At the cemetery we all stood in a knot, whispering and conjecturing as to whether the murderer might appear. The family procession passed into the grounds, and we followed, remaining at a respectful distance. I heard the rabbi, speaking briefly – the crime was not mentioned; he spoke only of a young life taken in purity. Then the Kaddish, recited very softly by the father. And thus was Paulie Kessler buried a second time.
We came away hurriedly, for there was a police tip that Clement Holmes had been seen, in a Winton, on Skokie Road.
Monday, police were checking every registered Winton owner in Chicago. One had even turned up whose name was Harold Williams. But it seemed he had an absolutely airtight alibi.
In the afternoon there was a sudden wild alarm, and we followed police cars to an address on Harper Avenue. The pavement was filled with people asking one another what had happened. Police came rushing out of doorways; police were scouring the alleys. It seemed that a tall man in a grey suit, wearing a fedora hat, had come hurrying into a rooming house saying excitedly, “I want a room right away. I’ve got to get off the street!”
He had behaved so strangely that the landlady had whispered to a lodger to call the police. The stranger must have heard, for he had turned and run out of the house. There had been a wild chase through back yards. But the suspect had got away.
By then we were looking for a woman, too. The clue came from the glasses. A Lieutenant Cassidy had been detailed to try to trace the spectacles, and he had consulted an optician near the Bureau. The lenses were of a common prescription, as we all knew. But the frame, the optician said, was not a style that he handled. It was a tortoise-shell frame manufactured, he believed, outside of Chicago. Also, the frame was quite narrow. He judged that the glasses might have been worn by a woman. Someone with a thin nose bridge and a narrow forehead. Pictures were drawn of the female accomplice of the man in the grey suit, both of them sitting in a grey Winton car.
We began to hear stories of pressure. The almost mythical multimillionaire founder of the Weiss-Straus enterprises had appeared in the office of State’s Attorney Horn. He had come down with Judge Wagner. The magnate had asked pointedly about the progress of the investigation. For though the slain boy had been only remotely related to the Straus clan, there were among his classmates two of Weiss’s favourite grandsons. Were they safe? Were any children in Chicago safe as long as this monster remained uncaught, unknown? An editorial of the same tenor appeared in our own paper and in the Post.
Suddenly, police raids were taking place. Flophouses were combed, derelicts were picked up. Police Chief Schramm came back into the headlines by announcing that he had dropped the ransom theory and now favoured the pervert theory. ROUND UP ALL DEPRAVED, we headlined. Petty ex-convicts, floaters, queers were brought into the stations by the score, and we went and looked at them in the sour-smelling Canal Street lockup, the restless little men with puffy faces, the whisperers, the morons, as we called them. How many were kicked around, battered, abused? Who knew? Who cared?
Then Captain Nolan, chief of detectives, recaptured the headlines from the chief of police. “Dope will be found at the bottom of it all,” he announced in one of his exclusive interviews with the Tribune. And every dope addict in town was to be picked up and examined.
But as Nolan and Schramm failed to provide convincing suspects, our headlines were turned over more and more to State’s Attorney Horn and his eager staff of investigators. “The most important clue to appear so far,” we declared, had been provided by Horn, whose men had been questioning a railroad switchman oddly overlooked by the police. In Horn’s office we all listened to the switchman’s story. An elderly man with the scrubbed look of the intensely sober, he was quite convincing. On Wednesday night about midnight, he said, he had been driving home to Gary, and just past Hegewisch he had come upon a car stuck on a little side road. A dark sedan. It was a Nash or a Moon, not a Winton. He had given the car a push to get it back onto the road. Those people had been carrying a bundle of some kind, like something wrapped in a tent. He had even made a remark to the woman, “This is a hell of a time to go camping.” They had thanked him for the push. And one detail he remembered: their car had a broken front bumper.
And then Detective Chief Nolan issued an extraordinary statement: “I ask everybody in Chicago to look around and ask whether his neighbours, friends, or acquaintances showed signs of muddy clothes last Wednesday night, or were away from their usual haunts or callings last Wednesday afternoon or evening.”
“Hey, I saw mud on your shoes last Wednesday!” became the jest of the day, but Nolan’s invitation was followed by a new wave of telephone tips, letters, denunciations, arrests. Everyone was looking at his neighbour with strange eyes.
And at night, police pounced upon a group of people in a vacant lot at Cottage Grove and 44th – a few blocks from the Kessler home. There were two men and a woman. They had been acting strangely, burning something on the lot. And they carried a small bundle. It proved to be a shirt wrapped around something hard, which was nothing else than a broken typewriter! But it turned out to be an Oliver.
And near Aurora, police saw two cars stop. Their drivers got out, talked. A portable typewriter exchanged hands. The cars drove off in different directions. The police car chased one, and an officer commandeered a passing automobile to pursue the second fleeing vehicle. But the exchange proved to have taken place between a typewriter repairman and a respectable customer.
Neighbours of a mysterious redheaded woman reported that her room was filled with newspaper clippings about the murder. “I know all about the case,” they had heard her say. She was arrested as she was parking her old grey car. In the car was a shoemaker’s hammer, a weapon that might well have caused the death wounds on the boy’s head. She turned out to be a harmless eccentric.
Then we were haunting Steger’s block again. An anonymous telephone caller had informed the police that the dead boy’s clothing would be found “inside that block”. “We can’t afford to pass up anything,” Chief Schramm said, and the police combed the block. A woman was noticed acting suspiciously, running and peering under shrubs. But it was proved that she had merely lost her cat.
Meanwhile a truck filled with street labourers arrived, the block was closed off, and the men began breaking open the pavement. With the other reporters, I ran up and down the stairs that led to Steger’s apartment. Front and back doors were locked; blinds were drawn. It was rumoured he had been rearrested. One of the officers who was friendly to Tom, Lieutenant Cassidy, swore he didn’t know anything new about the school teacher. As for the digging operation, he only repeated our own guesses. “Maybe the sewer is stuffed up.” Maybe Paulie Kessler’s clothes would be found stuffed in the sewer.
The job continued into the darkness. Special lights were set up around the trench. In the crowd, the wisecracks flew, and the shocked, self-conscious giggles of flappers could be heard, as suggestions were made about what people might want to get rid of down the sewer. And in that same crowd, inevitably, Artie Straus had turned up with his satellite, Judd, hailing me, pausing to add a few horrors to the list, and swirling away among the watchers. I had a momentary impression of Artie’s voice laughing above some girlish shrieks, and then the sewer was finally opened. They found only a lot of muck.