A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

Ruth shoved the jewelry between her mattress and box spring, where the Queens police found them on Sunday afternoon. She’d forgotten where she’d put the chloroform container and frantically searched the room in the faint arc light from the street until she found it beneath Albert’s sheets, against his right thigh. She then hugged herself as if with cold as she hovered over Albert’s head for a final confirmation of his extinction. She felt like hitting him again, just because, but said only, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“Shall we go?” Judd asked. He was swaying, but his suit coat and owlish eyeglasses were on; his hat, overcoat, and briefcase were in his hands.

She smiled and slid her left arm around his waist and she quietly helped Judd step downstairs. There, in his drunkenness, Judd yanked the chintz cushions from the sofa but did not steal Ruth’s fur coats and scarves in the foyer closet; he tipped over chairs in the dining room but did not steal the Chambly silverware. Crazily, he ransacked the kitchen.

Ruth had gone into the cellar to hide her blood-sprayed pillowcase in a hamper, hopelessly confusing the tale she would tell, and Judd followed her to burn up his sales route list. With exactitude he flicked chunks of coal into the furnace so he would make no noise and then broomed the floor wherever his shoes had been. She’d hidden the sash weight in a box of tools and Judd carried over some furnace ash to pepper it with so that the hardware would seem to have been there for weeks. But in the faint light he did not notice a spot of blood that was still on the sash weight; detectives did.

Upstairs again, Judd got a fresh quart of Tom Dawson whisky from a sideboard, filled a water glass with it, and fell down into a chair in the kitchen, sliding a dollar bill under the quart bottle to pay for what he took. She sat with him, rehearsing the tale she would tell. He half-finished smoking a Sweet Caporal, but the night was graying and she worried that the milkman would soon be on the kitchen porch, so she took Judd upstairs and into Josephine’s room.

“You have to slug me,” she said.

“I can’t do that, Ruth!”

“But I have to say the burglars gave me an awful whack on the head and knocked me out.”

“Still, I couldn’t ever hurt you.”

She smiled and petted his sweet cheek and said, “Oh, you. What a sweet boy.” She turned and he tied her wrists behind her back with clothesline rope, then he over-tied her ankles, and he lifted her like a new bride, laid her down on her mother’s bed, and softly cupped her right breast through her nightgown as he tenderly kissed her good-bye.

He felt he was in a movie romance as he said, “You won’t see me for a month, two months, perhaps ever again.”

Ruth took up the same tone. “Oh, no, don’t say that!”

Judd straightened, got into his herringbone overcoat, and fixed his fedora at a rightward cant. “Remember, if the police catch up to me before I get back to Syracuse, I have no excuse for being here.”

She said she’d die before giving up one word against him. She said she still had a capsule that had enough poison to kill a dozen people and that particular one she was going to keep for herself, just in case. And then, as he was exiting, she told him, “Unlock the baby’s door as you go out.”

He forgot.

And now thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

SEVEN

THE ENDLESS DESOLATION OF THE SOUL

She heard the milk truck and fell asleep again, and then she heard a creaking of the door. Ruth lifted up from Josephine’s bed and saw Albert hunching against the frame, his head hideously swollen and purple, his flannel nightshirt soaked in blood, his handgun dangling from bloody fingers. Wads of cotton spilled from his mouth as he said, “Look what you did to me, Root.”

And then she really did wake and Albert was not there. She looked to the Ingersoll clock and saw it was almost half past seven. The hands tied behind her back were tingling. She swung her clotheslined legs to the floor, knelt beside the bed as if childishly praying, and then rocked from knee to knee in an awkward waddle to the hallway and south to her daughter’s room. She fell to her side there and felt her green satin nightgown was hiked up but could not arrange it. She caught her breath and softly thudded the oaken door a few times with her head as she called, “Lora. Lora, it’s me.”

Anyone who saw Henry Judd Gray on Sunday seemed to remember him. At five minutes to six in the morning, an old man named Nathaniel Willis walked up to the bus stop at the major intersection of Springfield Boulevard and Hillside Avenue in Queens Village and saw a man in a gray fedora and herringbone overcoat buttoned up to his chin as if it were below zero. Swaying as he stood on

the corner, that man asked, “Any idea when the bus gets here?”

“Seems to be late,” Willis said, and then he noticed Officer Charlie Smith, a member of the New York City Police Department, sweeping out his traffic booth. Willis kidded him about cleaning house so early in the morning. The officer ignored him as he collected the night’s beer bottles from the sidewalks and streets, stacked them on a curb thirty yards away, crossed to his booth, and took his handgun from its holster. Willis thought he saw Judd flinch. And then, not four feet from Judd, Smith half-turned in an official way, with his left hand on his hip and his right arm and revolver extended, and fired, his right hand jerking up with each of five ear-ringing shots at the beer bottles. He smashed all five. Woke the neighborhood.

Judd Gray remarked to Willis, “I would hate like hell to face him in a firing squad.” He meant it in the friendliest way, the innocent jest of an ordinary fellow just waiting for a bus, but his throat was so tight with tension that he squeaked like a juvenile, and so he was stared at by both men and later recalled.

Willis and Judd and a janitor got on the same westbound bus and Willis noticed the limp of the man in the finely tailored clothes as he edged down the aisle. Judd got off near Jamaica Station on Sutphin Boulevard with the intent of riding the Long Island Rail Road west into Manhattan, but three policemen were standing just inside the station entrance, holding coffee mugs and seriously conversing. Judd looked to the street.

A teenage Yellow Cab driver with a face like an altar boy’s was waiting outside the Jamaica railway station when a soused man in a herringbone overcoat fell into the taxi’s back seat. In an evasive maneuver Judd soon realized was pointless, he told the driver to go to Columbus Circle at 59th and Broadway. Otherwise nothing at all was said, though Paul Mathis remembered that as they crossed over the East River the passenger rolled down the window to feel the cold and sobering air on his face. The final fare was $3.50 and Judd tipped him just a nickel. Mathis scowled at him in the rearview mirror and said, “Thanks a heap, pal.”

Judd simply clutched his tan, Italian-leather briefcase to his chest, floundered outside, took a southbound bus to 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, and walked east to Park Avenue and Grand Central Station. There his hunger overwhelmed him and he went into a railway diner for his first real meal since lunch on Saturday. Waitress Becky Sinclair recalled a hungover man in owlish spectacles confessing, “I’m ravenous,” and ordering enough breakfast for three. But he hunched over his food with a fork in his hand and finally did not eat, just swishing coffee in his mouth before he wearily paid and walked out. It was eight o’clock.

About that time on Sunday, Haddon Jones was entering room 743 in the Onondaga Hotel. He fully twisted the white porcelain bath handle labeled Hot and let the faucet gush as he jerked the coverlet, blanket, and linens around, swatted the pillows, and yanked a bath towel off its rod. On a hotel envelope, he penciled a note: Bud: Perfect. Call when you are ready. Had. He tucked the left edge of the note into the frame of the bathroom mirror so Judd couldn’t fail to see it, noticed that bathwater was nicely wetting the floor, and turned off the faucet. Exiting the room, he tossed the blue “Do Not Disturb” sign inside, then locked the door with the hotel key. Haddon left the Onondaga without being seen, got some gas for his Studebaker, and whistled “Blue Skies” as he drove home.

At eight thirty, Judd boarded Pullman car 17 of the New York Central Railroad’s train number 3, which was heading for Chicago. Though he was the only passenger in the car, Judd examined his ticket, properly took chair number 1 in the sleeper compartment, and found in his overcoat pocket the pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes that Ruth left for him in the kitchen. Sash weight + Albert + lucky strike. He finally caught Ruth’s joke but found it not funny. He lit a cigarette.

Colonel Van Voorhees, the New York Central’s chief conductor, walked down the main aisle ahead of the Pullman conductor and took Judd’s ticket from him. Looking at it, he asked, “Are you going through to Syracuse with us, or do you intend to stop at Albany?”