The Murder of the Century Read Online Free PDF Page A

kind of calluses a sailor would have?
    Hogan didn’t really have an answer on that one.
    In fact, there was a lot the police didn’t have answers for. They’d already been on the defensive all weekend, even
before
this case; one of their captains had ledsweeps of women guilty of little more than walking along Broadway after midnight, filling the courts with the tragic injured respectability of sobbing baker’s assistants and late-shift shopgirls. When one cop was asked for his evidence, he’d scarcely sputtered, “I saw her walk up and down the street a few times” before being cut off by a magistrate’s bellow of “Discharged!” Reporters had been having a field day with it; a new murder was the last thing the department needed that day.
    But Carey was different: He knew this was a homicide case, and he was making it
his
case. He even hadhis own pet theory. The murder, he mused aloud to a reporter, might have been committed in Long Island or Brooklyn. The killers—for it would have required more than one to cut up and dispose of the body so quickly—had taken a ferry and dumped the first piece. But then they’d panicked. Maybe they thought that they’d been seen. That’s when they went back and fetched the larger piece with a wagon, drove over the Washington Bridge, and dumped it onto the loneliest stretch of road they could find. Of course, this was just a hunch—half a hunch, really. And as for who did it, or who the victim was … well, there was no way to tell yet.
    Taking one last look at the body before he headed back to the World Building with Gus, though, young Ned Brown wasn’t so sure about that. When he examined the headless corpse’s hands,an unnerving sense of recognition crept over him. Those well-muscled arms and smooth fingers—they were like something he’d seen somewhere before.
    But where?

4.

THE WRECKING CREW
    ON MONDAY MORNING , New Yorkers awoke to find a hand shoved in their face. HAND OF THE HEADLESS MURDERED MAN—EXACT SIZE , crowed the June 28
New York World
. There, above the fold, the life-sized fingers splayed across the morning paper—a dead man reaching out of the page to grab readers by the collar. RIVER MYSTERY GROWS IN HORROR , bellowed
Press
newsboys, while the high-minded
Herald
fretted over “the strangest and most brutal murder of the century.” Even the immigrant sheets took notice, with the staidly Teutonic
New Yorker Staats Zeitung
trumpeting the latest on
Der Kopffabschneider
—“the Headcutter.” But none topped the
World’s
engraving—procured, it boasted, “from a flashlight photograph made in the Morgue last night.” The illustration irresistibly invited readers to place their own hand across the dead man’s—to clasp their fingers across his—and wonder at his identity.
    An overnight autopsy of the second parcel by Coroner Tuthill furnished some intriguing hints. The victim, as one reporter put it delicately, “may have been a Hebrew.” He hadno alcohol in his stomach, which discounted a drunken brawl. Nor was there food in there—so it had been at least three or four hours since his last meal. But among this minutiae, one of the coroner’s consulting physicians had made a sensational finding:
The leg stumps had been boiled
.
    “It appears to me,” he’d confided to an
Evening Telegram
reporter, “that an attempt has been made to dispose of the body by boiling it. It is possible the murderers thrust the legs into a kettle hoping to boilthe flesh off, but found they could not do it quickly or easily enough, and that they then cut up the remains.”
    Well, that was one way of looking at it.
    CANNIBALISM SUGGESTED , the
Herald
announced. Or was it something more subtle—quicklime or a harsh deodorizer on the skin, the remains of a failed attempt at a hasty cover-up? The most fascinating solution offered up in the morgue came from a
Times
reporter: Weren’t butchers in the habit of scalding stuck pigs to loosen up their skin? The