The Genius (10 page)

“Well, geez. Too bad for me. If you don’t mind, though, I’d still like to find out about Mr. Cracke. Any chance you would like to come by for a bit, just to chat?”

I began to tap my fingers against the desk. “I wish I had more to tell you, but—”

“What about these, eh”—I heard the sound of a newspaper being lifted—“journals. The journals he kept. Are those sold, too?”

“Not yet. I’ve had several offers.” Not completely true. Some collectors had admired the journals, but nobody had put a price on them yet. People wanted objects readily displayed on a wall, not a dense, tedious text.

“Do you think I could see them?”

“If you come to the gallery, I’d be happy to show you,” I said. “Right now I’m afraid I can’t transport them anywhere. They’re falling apart as it is.”

“This isn’t my lucky day, huh.”

“I’m truly sorry,” I said. “Please let me know if there’s another way I can accommodate you.” Something about McGrath’s folksiness made me want to be as formal as possible. “Was there something else I could help you with?”

“Probably not, Mr. Muller. But I have to take a chance and ask you one more time if you’d consider taking a trip out to see me. It’d mean a lot to me. I’m close by.”

Without realizing what I was doing, I said, “Where.”

“Breezy Point. You know where that is?”

I didn’t.

“Rockaways. You take the Belt. You know how to get to the Belt?”

“Mr. McGrath. I didn’t agree to come.”

“Oh. I thought you had.”

“No, sir.”

“Oh. Well, okay then.”

There was a pause. I started to say, “Thanks for calling” but he said, “Don’t you want to know what this is about?”

I sighed. “Okay.”

“It’s about the picture in the paper. The one of the boy.”

I realized he meant the Cherub in the
Times
. “What about him.”

“I know him,” said McGrath. “I know who he is. I recognized him straightaway. His name was Eddie Cardinale. Forty years ago someone strangled him to death, but we never found out who.” He coughed. “Can I give you directions or do you know how to get to the Belt?”

Although technically part of Queens, the long, flat Rockaway peninsula juts beneath Brooklyn’s potbelly, like the concealed feet of a perching waterfowl. To get there you drive through Jacob Riis Park, a marshy preserve more Chesapeake Bay than New York City. Turning northeast takes you to JFK and some of the most ghettoized areas in the Five Boroughs, neighborhoods you’d never think of as dangerous, simply because they abut the beach. How can the beach be dangerous? Go to the Rockaways and you’ll get your answer.

Breezy Point Cooperative sits at the other end of the peninsula, in every sense of the phrase. Nonwhite faces become less common as you head southwest, as does traffic, which thins out as you approach the parking lot. I pulled up in a cab around three. Just outside the entrance to the community was a pub that had drawn a decent crowd. The driver bobbed his head noncommittally when I asked him to wait, or to come back in an hour. As soon as I paid him, he sped away.

I entered a warren of low-slung bungalows and Cape Codders and right away felt the eponymous breeze: cool and briny, whipping up grit from the beach a hundred yards away. My loafers filled with sand as I walked the alleyways, past houses done up with nautical themes: lifesavers and signs carved from weather-beaten teak:
JIM’S CLIPPER
or
THE GOOD SHIP HAL-LORAN
. Irish tricolors abounded.

Later I learned that most of the homeowners are summerfolk who flee after Labor Day. But in mid-August they were still out in droves: out on their cramped porches or down by the boardwalk, sweating and crushing cans of Budweiser and watching towheaded skateboarders dive-bomb the pavement. Charcoal smoke turned the air heavy. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, and nobody knew me. Kids playing basketball on a low hoop with a water-filled base stopped their game and gathered to stare at me, like I had a big scarlet letter on my chest.
N
, perhaps, for
Not Local
.

I got lost looking for McGrath’s house, ending up on the beach beside a memorial to local firefighters killed at the World Trade Center. I shook out my shoes.

“Lost?”

I turned and saw a girl of about nine in denim shorts over a bathing suit.

“I’m looking for Lee McGrath.”

“You mean the professor.”

I said, “If you say so.”

She hooked a finger and went back into the maze. I tried to keep track of her turns but gave up and let myself be led to a shack with a well-kept front yard, peonies and pansies and a lawn cut golf-course close, good enough to make the cover of
Martha Stewart Living
. A hammock with a lumpy pillow hung at the far end of the porch, and behind it an old Coca-Cola sign leaned against the wooden siding. The mailbox out front read MCGRATH; underneath, an NYPD decal. In the front window was a sun-bleached poster of the Twin Towers, an eagle, and an American flag.

I knocked, drawing slow footsteps.

“Thanks for coming.” Though Lee McGrath was not as old as he sounded over the phone, time had not been kind to him. Hairless calves gave him a feminine quality, and slack skin hinted that he had once been a much larger man. He wore a blue terrycloth bathrobe and disintegrating slippers that made a ghostly sound as he turned and shuffled back inside. “Take a load off.”

The interior of the house smelled of ointments, and its clutter didn’t square with the neatly kept yard. Before seating me at the dining-room table, McGrath spent a good five minutes clearing out a workspace, shuttling piles of unopened mail, half-empty paper cups, and pill bottles to the passthrough, one item at a time, a process maddening to watch. I tried to help him but he waved me off, breathing hard and making small talk.

“You find your way okay?” he asked.

“I got help.”

McGrath cackled weakly. “I told you to take directions. Everyone gets lost the first time. It’s an interesting neighborhood but a bitch to walk around. I’ve been here twenty-two years and I still get confused.” He surveyed the exposed stretch of tablecloth and deemed it sufficient. “Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“There’s juice and water, too. Maybe some beer, if you want.”

“I’m okay.” I wanted to leave. Sickness makes me anxious. Watching your mother waste away will do that to you.

“Speak up if you do. Before we get started, mind giving me a hand?”

The back room had a threadbare area rug, a rickety-looking desk, a computer, a small television atop a rolling stand, and two large bookcases, one filled with paperbacks and the other with numbered three-ring binders. A yellow La-Z-Boy looked recently vacated, a John le Carré novel splayed on one arm. Along the far wall hung a dozen or so photographs: a younger, more robust McGrath in a police uniform; McGrath holding two squirming girls; McGrath shaking hands with Mickey Mantle. Several framed service commendations had been crowded in at the side of the display, afterthoughts. The adjacent wall was bare, save a laser-printed wanted poster for Osama bin Laden.

On the floor was a box, cardboard with a woodgrain print. McGrath pointed to it. I hefted it—it weighed a ton—and carried it back to the dining-room table.

“This is a copy of the file on the man who murdered Eddie Cardinale,” he said, sitting. He began taking out clipboards, manila envelopes tied with string, two-inch-thick police reports held together with alligator clips. He took out a stack of black-and-white crime scene photos and turned them over rapidly—but not so rapidly that I failed to notice the carnage.

“Here.” He slid a picture across the table. “Look familiar?”

It did. Every pore on my body opened at once. There was no doubt that the smiling boy in the snapshot was one of the Cherubs from Victor Cracke’s drawing.

My shock must have been obvious, because McGrath sat back, rubbing his unshaven chin.

“Thought so,” he said. “At first I figured I was going crazy. Then I said, ‘Hey, Lee, you ain’t that old yet. You got some brains left. Give the man a call.’ ”

I said nothing.

He said, “Sure you don’t want some juice?”

I shook my head.

“Suit yourself.” He picked up the picture of Eddie Cardinale. “Poor kid. Some things you don’t forget.” He put the photo down, crossed his arms, and smiled at me with an intelligence that belied the Clueless Geezer persona he’d fed me over the phone.

I said, stupidly, “You’re a professor?”

His laughter ended in a coughing fit. “Oh, no. They just call me that.”

“Why?”

“Hell if I know. I think because of my glasses. I have reading glasses.” He pointed to his head, where said glasses resided. “I used to read on the porch, and the neighborhood kids would see me and call me that. BA from City College, that’s me.”

“BA in what?” I preferred asking the questions.

“American history. You?”

“Art history.” I neglected to mention my lack of degree.

"Look at us, buncha historians.”

"Yup."

"Yup.”

“You all right? You look perturbed.”

“I’m not perturbed,” I said. “I
am
a little surprised.”

He shrugged. “Look, I don’t know what it means. It might mean nothing.”

“Then why did you call me up?”

He smiled. “Retirement bores the shit out of me.”

“I honestly don’t know how much I can help you,” I said. “Other than what I told you over the phone, I know nothing about the man.”

I don’t know why I felt so defensive. McGrath hadn’t accused anybody of anything, least of all me. A murder forty years old would have been a bit beyond my reach, unless you believe in karma and reincarnation, and I didn’t have McGrath pegged as the mystic type. (There. I hardboiled a sentence. Aren’t you proud?)

“You must know a little more,” he said. “You wouldn’t pick up some drawings out of a Dumpster and put them up in your gallery.”

“That’s essentially what happened.”

“Did you hope that he’d read the article and show up?”

I shrugged. “It occurred to me that he might.”

“But you haven’t put an ad in the paper or anything.”

“No.”

“Aha.” I got the sense that he thought I had manufactured the “missing artist” story for publicity. On some level he was right. I wasn’t lying when I told people that Victor was missing. I had stopped looking, though.

“If that really is the case,” McGrath said, “then I might be wasting your time.”

“As I told you this morning.”

“Well, my sincere apologies.” He did not appear sorry at all; he appeared to be sizing me up. “Since you’re here already, let me tell you a little about Eddie Cardinale.”

EDWARD HOSEA CARDINALE, b. January 17, 1956. Residing 34-17 Seventy-fourth Street, Jackson Heights, Borough of Queens, Queens County, New York City, New York. P.S. 069; good kid; well liked. In his class photo he’s a prepubescent Ricky Ricardo; big, pointy collar and slicked-back hair, smile revealing a slender gap between his two front teeth.

On the evening of August 2, 1966, a Tuesday night in the middle of a crushing heat wave, Eddie’s mother, Isabel, sits on the stoop of their apartment, her shirt dusty and creased from bending constantly to pick up litter or toys. She is worried. The twins have just learned to walk, and keeping track of them is a full-time job. To give herself room to think, she sent Eddie to the park with his baseball glove, telling him to be back by six.

Now it is eight thirty and he is nowhere in sight. She asks her next-door neighbor to keep an eye on the twins and goes out looking for her eldest son.

An hour later Eddie’s father, Dennis, a shift manager at a Brooklyn sugar factory, comes home from work and, upon being told of Eddie’s disappearance, goes out to have a look of his own. Isabel stays back to phone the parents of Eddie’s friends. According to boys who’d been at the park, the game lasted roughly from one until five, when everyone broke up to walk home. Nobody saw Eddie all day.

At ten P.M. the Cardinales phone the police. Two officers are dispatched to the residence, where they take statements and a description. Patrolmen are notified to be on the lookout for a boy of ten, black hair, wearing a blue shirt and blue jeans and carrying a baseball glove.

Initially, police speculate that Eddie, unhappy with the amount of time his mother has been spending with his younger brothers, has run away to get attention and will likely turn up within a half-mile radius. The Cardinales adamantly maintain that their son is too mature to pull such a stunt—a belief confirmed in the most gruesome way imaginable three days later, when a caretaker at Saint Michael’s finds a body just outside the cemetery grounds, near the Grand Central Parkway. An autopsy reveals semen on the buttocks and thighs, as well as traces of semen and blood on the victim’s jeans and underwear. A broken hyoid bone and severe bruising around the neck indicate manual strangulation as the cause of death.

However sensational and titillating the case might be, it does not spread beyond the local papers. Another, far more sensational crime is already hogging the national news: Charles Whitman’s sniper massacre at the University of Texas, Austin. Only so much dark territory exists in the modern American consciousness, and for a few weeks in the summer of 1966, Whitman has staked out the entire plot. The murder of Eddie Cardinale goes cold.

MC GRATH SAID, “He wasn’t the first.”

I did not look up from the stack of crime scene photos, which McGrath had handed to me as he talked. I saw Eddie; Eddie’s mother and father, both of them hollowed out; I saw the body, so ungraceful in death, like a broken violin. According to McGrath, the heat had accelerated decomposition, turning a slender, good-looking boy into a bloated sack, his face inhuman. I decided that the photos were half Weegee and half Diane Arbus, and then I remembered that I was looking at a dead child, a real dead child, not a piece of art. And then I remembered that Weegee and Diane Arbus had been looking at real people, too. Only my lack of familiarity with the subjects made their pictures suitable for looking at. Now that I knew Eddie Cardinale, I found him hard to look at.