Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer by Harold Schechter Page B

often enough, but he didn’tseem to know how to laugh. Instead of opening his mouth, he would tighten his lips together and make a faint snuffling sound through his nose, like someone clearing his sinuses. He did this now in response to Albert Budd’s question.
    “That’s right,” he said happily. “Those products come direct from my farm.”
    Howard was invited to stay for a potluck lunch. Eddie was over on Seventeenth Street, Mrs. Budd explained, playing stickball with some friends, but he had promised to be home by noon. Removing his hat, the old man said he would be pleased to join the family for their meal. Mrs. Budd excused herself and bustled off to the kitchen, carrying the treats that Howard had brought.
    “I’d be interested to hear more about that farm of yours, Mr. Howard,” said Albert Budd, motioning his visitor toward the sofa.
    “I hope the boy wasn’t too disappointed about yesterday,” the old man said. “I was over in New Jersey buying horses.” He was about to seat himself on the sofa when he stopped, as if struck by a sudden thought. “That message I sent,” he asked. “Do you know if the boy threw it away?”
    Why no, replied Mr. Budd. It hadn’t been thrown away. Eddie had stuck it over there, on the mantelpiece.
    Frank Howard nodded, then did something that would stick in Mr. Budd’s mind, though at the time he didn’t attach much significance to it. Stepping over to the mantel, the little man picked up the message, glanced at it for a moment, then casually slipped it into the pocket of his suit jacket and walked back to the sofa, where he carefully lowered himself onto the cushion with a sigh.
    Mr. Budd settled into the easy chair facing the sofa. Then, as he listened raptly, Frank Howard proceeded to paint the same beguiling picture he had evoked for Delia Budd the previous Monday—a vision of his twenty fertile acres, his teeming colony of fat Rhode Island Reds, his fecund dairy cows, his lush fields of produce, his crew of happy workers, his Swedish cook. Poor and uneducated, a simple man who had spent his life toilingat the most menial jobs, Albert Budd could only shake his head and make admiring sounds.
    This Frank Howard, thought Budd, might not look like much. With his stooped and shrunken frame, he certainly didn’t look like a successful farmer. But clearly he was a man of substance. Albert Budd—accustomed in his work life to assuming a submissive manner in the presence of the businessmen and financiers he served—responded to his visitor with a deeply ingrained and automatic deference.
    A short time later Mrs. Budd appeared in the doorway, announced that lunch was ready, and ordered little Beatrice to go and wash her hands. The men retired to the kitchen, a clean but dingy-looking room, illuminated by a single bare bulb that tinged the whitewashed walls a sickly yellow. The long wooden table, covered with a plaid oilcloth, held a big cast-iron pot full of ham hocks and sauerkraut—the warmed-over remains of the previous night’s dinner. The sharp, briny odor of the cabbage filled the room. Arranged around the pot were platters of pickled beets and boiled carrots, a basket of hard rolls, and two ceramic bowls into which Mrs. Budd had transferred Frank Howard’s pot cheese and strawberries.
    The Budds and their guest had just seated themselves at the table when they heard the front door open and somebody enter the apartment and proceed down the hallway to the living room. The person was humming a sweet, buoyant tune, and the voice, fragile and bright, clearly belonged to a young girl.
    “That’ll be Gracie,” said Mrs. Budd, and called her daughter’s name.
    A moment later, Grace Budd stood in the kitchen doorway.
    Everyone who set eyes on little Grace for the first time was struck by two things: her prettiness and her pallor. She had an invalid’s complexion, the look of a child who had spent too much of her life surrounded by concrete and brick and was in need