The Murder Room (4 page)

This was a common response to the society’s efforts, although stoic law enforcement officers seldom expressed it aloud. Fleisher, right in front of LeHavre at the head table, sat beaming.

By 2 P.M., the men and women at the tables began to rustle in their chairs. Fleisher looked conspicuously at his wristwatch, and looked up and signaled to LeHavre that the session was over.

The VSMs had agencies to run, their own private cases to work, planes to catch. If members were interested enough to form a “working group” to dig deeper into the case, that would come later.

Fleisher joined LeHavre at the lectern. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “We hope we’ve helped provide Mr. LeHavre with some new leads, taken the case a way down the path toward justice. As you know, he has no official help from law enforcement, so if any of you are interested in taking this further, you know where to find me.” He grinned. “Meanwhile, we’d like to give you this small token of appreciation for appearing before the Vidocq Society—the very first tool of deduction.” He opened a small, polished wooden box and held up a wood-handled magnifying glass. For an instant the curved glass blazed with light.

Fleisher put the glass back in its box as the VSMs were standing to leave. “Everybody, wait,” he called out. “Frank has something else.”

Everyone sat down as Bender stood, his pure line of black emphasizing his bald head and white goatee, and waited a bit impatiently for it to be over, although they knew the forensic artist wouldn’t take long. While his partner Richard Walter possessed an arch, erudite, verbose style, Bender was known to be brutally plain and blunt-spoken, true to his Philadelphia row house roots. The muscular artist lowered his head, his eyes disappearing in shadows under the heavy brow, raised his arm to the front of the room, and pointed directly at LeHavre.

“I know who killed Allain,” he said evenly. “You did. For my money, you’re the murderer.”

An uproar swept the room. Fleisher stood and called for order. LeHavre’s face drained of color, but he said nothing. Then all eyes turned to Walter, the blade of a man in a blue suit, as he walked to the front of the gathering and asked for silence.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I might be wrong, OK, but I haven’t been wrong since 1949.” Tittering laughter, a lone guffaw. Walter turned and stared at LeHavre. “My impetuous friend may jump to wild, unsupported conclusions on occasion, but as it happens, in this instance Frank Bender is indeed quite right—you, sir, are quite clearly a psychopath.” The profiler removed his spectacles, revealing small blue eyes set in a baleful stare.

Walter coolly described the presenter as a classic murdering personality who had sex with his employee before he killed him. LeHavre stood at the podium, his face a blank mask, and said nothing.

The first clue, Walter calmly noted, was that he detected “a grand, slightly overinflated presence in our guest. I picked up what I considered to be a covered, macho effeminate voice, just that clip of language that made me raise my eyebrow and look up at him, notice him as it were, in a new way.” Walter arched his left eyebrow for emphasis.

“Studying the photographs of the young man who is the victim in this case, as it happens a young and very handsome man, it became clear to me the nature of the friendship the two men enjoyed, at least for a time. It was clearly a biblical alliance—the young, handsome man and the older, powerful but less attractive boss—and the whole issue of jealousy had come into play. And of course in these situations the guy who is the boss controls the money.”

Walter looked up at the chandelier as if in contemplation. “Now then, many times in such relationships, as one observes them,” he said, “you kiss the hand you dare not bite. But such relationships are notoriously unstable, especially in the homosexual realm. Almost always there comes a time where the young one is unfaithful, untrue, or goes in search of a new alliance, and what we have is punishment coming back—if this guy can’t have him nobody’s going to have him.”

“This is outrageous,” LeHavre said softly, to no one in particular. He gathered his materials and began to move toward the door.

“You see, it never made sense that a bouncer or bouncers had killed Allain,” Walter went on. “What’s in it for them? Bouncers don’t kill people; they throw them out of bars.

“Mr. LeHavre, for the pleasures of power and control, has thrust himself into the police investigation for years,” he added. “He believes he’s smarter than anyone.” He smiled. “He enjoys playing that dangerous game of catch-me-if-you-can. Today we have witnessed an arrogant and vainglorious attempt to brag to a roomful of cops.

“You see, the first rule of murder is the murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is . . . and you, sir, are attempting to extend the pleasure of murder by exploiting all of us here today. At that, you have failed. You are not smarter than any of us. You are bright but an underachiever, for which the triumph of murder compensates.”

At the door, LeHavre turned back and said, “You have no proof of this, of any of this, none whatsoever. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

Walter spoke over the top of his glasses. “You must have enjoyed it whilst it lasted.”

“Poor guy didn’t even get his magnifying glass,” Fleisher said as he left the room with his partners. “What did I tell you? I told you it was a case that merited attention,” he added, a huge smile creasing his beard. Bender grinned and Walter glared at his partners.

“Another Vidocq Society lunch,” Bender said, “another murder solved.”

Fleisher said he was uncomfortable with his partners’ attack on LeHavre. “I don’t see the evidence for it,” he said.

“You may want to rethink it, Bill,” Walter said. “The guy didn’t get his jollies this time. The urge is insatiable. If he can’t stimulate himself sufficiently with memory, he’ll kill again.”

A
fter lunch, the VSMs exited the eighteenth-century tavern and hurried across the narrow and cobbled streets, making connections to Arizona, England, Egypt, France, and beyond; Fleisher, Bender, and Walter walked to a coffee shop on the corner. “Murder will out,” Chaucer wrote in
The Canterbury Tales
. “This is my conclusion.” But real life, Walter was fond of saying, was never so easy.

“That’s bullshit!” Fleisher said to his partners as heads turned to their small table. “LeHavre is an innocent man until we prove otherwise. It’ll take a lot more than intuition to convince the police.” The big man’s bearded face was flushed; in political infighting as during interrogations he was an overwhelming and mercurial force, bully, teddy bear, jokester, loyal friend, withering skeptic, con man, tickling feather—a needle poking for truth until it bled.

Vidocq Society cases were chosen by the founders in consultation with the society’s board of directors. The board included an assistant U.S. attorney, a naval intelligence officer, the security director of Sun Oil Company, an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent, a Philadelphia homicide detective, and an English professor specializing in Shakespeare and literary analysis of bomb threats and suicide notes. But Fleisher was board president as well as commissioner. He had masterfully steered through a quarter century of federal bureaucracy; no case went forward without his blessing.

Bender’s balding head reddened as it did when his paranormal revelations were questioned, which was almost always among world-weary cops. “Bill, I know the killer was LeHavre,” Bender said. “I know it. Remember our first meeting, in the old Navy yard, this guy got up and spoke and I said, ‘He’s a Russian spy. I can feel it.’ And I was right!”

Fleisher rolled his eyes, while Walter peered down his horn-rimmed glasses at the artist as if appraising a new species. “Frank, in this case you may be right, but keep your day job. There’s no structure to your thinking. You’re like a fart in a bathtub!” The thin man snorted with derision as Bender’s crimson deepened. Fleisher laughed and slowly shook his head.

Fleisher marveled at the forces that brought them together, and constantly threatened to tear them apart. By combining his partners’ deduction and intuition with his own leadership and investigative skills, they formed a tripartite Great Detective with skills seldom found in one man.

“Richard is our Sherlock Holmes,” Fleisher said with genuine admiration. “He has the greatest deductive ability I’ve ever seen. As for Frank, only God can explain the things he does. Me, I’m just a fat Jewish kid who grew up reading true-crime comics and dreaming of being a detective.”

It was fitting, Fleisher thought, that the idea of the great American detective was born in Philadelphia, just a few miles from where they sat—in a brownstone off Spring Garden Street, where Edgar Allan Poe, in 1841, created the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the first fictional detective—C. Auguste Dupin.

It was a new character type, which Poe is said to have borrowed from the life of Vidocq, whose memoirs, allegedly ghost-written by his friend Balzac, were an 1829 bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The new type was a darkly eccentric, deductive genius who outsmarted the police. Dupin possessed “a peculiar analytic ability. . . . He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its exercise. . . . He boasted . . . with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs. . . .” This was Vidocq’s life, and the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes and all fictional sleuths to follow.

It was an archetype made flesh in Richard Walter.

“You have to be on your game to beat me, Frank, and Bill,” Walter said. “If you knock us off our feet we’ll walk on our knees. If you knock us off our knees we’ll walk on our balls—and our balls have calluses.”

Now Fleisher scowled at his partners.

“There’s a reason a case is cold for many years. This isn’t TV. You need the family support, police commitment, the political winds blowing your way,” he said, counting them off on the fingers of a raised hand. “You need investigative brilliance—and you need luck. You got about one out of five in this case.”

Walter glared at Fleisher. The psychologist and federal agent complemented each other well, but their differences could be sharp along a philosophical fault line. Walter considered Fleisher a brilliant lawman but naïve about the nature of evil; Fleisher admired Walter’s cold eye for evil, yet the thin man’s Machiavellian view of human nature oppressed Fleisher’s generous heart and hopes for redemption for all men.

Typical Fleisher, Walter thought now, utterly conventional.

Walter looked over at Bender, who seemed to have entirely forgotten about the case, his attention having drifted elsewhere. Bender was brooding over his espresso, his light hazel eyes in the middle distance, where laughter sounded at a table of young women. Fleisher, following his partner’s eyes, quipped, “If I ever stop getting excited about that, shoot me.” Bender returned from his reverie and chuckled.

Walter, with his uncompromising, antiquated code of honor, considered Bender a knight of opposite color—a man who honored little but his own desires, with nearly sociopathic cunning. Yet together Bender and Walter saw around corners that other detectives, Fleisher included, did not. It was the impish Bender, a wizard with the gift of seeing the past and the future, who had brought the three men together and ever conspired to bust them apart. Bender was narcissistic, manipulative, well named; he bent rules and time, the boundaries of the grave and the connubial bed. “Frank,” Walter said, “is a shit stirrer. He thinks our motto is ‘One for all and all for one, and that’s me!’ ”

But nothing happened without Bender, or Walter, or Fleisher. No case went forward without accord between the three. Now they reminded themselves that they couldn’t solve every case. They had no formal subpoena, arrest, or investigative powers; their goal was merely to offer advice and counsel to the police and victims of crime who needed it. “If we help move a case along, we’ve done our job,” Fleisher repeated. In fact, wasn’t the idea originally to be a social club for detectives? To have fun?

By the time they had reached the grounds in their cups, Walter and Bender had decided that Antoine LeHavre, if he had indeed done it, was free to get away with murder as far as they were concerned.

O
n Saturday, February 23, 1957, a cold rain spattered a lonely country road on the northern edge of Philadelphia, falling on a field of brush and vines slowly claiming an old cardboard box behind the tree line. Inside the box lay a small blue-eyed boy of perfect tapered form, naked and laid out with his arms by his side like a forgotten boy-king of Egypt. His sarcophagus was a J. C. Penney box of corrugated cardboard, three feet long and eighteen inches wide, marked FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE. Great and prolonged care had been taken.

The boy had been washed and groomed and wrapped in a coarse Navajo blanket as if ritually prepared for the next life. His hair was roughly chopped, his fingernails trimmed with a loving touch. His life had been extinguished in an ancient ritual designed to harvest his innocence and beauty by inflicting on him the greatest of cruelties. These were the abominable mixing of love and tenderness with betrayal, torture, and terror, culminating in the horror of his murder, which alone provided the climax for the killer or killers.

The ritual was often confused with Satanism but bowed to neither God nor the devil. In the soft landscape of eastern Pennsylvania in the middle of the Eisenhower 1950s, no one had a clue what the signs meant. The boy was scarred with deep cuts and bruises from head to toe.

He was only three feet, four inches tall. But he was too long for the box, and had been curled into the little cardboard coffin to fit. His head peeked out the open end, sightless eyes fixed on the sky. Moles tunneled under the wild grass that sprouted around the boy. Mice and insects rustled nearby in the underbrush, sensing the seeping blood.