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to feel clean so they passedalong a change of clothes delivered each morning to the jail doors by his valet. He disliked Negroes so they made sure no Negro prisoner was lodged near his cell. Thaw was not unmindful of the guards’ kindnesses. He showed his gratitude not discreetly but with impeccable style, crumpling and tossing twenty-dollar bills at his feet and telling them what swine they were as they stooped to retrieve the money. They were very happy. Reporters asked their views when they left the Tombs at the end of a shift. And each afternoon when Evelyn arrived looking crisp in her high-collared shirtwaist and pleated linen skirt the husband and wife would be permitted to stroll back and forth across the Bridge of Sighs, the iron catwalk that connected the Tombs with the Criminal Courts Building. Thaw walked with a dipping, pigeon-toed gait, like someone with brain damage. He had the wide mouth and doll eyes of a Victorian closet queen. Sometimes they saw him gesticulate wildly while Evelyn stood with her head bowed, her face in shadow under her hat. Sometimes he would ask for use of the consultation room. The guard whose station was just outside the consultation room door with its small porthole window claimed that Thaw sometimes cried and sometimes he held Evelyn’s hand. Sometimes he paced back and forth and beat his fists against his temples while she gazed through the barred window. Once he demanded proof of her devotion and it turned out nothing else would do but a fellatio. Abutted by Thaw’s belly Evelyn’s broad-brimmed hat with its topping of driedflowers in tulle slowly tore away from her coiffure. Afterwards he brushed the sawdust from the front of her skirt and gave her some bills from his money clip.
    Evelyn told reporters who met her outside the Tombs that her husband Harry K. Thaw was innocent. His trial will prove my husband Harry K. Thaw is innocent, she said one day stepping into the electric hansom provided her by her august mother-in-law. The chauffeur closed the door. In the privacy of the car she wept. She knew better than anyone how innocent Harry was. She had agreed to testify in his behalf for the sum of two hundred thousand dollars. And her price for a divorce was going to be even higher. She ran her fingertips over the car upholstery. Her tears dried. A strange bitter exaltation suffused her, a cold victory grin of the heart. She had grown up playing in the streets of a Pennsylvania coal town. She was the Gaudens statue Stanny White had put at the top of the tower of Madison Square Garden, a glorious bronze nude Diana, her bow drawn, her face in the skies.
    Coincidentally this was the time in our history when the morose novelist Theodore Dreiser was suffering terribly from the bad reviews and negligible sales of his first book,
Sister Carrie
. Dreiser was out of work, broke and too ashamed to see anyone. He rented a furnished room in Brooklyn and went to live there. He took to sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of the room. One day he decided his chair was facing in the wrong direction. Raising his weight from the chair, he lifted it with his two hands and turned it to the right, to align it properly. For a moment he thought the chair wasaligned, but then he decided it was not. He moved it another turn to the right. He tried sitting in the chair now but it still felt peculiar. He turned it again. Eventually he made a complete circle and still he could not find the proper alignment for the chair. The light faded on the dirty window of the furnished room. Through the night Dreiser turned his chair in circles seeking the proper alignment.

5

    T he impending Thaw trial was not the only excitement down at the Tombs. Two of the guards in their spare time had fashioned new leg irons that they claimed were better than the standard equipment. To prove it they challenged Harry Houdini himself to put them to the test. The magician arrived one morning at the office of the Warden of the Tombs