“How long have you been without sleep?”
With sighing effort, Judd did the arithmetic. “Forty hours.”
“We’d better get you to the hotel.”
At eleven thirty, a taxicab driver collected Judd at 207 Park Avenue and conveyed him to the Onondaga Hotel and later told an investigator that his passenger was snoring soon after he snapped down the metering flag. Judd tore off his clothes as soon as he entered room 743, filled a water glass with whisky that he put within reach on the vanity, folded his tortoiseshell spectacles next to it, and got into bed in his underwear, falling asleep at once.
Reporters had already filed their newspaper stories about the slain Motor Boating art editor, and Albert Snyder’s widow was getting ever more confused as forty-year-old police commissioner George V. McLaughlin cross-examined her. Around half past one o’clock in the morning, Detective Lieutenant Michael McDermott walked into the office with a notepad on which he’d written the name “Judd Gray.” McDermott crouched to whisper into McLaughlin’s ear and
the commissioner solemnly nodded, then held the notepad in front of Ruth and concentrated on her sleepy face as she read it. Soothingly, he asked, “Was this the man who killed your husband?”
Ruth finally accepted that she was caught and asked, “Has he confessed?”
The Syracuse Police Department received a cable from the Jamaica precinct house at 1:47 a.m., and acting on Mrs. Snyder’s information, three Syracuse detectives arrived at room 743 in the Onondaga Hotel at half past two.
Judd woke to a hard and continuous knocking on his hotel room door and was so disoriented that he presumed he’d overslept and that housekeeping was there to collect his laundry. He switched on a light, hooked his spectacles over his ears, and fell toward the knocking in his drunkenness, finding three sour-looking men in the hallway. Cold eddied off their overcoats.
“Mr. Gray?”
“Yes.”
A looming man held up his wallet so Judd could see a Syracuse Police Department badge. “I’m Detective Firth. The New York City Police Department seems to need you for questioning about a homicide.”
Weakly trying to buy time for his thoughts, Judd lied, “I don’t know what that word means.”
“Homicide? It means murder. The City wants to question you about a murder.”
The jocular corset salesman took over to say, “Fellas, the only thing I ever killed was a pint of liquor from time to time.”
Another detective named Finocchio commented, “We got the joker in the pack, didn’t we?”
Firth said, “You’ll have to come with us, Mr. Gray.”
Entering the hotel room, Finocchio and Firth looked intently at everything, finding a gold Cross fountain pen in his overcoat and a Sunday New York Times on his desk, but forgetting to root through the wastepaper basket. A friendly older detective named Kerrigan watched Judd wash up and brush his teeth with Pep-sodent in the bathroom, and he leaned into the wall next to the closet as Judd dressed nattily and, because his suitcase was in Harry Platt’s office, crammed his hangered suits and shirts into his samples trunk.
“Don’t you have luggage?”
“I have to travel light.”
Judd found the half-pint of rye that Ruth had contaminated with bichloride of mercury and slipped it into his suit-coat pocket.
“What was that?” Detective Kerrigan asked.
Judd winked. “Cough medicine.”
“Well, I’ll have to confiscate it for now.”
Handing it over, Judd watched as the detective unscrewed the cap and sniffed. Would he taste it next? Judd irritably said, “For God’s sake, don’t drink it. It’s poison.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Huh,” Detective Kerrigan said.
At three in the morning on March 21st, a genial Henry Judd Gray was treating the interrogation as either a regrettable mistake or a lark, and he seemed so unlikely a threat to flee or inflict injury that he was not handcuffed as he was escorted outside to a waiting police car. Recalling that he hadn’t checked out, Judd gave one of them thirteen dollars for the hotel bill, and as the policeman went inside to pay, Detective Finocchio turned around in his front seat to ask, “You have a lot of friends and associates in New York City?”
“Of course,” Judd said.