The Murder Room (3 page)

The chamber on the second floor of the City Tavern was the historic Long Room, forty-four feet long and narrow with a soaring chapel ceiling, the first ballroom in the New World, where General George Washington had toasted his election to the presidency as cannons boomed across the city and Madeira glasses smashed. By modern standards it was austere, a pale green chamber with chair rails and candle sconces. But now it had been arranged to re-create the spirit of a second-floor chamber in Paris in 1833. In the upstairs room of No. 12
rue Cloche-Perce
, Vidocq had run the first private detective agency in history,
Le Bureau des Renseignements
(Office of Information), seventeen years before the Pinkerton Agency was founded in the United States. It was the first room in history designed for a group of men to systematically deduce and brainstorm solutions to murder cases.

In the north corner of the room, overlooking the Delaware River, a bronze bust of Eugène François Vidocq rested on an oak pedestal. The wide, arrogant face was stippled in shadows from the heavy green drapes, beneath crossed French and American flags. In the room at No. 12
rue Cloche-Perce
, in the flickering shadows of hissing gaslights, Vidocq and his men kept intricate records to track criminals’ patterns. They discussed motive and modus operandi in greater detail than ever before in history. They made plaster casts of shoe impressions and studied bullets to link them to crimes. They worked under paintings of Damiens being quartered, John the Baptist losing his head, and Ravaillac being tortured. They were the first modern criminologists. Convinced of their superior knowledge of the criminal mind, Vidocq had chosen them from the ranks of ex-convicts, like himself.

Each of the men and women at the long tables wore a red-white-blue pin on their lapels—
Les Couleurs
, the colors of France, the signature of their status as Vidocq Society Members (VSMs). There were eighty-two VSMs, one for each year of Vidocq’s life. It was the world’s most exclusive club, open, regardless of race, sex, age, or national origin, only to the best detectives and forensic scientists on the planet. They had been called the greatest gathering of forensic detectives ever assembled in one room. “No police agency in the world has the luxury of this kind of talent,” Fleisher said.
The New York Times
declared the Vidocq Society “The Heirs of Holmes.” “This is not a gathering of a ragtag bunch of Baker Street Irregulars playing dutiful amanuensis to Sherlock Holmes’s genius,” the
Times
said. “Nor are they a bunch of good-natured Archie Goodwins, filling the role of narrator and legman to the sedentary but brilliant Nero Wolfe in the mystery novels of Rex Stout. . . . It is a group that collectively has hundreds of years of crime-solving experience.”

The Vidocq Society’s mission was simple and straightforward: As many as one in three murders in the United States went unsolved. It was a well of suffering scarcely known to the journalists who claimed crime was sensational and overblown, or the millions of Americans entertained nightly by it on TV. Murder was a scourge that had taken more than a million lives, more than most of the American wars ever fought in the twentieth century. Cops were overworked, departments underfunded; the criminal justice system favored the rights of criminals over victims. In a world that had forgotten its heroes, they resolved, by the light of a twelfth-century chivalric pledge, to hunt down murderers in cold cases, punish the guilty, free the innocent, and avenge, protect, and succor families victimized by murder. They resolved to work pro bono rather than swat a golf ball around in Florida or Arizona. They met on the third Thursday of every month; they were the Thursday Club. The eighty-two of them pledged themselves to their cause until death, when the rosette would be pinned on another man or woman chosen to fight for a better world.

The old Victorian brownstone on Locust Street in Philadelphia, headquarters of the Vidocq Society, was besieged with requests from around the world from cops and victims seeking an audience in the private chamber in City Tavern. A congressman who wanted to solve a murder in his family. A federal agent in Washington who needed another pair of eyes on the assassination of a woman agent in broad daylight while jogging. A young, small-town Tennessee cop overmatched by an elderly millionaire serial killer who moved from state to state killing his wives. But the Vidocq Society would not touch a case unless it was a murder, the victim had committed no crimes, and the case was at least two years old, officially a “cold case.” “Our mission is to help the police at their request, working quietly in the background without fanfare, to act as an agent for justice,” Fleisher said. In all cases, the society required the presence in the room of the municipal police officers, state or federal agents, or government prosecutors working on the cold case; families looking for vengeance became too emotional without official support. Yet in rare instances, when police corruption was suspected, an ordinary citizen was granted an audience before the Vidocq Society. This afternoon was one of those cases, when an ordinary citizen had earned an audience before the forensic court of last resort.

At one o’clock, Fleisher stood at the lectern and welcomed them from four continents to Philadelphia and the monthly convening of the Vidocq Society. Before lunch, he had led them in the Pledge of Allegiance, hand clamped over his heart, his voice the loudest in the room. He had introduced a pastor who asked that God favor and guide their undertakings for justice. Now Fleisher loosened the room with a joke about their purpose, “to enjoy my great hobby, which is lunch.” Then he reminded them somberly that their work was to speak for the dead who cannot speak for themselves. It was sacred work.

The essential method that Fleisher, Bender, and Walter had resurrected from the nineteenth century was deceptively simple: They had filled a room with detectives to unmask a crime of murder. Like Vidocq’s ex-cons, though far more sophisticated, they had at their disposal the most advanced forensic tools of their age. Busboys swarmed out of the kitchen and swept away the last of the silver and china, carded the remaining crumbs from the white tablecloths. As the coffee was poured, the historic chamber was no longer the Long Room. It was the Murder Room, reborn.

At ten past one, Fleisher introduced Mr. Antoine LeHavre of Louisiana. A rotund man in his forties with dark hair and a gentlemanly manner, LeHavre wore a sports jacket and eyes burdened with woe. He stood at the lectern, slightly to the right of the gruesome image of his slain friend. There was an air of anticipation, as never before had an ordinary citizen presented to the Vidocq Society, alone.

LeHavre began by thanking the society for inviting him. “I know that you better than anyone else understand what I’ve been through,” he said. “I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t do it anymore alone.”

They had all seen enough cases to know the Murder Room was a place to walk far around, a step in life to bypass if you could. The chamber was invisible to a happy man. Agony lit the way. The room appeared to the suffering. They had seen his like before. He was one of the walking dead, zombified by the unsolved murder of a friend or loved one, a man willing to crawl to the end of the Earth to right a terrible wrong. But they saw something else as well, also well known among them: After four courses served hot, Antoine LeHavre was ready for revenge, served ice-cold.

T
he killer got away with it—that’s what he couldn’t accept. The cops on the take didn’t bother him anymore, though he hoped they would be punished. Nor did the blind coroner, the witnesses who saw nothing, the deaf and dumb DA. He’d forgiven them all, even the hit man who kept his address on file. Lastly his callow lawyer who said, Let it go—there’s too much power against you. Let it go, Antoine. It’s how the world works. It’s the mob, for Chrissake. Which was a good point, an excellent point, except he couldn’t let Paul Bernard Allain go.

Allain’s bloodied face still shimmered in his dreams. His best friend was beaten to death right before his eyes, and he stood there helpless to pull him out of it. He couldn’t sit now and watch Paul go all the way, slip into infinity, unredeemed.

The man who got away with murder was going to pay.

As strong as his feelings were, he didn’t want revenge, only justice. Antoine LeHavre told his story simply and directly. He wanted to convey his gratitude for being granted an audience with the investigators, especially as a private citizen. He thanked Fleisher, who had said, “Don’t worry, we’ll solve it.”

A respectful hush had fallen over the room as LeHavre stood at the lectern. The tall windows reduced the sounds of the city to a distant hum. On the sidewalk below, tourists walking to Independence Hall passed the old brick tavern at Second and Chestnut streets without a glance; once the grandest establishment in the New World, the City Tavern was an Enlightenment castle lost in time. As Fleisher stepped onto the wide-plank floor, he had fallen under the room’s familiar spell. A history lover, Fleisher knew that Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and Franklin had dined here nightly during the Constitutional Convention, enjoying “a feast of Reason and a flow of soul.” The Masons held their first secret rituals on the North American continent in this room.

As LeHavre began his presentation, Fleisher thought of the tavern’s round pediment window, now obscured by taller buildings, which once commanded the New World harbor. It was the Masonic All-Seeing Eye that had blessed the colonies with the benediction
Annuit Coeptis,
“God is favorable to our undertakings.” He silently prayed that God was still watching.

LeHavre was a furniture manufacturer in Louisiana, a civic leader. In the middle of June seven years earlier, he had taken a dozen of his employees, including Allain, a valuable office manager and a friend, to a minor-league baseball game under the lights. Afterward, they all repaired to a restaurant-bar. There Allain had become inebriated, and, out of character, made a small scene. The last LeHavre saw of him alive, he was being led out a side door by a bouncer. It all happened with a surreal speed. By the time LeHavre located Allain, he witnessed the end of a struggle in which two bouncers beat the young man unconscious. He never regained consciousness. LeHavre had been stunned and confused. Allain had no enemies. He was a young man with a wife and two young children, a churchgoer. The police and a series of private eyes were no help. His best guess was that it was a tragic misunderstanding: Allain, who was rarely inebriated and couldn’t handle it, had acted out and the bouncers overreacted and killed him. He suspected the police and DA had stonewalled the investigation at the request of the bar owners, who had well-known ties to the mob.

LeHavre was giving the presentation he had provided to the police, who had feigned interest seven years earlier. The second slide was even more gruesome: a close-up of the side of Allain’s head, severely battered, leaking what appeared to be cranial fluid. Murmurs swept the tables. Fleisher felt his own indrawn breath, the familiar welling behind the eyes. He couldn’t help himself: The view of a young man’s corpse always reminded him of the yearnings and lost promise of his own youth.

The Vidocq Society had become famous for cracking cases with its freewheeling style of investigation. Now, with a nod from Fleisher, it began.

“Has any DNA testing been done?” Fleisher asked.

“No,” LeHavre said. “Blood and hair samples were lost before there was a chance to do any testing.”

“What do you mean, lost?” asked a Navy intelligence officer.

“There’s a receipt for the samples in the evidence locker. But the samples disappeared. The DA has refused to look into it.”

“Have you tried to exhume the body?” Bender asked.

“Yes,” LeHavre replied. He was awaiting a ruling on his petition to do just that.

At the tables, the detectives shifted and rustled as they studied the police file and coroner’s report. Ressler, the famed FBI agent, leaned over to whisper to Homicide Hal, the white-haired dean of Philadelphia coroners, and Homicide Hal nodded. Walter and Bender kept their own counsel.

The room was silent, “like an ocean drawing back,” Walter recalled. As the last round of coffee was poured, the questions came in a burst, from forensic odontologists and medical examiners, explosives and firearms specialists, FBI, DEA, IRS, forensic anthropologists, ritual-murder experts, and psychiatrists.

“Did the bouncer and Allain have a prior relationship?” asked an NYPD homicide detective.

“No,” LeHavre said.

During the fight, Allain’s body had slammed against a door in the bar, splattering it with blood. “Do you still have the door? Have tests been run on it?”

“No,” LeHavre said. The door was repainted. Tests were never conducted on it, to his knowledge.

“How have you documented the bar’s connection to the mob?”

He hadn’t, but it was well known in the business community.

“How long had you known the victim?”

“I met him when I hired him nine years ago.”

“Were you drinking with him that night?”

“No. I was at a table with other friends and employees.”

“What was your relationship?”

“He was one of my best employees. He came to me without a college education. We hire MBAs out of Vanderbilt and Tulane, but Paul made himself into one of the most capable managers I’ve ever had. He was exceptionally bright and dedicated, a natural leader.”

The grilling continued for half an hour. As the questions and answers volleyed back and forth, LeHavre came alive. He seemed to sense the society’s real interest and a burden lifting. His whole manner had changed; in place of stoic resignation his face brightened, his answers grew more detailed and energetic. After years of carrying the investigative load by himself, stonewalled by the police, he stopped in the middle of the questioning to openly thank the Vidocq Society again. “Frankly, after all this time going it alone, I’m overwhelmed at the level of interest and support.”