“Those are butcher’s bones,” the doctor said. “Nothing human about them. But they are very fresh. Apparently somebody is trying to play a trick on you.”
Reached at the wedding, Grace didn’t seem surprised. “We expect to go on with the excavation in the Cocchi cellar to-morrow. That cellar has been under suspicion for some time, and it should have been dug up a long time ago.” Privately, Grace was wondering if they might be able to legally tunnel all the way into the actual cellar through the sidewalk vault.
“Naw, the whole place would fall down,” said the plumber she called up. “You’d have to get a mason or buy the place,” he joked. When Grace talked to Kron on the phone for the last time that night, she said, “Meet me outside Cocchi’s cellar to-morrow. To-morrow will write the finish to the Cruger mystery.”
But Kron still had one more task to accomplish. He had put it off long enough. He took the corset cover, which was just a scrap of a thing, and took it over to the Crugers’ apartment. It weighed more heavily in his pocket than it should have. Mrs. Cruger was too ill to look at it for more than a moment. Mr. Cruger stared at it for a very long time. He said he was sure that the apparel had not belonged to his daughter. Going home, Kron wondered. They had labored long in the earth and found things that meant nothing. Kron felt as if someone was mocking them.
The next day, Kron was still tracking down leads as Grace used their newly unearthed discoveries to convince Swann to open an immediate investigation of Alfredo Cocchi by the grand jury. Grace was still intent at getting to the actual cellar. After reading of the so-called horrors found in the vault yesterday, a substantial crowd had already gathered outside the motorcycle shop. There were men in suits and white straw hats. There were children, too—pushed up to the front, their fathers’ hands pressed flat against their chests.
From down the street, Kron, McGee, and their two workers headed toward Cocchi’s store. Grace was nowhere to be found—she was presumably at court—but had left instructions with Kron to try to negotiate an entrance that didn’t involve the coal chute. Kron held up a hand and walked to the front door. He needed to get the cellar keys from Mrs. Cocchi. After he knocked, he saw her on the other side, separated by the dark glass. With a grand jury opening an investigation and all the things they had found, Kron thought she might be willing to finally bury the hatchet. She was, but not in the way he hoped.
Mrs. Cocchi opened the door with a hammer in her hand.
“Get out of here, or I’ll throw this hammer at you!” she shouted, her eyes flashing.
Kron stopped in his tracks. She raised the black mallet high above her head.
“I don’t care if the whole Police Department and a regiment of soldiers came here! No more digging in my cellar!” She pushed forward and Kron ran back to the sidewalk.
“She told me to get out,” Kron told McGee. “She won’t give up the keys.”
McGee looked at Mrs. Cocchi from the street and thought he might as well give it a try. He walked up, and she actually let him inside the store. Kron watched closely through the glass. They could see McGee show Mrs. Cocchi his badge, shiny and solid. Mrs. Cocchi looked flushed and waved her hands. McGee trudged out, defeated. Apparently, there would be no digging today. They weren’t going to fight her in the streets. Kron had to tell Grace. A grand jury investigation didn’t mean they had a warrant for anything.
That afternoon, Aaron Marcus, who was Mrs. Cocchi’s attorney, issued a statement that said any further excavations would be refused because the crowd that had gathered frightened away prospective customers.
“Mrs. Cocchi’s attitude is not an unfriendly one,” said Marcus. “She has helped the authorities with the investigation in the past.”
By five o’clock, Grace had arrived on the scene with good news. The Commissioner of Public Works had granted her a full digging permit, including the cellar. Grace’s men resumed their work in the dirt. The so-called “box” was just another sign. But before they could get any further, Grace was summoned back to court for obstructing the sidewalk with the big pile of dirt that her men had been unearthing. Grace knew that Mrs. Cocchi’s lawyer was behind the complaint. He was good. Grace hired wagons, on her own dime, to cart away the soil. But then the court summoned her again, saying that the dirt had belonged to the landlord and couldn’t be removed without her say-so. Grace was ordered to return it. For the rest of the week, Grace went back and forth between the bench and Cocchi’s shop. The workers waited in the candy shop. Nothing was getting done. By Friday, at the end of another long week, the court ordered her to stop digging altogether by the end of Saturday.
City officials were not being helpful. Deputy Police Commissioner Scull said of Ruth and Cocchi that “there was no connection between their disappearances.” “There was no such thing as abduction,” Scull said to reporters. He had never seen it happen before.
“No one has ever disappeared in such a manner in New York,” agreed Captain Cooper.
That night, Grace went back to her office. It was now the middle of June and almost three months’ hard work had gone for nothing. They had expended all this time and work tunneling toward a small basement that the police had already searched at least twice. Even Kron had found nothing in his brief time down there. They had found some things under the sidewalk, but nothing even remotely conclusive. Were they grasping at straws? At nothingness? Cocchi himself was halfway around the world. That night, Henry Cruger visited Grace, as he did every night, anxious for the day’s report. They sat around her office, now quiet, not knowing what to do or say. They had less than a day before the digging permit expired.
A thought occurred to Grace that if a building inspector could look over the basement, he might find something they overlooked that could translate to a real, honest-to-goodness warrant. Henry Cruger piped up that he knew an inspector named Paddy Solan who worked in the Erie Railroad offices. Solan was summoned to the office and agreed to help. He had an Irish accent and wore a suit that seemed strapped to the shoulders of his short, thin frame. As they worked up a plan, Grace went to make a few more calls.