The Murder Room (11 page)

Fleisher’s brown eyes softened. “Everyone dreams of something.”

“Vicki Harbin was stabbed in the heart. It was a professional hit.”

“It’s terrible, but so what?” Fleisher shot back. “Is it a white-slavery case? Otherwise, it’s a Boston homicide, a police case.”

Scanlon frowned. “Until a black man by the name of Orange Harbin—”

“Orange?”

“The same. Mr. Orange Harbin, Vicki’s husband and by all accounts a fine gentleman, walks into the Boston PD last week and tells the desk sergeant his wife was killed on orders of the Baltimore gangster Bernie Brown.”

Fleisher’s eyebrows went up. “Wild Bernie Brown?”

Scanlon nodded.

“He’s quite a package,” said Fleisher. “Murder. Extortion. The rackets. Wild Bernie is about as mobbed-up as you can get without being Italian. He’s not a made guy, but he’s kicking money upstairs to someone, paying the street tax. I think he might be Jewish.”

“Whatever. Baltimore says Vicki was testifying against Brown before a federal grand jury,” Scanlon said.

Fleisher whistled. “The murder of a federal witness. He thought of a very effective way to shut her up. I guess Bernie’s still not going to choir practice on Sunday. He’s not flossing before he brushes.”

Scanlon was stone-faced. One of Fleisher’s weaknesses was he thought he was funny. It was part of his charm with informants. A bad joke or pun made them even more comfortable than a good one.

“They’re bringing in a lot of witnesses to the grand jury, putting the squeeze on him,” Scanlon said. “Bernie’s the king of the bust-out bars. The bar girl hangs on you all night selling a fantasy, but you never go home with her. She just busts out your wallet for watered-down gin. So the grand jury is after the bust-out bar empire, and Wild Bernie is busy knocking off witnesses.”

“More than one?”

“Talk to Baltimore. Before Harbin, they put a contract out on another witness down there, some guy involved in the bars. They put a bomb under the seat of his car, enough to obliterate him and a Buick. They didn’t want to kill his wife, so they figured this guy works at night, he’d turn the lights on and—
boom
—he’s in the next zip code. What they didn’t figure on was the wife, who’s a night person, too, sets the alarm, gets up early the next morning, and takes the car in for inspection. The mechanic checks the lights and
boom
—”

“They killed the mechanic?”

“No, only the blasting cap went off. Moisture might have got in it. It sounded like a cherry bomb, ripped up the seat, burned the guy’s ass, and scared the hell out of him. He was lucky.”

“So Vicki Harbin saw the handwriting on the wall and ran up to Boston and a new life in the Avery Hotel?”

“Right. The question is, what crawled out from under a rock and followed her? It’s the $64,000 question.”

“Nah,” Fleisher said. “It won’t cost that much.” He said he’d work his sources. “I bullshit with them all the time. They like me. Everybody likes me.” He grinned. “I don’t pay for it in the Combat Zone.”

 

Fleisher drove to the Bradford Hotel on Tremont Street. A Boston landmark built in the 1920s, the redbrick neoclassical hotel that was once “In the Heart of the City.” In the 1940s, big bands played on the rooftop and in Boston’s largest ballroom. Now the Bradford was a hooker hotel in the heart of a living hell.

Fleisher had learned from FBI agents in Baltimore that Brown had sent his enforcer, Jack Sugarman, up to Boston to find Harbin. Sugarman was a World War II Marine hero from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who came back from the war and ended up a gangster’s right-hand man. According to informants, Sugarman was the finger man—he went to Boston to find the dancer and point her out to the hit man. The hit man was Hans Vorhauer, whom Fleisher had never heard of. Baltimore said he was the best in the business. When the fax came in from the Baltimore office, Fleisher was chilled by the killer’s eyes in facsimile.

The Bradford was a sad twin sister to the nearby Avery. He figured it was the most likely place Sugarman would have stayed—if indeed the enforcer had come to Boston.

He would never stay in the Avery with the victim, and the Bradford is in the area of the Combat Zone,
he thought to himself.
A lot of hookers, pimps, and miscreants stay here.

“Hey, Bill, what do you want?” Paul, the hotel manager, a tall, balding man with stooped shoulders, stopped him near the elevators.

“I need to see the records.” Fleisher shook hands with the manager.

“More hookers?”

He nodded, but the manager had already turned around and was briskly leading him downstairs into a gloomy hallway. The hotel manager was a friend.

He’d helped Fleisher make his name working white-slavery cases. The White Slavery Act made transporting women across state lines for prostitution an interstate, or federal, crime. Along with tax violations, it was a favorite federal tool for tripping up gangsters; Lucky Luciano and Al Capone were arrested on white-slavery charges.

On one case, Fleisher had approached Paul with photographs, saying, “Have you seen these two women? I have a lead they’re hookers in town from Minneapolis.” To prevent the cops from zeroing in on them in their home cities, white slaves followed a circuit like a troupe—Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans.

“They’re here right now, come with me!” the manager had cried. He took the elevator to the fifth floor, then walked down the long hallway. Reaching their room, the manager had started banging on the door screaming, “Get out of my hotel, you whores!”

Now Paul led him to a small, dusty room and put three long cardboard banker’s boxes on a table in front of him. The boxes were stuffed with the hotel’s three-by-five registration cards, stacked and bundled with rubber bands. Fleisher riffled through three stacks of the cards for the previous month with great impatience, working rapidly.

Three weeks before the murder there was a chicken-scrawl signature reserving three nights:
Jack Sugarman.

Two weeks before the murder, another three nights:
Jack Sugarman.

The week of the murder, just one night:
Jack Sugarman.

Bingo,
he thought.
I’ve got Sugarman in town. The first time he comes up from Baltimore to stake Vicki out, see what she’s doing. The second time, he works on her schedule, gets her hours and habits down. The third visit is brief—he points her out to Vorhauer.
It would be trickier proving Vorhauer’s whereabouts. Vorhauer was a wanted fugitive and master of disguise; he would never have used his real name.

That evening Fleisher went to the dim, smoky cave of the Caribe Lounge, the best known of the Combat Zone’s nude bars. A young redhead was dancing on a small stage circled with men watching through clouds of cigarette smoke. The redhead would occasionally flash her G-string and pasties—total nudity was banned in Boston—but not with a cop in the room. George Tecci, the owner-manager, stopped him cold near the door.

“What do you want?” Tecci asked, his lip curled in distaste.

Fleisher took out his wallet and showed his badge. “FBI, I’m looking for Cinderella.”

“What about?”

“I want to talk to her about the murder of Vicki Harbin, who danced at 222.” He showed Tecci a portrait photograph of the dancer, a brunette with a round, aging face. As the manager led him downstairs to the dressing rooms, a tall woman in her twenties, at least six feet in heels, blond and buxom, came walking toward them with a leonine grace that took his breath away. She was the sexiest woman Fleisher had ever seen, and when he studied her face, one of the prettiest.

“Cinderella, this fellow wants to talk to you,” Tecci said. She smiled—she had high and delicate cheekbones, and her smile was dazzling. The eyes were big and blue and brittle. Fleisher took the portrait out of his folder.

“I understand you were a friend of Vicki Harbin’s?” Cinderella’s smile disappeared as she led him to her dressing room.

“I don’t know anything.”

They sat in the mirror lights, so close Fleisher breathed her scent, and he gave her his warmest, most sympathetic smile. She was a knockout and she was sweet and she liked him; he could feel it behind the hard eyes. Their legs were almost touching. She had incredible legs. He looked closer in the hazy light and focus returned like a blow to the head—
Her Adam’s apple is the size of Johnny Appleseed’s,
he thought.
Her hands are as big as Sonny Liston’s.
A fantasy about a he-she, he thought, could wake you up like twenty-four ounces of cold coffee.

When had she last seen Harbin?

Her eyes were dead. “I don’t know anything.”

Was Harbin afraid of Bernie Brown?

“I don’t know anything.”

Had she seen these two men? He took out the faxed photos of Sugarman and Vorhauer.

“I don’t know anything.” It sounded like a mantra to an empty universe.

Fleisher knew it would be difficult. According to his sources, Cinderella’s husband was Bobby Urbin, a doorman for Bernie Brown. He watched the gangster’s door in Baltimore and “ran a card game for some wise guys in Boston,” Fleisher said. He and Cinderella traveled the circuit together.

“You don’t know anything, but now you know this. Let me show you what they did to your friend Vicki.”

He reached into the folder for the close-up of Harbin with the knife wounds in her heart.

Cinderella let out a small gasp and put a hand over her mouth; the big blue eyes were moist.

“I’m trying to find out who killed Vicki. Here’s my name and number. Call me if you want to help.” She said nothing as he gave her his card and left.

It was time, he thought as he got in his car, to put pressure on Cinderella and her husband.

At ten that night, he drove to the 222 Club. The bouncer—a squat, heavyset man, five foot three inches tall and nearly as wide—stopped him at the door. He wore thick glasses on a pudgy round face, had hair dyed a shade too dark, a cigarette hung on fleshy lips, and had a blackjack in his back pocket. One of his brown eyes wandered in the socket like a satellite to the moon face.

“Cockeyed Benny,” Fleisher said in greeting. They shook hands warmly. “I’m looking into the murder of Vicki Harbin, and I’m looking for these guys.” He held up photos of Sugarman and Vorhauer.

Cockeyed Benny nodded at the picture of Sugarman. “He was here.” Sugarman left the 222 with a hooker, Benny said; he’d watched them walk out. He took her back to the Bradford, and “he paid her with a check that bounced.”

“Do you know Bobby Urbin?”

Cockeyed Benny grunted. “Sure. He’s always in here.” Fleisher had never met Cinderella’s husband and didn’t have a photograph of him. He and Cockeyed Benny worked out a signal that evening. Fleisher would sit at a table with a drink, Benny would stand at the bar; when Bobby Urbin walked by, the bouncer would light a cigarette. Just as Urbin strolled by, Benny lit up, but at that moment some guy at the bar passed out, and a crowd formed. Cockeyed Benny waded into the crowd with Fleisher and tapped Urbin on the shoulder; Fleisher said, “FBI. I want to ask you some questions,” and hustled him out of the 222 and into a car. Fleisher sat in the back pumping Urbin with questions, while the street hustler put his hand inside Fleisher’s thigh.

I’ll let him do it to get the story,
he thought, amused.
He likes me, too. They all like me.
But Urbin refused to talk about the Harbin murder. He had to let him go.

Frustrated, Fleisher went back to FBI headquarters and called Frank Mulvee, the Boston police detective assigned to the case, and told him Urbin had knowledge of the murder and marijuana in his apartment, a tip he had gleaned on the street.

The next morning, the police raided Urbin’s apartment; Urbin and Cinderella were both at home, and Mulvee called the FBI agent. Fleisher went to the apartment and tried to get Urbin to cooperate in the Harbin murder. “You don’t know anything,” Fleisher said. “I don’t believe you, and neither do the police. Why don’t you just take a polygraph?”

“Oh, Bobby, take the test,” Cinderella chimed in. Boston police took him to a private examiner; the polygraphist attached the blood-pressure cuff, the pneumograph tubes across the chest and abdomen, the electric sensor plates on the fingertips. Urbin answered a few questions, then ripped off all the instruments and ran out of the office. They had only one chart on him, but it showed clear deception.

Fleisher’s head was spinning. He had placed Sugarman, the finger man, in town, but nobody had seen the hit man Vorhauer; Vorhauer was a ghost. Brown’s people were scurrying like rats from a ship. The police couldn’t find Urbin. He had failed to get Harbin’s friends to talk. Finally he got the name of a dancer who knew Vicki intimately—Terri Emanuel, a gorgeous copper-toned young woman, half Filipino, half Cajun American, half man, half woman until recently; now Terri was as pretty as Cinderella. He put her at the top of his interview list.

That night he was at a bar with two friends, deputy agent in charge U.S. Marshal Mike Assad, and his brother Eddie, a Boston cop, when an extremely shapely woman walked by their table. The three bachelors whistled as they watched her go, then sucked in their breath for a moment of silent contemplation.

“You think she’s endowed,” Fleisher said, “you should have seen the knockout I interviewed at the Caribe the other night, Cinderella.”

“Cinderella, pretty name,” Mike said.

“She makes this one look like a schoolteacher, and she’s a guy.”

Mike and Eddie groaned.

“That’s strange,” Eddie said. “We had a job this morning, before dawn, a mysterious death of a woman and she was a he-she, too.”

“What was her name?”

“Terri Emanuel.”

“Jesus Christ!” Fleisher cried. “I’m supposed to interview her.”

After pressing Eddie for details, Fleisher left the table and called Mulvee from a pay phone. He agreed to meet the Boston detective at police headquarters. At two in the morning, the police report gave them the address where Emanuel’s body was found. She lived in an apartment with some guy named Art Nettles.