The Murder of the Century Read Free

into quite the Sunday adventure for the two boys.
    Detective Carey listened carefully to their story. Little Edgar, they recounted, had yelled back excitedly to his father from the footof Undercliff Avenue’s steep retaining wall. He’d found a peddler’s pack. There, on a small shaded ledge that jutted out just before the forest sloped away, was a tightly bound bundle, the sort that a linen or notions dealer might waddle under from one house to another, ready to untie it to lay out his wares. But it was heavy—easily a hundred pounds. A tug on one end had drawn out a putrescent waft. Meyer didn’t know what it was, but he knew something was amiss. He left his boys to guard the find while he flagged down some mounted policemen. They’d needed a stretcher and towing ropes just to hoist the mass up from the ravine.
    Detective Carey and Captain Thomas Killilea carefully appraised the package. The stationcaptain was another Byrnes appointee sent up to Goatsville. He’d been on the force since the Lincoln administration and held a double claim to the precinct: He was also tangled in yet another corruption fiasco just a year earlier, accused of renting out on-duty police to work as security guards at football games. The former police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt had tried pushing Killilea and his cronies out altogether, getting so many top officers under indictment one year thatthe annual police parade was canceled. Still, even an old-timer like Killilea retained enough of a fondness for his old downtown beat to read of the latest doings beyond Goatsville. And to him, the red-and-gold-patterned oilcloth already looked plenty familiar; in fact, the captain knew exactly where he’d spotted it before. He’d seen it, he explained,in that morning’s
New York Herald
.
    Detective Carey cut the baling cords and pulled back layers of red oilcloth, burlap, and twine-secured brown paper. Inside was the midsection of a man—and it was very clearly a man—hewn between the ribs up top and about four inches below the hip joints at the bottom.
Medical students
, others at the station house shrugged. They figured the officers at Tenth Street had been right, and the morning’s newspapers were just out to make something out of nothing.
    Carey wasn’t so sure.
    The bundle would be sent onward to the morgue at Bellevue, of course—an officer was already making the phone call—but Careywanted a closer look. This wasn’t the cat-up-a-tree work of his precinct that he had before him; and even if nobody else in the station thought so, to Carey it had the feel of something big.
    The detective examined the inside of the parcel. The layer of dirty burlap was secured with faintly pink-colored string, and Carey had seen spools of it before:It was a sort druggists used, a variety called seine twine. Below that was a brown paper wrapping, and then the body. The revolting smell was filling the station house. But Carey wasn’t quite finished: He wanted just one more look before they loaded it up onto the wagon again. Carey rolled the limbless trunk over for a better view.
    There, in the small of the back,adhered another piece of brown paper—a slightly different, smaller piece. He delicately peeled it away and examined it. The paper bore a single, small ink stamp—and the detective knew, in that moment, that he had to return to his old precinct.
    Murder
, mused Carey darkly,
followed me here
.
    THE TRIP from the cows and orchards of the north down to the corner of Houston Street and Bowery was only about ten miles, but Arthur Carey might as well have been traveling to another world. These were his old haunts from his rookie days on Byrnes’s detective squad: aramshackle and roiling retail polyglot of hagglers, banjo players, dime museums, beer gardens, fruit stands, and discount crockery shops. You could walk full blocks down Bowery and fill your arms with newspapers hawked by newsboys, each one a different title, and none of them in English. It