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SHADOW MEN - Excerpt

Prologue: A Lonely Road

We don’t know why Duncan Rose was late to work that May morning in 1922. But there he was at around 7:45 a.m. on May 16 speeding down King Street, a concrete thoroughfare tunneled by red oaks and sweet birch trees in Westchester County, New York. The morning was unusually warm, the air damp and hazy. Rose encountered little traffic as he made his way to Rhoemer’s Pharmacy on Main Street in White Plains. Thirty-year-old Rose started as a pharmacist apprentice in the years before World War I. After the war, he and his wife, Betty, settled in the town of Chappaqua, just twelve miles north from White Plains and about thirty miles from New York City. While the two would eventually have four children and raise them in the changing suburbs of Westchester, Rose was most likely not thinking about the path his life might take as he drove along King Street, rounding the northern edge of the Kensico Reservoir. His only concern was getting to the store before a small crowd of customers simmered with impatience as they found the pharmacy door locked and the closed sign still hanging in the front window.

As often happens when one is rushing to work, Rose soon encountered a roadblock: two Packard trucks, standing side by side, faced him as he slowed his car to a stop. Waiting for the trucks to move, he took note that one carried three or four men, and the other looked empty. The driver of the one truck stood in the middle of the road, talking and laughing with the others, animated in his hand gestures. Rose wondered what might have motivated the man’s excitement at that early-morning hour. He would later describe how the men “looked like foreigners and laborers.” After one of the trucks pulled to the side, Rose resumed his commute.

But not for long.

About mile or so later he encountered Clarence Eckhardt stand- ing on the narrow, sandy shoulder, waving his arms wildly in the air. Eckhardt owned Ardson Farm adjacent to King Street, just up the hill, through a thicket of trees from where he stood. Worried about the time, Rose ignored the farmer, thinking he was just a lonely hitch- hiker, or worse, some bootlegging bandit. But as he got closer, the farmer persisted in his shouting, forcing Rose to stop. Parking along the narrow shoulder, Rose walked back toward Eckhardt. He noticed three other men standing in the distance near a small clearing. William Burke, one of Eckhardt’s farmhands, stood nearest the scene. Next to him was Richard Short, who worked at a neighboring farm. And far- ther off from the group was Frank Taxter, a twenty-year veteran of the Westchester County Light Company who was casually searching the edges of the woods. The men were all somber faced as they watched Rose approach.

That’s when Rose noticed the body of a young man on the ground. Dressed in a dark-brown suit with thin red stripes and wearing a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck and absent a collar, he lay on his back, looking perfectly composed. His blond hair was slightly disheveled, a cap wedged between the back of his head and the ground’s sandy gravel, his arms tight by his sides with his hands resting on his hips— both palms appeared dusty with sand—and his legs extended stiffly in front of him a few inches apart. Rose noticed how the tips of the man’s shabby and worn shoes pointed skyward. It’s “about the way an undertaker would do it,” Rose thought. But the mysterious man’s eyes betrayed his fate: half-open in a frozen stare looking at the hazy morning sky.

The men were confused by the body’s neat position along the road. Taxter explained how he first came upon the body around 7:00 a.m. while riding with other linemen to a jobsite near the reservoir. He made clear that neither he nor any linemen had touched or moved the body. Taxter stayed behind to find help for the man, walking up to Ardson Farm and calling on Eckhardt, who was also perplexed by how the man could have ended up along the side of the road. He hadn’t heard any- thing unusual in the early-morning hours that could explain the man’s demise. This stretch of road was fairly isolated, and Burke, his farm- hand, lived not more than two hundred feet up the hill, and he said he hadn’t heard any noises that morning except the usual traffic. They thought the man might have been hit by a passing car, though that didn’t explain how his body could be so perfectly composed. It must have been a strange scene along King Street as those five strangers gathered around a corpse as if attending a funeral for a man they did not know.

Being a pharmacist, Rose might have felt a duty to make sure the man was dead. “I reached over and felt his pulse,” he later told authorities. “There was no sign of life. The body was cold,” he remembered. Both Rose and Eckhardt took notice of the man’s frayed and soiled suit and how his shoes were badly worn. While the suit was of a good quality, well-tailored, double-breasted, it had seen better days. Underneath his jacket he wore a tattered vest. Looking into the man’s jacket pocket, Rose noticed a tin cigarette case, but he thought better than to rum- mage through the man’s possessions or explore any further. You might leave fingerprints on the body, Taxter warned. Fingerprinting was a relatively new practice for crime investigations. Lawyers often debated the reliability of such evidence in courts. It was more common to find such evidence in the era’s popular crime novels, which might have been where Taxter learned of it and why he was so concerned. They all noticed the one set of tire tracks in the gravel near the body. The heavy indention of the tracks indicated the car had stopped abruptly, as if the driver sped along and suddenly for some reason picked that spot to brake at the last minute. Nothing indicated a fight or a struggle. They saw no evidence the body might have been dragged or dropped there. Rose got back into his car and told Eckhardt he would call the police once he arrived at the pharmacy in White Plains.

We can imagine how torn Rose might have been, caught between anxious thoughts of his customers pressing their faces against the darkened pharmacy windows and his unease with the scene in front of him. Rose had taken King Street most mornings and could practically drive the route from Chappaqua to White Plains blindfolded. He knew every turn and curve and rough patch. At that moment though, the road seemed completely new and strange, as if he had never passed that spot before, never noticed Ardson Farm, and certainly had never met nor spoken a word to Clarence Eckhardt. But what unsettled the pharmacist the most was the mysterious man’s expression. Rose knew it would be a while before he would forget the image of this young man’s half-open eyes and their lifeless, empty stare into the beautiful May morning. Order now on Amazon, Audible, BookShop.org‍, or ‍Barnes&Noble.