The old man lay on the rocky hillside for almost an hour, just another drunk nobody paid any attention to until a squad car cruised by containing two policemen whose business it was to pay attention to bums.
They went up and looked the old fellow over, found him unconscious, and sent for an ambulance. The response was tolerably prompt, two internes arriving within twenty minutes, but the old man died halfway to the hospital.
What had happened was pretty obvious. An old drunk trying to find a secluded spot to sleep it off had fallen on a rocky hillside in the park and busted his skull. The mark of the rock was plainly visible. No perceptible signs of alcohol — but that didn’t mean too much because you could never tell about those old rummies. Even if he hadn’t been drunk at the moment, what was he doing there in the first place? Easy for a cripple to slip on that rocky incline.
As a matter of form the two policemen went back to check. And sure enough, there was a sharp rock with blood on it. You didn’t even have to look close. After all, what was this? A big murder case or something?
So that closed one of the afternoon’s incidents on B Street; the other — the sudden collapse of the brick wall into the basement of the old warehouse — generated more interest and excitement.
A woman across the alley was sure she’d seen some boys playing in the basement just before the wall went down. But a quick check showed the basement to contain nothing but bricks and mortar, leading them to believe the woman had merely wanted to “get into the act,” to be momentarily important.
So, all in all, the incidents on B Street that afternoon were not without value to the community. In a matter of minutes, the mothers of Hat Point were relieved of two worries. Twin threats to the well-being of their children had been eliminated.
And that made it a better community.
A safer place to grow and prosper.
Cure for a Headache
by Stuart Palmer
The bottle of Bromo-Seltzer arrived by mail on Christmas Eve, its package addressed in a rather flowery hand to Mr. Harry Cornish, Knickerbocker Athletic Club, Madison Avenue and 45th Street, New York City. A gift package, gift-wrapped — and the gift was death.
Harry Cornish was chief athletic director of the exclusive club, a red-haired, moderately pugnacious man in his early thirties. He seems to have been very popular with all — or almost all — its select membership of young men about town.
There was no return address on the parcel. Inside it was a Tiffany box — or at least a box with a Tiffany label — containing a little blue bottle of Bromo in an ornate, solid-silver holder. It was the sort of gift a woman might choose — a woman with a sense of humor. Harry Cornish received a bit of ribbing from the members about the gift, and his anonymous admirer; the implication was, of course, that he would be likely to need some sort of hangover remedy after the imminent holiday festivities. But he professed to have no idea as to the identity of the mysterious donor, and on second thought, he retrieved the package wrapper from the wastebasket and put it into his desk, with some vague idea of finding who might have sent it. He also left the bottle and its silver container there, and went home as usual to the boardinghouse where he lived. This was a sedate brownstone at 61 West 86th Street, operated by the elderly Mrs. Katherine Adams, a distant relative of his. There he celebrated Christmas in his usual sedate fashion.
This was back in the so-called Gay Nineties, but Harry Cornish was no gay bachelor. He had been married briefly and divorced; his ex-wife had remarried happily and was living in Albany — and he was wary of women and wine. In the household was also Mrs. Adams’ daughter Laura, separated from her husband, and an elderly lady known as Aunt Anna. It cannot have been a very exciting menage — but he wasn’t out for excitement.
On the day after Christmas, back at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, there was in the locker room more friendly masculine badinage about Cornish and his Bromo. Mr. Henry King, a Wall Street broker of some standing, spoke up and said that he had a bit of a brannigan — or hangover — and that he would like to try a dose. He took the sealed bottle of powder and went over to the water cooler. In the words of the late Edmund Pearson, who wrote one of his inimitable essays on the case: “If he had listened carefully, I think he would have heard the soft rustling of wings; it was a moment of intense activity for Mr. King’s guardian angel!” For the water cooler luckily happened to be empty. After a few harsh words about the laxity of the house committee, King returned the bottle to Cornish and forgot all about it.
A day or so later, Cornish took the anonymous Christmas present home to the boardinghouse and put it on his dresser. Here also, from the three ladies in the house, he received some “joshing” about his secret admirer. And then next morning, Mrs. Katherine Adams arose with a blinding headache. Her dear daughter Laura thought immediately of Cornish’s Bromo-Seltzer and asked him to prepare a therapeutic dose for the old lady, which he did. To his lasting sorrow.
Mrs. Adams downed the draught with a wry face, complaining that it tasted “sort of bitter.” Cornish himself took a sip, and said he didn’t notice anything out of the way. But in a matter of moments, the old lady collapsed in agony. Cornish rose from his chair to go to her aid, and found that his knees buckled under him. A doctor was hastily summoned, but the old lady was dead on arrival. Heart attack, said the medico.
When the undertaker had been sent for, and the other melancholy formalities attended to, the conscientious Mr. Cornish went down to his regular daily duties at the Knickerbocker. But he was in no shape for work; he was suffering excruciating abdominal pain and had to be hastily put to bed in one of the rooms for resident members. For some days he hovered on the brink betwixt life and death. Yet nobody at that moment seemed to see any possible connection between Mrs. Adams’ fatal “heart attack” and the severe gastritis attack suffered the same morning by her lodger.
The first crack in the case appeared when an alert cub newspaperman from the New York Journal — a so-called “yellow sheet” of that year of 1898 — saw the report slip hanging on a hook in the coroner’s office in the Criminal Courts Building — and smelled a rat. Those were the halcyon days when the gentlemen of the fourth estate were allowed, or at least ventured to take, a great deal more latitude than reporters can today.
As a result of this reporter’s brief story in the Journal, the police picked up the bottle of Bromo-Seltzer from the Adams boardinghouse. Upon analysis it was found to have been spiked with cyanide of mercury, one of the deadliest of all poisons and one of the hardest to come by — at least for the average citizen.
So now it was clearly a matter for Homicide. Poor old Katherine Adams had no known enemies, in her house or without. But she had died, suddenly and horribly. The newspaper boys, especially those on the Journal, did a lot of the investigation for the police. It was fairly obvious, at least to one of them, that some murder plot had here misfired — that the poisoned Bromo had been aimed at Harry Cornish. Reporters from all the papers of the time bore down upon the Knickerbocker — and there they began to lift the lid of a veritable Pandora’s Box.
One of their discoveries was that about nine months ago, Harry Cornish had had a disagreement with one of the leading members and directors of the Knickerbocker Club. This was a handsome young buck in his early thirties, by the resounding name of Roland Molineux, who threw his weight around at times but was still popular, if only for his athletic prowess. Roland was the son of General Edward L. Molineux, then one of Brooklyn’s wealthiest and most respected citizens. The younger Molineux was a chemist, superintendent at the factory of Morris Herman, Inc., in Newark, manufacturers of paints and colors. He was also, at this time, a national champion amateur gymnast — among other things. Among many other things.