The Murder Room (13 page)

Third, he would become a blond.

 

“A
blond
?” Tom Rappone, the head of the U.S. Marshals Service in Philadelphia, looked quizzically at Bender when he handed him the final sketch of Vorhauer that afternoon. It was a black-and-white sketch; there was no time to blend pastel colors, Bender explained. Still, the charcoal shading indicated light blond hair.

“This is what Vorhauer looks like,” Bender said defensively. “If you catch him within two weeks, he’s going to be bleached blond.”

“Blond.” Rappone flashed a humorless smile beneath dark, probing eyes. The deputies were constantly amused by Bender’s off-the-wall ideas and visions, but this was a topper. A mob hit man disguised as the Breck girl.

“He’s Aryan and proud of his Germanic heritage,” Bender said. “The skin coloring is right,” he insisted. “He’s also an artist, very creative.”

Rappone waited as if there must be more. Bender’s face reddened. He didn’t get timid when his psychic visions were questioned; he got mad, and sometimes he got even.

“I learned from Fleisher that when he was with the FBI in Boston they tailed Vorhauer to a lot of gay and transsexual bars,” he said. “Vorhauer wasn’t gay, he was recruiting enforcers. But he looks way too straight. Going blond would allow him to pass in tranny bars. Tom, I’m telling you, he’s going to bleach his hair.”

Rappone shrugged and made copies of the blond hit man for his agents. When Schneider saw the sketch, he sported a wide grin. “We believe in you, Frank, but an assistant DA says this is a joke, and a lot of the guys think you’re nuts.”

Bender smiled with his sheepish look that swayed moral women of all ages.

 

Bender was still struggling to perfect the Vorhauer bust a week later when the phone rang in the vast warehouse studio. It was Rappone, with the news that the task force’s long surveillance of Barbara Vorhauer had borne fruit. She had led the marshals right to her husband.

“You’re kidding me! What happened? ” The artist’s voice, childlike in its enthusiasms, rang across the line.

A night-shift nurse at Osteopathic Hospital, Barbara had gotten off work early in the morning as usual. But instead of taking her routine route home, she’d raced along a twisting, helter-skelter path designed to shake surveillance. Trained by Hans, Barbara had proven remarkably adept at avoiding the marshals for months.

But this time they kept pace with hairpin turns and U-turns, up blind alleys, and into the parking lot of the Penrose Diner. Barbara got out of her car and entered the diner. When she came out, she left her car in the parking lot and walked across the street to the Quality Inn, a twelve-story cylindrical edifice. Hans Vorhauer had picked the round hotel with views in all directions for a tryst with his wife.

Rappone posted a nondescript surveillance van in the hotel parking lot intending to wait out Vorhauer. The day wore on, and inside the van, four heavily armed U.S. Marshals kept a relentless eye on the hotel entrance, unable to leave the van even to use the bathroom. Any unusual movement would spook Vorhauer into fleeing. The surveillance continued all night long. By morning, Rappone had called for backup.

At 10 A.M., Vorhauer and his wife walked out of the hotel and were immediately surrounded by U.S. Marshals. The hit man raised his hands in surrender. He was wearing a light jacket, a hat, and sunglasses, and when he removed the hat his hairstyle was dramatically different: It was cut short and bleached blond.

 

“Good work, Visual Detective. I don’t know how you do it,” said a still-stunned Schneider, who had dropped by the studio to congratulate his artist partner. “A lot of people owe you an apology.”

“Good work yourself,” Bender said. “You’re the best detective I’ve ever worked with.”

“Want to go get a beer?”

“Nah, I’ve got to paint this head.”

Schneider looked at the bust of a dead man with a familiar face. “The Man in the Cornfield,” Bender called the unidentified white male in his twenties whose corpse had been found by a farmer plowing his fields in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Over the weeks they had worked together on the Vorhauer case, Schneider had watched him transform the skull of the Man in the Cornfield into a clay mold and finally a plaster cast. The white plaster bust had a heroic profile, a handsome long-haired young man with a strong jaw and a noble nose. The Man in the Cornfield looked like Theseus about to face the Minotaur. “Now that you’ve found Vorhauer”—Bender nodded toward the head—“maybe you can find out who this guy is.”

Schneider smirked. “You know nothing about him, right?”

“Nope, nothing.”

Lines of discontent etched the sides of the detective’s mouth. “Yeah, right. Tens of thousands of missing people in this country, and you want me to pull him out of a hat. I’m no magician. You think you are?”

The artist’s eyes glittered. “No, it’s a team effort.”

 

On his way home from Bender’s Philadelphia studio, Schneider stopped at the Upper Darby Police Department to get his mail. He hadn’t been to the station in weeks. When he wasn’t on loan to the U.S. Marshals Service, Schneider worked as a township detective, and because of his years investigating the Warlocks—and Vorhauer’s fellow escapee Nauss—Schneider was chosen as a key member of the Vorhauer and Nauss fugitive task forces. He was known in the department as an expert on biker gangs. As soon as he walked in the door, an officer hailed him to look at a photograph in a missing-person flyer. The officer said he’d just learned from an informant that the missing person in the flyer was a man named Edward Meyers, who had been killed by a biker gang and buried in the Pennsylvania hills.

“This is the guy. Do you know him?”

Schneider’s face opened in surprise. Staring out at him from the photograph was the Man in the Cornfield. “No, I don’t know him, but I saw him not fifteen minutes ago in Frank Bender’s studio.”

Oblivious to his colleague’s smirks and wisecracks, Schneider returned to the studio, and he and Bender held the flyer photograph alongside the bust. The Man in the Cornfield was a double for Edward Meyers. Police would match Meyers’s dental records to the skull and confirm it.

“We’re on a roll, Visual Detective,” Schneider said. He had been a step behind Nauss for many frustrating years during the biker’s reign of terror on his home turf. He saw this as his big chance. “Now we’ve got to find Nauss.”

“Piece of cake, partner.” Bender beamed in pride, his silver incisor winking in his own skull.

Bender and Schneider were secretly excited about their chances of finally nabbing Vorhauer’s partner, the convicted killer Robert Thomas Nauss. Their enthusiasm was not dampened by the fact that the cunning Nauss had been on the lam for years after the prison break without once being seen by law enforcement, or that there was no reliable new information about his whereabouts or appearance. Nothing.

Success was all but assured, though it wasn’t something they could discuss with most cops. It had been foretold by a psychic.

The psychic was Penny Wright, a nearly blind woman who had helped Schneider on several cases. The marshal had taken Bender to meet her several weeks earlier, and she had predicted that they would capture their next fugitive in a building with a large column. After the Vorhauer arrest at the Quality Inn, Schneider and Bender realized the hotel’s unusual architecture was itself a large column. With new significance, they recalled Wright’s other prediction that after the column arrest the next fugitive they would catch would be a man with a bad stomach. Schneider was fired with excitement. “Nauss was shot in the stomach by a fellow Warlock gang member when he was younger,” he said. “I bet his stomach is giving him trouble.”

Bender agreed. Schneider looked at his Visual Detective partner with a widening sense of possibilities. He’d been chasing fugitives for a decade, to country safe houses and urban hideaways, against impossible odds. But now it seemed that even the Most Wanted criminals were merely hiding in folds and twists in time, their movements apparent to the strangely light-colored eyes of Frank Bender.

“Mr. Nauss,” Schneider said, “must be the Man with the Bad Stomach.”

Bender grinned.

“No doubt.”

A
fter midnight, Bender took Joan to the white underground room. They danced and drank vodka in clear glasses. Outside the wind wailed over the dark shuttered row houses and dying river. They watched David Lynch’s
Blue Velvet.
Bender was reminded of Lynch’s dark but lovely Philadelphia vision and felt it “downloading” into him. “Philadelphia [is] . . . fantastically beautiful,” the filmmaker wrote. “Factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters, the darkest night . . . so much fear and crime that just for a moment there was an opening to another world . . . I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and . . . I hear the wind, and I’m off into the darkness somewhere.” It was a blast of energy, but nothing helped.

In the middle of the night Joan returned home to her husband and two children in New Jersey. Bender crawled into bed with Jan for a brief, tortured rest. The sun rose pale and fractured by the dirt-streaked skylights. It was July, the steaming summer of 1987, and nothing could possibly help. His muse was gone.

“The Harmony of Form” was the name he gave his muse. Harmony was the blissful grace that allowed him to feel the inevitable shape of a dead man’s mouth based on the eyes and nose. He entered a trancelike state of creation that others mistook for God-like arrogance. In fact, in these moments Bender felt the lowest humility and love for the implicit order of things. “There’s a harmony flowing through everything: art, music, shape. Sometimes you can just feel the way things are and ought to be,” he said. Sometimes not. And then he was like a junkie standing before the last clinic cut from the budget.

Without his muse, the half-formed head of the sadistic killer Robert Thomas Nauss was a stubborn scornful lump of undead clay, a brown-mud Beelzebub. The reborn killer, of Bender’s own creation, seemed to be hiding from his true form, mocking him in a battle of wills. He felt like he lived with the spirit of his subjects, and Nauss was proving even trickier and nastier than Vorhauer. He was staring at the Warlock’s merciless clay eyes when the telephone scattered the cats in the shadows of the warehouse.

“Frank Bender.” His voice was clear and strong, an inverse of the chaos around him. The man on the phone introduced himself as Bob Leschorn, chief inspector of the U.S. Marshals Service at headquarters in McLean, Virginia. He sounded smooth and businesslike, with that commanding charm that’s a half size too small to cover the blunt impatience of power.

“I’ve heard about your work on Vorhauer and Nauss, Frank. We need your help on a very important and sensitive case. I’m calling to see if you’ll consider doing it.”

“Sure, great! I’ll do anything I can to help.” Bender’s breath came a little faster. His commercial photography was inconsistent and money was tight; he needed the work badly. Jan would be thrilled with another federal case—this time from the very top of the pyramid.

“Good. But let’s take it one step at a time. We can’t talk about this on the phone. We have to be very covert about this. It’s an extremely dangerous fugitive, Ten Most Wanted. My assistants will bring you to me. Meanwhile, Frank, I don’t want you to mention this to anyone. Not to friends in the police department, the FBI, even marshals not working on the case.”

“That won’t be a problem.”

“We don’t want anyone to know, not even your wife.”

Jan wasn’t interested in the details of his work, and Bender was uncomfortable sharing case information with anyone, even with Joan. He’d just have to be careful to cover or hide the new bust when anyone visited the studio.

“OK,” he replied.

Three mornings later, marshals Tom Conti and Steve Quinn picked him up in a dark sedan with tinted windows. As they hurtled south on I-95, the deputies said they were driving him to the Philadelphia airport, and the chief inspector was flying up from Virginia to meet him. The only flight information the chief supplied was “afternoon.” As the marshals scurried around the airport trying to find his flight, Bender sensed the chief was testing him and his men, as well as taking security precautions. They waited two hours for the flight to arrive.

Leschorn was in his fifties, tall and graying, a spit-and-polish lawman in an expensive suit and tie. He took them into an airport restaurant and chose a table in a back corner. After the waitress disappeared with their order, he leaned toward Bender and lowered his voice to describe the case while the deputies kept a watchful eye on the door. Leschorn said they were looking for Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, the underboss of the Colombo crime family in New York City. Persico, fifty-seven, had been groomed to be the godfather of one of the five major American crime families, along with his even more notorious brother, Carmine “The Snake” Persico. The Persico brothers had come up through the ranks as feared enforcers for the Colombo family. The titular heirs to the late, legendary godfather Joseph Colombo, the Persico boys had trouble staying out of jail. Allie Boy had served sixteen years for murder in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York—allegedly taking the rap for his brother. After his conviction in 1980 for extortion and loan sharking, he jumped a $250,000 bail and went into hiding rather than face twenty more years in jail. He’d been on the lam for seven years.

The high-profile Persico had been so elusive a fugitive the FBI decided to wash its hands of the case and had recently pushed it over to the marshals. After spending a fortune on a worldwide manhunt following a trail of fake identifications and aliases, the bureau didn’t even know if the mafioso was still alive. “The last seven years basically we have been getting anonymous tips,” a federal spokesman said. “They were taking us all over the world—tips that he was in Honolulu, Japan, Miami, South America. They were numerous but they never panned out.”