The Valentino Affair (42 page)

When the main doors of the kitchen were thrown open and fifteen steaming-hot brown fowls had been brought through and placed upon the table, the men bowed their heads in silent prayer. The cast list of “thirty dayers”
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who were delegated to serve the food read like the characters from a Damon Runyon short story. There was pickpocket “Blinky the Dip,” who ladled cranberries, while Austin Riley, otherwise known as the “Educated Bartender,”
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took charge of the sweet potatoes. By all accounts Riley earned his moniker from the fact that on those weekends when he wound up in the DD cells—drunk and disorderly—he would sober up by reading thick books. The food was delicious, especially to men fed an unvarying daily diet of stew and brown bread, and they showed their approval by clapping their hands and passing their plates for second and third helpings. For dessert there was ice cream and coffee, and every prisoner was given a box of cigarettes.

Elsewhere in the jail, the institution’s two lesser-known female inmates—one charged with arson, the other a habitual drunk—were served a turkey of their own, while Blanca was allowed to dine in her own room. She had a special guest. Jack Jr. had arrived that morning at eleven o’clock in one of the Heckscher limousines and was escorted into the jail by private detective Harry Dougherty. As soon as Jack saw his mother, he ran into her arms. “They said you had turkey,” he cried. “Where is it?”
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He was led to the ovens and given a glimpse of the birds crackling in their pans.

While little Jack stared wide-eyed at the feast to come, Blanca took Dougherty to one side and asked his opinion of how the trial was going. He hedged. “Well, there may be a disagreement.”

“Oh, don’t say that. Anything but that. I don’t want to go through this again.”
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Suzanne Monteau, who had arrived with Amalia, looked on horror-stricken. “Would I have to testify again?” Told that she would, she exclaimed, “I could not stand it, to have that district attorney talk to me again.”
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One person increasingly likely to be spared a confrontation with Weeks was Señora Errázuriz-Vergara. Reports had her still reeling from the humiliation of hearing Blanca mock her on the stand, and they also said that she had returned to Crossways in a hysterical state, with a recurrence of her reported heart condition. For this reason, Uterhart had delayed calling her. According to Dr. Wight, who remained in close attendance, the señora’s condition was slightly improved, but he doubted that she would be up to the strain of a courtroom appearance. Nor was she fit enough (or willing) to visit her daughter in jail.
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Now, though, it was time for Blanca to set family and court worries aside as the fowl made its appearance. Blanca carved the golden-brown turkey and piled her son’s plate high. Her own portion was much smaller. She had never had much of an appetite and merely picked at her food, sitting back for the most part and watching her little boy wolf his dinner down hungrily, until they reached the wishbone, which they pulled together amid much mystery as to their hopes. At the same time, from another quarter of the building, came a rarely heard jailhouse sound—loud roars of laughter, as the other prisoners made the most of this unexpected treat.

In the improvised banqueting hall, the “Educated Bartender” lived up to his nickname by producing a piece of paper and announcing that decorum demanded some written expression of gratitude to Blanca. “All right, scratch it off and we’ll sign it,”
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yelled one. Eight prisoners signed the following:

“Mrs. Blanca De Saulles, Mineola, L.I.

Dear Madam: We desire to thank you sincerely for your kindness and thoughtfulness toward us today. It is impossible to put into words our kindly thoughts toward you. However, it is our earnest wish that your next Thanksgiving will be spent with your dear family and your noble little boy.”
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As Riley was looking around for someone to bear this note to Blanca, the door opened and the “White Mother,”
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as she had been affectionately dubbed by the other prisoners, entered, hand in hand with little Jack. Her appearance triggered a raucous round of applause and cheers.

Blanca stood at the head of the table and smiled down at the inmates. One prisoner, accused of stabbing a fellow workman, feeling that some words of gratitude were necessary, fumbled with his fork, overturned his coffee, and succeeded in getting to his feet with what was intended as a courtly bow. “We’re all mighty thankful to you—for what you’ve done for us.”
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Blanca rewarded him with a broad smile and a deprecating wave of her hand. “I’m mighty glad I could have this little dinner with you today.”
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Jack, too, added his good wishes, in a grave voice that belied his tender years, before proudly brandishing a brass sheriff’s badge that had been presented to him as a gift and saying, “I am a policeman and I can arrest any of you.”
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The unintended irony was not lost on the audience, most of whom convulsed with laughter as they held out their hands and complied with the lad’s attempts to take them into “custody.”

All too soon the levity was over and it was time for Jack to be returned to his guardians. Blanca gave her son one last crushing embrace before Dougherty led him out to the waiting automobile.

Although a few favored journalists had been given access to the dinner to record Blanca’s Thanksgiving generosity—Uterhart’s PR skills were as sharp as ever—outside the jail an even bigger press scrum awaited Dougherty as he emerged with Jack Jr. And for the first time they learned that the private detective had been on the de Saulles family’s books for more than a year. “During the divorce proceedings De Saulles said to me: ‘My wife is getting a divorce from me. We can’t get along together. I haven’t anything to say against her at all, but if the boy should ever be taken to Chile there would be no chance on earth that I could get him back again.’ ”
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To ensure that Blanca did not attempt to flee the country, Dougherty had operatives watching the boy whenever he was with his mother, either in the city or at Roslyn. According to Dougherty, even after de Saulles was killed other family members were fearful that Jack Jr. would be kidnapped, hence their insistence that Dougherty accompany the lad everywhere. He also noted that on little Jack’s first visit to the jail, the boy and his mother had seemed very distant, but since that time they had become increasingly affectionate. His media duties over, Dougherty joined Jack Jr. in the auto, which sped them back to the Heckscher household, where the Thanksgiving festivities were, understandably, muted.

Others, too, had a blighted holiday. Uterhart, assisted by his co-counsel Lewis J. Smith and Cleveland Runyan, had labored into the small hours of Thanksgiving morning on the much vaunted “hypothetical question.” The lawyers had worked in relays in their rooms at the Garden City Hotel, framing the question and exhausting four stenographers in the process before calling a halt.

The question—a formidable document rumored to be fifteen-thousand words in length and getting longer with every revision—would begin with Blanca’s birth, summarize the accidents in her life, recount a string of humiliations inflicted by her husband, and conclude by requesting an opinion as to whether the defendant was capable legally of understanding her act when she shot Jack de Saulles. One newspaper acidly suggested that all that wordiness could be condensed thus: “Do you believe this lady was sufficiently crazy to justify a kind-hearted jury in acquitting her for the murder of a brutal husband?”
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A general sinking of hearts greeted reports that Weeks, not wanting to be outdone, was preparing a hypothetical question of his own, though what form this would take was not revealed. Far more certain, and far more interesting circulation-wise, was the DA’s bitter and continuing antipathy toward Sheriff Seaman. Weeks said that because the sheriff had “seen so much of the defendant,”
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he feared that her charm had clouded his judgment, and for that reason, he would not be recalling Seaman to the stand on rebuttal.

T
HE
T
RIAL,
D
AY 9

November 30, 1917

When court reconvened after the holiday, the first order of business was sentencing Dominick Damasco. Originally charged with murder, he was ultimately convicted of manslaughter and could count himself lucky to be so, according to Justice Manning, who sentenced him to eleven years. In a daze, Damasco rose from the same chair that Blanca would occupy and made his way slowly to the door. As he exited the court, he passed Blanca in the corridor. She smiled and looked as if she were about to speak, but Damasco, totally preoccupied, passed by without raising his head and the door closed behind him. Blanca stood for some time just staring at the spot where Damasco had been, and then she took her seat. Unlike previous days she did not wear an outfit that emphasized the frailness and girlishness of her figure, but instead wore a suit of heather mix. She was very pale. And she looked anxious. For the first time since the trial began, she would glance at the jury to see how various strands of evidence had struck them.

In the morning the by now notorious “hypothetical question” was read out by Lewis J. Smith to the two defense doctors. He began at 10:20 with “Assume, doctor, that Blanca Errázuriz De Saulles was born near Santiago, Chile, April 29, 1894, that in her childhood . . .”
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and kept on going for another eighty-five minutes. During the question’s reading, Juror No. 4 fell asleep (he was elbowed awake by the juror to his left), while some of his colleagues watched airplanes through a window. Others, with closed eyes, nodded in their chairs.

The hypothetical question was a popular (with lawyers) legal strategy at the turn of the century, especially in high-profile trials where the defendants had deep pockets and could afford all those extra billable hours. No court-appointed attorney was going to squander this time-consuming option on some indigent prisoner.

It first appeared at length during the trial of Carlyle Harris, a New York medical student who poisoned his wife in 1891. On that occasion, several times during its reading a juror was heard to snore loudly, impervious to nudges and kicks from his comrades. Finally, the judge’s patience snapped. If any juror fell asleep, he boomed, he would order the entire question to be read out again. At this, the dozing juror was now almost kicked out of the jury box by his indignant colleagues. Their prompting worked; the question did not, and Harris died in the electric chair. A similar somnolence befell jury members subjected to hypothetical questions in the Molineaux
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and Thaw cases.

And it was the same here. As one paper commented slyly, “When Juror No. 4 at Mineola decided that his mind was made up and he had heard enough he was merely following a precedent as old as the hypothetical question itself.”
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In essence the question dealt with Blanca’s early life, the fall in childhood, meeting Jack and marrying him, his use of her money and his adultery, all the events that culminated in the shooting on August 3. Weeks objected to the question being put to Wight, as he was a surgeon, with no background in psychology, but he was overruled. When the question was complete, Uterhart asked Wight, “Assuming all the forgoing facts and having in mind your personal examination of the defendant, in your opinion was the defendant mentally sound at the time of the shooting?”

Wight turned very deliberately to the jury. “She was not,” he said, laying heavy emphasis on each word.

“In your opinion did the defendant know the nature and quality of the act she was committing?”

“She did not.”

“In your opinion did the defendant know the act was wrong?”