By 1897, telephones, invented twenty years earlier, were coming into common use. There were already more than fifteen thousand in New York City alone—and one of them could be found in the gymnasium of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club.1 When it rang on an evening in April of that year, Harry Cornish answered. The caller was a Newark detective named Joseph Farrell, and his message, as it happened, was for Roland Molineux.
One of the workers at the paint factory had been caught in a raid at the Washington Hotel, a notorious brothel in Newark. This person had given the police Roland’s name and told them where he could be contacted. Farrell, who was on friendly terms with Roland, wanted him “to come to the Newark police station as soon as possible” to resolve the matter.2
By this time, Cornish harbored a powerful antipathy toward Molineux, who had recently persuaded the Board of Governors to strip the athletic director of some of his privileges. Before long, Cornish was telling other club members that Roland made his money as a “rum seller” and that a building Molineux owned in Newark was used as a “disorderly house.”
When Roland got wind of these rumors, he lodged yet another outraged complaint, demanding that Cornish be fired at once. Called before the House Committee, however, Harry denied having made such slanderous remarks and the matter was dropped.
Though Roland was left feeling deeply aggrieved, he had more serious things to worry about than his feud with the detested athletic director. A far more urgent matter was his relationship with the individual who had been arrested in the Jersey City brothel. This person hadn’t been there as a customer but as an employee.
It was Roland’s longtime lover, Mamie Melando.
Even before he learned that she was moonlighting in a whorehouse, Roland had begun to tire of Mamie. Now—by having the police phone him at his club to help get her out of trouble—she had exposed him to public ridicule. And there would soon be another reason why he wished to rid himself of the increasingly burdensome factory girl.
Roland—insofar as he was capable of feeling such an emotion—was about to fall in love.