A Child's Garden of Death

by Forrest, Richard;

  Lyon and Rocco looked down at the montage of intense, serious young Jewish men on the floor. The faces that stared from the small photographs on the permanent resident cards were gaunt with brooding darkness.

  “Christ,” Rocco said. “They look like prison mug shots.”

  “In a way that’s what they are,” Lyon said. “God only knows what they went through to get here.”

  The search by the immigration authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had turned up sixteen names with sixteen photographs and visa information. Sixteen names of Jewish males emigrating from Germany or of German origin as they made circuitous routes to this country. Each had arrived between 1935 and 1938 and was approximately five foot three inches tall, with some sort of machinist or engineering background. Each had moved to Connecticut, and each was now lost to the authorities because of death, failure to register, formal citizenship or other factors. Of the thousand possible names they were down to sixteen.

  “It’s still going to be a hell of a lot of work,” Rocco said.

  Lyon thought for a moment. Some of the names had known addresses in the forties, others had dossiers that ended in the late thirties. He knew there were other sources they could go to, the Social Security Administration, the Armed Forces, or other governmental agencies that became involved in every person’s life.

  “You know, Rocco, it makes you realize how impossible it is to disappear completely. There are too many bureaucratic tracks on each of us.”

  “Still, Connecticut is a big state for a little state,” Rocco said, “and thirty years is a long time. Where in hell do we start?”

  “We’ll go on the assumption that the man we’re looking for lived somewhere in the Greater Hartford area, say in a thirty-mile radius. Let’s start with the State Bureau of Vital Statistics and see if we can pick up the deaths from our group.”

  Rocco’s hand already cradled the phone and he dialed the Bureau of Vital Statistics. In twenty minutes they’d given the names and received a reply. “Thank you very much,” Rocco said. “As a double check I’ll duplicate the request by mail.” He turned to Lyon and handed him a pad with a neatly aligned list of names. Four had been crossed off with the notation, “deceased.”

  “And then there were twelve,” Lyon said.

  Kimberly kicked the door open and slammed two plates of sandwiches on the desk. “Off you, pig,” she said to Rocco.

  “Kimberly, have I told you recently how much I love you?” Rocco said.

  “Go to hell, man,” she replied and strode from the room.

  “Someday, Lyon, will you tell her that I don’t oppress ghetto dwellers—that Murphysville doesn’t even have a ghetto?”

  “I told her,” Lyon said. “But she said that if Murphysville did have a ghetto you would oppress them.”

  The big man shrugged and they went back to the lists. “Well,” Rocco said, “let’s see who on this list is alive and kicking.”

  They drew a thirty-mile circle on a road map, using the grave site as the center. They found that the ring included in its area a total of twenty-two towns. They decided that the quickest initial check would be through the phone company.

  Two hours later they had marked seven more names off their lists. Personal calls to the seven, either at home or at their place of business, verified that they were in fact the emigrants staring so solemnly from the old visa photographs.

  “Jesus,” Rocco said. “Five left. They could be anywhere.”

  “Let’s try the school systems in the area. They keep records,” Lyon said. “Let’s find out if any of the names left had a daughter in school during 1943 in the seven to ten age range.”

  As a small boy Lyon could remember driving through the cities and towns in the area encompassed within their circle. His father, a doctor, often traveled to what were then remote areas. At that time, as throughout the country, what were now thriving suburban towns and cities were still sleepy hamlets. An immigrant settling in the area, and likely working in a factory or foundry, would probably live in a metropolitan area near his place of work and not too distant from fellow immigrants. At that time, the North End of Hartford held the Jewish ghetto. Although the murdered family lived in a trailer, he thought it unlikely they would have moved far from the city.

  They were lucky on the first call to the Hartford Board of Education. The impatient clerk, after rummaging through old records, gave them a verification on two of their names. Each had a child in the public school system in the early 1940s; each of the girls was of the proper age.

  They made an appointment to see the records on the following morning.

  Lyon sat in the police cruiser in front of the post office while Rocco Herbert wrote out two tickets for overtime parking. When the large man finally heaved himself behind the wheel with a satisfied grin, Lyon turned to him impatiently.

  “Overtime parking, when we’re trying to find a murderer?”

  “That’s a fifteen-minute zone by the post office, and I know damn well they’ve been there for over an hour.”

  “We’ve got an appointment at the Board of Ed.”

  Rocco shrugged. “I know. Too many years, too many parking tickets. It’s become a thing.” He threw the car in gear and they started toward the highway. Near the entrance to the Interstate a housewife in a station wagon filled with children ran a stop sign. The cruiser began to slow until Lyon put his arm on Rocco’s.

  “I know. I can’t help it,” Rocco said.

  “I hate to see crime run rampant in Murphysville for a whole morning, Rocco, but …”

  “All right, wise guy,” the big man replied. “See how you’d fare if you’d been doing the same thing for twenty years and then … say, in your case, if you had to write a book with more than two syllable words.”

  “Touché.”

  The neat blue badge with white lettering read, “Miss Louella Parsons.” The wearer of the badge, a gaunt, white-haired woman in her sixties, stood defiantly at the counter, separating her protected school records from the remainder of the world. “It is immaterial to me what they told you in the front office,” she said. “These records are only available to certain persons on written request.”

  “This is a police matter, lady.”

  “That patch on your sleeve says Murphysville, not Hartford.”

  “We try to cooperate with all local authorities,” Rocco said, impatience edging his voice.

  “I suggest you get authorization from the local police,” she replied.

  “Louella Parsons,” Rocco said, authority ringing his voice. “That name’s familiar to me. I bet you have unpaid parking tickets in Murphysville. Right, lady?”

  She stepped back from the counter. “I don’t even drive.”

  “Jaywalking then.”

  “Wait a minute,” Lyon said softly. “Louella Parsons was a movie gossip columnist, Hearst syndicate, I believe.”

  “No relation,” Miss Parsons said primly.

  “It might help if I explained why we’re here,” Lyon said. In quick strokes he painted her a picture of the grave site and briefly sketched their investigation so far, and their hope that the file of one of the two girls might give them a lead to the identity of the victims.

  In a few minutes they were sitting at a small table in the well-protected sanctity of Miss Parsons’ record room. Each held a folder in his hands while Miss Parsons stood nearby, part instructor and part protector of the realm.

  The serious eight-year-old eyes of Rebecca Meyerson stared out solemnly at Lyon. The corners of the lips seemed slightly stretched as if smothering a smile and fighting to maintain composure. A black-haired girl with raven eyes and alabaster skin. As Lyon closed the folder he could imagine the little girl jumping from the photographer’s chair to skip down the hall to class. He knew with a start that if this was the victim, that if this little girl was the one whose body …

  “What’s in yours?” Rocco asked.

  “Oh, it’s not this one,” Miss Parso
ns said, snatching the folder from Lyon. “There’s a note on the outside of the folder that the family moved to California.”

  “Where did the father work?” Rocco asked.

  Miss Parsons efficiently flipped open the folder. “Father, Meyer Meyerson, address 1215 Houston Blvd., employed at the Houston Company.”

  “But moved to California,” Lyon said with relief.

  “We’ve got it here, then,” Rocco said jubilantly. “Want to see her picture?” he said, and handed the folder across the table to Lyon.

  “No, thank you. Are you sure it’s her?”

  “Got to be. Listen. Father, Moshe Eisenberg, home address 210 Asylum, place of business, Pratt and Whitney Aircraft.”

  “210 Asylum. That’s the Civic Center.”

  “Sure it is, now. But we’ve got something to go on. We’ll track them down.”

  As they left Miss Parsons, Rocco thumped Lyon on the back, and Lyon was grateful that he hadn’t looked at the Eisenberg girl’s photo.

  The young and efficient assistant personnel manager at the aircraft plant was most helpful as she ushered them into a private conference room. She sat at the end of the table, with pencil poised. Long red hair framed her youthful face.

  They quickly told her the story, and her intense young face became even more intense. “Of course,” she said. “He could have worked here or at one of the other plants, but let’s start here.” She jumped from her seat and scurried from the room, only to return in a few minutes with a personnel folder and a puzzled look.

  “You have his folder?” Lyon asked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I have Moshe Eisenberg’s folder, but it’s very strange. The folder just ends. I mean, it’s like there should be other pages or something, but it just ends in 1943.” She paused to reflect a moment. “That was during World War II or something, wasn’t it?”

  “Or something,” Lyon said and felt old.

  “Record keeping wasn’t the best then. Lots of men were in and out of here, but this folder just ends … doesn’t say if he was terminated or anything.”

  Lyon and Rocco glanced across the table at each other with the knowledge that they now had an address turned into a civic center and a file that just ended.

  “I just don’t understand it,” the young personnel assistant said. “We try to be so careful, but of course we never have to go back this far in the records unless someone is still here.” She tapped her pencil with a click against the table. “You know what we might do. This man was in Department 210. Just yesterday I was processing a retirement for the superintendent of that department. He’s been here over thirty years and just might remember something.”

  Department 210 was a die shop almost a quarter of a mile through the plant from the executive offices. They followed the clicking heels of the young girl, and since conversation was difficult in the din of the factory, Lyon glanced at Rocco and saw that he was intent on the taut skirt of the young woman in front of them. Lyon nudged him in the ribs and the large man looked over at him with a grin and proceeded to inspect the overhead crane system with great intensity.

  The superintendent of Department 210 was wearing safety goggles and bending over a lathe as he helped the operator to set up the machine. He turned quickly and smiled at the young personnel assistant, then beckoned them toward a small glass-enclosed office.

  “These gentlemen are trying to locate a Moshe Eisenberg who worked in this department a number of years ago,” she said. “It’s very strange, the personnel records just end … nothing … no notations, nothing. We thought you might remember something about the man.”

  The superintendent looked at them blankly for a moment and then slowly removed his goggles and laid them neatly on the desk. “Why do you want him?” he asked.

  “We think he may have been murdered,” Rocco answered.

  “Moshe Eisenberg?”

  “That’s what we think.”

  The superintendent blinked and then began to laugh until he grasped the edge of the desk with both hands. “Well,” he choked. “Well, then, I guess I killed him. I’m Moshe Eisenberg. Changed my name to Monty Eisenhower in 1943. Seemed like the patriotic thing to do at the time.”

  Four

  Since getting drunk at eleven in the morning seemed slightly obscene, Rocco left Lyon off at Nutmeg Hill and proceeded back to Murphysville to wreak utter devastation on overtime parkers and those who pass stopped school buses.

  The Wobblies grinned at Lyon from the mantelpiece, and Kimberly, sneakered feet on desk and phone in hand, was arranging a protest meeting for the Attica brothers.

  Lyon stomped out onto the patio and contemplated the blossoming trees and nesting birds. Contemplating trees and birds is a hell of a thing to do if that’s not what you want to do, he thought. Going back into the study, he glared at Kim, who waved him away with an obscene gesture.

  In the kitchen he made himself a dreadful cup of instant coffee and sulked at the formica-topped table. He ran the tips of his fingers over the haphazard design of the table top. Formless, erratic, purposeless …

  Lyon Wentworth was angry with himself. Angry for his initial involvement with this case in the first place, angry for looking at the grave and for deluding Rocco into thinking that an amateur and a small town police chief could best the powers of one of the most highly trained State Police forces in the country.

  His theory of the identification of the male victim had seemed rational, to fit the scanty clues available. Now there were three choices available: one, to chuck the whole thing and go back to his book; two, to rethink the whole matter and try to come up with something else; or three, continue to pursue the same path with the … with the realization that if the murders were not done by a madman, all possible attempts would have been made to cover up identity. In retrospect it had to be considered that the murderer so far had done a pretty damn good job in covering up leads.

  What other avenues were open? The murder weapon? Considering what Rocco had told him of the pathologist’s report and what he’d seen in the trailer, Lyon suspected it was the missing stove ring. Even locating that wouldn’t prove much. The ownership of the land and lake where the trailer was found was a dead end; the corporate face of the Water Company had yielded nothing. Reluctant liaison by Rocco with his brother-in-law of the State Police had produced no further results. The dredging operation was now almost complete and, except for finding thousands of pieces of ancient trailer, had turned up nothing tangible.

  If it had only been one of the two little girls whose records they’d looked at … but the evidence was undeniable. Monty-Moshe was quite obviously alive, with a 37-year-old daughter living in Fresno, California, and little Rebecca was also living in California, according to …

  Something was wrong. He realized that he’d been denying the subconscious premonition that had been with him for hours. He had fought it, submerged it back into his mind, obliterated it because he had willed it so, because he refused to consider the possibility, because he didn’t want it to be Rebecca.

  He went back into the study to find Kimberly still intent on the telephone. During a break in her conversation he spoke loudly. “The FBI’s at the back door and respectfully wishes to interview you about certain of your activities.”

  Kimberly slammed the phone down. “Are those mothers back again …” She stalked out as Lyon gratefully reached for the still warm phone.

  Miss Louella Parsons sounded disarmingly young on the phone, and it took will to conjure up her rather waspish face and manner. He asked that she get Rebecca Meyerson’s folder.

  As he waited for her to return to the phone, Kimberly stuck her head in the doorway. “There’s no one out there,” she yelled.

  “They’re probably digging up the pasture for hidden arms,” he replied.

  Miss Parsons came back on the phone. “I have the file. Exactly what did you want to know, Mr. Wentworth?”

  “I’m interested in the notation that the family moved to Californ
ia.”

  “Yes. The local school probably made it after a call from a member of the family, or a truant officer’s report when the child never returned to school. It could have happened any number of ways.”

  “Wouldn’t the file show the shipment of records to the new school?”

  There was a pause on the line, then the return of the now doubtful voice. “That is strange. Under ordinary circumstances a transcript would have been sent along, or sent when the new school requested it. Of course, that form could have been lost from the file years ago.”

  “But under ordinary circumstances there should have been a further notation, a follow-up.”

  “Yes, usually there would be.”

  “Thank you very much.” Lyon Wentworth hung up with a sick feeling, the photograph of the dark-haired girl clear in his mind. He quickly dialed town police headquarters and asked for Chief Herbert. “How’s it going?” he asked when Rocco picked up.

  “Just great, really great. Fourteen parking tickets in an hour, which is my record. Caught a selectman and a member of the Board of Ed.”

  “You’ll get in trouble doing that.”

  “I’m not stupid. I scribble a signature on the ticket, and when they complain I blame it on a new man. Now I’m going over patrolmen’s time sheets to see if I can suspend anyone for anything. As you can tell, I’m in a good mood.” His voice lowered. “I’ve got to call in the state, Lyon.”

  “Wait another day. I may have something.”

  “Another day.” He could sense the Chief’s voice attempting to sound not too hopeful. “You really think you have something?”

  “I guess so, Rocco. At least I think I guess so. I’ll let you know this time tomorrow.”

  “Call me as soon as you can.”

  Houston Boulevard had changed since he was a boy. The Park River had flowed green and was filled with shad. Now the river was cement-covered and ran murky in hidden culverts, while the whole area was covered with clusters of elevated portions of Interstate highway. The Houston Company had grown over the years until now it was one of the largest factories in the area.