The Mad Sculptor Read Online Free PDF Page A

if the telltale print matched up with the thumb mark of the man who was rapidly becoming their prime suspect: Joseph Gedeon. 6
    As much as anything else, it was Gedeon’s weird indifference to the murders that had piqued the suspicions of the detectives. His bizarrely blasé behavior was on full display on Tuesday. Even as the bodies of his wife and daughter were being transported from the Bellevue morgue to James McCabe’s funeral parlor on West 90th Street—where a crowd of morbid curiosity seekers was already gathering on the sidewalk for a glimpse of the celebrity corpses—the little upholsterer was pursuing his daily routines as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
    Emerging from his shop at around eight in the morning, Gedeon—trailed by a mob of reporters and a pair of detectives assigned to keep watch on him—strolled to Diamond Dry Cleaners at 547 Third Avenue, where he dropped off a gray topcoat to be sponged and pressed. He then proceeded to the Willow cafeteria on 34th Street, stopping first at a corner newsstand to pick up the morning tabloids.
    Seating himself at a table, he flirted with the waitress as he put in his usual order of oatmeal and coffee, then settled back with the papers, pursing his mouth in apparent distaste as he pored over the many photos of his scantily clad daughter. From surrounding tables, reporters began peppering him with questions. Asked if he had any theories about the killer, he replied without hesitation.
    The culprit, he declared, was “a married millionaire who wanted to have an affair with Ronnie. I don’t know his name. I just know he came from Boston. He offered Ronnie a big car, an apartment, and jewelry if she would sleep with him. But she turned him down. I believe his frustration caused him to do it. Not that he killed her himself. He must have hired someone else to do it.”
    How, someone asked, could he take the tragedy so calmly?
    “I’m a fatalist,” he replied with a shrug. “Also a naturalist. I take things naturally. Everything occurs because of causation. Whatever happens has to happen, and so why get excited about it?” 7
    There were, of course, certain things that did upset him. He lamented the fact that his wife carried no life insurance. “She always told me she didn’t want anyone to profit her death. I thought differently,” said Gedeon. “My idea is that a man and wife should be insured in each other’s names for the benefit of the domestic partnership.”
    Still, he wasn’t overly concerned about his finances. “A girl with five thousand dollars wants to marry me right now,” he explained. “But she’s ugly. I couldn’t marry an ugly woman. My idea of the right wife for me is a woman between thirty-five and forty, pretty and full of pep, but with good sense. I wouldn’t care whether she was a blonde or brunette.”
    Gedeon continued to chat away merrily until one of the reporters began to press him on his alibi. “That’s enough,” he growled, leaping from his chair and bolting from the restaurant. After a quick trip by cab to McCabe’s funeral parlor—where he dropped off the burial clothes that Ethel had tearfully picked out for Mary and Ronnie—he returned to his shop and locked himself inside.
    Shortly afterward, a group of his friends showed up, all fellow Hungarians, including Paul Nadanyi, editor of the local Hungarian newspaper, the Daily Népszava . After a few glasses of schnapps, Gedeon agreed to be interviewed by Nadanyi. His “mood fluctuating from gloom to belligerence,” he blamed his travails on his wayward daughter and overindulgent wife. As for the police, who clearly still had him under surveillance, he expressed nothing but defiance: “The cops can’t break me,” he said, shaking a fist. “I have seven lives.” 8
    From the sidewalk below his second-story shop, reporters called up to Gedeon that his alibi had been shaken. Going to the door, he was told that the owner of Corrigan’s Bar and Grill,