The Murder Room (55 page)

Frank said, “I feel great right now. And it’s now that counts, right?” His smile, like his voice and his eyes, was electric, joyful.

His partners nodded. “Yeah, sure, Frank. It’s great.” They knew. Some others knew but Frank had not wanted to share it widely.

Frank Bender was dying.

Walter stared at Fleisher, who laughed nervously. “Yeah, it was a last-minute thing. We weren’t going to give Frank the award, but then we found out he’s dying. We gotta give it to him.”

Walter glared. Bender roared with laughter.

In recent days he’d learned that he had pleural mesothelioma, the cancer brought on by exposure to asbestos. The cancer was extremely rare, a thousand times rarer than lung cancer caused by heavy smoking. Only about one in a million people worldwide developed it. And it was deadly.

Mesothelioma took twenty to fifty years to develop after exposure. Bender was exposed to asbestos in the Navy, having fled the art establishment and an art college scholarship, knowing only that he didn’t want his art to hang only in museums. The Navy had offered to make him a photographer, but he refused. He wanted to work in the engine room, a mechanic like his dad, although he still couldn’t stop pencil-sketching the other mechanics. He spent three years in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the engine room of the destroyer escort U.S.S.
Calcaterra
, loving it. “I not only worked with asbestos,” he said, “I slept with it.”

The cancer filled his torso. “It’s bigger than a baby’s head,” the doctor said. The image made him feel bitterly miraculous, like he was giving birth to his own death. Radiation could ease the pain, but it wouldn’t save him. Chemotherapy could shut down his kidneys. “Surgery would be fatal,” Bender said, “because the cancer is already around my heart and lungs like a spiderweb. I have no options.”

Shaken, he had taken his partners into his confidence. He asked Fleisher to read the medical reports for him and give his impression. “It looks very grim, Frank,” Fleisher said sadly. Then Fleisher let out a small laugh.

“It’s just like you, Frank. There could be a movie on your life, and you kick the bucket. The big check comes, and you won’t be here to cash it.”

Bender laughed. They had been friends forever and Fleisher could do no wrong, ever. Bender loved life and he was going to keep at it. He wasn’t frightened. He was Frank.

The pain was very bad at night. The doctors gave him morphine, but he wouldn’t take it.

“Vodka and orange juice works much better,” he said. A screwdriver eased the hurt more smoothly, and it was still sexy. It was hard to pick up a woman after you did morphine.

“His biggest worry,” Fleisher told Walter, “is he still wants to have sex.”

Walter rolled his eyes. “Typical Frank.”

“I don’t think he has as much sex as he says he does,” Fleisher said. “I think he just likes to say it.”

Walter agreed. He didn’t even completely believe that Bender had cancer. The fact was, he hadn’t believed it when Bender had crowed to the media rooftops about the divine “miracle” of Jan’s cancer disappearing, and Jan’s cancer came back. Had it ever really gone? Or was Frank just addicted to getting his name in the paper, exposure that might mean work? It was a harsh thought, but in Walter’s world, such psychopathic deceptions and worse happened with every dawn. But deep down, Walter knew his cold reaction was largely a defense.

He didn’t want Frank to be sick. He didn’t want him to die.

“Richard, if you don’t believe me I can show you the medical report,” Bender said at the next Vidocq Society meeting.

“Not necessary,” Walter said, grabbing his friend’s arm. “Come with me.” He dragged Bender over to talk with Dr. Maryanne Costello, distinguished VSM and former chief medical examiner of the state of Virginia. Dr. Costello was one of the nation’s most esteemed forensic pathologists. The living Sherlock Holmes was investigating, searching for evidence.

“Tell Dr. Costello what your doctors told you.”

Bender launched into detail about his cancer, and the two of them were going back and forth, “using a lot of words I didn’t understand,” Walter said.

Dr. Costello said, “How long did they give you?”

Walter lowered his head. “I knew then that this was real,” he said.

Bender said, “Eight to eighteen months. It’s already destroyed one of my ribs.”

Walter arched an eyebrow. “I’ve got an extra rib,” he said.

Bender stared at him.

“Really. Do you want it?”

“No, thanks, I’m watching my weight.”

They laughed.

“You see, doctor, he’s all about vanity to the end.”

Bender was determined to make his time with Jan sweet time. He knew they’d always been meant to be together, and now he felt it in a deep soul way. He remembered when he was eight years old, standing on the stoop of his row house at 2520 Lithgow Street. A young couple carrying a baby knocked on the door of number 2518 next door, the Schwartzes’ house. The door opened and the Schwartzes excitedly welcomed the couple. Frank saw them carry the baby into the house. Many years later he learned the Schwartzes were Jan’s aunt and uncle. The baby was Jan, on the day of her christening. “I saw my wife when she was just born,” Frank marveled. “Now
that’s
having history.”

Now they were dying together. The doctors had them going at almost the exact same time. It stunned him, like the plot of an opera. “It’s kind of romantic, in a way.”

Frank poured his energies into taking care of Jan. Sixty-one and very tired, with nerve damage from chemotherapy, she said, “I’m like a fuse that burned out at the tip.” He was still a forensic artist, willing to take on any assignment, hoping the Vidocq Society would need him. But it was harder than ever to find work in a recession.

Bender took up the brushes that had started him in the art world. He began painting again. A watercolor of Jan as a smiling ghostly presence floating above a green field; a stark Gothic sketch of a black-and-gray wasteland above which triumphantly rises a tall church (St. Peter’s Church, the shrine of Saint John Neumann, the miracle worker); a man making love to a young woman on a train.

He’d made seven paintings inspired by Jan when she first got sick, and put them on his Web site with a one-line legend: “And she survived!”

On Halloween 2009, the couple that had had their wedding reception in a graveyard celebrated their thirty-ninth anniversary with the gusto of a first date. They drank and danced to “Nobody Does It Better.”

“They’ve had a rich life,” their daughter Vanessa Bender, thirty-eight, told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. “We wish they had more time.”

Frank said he wasn’t afraid of death. “I can’t say, ‘Wow, I wish I had done this or that,’ because I realize what I’ve done. If I go in eight months, I’ll still feel fulfilled.” Death wasn’t something foreign; he’d had his hands on the Reaper for years. And there was a lot of good karma waiting for him wherever it was he was going.

“My father would rather see a victim identified than make money,” their daughter Lisa Brawner, forty-four, told the
Inquirer
. “It drives my mother crazy, but I know when he gets to heaven, people will be lining up to thank him.”

“In all my dreams,” he said, “the dead protect me.”

That night in the mansion, with the lights and the music floating out over the river, it still all seemed like a dream to him. A friend, VSM Barb Cohan-Saavedra, the former assistant U.S. attorney, warmly congratulated him on his award. She said she always thought of him as a wizard.

“We always knew you were Merlin,” Fleisher quipped. “I’m glad somebody announced it officially from the podium tonight.”

A speaker had told them that men, and now women, had met at round tables to battle evil for a thousand years. There was evidence for a historical King Arthur. Yet, why, he asked, had the Arthurian tales featured three men? Why had these archetypes lasted for ten centuries? Looking at Fleisher, Bender, and Walter, he said there was always in the old stories a wounded king struggling to save the wasteland; his right-hand knight to destroy evil; and the wizard, Merlin, a seer who introduces the life of the spirit, transcendence of good and evil, but is bewitched and finally entrapped by women. Bender grinned, and laughter rippled in the room.

Why did the king keep the seat next to him empty? It was the Perilous Seat, fatal to all but a knight worthy of the journey, who could claim the Holy Grail. More laughter. Fleisher, they knew, kept the seat next to him at the round table empty as a memorial to his late brother-in-law Sal. “That was Sal’s seat, and I loved him. There was nobody like Sal.”

“It’s
perfect
!” Cohan-Saavedra said. “Frank
is
Merlin. Richard is Lancelot, and Bill is the Fisher King.” She turned to Bender. “Frank, next year you’ll have to come dressed in a long robe and a tall wizard’s hat.”

“If I make it next year.”

She hadn’t heard. He told her his news, and she didn’t hesitate a second. “Frank, you’ll make it.”

Two men stood nearby, at the edge of the conversation. One short, one tall, both white-haired. Kelly and McGillen were quiet that night. Their table felt empty. Weinstein was gone, having died quietly in his sleep on his seventy-eighth birthday, and Earl Palmer, too. The Vidocq Society Boy in the Box investigative team was the two of them now. Life was pills, prayers, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They were slowing down. But they didn’t stop.

There was a gentle wistfulness about the two old Irishmen, but they were ironweed stubborn. They declined to share the police skepticism about Mary. They had finally talked to the owner of Mary’s old house, who was terrified about what her children and the neighbors would think, into letting them see the basement.

On a fall day when the children were at school, Kelly, McGillen, Detective Augustine, and two police crime technicians arrived at the house in two unmarked cars. The basement walls, floor, and drain seemed just as Mary described. So did the side door that led outside, blocked by shrubs as it opened onto the driveway. Kelly took pictures and the crime tech measured everything. “Those beams show where the coal bin used to be,” said Kelly, who’d tended a coal furnace as a child. “Do you see?” Extra ceiling beams formed a rectangle that looked like it once supported the walls of a coal bin. Augustine said they could go ahead and dig into oil company or real estate records to see if the house once had a coal furnace, but it didn’t matter if they proved that, too. It just didn’t add up. The police closed the case. The old men of the Vidocq Society smiled and nodded, but they knew in their hearts that Mary told the truth.

“We see the boy in three weeks, Bill,” Kelly reminded Bill Fleisher. “The fifty-second year.”

It was just the three of them now at the grave every Veterans Day, the anniversary of the reburial. The park cemetery was gray in the fall, but they brought armfuls of bright flowers. They stood at the tombstone and said a few words to one another and to God. Then they took pictures standing together behind the stone. There were years of pictures like a family album, once five and now three of them standing with the boy in their fedoras and military caps and autumn smiles, guardians of something nameless. It was a private ceremony; the media and public were not invited. They were carrying on Rem Bristow’s thirty-seven years of work, the blue unbroken line. Sometimes Kelly went alone, an errand of joy. The old man leaned down and kissed the stone. “I’ll see you soon, Jonathan.”

Fleisher wasn’t convinced that Mary had told the truth. But he believed “we’re going to get it. The case is solvable.”

Walter wrinkled his nose, as if he smelled sentimentality. “I know who killed the Boy in the Box,” he said, “and Mary’s mother isn’t it.” Walter said it was the young college student who discovered the boy but delayed reporting it for days because the cops had already been hassling him about being a Peeping Tom. The cops at the time couldn’t have understood the significance of the sexual perversion, the signs of the pathology in the suspicious man who discovered the body.

The student admitted he’d spied on the unwed mothers of the Good Shepherd Home, Walter said, and the newspapers in the 1950s didn’t publish the rest of the story: Hidden behind the tree line the young man masturbated as he watched the women across the street. “First, the guy’s an admitted liar and he’s a pervert. The police gave him a rough time about the peeping, but nothing came of it.” With his sexual perversion, he had already entered the Helix, the “House of Sadism.” He was on the growth curve of the sadistic killer.

“This is the guy who found the body,” Walter said. “I don’t believe in coincidences. As it happens, he’s still alive. He’s in his eighties. He’s had a long time to revel in the memory of raping and killing the boy. In fact, he’s still taking pleasure from it. The murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is.”

Fleisher looked over his shoulder to make sure no society women or laymen were in earshot. The Murder Room had unexpectedly rematerialized in the foyer of the Pen Ryn. Sexual sadism hadn’t been on the menu.

“Joe, I’ve got a job for you.” Walter turned to his friend Joe O’Kane, the burly, bearded crooner, poet, and federal agent. “I know where the killer lives. Are you game?”

O’Kane tonight had been singing sad Irish songs he wrote himself to a lovely blond woman, singing with a power that caused her to hold his hand, close her eyes, and tremble with the ancient trails of the O’Kanes. His eyes gleamed with Tullamore Dew, “the milk of my race.”

“I’m there,” O’Kane said in his strong tenor.

Walter had a simple plan. They’d park the Crown Vic on the crowded block in the small eastern Pennsylvania city. He saw it in his mind’s eye. He and the hulking O’Kane would knock on the row house door. An old man, living alone, would peek over the chain, white-haired, probably decrepit and smelling of booze, face tight.