The Murder of the Century Read Free Page B

B, number 3220.”
    It was a cheap and unpopular pattern—a leftover from last year’s stock, in fact—and just too gaudy and vivid to sell well. He hadn’t unloaded a roll of it to any store in four months. Most dry-goods customers for oilcloth, Feuerstein explained, preferred something a bit lighter in color.
    Of course, the detective could check theother distributor that Buchanan & Sons used—there was also Claflin & Company, over on Church Street. But that wouldn’t happen without a warrant; its proprietor, JohnClaflin, had been arrested weeks earlier after dodging a jury summons. He was not known to be overly fond of police. But Feuerstein, you understand, was a reasonable man.
    The merchant threw open his ledgers, tracing out the network of dealers and distributors. And once they tallied up all the dry-goodsshops and general stores they distributed this stuff to, it became clear: Carey would havesomething like fifty more shops to visit. Here, right in Feuerstein’s books, you could see how far even an unpopular cloth went. There was a Mr. Bernstein on Belmont Avenue in Brooklyn; a Mr. Bratzenfelder on Avenue D; a Mr. Theimer uptown at Seventy-Second Street; a Mr. Prencky … It went on and on. A roll of Diamond B #3220 even went to the store of Ignatz Rucmark, over in Hoboken. You’d need to hit all five boroughs and then some to track this cloth down. That would take time—and men. Aside from Detective Carey, though, barely anyone else on the force had moved into action yet.
    But if the police weren’t on the case, Carey found, somebody was. Because someone
else
had been coming here and asking Feuerstein these very same questions.
    Reporters.

3.

THE JIGSAW MAN
    SUNDAYS WERE ALWAYS a bit slow at the
New York World
, andNed Brown just about had the place to himself. Walking along a vast Park Row newsroom so crammed with rolltop desks that it was nearly barricaded, he read panel after panel onwalls placarded with exhortations:
    ACCURACY, ACCURACY, ACCURACY!
    And:
    WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? HOW?
    And:
    THE FACTS—THE COLOR—THE FACTS!
    These continued around the perimeter of the room, so that in every direction a reporter looked, the
World
credo was shouted at him. But on this day the room was quiet; only the stale cigar smoke hinted at last night’s fury in getting the June 27
Sunday World
out.
    From the windows between the placards, Ned could see out over the rooftops—over every rooftop, in fact—clear out to the East River. The teeming city below had nearly doubled in size over the last generation; it vaulted upward with newly invented elevators, and outward with hurriedly built elevated railways. Towering above it allwere the eighteen-story offices of the mighty
New York World
, the crowning achievement of Joseph Pulitzer.
    A lanky Hungarian immigrant, Pulitzer had enlisted in the Union army,ridden cavalry in Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, and then drifted into New York at the end of the Civil War. On the very site of this newspaper office had once stood French’s Hotel, andPulitzer, then a penniless veteran, was thrown out of it. Two decades later, in an almost operatic act of revenge, a wealthy Pulitzer returned from out west and razed the hotel to the ground, erecting on the spot the city’s tallest building:
his
building. He’d lavishedtwo miles of wrought-iron columns to support the world’s largest pressroom and placed his offices on the soaring top floors beneath an immense425-ton golden dome. The reflection ofits gilded surface could be seen for miles out to sea; for immigrants coming to America, the first sight of their new land was not the Statue of Liberty but Pulitzer’s golden beacon. Inside, his sanctum was decorated with frescoes and leather wainscoting; one of his first visitors, emerging from the elevator and into his office, blurted: “Is God in?”
    But when Pulitzer had bought the paper from Jay Gould in 1883, the
World
was scarcely godlike at all. It was an