Free American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum Page B

celebrated and accomplished, but it was Molly who controlled the relationship. Her ideals, her expectations, prodded Darrow. To her, he was unique, one of those rare individuals “who have loved and served their fellow men with sincerity of heart.” Darrow, weary after fighting for so many causes, tried to find the energy and the clarity of purpose to be the man she saw in him. Her faith aroused him. They talked about Tolstoy, read poetry aloud. At night she would unpin her long, dark hair, and her heavy tresses would cascade down the pillow and fall around the two of them, hiding the couple away in a secret world.
    _____
    But guilt ate at Darrow. He was betraying Ruby, and, he came around to conceding to himself, he was also betraying Mary. He could not leave Ruby; she was the anchor that weighed him down, yet at the same time she kept him moored. And if he wasn’t going to marry his Molly, what would become of her? She was young, and she needed to make her own life unencumbered by a middle-aged married man.
    Their parting was a sadness. It would not do for her to remain in Chicago; proximity would bring memories and new temptations. Darrow gave her some money and wrote a letter of introduction to his friend Theodore Dreiser. The author, after the negligible sales of his first book, Sister Carrie, was now editing a women’s magazine, The Delineator. Molly went off to New York with the hope of becoming a writer.
     
    The week of the explosion in Los Angeles, Mary’s first article appeared in The Delineator. Dreiser was enthusiastic, and other editors noticed the piece, too. John Phillips, at America Magazine, wrote her: “That piece of yours in the The Delineator was a beautiful thing . . . and I may tell you that it is only now and then that I feel envious of what I see in other magazines.” Her pieces started appearing in America, too.
    Darrow was impressed and a little surprised. “You have gone so far I can’t see you anymore,” he wrote her. And he missed his Molly. “No one else,” Darrow told her in another of his ardent letters, “is so bright and clear and sympathetic to say nothing of sweet and dear.” “Am tired and hungry and wish you were here to eat and drink with me and talk to me with your low, sweet, kind, sympathetic voice.”
    He told her that he would come to New York to see her. He planned to move there so that they could be together.
    But even as Darrow wrote those words, he was not convinced. He could not leave Ruby, and the prospect of his being with Molly again was, he knew, simply an old man’s wishful thinking. His life would have to go on without any feelings of love.
     
    As Darrow resigned himself to the vast unhappiness of his stolid life in the Midwest, a life without Molly, as D.W. traveled to Los Angeles wrestling with his own ambitions and demons, a telegram arrived at the Burns Detective Agency in Chicago.
    In Los Angeles, Billy Burns had examined the suitcase bomb that had been found in the shrubbery outside Felix Zeehandelaar’s house. A New Haven Clock Company alarm clock and a No. 5 Columbia dry battery were fastened by a copper wire to a small board. One piece of brass had been soldered to the alarm key on the clock, and another was fastened by a screw and a bolt to the board. These were the two contact points. When the alarm rang, the current would shoot from the clock to the battery and ignite the dynamite. It was a simple but lethal device. The explosion would have been devastating.
    As powerful, the detective realized with a sudden intuition, as the blast that had rocked the Peoria train yard earlier last month.
    The next day Billy sent a telegram to his son Raymond in the agency’s Chicago office. He wanted the operatives who had worked on the Peoria investigation to come immediately to Los Angeles. They were to bring with them the package containing the evidence gathered at the train yard.
    He waited impatiently for Raymond’s response. When no telegram arrived,