She flicked his left nipple with her tongue and grinned. “Would you get some for me?”
Judd heard himself saying he would. And when he was in his office after Thanksgiving, he urgently telephoned Ruth to say he definitely would not.
“Oh, that’s fine,” she said, as if he’d simply refused a second helping of succotash. And she patiently moved on to a wholesome conversation about housecleaning, making it seem his ethical dilemma was insignificant.
She knows me so well, Judd thought.
At first he pretended that his plotting was just an entertainment on sleepless nights. Ignoring the fact that murder was their intention, Judd concentrated on getting to the house and getting away, on establishing an alibi, not accomplishing the act. The act was his term for it, just as it was for intercourse. And his reveries about it were just as erotic.
Everything seemed to feed into their plans. She and Judd went to the movies and saw Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo, in which John Gilbert is an Army officer and illicit lover who kills Garbo’s husband in a duel over the vamp. Onstage, they saw Alan Dinehart and Claiborne Foster in Sinner, Judd’s view of himself, and just before the show was shut down for being lewd and obscene, they saw Mae West in Sex, the hottest farce on Broadway. Theodore Dreiser’s controversial novel An American Tragedy was adapted for the stage and Judd took Ruth to a hit performance at the Longacre on West 40th Street. Afterward, in the Ritz, they discussed Clyde’s murder of Roberta, the pregnant mother of his child. Clyde left too much to chance, Ruth thought; if he needed to do it he ought to have thoroughly prepared rather than act instinctively. Ruth said, “Hitting her with a camera and letting her drown? What a goof! That’s not a murder, it’s a flip of the coin.”
Because there was a cat burglar in Queens who’d been getting into houses through upstairs windows, Albert had purchased a .32-caliber handgun and Ruth said he flourished it whenever she crossed him, shouting once, “Any day I choose, I can blow your brains out!”
Judd never wondered if she was lying to incite a reaction from him. Rather, he worried that Ruth would be dead the next time he called.
Lorraine was discovered to have the condition called “lazy eye,” and every other Saturday Ruth brought her into the city for examinations and exercises. Judd would meet them at Henry’s and always give Lorraine a dime and some candy. Ruth coached Lorraine to sneak her hand into his and affectionately say how much she loved him. Lorraine once smiled as she asked, “Are you sure you’re not my father?”
Albert, Judd thought, is as bad as that.
“Tell him about this morning,” Ruth said.
The girl was puzzled. She cocked her head. “What?”
“Daddy grabbed your English muffin from you and …”
“Oh, and he scraped off some of the peanut butter. Because I was wasteful, he said.”
Ruth prodded, “And what happened next?”
She smiled. “I cried and said I wanted lots of peanut butter.”
“And he got angry …,” Ruth said.
“Yes, then he got angry and slapped me. I hid behind the dining room chair because I was afraid of him and then Mommy stood right up to him and yelled things.” The nine-year-old seemed to have trouble recalling the morning, and then she recited, “But then Daddy rushed upstairs and ran back down a few minutes later with a gun in his hand, yelling, ‘I’ll kill the both of you!’ Only he used some swearwords. And he shoved the gun into Mommy’s chest.”
Judd petted the pretty girl’s head. “Oh, sweetie. I’m so sorry,” he said. And he was dismayed that she would be just as direly affected if he did what Ruth was hounding him to do.
But Ruth winked at him and said, “All’s well that ends well.”
On Christmas Eve 1926, the three met at the Waldorf-Astoria to exchange presents, and Judd widened Lorraine’s eyes with a girl’s very adult-seeming pink silk lingerie that she was thrilled by. Ruth, too, was in high spirits as he gave her a jeweled blue purse that she liked enough to carry into the courtroom four months later. Lorraine presented him with a silk Brooks Brothers tie of the sort he favored, and Ruth handed him a gleaming silver grooming set for the road. And next to the hairbrush he found a check for two hundred dollars, or two weeks’ wages, written against the account of Mr. and Mrs. A. E. Snyder.
Because Lorraine was there, Ruth could only say, “You’ve been so generous to us. We need you to stay out of hock.”
“But how can you afford it?”
With the seriousness of a tutor, she said, “I have great expectations.”
Judd cashed it, and the canceled check with his signature on it would be found by detectives
on March 20th.
In January 1927, in Buffalo, Judd dreamed that a faceless Albert was crouching toward him in a corridor, seething with hatred. Huddled behind a curtain beside Judd were Ruth and Lorraine, Isabel and Jane. Judd was teasing Albert forward, hoping his rage would let him bypass the mothers and daughters, but the curtain was fluttering out and tangling and Ruth’s fair calves and thighs were exposed. Albert turned in vengeance and lifted an ax and Judd woke in a scream.
But he knew it was not just a nightmare that scared him. Albert represented everything wrong in his life: Judd’s negligence of his job, his worry over conditions at home, his failing physical stamina, and the ever greater excess of alcohol that was wrecking his health and his future. Judd did not fall asleep, he passed out; he did not wake up, he came to. Even the fine memory of which he was proud was becoming so faulty that he was forced to scribble notes about whatever he’d done or had to do.
And Albert’s health, too, seemed ever more precarious. In January, Ruth wrote Judd that The Governor couldn’t stop hiccupping and Judd replied in his letter that a customer in Geneva, New York, recommended pineapple juice. Ruth laced the juice with bichloride of mercury tablets, and instead of dying Albert just vomited all day and was cured. With a mixture of dashed hopes and renewed admiration, Ruth wrote her lover that she’d never seen anyone so deathly ill pull through.
Judd primly wrote back that he felt she was behaving in a monstrous manner. But when they dined at Zari’s the next weekend he confidentially said, “I find it so mysterious. Had you said you wanted to kill a dog or cat, I would have broken all connections with you. And yet I have to confess to an excitement I don’t understand. I’m entranced by your bravery. Your outlawry.” Judd unscrewed the silver cap to his flask, filled his glass with juniper-flavored grain alcohol, and finished half of it. “I have two beings inhabiting my skin, Ruth. One strives to act normally but is wildly incompetent, while the other seeks the outlandish and forbidden and is gaining influence over me. I’m becoming a mess. I hunt hither and yon for my jacket and find I’m wearing it. I twist on the bath’s faucet handles and forget them and flood the floor. I feel like I’m in a coma. Yesterday Isabel and Jane were there to meet my train, and I was in such a haze that I failed to recognize them and walked right by.”