Henry had already given the police a list of Ruth’s destinations, including the bank, the motorcycle shop, and the stationery store, whose purpose on Ruth’s excursion was still mysterious. So when he talked to the detective agency, he told them the same things. Henry also tried to explain what kind of girl she was, how she was bright, helped at church, and watched over her sister when Christina was sick, but he felt the words came out all wrong. So he stuck to numbers and facts. She went here, then there, and then disappeared. Henry hung up. That afternoon, two police detectives came by the apartment. Detective Lagarenne was tall and had brown hair. His partner, McGee, had dark hair and looked like Fatty Arbuckle. When they came to the door, Henry’s heart was in his mouth.
Helen was still gone when the detectives arrived. She wanted to check the bank and the other stores that were closed the night before. Helen first went to the motorcycle store at ten thirty in the morning, but it was still closed. As Helen approached the door, she saw something new. There was a movable sign with a small black hand pointing downward. She followed the direction with her eyes and saw a small stairway under the sidewalk that led to a cellar, but it was locked up. Helen tried the bank next. It was busy, but no one had reported a robbery or had seen her sister. She returned to the motorcycle store at 12:45, but it was still closed. The pointed little hand was gone.
When Helen went back to the motorcycle store at 2:30 in the afternoon, it was finally open, and Helen walked in through the glass doors. She saw a man kneeling by a bicycle, turning a heavy wrench. When he saw her, he stood up. He was dressed in khaki. He smiled at her with a warm, dopey grin.
“Yes?” the man asked. He spoke with an accent.
Helen explained that she was looking for her sister, who had her skates sharpened the day before. She described her, with her funny hat and blue coat.
“Yes,” the man said, nodding. His voice seemed like it was starting and stopping as he figured out the right words. “She left her skates here in the morning and came for them in the afternoon, paid me, and went on.”
Helen’s heart lifted and fell in an instant.
“What kind of shoes did she have?” asked Helen. The man looked down at her feet.
“Like yours,” he said, cheerily, raising his eyes back to hers.
Helen then asked if he had seen which way she had gone. He thought for a moment, trying to remember.
“At 1:20. She went east,” he said, his hand pointing out the direction. He wanted to help more, but Helen excused herself, thanking him for his kindness. She ran home to tell her father. When she walked in, Henry had a twinge of alarm. The two detectives—Lagarenne and McGee—had just left. They had told Henry that they had so far found nothing. But Helen did have something. A direction.
Helen told her father about the motorcycle shop. Henry immediately called Fourth Branch to leave a message. Henry stared at his strong daughter. She had the right idea. As she retired to her room, exhausted, Henry went out himself to search the empty, ramshackle buildings around 123rd and 124th. Theirs was a nice neighborhood, but the buildings in the shadows, wedged between alleys and streets, were still there, still occupying space. Henry could hear crying children and parents screaming in strange languages. Henry stared up into the dark windows of the tenements, sometimes catching someone’s eye. There were so many occupied places here, known and not, all throughout the city. Parents and children and dogs and babies seemed to fill every invisible corner, pushing out against the city’s uneven seams. As the afternoon sank into night, Henry made his way home. He paused at the stairs of his own building, his eyes drawn downward to the closed cellar door. He descended the steps down and entered the basement. He looked tensely into every black corner, where the walls met each other in shadow. He could almost hear his heart beating, the sound reverberating against the cool walls.
The next day, Henry put on his coat and went down to the Fourth Branch detective house at West 123rd Street near Manhattan Avenue. Mr. Brown accompanied him. Henry told Detectives Lagarenne and McGee that he wanted his whole neighborhood checked and everything possible done in terms of publicity. “I want the property searched all around,” Henry demanded.
Henry then asked the detectives about the man his daughter had talked to. The motorcycle man with the accent. The detectives said he was an immigrant named Alfredo Cocchi. Lagarenne assured Henry that he had personally searched the store the day before—through and through—and found nothing. They even searched the basement and the closets. Henry insisted that they put this Italian man under surveillance anyway, but Lagarenne calmly assured him that there was no reason to do so. Cocchi was respectable; he had been in business there for a year and a half and had a wife and children. Lagarenne said that Cocchi’s wife was a little troublesome, but that was all. Henry asked about the bank, too—if there could have been criminals in the area, looking for easy targets who had money in their pockets. The police said they would look into it.
There was a pause as the detectives looked at each other. Lagarenne fixed his gaze back on Henry and asked if his daughter had been involved in any kind of romantic affair. Henry stared right through the two detectives as if they were made of glass. They suggested that she was perhaps on some youthful love affair and nothing more. Henry, asked them, in so many words, how they could ask him about his daughter like that. Henry Cruger saw things in absolutes. The thought of his daughter running away with a man was an utter impossibility to him.
Lagarenne then revealed that they had their first clue and pulled out his notebook. In their canvass of the area, a cab driver said that he had driven that night to 127th and Claremont Avenue, which was no more than a block from the Cruger apartment. There, he picked up a man and a young woman who matched the newspaper description of Ruth Cruger. Henry froze. The cabbie said he picked them up near Ruth’s home and dropped them off near a subway entrance.
Henry put his head in his hands, reeling. The detectives cautioned him against talking to the newspapers. If the cabbie’s story was true, and they warned him that the account was uncorroborated, it suggested an elopement rather than a kidnapping. They had to proceed carefully. They didn’t even have the cab driver’s name yet, the detectives explained. Henry didn’t believe them.
Henry was furious that the detectives had not told him this immediately. So when a reporter called later that day, he didn’t heed the detectives’ request for silence. This was his daughter, after all.
“She is very attractive in appearance,” Henry told the reporter. “She cared more for her studies than for social life. She was happy and contented at home and, I am sure, had no love affair. She was endeavoring to recuperate from the slight overexertion to which she subjected herself in passing the examinations that enabled her to graduate from the high school early this month. She taught Sunday School.” He took a breath.