Careless People by Sarah Churchwell Page A

medical examiner only four years earlier, in 1918, and the mayor’s office still objected to paying his salary. In 1922 New Jersey didn’t have a medical examiner at all; it fell upon the county physician to examine the bodies, and from Dr. Long’s short perspective there was nothing in doubt medically. He had two corpses with bullets in their heads.What did it matter how many bullets? They had been shot in the head and they were both dead.

    Under intense pressure from the press and public, the authorities decided to exhume Mrs. Mills’s body and perform a new autopsy to “remove all doubt as to the manner in which the woman was slain.” After exactly two weeks of fruitless investigation, the body of Eleanor Mills was exhumed. The results were startling, to say the least.
    Not only had Dr. Long missed two of the three bullet holes in the victim’s head, he had also failed to notice that her throat had been slashed from ear to ear, so deeply that it exposed her vertebrae. Eleanor Mills had been shot above one eye, again in her right cheek and the third time in her right temple. The bullet holes Dr. Long missed weren’t even in the back of her head; all three were full in her face. “Following this discovery,” the
Times
reported, Dr. Long, “who had announced that Mrs. Mills had been shot only once and had said nothing about her throat being cut, admitted that he had never performed a regular autopsy, but had merely made a superficial examination.” That was putting it mildly: to miss one bullet wound might be regarded as a misfortune, but to miss two, and a throat slashed from ear to ear so deeply that it nearly severed the victim’s head from her body, looks like carelessness.
    In fact, Dr. Long hadn’t performed any autopsies on the bodies at all, explaining that the county prosecutor had not requested them; the prosecutor, in turn, said he simply assumed Dr. Long had performed autopsies. Now that the bodies had finally been examined, the pathologists reported that “the position of the bullet holes in the woman’s head did away with the possibility of murder and suicide or a suicide agreement.” Some had argued that a murder and suicide might explain the deaths, despite the fact that no gun was found at the scene.
    Gossip began to murmur that Frances Stevens Hall was being treatedwith kid gloves by the authorities. The rector’s widow had been reported from the outset as the wealthy heir to a fortune from Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical company headquartered in New Brunswick. Mrs. Hall was a respected member of a prestigious family and rumors were increasing that she was using her vast wealth to quash the investigation.

    B urton Rascoe reported in “A Bookman’s Day Book” that on Saturday, September 30, he and a friend called upon John Dos Passos in Manhattan. “Finding him out, we climbed into his studio through a window and left him a note.” A little later that night, Rascoe visited the actress Mary Blair, who would marry Edmund Wilson in less than six months; they went together to the apartment of Seward Collins, who would later have a serious affair with Dorothy Parker, “where we found Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald and Dos Passos. They had all been house-hunting for the Fitzgeralds and had rented one in Great Neck. Dos was dancing about in gay abandon with a piano lamp on his head and Zelda was imitating Gilda Gray. Scott was apathetic, observing once that I danced as badly as George Jean Nathan and bestirring himself later to inquire whether I was ‘going to pieces. ’”
    That Saturday was a bright, fresh day, in the cool sixties for the most part, although it reached 80°F at its hottest. Was it the last day in September that Dos remembered and Fitz documented, or had they gone back to Great Neck again for another look? In Dos Passos’s account, there is no mention of actually renting a house,