“Women at that card party.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“I just need to know who went with you.”
Ruth was tentative. “Mr. and Mrs. Kehoe.”
McLaughlin jotted the name down. “You have a telephone number for them?”
“No.”
“How about an address?”
“Somewhere in Brooklyn.”
She was lying; he’d counted at least three tells in her face. McLaughlin laid his pencil down in frustration and walked out of the office, and Ruth just sat there alone, stewing, for half an hour.
Around eleven o’clock Detective Peter Trumfeller peeked into the room and smiled as he said, “Why, hello, Tommy!” Trumfeller was a wide and happy man with slicked-back hair and windburnt cheeks. He owned a 1925 Ford T-bucket roadster convertible and she’d once cruised with him in it, her scarf and hair fluttering, all the way to West Point and back.
Ruth smiled at him in relief. “Oh, are you coming to take me home to Lorraine?”
Detective Trumfeller walked in and held his hand tenderly to her cheek. She turned into the hand and kissed it as tears filled her eyes. She was getting up to go as his other hand roughly forced her down. Like a lover, the fat detective bent over to find her right ear and say in hushed tones, “These guys know when you’re lying, Tommy. They’ve gone through this hundreds of times and you, you’re just a rookie. They know your stories are all baloney because nothing fits together. You’re torturing yourself with lies. Just go ahead and tell the truth and get the elephant off your chest.”
Ruth was stiff in astonishment and then she lifted the handkerchief in her lap and touched it to each pretty eye. “I’m so very tired,” she said, but only as if she’d had a hard day tilling the garden. “Where’s the police commissioner?”
Detective Trumfeller escorted Ruth past the still-glaring card party to the head man’s office. It was just past eleven o’clock. Cigarette smoke hung from the ceiling. Lieutenant McDermott shook out another Pall Mall but just let it lie on his lip as he watched Ruth walk in. Commissioner McLaughlin swiveled in his creaking oak chair and immediately hung up the black telephone earpiece when he saw her.
She smiled. “Please accept my apologies for keeping all of you up so late.”
The police commissioner jerked his head toward a straight-backed chair and Peter Trumfeller scraped it over for Ruth to regally sit on.
She softly said, “I don’t think I can stand any more questioning.”
McLaughlin nodded toward McDermott and said, “Mac’s been talking to your cousin Ethel’s estranged husband.”
“Eddie,” she said, as if saying it made her happier.
“Well, Eddie says you’ve got a boyfriend.” The police commissioner twisted around and got a notepad from McDermott, and held the notepad up in front of Ruth’s face. The name “Judd Gray” was printed on it. “Was this the man who killed your husband?”
She sighed. “Has he confessed?”
McLaughlin lied and said Judd had indeed confessed; then he invited a stenographer to record their conversation, instructing Ruth so she could make the stenographer’s job easier. “We’ll begin with your name and intent,” he said.
“My name is Ruth May Snyder,” she said, “and I want to make a full and truthful statement about the death of my husband, Albert Snyder.”
The police commissioner coached, “‘And I understand that anything I say may be used against me.’”
She said that.
The headlines for the front page of the New York Times had been firmly set by then: “GIRL FINDS MOTHER BOUND” and “Woman Tells of Quarrel at Card Party and of Strangers in House.” Page two carried the headline “ART EDITOR SLAIN,” but that was the last time an account would focus on Albert Snyder. It was Ruth who fascinated.
TWO
VERY PRETTY
She told them she could not recall when she was first introduced to Judd Gray, but she could, in fact, recall everything: the fierce sun at noon, the torrid heat shimmering off the streets of Manhattan, the horns of jockeying Model T taxicabs, and the shrill whistles of white-gloved police directing the traffic on Madison Avenue. It was June 1925 and inside the hosiery shop there was a faint chemical smell and a gray tin fleur-de-lis ceiling and giant fan blades shoving hot air around as a pretty hairdresser friend named Kitty Kaufman flirted with a stocking salesman named Harry Folsom and Harry joined the flirtation with lame jokes and flattery.
“Are you girls hungry?” Harry finally asked.