Conspiracy of Silence Read Free Page A

last-minute addition on Frank’s part, she would have to have worked pretty fast to seize the opportunity to knock off her hoped-for fiancé.
    And then there was the overriding matter of why James—I got the impression nobody ever called him Jim or Jimmy—had decided to take the rap for her. He too had acted quickly, wasting no time in telling the cops he was responsible. What could have possessed him to do that? Was that his bizarre way of protecting the family name? How was it any less scandalous to admit to killing your own brother—and spending much of the rest of your life in prison—than to allow his resentful sweetheart to serve time for the act?
    Well, some of these points were queries for another day. Right now I had some fairly concrete leads to follow, and the best place to start was the police station in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.
    As I headed out in my well-used Chevy roadster, across the George Washington Bridge into the wilds of New Jersey, I felt I was heading back into a past that had already come to seem ancient. This case would take me into an era that, after seven years of a depression, already seemed as remote as Thebes or Babylon. In 1924 I was barely out of Johns Hopkins, looking out upon a world that seemed to have endless possibilities. I didn’t waste any sympathy on the sudden and unexpected death of our sainted president, Warren G. Harding, the year before—it turned out he had the good luck to die before the Teapot Dome scandal dragged him into its clutches. My pal Henry Mencken was riding high, lambasting all and sundry with cheerful vitriol—nothing like the dour, furiously anti-FDR curmudgeon he had now become. Sinclair Lewis was still basking in the glory of his best-selling novels, Main Street and Babbitt. Fitzgerald had yet to publish The Great Gatsby, Dreiser hadn’t come out with that behemoth called An American Tragedy (who ever heard of a two-volume novel?), the world had never heard of John Thomas Scopes, flat-chested flappers were everywhere . . . and so were jobs.
    Casting my mind back to that spring of 1924, I remembered that Doug Fairbanks Jr. was working on that Oriental extravaganza called The Thief of Baghdad —and (as Mencken told me) had to hire the poet George Sterling to write captions, for of course there were no talkies. Valentino was still alive and causing ladies to swoon, Chaplin was riding high, even though trouble was looming with his ill-advised fling with the sixteen-year-old Lita Grey; and everyone was singing “Everybody Loves My Baby” and “Riverboat Shuffle.”
    Not everything was a song and dance, of course. After five years, people were already beginning to have second thoughts about Prohibition. It wasn’t merely the fact that the Mob had quickly taken over the bootlegging business; it was that corruption on every level—from federal judges to state legislatures to police officers to Prohibition enforcement agents—was turning just about everyone into overt and unashamed lawbreakers. More and more people were coming around to thinking that that high-pressure arm-twisting group, the Anti-Saloon League, was as bad as the Mafia. Even though evading the Volstead Act had become a kind of game for many, the 18th Amendment had turned the country into something not far from a police state.
    As for me, I kicked around New York City for a couple of years before deciding that I didn’t like any boss except myself—and sometimes I didn’t like him either. Silent Cal Coolidge was about to come up with that priceless gem of homespun wisdom—“The chief business of the American people is business”—but he also would thank his stars he got off this planet before he and his successor, Let ’Em Starve Hoover, reaped the harvest of their “rugged individualism” and let the country and the world into the worst depression in history. Wall Street had been given a license