Joseph W. Grigg covered much of the news in Europe for United Press and UPI over a nearly fifty-year career. He covered the Blitz in London, saw the Wehrmacht thunder into Poland, had torpedoes shoot at his boat, was taken into custody by the Germans after Pearl Harbor, and had to bang out a story in Algiers as teargas was coming in the window. He met Hitler and Eisenhower, Stalin and Churchill, De Gaulle and Adenauer. He died on October 29, 2000, at the age of ninety.
JOHN DOOLING
John “J.T.” Dooling remained a legal advisor for Tammany Hall even after his career as a district attorney ended. He was especially useful when when it came to election year questions and loopholes. Dooling also managed a very successful private practice with his firm Knox & Dooling. He died in 1949 at the age of seventy-eight. When New York Governor William Sulzer was impeached in 1913 for misues of campaign funds, among other things, Dooling was questioned about monies he had given to Sulzer.
HERBERT ROEMMELE
The shy boy who once sketched out a map of Cocchi’s basement for Grace, Herbert F. Roemmele, became a beloved professor of mechanical engineering at Cooper Union, where he taught for forty-two years. When introduced at an alumni function years later, some of his students noted that he had “a photographic memory for faces and names.” He died in 1983 at age seventy-nine, leaving five children and one great-grandchild.
HENRY STIMSON
Henry Lewis Stimson enjoyed a monumental career in public service. His bloodline reached back to the president of the Continental Congress. As a child, his great-grandmother told him stories of meeting George Washington. At Yale, he was Phi Beta Kappa and was tapped for the mysterious Skull and Bones. After his stint as a U.S. district attorney, Stimson ran for governor of New York in 1910. He lost, badly, and was nicknamed the “human icicle” for his campaign trail demeanor. He served as secretary of war under Taft, where he oversaw the Panama Canal construction and visited the Philippines. On the home front, he was against suffrage. “It is not needed to right any substantial grievance,” he said, “and will introduce too many voters who don’t know what they’re doing devoid of business training and experience. It would certainly tend to throw a disproportionate amount of political influence and power into certain localities and classes of citizens of the state as against other localities and other classes.” When the suffragettes marched on Washington, one of them on a horse, Stimson called in the troops.
Stimson served as a lieutenant colonel in the 305th regiment out of Camp Upton. He spent nine months in France. He became secretary of war for a second time, this time under FDR. During the Second World War, Stimson met with generals and commanders, supervised the internment of the Japanese, and yet still found time for vigorous games of deck tennis and quiet evenings at home with his wife.
When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suddenly died, it was Stimson who briefed President Truman on the existence of the Manhattan Project, of which Stimson was the senior advisor. Once the decision was made, it was Stimson who selected the targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stimson retired to Highold, his Scotland estate, where he died on October 20, 1950, at age eighty-three.
VAL BRANDON
After his wife’s murder, Val Brandon joined the army and fought in France with the 135th machine gun battalion of the Thirty-seventh division. While stationed at Camp Meade, he was reported to have “admitted the crime in a dream.” He sued the newspaper that reported it for slander. Once he returned home, Val relocated to California, remarried, and became very active in veterans work. He was elected commander in chief of the California and Nevada divisions of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at its national convention in 1927. He died on August 15, 1968, at seventy-two.
PADDY SOLAN
Paddy worked as the superintendent of building maintenance at Grand Central Terminal until his retirement. He invented the nonslip ramps in the terminal. He retired to West Englewood, New Jersey, where lived with his wife, Sadie, for twenty-three years. He told friends for years that he had solved the Ruth Cruger case.
MARIA COCCHI
By 1944, Maria and her son lived in Brooklyn, at 362 Elton Street. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
RUTH
Ruth Cruger skates on cold glass dusted with white snow. There is frost along the edge of her silver skates. She smiles and closes her eyes. She was born on December 8, 1898.
Across the ice, Ruth spots a boy and looks away. Of course, it is more complicated than that. Perhaps she is hot under her heavy coat that she hates or she is angry with her father. Or none of those things at all. That doesn’t matter.
Ruth pushes off and cuts across the ice. She feels the cold snow spraying her ankles. People are in coats and mufflers. She catches her skate on an edge and almost pitches forward. She feels her heart in her chest, but stops herself. Everything is fine. She looks at the ice. Like everyone, she wonders what is beneath it. The lake or fishes or just the ground, none of which are that scary, after all.
She laughs and continues on, with an endlessly long afternoon ahead of her. There are no more minutes to even think about. She smiles and is quiet and her cheeks are red and cold. The tips of her fingers sting, but it makes her feel alive. There cannot be skating, after all, without a long dark lake, and skating without one isn’t really skating at all. She tips her weight to the right and both skates are on the edge of things now, pushing toward the bright, open space.
GRACE