Free The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins Page B

the day after the murder, wassigned Guldensuppe, which was what
other
people called him—and not Gieldsensuppe, which was how the victim himself spelled it. Detectives poring over Mrs. Nack’s bank account and pursecouldn’t find missing money she claimed to have given Guldensuppe just a couple of days earlier—it was all still on her, fora jail matron found it hidden in her corset.
    The alibi literally didn’t add up.
    The matron also noticed bruises along Mrs. Nack’s upper arm—signs of a struggle, perhaps—and called in a doctor to have a look. From their faded color, they were judged to be about five or six days old. Mrs. Nack couldn’t account for those, either. Captain O’Brien made a great show ofhaving her fingernails pared and scraped out—if there was any foreign blood or tissue there from a fight, he assured her, they’d find it.
    Sitting in his office later that night with a crowd of reporters, O’Brien was pleased indeed. He had the putative murder weapons laid out on his desk, nearly a dozen identifications on the body in the morgue, and the prime suspect in a jail cell upstairs.
    “Do you believe that Mrs. Nack killed the man whose body is now in the morgue?” one reporter asked.
    “If that body belonged to William Guldensuppe, I believe she did, or is implicated.”
    It was a dramatic turnaround in just one day. That morning he’d had only two people in custody in connection with the case, and both were clearly useless.One was a Bowery waiter who’d seen two men carrying awkward packages on a streetcar—as if that were newsworthy in New York City—and the other was a babbling metal-polish peddler who’d led the police on a wild-goose chase after claiming to spot an eyeless and toothless severed head in a vacant lot. The “head” was nothing but an old hat. The peddler was booked purely out of pique, and returned the favor by giving ahome address that proved to be a lumberyard.
    “He is a freak,” O’Brien had to explain earlier that day to an inquiring
World
reporter.
    But now the chief of the Detective Bureau had a real suspect. And maybe, he mused contentedly, she was the only one he’d need.
    “She has a temper—an awful temper, I believe,” O’Brien said, though he hesitated to give specifics on her capacity for vengeance. He didn’t need to: A
Herald
writer heard Herman Nack claim that his ex-wife had indeed once threatened to kill him.
    “She is strong enough?” a
New York Press
reporter asked.
    “Oh my, yes,” O’Brien joked. “She has arms larger and more muscular than mine.”
    BUT MRS. NACK was not without friends.
    Late that day, one of the city’s top defense attorneys, EmanuelFriend, had marched into the Mulberry Street HQ. Manny was fond of asking awkward questions, and this case had plenty. Where was the victim’s head, and how could they make a positive identification without it? Since none of Mrs. Nack’s neighbors had heard or seen any struggle at all the week before, just where was the scene of this so-called crime? And what was her motive, exactly? Why hadn’t they found this “Fred,” who
did
have a motive?
    In fact, it wasn’t quite clear what
Manny’s
motive was. Was he even Mrs. Nack’s counsel, and who had hired him? He wouldn’t say, but Murder Squad writers harbored their own suspicions about who might want to undermine the
Journal
’s case against their prime suspect. Badly burned by their bet on the Cyklam theory, the
World
editors were doubling down late that night with the next morning’s headline:
    THE MURDER MYSTERY IS A MYSTERY STILL
Not Sure of Identification

Police Losing Faith
    “The detectives of the Central Office have very little faith in the case against Mrs. Nack,” the paper insisted. The
World
found a few men who knew Guldensuppe—including drugstore owner Franz Werner,now profiting nicely by both papers—who werewilling to testify that the body was not his. Alas, only one of them had actually been to the morgue