Our alert reporter, working in the true Front Page fashion, dug up some of the pertinent details of this old, almost forgotten disagreement between the powerful, spoiled young Molineux and Mr. Harry Cornish. The Knickerbocker Club had been planning an amateur athletic circus, and Molineux had loudly objected to having Cornish, as only a paid employee, taking any part There had been words — and the record shows that Cornish, who had red hair and the temperament which traditionally goes with it, was driven so far as to call Roland “a vile name.”
Certainly it was not tactful of Cornish to talk like that to one of the most influential members of the club he worked for. But Roland Molineux, instead of immediately resorting to fisticuffs to defend his honor, only set out to get Cornish fired from his job. “He goes — or I go!”
And as it happened, the directors of the club decided in favor of their faithful if hotheaded athletic director, so Mr. Roland Molineux departed in a high huff. He immediately joined a rival athletic club, and the incident was forgotten — by everybody but Roland Molineux, as the record shows later.
The inquisitive reporters also uncovered something else, which they brought to the attention of John D. Adams, secretary of the club, and of Andre Bustanoboy, its superintendent This was the surprising fact that only last November, a prominent member, a Mr. H. C. Barnet, had died in his room there, after an illness diagnosed by the doctors as diphtheria. He had got up from his sickbed too soon, decided the medicos, and had had a cardiac attack. But there was some mention, by club employees, of Mr. Barnet having received a bottle of Kutnow Powders in the mail, a bottle in a Tiffany box containing an empty envelope meant for the donor’s card, just as had Harry Cornish later. Barnet even had taken one or two of the powders, and had complained of their taste!
The reporters also found out that both Harry C. Barnet and Roland Molineux had for a fair period of time been courting the same lovely lady, a choir singer by the name of Blanche Cheseborough. Blanche seems to have divided her favors — which certainly were not inconsiderable — between her two swains. She couldn’t make up her mind, at least not until Barnet succumbed to diphtheria.
Blanche Cheseborough, according to the newspaper pen sketches of the time, was an exceptionally lovely and well-formed young woman and one who was almost of Miss America caliber. She also happened to have one glass eye, the result of a childhood accident. Perhaps it is true that one obvious flaw enhances real beauty.
Anyway, Blanche married Roland Molineux, less than three weeks after Barnet’s funeral at the Church of the Ascension, a ceremony which neither attended, though Blanche did remember to send flowers. Roland was later to explain that while he and Barnet were the closest of friends, he didn’t go to the funeral because “I wasn’t invited.”
The young couple plighted their troth in an ornate ceremony at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan, and then moved to the Waldorf-Astoria, where they had a brief and obviously superfluous honeymoon. Then they moved to a rooming house operated by a Mrs. Bellinger. And the roof began to fall in.
All this time, Roland Molineux had kept a set of rooms at the Herman factory in Newark, where, remember, he was the boss. This suite was cared for by an extremely attractive girl of Italian-Spanish-Mexican extraction, named Mamie Melando. We cannot at this late date inquire into the depth and extent of the relationship between Roland and Miss Melando. However, it is part of the record that after his marriage to the fair Blanche, he usually resided with her at the Bellinger house, and commuted to Newark. He also had numerous other ports of call, being a devious young man. In fact, for months before he and Blanche “made it legal” — and solemnized their relationship in church — he had maintained a flat in New York City under the name Mr. Cheseborough. Roland Molineux was a man of many parts, and a man of many names not his own. Why he chose the names he did is primarily of interest to psychologists, some of whom have debated on the point. It is also of possible interest to any serious observer. Molineux had his times when he was not Molineux, but somebody else. At least, in his own mind. He was Mr. Cheseborough, and so on and so forth — but at crucial times he was never Roland Molineux.
While the police of the City of New York were acting or thinking very slowly and carefully, the newspaper reporters kept busy. Finally, the Journal came out with a banner head: POLICE WANT ROLAND MOLINEUX. It was not quite the exact truth. But it served its point. That same day, the dapper young dandy, accompanied by his father, the General, and an influential family friend, did call upon Chief of Detectives McClusky, where they were received with kid-glove treatment and told that if and when the authorities wanted Roland, they knew where to find him.
Roland Molineux went home, and the heat seemed to be off. But the gentlemen of the press kept digging, and needling the authorities in every column. It was discovered that the bottle of Kutnow Powders, an effervescent laxative, had contained enough cyanide of mercury to kill a horse — or a whole stable of horses.
Chief McClusky then came up with a remarkable deduction. He had a small press conference and said, “The same mind sent both poisons!”
What good Chief McClusky wanted to say was that Harry C. Barnet had taken a draught from a bottle sent to him anonymously in the mail, and that Harry Cornish had narrowly escaped doing the same thing. One died, and one narrowly escaped death only to have his landlady die in his stead.
There was no immediate action taken, however. Except by the busy reporters. They found out somehow that a mail-service box had been rented, over a year earlier, at a shop on Broadway under the name Harry Cornish. The renter was a well-dressed, handsome young man who did not in any way resemble the real Cornish. That led to the discovery of the fact that another handsome, well-dressed young man had rented another “convenience-address” box in another shop on West 47th, this time under the name H. C. Barnet.
Somebody who wished his mail to come to him anonymously had rented mailboxes under the names of two other people. It is perhaps significant that the renter of these boxes never thought of a “John Smith” or a “Joe Robinson” alias. It was then found that the proprietors of these convenience-address shops had done a bit of snooping, and that they had in their busy way come to note that all the correspondence of their mysterious, handsome young client had been with firms dealing in “lost manhood” pills — in other words, in remedies for impotence, real or imagined. Also, the description of the client fitted Roland Molineux so perfectly to a T, and the handwriting on the application forms fitted his hand so perfectly to the same T, that it looked to everyone as if the case was in the bag.
All this was proved, and effectively proved, later in court. Roland Molineux had once taken an apartment under the name of his then mistress, he had taken at least two mailboxes under the names of two acquaintances whom he considered to be enemies. He could, of course, at any time have bought his potency pills at the nearest drugstore, with no questions asked.
Why this man went into such devious ways is a question we can only ask. Why he spent so much time, and so much of his father’s money, on the pills, when he was a champion athlete, with a mistress — later, for a short time, his wife — and at least one or two other ladies with whom he had an “understanding,” is also, as the politicians say, a good question. Besides, it is in the record that at the age of fifteen, our hero had been named as corespondent in a divorce case!