page)

W
hile the temperature in New York continued to drop and winter settled in, the
Tribune
offered some thoughts on “Murder and the Quiet Life.” Conclusions were beginning to be drawn—not about who had murdered Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills, but about the “historic collisions” that produce the best stories. Recent public interest in the New Brunswick murder case had crossed class boundaries and made writers of everyone. No one was immune from guesswork, and the entire nation was absorbed in the case, speculating over the dinner table about who had committed the crimes. “
Everybody followed it. Persons of the palest, most rarefied refinement watched the divagations of the authorities and made shrewd guesses. The mystery maintained itself on the front pages for a length of time probably unparalleled, under similar circumstances, in the annals of newspaperdom . . . A good mystery is, after all, a good mystery; which is to say that it embraces surprise, suspense, illusion; yea, reader, all the constituents of pure romance.”

The investigation into the New Brunswick murders was slowing down, but the nation was unwilling to relinquish the story. Without an official version, readers were writing their own endings. Thousands of people, “
shielded by the cloak of anonymity,” had offered their theories and opinions about the case: “probably never before in all the history of crime have
so many letters been written.” Charlotte Mills decided to share them with the press.

One of her letters came from the ubiquitous John Sumner, of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, asking for information about “certain books” her mother had read. Charlotte wouldn't tell reporters what her response had been, but shared Sumner's reply: “
I note what you say with reference to your mother having made quite a few criticisms on both books. These criticisms would be of interest if available. I am glad that you feel that such books never influenced your mother in any way. That is the way you should feel in the matter and indicates a degree of faith in the wisdom of your mother which would be fortunate if all young girls could feel.” Reserving judgment may be a matter of infinite hope, but Charlotte had some reason to have lost faith in the wisdom of her mother.

James Mills received a letter on the stationery of a “leading” country club, demanding: “Who said this country is a democracy? That's a lie! A country where money controls everything, even justice, the most sacred of human institutions, cannot be a true democracy! Isn't there anybody who has nerve enough and backbone enough to take a hand in this? . . . What about fingerprints? What a comedy throughout!” And a woman wrote to Charlotte: “
Imagine that doctor not reporting that your mother's throat was cut. My husband is a young conscientious doctor, and he says it is a crime the way some doctors are influenced.”

Under pressure, New Brunswick officials insisted that they were doing more “
than the public suspect.” Officers Lamb and Dickman had been replaced by New Jersey state police, who were “conducting an investigation into New Brunswick's underworld.” New evidence had suggested they should “delve into New Brunswick's lower social strata in their search for the murderer.”

Almost everyone had theories, Zelda later observed: that the Longacre Pharmacies carried the best gin in town; that anchovies sobered you up; that you could tell wood alcohol by the smell; that you would be drunk as the cosmos at the end of the night and discover that there were others
besides the desk sergeant in the Central Park Police Station. Unfortunately, she added, none of her theories worked.

A
s Daisy and Gatsby drive home in the cooling twilight, Myrtle Wilson rushes out into the street and is struck down by the car that symbolizes Gatsby's wealth. Her thick, dark blood pools into the ashes and dust of the road; her breast is torn open and her mouth ripped, as if she died choking on her own vitality. She expires under the faded eyes of T. J. Eckleburg, the billboard her husband mistakes for God.

Nick is able to reconstruct what happened from the testimony in the newspapers, legitimating Fitzgerald's sudden shifts in perspective to what George Wilson's neighbor Michaelis observed at the ash heaps. Nick is now narrating as a reporter and so can tell us of things that he didn't see at first hand. The jump to Michaelis's point of view begins with the news that he was the “principal witness at the inquest,” suggesting that Nick reconstructs this account of George Wilson's movements from the inquest itself and from the newspapers' reports.

While Tom, Nick, and Jordan were also driving back through the twilight toward Long Island, Wilson was telling Michaelis of his determination to take his wife west. Michaelis was astonished at Wilson's sudden vigor: “Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn't working he sat on a chair in the doorway . . . when anyone spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable colorless way. He was his wife's man and not his own.” When Myrtle Wilson breaks out of the room where Wilson has locked her, she taunts him, daring him to stop her (“Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!”), and rushes into the road as a car races toward her in the gloom. It doesn't stop, even after it's struck her down; newspapers called it “the death car,” Nick tells us. Michaelis is unsure of its color, but
thinks it might have been light green—the fateful inverse of Gatsby's hopeful green light.

On December 8, 1922, the
Evening World
reported after a hit-and-run killing in New York that “
the police have sent out a general alarm for the driver of the death car.” Given the number of accidents on the roads, newspaper reports of killings involving a “death car” were all too common. It was becoming so familiar that there were jokes about it.
Town Topics
reported that the new motorcar would come “
with springs so perfectly adjusted that the occupants feel no discomfort when the car runs over a pedestrian.” In mid-November the New York police had sought another “death car” after a reckless driver killed an officer; in July, a Mrs. Mildred Thorsen had been killed by a “death car” that continued at high speed after it ran over her. That summer the American papers all reported the sensational story of Clara Phillips, a Los Angeles woman who'd heard that her husband was having an affair with an acquaintance named Alberta Meadows. He was not: rumor had lied again. But Mrs. Phillips believed the rumors and so she'd bashed in Alberta Meadows's head with a hammer.
“
‘
GOSSIP' REAL MURDERER OF MRS. MEADOWS”
shouted the
Evening World
. The victim had been found in a pool of blood in her own car; it was promptly labeled “the death car.”

When Tom, Jordan, and Nick return to the Buchanans' after discovering Myrtle's body, Nick encounters Gatsby, lurking outside the house. Under the misapprehension that Gatsby was driving the car that killed Myrtle, Nick half expects to see Wolfshiem's thugs lurking in the shrubbery. But then Nick guesses the truth: the death car was driven by a woman. Daisy is the culprit; devoted Gatsby is watching over her to ensure that Tom doesn't try “any brutality.” Nick goes back to the house, where he sees Daisy and Tom by the window, talking urgently: “there was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.” Nick leaves them to their conspiracy, and Gatsby stays all night at his sacred vigil, still hoping.

O
n the cold, dry, bright day of Saturday, December 16, the
World
ran a satirical feature on modern murder, in which a fictional character—who owes a debt to Ring Lardner's collection of semiliterate rustics and jazzy rude mechanicals—opines on the wide gap between the unrealistic competence of fictional “detecatives” and the incompetence of real ones: “
The Government might just so well issue shooting licenses for bootleggers and declare open seasons on rectors in Jersey, because the way it is now, murder ain't a crime in this country. It's a sport.” In fact, the character suggested, “if they want to make an arrest in a case like this here New Jersey murder,” they should “arrest the witnesses, the widow, the executors and the owner of the property where the crime was committed upon the ground that he failed to put up a notice reading: ‘Commit No Murders on These Premises. This Means YOU.'”

Having been mined for all it was worth, the rich vein of the Hall–Mills story seemed to be petering out. Mrs. Gibson was still panning for gold, however. She announced that she wanted to make a new statement “
supplementing her former story,” but the prosecutor declined to meet her. A private investigator claimed to have found new eyewitnesses, but readers around America scoffed loudly at the idea that yet another person might have witnessed the murders. “If they could just get the fellow who sold the tickets to that affair, they might find out something,” quipped the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, a joke that was picked up around the country.

Meanwhile a justice in the New Jersey Supreme Court announced that there was no longer any reason for haste in pursuing the investigation, offering a masterful summation of the facts: “
The crime was committed. It did not commit itself. The murderer is still unpunished . . . But in my judgment anything like fervid haste to discover the criminal seems now no longer to exist,” said the
Times
. (The
World
quoted him as saying “fevered haste,”
which seems more likely; either way, he was in no rush to solve the murders.) “There is nothing mysterious in the fact that the murderer has not been caught,” insisted Justice Parker. “Sometimes they are never discovered and often it has taken years to find them.” He then comfortingly listed a number of recent unsolved murder cases to bolster his argument in defense of the New Jersey justice system.

A
s 1922 drew to a close, yet another farcical trial was under way, eight miles from Great Neck. That summer, the actress and singer Reine Davies had held a party at her weekend house on Long Island. During the party a prosperous contractor named Wally Hirsch was shot in the face; the force of the blast knocked his false teeth out of his mouth. The teeth were admitted into evidence when the state accused Hirsch's wife Hazel of attempted murder.

The story had made headlines in June and not only because of its macabre comedy. Celebrity played its role, too, for Reine Davies was the sister of the movie star Marion Davies. Reine Davies had already featured in another trial that January, when she was thrown from her car on Long Island after a collision, and sought half a million dollars in damages from the other driver for head injuries she'd sustained when she almost hit a cow.