Deranged (8 page)

This Frank Howard, thought Budd, might not look like much. With his stooped and shrunken frame, he certainly didn’t look like a successful farmer. But clearly he was a man of substance. Albert Budd—accustomed in his work life to assuming a submissive manner in the presence of the businessmen and financiers he served—responded to his visitor with a deeply ingrained and automatic deference.

A short time later Mrs. Budd appeared in the doorway, announced that lunch was ready, and ordered little Beatrice to go and wash her hands. The men retired to the kitchen, a clean but dingy-looking room, illuminated by a single bare bulb that tinged the whitewashed walls a sickly yellow. The long wooden table, covered with a plaid oilcloth, held a big cast-iron pot full of ham hocks and sauerkraut—the warmed-over remains of the previous night’s dinner. The sharp, briny odor of the cabbage filled the room. Arranged around the pot were platters of pickled beets and boiled carrots, a basket of hard rolls, and two ceramic bowls into which Mrs. Budd had transferred Frank Howard’s pot cheese and strawberries.

The Budds and their guest had just seated themselves at the table when they heard the front door open and somebody enter the apartment and proceed down the hallway to the living room. The person was humming a sweet, buoyant tune, and the voice, fragile and bright, clearly belonged to a young girl.

“That’ll be Gracie,” said Mrs. Budd, and called her daughter’s name.

A moment later, Grace Budd stood in the kitchen doorway.

Everyone who set eyes on little Grace for the first time was struck by two things: her prettiness and her pallor. She had an invalid’s complexion, the look of a child who had spent too much of her life surrounded by concrete and brick and was in need of some sunlight. (The previous summer, Grace had, in fact, managed to get out of the city for a short time, courtesy of the New York Tribune’s Fresh Air Fund, a charitable program that arranged for underprivileged children to spend a week or two in the country.) But her anemic coloring couldn’t obscure her loveliness. With her big, dark eyes, her lustrous brown hair—cut in a fashionable bob—and her radiant smile, she seemed destined to blossom into a beauty.

She was still dressed for church—in the white silk dress she’d been confirmed in a month earlier, white silk stockings and canvas pumps, and a string of imitation pearls. The outfit made her look surprisingly grown up. But her pose, as she stood in the doorway—hands clasped behind her back, right foot pointed like a fledgling ballerina’s—was unmistakably that of a little girl.

The old man lowered his fork and stared. He smiled his rabbit-toothed smile. “Come here, child,” he said, patting his leg.

“This is Mr. Howard,” Delia Budd explained. “The man Eddie’s going to work for. Come say hello.”

Gracie lingered in the doorway a moment longer, regarding the stranger. Then she walked to the table and stood by his knee.

So intent was the old man’s gaze as he took in the child that it was as if her parents had simply vanished from the room. Speaking in a soft, wheedling voice, he told her how slender and pretty she was. He asked her questions about her friends, her favorite pastimes, her school. As he talked, he reached up a hand—mottled with liver spots but surprisingly powerful-looking, a laborer’s hand—and began to stroke her hair. Gracie squirmed a bit under the stranger’s touch and cast a questioning look at her mother, who smiled back in encouragement. Catching the wordless exchange, Howard let his hand slip down to the girl’s flank and nudged her onto his lap.

“Let’s see how good a counter you are,” he said, leaning backward in his chair so that he could stick one hand deep into his pants pocket. He pulled out a thick wad of bills, which he set on the table before him. Then, reaching back into his pocket, he came out with a handful of coins. At the sight of the overspilling money pile, Mrs. Budd lifted her eyebrows appreciatively, while her husband gulped down a big swallow of sauerkraut and smiled vacantly.

At Howard’s prodding, Gracie picked up the stack of bills—so thick that she needed both hands to hold it—and counted them back onto the table, one at a time, adding aloud as she did so. Then she scooped up the coins and counted those. The total came to $92.50.

“What a bright little girl,” said Howard. Plucking a few nickels and dimes from the table, he held her hand open, placed the coins into her upturned palm, then folded her fingers over the money and patted her fist. “Here is fifty cents. Go out and buy some candy for you and your sister.”

“Thank you,” sang Grace as she slid from his lap, grabbed her sister’s hand, and sped from the room.

“If you see Eddie,” Mrs. Budd shouted after her older daughter, “tell him Mr. Howard’s come for him!”

“Well,” said Mr. Budd, chuckling softly. “You’ve made them children happy.”

But the old man seemed lost in thought.

Grace had heeded her mother’s instructions. Just a few minutes after she disappeared out the door, Eddie showed up with Willie Korman at his side. The boys, breathless from running, burst into the kitchen, where Mr. Howard greeted them warmly. But after apologizing for the previous day’s delay, the old man made an announcement that took the two friends by surprise.

“Edward,” he said. “I am not going to take you to the job right at the present. I received a letter from my sister yesterday, and she is throwing a birthday party for one of her children, which I’m obliged to attend.” Howard, who had replaced his money in his pocket after Gracie’s departure, now pulled out the wad again and peeled off a couple of bills. “Here’s two dollars. You and Willie and some of the boys go take in the moving pictures. Later on this evening, after the party, I will pick you up on my way home.”

Eddie and Willie took the preferred singles with thanks.

“Before you two run off,” Mrs. Budd said, “why don’t you have a bite of lunch?”

Eddie and his friend seated themselves at the big kitchen table, heaped their dishes with food, and began to shovel it in. Their plates were clean in minutes. Shoving their chairs away from the table, they thanked Mr. Howard again, told him that they would see him that evening, and headed back onto the street to round up some friends.

By that time, Grace and her little sister had returned with their treats. Mrs. Budd had just stood up to pour the coffee when the old man consulted his pocket watch. “It’s almost time for me to be on my way,” he said, then paused as if considering a possibility.

Something had just occurred to him, he said. He wondered if Gracie would like to come with him to his niece’s birthday party. It was going to be quite a bash. Lots of children and games. He would take good care of her, he assured the Budds, and bring her home no later than nine.

Mr. and Mrs. Budd found themselves in a delicate position. They were reluctant to offend their guest by suggesting that they couldn’t trust him with their daughter. And with Howard sitting right there, they didn’t feel free to discuss their doubts with each other. But after all, what doubts could they have about their son’s kindly new employer, the well-to-do, grandfatherly man who had treated them all with such generosity?

Mrs. Budd hesitated for a moment, but her husband cleared his throat and said, “Let the poor kid go. She’s always cooped up here in this dungeon. She don’t see much good times.”

There was one important fact the Budds had neglected to ascertain. Where, Grace’s mother wondered, did Mr. Howard’s sister live?

The old man answered without hesitation. In a nice building on 137th Street and Columbus Avenue, he said.

New Yorkers like to think of themselves as streetwise and worldly. But many New Yorkers are as provincial as any small-towners. Both Delia Budd and her husband had lived their whole lives in Manhattan. But like many working-class housewives of her time, Mrs. Budd rarely ventured out of her neighborhood, and her husband’s world was only slightly less circumscribed, its boundaries denned by the Midtown office building he worked in and his Fifteenth Street home. For that reason, no alarm bells rang in their heads when the little man told them where the party was taking place. The Budds simply didn’t know that Columbus Avenue ends at 110th Street—that the old man had given them a nonexistent address.

By the time they found out, it was already too late.

Mrs. Budd helped Gracie into her dress-up spring coat with fur-trimmed collar and cuffs. A fake pink rose was pinned to the lapel. On her head, the girl wore a gray hat with blue streamers. With her little brown leather bag clutched in her hand, she was the picture of a proper young lady, dressed for a Sunday stroll.

The old man bid goodbye to Gracie’s parents and little Beatrice, who was still munching candy from a small paper sack.

Mrs. Budd followed the pair outside and stood on the front stoop of her apartment building, watching them walk up the street, the bowlegged old man in his dusty, dark suit with her pretty ten-year-old daughter beside him. A few of Gracie’s friends, playing on the street and spotting the girl in her holiday finery, began to shout at her in razzing tones: “Gracie’s a swell! Gracie’s a swell!” The little girl ignored them for a moment before turning her head quickly and sticking out her tongue.

Then, with Mrs. Budd still watching, the couple turned the corner and disappeared.

Before they proceeded on their journey, the old man had a stop to make. At the corner of Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue, he retrieved his canvas-wrapped bundle and thanked the man inside the newsstand for watching it. Then he and the girl continued on their way, the old man cradling his bundle in his arms.

Wrapped inside were a butcher’s knife, a meat cleaver, and a small handsaw—the three items that had come from Sobel’s hock shop and that the little gray man with the kindly eyes and friendly smile liked to think of as his “implements of hell.”

PART 2

King of the Missing

8

He looked like a meek and innocuous little old man, gentle and benevolent, friendly and polite. If you wanted someone to entrust your children to, he would be the one you would choose. FREDERIC WERTHAM, The Show of Violence

There is a type of optical illusion known, in its more pretentious manifestations, as “camouflage art.” These are paintings, generally of wilderness landscapes, that, viewed up close, look like simple, picturesque scenes—a mountain lake with a snow-covered slope reflected on its surface, a field of wildflowers, a forest of birch trees.

Take a few steps back, however, and the picture changes. The mirrored rock assumes the shape of an eagle in flight, the flowers form themselves into a rearing stallion, the boles of the birch trees become the profile of an Apache warrior. The myriad details resolve themselves into a single, unmistakable image, previously hidden from sight—but only when they are seen from a distance.

So it was with that terrible sequence of crimes that commenced with the killing of Francis McDonnell and climaxed, several years later, with the kidnapping of Grace Budd. Overwhelmed with a welter of tips, leads, rumors, and clues—countless bits and pieces of information and hearsay—the police failed to perceive a connection among the three cases. It was only from the distance of years that those scattered facts came together and formed themselves into a single, distinct identity, and the shadowy figures of the “gray man,” the “boogey man,” and the “gentleman farmer,” Frank Howard, merged into the same monstrous individual.

For the present, in early June, 1928, all the police—and the city—knew was that another child was missing.

Early Monday morning, after a torturous night of sleeplessness and mounting alarm, Grace’s parents had sent Edward off to the West 20th Street stationhouse to report their daughter’s disappearance. A short time later, Lieutenant Samuel Dribben and three of his men—Detectives Jerry Mahar, James McGee, and James Murphy—arrived at the Budd’s apartment, where they questioned the distraught couple closely about Frank Howard of Farmingdale, Long Island, who had promised to bring their daughter home from his niece’s birthday party by nine o’clock Sunday night and never returned.

Lieutenant Dribben, after inquiring where the party was supposed to have taken place, informed Grace’s parents that 137th Street and Columbus Avenue was a fictitious address. Dribben’s news hit the Budds like a physical blow.