The Alice Crimmins Case

by Ken Gross

  “Couldn’t we make a composite tape?” asked Brady.

  Kersta said it was possible, but the results would probably be useless since it would be impossible to maintain a “chain of evidence.” There would never be anything incriminating against Eddie. His faulty reactions and strange patterns would be attributed to nothing more than normal variations of human behavior. In Alice’s case, each item became a weapon. But with Eddie the investigators put things into a different perspective and dismissed them.

  Brady arranged a reunion between Joe Rorech and Alice late in 1965. They met one night at Chez André’s on Northern Boulevard. Brady was with his wife, Ann. It was a delicate maneuver. They stood in the dark at the huge egg-shaped bar sipping whiskey that flooded their reserve. André’s, nestled behind a moat of hedges and protective trees, was an almost perfect rendezvous. The people who worked there were bred like eunuchs to discretion. The parking-lot attendants had seen women go home with strange men while their husbands dined clandestinely in another room. More than just a cheaters’ bar, André’s was the last word in Long Island’s elegant game of musical mating.

  By midnight Joe and Ann and Phil and Alice were feeling glowingly mellow over the rediscovered friendship. The whiskeys had softened the bad memories and Pal Joey was playing on the television over the bar—a nostalgic whisper of the past. And then Alice broke the spell. “Eddie’s home by now,” she said. “I better call home.”

  Phil Brady remained at his post at the bar, knowing he could hear the taped conversation the next day. The conversation with Eddie was brief, although charged with unstated tensions.

  “I’m out here at André’s having a drink with Phil and Ann Brady,” said Alice.

  “Who else is there?” asked Eddie.

  “No one,” said Alice.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  Alice didn’t say a word when she came back from the telephone. She picked up the conversation and her Scotch mist. About twenty minutes later Brady looked toward the door and saw Eddie. Joe Rorech was hidden behind Brady. Without turning, Brady delivered the warning: “Eddie’s here!”

  Rorech didn’t say a word. He slithered off his chair—as Brady recalls, it was as if his body suddenly shed its bones. He slid down to the floor and crawled on all fours the long way around the bar. The only problem was the bill, which Ann Brady good-naturedly paid.

  Brady was impressed and amused by Rorech’s bizarre escape. The reunion, it seemed, had been successful. For the rest of the night no one said a word about the spare drink on the bar in front of the four.

  32

  Alice Crimmins worked under her maiden name, Alice Burke. But her past and all its associations followed her. The pattern hardly varied. She’d get a job—as a secretary or receptionist, once as a travel agent in Manhattan. After a few weeks, just long enough for her to settle comfortably into a new environment, her employer would receive a pair of official visitors. Sometimes they would spare Alice the embarrassment of an office visit and see the boss at his home.

  One such visit was to a large house in a Westchester suburb. There were fountains on the expanse of lawn and a maid to escort the two detectives into a den. Another servant asked if they wanted drinks and they said no, not wishing to diminish the solemnity of their visit. The business executive came in smiling, extending his hand. He was wearing a smoking jacket and an ascot. He apologized for shunting them into the den, but he had guests and dinner was waiting. John Kelly said he understood. As he flashed his detective’s shield, he noted that the man paled momentarily. The shield always had the same effect. Even the most innocent people, perhaps experiencing a flicker of some remote guilt, were stunned by the show of force.

  “Sit down, gentlemen,” said the executive.

  The detectives made themselves comfortable, having established themselves. Kelly lit his thick cigar.

  “What’s this about?” asked the executive.

  You have a girl working for you, began Kelly. You know her as Alice Burke.

  The man nodded, absorbing the information, unclear about the implications.

  Her name is really Alice Crimmins, continued the detectives. Maybe you’ve heard of her.

  The name would always jar some tabloid memory. The executive waited.

  We think she killed her children, the detectives said.

  The man waited. Was there something else?

  We just thought you should know, said the detectives.

  “Is she charged with a crime?” asked the man.

  The detectives said no, but they had no doubt that she had been involved in the murder of the two children.

  “She’s a secretary,” said the executive. “A good one. What do you expect me to do?”

  Maybe you don’t know what kind of person she is, continued the detectives. Maybe we haven’t made ourselves clear.

  Yes, said the executive, rising. You have made yourselves completely clear. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have dinner guests.

  In the squad room of the 107th Precinct there was consternation. This had never happened before. Every time they went to one of Alice’s employers and told what they suspected, she was fired. Or quietly asked to leave. But now they had, in effect, been told to go to hell.

  “He was the only stand-up guy in the case,” said Phil Brady.

  As winter folded over the investigation, the detectives had exhausted the usual investigative techniques, but a solid case still eluded them. They believed they possessed the seed of the answer—but there were blank spots. Gaps. All the inferences seemed to lead to Alice Crimmins. Her frustrating denials and cold silences were maddening.

  Nat Hentel had to worry about the election. If he allowed this case to dribble away, he risked being dismissed at the polls as an impotent prosecutor. He faced a formidable adversary, State Senator Thomas Mackell, a widely popular Democrat with a bank balance of friendship all over Queens. Mackell was an organization man who glowed with the reflected blessings of the Kennedys. He had been one of the first state politicians to endorse John Kennedy for President and Robert Kennedy for Senator. He also enjoyed the reputation of being a hard worker with dependable loyalties. In the clubhouses they would speak affectionately of his common touch and his fine Irish voice. And it went without saying that Tommy Mackell was a good family man. He was devoted to his wife, Dorothy. Perhaps a little too devoted, since Dorothy had an amusing innocence and could blurt out mistakes and then Tommy would trail behind her tolerantly repairing her gaffes.

  During the early stages of the campaign Mackell boasted that he would make the Crimmins case his first order of business. The culprits would be behind bars in his first season in office, he implied. The case was no mystery in the Mackell household. The night after the children disappeared, Mackell’s wife poked him in the chest and said there was no doubt in her mind—the mother did it. She based the judgment on intuition—and, of course, the reports that the mother would not appear in public without makeup. Mrs. Mackell had developed something of a reputation among friends as an amateur sleuth. Her hunches had the eerie insight of a Miss Marple. The Mackells’ apartment in Rego Park was across the street from Alexander’s parking lot. Late at night Mrs. Mackell would stand at her window and count the cars in the lot, picking out the ones that were stolen. She had been right often enough for the local precinct to send a car around to check. Her husband had learned to accept his wife’s hobby with a certain amount of good-natured kidding, the way some men shrug helplessly at cold remedies. Still, Mackell did not dismiss his wife’s hunches out of hand.

  When the gossip coincided with Mrs. Mackell’s hunch about Alice Crimmins, the official viewpoint hardened into virtual certainty. “A great little detective,” Mackell would say with a trace of condescension. And yet the police version and Mrs. Mackell’s hunch were based on the same foundation—an attitude; an unsettling defiance in the stance of Alice Crimmins; the way she took sex like a man, as an appetite to be satisfied witho
ut entanglements; her dismissal of faith like another casual lover.

  The detectives working on the case sensed Nat Hentel’s vulnerability, and they used it to win permission for every advantage, from indiscriminate wiretaps to permanent tails. Each subject in the case—from the maid to neighbors—was isolated and the dossiers began to grow like a forest.

  The police enlisted Margie Fischer, the upstairs neighbor. Phil Brady fixed up a tape recorder inside her wicker handbag. She was asked to meet Tony Grace at Ripple’s. What did the cops want to know, she asked?

  Pump him, she was told. Get anything you can out of him. Margie kept the date and had a long, rambling meal with Tony Grace. They spoke passingly of Alice and agreed that everything would have been different if Tony had gone over that night.

  Her assignment completed, Margie Fischer drove home along Queens Boulevard. Along the way, she stopped to pick up a man. The tape recorder was going all during their brief encounter. It amused the men of the 107th squad.

  33

  One morning in early December 1965 John Kelly and Phil Brady sat across a desk in an office of the Fresh Meadows Precinct. Spread over the table were stacks of dun-colored folders, each containing a file on a principal in the case. Like two chemists, they stared at the folders, knowing that one or more contained the right formula to solve the case. They were reluctant to start, knowing the complexity of their puzzle. Kelly puffed on his cigar and Brady smoked cigarettes as they sipped coffee to postpone the ordeal. For the moment, the subtle rivalry between the two detectives was forgotten. John Kelly had entered the case late and Brady felt proprietary misgivings. Kelly had been touted as a golf expert who could use his hobby to wedge himself into the confidence of Eddie Crimmins and Joe Rorech. But Phil Brady played golf, as did a dozen other detectives on the case. Brady and Shields and Prestia had worked as a team on Queens homicides and there was resentment of the hotshots from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan.

  It was natural enough. Detectives are, after all, human. Even within the home borough, someone was always feeling left out. The thousand little details that create the mosaic of any case have multiple authors, each convinced that it was his tile that fleshed out the picture. Men who have been partners for years have broken up over misappropriated credit for solution of an important case.

  With Brady and Kelly, the antagonism was not a smoldering one. Brady believed that he had better access to the people in the folders, despite Kelly’s seemingly urbane understanding of the world of Joe Rorech. Brady’s asset was his priestly manner—an ear that absorbed confessions with the natural suction of a sponge.

  If there were tensions between Kelly and Brady that morning, they could at least agree on the humorous flaws of the man running the case, Jerry Piering. And there were comic aspects to Piering’s frantic attempts to cover every part of the investigation. Piering regarded himself as the compleat detective. He would, for example, install his own recording machinery, even if all the tapes did come out blank. He would take his own photographs, using expensive telephoto equipment, even if the pictures were blurred and out of focus. On his days off, he would follow witnesses, although they would often turn around and smile at him.

  Some of the cast of characters had settled comfortably into their stories as if moving into a familiar home: For a time there had been some mystery about Carl Andrade, the slightly overdressed waiter at the Surrey Steak House. He was one of Alice’s more important lovers. They had slept together more than fifty times. And yet, whenever he was questioned, the detectives had a feeling that an element was missing, that he was concealing some ingredient of his story. Alice had called to ask Andrade to intercede with her maid, Evelyn Linder Atkins, when she learned that Evelyn was going to testify against her at the custody hearing. Why, the police wondered, would Andrade have any influence with Evelyn? Then they learned that Andrade worked with Evelyn’s future husband, Teddy Atkins, at the steak house, where Teddy was a chef. Andrade had been born in Jamaica, a fact known by very few, including Teddy, Alice, and Evelyn. One week before the disappearance, Andrade had come to the apartment house to talk to Alice. They had sat on the lawn about midnight and discussed strategy for dealing with Evelyn and her damaging testimony. The detectives were convinced that Andrade was not involved in the disappearance and that there was nothing sinister about his protectiveness.

  Anthony Grace, the middle-aged millionaire, left a trail of gratuities in his wake, like a careless oil tanker. He was a crude man, but he could always retreat behind the barricades of his money and his important friends. There were lapses in the folder on Tony Grace. An implicit decision had been made early in the case that certain names would never appear in writing—names like Bob Wagner, Paul Screvane, Sal LoCurto. More than one detective had been sharply reminded of Inspector Michael Clifford, transferred to Brooklyn for his clumsiness. Phil Brady was not convinced that Tony Grace was sacrosanct. He set that folder aside; he would come back to it.

  There was a slew of folders on minor actors, all with their own pet positions to protect—a neighbor afraid of having an affair exposed and a marriage ruined; a welfare recipient unwilling to jeopardize her income.

  The file on Alice Crimmins had spread to multiple folders. Phil Brady reread his own transcriptions of the tapes he had placed on Alice’s telephone. If someone was to approach Alice, Brady felt it should be himself—the president of the Holy Name Society in his parish and a teacher of confraternity. He came to believe that Alice could be brought around to cooperating if only she was approached in the right spirit. A settling feeling of forgiveness seems to bathe everyone that Brady touches. No one seems beyond his understanding.

  Alice had sensed this quality. When she had stopped talking to almost all of the policemen in the case, she would still call Brady. They were chatty, private calls, a substitute, perhaps, for her lost lovers. Although he never forgot his role in the case, Brady was upset one day when he saw Jerry Piering listening in on an extension to one of his talks with Alice.

  Brady learned to keep his sympathies private. The others in the case had reached a level of such bitterness that his own views struck his colleagues as naive, even a betrayal. Almost alone, Brady suffered in parallel isolation with Alice. He knew her defiance had its limits. Sometimes, alone in her car when she thought no one could see or hear, she would scream out her grief. In public she never dropped her insolence.

  If it would shock the police to flaunt her lovers, then she would parade them wantonly. The police, according to Alice, had committed the ultimate betrayal by not looking for her children’s killer, and so she felt justified in almost any kind of reprisal. The detectives who listened to every sound from her apartment heard a one-dimensional refrain:

  “Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!”

  The words were recorded by literal-minded police typists, and repeated in a kind of latrine fascination. Sitting in their carpeted offices after telling the secretaries they were not to be disturbed, the prosecutors and detectives listened to the tapes from Alice’s apartment with a mixture of anger and confusion. Jerry Piering’s face would flush in frustration.

  Kelly would sit with his reaction clouded behind a puff of cigar smoke. It was strange. Alice knew very soon that her telephones were tapped and that her apartment was bugged. And yet:

  “FUCK ME!”

  What were they to make of it? It had become an all too familiar cry. Sometimes they heard Alice say she felt a pang of guilt about what had happened to the children. That was enough for Piering—to him, she was confessing murder. No matter that Brady pointed out she had made the same assertions of guilt feelings months before the murders. In February, five months before the deaths, she had spent a weepy night with Joe Rorech, telling him she was a bad mother and felt guilty about it. When she said it in December, after the children were dead, Piering regarded it as a confession.

  For Brady, Alice’s feelings of guilt were tragically attached to lost innocence and some uncanny lapse of fait
h.

  But as the grave-faced detectives and prosecutors sat in the District Attorney’s office listening to the tapes, they began to accept Jerry Piering’s view; they took Alice’s flesh need as the technical explanation surrounding the bones of their case. Phil Brady’s liturgical explanation was dismissed.

  Brady heard pain instead of pleasure. Alice Crimmins, he had come to believe, was appealing to her lost God.

  34

  If Phil Brady was going to help Alice Crimmins, it would have to be an oblique assist.

  “What’ve you got?” he asked Kelly, who had been reading a single file for more than an hour.

  “It’s your notes on Joe Rorech . . .”

  Brady had conducted one of the first interviews with Rorech. He had gone to the man’s home and passed himself off to Gloria Rorech as an insurance adjuster. If there was one brittle character in the case, it was Joe Rorech. Kelly read the notes of Brady’s long interviews with Rorech.

  The notes covered the familiar story of Rorech’s strange behavior the Tuesday before the children disappeared: he had met his cousin and a friend at the Steak Pub in Huntington in the early afternoon and had consumed six vodka-and-tonics. There had been no elaborate plan to his day. He had gone home, where he consumed a few drinks, then had begun his restless nighttime meandering. He met Bob Rorech and Dick Nevins at the Bourbon Lounge of the Heritage House. They had not wanted to make a late night of it—all had told their wives they would be home by midnight. But Gloria had come to expect little of her husband’s promises, and was coming to think of herself as a minor Catholic martyr. Her husband was out drinking, by then, Scotch and water. Joe had called Alice, and he told Brady how calm she had sounded. Trying to entice her out, he had described a singer, Anne English, and said she was “wild and sexy,” words designed to lure Alice from her nest. But Alice had been stubborn. He’d kept drinking after that and admitted he had been “stoned.”