A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

“Heading downstairs now.”

McLaughlin waved in the coroner’s men to collect the victim, told the policemen in the room to scour it and make an inventory, and then he followed the photographer downstairs.

Albert Snyder’s cadaver was sheeted, carried downstairs, and laid onto a gurney that was rolled out to a hearse belonging to the Harry A. Robbins Morgue on 161st Street in Jamaica. Hundreds of Queens residents were out there, watching the Robbins men haul Mr. Snyder away.

A photographer had climbed high up the front yard’s elm tree with a Kodak box camera and was taking pictures of Ruth answering over and over again the same questions. And a journalist roved among the horde in the yard collecting anecdotes about the Snyders. He found a twelve-year-old boy heading to church who remembered hitting a baseball that crashed through the Snyders’ kitchen window, and Mr. Snyder had run out of the house after him, crazy with rage, chasing him inside his house and spanking the boy with his big hands in front of the boy’s frightened father. And George Colyer told the journalist that all the neighbors liked Ruth because of her great love of fun and laughter. “But she’s a cut below Snyder. He was a fine fellow. You just couldn’t help but admire him.” Colyer hesitated before he judged it tolerable to state, “I would have to say they were mismatched.”

Mrs. Josephine Brown, Ruth’s mother, was a practical nurse who had worked Saturday night and Sunday morning in Kew Gardens, caring for an invalid in his apartment at Kew Hall. She was a tall, sour, regal widow in nurse’s whites, a brown woolen cloak, and owlish spectacles. She seemed genuinely upset by Albert Snyder’s death, and once she’d gotten over the sorrow and tears she spoke frankly if formally in the metronomic cadence of a Swedish immigrant. She gave her maiden name as Josephine Anderson and said she also had a son, Andrew, who lived in the Bronx and was two years older than May.

“Who’s May?” McLaughlin asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry; Ruth. We named her Mamie Ruth when she was born, but she decided she was May when she was grown some. We all of us got so used to that we never gave it up when she changed again to Ruth. And now I hear the men calling her Tommy.”

“Why’s that?”

“Oh, I guess she’s one of the boys, like they say.”

The police commissioner asked Mrs. Brown to go with him upstairs to the middle bedroom she slept in, just above the front porch vestibule and just south of Albert and Ruth’s room. She was asked if she noticed anything different. She saw an empty quart bottle of Tom Dawson Whisky on the floor between the white Swedish chiffonier and her pink velour reading chair and she said she had no idea how it got there. And Albert’s electrician’s pliers seemed to have been shoed underneath the twin bed.

“Would your son-in-law have been working with pliers up here?”

“Oh heavens no. Albert respected my privacy. Even looked away when he walked down the hallway.”

“Could you give me an idea of what kind of man he was?”

Seeking to say nothing ill of the dead, she told McLaughlin only good things about her son-in-law: that he was smart and artistic, fond of classical music, strong and handy and industrious, a good provider and avid sportsman with lots of hobbies and with a hearty, infectious laugh. But he was hotheaded and older than his age in his habits and customs, and Ruth was, after all, still vital and young.

“Was there marital discord?” McLaughlin asked.

Ruth’s mother frowned. “My English ain’t so good sometimes.”

“Your daughter and Albert. Were they unhappy?”

“Oh, just like most folks.”

McLaughlin felt confident she had nothing to do with the murder so he just called the invalid she cared for in Kew Gardens, heard Mr. William F. Code confirm that the nurse had been there the whole night, then walked Mrs. Brown across to the Mulhausers’ to be with the granddaughter. But before leaving the neighbor’s home, McLaughlin guided Lorraine into a parlor. Sitting left of her on a davenport sofa, he went over her memories of the card party Saturday night and the chaos on Sunday. Because there were no other children at the party, she said she’d just read Motion Picture magazines alone or with her mother while the grown-ups played cards. There was yelling at the party, but Daddy always got that way when there was drinking. She fell asleep in the car going home and couldn’t recall getting into bed, it was so late and she was so tired. And then she found her mother on the hallway floor and all tied up that morning.

“Was your bedroom door often locked at night?”

She shook her head.

“Was it your mother who locked it?”

“I guess so,” Lorraine said. “She was the one who took care of me.”

“And not your father?”

She shrugged. “Daddy’s always busy with things.”

McLaughlin noticed she used the present tense. She’d not been told. “Are they happy with each other, your mommy and daddy?”

“I don’t know. They’re always arguing.”

“Will you tell me again what your mother said when she was found?”

She told him.

“Would you hazard a guess as to why your mother wouldn’t want you untying her hands and feet? And why she had you get Mrs. Mulhauser first?”