Alan Hynd - Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd

So the doctor, as he was called, with a wife and a houseful of off-spring to support, had gone into a side business: selling bottles of stale ginger ale spiked with saltpeter to women whose husbands had strayed from the connubial couch. The saltpeter had slowed down the husbands but it hadn’t slowed down a parade of creditors to the doctor’s domicile and office, in a faded-red brick house on the corner of Ninth Street and Moyamensing Avenue, in the heart of the Quaker City’s Italian district. One morning in February 1932, Bolber was in a state of acute depression as he sat in a gloomy front room that he used for professional purposes, against a background of scuffed leather volumes on abracadabra, while a howling wind rattled the windowpanes. The faith healer looked somewhat in-congruous in such a setting, for he was an affluent-looking little man of 42, neatly barbered, alert of eye and sharply turned out. As he sat there in his office, railing at the fates, somebody pulled the bell at the front door.

Bolber rushed to a window to see whether it was friend or foe: patient or creditor. The caller was a new patient, a moderately attractive woman of about 30, the wife of a man named Anthony Giacobbe, who ran a dry-goods store. She had come to get a bottle of that stuff she had been hearing about, the stuff that slowed men down. Mrs. Giacobbe told Bolber that her husband was spending so much time and money on drink and other women that he was letting his business go to pot.

“We’re even having a hard time keeping up his insurance,” said Mrs. Giacobbe. “Insurance?” said Bolber, all ears. “How much insurance does your husband carry?”

“Ten thousand dollars’ worth.”

Doctor Bolber was visited by an inspiration. He gave Mrs. Giacobbe a bottle of stale ginger ale spiked not with saltpeter but with an aphrodisiac strong enough to transform a broken-down wreck into a howling wolf.

“Come back in a couple of weeks,” said the doctor, “and let me know if this has any effect on your husband.” As soon as Mrs. Giacobbe left, Bolber, according to an admission he was one day to make to the cops, had an inspiration. He hustled around the corner to the hole-in-the-wall tailor shop run by his friend, Paul Petrillo.

Petrillo, a chubby man in his thirties, with heavily greased black hair and the smell of Sen Sen on his breath, had for some time been collaborating in a unique arrangement with the faith healer. Petrillo made free suits for Doctor Bolber in return for the names of women married to men who were neglecting their homework.

Petrillo was one day to be revealed in a courtroom as a gentleman with phenomenal amorous powers. This particular day, when the fraudulent faith healer slipped the wolfish tailor the name of Mrs. Millie Giacobbe, something new had been added. Petrillo was not only to seduce the lady; he was to pretend to fall in love with her and propose mar-riage.

“But what about the husband?” Petrillo asked.

“Never mind about him,” said Bolber.

“Just get the wife nuts about you and I’ll take care of the husband.”

“How?”

“I’ll kill him.”

“But why knock the guy off, Doc?” asked Petrillo. “What’s the angle?”

“Insurance. He’s got $10,000 worth of insurance. We can get half of it from the wife. That’ll give us $2,500 apiece.”

Petrillo was all for it. In 1932, $2,500 was a bundle.

“How you gain’ to knock the guy off, Doc?”

“Poison,” said Bolber. “I got a poison that’ll fool any doctor.”

“What’s the name of it?”

The substance Bolber had in mind was conium, a lethal herb known to the layman as hemlock, the stuff that was in the mickey that did in Socrates, the Greek philosopher, in

500 B.C. The attractive feature of conium, which was easily disguised in food and drink, was that when it was adminis-tered to a patient suffering from any one of a wide variety of diseases it caused the ailment to worsen materially. Making things even more convenient in the Giacobbe household, the man of the house was a chronic drunk. It would be easy to slip something into his beverage.

Next morning Petrillo sprayed himself with cologne and, posing as an encyclopedia salesman, called on Mrs. Giacobbe after her philandering husband had left for his place of business. In a couple of weeks, Mrs. Giacobbe called on the faith healer again. The stuff that he had given her to slow down her husband had had no effect.

“But I don’t care,” said Mrs. Giacobbe. “I’ve met somebody else.”

“And you’re in love with him?”

“Yes.”

Bolber sat in his office half the night writing a dramatic act, complete with instructions for gestures, by which Petrillo was to propose marriage to Mrs. Giacobbe. Next day, after Giacobbe, the marked man, was away at business, Petrillo called on the wife. On bended knee, he professed his undying love for the lady.

“Let’s get married and run away some-wheres,” he said, beating his chest.

“But what about my husband?” asked Mrs. Giacobbe.

“Something could happen to him.”

Mrs. Giacobbe had never thought of such a happy eventu-ality.

“What could happen?” She asked.

“We could take all his clothes off when he comes home drunk some night and he could get pneumonia from layin’ there naked with the cold wind blowin’ right on him.”

A few nights later Bolber was sitting in his office listening to Petrillo relating the happy developments.

“Giacobbe didn’t go to work today,” the tailor was telling the faith healer. “Me and his wife stripped him when he come home drunk last night. He woke up with an awful cold this morning.”

Mrs. Giacobbe had gotten her husband thoroughly starched again that night.

“So we stripped him again a little while ago,” Petrillo went on. “The weatherman says it’s gonna be down to ten above tonight. When Giacobbe wakes up tomorrow morning he ought to be practical blue.”

The next night Petrillo reported to Bolber that Giacobbe had contracted pneumonia. The family doctor had been called and had prescribed two kinds of liquid medicine.

“Good,” said the faith healer. “Tell Mrs. Giacobbe to come around with that medicine.”

The patient quickly began to come apart at the seams. The bona fide doctor wasn’t surprised.

“Your husband was a heavy drinker,” he explained sadly to Mrs. Giacobbe. “Heavy drinkers often fail to survive pneumonia.”

“My poor Antonio,” said Mrs. Giacobbe, warming up to the idea of an early widowhood.

After the funeral, Bolber sent for the widow. There would be a fee, he explained, for his doctoring up that medicine, a fee of half that insurance money. Mrs. Giacobbe, not too bright and happy to be rid of her faithless spouse so that she could marry the ardent tailor, willingly forked over the five grand in cash.

It wasn’t long before Mrs. Giacobbe appeared in Bolber’s office greatly distraught. Petrillo had banked his romantic fires. The doctor made a ticking sound and shook his head sadly. The male animal was an unpredictable beast. There was nothing, he feared, he could do to help the lady.

One night, after office hours, the faith healer suggested to Petrillo that they get busy on another husband. Where, Petrillo asked, would they find a man carrying enough in-surance to make the enterprise worthwhile?

“We’ll insure somebody ourselves,” said Bolber. The doctor had already been thinking about his own patients. He went to his card file and selected one.

“Now here’s a woman named Lorenzo whose husband is a roofer. We could insure the husband for say $10,000, with double indemnity in case of an accident, and then get him pushed off a roof.”

How, Petrillo inquired, would they get Lorenzo insured without his knowing it? And who would push him off the roof? Bolber ignored the questions.