A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

“Well, go on,” Ruth said.

“You know Judd Gray pretty well?”

“No, not really.”

Reminding Carey, George McLaughlin quietly said, “J. G.”

“Wait a minute,” Arthur Carey said, and he opened the cardboard container of canceled checks. “I’m fairly certain I saw that name Judd Gray before. Oh yeah, here it is.” The deputy inspector lifted up a canceled check with a masculine signature on the back. “To H. Judd Gray, for two hundred dollars. Isn’t that your handwriting, Mrs. Snyder?”

She examined the check. She nodded. “Mr. Gray is a traveling salesman for Bien Jolie. He has a lot of food and hotel expenses and his company, Benjamin and Johnes, was late in repaying him, so I helped out with a temporary loan.”

“And did he repay you?”

“Certainly.”

“Wouldn’t two hundred dollars be a lot to loan a man you don’t really know?”

She was flustered. “Who said I didn’t know him?”

“You did,” George McLaughlin said. “Half a minute ago.”

“I have no idea where this is going.”

“We do,” George McLaughlin said. “And we know where you’re going, too.”

“The Jamaica precinct house,” Arthur Carey said.

“I can’t leave here.”

“You have to.”

“But I’m ill.”

“You look fine to us.”

She teared up. “I’ve lost a husband,” she cried. “You ought to be sympathizing with me. You ought to be looking for the killers.”

“We just have some more questions to ask. But at the precinct.”

And just like that her mood changed. “All right,” she said, and in fury flung aside Lorraine’s blanket as she got out of bed. She then gripped the hem of her green satin nightgown and wriggled it up over her head so that she was stunningly naked in front of the men. She was blonde there too. She defiantly smiled at their guilty fascination and uneasiness and then strode down the hallway to the room of Albert’s murder, where she taunted the shocked policemen at the crime scene by ever so slowly getting into her undergarments and dress.

At the Jamaica station house Ruth Snyder was escorted past the glaring group of the Fidgeons, the Eldridges, and the Houghs, including the loutish George with whom Albert had skirmished. She was seated in an interrogation room, where she was grilled for several hours, with each interrogator making wilder suppositions and claiming evidence he didn’t yet have. Still, she impressed the commissioner as “a woman of great calm.” She never requested a lawyer. She requested only food and sleep. And so she was given an Italian restaurant’s dinner of spaghetti, salad, and garlic bread, and was permitted a half-hour nap on an office sofa as McLaughlin interrogated the guests who’d played contract bridge with Albert on Saturday night.

Right after that Commissioner George McLaughlin gently shook Ruth awake and introduced her to Detective Lieutenant Michael McDermott, who’d “be just listening for a while.” And then the commissioner asked, “Mrs. Snyder, is it true that you often stay out all night?”

“Well, I don’t know about often.”

“Who with?”

“With my cousin, Ethel Anderson. Call her and ask.”

“She married?”

“She was. To Edward Pierson.” And then, as if it confirmed her veracity and reputation, Ruth commented, “Eddie’s a Bronx patrolman.”

McLaughlin turned and McDermott took the hint, heading out of the office to telephone the officer and order him to Jamaica. McLaughlin faced Ruth again. “We’ve been told that last fall you went on a tour of Canada without your husband.”

She frostily said, “Who told you?”