Crime-oj-the-Week

CRIME

Crime-of-the-Week

The sun never shines in Allen Street. The people there, denizens of Manhattan's lower East Side, go about in a latticework of shadows cast by the superstructure of the elevated railway, a vast and gloomy pergola rising to meet the rungs of blackened fire escapes which hang from the buildings like the foliage of a fantastic iron jungle. No. 63 Allen Street, near the corner of Grand, is a large green-painted wooden door with a rusty lock and bar. Above some ash cans floats a white hand in eerie benediction. Beneath the hand is painted: E. A. RIDLEY, Sub-Basement.

For 32 years Edward Albert Ridley had put on his rubbers rain or shine, clapped on a bowler over his flowing white hair, muffled himself in an overcoat outside of which he arranged his long, curly white beard, and had taken an early train to New York from his boarding house in Fanwood, N. J. In Allen Street he let himself through his door, descended a long ramp to what had once been the basement blacksmith shop of the stables of his father's large drygoods store. Before 1901, when the firm sold out, E. A. Ridley & Sons had done $6,000,000 worth of business a year. Down another flight of stairs to a dank subcellar aged Mr. Ridley would go. The air smelled like cool glue. Here, where once had been a well whence Mr. Ridley provided his tenements with cheap water of questionable purity, the strange, 88-year-old man had partitioned off a cheerless office. There were two iron safes, a high counting desk and swivel stool where his clerk sat, and Mr. Ridley's rolltop desk. Neither of the occupants ever took off his rubbers or overcoat. In their Dickensian foxhole they shared a lunch of bread and cheese.

Two years ago someone murdered Mr, Ridley's clerk, Herman Moench, who had served him 50 years. Mr. Ridley had come in late that morning. He did not notice Moench, dead on the floor, for some time. The mystery of Moench's death was never solved. Last week another killer followed the pointing white hand down to Mr. Ridley's musty retreat and another, more gruesome mystery attached itself to No. 63 Allen Street.

All morning long the brother of Lee Weinstein, Moench's successor as old Ridley's clerk, had tried to get him on a telephone in the upstairs garage, where the stables used to be. Not until after one o'clock did the garage proprietor bother to go down to where the strange pair worked at their accounts. At the bottom of the subcellar stairs, visible by the light of one yellow bulb glowing dismally in the office, the garageman found Old Man Ridley. His curly white beard was torn out in great patches, one ear was gone, his head had been bashed many times with the swivel stool. In the ghostly underground quiet, Lee Weinstein was found. He had been shot seven times in the stomach, chest, neck and face. None in the neighborhood had seen the murderer come or go.

It was found that Mr. Ridley had owned extensive property uptown as well as many an East Side tenement. In his bank was over $1,000,000 in cash. His will left $812,000 to relatives who had not seen him for years. A bequest of $200,000 was left Weinstein provided the latter survived him. Police medical examiners were hard put to tell which victim had predeceased the other. Since neither body was robbed, it was supposed that some obscure revenge had motivated the crime. A bootlegger's hideout, discovered deep in the same old building, darkened the mystery further. Old Ridley was a hard man to deal with, dealt severely with his tenants. A clue which fitted nowhere was the discovery that Weinstein had been secretly married for eight years to a woman calling herself Mrs. Jack Lee. And the bullets which killed Weinstein came from the same gun which killed Moench two years before.

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