The Laughing Gorilla (2 page)

Over a late breakfast with his wife, Winifred, and baby, John (Charlie Jr., the eldest, and Eddie, the middle child, were already at school
¹
), he opened his morning
Chronicle
and read the date—April 29, 1930. Yes, it had been four years since the Gorilla Man spoke those hushed words—“Are you Mrs. Clara Newman?” Ultimately, the long-armed strangler had wriggled out of Dullea’s West Coast dragnet and escaped across the country as the first traveling serial killer in the nation’s history. Dullea still castigated himself for not being able to save Clara Newman and over two dozen others, including a six-month-old infant, from strangling and
then
rape. Dullea kissed Winifred good-bye, centered his high-crowned hat, and left the house. Outside he saw the sky had turned green. Not knowing what to make of this odd occurrence, he climbed behind the wheel and drove to the Hall of Justice. He watched the morning sky until no green remained, only a growing darkness.

 

 

AT
9:52 A.M. a bullet hole surrounded by streamers of light appeared in the skies above San Francisco. Pilot Bill Fletcher, at the controls of a powerful Stearman biplane, circled Mount Tamalpais to the north. Then he headed southwest and nosed straight up into the great rift. Fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific, the lens on his fixed wing camera froze over. His gloved hands became frigid. Above Fletcher, “Baily’s beads” surged clockwise around a moving black hole. He switched on his oxygen, kept climbing, and ascended into a darkening fissure many thousands of miles long. As the enormous rupture crawled northeast it cast a half-mile-wide shadow over San Francisco and plunged the temperature below by nearly twenty degrees. Ground level, at the wheel of his cab, Captain Driver Harry Gibson felt his fingers grow as numb as Fletcher’s. He flexed them, craned his head out the cab window, and studied the blackening heavens with widening eyes. He put his cab in gear and crept to the intersection of California and Montgomery streets, all the while peering upward.

At 9:58 A.M. two well-dressed gents—paymaster Morris B. Murphy, thin, bespectacled, and nearly hairless, and office manager Max Kahn, pallid and double-chinned—exited a branch of the Bank of Italy. Under his arm, Murphy clutched a black leather grip stuffed with $4,000 in small bills. Nervously, both men scanned the green sky, flagged down Harry’s cab, and scrambled into the rear seat. As the cab edged along the shadow path, the squeal of street cars and growl of motors gradually faded away. The shuffle of ten thousand feet ceased. People stopped to watch the skies. As if holding its breath, the bustling metropolis grew deathly silent. Its heartbeat ceased.

By 10:14 A.M. a third of the sun had been eaten away. Lights sprang on in diners, dingy hotels, and the half-filled office buildings of failed businesses. Hundreds atop the lofty Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Building held up pieces of smoked glass and squinted at the moon inching its way across the sun. One man lighting matches to make smoked glass set fire to City Hall. At San Quentin State Prison, “Killer” Kid McCoy and LA’s crooked DA Asa Keyes (ostracized by other prisoners) caught the sun’s reflection in a water bucket and watched the rare spectacle that way. The last total eclipse had occurred five years earlier over New York. There wouldn’t be another for two years, and that over Maine and New Hampshire, not San Francisco.

By the time Harry angled his cab up on the bulkhead between Piers 26 and 28, the eclipse had blanketed a half-mile width. He rolled to a stop at the entrance to the Stevedoring and Ballast Company as a waiting man stepped from the shadows. “He wore a good Herringbone suit that had seen better days,” Harry recalled. “The only thing new about him was his big shiny revolver.”

By 10:36 A.M. half the sun was gone.

By 10:57 A.M. the last bright sliver was blotted out as the eclipse reached totality. Its shadow swept across the earth at terrific velocity—half a mile a second. By 10:59 A.M. the moving bullet hole, outlined by flickering flame, split the sky above Napa County. By 11:00 A.M. it darkened Woodland in Yolo County. Its advance over the hills was marked by a halo fifty miles in diameter. By 11:02 A.M., amid the high altitude, tall trees, and bright flowers of Bishop Ranch in Yuba County, Dr. Robert Altken waited at Comptonville along the path of totality. He tinkered with two delicate spectrographs, adjusted angstrom units to violet blue and orange red wavelengths and captured the flickering corona as it swept over him a minute later. His bones went chill. Soaring from a lake, two amphibian planes with red stripes took up the chase until they were outdistanced. For a little over an hour dusk shrouded the San Francisco morning. Within that daytime darkness all manner of things were done by all manner of men, but in the same old familiar ways since Cain killed Abel.

 

 

BY
1:37 P.M., the time Captain Dullea arrived, the pond-size stain next to Pier 26 was barely tacky on the well-trodden concrete. As he parked his car, he surveyed the waterfront. Eleven miles of jutting piers aligned along the arched northern and southeastern sections give the Embarcadero the appearance of a gap-toothed smile that commences with the sooty factories and freight yards of the S.P. Depot at Third and Townsend. From there it curves north for several blocks before beginning its abrupt arc to the northwest to terminate at Fisherman’s Wharf. Dullea could see the Ferry Building a few blocks away, midpoint in an area called the City Front. Defined on the south by even-numbered private piers and warehouses, the Ferry Building is bounded on the northeast by odd-numbered, state-owned pier sheds and industrial plants. East Street, which fronts the Embarcadero, dipped briefly into a tunnel at Market Street and reemerged near Washington Street at a huge Camel cigarettes billboard near the Bay Hotel.

Powerful locomotives were pushing and pulling Southern Pacific, Western Pacific, and Santa Fe boxcars to waterfront railroad yards to be joined to other freights. Boxcars on spurs of the Belt Railroad, a state-owned and operated railway, led out onto every pier so cargo could be loaded directly from the ships into boxcars. A Belt Line locomotive passed Dullea, wheezing mightily and trundling like a huge black beetle. Slowly, it nudged two refrigerator cars toward the Matson Line docks at Pier 30.

Dullea heard the cry of gulls and water lapping against timbers. All about him flashed the wide, unbroken expanse of the Bay—no Golden Gate or Bay Bridges. The iciness in the air had evaporated as suddenly as it had come. It was hot now. He knelt and dragged the point of a yellow pencil through an immense stain. The seepage had congealed enough to leave a definite trail. Once dry he would be hard pressed to judge its age. Already dry to his touch at the edges, it could have been paint, rust, or oil, but it wasn’t. The dried blood had begun to clot three to five minutes after being shed.

The blotch darkened under the blazing sun, each moment making it more difficult to differentiate it from older stains like grease and tar. Freshly spilled blood shines a glossy reddish brown, but its ultimate hue is always black. In the open air, the slight luster on its surface faded as Dullea watched. Automatically, he calculated by the change in color how long the blood had been there. “Three hours old,” he determined, though he already knew exactly when it had been shed—10:37 A.M. He was looking at drainage. A human life reduced to drainage! And that, he concluded sadly, was the origin of the lake of blood. In a few years, the Bay Bridge would pass like an awning over the loathsome stain and shroud it as effectively as this morning’s total eclipse.

Dullea averted his eyes. Normally, he didn’t know the victim. This time he did. So did the tough new police chief, William J. Quinn. So did hundreds of longshoremen along the crookedly smiling waterfront. The blood belonged to the most beloved patrolman on the Embarcadero, Officer John Wesley Malcolm, a thirty-two-year veteran. Big-eared and turkey-necked, this last of the old Barbary Coast beat cops had been “a friend to the downtrodden and an unrelenting enemy to the vicious and corrupt.” Dullea could still see his face, lined as a street map, creased by a broad smile, a snowdrift of white hair spilling from his cap.

At the northern edge of the lake of blood, where the concrete had been beaten down by the steel rims of carts and wheels of heavy trucks, a hob-nailed boot had tracked blood. Dullea followed its trail to a crowd of sullen men. All were potential witnesses—burly merchant sailors, stevedores, and longshoremen dressed in flat caps, denim shirts, and heavy black canvas pants. Every pair of Frisco pants had been patched, repatched, and re-stitched where they were ragged at the cuffs. Every shoe was worn, cracked, caulked, and resoled. From every back pocket hung a cargo hook for snagging rolls of hemp, grappling burlap bags, and settling disputes. Labor unrest festered in this foggy region of grimy waterfront hotels and warehouses. Soon blood would run on these piers. The hooves of the National Guardsmen’s horses would grind it into the pavement to blacken under the sun until it was indistinguishable from Malcolm’s blood.

Anger was in every eye, and something else—fear. Dullea understood. It was in his eyes, too. People were losing their homes and jobs. This morning, in sympathy with new Wall Street lows of copper, steel, and rail issues, local exchanges had dipped another 19 points (though in the final hours of trading a small rally was being staged). Ever since the nation’s employment rate had stalled at 9 percent, desperate men had mobbed the waterfront’s eighty-two docks and 118 steamship lines seeking work. City-operated soup kitchens were serving oatmeal, a wedge of dry bread, and watery coffee to long lines of unemployed. Once they had eaten, the men joined a longer line for supper: a cup of thin beef stew and a chunk of sourdough. At the foot of Telegraph Hill, Lois Jordan’s White Angel Jungle was serving casseroles. At Rich and Clara streets the Salvation Army was handing out room chits in exchange for sawing wood. A few of those who couldn’t find work turned to illegal means like the man who murdered Malcolm.

Dullea observed a battered black taxi, spare and simple as a poker, angled on the bulkhead, a bold white
512
on its open door. The slender cabbie was conspicuous in the milling crowd. Harry Gibson, a resident of 725 Cayuga Street, was red haired and red complected with a long, lean face and sorrowful brows. Harry’s thin black tie was cockeyed, and he had pushed his cap with its oversize gold medallion as far back on his head as he could. Sweating and nervous, he squinted into the post-noon sun. Harry wiped his face with his sleeve and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “We pulled up to the pier,” he told Dullea. “At that moment a guy stepped forward and told me not to make any noise. When I seen it was a raise, I studied his car so I could remember it. It was a Dodge and a very beautiful girl was in the back seat.”

“A girl on a heist?” said Dullea.

Harry’s fares, Murphy and Kahn, huddled in the Stevedoring Company entrance by a white picket fence, might know more. “Just after we drove up in the taxi,” said Murphy, “I slid out carrying a black leather grip stuffed with $4000 in small bills, a typical single day’s payroll. I saw a stranger standing in the shadows by the cab as soon as it rolled to a stop. I’ll never forget that man’s face as long as I live. It’s planted indelibly in my memory. If I meet him fifty years from now I’ll still recognize him. He had a narrow face, pasty complexion, a sharp nose and glassy brown eyes. He wore a soft tan hat, a garish hand-painted tie and was well dressed in a dark herringbone suit. About thirty, five-foot-six, lean, between 130 and 140 pounds—and, oh, yes, he whispered.”

 

 

AS
soon as the cab stopped, the Whispering Gunman slipped alongside Murphy, speaking so faintly that Kahn next to him had not heard a word. Neither had Oscar K. Brehmer of Corta Madera working on Pier 28 as a freight clerk, nor Harry Hade of Pleasant Valley, nor Chris Claussen, erstwhile port captain of the Stevedoring Company not a dozen yards off. All were within earshot. Dock men, passersby, draymen, rail workers, black lines of round-nosed Fords filled with potential witnesses cruising on Harrison Street failed to notice the bold robbery in the bizarre midmorning darkness.

“Gimme that bag, if you know what’s good for you and your friend,” the Whispering Gunman said, grinding a cheap revolver into Murphy’s ribs. Not until he pried the satchel from his fingers did Murphy understand his breezy confidence. Some feet away a confederate was leaning against a light blue Dodge, “a small coach model with wire wheels,” and calmly smoking a cigar. Murphy memorized the sedan’s license—“No. 8-D-598.” Captain Louis Ellsinger, of the coastwise passenger steamer the
Harvard,
noticed the Dodge, too.

 

 

“
THE
second man was younger than the first,” Murphy continued, “twenty-five to twenty-nine years old, dark hair, and sallow-complected—slightly taller than the first by several inches—about five-foot, ten-or-eleven . . . weight about 175 pounds. He wore a shabby blue suit and a cap pulled down over his face. He looked Italian. After only a moment I realized there was a third person in the rear of the Dodge—an attractive woman—slender, large blue eyes, brunette hair slightly waved and pulled back of her ears. I couldn’t figure out what such a nice, refined young lady was doing there and with such rough men.”

Neither could Dullea.

 

 

“
GIVE
the gunsel the bag,” Kahn had advised Murphy who had done so. At 10:37 A.M. the Whispering Gunman passed the bag off to his Italian confederate—just as Officer Malcolm came whistling round the corner.

The polished brass buttons studding his dark blue serge barely shone in the odd morning dusk. The old workhorse wasn’t supposed to be here. Normally he had today off but had switched shifts with another officer. Born in Santa Cruz County May 28, 1870, he had been a San Francisco blacksmith before joining the SFPD at age twenty-eight. More important, he was a close friend of Captain Dullea and Chief Bill Quinn. If the robbery had not been so quiet, Malcolm probably wouldn’t have stumbled onto it. If the white noise of passing vehicles hadn’t drowned out the soft-spoken robber’s words; if it had not been so dark and the robber had not panicked at the sight of a uniformed cop—if—Malcolm would’ve gone on his way to a well-deserved day off and, when he turned sixty in a month, entered a well-deserved retirement with his wife, Emilie, in their Ellis Street home. But Malcolm walked right into the gunman.