There are poisons easy to apply. Fast killers. A strong solution of prussic acid could be pressed to the mouth and nose and the inhalation prove fatal. An inhaled cigarette infused and saturated with prussic acid, also known as hydrocyanic acid, caused instantaneous death. Rayette knew this was the quickest of poisons, and had heard it left no traces. She had solved Eddie's unemployment troubles for good.
“Honey,” Rayette murmured. “I’m going out to the Ladies.” With a tender hand, she slipped the claim check for the man's travel bag in Eddie’s breast pocket. Eddie Kromer neither felt nor heard a thing, since he was already slumped in death. On the screen, the next newsreel showed Amelia Earhart climbing into her twin-engine Lockheed Electra with co-pilot Fred. The voice-of-God reported her lost, maybe around New Guinea.
It wasn’t until the New York City Police came into the Theatre that they found Eddie with an arm draped on the valise with the strap around it, and by now the valise began to leak. Four men in blue grabbed the young man apparently dozing in the Theatre's back row. They roughly shook him. Yanking the valise from him, a cop snapped, “We’ll take that, buddy, and we have some questions for you.”
Eddie Kromer, 28, wasn't taking questions and he wasn’t waking up. In the breast pocket of his good jacket, the police found a baggage claim that they quickly matched up with the travel kit in the checkroom. The kit contained a.32 pistol and a bill of sale for one oak casket. That casket had been retrieved from behind a pile of crates out in the rain near Vanderbilt Avenue. It held the bodies of a man and a woman, both dead of gunshot wounds to the head and chest. The hands had been cut off, and were found in the leaking valise. Everything fit, but the killers had overlooked one thing. A thin gold ankle bracelet on the female corpse was engraved: Madelyn Burns.
“Christ in a manhole,” muttered one of the cops. “This is something big, and we got the guy who did it.”
“I don’t know,” said his partner, who had a tough baby-face and stubborn dimpled chin. “It looks to me like we got a whole new bunch of questions.”
Satisfied she’d got what she wanted, Rayette Debs looked less waiflike in the mirror of her paid toilet stall. In her final trip to the Ladies, she pulled off the rosé wine wig and stuffed it in the lizard satchel with her other props. Together with the cash and jewels. She decided she’d earned them getting those two losers off the hook, and she was already tired of Jaxon. She didn't think she’d ever be seen in Grand Central again.
She walked out across Vanderbilt Avenue and Madison, over to Fifth, and on through the rain-driven streets until she reached Sixth Avenue. She raised her dainty umbrella and a gloved hand. Before long a taxi stopped. The driver glanced without interest at the girl with cropped black hair.
Rayette got in. The two brothers would be waiting for her at the ferry landing in Jersey City. They expected she'd be on the Christopher Street Ferry. Rayette had other plans.
“Newark Airfield.”
The cabbie grunted, noting his fare's strange gray eyes. They reminded him of a snarly gray cat. Or the dirty roiled-up Hudson River. Then he drove through the tunnel and forgot her looks.
In her lizard bag Rayette had a timetable for the Pan American flights to Florida. In a few hours she'd board the flying boat called the American Clipper. By early morning the plane would circle down for a landing on Dinner Key near the Miami Guard Station. The passengers would applaud and sing “A Happy Landing.” They always did. One passenger wouldn’t trouble herself with clapping. She’d smile.
Mary Mulligan – by Jen Conley
MARY MULLIGAN, NINETEEN, walked confidently through the station halls, her strappy black one-inch heels clicking, her small beaded pocket book on her wrist, her skirt just below the knee in the latest fashion. She was meeting Mr. Gilbert, or Harvey, as she called him, for a late supper at the Oyster Bar. He lived in Connecticut but worked on Sixth Avenue, and sometimes, after he left her room on 13th Street, he offered to meet her later for a meal before he caught the train home.
She touched her short light brown hair with her gloved hand, ignoring the leers from the suited men as they passed by. Usually she’d smile at them (men were like trains: there was always another one coming and she had to keep her opportunities open) but she was on a mission. Mary, with her tiny waist, fair skin, and bright blue eyes, was beautiful enough to be an actress, although Dick Grasso, the stage manager she auditioned for a week earlier, told her she didn’t have the skills to make it in theater, never mind the pictures. “You can’t dance, you can’t sing, and you can’t act.” This wasn’t true – maybe her dancing skills were weak but she could sing and she could definitely act. Sometimes Mary dreamed of going to California but she never had enough money.
Making her way across the concourse, her heels clicking, faintly echoing in the great marble station, Mary felt her stomach grumble. She’d paid the landlord but it had left her with nothing else. That afternoon, Harvey had forgotten to leave her cash and the only thing she had eaten was a buttered roll for breakfast.
She stepped into the ladies’ room and powdered her nose in front of the mirror. She applied red color to her lips, lipstick she’d lifted from Woolworth’s, and patted her cheeks. Afterward, Mary stood against the wall in the Main Concourse, waiting, salivating as she watched a nearby child eat a sandwich. She was so famished, weak, dying for anything to eat. She’d never been to the Oyster Bar, and she wasn’t sure she would like oysters, but at this point, she’d devour anything.
A man stood near her reading a newspaper and she caught the word “Roosevelt,” but he folded the paper and walked away. Mary could read because the nuns who ran the orphanage had made sure of it. “If you can’t read, what good will you be?” Mary had been lonely in the orphanage. Throughout her childhood, she often dreamed a long-lost relative would come rescue her, but one never did. The Home, as the orphanage was sometimes called, wasn’t a terrible place, though. At least there was always something to eat. The sisters had even taught the girls how to grow and tend a garden in the plot behind the Home’s building. “So you’ll never go hungry,” they said. The nuns hovered over the girls like large birds, constantly dropping life advice: eat vegetables every day; drink milk; stay away from booze; wash regularly. “You’re never too poor for soap,” the nuns said.
When Mary finally saw Harvey, her skin tightened because she realized he was drunk. He stumbled down the marble steps of the station, his suit and tie disheveled. Mary did not like drunk men, even though lately it seemed they were all drunk. But Harvey had money and it was amazing what a girl will put up with for a few dollars.
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary!” he called, causing people to turn their heads. Harvey was a balding man, very tall, and in his thirties. When he reached Mary, he fell against her. She pushed him away and straightened her skirt.
“I’m hungry, Harvey.”
He rocked forward and nuzzled into her neck. “Mmmm.”
Mary pushed him off again and stomped her foot. “Harvey, please!”
“Now, now,” he said, chuckling, blinking his eyes at her. “All in good time.”
“I’ve had nothing to eat all day. You didn’t leave me no money.”
“That’s why I’m taking you home,” Harvey said. “We’re going to have a late supper in town.”