Raffaelo was brought to trial in August and quickly convicted of murder in the first degree. He was committed to the death house at Sing Sing and there waited to be joined by his fellows. When the hour for his execution had almost come upon him, Raffaelo was seized with remorse and declared that he was willing to tell all he knew. He was reprieved and appeared at the trials of the others, where he told his story substantially as recited above. Largely as a result of his testimony, Cusamano, Marino and Ruggieri were convicted and sentenced to electrocution while Melchione went mad in the Tombs and was sent to Matteawan to end his life among the criminal insane. Governor Smith finally granted commutations to life imprisonment in each of these cases, because it was fairly well established that all the convicted men had been in the Tombs at the time Joe Varotta was drowned and had probably nothing to do with his actual murder. They are still in prison and will very likely stay there a great many years before there can be any question of pardon.
In spite of every effort on the part of the police and every inducement held out to the convicted men, no information could ever be got as to the identity of the man or men who threw the little boy into the river. The arrested and convicted men, except for Raffaelo, who evidently did not know any more than he told, absolutely refused to talk, saying it would be certain death if they did so. They tried all along to create the impression that they were only the minor tools of some great and mysterious organization, but this claim may be dismissed as fiction and romance.
XIV
THE LOST MILLIONAIRE
Some time before three o’clock on the afternoon of December 2, 1919, Ambrose Joseph Small deposited in the Dominion Bank, of Toronto, a check for one million dollars. At seven fifteen o’clock that evening the lean, swart, saturnine master of Canadian playhouses bought his habitual newspapers from the familiar boy under the lamps of Adelaide Street, before his own Grand Theater, turned on his heel, and strode off into the night, to return no more.
In the intervening years men have ferreted in all corners of the world for the missing rich man; rewards up to fifty thousand dollars have been offered for his return, or the discovery of his body; reports of his presence have chased detectives into distant latitudes, and the alarm for him has been spread to all the trails and tides without result. By official action of the Canadian courts, Amby Small, as he was known, is dead, and his fortune has been distributed to his heirs. To the romantic speculation he must still exist, however. And whatever the fact, his case presents one of the strangest stories of mysterious absenteeism to be found upon the books.
Men disappear every day. The police records of any great city and of many smaller places bear almost interminable lists of fellows who have suddenly and curiously dropped out of their grooves and placements. Some are washed up as dead bodies—the slain and self-slain. Some return after long wanderings, to make needless excuses to their friends and families. And others pass from their regular haunts into new fields. These latter are usually poor and fameless gentry, weary of life’s routine.
Ambrose Small, however, was a person of different kidney. He was rich, for one thing. Thirty-five years earlier, Sir Henry Irving, on one of his tours to Canada had found the youthful Small taking tickets in a Toronto theater. Attracted by some unusual quality in the youngster, Irving shrewdly advised him to quit the study of law and devote himself to the theatrical business. Following this counsel, Small had risen slowly and surely until he controlled theaters in all parts of the Dominion and was rated at several millions. On the afternoon before his disappearance he had consummated a deal with the Trans-Canada Theaters, Limited, by which he was to receive nearly two millions in money and a share of the profits, in return for his theatrical holdings. The million-dollar check he deposited had been the first payment.
Again, Small was a familiar figure throughout Canada and almost as well acquainted in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities of the United States. Figuratively, at least, everybody knew him—thousands of actors, traveling press agents, managers, real estate men, promoters, newspaper folk, advance agents; indeed, all the Wandering Jews and Gentiles of the profession of make-believe, with which he had been connected so long and profitably. With such a list of acquaintances, whose rovings took them to the ends of the earth, how almost impossible it seemed for Small to drop completely out of sight.
Finally, Amby Small was a man with a wife and most deeply interested relatives. Entirely aside from the questions of inheritance and the division of his estate, which netted about two millions, as was determined later on, Mrs. Small would certainly want to know whether she was a wife or widow, and the magnate’s sisters would certainly suspect everything and everybody, leaving nothing undone that would bring the man back to his home, or punish those who might have been responsible for any evil termination of his life.