Early the next day, people walking on the sidewalk of West Eightieth Street looked up quickly when they heard something shatter in the sky. Those who were fast enough thought they saw a pretty young woman jump through a third-floor window and fall into the vacant lot yawning between the buildings.
A beat cop on the street spun around and ran toward the space that had swallowed her. When he turned the corner, he saw a small body, in a dress, lying still on the hard ground. She started to move. She was alive. He took three shrill pulls on his whistle for help. Gray bone was protruding from her crumpled left leg.
“He’s up there,” she gasped, turning her head. She pointed up to the building, to the sky.
“The men,” she said, seeing the cop’s confused look. “One grabbed me by the throat and said ‘I guess you’ll not tell anymore.’”
The cop tried to quiet her as the ambulance arrived. As they pulled her onboard, the woman pulled on his hand.
“Please,” she asked, “tell Mrs. Humiston.” The girl was in a great deal of pain. “Two men had tried to murder me because I gave Grace Humiston information.”
The woman said her name was Consuelo La Rue.
“If you only knew what I’ve had to go through,” she said, on the way to the hospital. “They told me they’d kill me, for what I’d done.”
Grace was summoned at once. When she finally arrived at the Polyclinic Hospital and was ushered into the emergency ward, her face was deadly serious. When she tried to see La Rue, Grace was told that the police were limiting her visitors. La Rue was apparently unable to tell a coherent story, and the doctors were worried about her state of mind. As Grace stood in the hall, Inspector Faurot appeared to speak to the press. He said that he was going to charge La Rue with attempted suicide, even though he admitted there was a mark on her throat as if she had been choked. Faurot also said that he had made another important discovery but thought it best to withhold it until he found substantiation. Grace was furious that the police would not permit her to even talk with La Rue and that they already seemed to be dismissing the girl’s claims. Grace doubted that Faurot had even spoken with La Rue in person.
As La Rue laid in her hospital bed, Captain Cooper stood outside the door, talking with the guards. Grace walked by and stopped.
“I have absolutely nothing to say,” Grace said.
“No one asked you to say anything,” he replied. Only days ago these two people were helping each other. Now they were at odds. Grace knew why. The entire city was blaming the police for failing to find, and perhaps even save, Ruth Cruger. And the police, at least some of them, were blaming Grace for making them look bad.
As the press converged on the hospital, clogging up its thin halls, the assistant district attorney, Alexander Rorke, who had questioned La Rue at the hospital, said that the young lady had maintained a mysterious reserve. The police could not confirm if La Rue had any relationship to Ruth Cruger. A reporter at the hospital finally spotted Grace hanging around the back and asked her if it was true, if La Rue had given her the information needed to find Ruth Cruger.
“To answer that now would do more harm than good,” Grace responded, after a moment’s pause. “I feared for Miss La Rue’s life. She telephoned me that her life had been threatened and I had a private detective searching for her.”
That afternoon, the police reported that an examination of La Rue’s apartments on the second floor of 215 West Eightieth Street revealed a broken mirror and an overturned chair, but no other signs of a struggle. Neither was there any trace of either of her mysterious visitors. There was also a calling card with a name that was found in her room. The name was prefixed with “Count.” In the hospital, La Rue told police that when she had been kidnapped, months earlier, two white slavers were with her, accompanied by the men. She said that she was led to a grave and made to view the body of a girl they said was Ruth Cruger. La Rue said that she was warned the same thing would happen to her if she tried to escape.
La Rue was too badly injured to be questioned any further. So Captain Cooper pulled up a chair and watched over her bedside. Sometime later, one of his men came in and whispered in his ear that Grace wanted to talk to him in the hall. He left La Rue’s bedside and walked into the hall. He regarded Grace, alone.
“I thank you for ordering me out,” she said, referring to the earlier incident.
“I don’t understand your remark,” said Cooper.
“I shall see Commissioner Woods in the morning,” replied Grace.
“All right, then, I have nothing more to say to you,” said Cooper.
Grace got on the phone and complained directly to Woods that she had been ordered from the room by a captain, but Cooper denied it. Governor Whitman, who was in the city for the day and staying at the Hotel St. Regis, showed keen interest in the development of any part of the Cruger case, including the La Rue matter, which he intimated might eventually come before his desk. He didn’t say anything about Grace Humiston, whom he remembered quite well.
Later that night, Rorke revealed that another attempt had been made on La Rue’s life while she was recovering in the hospital. A strange man had been seen in the hallway near her door before cops chased him away. A rock had been thrown from the roof of an adjoining building. The attached note was in Spanish and warned that she would be killed if she talked. The papers also reported that a man with a gun had been detained wandering her hallway in the hospital. The police proceeded to limit La Rue’s visitors in order to protect her against injury or intimidation. Two policemen remained on guard at all times. The police refused to comment further, saying only that her story strongly corroborated rumors that powerful forces were seeking to shield Cocchi, who, the day before, had been indicted in absentia for the Cruger murder. There was a rumor that Cocchi had supposedly threatened vengeance on anyone connected with his prosecution. Papers reported that Cocchi was a member of the dreaded Camorra and that its agents had made it possible for him to escape to Italy. Some of the papers were now reporting that Ruth’s body had been found folded in two, with her ankles at her face. To New Yorkers with long memories, it sounded eerily like the murder of Benedetto Madonia by the Morello gang in 1903. Madonia was found stuffed in a barrel, unmercifully contorted in the same ugly way.
Grace had heard enough. “This girl is a victim of white slavery,” she told the press. “She offered to help me in the Cruger case and insisted all along that I should dig up the cellar, not because she had actual knowledge of the case, but because of her knowledge of the methods of white slavers. I am satisfied that the gang that made the La Rue girl suffer tried to kill her last night. They knew she was in touch with me, and they were afraid that she would expose them after the Cruger case had been cleared up.”