by Ken Gross
When she came home from her unplanned cruise, she called Joe Rorech, a building contractor, to meet her at the airport. But he got tied up in a snowstorm. So Alice called Eddie and he came out to the airport to bring her home. On the ride back to the Queens apartment, they had another of their cutting exchanges:
You left Evelyn without any money.
There was a hundred dollars in the house and she knew it.
There was no food in the house.
She knows she can always buy food.
The words were like little nicks, drawing emotional blood, leaving tiny scars.
What kind of mother are you?
There’s nothing wrong with my kids.
Where were you?
None of your business.
Less than two months later Eddie began the custody suit. The idea was not so much to take the children away from Alice as to bring Alice back into the fold. She had strayed, but everyone was ready to forgive and forget. Everyone except Alice.
While the children played in Kissena Park that Tuesday, her determination to hold on to them hardened.
Her fury about the suit had been no secret. “I’ll take them out of the country if I have to,” she had told Joe Rorech. “I’ll never let Eddie have them.”
She did not want her children to grow up under the canopy of the church. She taught them prayers, but had resisted enrolling them in parochial school. Eddie had been badgering her about that just before the disappearance. Alice had seen and sampled the weight of money and power. She knew what beauty and wit could accomplish. She was dazzled by the men who moved cities and built roads.
“I’d rather see them dead than with Eddie.”
Alice Crimmins was careless with words. She knew she could use them to wound her husband; she could drive men to the edge of expectation with hints and double entendres. She had learned to employ verbal brinkmanship to keep interest alive, or decisive putdowns to ward off vulgar approaches.
“I’d rather see them dead than with Eddie.”
She would learn that words could cut both ways.
7
The thing that Detective Piering picked up from the cold progression of Alice Crimmins’ day was a pungent suspicion. She had notebooks full of men’s names. A woman like that, Piering deduced, would automatically deal in evasion and lies. She dangled too many men to be truthful. As his ballpoint pen moved across the page of his own notebook, he did not trust a single word she said.
“OK, you called the lawyer. Whatdja do then?”
“I had to call him back when I got home; he was busy. So I picked up some things for dinner. . . .”
He wrote down the name of Sever’s Delicatessen. Soda. String beans. Etc. From her home she called LaPenna again and he told her that he wanted to see her the next day—that would have been today—to talk about the case. He warned her again that there could be an inspection visit any time and that she had better be careful. He didn’t sound as sanguine about her chances as he normally did and she felt uncomfortable.
Missy and Eddie were outside tossing a ball around. And laughing. She put the package of frozen food in the oven and looked at her watch. She couldn’t remember the exact time, only that she checked it to time the dinner. Then she opened the can of string beans and set the table for dinner. She telephoned Tony Grace at his office in Whitestone. He sounded brusque.
“I’m busy; lemme call you back.”
Outside, Theresa Costello was sitting on the cement porch, tossing the ball to Missy and Eddie, giggling delightedly. They were the sort of children who always enticed adults into their games. Theresa pretended that she had been fooled into playing. She could hear Mrs. Crimmins in the kitchen, rattling pots and pans.
“Missy! Eddie! Let’s go! Supper.”
“Ahhh,” protested Eddie.
“I gotta go eat, too,” said Theresa, settling it.
No one intended to live forever in Regal Gardens—not at first, not when the moving vans arrived and the spectators on the lawn stared with a mixture of prison pity and just-wait smirks. For some, Regal Gardens was a white, lower-middle-class staging area halfway between the escape from the city and the house on Long Island. There, before the commitment to mortgages and lawn care, the bad marriages were sorted out and life styles were settled. But nothing seemed permanent and this affected even the relationships between neighbors. There was an element of reluctance on the part of some residents to commit themselves to deep friendship, since they might be moving again soon. The relationships grew gradually, grudgingly, the way that people accepted living in Regal Gardens.
In many ways Theresa Costello shared Alice Crimmins’ dissatisfactions. She understood the arid existence that could spawn such restlessness and envied Mrs. Crimmins’ strength in establishing her own standards. She was not put off by the obdurate gossip that set Alice Crimmins apart She saw through much of it as plain envy.
“I liked her very much,” she would say later. “She was a good person.”
It was a judgment not made lightly. The week that Alice moved into the larger apartment with two bedrooms—in March 1962—Theresa saw her on the mall with the two infants.
“Hi,” Theresa said to Missy.
Theresa became more than Alice Crimmins’ baby-sitter. Two or three times a week she would stay with Eddie and Missy until Alice came home at 1:00 a.m. Later Alice would hire a live-in maid at thirty-five dollars a week, losing the steady services of Theresa as a babysitter, but Theresa was always her friend. And even if their ages made it unlikely, it was important to Alice to have the approval of the fourteen-year-old Theresa Costello.
Piering again pressed Alice for details about the children’s last day.
“Let’s go for a ride,” Alice suggested after the children had finished dinner. The children piled into the back seat of her Mercury convertible and they started riding toward Main Street. It was not a random choice. Alice had a plan in mind; she wanted to find out where Eddie had moved.
Eddie Crimmins had left his furnished apartment on 164th Street at the end of June. He was now in another flat a few blocks away, overlooking the Grand Central Parkway.
“I figured it was close because his phone number stayed the same,” Alice told Piering.
In the escalating custody battle Eddie and Alice had been tracking each other’s lives with amateurish zeal. She knew he had planted a crude bug on her telephone and was assembling evidence to use against her. She half suspected he had a girlfriend and wanted to find him living with someone. It was her only hope of countering his assault on her character in court. “Look for Daddy’s car,” she told the children, as she cruised the streets off Main Street.
Alice drove around for more than an hour, until it was almost dark, and then she headed home. Nina Schwartz, who lived across the mall from her, saw Alice and the children coming home. Mrs. Schwartz watched for a moment, then closed her window because, she said, it was “cool and breezy.”
No one has disputed that Alice Crimmins was a fastidious parent. The children were always clean, and with little Eddie’s propensity for getting messy, unusual attention was required. Some neighbors thought Alice was a little too fastidious. No sooner would one of the kids smear his or her face than Alice was ready with a washcloth. There were things about her that defied understanding. She didn’t mind putting on the scantiest costume as a cocktail waitress—in fact, she preferred a costume—but she refused to wear anything that would show her cleavage. From the waist down, she had no rules. There was another thing: with all the men she had been with, she never undressed in the light. This shyness was mystifying, in view of the fact that she shed her inhibitions in the dark. It was an irreconcilable paradox that clouded everything she said.
She told Detective Piering that after coming back from the drive she had undressed the children, washed off their ice-cream stains and the accumulated debris of the day’s playing, put fresh T-shirts and underwear on them and put them to b
ed.
It was at this moment that Theresa Costello passed under the bedroom window on her way to a baby-sitting job across the mall. “God bless Mommy and Daddy,” she heard Eddie say.
It had surprised Theresa that Alice insisted upon the children’s evening prayers. The first time she baby-sat for Eddie and Missy, the boy told her they had to do something first before going to bed. Theresa watched as Missy and Eddie got on their knees in front of their beds and, half stumbling, said the prayers.
“Do you always do that?” Theresa asked little Eddie.
“Yup,” he replied.
Alice’s unusual religious faith was an incongruity that Theresa came to accept.
On the evening of the disappearance she heard Missy giggling. “C’mon, Missy, no more fooling around,” she heard Alice say.
“God bless Mommy and Daddy . . . and Brandy,” she heard Missy say. Then she crossed the mall to keep her appointment.
Alice, meanwhile, had a busy night. She brought the screen from her room into the children’s room. But then she noticed some dried turd on the screen and realized she couldn’t put it up. After Brandy gave birth months earlier, they had used the screen to fence in the pups and it had never been properly cleaned. Alice reset the children’s screen in the window, without bothering to bolt it into place. It was only leaning against the window because she intended to clean hers and affix it at the next opportunity.
She had always kept a clean apartment, but now Alice had to look at it through the eyes of a city agency. She collected empty wine and liquor bottles to throw away. She made a pile of old clothing—mostly Edmund’s. By 10:30 she was exhausted and slumped on the living-room couch, watching The Defenders on Channel 2.
Tony Grace hadn’t called back, and she telephoned a Bronx bar where she knew he would be—the Capri—and asked for him. It was Tuesday night, and on Tuesday nights Tony Grace drank whiskey at the Capri bar on Williamsbridge Road, within sight of her mother’s window. Grace was a big man in the Capri, a place that seemed to belong to another time—a time of Italian crooners singing “Isle of Capri”; of ambitious secretaries with rhinestone rings ordering Creme de menthe; of double-parked Lincoln Continentals. Inside the Capri the lighting was mostly shadows, the seats were made of leather, and there was a suggestion of violence in some of the men who drank there.
“You didn’t call me back,” she said coolly when Grace came to the telephone; her legs were tucked under her and she was tapping ashes into an overflowing tray.
“Ah, I got busy,” said Grace impatiently. She sounded like a wife.
“I could come over for a drink.”
“Where are you?”
“Home.”
“I’m only gonna have a drink and go home,” said Tony.
“Are the bowling girls there?” she asked, referring to a group of women who used the excuse that they were going bowling to get away from their husbands.
“No. No, I’m alone.”
“I’m having a lot of trouble with the custody thing.”
“What’s the lawyer say?” asked Grace. He had directed her to LaPenna as he would a friend to a favorite barber.
Alice was itchy. She knew he was with the bowling girls and had no intention of going home early. She didn’t like the sound of her own voice. They hung up, each feeling some dissatisfaction.
She didn’t brood for long. Sometime after ten, the telephone rang and the roles were reversed. Joe Rorech was calling from a bar in Huntington, Long Island, where Alice had once worked, and he wanted her to join him.
“Hey, guess who’s here,” he said, trying to kindle some interest. Alice listened politely, but he sounded drunk. He had in fact been drinking all day. He was with his cousin, Bob Rorech, and a business partner, Dick Nevins. There was an exotic singer performing and Rorech tried to make it sound inviting. But Alice was merely polite.
Once Joe Rorech’s calls had excited Alice Crimmins. That had been when he seemed like a huge success; when he was considered the biggest home-improvement contractor on Long Island and there seemed to be no limit to his potential. She’d been impressed by the way he piled people onto airplanes for weekends in Las Vegas; the way he traveled first class and seemed a bottomless spender; the way he could drink from lunch until all the bars closed and never seem drunk.
But the glitter had gone out of their romance. Joe Rorech was no longer the fastest contractor with the newest Cadillac. He was the sad father of seven children whose business was beginning to fail and who sounded like a lush.
“Why don’t you come on out?” he asked.
“I don’t have a sitter,” said Alice.
They both knew there had been a time when he had only to suggest a rendezvous and she would make some arrangements. But that time was gone. She was tired now. He was a jealous man and he knew about Tony Grace and the other men in Alice Crimmins’ life.
“I can’t get a baby-sitter,” she said, and Joe Rorech returned to his Scotch mists.
Alice went back to watching television. At midnight, she told Detective Piering, she took little Eddie’s hand and walked him from his cot to the bathroom, where he emptied his bladder. She tried to shake Missy awake, but the little girl just moaned and rolled over in her crib. Alice let her sleep.
She thought she relatched the door, but the memory was hazy. The hook-and-eye lock had been put up when she still lived with her husband. One morning little Eddie had left his room and made himself sick by gobbling everything in the refrigerator. The parents had agreed to install the lock.
After she checked the children, Alice took Brandy for a walk. She passed a neighbor, Bob Yoquinto, who was walking his boxer. They waved to each other and she smiled. She sat on the stoop for a moment; the night was clear, and it felt good to inhale fresh air. There were distant sounds, perhaps coming from late celebrants at the World’s Fair. Traffic was light in this section of Queens, which was like a bypass road that had been made obsolete by a superhighway.
Alice didn’t bother to bolt her front door since she was sitting out front. But habits and memories are deceptive. Times and events sometimes blur and are hard to separate into components. Perhaps it was another time that she sat outside without locking the door. Alice was almost certain, she told Piering, that she shot the dead bolt to the front door when she returned. But she was not positive.
She went into her room, turned on the air-conditioner, and fell asleep in her clothing. She heard a sound in the rear, perhaps a child crying, but she wasn’t certain. Something woke her at a quarter to three. It might have been a scream, or just a random noise, or a nightmare. She went to the bathroom and washed and prepared for bed. Nothing seemed unusual or disturbed.
As she was stepping out of the bathroom, the telephone rang. It was Eddie, who sometimes called at this hour.
“Evelyn says you owe her money,” said Eddie.
“Oh, yeah. Well, she’s such a good friend of yours, go ask her yourself.”
She did not sound upset, Eddie would recall later. She didn’t sound nervous as if something drastic had happened. He said that she acted normal—that is, nasty.
The telephone call from Eddie made Alice angry. She had gone to see Evelyn about the debt, but the former maid wouldn’t even let her come in. Alice took Brandy out again, cooling off. She sat on the stoop for about ten minutes, then went back inside. She took a bath and went to sleep sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 a.m.
“That’s it?” asked Piering.
8
“The situation is mushrooming.”
—DETECTIVE PIERING TO EDMUND AND ALICE CRIMMINS BEFORE MISSY’S BODY WAS FOUND
Edmund Crimmins sat in a squad room of the Fresh Meadows Precinct, flanked by two detectives. He was trembling. The room was thick with the suggestion of violence. There was a desk and two chairs, but no window. There was the artificial light of a naked bulb and the unblinking presence of the detectives. The starkness was meant to be intimidating.
“How did you kill her?” asked Sergeant Kurt Gruenthal.
Eddie Crimmins didn’t say anything—he was still absorbing his daughter’s death.
“You better tell us how you did it,” said Gruenthal with more than a little menace.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but I didn’t kill my daughter,” Eddie replied. Gruenthal and Detective George Martin just stared at Eddie.
In the aftermath of the discovery of Missy’s body, it had been decided to keep the parents separated. If there was a chance that they were in it together, the police didn’t want to give them an opportunity to lean on each other for support. There was another, more subtle reason. In the summer of 1965 there were no women detectives in the New York City Police Department. Eddie Crimmins could be handled according to standard procedures. If they were rough with him, he would simply have to stand it. There was no mystery in his role. If he had killed his child, the motive would have been a simple one—jealousy, rage, revenge—or it might have been an accident Such explanations were familiar ground and the police were confident they would get the truth out of Eddie by using standard investigative tactics. With Eddie they could be as tough as the situation demanded. Alice posed a complication. She was a woman, and to the men of the detective command she had the mystique of a woman—that is, she was unfathomable. Furthermore, she was an unusual woman. She didn’t crumple and fall apart as they expected a grieving parent would. They would have to come up with a different kind of roughness to deal with her.
As the questioning of Eddie went on, the police became aware that his attention strayed. One level of his consciousness coped with the questioning. But other levels were going through the torment of the sudden tragedy.
The feelings of both parents about their children were complicated and inextricably bound to parcels of love and guilt. Children inevitably feel some guilt at the breakup of the marriage of their parents—and in this case the parents inevitably would feel guilt about the death of a child.