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slumped into her minister’s arms and was carried into a morgue office and revived. She wanted to try again. There was a scar on his left hand, she recalled, and so the morgue attendants covered up the remains, leaving only the forearm and hand undraped on the table. Mrs. Wood and the ministerapproached quietly, while the crowd inside kept keen watch from a close but respectful distance. She held the cold, lifeless hand in her own and examined the nails of the man she believed to be her husband—and a man with a distinctive scar on his middle finger. This body also had a scar on its finger … the index finger.
    It is not him
, Mrs. Wood announced.
    It was also not missing Mafia murder witness Agguzzo Baldasano; neither was it a missing young Mr. Levaire of 106th Street, nor theBrooklyn gas engineer Charles Russell. But it
was
Brooklynbartender John Otten, or Brooklynprinter John Livingston, or perhaps New Jersey carpenter Edward Leunhelt. The body also, apparently, belonged to aManhattan bricklayer.
    “It is surely George,” his brother assured the morgue attendants.
    On and on the identifications came, all day, like an endless handkerchief pulled from a magician’s pocket. Watching outside was a young man dandling an infant; when asked by a
World
reporter what he was doing there,he refused to talk; all questions for him had to go through the gentlemen over
there
. The reporter turned to find himself face-to-face with the assembled forces of the
Evening Journal
. They were a formidable sight. Hearst was fond of giving his reporters bicycles, so that his crew were like another regiment of “scorchers”—the lunatics who barreled through city traffic on Sylph cycles, Lunol racers, and greased Crackajack bikes, their futuristic bronze headlights ablaze and slopping kerosene. There were enough of these wildmen riding up the sidewalks and getting horsewhipped by irritated carriage teamsters that Hearst retained a specially designated “bicycle attorney” on the paper’s staff.
    Cycles tossed aside, the Wrecking Crew pushed their way in. Their witnesses, they told detectives, were the nephew and niece of one Louis Lutz, a cabinetmaker who had disappeared from his Upper East Side home on Wednesday. His namesake nephew examined the left hand for a scar.
    “I feel sure it is my uncle’s body,” he proclaimed.
    The attending detective wasn’t impressed.
    “They are too willing,” he muttered.
    “The finger of the dead man looks like my uncle’s marked finger,” young Lutz insisted—whereupon a morgue attendant leaned in and wiped away the scar with a rag. It had been a streak of dirt.
Now
was Lutz sure?
    He wasn’t so sure.
    As the Lutzes filed out, a hysterical woman passed them on the way in.
    “Oh, Dick! Oh, Dick, why did you go away and leave me?” she wailed, and was led sobbing over to the body. It was her husband, she moaned—Richard Meggs, a retired liquor dealer of West Fifty-Second Street. He’d left on Thursday for a card game with $500 in his pocket, never to return. When shown the scarred finger on the left hand, she broke down again. “Dick had a scar right there,” she sniffled.
    The detectives and coroner’s assistants weren’t quite convinced. Did her husband have any other unique characteristics? Why yes, she recalled. Her husband had a very distinct scar on his groin. The attendants dutifully displayed it to Mrs. Meggs’s full view.
    It was not Dick.
    IN THE DOORWAY of a redwood-paneled office at the
New York Journal
, a dapper young man could be seendancing a little jig. Then, as page proofs were laid out over the floor of the war room, he’d indulge in another little dance—tapping over the day’s stories, snapping his fingers like castanets. He might well dance: He was becoming the most powerful publisher in New York.
    LOUIS A. LUTZ THE VICTIM? his evening edition demanded. Lutz wasn’t, of course, but that hardly mattered. The important thing was that the
Journal
had a great