Charles Devereaux.

Devereaux and Clayton had been business partners and Knickerbocker Club brothers for thirty years. Together they ran Devereaux-Clayton Investments out of the same reading room where Clayton would die. For four months, Clayton had been quietly auditing Devereaux's transactions. He found $84,000 in misdirected funds. He scheduled a confrontation for Monday, December 8th. After that, the evidence would have gone to federal prosecutors and Devereaux would have been ruined.

Devereaux found out. On the night of December 6th, he asked his oldest friend for a private drink in the reading room. Clayton had no reason to refuse. They sat together. Devereaux poured the brandy. He lit a Romeo y Julieta from the club's tobacconist. He waited until Clayton turned to look at the bookshelves, took the senator's own pistol from the desk drawer where Clayton always kept it, and fired one shot.

Then Devereaux did what he thought was clever. He typed a note on the club library's typewriter — 'I'm sorry. It's all gone. — H.' He placed the gun in Clayton's right hand. Devereaux had known the senator for thirty years and somehow never registered that the man signed every document with his left. He left through the side staircase past the kitchens, locked the reading room door behind him with his member's key, and walked twelve blocks to the Stork Club. He arrived at 12:05 AM and ordered oysters. He had been there before, the same way, the same time. The pattern was the alibi.

What gave him away: the gun in the wrong hand, the second brandy glass he hadn't time to wash, the trace of cigar ash on a windowsill belonging to a non-smoker, and the page of the ledger Clayton had hidden in his portfolio — the proof of embezzlement that gave Devereaux his only motive worth killing over.

Charles Devereaux was indicted on December 9th, 1947. He confessed before trial. The fund's $84,000 was returned to its investors, including the senator's widow.

The Long Goodnight closes here.

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