The Murder Room (26 page)

 

Friel saw parents quietly approach the wall, heads bowed. They left notes and flowers as if at a war memorial. They seemed broken, invisible men and women whom he’d heard say in the hallways and seminars, “Don’t let the killer take another victim.” It hit Friel then that nobody had put into numbers the larger tragedy of American murder, the uncounted hundreds of thousands of people struggling to find a healing they knew would never come, a rough closure. How they hated that word, “closure,” he noted. They knew it was not possible.

JUST ONE PERSON IS MISSING, James Charles Kaloger’s parents wrote at the wall. BUT OUR WHOLE WORLD SEEMS SO EMPTY!

Friel scarcely remembered his keynote address that night. Returning to Philadelphia, he knew he had seen through a fissure in the surface of American crime to an underground, a place of routine tragedy and suffering that was unimaginable and therefore unimagined.

“This is a tragic situation in our country,” Friel said to Fleisher and the others at a luncheon. “How can we see this level of suffering and do nothing? There are lots of people who need our help.” The mission of the Vidocq Society was finally clear.

C
overed with dust from an all-nighter in the studio, Bender sighed deeply and picked up the telephone. Jan was still asleep, and Joan was cleaning up from helping him finish a head. He had greeted the dawn with exhilaration; at moments like these, he felt half his age, which was fifty-two. Then the sexual energy and hectoring presence of twentysomething Laura Shaughnessy buzzed through the line.

Laura was furious that he hadn’t yet left his wife; Bender was trying to tell her without coming right out and saying that it was over between them. She was demanding he leave Jan and Joan and settle down. She was trying to make him monogamous. Bender was starting to call her “Sarge.”

They still dated. He’d still have sex with her. “You don’t want to cut it off completely,” he reasoned. But he was saying things like, “I’m not sure this is working out.” He was letting her down slowly. By autumn 1991, he felt strongly reconnected to Jan and Joan, and Laura was trying his patience.

“Laura was a lovely person. We had great times together. It was a fun affair. But I felt like I was losing my space, my freedom. I just couldn’t deal with that.” After a period of self-examination, he had concluded, “I wasn’t about to leave Jan over her, and I wasn’t about to leave Joan over her. They’re the two women in my life who mean an awful lot to me. It’s times like that when you’re tested that you realize how much you really care for certain people.”

Now he thought ruefully, “The greater the pleasure, the higher the price.” His bill for the two-year affair was coming due.

 

Laura sounded like she’d been crying.

“Kenny is devastated,” she said. “He went on and on about this girl Zoia, this Russian girl, and now she’s disappeared. It’s his fiancée, he really loves her. I feel terrible for him. He’s a big teddy bear, and he’s falling apart.”

“Whoa!” Bender said. “Slow down and tell me what happened.”

Laura said she’d just gotten a distressing phone call from one of her best friends since high school in New Jersey, a Florida ophthalmologist named Kenny Andronico. Kenny had said his fiancée, Zoia Assur, who was living with her sister in New Jersey before moving down to be with him, had disappeared.

Zoia hadn’t been seen in two weeks. The cops were telling Kenny not to worry, people went missing and showed back up. But they’d been going steady for five years, and Kenny had given her a necklace and they had plans to marry. He knew something was wrong. He was scared that something bad had happened to her. He went to pieces on the phone.

“Frank, Zoia is missing and Kenny wants your help to find her—through your contacts at the Vidocq Society,
America’s Most Wanted,
or
Unsolved Mysteries
or whatever.”

Bender suddenly realized he’d met Kenny Andronico. Laura had introduced them at a New Jersey train station the previous summer. Bender and Laura had just arrived on a train from Philadelphia, heading to her family’s estate for an amorous weekend, and there in the parking lot was this lumbering big guy with a mustache in a casual suit.

Laura was effusive introducing her lover to her old friend, but Kenny didn’t pick up on the emotion, Bender recalled. “He shook my hand, but he barely grunted at me. He was clearly possessive of Laura. I sensed he didn’t like me being with her.”

Bender sighed. He wanted to help Laura. But he had sensed a dark and controlling spirit in Andronico. He was happy to get away from the guy. He also had the unsettling feeling that Laura was trying to manipulate him into getting involved as a ploy to prolong their relationship.

But as he heard her troubled voice pleading for help for her friend Kenny, his doubts washed away. He was touched. He liked the girl and decided to help. He felt he owed it to her, being as he was going to dump her and all.

“Sure, I’ll do anything I can,” Bender said. “Have Kenny call me.” Laura was deeply grateful, and Dr. Andronico didn’t waste any time. He called Bender that evening.

The voice on the line was bold and assertive.

“Hey, Frank, my good buddy,” he said.

Bender stiffened. “I barely know the guy. Now I’m his good buddy?” All six of Bender’s senses went on hyperalert.

“Frank, I need your help,” Andronico pressed on, imploringly. “My fianceé disappeared, and the police have no idea what happened to her, and I’m scared to death. I know from Laura that you’re the best forensic artist in the world, and work with the best detectives. Please help me.”

Bender remained cool. “I’ll do what I can, Kenny. Who would want to kill Zoia?”

“She was living with her sister, but there were serious conflicts in the home.” He explained that Zoia’s brother-in-law, a state police sergeant, was having sex with Zoia—sleeping with his wife’s sister under the same roof. He was afraid the cop might have had something to do with Zoia’s disappearance.

“What’s the story with the cop?” Bender asked. “Has anybody investigated him? Has he taken a polygraph?”

Yes, the policeman took a polygraph, Kenny said, and he passed it.

“OK, I’ll make a deal with you. You take a polygraph and you pass it and I’ll help you.”

“Wait a minute!” Kenny sounded furious. He was practically shouting. “I’m your good friend!”

“Kenny, you’re not my good friend. You’re a friend of Laura’s, but I barely know you. You want me to help you—you have to pass a polygraph.”

Andronico was quiet on the other end of the line.

“I work with two of the best polygraph examiners in the world—Bill Fleisher and Nate Gordon, both in Philadelphia. Both are members of the Vidocq Society, a group of detectives I belong to that looks at cold cases pro bono.”

He gave him Fleisher’s telephone number. “Call Bill and set it up. You’ll have to pay for the polygraph yourself—four or five hundred dollars. I also want you to call my friend Richard Walter. He’s a profiler; he can tell you more about what might have happened to Zoia than anyone I know.” He gave him Walter’s phone number.

Andronico grunted OK.

“Kenny, can you pass a polygraph?”

“I think I can.”

Bender’s anger flared. “You
think
you can? Jesus Christ, Kenny, if you pass the polygraph I’ll be happy to help you. If you don’t, and Bill tells me you’re a flat-out liar, I’ll hunt you down until the day I die.”

 

On Thursday, November 28, 1991, Thanksgiving evening, Richard Walter, home for a spell after trips to Hong Kong and Sydney on murder investigations, was dressing to go to a friend’s house for turkey and all the fixings. He was standing at the gilt Victorian hall mirror knotting his red tie on a white collar when the phone rang.

He stared at the bleating instrument thinking if it didn’t stop soon, one of them would have to go. Walter’s hypersensitive hearing was a gift on murder investigations, when he heard suspects whispering far out of normal earshot, and detected suprahuman signs of fear, such as sub-aural breathing increases, during interrogations. But the auditory assaults were getting worse with age. He couldn’t tolerate the sound of someone chewing food on the telephone line. When he detected the wet smacking of gum or the dry crunching of crackers on the other end, he hung up immediately.

His condition was apparently caused by sensory overload, the trademark of a man who absorbed too much information simultaneously. The aging ear sometimes lost the ability to screen noises, his doctor said.

He had been looking forward to crowning a successful year with a bottle of Chardonnay with friends. What execrable human being was delaying his celebration and jackhammering his ear-drums? He picked up the telephone.

“Who?” he exclaimed.

It sounded like a sales call. Walter prepared to hang up. He did not recognize the slippery, unctuous voice. Then he realized it was a stranger asking for a favor, and his ire rose along with his suspicion.

“Dr. who?”

“Frank told me if you want to solve this, and exonerate yourself, call Richard Walter,” the voice insisted. “He said, ‘He’s one of the best profilers in the world. He’ll give you good advice.’ ”

As the voice purred on, it came back to Walter: It was Dr. Kenneth Andronico, the ophthalmologist in Florida whose girlfriend, Zoia Assur, was missing in New Jersey. The police were getting nowhere; the doctor feared foul play and wanted help. Bender had told him to expect a call from “a good friend of one of my girlfriends.” Kenny was a confused and grieving man, Bender said, and needed some guidance.

Frank!

“Do you have a moment to give me some advice?” Andronico pleaded.

Walter scowled into the telephone. He instinctively didn’t like the oleaginous, manipulative voice. He checked his wristwatch: five minutes to seven. He would be late for Thanksgiving dinner.

“Oh, all right,” he said.

As Andronico told his story, from Zoia going missing to his suspicions of her policeman brother-in-law and general police ineptitude, Walter’s scowl deepened. The doctor didn’t sound like a confused and grieving boyfriend. He’d contacted a former FBI agent in Florida for help, and now Bender and Walter and the Vidocq Society.
This isn’t making sense,
Walter thought.
He’s right in the midst of everything, and he’s coming up with all kinds of cockamamie theories.

After a few minutes, Walter cut him off sharply. He joined Bender in insisting that the doctor submit to a polygraph examination with Bill Fleisher, president of the Vidocq Society.

“Young man, you’re looking under all sorts of beds and stirring up a lot of dust. But the fact of the matter is you are the primary suspect because you’re not credible. I won’t be looking forward to the case unless you are checked out.” Walter hung up.

As he drove to Thanksgiving dinner, Walter couldn’t decide who was more confused, the doctor he now suspected of murder or his licentious partner Bender. Bender took the concept of knight-errantry, the wandering warrior, to a different dimension.

Some men are a heartbeat away from the presidency,
he thought.
Leave it to Frank to be a penis away from a murder.

T
he big, mustached ophthalmologist Dr. Kenneth Andronico sat in a small windowless room melting like a candle, which was better than his fiancée, Zoia Assur, who had been found in a shallow grave in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. But he wasn’t in great condition, either.

Dr. Andronico’s powerful face, wide in the jaw, wore a slick yellow sheen under the hot lights. He refused to make eye contact; his pupils darted along the rims of his eyes, as if looking to escape his head. But there was no escape. The big man was strapped into the subject’s chair with arm and finger cuffs. Rubber pneumograph tubes bound his chest and abdomen. He couldn’t see an exit. He couldn’t see much around the dominant, five-hundred-pound shadow formed by two very large men, renowned polygraph examiners Fleisher and Gordon. They leaned close with their cool voices and big, manicured hands.

Gordon tossed Andronico a softball question, a standard warm-up.

“How do you think you’ll do on the lie-detection test?”

“This thing, I think I can beat it,” Andronico said.

Gordon smiled to himself.
Where do we find these guys? Let the fun begin.

The helicopters, dogs, and search squads had combed every inch of the Pine Barrens since August.

Four months later, the corpse was discovered in a place they’d already looked.

In December 1991, a hunter found Zoia Assur in a shallow grave in the piney woods, one of the largest remaining tracts of East Coast wilderness. Animals and the moist coastal sand had quickly reduced her to little more than a skeleton. Enough remained for the Ocean County medical examiner to determine the cause of death: Zoia had been shot three times in the chest. One of the bullets pierced her heart.