The Mad Sculptor (27 page)

Quite unexpectedly, police found something else besides the old jacket while ransacking Gedeon’s premises: a nickel-plated .38-caliber revolver loaded with two bullets and buried in a box of horsehair in a corner of his workroom. Taken to his shop and confronted with the weapon, Gedeon spun a wildly improbable tale, claiming that, on the steamship that brought him from Hungary twenty-nine years earlier, he had met a man who “gave me the gun and asked me to hold onto it for him.” Nearly three decades later, Gedeon was still waiting for its rightful owner “to call for it.”

As for how it came to be hidden in the horsehair, the little man explained with a smirk that he had kept it in his bureau drawer until recently, when a “big, blonde hustler” dropped in to keep him company one night and happened upon the pistol. “So I hid it, figuring that trouble might come of a girl like that knowing where there was a loaded gun handy.”
²⁰

Since Gedeon had initially denied owning a gun, “detectives were elated at having caught him in such a definite lie,” the
New York Post
reported. They were happy for another reason, too. By then, the upholsterer had already endured a brutal twenty-four-hour interrogation. Without formally charging him with a crime, police couldn’t hold him indefinitely. Since the gun was unlicensed, however, Gedeon was now subject to arrest for violating New York State’s Sullivan Act, a felony punishable by up to five years in jail.

He would be formally charged with the crime on Thursday evening. Before that happened, however, his inquisitors—partly out of basic human decency, partly in the hope that the emotional stress of the occasion “might break the stoicism with which he had thus far resisted their efforts”—granted him permission to attend the funeral of his wife and daughter.
²¹

Bundled into a police car with four detectives, Gedeon was driven uptown to West 90th Street, where a mob of the morbidly curious—estimated at between three and five thousand people—thronged the sidewalks outside McCabe’s funeral parlor. Others watched from the surrounding rooftops, fire escapes, and apartment windows. When the police car pulled up and the wizened little man climbed out, a shout went up: “There he is! There’s Gedeon!” Shielding his face with his hat, he was hustled through the surging mob by his police guards.

Inside the chapel, the air was heavy with the scent of dozens of wreaths, including one from the Society of Illustrators, “in whose show,” as the
News
helpfully reminded its reader, “Ronnie had a part when it was raided by police for indecency.” Other floral tributes were from “artists for whom Veronica had posed, from fellow models, and from her many boyfriends.”
²²

The bodies of mother and daughter lay head to head in open satin-lined coffins. Ronnie wore a white satin gown with an orchid corsage pinned to her left shoulder. Mary was garbed in blue satin with a corsage of roses and lilies of the valley. Each had a rosary placed in her right hand.

The little chapel was crowded, though mostly with news photographers and “determined curiosity seekers” who had managed to wangle their way inside. There were only a handful of actual mourners: Ronnie’s ex-husband, Bobby Flower; her supposed fiancé, Lincoln Hauser, and his pal Stephen Butter; her two closest friends, Jean Karp and a model named Sarilla Bell (who had also taken part in the notorious Society of Illustrators stag show). Ethel was in such
a state of collapse that she had to be taken into another room. Her husband, Joe Kudner, sat through the brief service with his parents at his side.

After asking the detectives to clear the room of strangers, Gedeon cast a brief glance at Veronica, then stood beside his wife’s bier for several minutes before seating himself in a folding chair behind his son-in-law. He sat dry-eyed through the service, conducted by the Reverend Father Joseph Daley of the nearby Church of St. Gregory the Great. “Enter not onto judgment of thy servants,” intoned the priest. “From the gate of hell deliver their souls.…Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord.”

When the prayers were completed, Gedeon stepped forward, glanced first at Mary, then at Veronica, and hurried back to his seat. If police were hoping that the sight of his murdered wife and daughter would cause him to crack and spill out a confession, they were disappointed. The little upholsterer remained utterly calm, in marked contrast to the emotion displayed by Joe Kudner and the trio of young men who had known and loved Veronica—Bobby Flower, Linc Hauser, and Stephen Butter. Each of them leaned over the casket and kissed the corpses. There were tears in the eyes of the three young men, while Kudner wept openly.

Fifteen policemen struggled to hold back the crowds as Gedeon emerged from the funeral parlor and was hustled into a waiting squad car. Another smaller crowd of morbid spectators—this one numbering an estimated three hundred people—was waiting at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Yonkers, where the two caskets were to be buried, one on top of the other, in a grave owned by Ethel Kudner.

Officiating at the burial was the mortician, James McCabe, who led the mourners in the Lord’s Prayer and three Hail Marys. As Gedeon watched the bodies of his wife and daughter disappear into the earth, he finally lost his “expressionless calm.” Bursting into tears, he stumbled toward Ethel, who sat weeping in a wooden folding chair.

“Oh, Father! Father!” she cried, stretching out her arms and drawing him into the chair beside her. As he laid his head on her
shoulder, his body convulsed with sobs, she threw her worn raccoon coat partly over him and held him in a close embrace. They sat there, weeping, until the brief service was over.
²³

Immediately after the burial, Gedeon was returned to the East 51st Street police station, where he was grilled for another six hours before being formally placed under arrest for the gun charge. Driven downtown to police headquarters, he was fingerprinted and placed in Cell No. 1, his shoelaces, necktie, and belt confiscated as a routine precaution against suicide. Apart from the respite to attend the funeral, he had endured thirty-three hours of brutal, nonstop interrogation and—except for the brief, aborted doze following his nightlong carouse with his friends—had gone without sleep for more than two days. Though a large, metal-caged ceiling light glared directly overhead, Gedeon fell into a profound slumber the moment he stretched out on the cot.

Awakened at 5:25 the next morning, he was given some coffee and cake, which he devoured with relish. At promptly 9:00 a.m., wearing his neatly buttoned double-breasted overcoat and a green hat cocked at a jaunty angle, he was brought upstairs to the lineup room, where he stood on the brightly lit platform and freely confessed to the unlawful possession of the handgun. Back to his old defiant self, he wore a disdainful smirk throughout the proceedings. Before leaving the stage, he topped off his performance by bowing deeply to his police audience and saluting them with a sardonic “I thank you—gentlemen.”

Brought into Felony Court for his preliminary arraignment, he was allowed a brief consultation with his lawyer, Peter L. F. Sabbatino, a former assistant district attorney retained by Ethel. Seated on a court bench, Gedeon described, with accompanying gestures, the third-degree treatment he had received at the hands of the police: how they had yanked his ears, bent his arms nearly to breaking over the back of his chair, slugged him in the stomach, and battered him about the face and head.

Sabbatino’s adversary that morning was the man now occupying
his former position, Assistant DA Raymond Leo. Appearing before Magistrate Michael Ford, the two lawyers got involved in a battle that quickly “approached the fisticuffs stage.” Describing the upholsterer as a “possible suspect in the triple Gedeon murders,” Leo asked the judge to set bail at $15,000. Sabbatino sneered that the police were “barking up the wrong tree.” Since his client had no criminal record and was there on a mere misdemeanor charge, Sabbatino demanded a nominal bail of fifty dollars.

When the judge sided with the prosecutor and set bail at $10,000, Sabbatino erupted. “Your Honor,” he said, “my client has been subjected to the third degree. They used the old back room tactics on him. He was kicked and pulled and dragged and slapped for hours. He’s a mass of bruises.” Acceding to Sabbatino’s demand, Magistrate Ford ordered an immediate physical examination of the prisoner by three court-appointed MDs: Gedeon’s personal doctor, Barnett Dobrow; Ralph J. Carotenuto, the Tombs’ resident physician; and Dr. Perry Lichtenstein, who was attached to the DA’s office.

Informed of Sabbatino’s charges, Police Commissioner Valentine brushed them off. “I don’t believe it,” he told reporters. “It’s the usual allegation of an attorney whose client is in serious trouble. At the beginning of the investigation, I instructed Assistant Chief Inspector John A. Lyons to see that no one laid a hand on Gedeon. He’s the victim of a double hernia and a frail little man.”

Asked about the visible bruises on Gedeon’s face, the commissioner had a ready response. “I’m told the suspect’s injuries were inflicted when he bumped into a swinging door at the East 51st Street Station. And the old fellow was mixed up in a number of brawls with photographers when he was out of police custody.

“His eyeglasses were smashed in one of those brawls,” Valentine added, “and it was the
police
who chipped in to buy him the new glasses he wore in court. That was done out of pity. The old man was staggering around blind as a bat.”
²⁴

Though Gedeon still topped the official list of suspects and the tabloids continued to bay for his blood, not everyone was convinced
of his guilt. One doubter was John Shuttleworth, editor of
True Detective
magazine. On the morning of the little upholsterer’s arraignment, Shuttleworth asked one of his writers, Frank Preston, to “check with Gedeon’s neighbors. See if they know anything about his movements on Saturday night.”

It didn’t take long for Preston to track down thirty-one-year-old Anthony Rocco at a smoke-filled pool hall below street level in the East 20s. After some prodding, Rocco, a former amateur boxer who occupied a tiny flat above Gedeon’s workshop, admitted that he had seen the upholsterer on Sunday morning at five minutes past 3:00 a.m.

“I was coming home late from a party and he was just reeling in,” Rocco recalled. “He looked to be pretty drunk. I said ‘Good morning’ just as he was putting his key in the lock. He mumbled back, ‘Good morning.’ I saw him go into his room and I went upstairs.”

When asked how he could be “so sure about the time,” Rocco explained that he “always set my alarm clock by my wrist watch and when I got upstairs it was exactly seven minutes after three.”

“Why haven’t you told the police about this?’ asked Preston.

“Because I didn’t want to get into a jam,” Rocco said.

After convincing the ex-pug that he had nothing to worry about, Preston rushed him down to the Centre Street headquarters, where Rocco related his story to the police, corroborating Gedeon’s alibi that he had returned straight home from Corrigan’s on the night of the murder.
²⁵

Later that afternoon, Sabbatino was back in court, brandishing the report of the three physicians, who had found unmistakable signs that Gedeon had in fact been manhandled during his thirty-three-hour ordeal. The little man’s “injuries included abrasions to the lower jaw, scratches behind the right ear, a black-and-blue left ear, abrasions and contusions above the right eye, and black-and-blue marks on the chest and back of the neck.”

“My client has been brutally beaten,” Sabbatino angrily declared. “I want him released on low bail so I can get him to press charges
against those responsible. The gun charge is not connected in any way to the murders. This man is being railroaded. The police and the district attorney have no case whatsoever.”

Sharing the lawyer’s indignation over the evidence of police brutality, Magistrate Ford cast a baleful eye on Assistant DA Leo. “I set high bail because of the Prosecutor’s statement that this man is a murder suspect. Shall I treat him as a murder suspect or merely as the possessor of a gun?”

“If Your Honor wishes to reduce bail,” a sheepish Leo replied, “we are willing. There is no issue here except violation of the Sullivan law. We withdraw all reference to murder in connection with this man.”

With that, Magistrate Ford reduced the bail to one thousand dollars. A few hours later, after bondsman Louis Topper put up the bail, Joseph Gedeon swaggered out of the front entrance of the Tombs with his lawyer beside him.

The next morning, Saturday, April 3, New Yorkers who, for nearly a week, had been assured by the tabloids that it was only a matter of hours before Joseph Gedeon confessed to the murders of his wife, his daughter, and a total stranger were jolted by bombshell headlines: “
GEDEON FREED
,” “
GEDEON OUT OF JAIL
,” “
LOW BAIL SETS GEDEON FREE
!”
²⁶

That same day Frank Byrnes, the pitiful bit player in the city’s hottest melodrama, went obscurely to his grave in St. John Cemetery in Queens. In contrast to the hordes that had turned out for the funeral of the glamorous star, only eight mourners showed up: two distant relatives and a half dozen friends from the New York Racquet and Tennis Club.

The interment was a sadly perfunctory affair. Still, the tabloids did their best to wring as much pathos as possible from the occasion. That Byrnes was laid to rest in a plot belonging to George Longfellow, a “remote relation by marriage,” seemed sadly appropriate to the
Mirror
’s reporter, who observed that the little Englishman’s “history as a lodger in other folks’ home was rounded out by
his burial in other folks’ cemetery plot.” The writer for the
News
, meanwhile, pointed out that Byrnes—who reportedly pined for his native England—had ended up in a cemetery whose “grounds were bright with reviving green, the green that reminds homesick Britons of England in the spring.”