A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion Read Online Free PDF Page A

“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
     
    S he 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.
    Kitty was Jewish and fetching, with hazel eyes and coffee-colored hair combed over to the left like a surge of ocean, and she wore a form-describing silk dress that hinted it could slither off. She was beyond the likes of Harry Folsom but she was ten yearsmarried and flattered by his attentions. She gave Ruth a
Shall I?
glance. Ruth snapped her Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum and shrugged.
    “Hey, you gotta eat,” Harry said.
    “I guess,” Kitty said. She sought affirmation, but Ruth couldn’t have cared less. She’d inserted a hand inside some fine silk hose that seemed dark as Coca-Cola. She held it up to the full glare of sunlight.
    “Ruth, you keep those McCallums,” Harry said. “Seriously. My gift. Look lovely on you. And join Mrs. Kaufman and me for lunch.”
    “You’re very kind,” Ruth said, as if he wasn’t.
    Kitty focused on Ruth in that
Say yes
way, seeming not so much attracted to him as to the fact that she still seemed attractive.
    “Where?” Ruth asked.
    Harry folded his gift of McCallum hosiery in a paper bag and became doggish in his eagerness. “How about Henry’s Swedish restaurant? Cooler there because of the ice. Thirty-sixth Street, east of Sixth Avenue. My treat.”
    “Smorgasbord,” Kitty said. “You get to have whatever you want.”
    “Rarely true,” said Ruth.
    Exiting the shop, Harry slanted on his Borsalino hat and inserted himself between the friends so his hands could ride both their backs in their stroll.
    The façade of Henry’s Restaurant was a cool, seawater green, and green were the lampshades inside, the cold tessellated floor, the fake ferns and nasturtiums and trellis. Ruth’s late father was from a fishing village in Norway, and Josephine was from a fishing village in Sweden, so she’d grown up with the foods now laid out on cracked ice in Henry’s Restaurant: cold dishes of salmon, herring, lox, whitefish, ham and mustard, jellied pigs’ feet, and hard-boiled eggs. And elsewhere the hot dishes of Swedish meatballs, roastedpork ribs, matchstick potatoes covered with cream, stewed green cabbage, onion and sprats, and beetroot salad in mayonnaise. But Harry Folsom first wanted to slake his thirst, so he ushered them to a booth he called “his” and ordered three Clicquot Club ginger ales from a fat waiter named Olaf, who returned with highball glasses that were just two-thirds filled so there would be room for the first-rate London gin that Harry stirred in from his flask. After hearing Harry’s old pun on his name as he offered them a “fulsome toast,” Kitty joined him in