by Ken Gross
“Yeah?” said Piering.
Then Alice had made another call. A friend. But he was busy. In conference. He had told her to call back.
“Who?” asked Piering.
Alice looked at Piering for a moment. This man was violating her privacy. She was trying to decide whether to hold anything back.
“His name is Tony Grace.”
The flashing diamond pinky ring adorned a hand that had spent a lifetime performing hard labor. Anthony Grace was fifty-two years old—precisely twice the age of Alice Crimmins. He was a small, thick man with a pencil mustache and the raspy voice of someone who had once been strangled. Grace’s name was stenciled on hundreds of trucks and pieces of heavy machinery throughout the state. His contracting firm built highways and parks all over New York State. He might have developed more polish on his rude climb to become a millionaire, but his social mobility did not suffer. He could sit in his favorite bar in the Bronx and point out famous politicians and mobsters he knew.
Among his friends was City Council President Paul Screvane. Because of their interlacing business interests, Grace had come to know almost every important New York City official. When Alice Crimmins became Grace’s girlfriend, she came to know them, too.
On the day that Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s engagement to Barbara Cavanagh—sister of Deputy Mayor Edward Cavanagh, Jr.—was being publicly announced, Tony Grace was fending off telephone calls from Alice Crimmins.
4
It was an accident that Jerry Piering was assigned as the detective in charge of the Crimmins case. Since Lieutenant Ray Jones was on vacation, his chores fell to Sergeant Kurt Gruenthal. A cautious man who was on the police promotion list waiting for appointment to lieutenant, Gruenthal was eager to court the friendship of members of the force. By surrendering the case to Piering, he was not so much avoiding risks as accumulating debts.
George Martin stepped out of Piering’s way without recriminations or protest. It would have been difficult for Martin to challenge Piering’s right to the case, even if he had wanted to. Perhaps Ray Jones might have insisted on assigning the case to the senior detective, George Martin. But Martin was already a first-grade detective and so he retreated in order that Piering might get some credit and a shot at second-grade detective. Martin also suspected that by passing up the Crimmins case he might be saving himself a lot of hard work . . . and grief.
While Piering was poking around the kitchen and going through the garbage, Martin was making a routine search of Alice’s bedroom, the room with the air-conditioner. He was not looking for anything in particular, but he would know a find when he came upon it. The vanity was cluttered with an assortment of sweet-smelling cosmetics that perfumed the entire room. The closet was jammed with an assortment of bright summer clothing. Martin noted that the clothing was inexpensive—labels from Macy’s and Gertz—and kept in neat condition.
And then he saw something sticking out from under the bed. It was a pastel overnight bag. He reached over to pick it up, grateful that he was not outdoors in the unbearable heat, marching up and down the neighborhood.
“Do you have to do that?”
Alice Crimmins was standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips, trying to suppress her anger. The police were pawing through her private things. Strange men stomped in and out of her bedroom, handling her intimate papers, her clothing, her underwear. Their clumsy, careless manner left her feeling violated.
“I know what I’m doing,” replied Detective Martin. “You’ve got two kids missing.” He unzipped the case and immediately regretted it. The case was filled with cards—birthday greetings, comic valentines, holiday cards—some of them signed. The detective lifted a batch and began to read them. “Holy shit!” he said. He had stumbled upon a greeting card from Paul Screvane, President of the City Council, likely to be the next Mayor. There was a telegram from the present Mayor, Robert Wagner, inviting Alice to attend the opening of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. There were dinner programs autographed by Mayor Wagner and Senator Robert Kennedy. There was a card from Tony Grace, the contractor who had constructed a small park underneath the Verrazano Bridge. They all had the same opening: “To Rusty.” To the important city officials she was known only as “Rusty,” a kinetic redhead who appeared and disappeared in their lives at convenient moments—she was one of the pretty smiling faces at their social assemblies; a party light who would glow until the men of power grew tired or bored and shut her out. Martin knew instantly that Alice Crimmins traveled in important circles and sensed that a hopeless complication had entered the case. He didn’t want any part of it. But at the moment all he could say was “Holy shit!”
Ruth Mandelbaum watched the two policemen going from store to store along Main Street, a few blocks west of the Crimmins apartment, in one of the shopping districts. Her desk was in the window of a small insurance firm where she worked as a receptionist, secretary, and soft counterpoint to the asset-eyed men. Ruth Mandelbaum was a swollen, middle-aged woman who gave herself special credit for gifts of insight and prescience. The latter, which she charged to some dim ancestor who had passed along genes of witchcraft, kept Mrs. Mandelbaum alert. She could always spot trouble coming up the block. She was in the middle of her morning coffee break, chatting with her daughter on the telephone, when she saw it coming.
“I’ll have to call you back, Sheila, something’s going on.”
Mrs. Mandelbaum seldom noticed the faces of policemen. Usually the uniform alone was enough to create an identity. But today she noticed the policemen’s faces. They were very young and seemed very anxious. She was already out of her chair and at the door when they reached the office. Her boss, a chubby man smelling of cologne, was standing next to her.
“We’re looking for these two children,” said one of the young policemen, holding out pictures of Eddie and Missy. Mrs. Mandelbaum’s boss, a short man, had to peer over her shoulder. Guided by some interior logic, the policemen went to the woman instead of the man.
Mrs. Mandelbaum looked gravely and carefully at the two photographs—not because she would have recognized the children, but because she felt some obligation to form. Ruth Mandelbaum saw hundreds of children every day from her window on Main Street. It was one of the more pleasant aspects of her job, the ability to divert herself to the street and a passing pack of children. After 3:00 p.m., when school broke, she derived satisfaction from watching the youngsters bursting with happy energy.
The small, preschool children passed all day, by the hundreds. This was a crowded section of Queens, busily breeding large families. But the children were always attached to an adult—even if the strings were loose and invisible. Whenever she saw a young child, she would instinctively look behind for the attending parent. It was something she never thought about, but realized instantly when the police showed her the photographs. She would have noticed an unattached child.
“They might be wearing pajamas or underwear,” said one of the policemen.
All along Main Street, like some tide that the policemen had drawn after them, storekeepers stood in the doorways looking up and down the street.
Mrs. Mandelbaum’s coffee was tasteless and cold by the time she got back to her daughter. “What kind of mother lets her children run loose like that?” said Mrs. Mandelbaum, and then, without thinking, “By the way, where are Mark and Lisa?”
By midmorning there were hundreds of detectives and uniformed policemen walking in pairs looking for the two missing children. More than a mile away, teams walked slowly through Cunningham Park, dreading every bush. Using their nightsticks, the policemen explored the undergrowth in Kissena Park.
One detachment spread out on both sides of the access road to the Van Wyck Expressway. There were wild, weedy patches where neighborhood children built secret warrens or tree houses, where teenagers left traces of midnight trysts—beer cans and contraceptives. Lately, new tenants had moved into the stretches of greensward. Rats, driven away from the World�
��s Fair grounds in Flushing Meadow Park, had temporarily nested on the uninhabited islands, like swimmers pausing in the mid-ocean of highways.
It was in no way an ordinary assignment for the policemen in the area. Most of them were parents. Most had children near Eddie’s and Missy’s ages, and they could easily imagine this nightmare happening to them.
Abe Silverman had always warned his children to stay out of the open lot a few doors from their home on 162nd Street. Besides being an eyesore, the lot was a dangerous dumping ground. There were wild flowers which attracted children into the area, but Silverman knew that there were outcroppings of broken glass and rusty cans. “I never want you to go in there without an adult,” Silverman told his son, Jay, nine years old, and his daughter, Leslie, who was three years older.
On July 14, Jay Silverman was furious. He had just fought with his sister and stalked out of their attached home in search of mediation. He walked quickly up 162nd Street. The dirt path that led past the empty lot turned into Jewel Avenue, a major east-west artery. Jay found himself heading toward the library, less than half a mile away, where he expected to find his mother. His indignation was high as he made the trip that he had made so often, the pale youth with glasses who always seemed buried in a book.
Jay’s mother wasn’t at the library and, with his anger unspent, he headed home. He kicked up dirt as he passed the empty lot near his home—the forbidden place which held so much allure. Automatically Jay glanced at some movement. A small cloud of flies hovered over something just off the footpath. Jay looked down.
Perhaps it was because his father was a designer for a toy company, or maybe it was an inability to accept cruel possibilities, but the first thing that Jay Silverman thought when he looked down was that he had come upon a broken doll. Of course, some part of him realized that it was not a toy. He was looking at the broken body of Missy Crimmins.
5
At 1:45 p.m. on July 14, 1965, there was an abrupt change of tone in the Crimmins case.
“Hey, Jerry, you wanna take this call?”
Detective Piering listened for a moment, then told Alice Crimmins that she had to go with him. There was no appeal in his voice. He did not tell her where she was going, or why. But she could tell that something had changed dramatically. Alice did not argue. She attached a leash to Brandy and went with Piering and Martin, wedged between them like the filling in a sandwich.
The unmarked police cruiser raced the eight blocks to the scene, a little pocket of urgency punctuated by a flashing red light and a mournful siren. No one spoke; everyone was absorbed by the details of the transit, by the frightened faces lining the streets. At the end of Jewel Avenue the street was blocked off. Uniformed patrolmen paced back and forth, delineating the limits of crowd penetration. They left the police cruiser in the middle of the street. Jerry Piering grabbed Mrs. Crimmins under the armpit and walked her across the street. The crowd pulled away.
Alice Crimmins looked down and saw her daughter and swooned.
Jerry Piering purposefully had not told her where they were going or what they expected to find. He had wanted to test her reactions, convinced that he would be able to read guilt or innocence in her expression of pain. He was ready when she crumpled and grabbed her. George Martin was unprepared. Stunned, he just stood watching.
“Do you recognize her?” asked Jerry Piering.
Mrs. Crimmins, sagging in his arms, replied: “It’s Missy.”
The two detectives walked the stricken mother back to the unmarked car. Another car had just arrived. Eddie Crimmins, flanked by two policemen, was about to go through the same ordeal. He was walking with Sergeant Gruenthal and another detective. Alice mumbled something, but Eddie didn’t seem to believe her. He just kept heading toward the shroud of flies where his daughter lay.
Alice Marie Crimmins—known by everyone who loved her as Missy—was dead. She was lying on her side with her back to the street. She had been dead for several hours. Exactly how many hours would be very difficult to pinpoint.
The police technicians circled her as if she were something contaminated, as if the job was too unbearable to begin. They had to follow the compelling professional routine to fight off a stab of emotion. The textbook ritual was explicit—keep the crime scene intact; keep the bystanders back; keep contact with command.
Still, it was very difficult. Missy’s legs, overstuffed like sausages, were stiff now with rigor mortis. The knees, smudged with little scabs from exuberant tumbles and careless play, were lifeless. The worst part was her head. She looked as if she might be sleeping. And the pretty blond hair and once bright blue eyes were covered with fly-egg larvae.
Jay Silverman had been pushed back with the rest of the crowd. After his discovery he had run home, the fight with his sister forgotten. Neighbors had rushed out with Jay, skeptical of his alarms. The radios in Queens had been broadcasting news reports of two missing children, but radio bulletins had only abstract claims on their attention. The dead child in the lot was overwhelmingly ghastly.
Jay Silverman stood with his mother, almost lost in the pack waiting for the police. In the years ahead he would have many bad nights, and his sister would not be able to sleep alone without lights. Jay would achieve his growth going in and out of courtrooms, telling of that moment when he found Missy’s body. He would be forced, by the requirements of law, to relive it again and again.
One of the first to answer the alarm was News photographer Tommy Gallagher. It took the police forty-five minutes to arrive, because many sector cars were involved in the search. A few minutes after 2:00 p.m. Detective Frank Frezza showed up. To the people on the street, it looked like the appearance of just another photographer. Frezza, however, was a police photographer who had learned his craft during World War II in combat. His pictures would be different from Gallagher’s. His job was to record the crime scene for possible courtroom use. He took eight pictures—five in black and white, three in color.
It was 2:45 p.m. by the time Dr. Richard Grimes arrived at the vacant lot at 71–31 162nd Street. In thirty-eight years as an Assistant Medical Examiner, Grimes had been exposed to almost every variety of violent death. He had performed thousands of autopsies and had a professional detachment from death. And yet he was moved by the sight of Missy Crimmins.
He touched her tiny leg. It was still warm; but that was from lying in the sun. He tried to flex the limb to test the degree of rigor mortis. The right side of Missy was pale. Her blood had settled to the left side—because of gravity. Technically, the condition is called lividity.
There was something tied around the child’s neck. It proved to be a pajama top. The arm of the pajama top had been knotted into two ligatures; but it wasn’t tight. Dr. Grimes could fit his fingers between the balls of the ligatures and the child’s neck.
He noted that there were bruises on the neck. Some spittle had dribbled out of Missy’s mouth—a froth that had run down her lips and onto her neck and was caked dry. The fly eggs were so thick that they obscured the eyelids and the forehead. Dr. Grimes had to keep brushing flies away from Missy’s face. He made a few notes and then released her to the detectives.
“Pretty little girl,” said someone in the crowd.
Dr. Grimes walked away quickly; he was not prepared to listen to that kind of talk.
6
Jerry Piering didn’t need Dr. Grimes or anyone else to tell him he was dealing with a homicide. He had seen it coming all day.
The police car headed back to the apartment. Alice Crimmins was in an apparent state of shock and Piering was plotting his next moves, beginning to realize that his correct guess would place him in a powerful position with his colleagues. No one would try to take the case away from him now. When they reached the home mall, hundreds of people were jammed on the patchy lawns. These strangers and neighbors had sensed tragedy, without having to be told. They cleared a path as Piering led Alice past the newspaper photographers. Piering noted that it w
as the cameras which started Alice’s tears. He recorded that, along with the memory of the liquor bottles, the tight slacks, the heavy makeup, and a theory began to congeal in his mind. Alice Crimmins had failed his final litmus test when he showed her Missy’s body. She had wept for the cameras, not for her child. The swoon he dismissed as theatrical.
Piering brought Alice back into her bedroom, sat her on her bed, and paced for a moment before launching on the tactics that he was certain would crack the case.
“Do you have any enemies?”
She shook her head.
“Think, Alice. Do you know someone who would want to do this?”
She paused and then shook her head again.
The apartment throbbed with even more activity as the criminal division of the Police Department moved in. In the children’s room, technicians were dusting for fingerprints. They had to take a set of elimination prints—fingerprints of all the people known to have handled things in the apartment so that they could be compared with any strange, unaccountable prints. They fingerprinted the parents, neighbors, baby-sitters. They took the children’s prints from their toys—Missy’s from a plastic tea set and a doll carriage; Eddie’s from a truck and the toy chest. The technicians also dusted the windows and the windowsills. They found one strange fingerprint on the third window pane from the bottom. It was an adult fingerprint and it would remain a mystery. In all the years that the case would be investigated, among all the thousands of fingerprints tested, that particular print would never be matched.