“Only he woke up and caught you at it.”
He shrugged, said, “Yeah, so I took my knife off the table and kind of threatened him with it, told him to get back away from me... then the old fucker took a swing at me... I think he cut his arm when he did... and the knife, it kind of went flying.”
“What did you shoot him with?”
“I kept this old hunting rifle .22, next to my bed. That’s a rough neighborhood, you know. Bad element.”
“No kidding. So you shot him point-blank with the rifle.”
Another shrug. “It was self-defense.”
“Why did you do the woman, Joe?”
His face tightened with indignation; he pointed to himself with a thumb. “That was self-defense, too! She started screaming and clawing at me, after I shot her old man, so I threw the bitch down the bed, and started just kind of slapping her, you know, just to shut her up, but she wouldn’t put a lid on that screaming shit so I hit her a couple times, good ones, only she just yelled louder, and so what the hell else could I do, I grabbed that knife off the floor, and...”
He stopped, swallowed.
So I finished for him: “Stabbed her in the back four or five times. In self-defense.”
That’s when he lunged for me, launching himself from the bed and right at me, knocking me and the chair over, ass over teakettle. Then he dove for the knife, but I was up and on him and slammed the nine-millimeter barrel into the back of his hand, crushing it against the nightstand. He yowled and pulled the hand back, shaking it like he’d been burned, and I laid the barrel along the back of his neck, hard, sending him to the floor, where he whimpered like a kicked dog.
I tucked the sheathed knife in my waistband. “Where’s your damn rifle?”
“Down... down a gutter...”
I gave the place a quick toss, looking for the other weapon, or any other weapon, but he was apparently telling the truth. He sat on the floor with his legs curled around under him, like a pitiful little kid who’d just taken a fearsome beating; he was crying, but the eerie thing was, he had that big crazy smile going, too.
“You stay put, Liberace,” I said. “I’m calling the cops.”
I shut him in there, tucked my gun away, and listened for the sound of the window opening and him clambering out into the courtyard.
It was muffled, but I heard it: “Hold it right there!”
Then a gunshot.
And Joe’s voice, pleading: “Please don’t kill me! I’ll tell you everything!”
Seemed the cops had been waiting when Joe went out that window.
Seemed my friend Allen had spotted a suspicious character in the rooming house hallway, trying various doors, then out back, trying windows, and Allen, being a good citizen, called it in. He thought it might be a fellow he knew from work, a dishwasher named Joe Greenberg with scars on his face and a greasy pompadour, and sure enough, that’s who’d been caught, climbing out Allen’s window, then trying to scramble over a fence when that cop fired a warning shot. Seemed the police were looking for an individual on a Bowery killing who answered Greenberg’s description. Later, a sheathed hunting knife used in the Bowery slaying turned up on the grass by some garbage cans behind Allen’s rooming house.
Anyway, that’s what the papers said.
How I should I know? I was just the Little Man Who Wasn’t There, slipping out the back.
8
Harold Weinberg (Joe Greenberg was an alias) had a history of mental illness, having been first institutionalized at age ten; in 1945, at seventeen, he’d been medically discharged from the Army, and had since racked up a long record of vagrancy and breaking-and-entering arrests. He confessed to the police several times, delivering several variants of what he told me, as well as a version that had Bodenheim killing Ruth and prompting Weinberg to retaliate with the .22, as well as my favorite, one in which a person hiding under the bed did it. Weinberg sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at his arraignment, bragged about ridding the world of two Communists, assured spectators he was “not crazy,” and was promptly committed to Bellevue, where Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife Ruth were also registered, albeit in the morgue.
I claimed the bodies, at Ben Hecht’s behest, who shared funeral expenses with Bodenheim’s first wife, Minna, subject of Max’s first book of poetry. Three hundred attended the poet’s funeral, including such leading literary lights as Alfred Kreymborg and Louis Untermeyer, among a dozen other nationally known figures in the arts, who mingled with lowly Village poets, painters, and thespians. Kreymborg gave a eulogy that included the prediction, “We need not worry about Maxwell Bodenheim’s future — he will be read.”
And Bodenheim’s murder did receive enormous national coverage — probably no Bowery bum in history ever got such a send-off — and by dying violently in a sexually charged situation, the one-time bestselling author of Replenishing Jessica gained a second fifteen minutes of fame (to invoke a later oddball Village luminary).
But Kreymborg’s prediction has otherwise proved less than prescient. Every one of Bodie’s books was out of print at his death, and the same is true as I write this, forty-some years later. As far as I’m aware, the last time a Bodenheim book was in print was 1961, when a low-end paperback publisher put some sexy babes on the cover of the Greenwich Village memoirs he was writing at the time of his death.
The body of the former Ruth Fagan was claimed by her family in Detroit.
As I had intended, and done my best to arrange, my participation in the official investigation into the murder of Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife Ruth was minimal; I gave a statement about the argument I’d seen at the Waxworks on the evening of Saturday, February 7. I was not required to testify, and while I’m sure at some point Weinberg must have told the cops about the guy with the automatic who took a confession from him in Allen Spiegel’s rooming-house room, it was likely written off as just another of the numerous ravings of a madman who was eventually committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane; he was released in 1977, and was behind bars again within a year on an attempted murder charge.
Until his death in 1964, Ben Hecht continued to write (and doctor) movie scripts, if with far less distinction than the glory days of the ’30s and ’40s. His real comeback was as a writer of nostalgic, wry memoirs, including A Child of the Century in 1954, in which he waxed fondly of Max; he tended to write of Chicago, not Hollywood or New York, and glorified the Chicago Renaissance (and himself) whenever possible, never letting the truth stand in the way of a good yarn.
He also completed the Marilyn Monroe “autobiography,” which was entitled My Story, but the project hit an unexpected snag.
“Looks like I won’t be paying you to make goo-goo eyes at Marilyn Monroe at this year’s ABA,” Ben said to me on the phone, in April of ’54.
“Hell you say. Why not? Isn’t she making an appearance?”
“Yeah, but not at the ABA. In court. That bimbo’s suing me!”
Ben’s British agent had peddled the serialization rights to the book overseas, without Marilyn’s permission. Her new husband, Mr. DiMaggio, convinced her she was being swindled and, besides, he didn’t like the idea of the book, anyway. Ben’s agent had violated the agreement with Marilyn, who hadn’t signed a final book contract; the book was pulled, the lawsuit dropped. My Story wasn’t published until 1974, when Marilyn’s former business partner, Milton Greene, sold it to Stein and Day, without mentioning Hecht’s role.
I did, however, encounter Marilyn again, and in fact had heard from her prior to Ben’s news about the busted book project. About a week after Bodenheim’s death, when I was back in Chicago, I received a phone call, at home, at three in the morning.