The Murder of the Century Read Free Page A

was one of the city’s oldest streets, its name a mocking remainder of the land’s old Dutch farms or
bouwerij
—but now a cheap, noisy, and beery cacophony of drunk bums and sober business.
    If you didn’t mind the occasional fisticuffs or dead body, it was a swell place for an officer—a little too swell, maybe. Teddy Roosevelt had found the neighborhood so obliging to his men that he went aroundpouncing on on-duty officers for quaffing pints in oysterhouses and dive saloons. In their place came recruits who had to pass fitness tests and undergo weapons training, and it was said thatyou could tell the old and new officers apart by sorting the fat from the slender. But the old sins remained, and then some; there was real money to be had in this neighborhood. The Bowery Savings Bank was improbably becomingone of the world’s largest savings institutions, and for police the temptation to dip in at less reputable businesses was everywhere. Even Carey’s well-regarded old bossretired with a fortune of $350,000—something not easily explained when a typical yearly salary on the force was $2,000. Some departmental accomplishments, perhaps, were better left unsung.
    The Bowery’s packed streets and low-slung tenements overflowed with Germans and Poles, and the storefront of Kugler & Wollens was emblematic of the changing neighborhood.John Jacob Astor IV owned the poky two-story brick building at 277 Bowery—in fact, the Astors owned much of the block, as their long-dead patriarch had made his first land buys a century earlier along this very street.For decades the building had been occupied by a clan of butchers and grocers, the Marsh family; but by the 1870s, as the neighborhood acquired umlauts at an impressive rate,it became a German beer saloon, and then a hardware retailer.
    On this block of narrow brick buildings, hardware in every variety was hawked by Germans. The mighty Hammacher Schlemmer hardware shop held down one end, selling everything from mechanic’s tools to piano fittings. At the other end was the domain ofErnst Kugler. Herr Kugler had been here more than twenty years,outlasting a previous partner, watching the passing of the Bowery Boy gangs, and seeing the latest immigrant wave turn the Bowery Theater into a Yiddish venue. Kugler and his employees knew their business well enough that when a detective turned up with a piece of paper stamped Kugler & Wollens, they knew exactly what it was for.
    At some point,
someone
connected with that bundled body had been here. It might have been any time and for any purchase from a handful of wood screws to a brass keyhole escutcheon. Like every hardware store, they kept a large roll of brown paper, a stamp, and areel of twine for wrapping up all manner of purchases. But the shape and condition of this piece was distinct.
    It had beenused to wrap a saw.
    SO CAREY HAD ONE CLUE . The other—his only other, really—was the oilcloth that the trunk had been wrapped in. The fabric was still so new thatit smelled of the store. But the piece found in Ogden’s Woods had been aboutfour feet wide and fourteen and a half feet long. Unless you had a baronial dining room table, you weren’t buying sheets that long for a tablecloth. Someone had bought this with a task in mind—maybe, given its red color, for catching dripping blood. But where would they have bought it?
    Finding someone in the Bowery who knew about oilcloth wasn’t hard. The street was filled with exactly the kind of peddlers who used the stuff, people who immediately knew where to locate thenearest distributor: Henry Feuerstein, a sharp-eyed Hungarian who wholesaled yarns and fabric just three blocks away on Stanton Street. An Orthodox Jew, Feuerstein was contentedly working in his warehouse on the Christian sabbath; he personally examined the swatch and identified the maker of the brightly colored red-and-gold floral pattern. “A. F. Buchanan and Sons,” he said. He even knew the pattern number. “Diamond