A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

“I’m going through to Syracuse,” Judd said.

“Well, the Pullman won’t go there. You’ll have to change to a coach.”

“Right.”

The conductor so seriously stared at him that Judd forced a smile. “I’m memorizing your face,” Colonel Van Voorhees said. “That way I can keep your railroad ticket and wherever you are in this car afterward, I’ll remember you.”

“Nice to know,” Judd said.

Twenty minutes after the train left Grand Central Station, he got up to flush the packets of sleeping powders and poison down car 17’s toilet, but he found in the lavatory mirror that there was a handprint of Albert’s blood on his vest that was just concealed by his overcoat. And he felt so condemned by it that he kept the poisoned rye whiskey just in case suicide seemed the only option later. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Returning to his seat, he folded a New York Times to the section that carried the crossword puzzle and only then noticed that his Cross fountain pen was there but his mechanical pencil was missing. Wondering about that was too tiring for him. And in his fuddle and exhaustion, the puzzle was too hard for him and he discovered he could neither read nor sleep, so he just stared outside at the cool and misty countryside.

In Queens Village then, Assistant District Attorney William Gautier was inviting a gum-chewing teenage stenographer into Lorraine’s bedroom to record Mrs. Snyder’s initial statement. Ruth smiled in kinship as she told the girl, “I was a stenographer once. At Cosmopolitan magazine.”

Sitting prissily on a too-small, straight-backed chair, the girl asked, “Where’d you learn?”

“Berg’s Business College.”

“Me too!”

Attorney Gautier interrupted to say, “Shall we continue?”

The girl flipped open a stenographer’s pad and Ruth got more upright on the child’s bed, shifting to pillow her spine. “Where do I begin?”

He prompted, “You went out into the hallway …”

“Then a giant man with a mustache grabbed me,” she stated. “He looked like an Italian. He whispered, ‘If you yell, I’ll kill you.’ Then he hit me a whack over the head and I know nothing more until morning when I came to and called my daughter.”

About the time Judd’s train was rolling through Ossining, a hearse was taking Albert Snyder’s remains to the Harry A. Robbins Morgue at 161st Street, Jamaica. When Judd was outside Poughkeepsie and saw the Hudson River lazing along below the railroad tracks, Ruth’s jewelry was being discovered underneath her mattress. Judd frantically yanked down the window and got up to fling the briefcase containing the chemist’s gloves, chloroform bottle, and bloodstained Croton wristwatch out into the weather, poking his head outside like a scamp so he could watch the Italian leather briefcase splash into the green water, rock on it awhile, and sink. Ruth’s Moroccan leather address book was found in a Windsor desk. And as Judd changed railway cars in Albany, Queens police found a freshly bloodstained pillowcase in the basement hamper and weekly twenty-dollar canceled checks made out to the Prudential Life Insurance Company, seeming to communicate that Mrs. A. E. Snyder would be the beneficiary of a great deal of money.

At five p.m. in Queens Village, police detectives conveyed Albert Snyder’s widow to the Jamaica precinct house. She discovered that Milton and Serena Fidgeon and their bridge party guests were gloomily there for questioning. She accepted their sympathy for her great loss. And then Commissioner McLaughlin courteously invited the widow into his office. Agitated but not grieving, she would be there, off and on, for eight hours.

In Syracuse, it was snowing. Judd arrived in his room at the Onondaga Hotel and found Haddon’s note on the bathroom mirror. He tore up the note and his Pullman ticket stub and threw them in the wastebasket, which he’d later regret, then telephoned Haddon at home.

Mrs. Jones answered. She said Haddon had spent his day dismantling the two-tone Studebaker’s hood, fenders, and doors for painting and was “too pooped to pop,?

? so he was napping. Judd said he envied him. She hoped Judd was still coming over.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Judd said. Rooting around in his Bien Jolie sample case, he found a fresh quart of Scotch whisky that he’d forgotten was there and he filled a water glass twice with it as he took a hot bath, and filled the glass once more as he paced room 743 and hatched a plot to hire a car and kill himself in a fatal wreck off the highway to Auburn or Lake Skaneateles. At five forty-five, when he was telephoned in his hotel room, Judd was freshly attired but spent. He hadn’t slept in thirty-four hours and was focused on the half-pint flask of rye that she’d poisoned with bichloride of mercury tablets. Hearing the hotel’s room phone ringing, he thought of Isabel for the first time that weekend, and he was tentative as he lifted the telephone earpiece. “Hello?”

But it was not his wife. “Would you still like to come over for supper?” Haddon asked.

He had a mental stammer and finally said, “I have forgotten your address.”

“Two hundred seven Park Avenue.”

The hint had failed. “Will you come and get me?”

“My Studebaker’s still laid up,” Haddon said, and he heard Judd sigh. “But I’ll have a friend drive me down.”

The friend was Harry Platt, another insurance salesman and a fat, gray-haired, half-bald man with circular spectacles. He’d joined Haddon in the elevator lift up to Judd’s room on the seventh floor and Judd affably invited both of them in for a highball. Harry would testify that Judd was “nervous and excited.” After introductions and getting out of their overcoats and hats and slouching down on the sofa with Scotch whisky and seltzers, Judd swiveled a desk chair around and straddled it and said, “I have some ’fessing up to do.”

“Ho boy,” Haddon said, and turned to Harry. “Cherchez la femme.”

“What is that? Is that French?” Harry asked.

Judd interrupted. “The fact is I’m in deep trouble. Real deep. And I need your help.”

Haddon’s face wrinkled with concern as he said, “Count on it, Bud.”