Deranged by Harold Schechter Read Free Book Online

George, baby Beatrice, and—the flower of the family—little Grace, a sweet-tempered ten-year-old, strikingly pretty in spite of her city-child’s sallowness.
    All seven Budds inhabited a cramped apartment at the rear of 406 West 15th Street at the edge of Manhattan’s Chelsea district. The apartment was overheated in the winter and—in the pre-air-conditioned days of 1928—unbearably oppressive in the summer. Young Edward had resolved to spend the summer outside of the city, away from its ceaseless clatter, rotting-garbage smells, and deadening heat. He had been working part-time as a truck drive but had no regular job. What he wanted most was a few months of fresh country air and a chance to work his muscles. He wanted to spend to spend the summer on a farm. The question was how to secure such a position. And the answer, proposed by his mother, was to take out a classified ad.
    And so, on Friday, May, 25, 1928, the teenager rode the subway to the offices of the New York World, where he arranged to have a one-line classified inserted into Sunday’s edition: “Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street.”
    Two days later, his notice appeared in the “Situations Wanted” section of the newspaper’s morning edition, and Edward, after satisfying himself that his ad had been printed as scheduled, went off to spend the day with his buddies, confident that his classified would do the trick.
    On that same Sunday, in a different part of the city, an elderly man at a rickety kitchen table, studying, as he did every day, the classifieds in the New York Work World. When he got to Edward Budd’d ad he stopped and read it again. And then again.
    To anyone else’s eyes, there would have been nothing notable about the ad, except, perhaps, for its simple reflection of old-fashioned American virtues—industry, youthful ambition, a feel for the outdoors.
    It look a mind already hopelessly lost to sanity to attach a very different meaning to it and to feel, at the sight of those innocent words, an overpowering thrill of malignant desire.

5

    The soul of the wicked desireth evil: his neighbors fundeth no favor in his eyes. PROVERBS 21:10
    At around 3:30 in the afternoon of the following day—Monday, May 28, 1928—someone knocked on the door of the Budds’ apartment.
    Seated on the creaky double bed she shared with her husband, Delia Budd was folding up underwear from a shapeless pile of freshly washed laundry that sprawled at her side. The day was warm and muggy, and Mrs. Budd, whose bulk made the heat even harder to bear, had undone the top few buttons of her tentlike cotton house-dress. Even so she found herself pausing every few moments to swab the sweat from her neck with a balled-up hanky. Through the plaster wall behind her, she could hear the muffled squeals of her youngest daughter, Beatrice, playing in the adjacent bedroom. The rest of the family was away from home, at work or with friends.
    At the sound of the knock, Mrs. Budd raised herself with a little groan from the buckled mattress and made her way slowly to the door. Before she reached, it the rapping again.
    “Just a minute,” she called.
    Rebuttoning the top of her flower-printed housedress, Mrs. Budd pulled the door open. There stood a small, elderly stranger, dressed in a dark suit and black felt hat. A folded newspaper was tucked under one arm. In the dusk of the tenement hallway, he looked impressively well-to-do and dapper. Mrs. Budd was unaccustomed to such nicely dress callers. Instinctively, she reached up and patted at her shapeless hair.
    “Can I Help you?” Mrs. Budd asked.
    The elderly gentlemen reached under his arm, removed the newspaper, and held it out to Mrs. Budd, as though he had dropped by to deliver it.
    “I am looking for a young fellow named Edward Budd. I read his ad in yesterday’s paper.”
    “You come to the right place. I’m his mother.”
    The little man removed his hat and bowed slightly,