One Police Plaza

by William Caunitz

  “I don’t think there is anyone with that name assigned to the Detective Division. Wait a minute and I’ll check the ten cards.”

  There was no active member of the Detective Division with the surname Madvick, he was told by the duty officer. Malone thanked him, hung up, and then dialed Operations. Using the same newspaperman ploy he asked the sergeant on duty to check the uniform force’s ten cards and see where Captain Madvick was assigned.

  There was no active member of the department with the name Madvick. “Maybe he retired,” the sergeant said.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s it.”

  Malone sat on his desk idly waving the Eisinger folder. Whoever made that telephone call was on the Job; it was one cop talking to another cop. He opened the case folder and thumbed through to the property vouchers. Physical evidence or property that was unusual, the phony Captain Madvick had asked. He scrutinized the vouchers: a personal checkbook; some keys; a telephone book; thirty-two dollars and sixty-seven cents; a makeup kit; a pocketbook; nail file; emery board; and a lipstick. On a separate voucher—a set of handcuffs and a curtain rod.

  Malone could not easily open the door to Sara Eisinger’s apartment as it was carefully sealed with an official department seal on which was quoted the pertinent provision of the law prohibiting entry for all those not on official business. He took out his police identity card and sliced down through the seal, and then removed a set of house keys from the plastic evidence bag. As he did he noticed a gold-plated key in the bag. He wondered what it was for. The super had repaired the kicked-in door panel. There were three locks and all the cylinders were protected by steel plates. After struggling through several keys he got the locks open and entered the apartment.

  He didn’t know why he was surprised to find the place still a shambles, but he was. After all, there was no one to clean it up. The air conditioner was still humming. Fingerprint powder was scattered over the furniture and walls and cigarette butts were crushed into the carpet and floors.

  Malone didn’t know what he was looking for, but whatever it was, it was making someone in the Job very nervous. He decided to start in the bathroom with its horrifying crusted tub. First he opened jars of creams and lotions inside the medicine cabinet. He poked a finger inside the creams and emptied the lotions down the sink, carefully straining the creamy liquids through his fingers. Finding nothing, he went to the foyer outside the bathroom. He reexamined the closets, getting on his knees in order to run his hands underneath the shelves.

  Forty minutes later he was standing in front of the refrigerator searching the freezer. He remembered an old Hitchcock television program where the wife used a frozen leg of lamb to bludgeon her husband to death, but there was nothing there but half of a jar of coffee and a stick of butter. He next searched the cabinets and under the sink and then leaned against the wall trying to think of any place he might have missed. He glanced down at the tiny stove and saw a Pyrex coffee pot on the far burner. His eyes swept the apartment. What had he missed? Perhaps nothing. Maybe he had found whatever it was and didn’t know it. That gold-plated key? As he thought, he absent-mindedly picked up the coffee pot and examined it. There was a metal strap around the middle. A screw was fastened through the handle securing both ends of the strap to the pot. He noticed that the screw was loose. He inserted the nail of his forefinger into the screw head and attempted to tighten it. Then he saw it. A strip of negative 16-mm film that appeared to be about three inches long was fitted between the handle and the neck of the pot. Hidden under the metal collar. He looked down at the knife. Eisinger must have unscrewed the handle with the knife, slid the film under the strap and been attempting to tighten it when her killer or killers interrupted her.

  Juggling the strip of film up under the light, he attempted to make out what was on it and couldn’t. He counted sixteen frames. He put the film into his shirt pocket and went to turn off the air conditioner.

  It was a little before nine the following morning when Malone walked into the squad room. O’Shaughnessy was on the telephone promising fidelity to Foam. According to Heinemann, Pat enjoyed walking the tightrope of infidelity with a bottle of nitro stuck up his ass.

  Det. Bo Davis, an expatriate from Dixie, lived in East Meadow, Long Island, with his wife and two children. He loved his family, the Job, his ranch-style home with the cyclone fence all around it, and going to bed with women other than his wife. His motto was: Never get involved. And, during sixteen unfaithful years, he hadn’t.

  Davis was slumped in a swivel chair with his feet stretched up over the desk, admiring his new cowboy boots. He was wearing a white sports jacket with wide blue stripes, white waffle-weave trousers flared at the cuffs, and a blue shirt with a white tie and gold tie clasp with a miniature detective shield emblazoned in the center.

  “Getting ready for Halloween?” Malone said, walking past Davis on his way into his office.

  “I got a date with a three-way broad with her own mattress,” Davis said, leaning forward to buff the point of his boot.

  Malone called the detectives into his office. A person who was murdered the way Eisinger was should not end up a faded case folded with years of nothing-to-report fives stapled to it.

  “What have we got on the Eisinger thing?” Malone said, glancing down at the sixty sheet, looking over the list of cases that had come in during the night. He was relieved to see that there was nothing heavy. At least he had a clear track for today.

  Gus Heinemann spoke first. He had gone through Eisinger’s telephone book and found the address of her parents in New Jersey. In line with department procedure he had sent a next-of-kin teletype message to the New Brunswick Police Department requesting them to make the notification. The rest of her book was surprisingly uninformative, except for two numbers, with no names next to them. One had a 703 area code and the other a 212 code. The phone company reported that they had no record of such numbers, so Heinemann contacted the Wagon Board, the department unit that allocated all the department’s patrol wagons and as a sideline knew more about telephones than Ma Bell. He had also gone through her scanty collection of personal papers, found her Social Security card, and expected word momentarily from the feds about where she was employed.

  Bo Davis was leaning against a file cabinet admiring his manicure and listening to Heinemann’s report.

  “What about the canvasses?” Malone asked Davis.

  “They all came up dry,” Davis answered. “We couldn’t come up with anyone who knew her. Several of the neighbors said that they’d see her in the elevator or hallway, smile and exchange a few pleasantries, but that was it.”

  “Did you interview all the people in her building?”

  Davis checked the interview sheets. “We missed about a dozen. The apartment numbers are listed on the sheets.”

  Malone said, “What about the other buildings in the complex.”

  “Same thing. The broad was a phantom,” Davis answered.

  “What about Forensic?”

  O’Shaughnessy answered. “They came up with a few partial prints. About twelve or fifteen points. More than enough for a positive I.D. if we can come up with a suspect.”

  “Were the prints compared with Eisinger’s?” Malone asked.

  “Yeah. They cut the skin of her fingers off and rolled them at the morgue. They weren’t her prints,” O’Shaughnessy answered.

  “I went back to the scene last night and found this,” Malone said, taking out the strip of film and omitting any mention of the phony Captain Madvick’s telephone call. “Let’s take a look,” Malone said, walking out from behind his desk.

  O’Shaughnessy went over to the equipment locker and took out the viewing machine. He set it up and then went around the squad room shutting off the lights and pulling down the shades.

  Jake Stern slowly maneuvered the film under the machine’s glaring light. A conical beam threw a blurred picture onto the wall. Stern reached in front, turning the lens, adjusting the focus. Even in the eerie
reversal of the negative, it was clear that the subject matter was a man and a woman in bed, making love.

  “That dude can really breathe through his ears,” joked O’Shaughnessy.

  “I hope he comes up for air so we can get a look at his face,” Malone said, watching with interest.

  The male star surfaced two frames later.

  “Jake, send that film to the lab. Have them blow up each frame and make us some stills,” Malone said.

  “Ten-four,” Stern said, switching off the machine and removing the film.

  Malone walked over to the large desk next to the wall. The property that had been removed from the Eisinger apartment was neatly lined up over the desk, each item in plastic evidence bags, tagged with property clerk’s evidence tags. Malone picked up the bag containing the keys. “Anything on this?” he asked, holding up the gold-plated key.

  “It don’t fit any of the locks in her apartment,” Stern said.

  Malone examined the key. An ordinary house key that had been gold plated. A locksmith’s six-digit registration number was stamped across its head. He tossed it to Heinemann. “Check the registration number with Consumer Affairs. Find out who made it and for whom. Anything on the cuffs?”

  “Not yet. We’re waiting to hear from Smith and Wesson,” Stern answered.

  Malone walked to the portable blackboard in the corner and wheeled it into the center of the room. He picked up a piece of chalk and started to outline the Eisinger case.

  The detectives gathered around.

  Across the top of the blackboard Malone blocked out the heading: Eisinger Homicide. Next to it he listed the case’s serial numbers: UF 61# 6739; UF 60# 4278; UF 6# 9846; Forensic # 1298-80; Property Vouchers A 456798-812.

  The date, time, and place of occurrence were listed below the heading. A diagram of each room was sketched in broken lines, the bathroom done in a larger scale. On the right side of the board each piece of inventoried evidence was listed along with its invoice number. WITNESSES was blocked out on the bottom left side. The space under it was blank.

  Malone stepped back, folding his arms, frowning. “Not very much, is it?”

  He studied it for a while and then flipped the blackboard to the reverse side.

  “Okay! Bo, I want you and Pat to recanvass her apartment building. Get the ones that were missed yesterday. There had to be someone who knew her. Also check with the local storekeepers. She had to eat and brush her teeth. And don’t waste time trying to put the make on any women.”

  Malone listed the assignment on the board. “I want a five on every interview,” he added.

  The lieutenant turned his attention to Jake Stern.

  “Jake, I want you to visit the morgue. Get hold of Epstein. Tell him I want to know when and how.”

  Malone stared at the blackboard. “The rest of us will hold down the fort. Gus, I want you to stay with the phones and see what you can come up with.”

  The flower cart standing against the building with the glazed brick façade on the corner of Thirtieth Street and First Avenue had a red umbrella. Its top was terraced with fresh-cut flowers. Roses, gerbera, carnations, irises, tulips, daffodils, a profusion of color that enhanced a beautiful June morning. Medical students in jeans and white jackets, stethoscopes jutting proudly from pockets, crossed from the Bellevue Hospital Center to their dormitories on First Avenue. A group of student nurses were standing next to the cart eying the students, giggling.

  Jake Stern glanced at the cart as he hurried up the wide steps into the building. The flowers reminded him of his wife, Marcia. She loved to work in the garden of their Howard Beach home. Whenever he wanted her for something and could not find her in the house he knew that she’d be outside puttering around her plants and flowers. Now that their only son Jeff was away studying business administration at the State University of Binghamton, she was always in the garden. As he pushed through into the lobby, he reflected on how he had almost lost his family. That was three years ago. He had been having an affair with one of his wife’s girlfriends.

  One night the girlfriend and her husband paid the Sterns a visit. He had a little too much to drink and got stupid. Marcia caught him playing footsy with the girlfriend under the kitchen table. The next day when he told his wife that he was going to take the car in for a tune-up she followed him. When he and his lady friend left the motel on Crossbay Boulevard two hours later Marcia was leaning up against his car tapping her foot. He would always remember that one excruciating moment when his bowels gave way.

  Forty minutes later in the living room of their split-level home Marcia Stern gave her husband a choice: wife or girlfriend. There was to be no compromise. Ashen, he began to look around his home: gold wall-to-wall carpet, French provincial furniture wrapped in plastic to keep it clean, bulbous lamp shades with hanging rhinestones, and, also encased in plastic, heavy dining-room furniture with carved cherubs on the breakfront, and in the basement his weights. He begged; she forgave. He never mentioned the incident to any of the guys in the Squad, nor had he ever cheated again.

  Stern’s cheerfulness vanished as he walked down the stairway leading into the morgue. In the basement were corridors of stainless-steel boxes, their latched doors shining under overhead fluorescent lights. There were bare concrete floors with evenly spaced drains. Gurneys lined the corridors; bodies under white sheets, protruding legs with slanted feet and identification tags looped over big toes. In the corner of the basement there was a huge freezer. Inside, Stern knew, were baby cadavers, waiting their turns to be cut up by medical students. An omnipresent sweet smell lingered in the cold air, tickling the back of the mouth. Stern had often been a visitor to this timeless place and he hated it. He pushed through the double doors with the black rubber apron and turned right, heading for the cutting room.

  Six tables were occupied. Four of the bodies had their chest cavities opened by an incision that ran from the neck, down the center of the chest, to the pubic hair. The rib cages were pried open, exposing the inner organs. There was a scale next to each table. An attendant was cutting off a cranium with a high-speed circular saw.

  Sol Epstein was studying the inside of a body, whistling “Zippety Doo Dah” and waving his scalpel in a mime of leading a band. A microphone hung over his head recording words and music.

  Stern rolled his eyes as he entered the cutting room. “How’s my favorite ghoul?”

  “Quick, Jose, my saw. We’ve got a live one to work on,” Epstein said, looking up.

  “You look right at home, Sol.”

  “What brings you into my world?” Epstein asked, reaching inside the cadaver.

  “Sara Eisinger.”

  Epstein lifted the liver out of the cadaver and held it up to the detective. “Hungry? It’s yummy with onions and bacon.” He turned away and slapped the organ onto the scale.

  “Tell me the results of the post so I can get the hell out of here,” Stern said, walking over and looking inside the chest cavity.

  Epstein looked up and smiled. “Okay. Person or persons unknown did willfully beat the shit out of her and then shoved a curtain rod up her cunt. Sara Eisinger’s skull was crushed. The lower jaw was shattered. A twenty-seven-inch curtain rod was jammed into her. Her intestines were ripped to pieces. The abdominal muscle, the vagina, small intestines, colon, stomach, and abdominal aorta were destroyed. Whoever did it poked the rod around inside of her, like he was fishing. It wasn’t a painless death. There was massive hemorrhage and shock, either of which was enough to kill her.”

  “So what finally did the job?” Stern asked, admiring the skill of the doctor’s hands as they probed the various organs of the body.

  “She drowned. We found water in the lungs. Evidently she was still breathing when they tossed her into the tub.”

  “How long was she dead?”

  “To be positive, we’ll have to wait for the laboratory results of her organs. The castings that we found on the body indicated fourth-generation maggots. From that and the de
gree of decomposition I’d say about a week.”

  “Malone would appreciate it if you could rush the lab report.”

  Epstein removed another part of the body and placed it on the scale. He frowned. “Jake, old buddy, your lieutenant is going to have to learn that the man who made time made plenty of it.”

  Stern shrugged, resigned to waiting. “Did you come up with anything else?”

  “We scraped her fingernails and found human flesh. Evidently she put up a fight. The skin was from the face of a male Caucasian with a heavy beard. When I get the lab report I’ll send it to you, direct.”

  “Thanks, Sol.” Stern turned to leave.

  “Jake?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Epstein said, laying down his scalpel. He stripped off his gloves.

  When they were in the corridor outside the cutting room, Epstein draped his arm over Stern’s shoulder and shepherded him toward the exit. They stepped aside for an attendant wheeling a loaded gurney.

  “I want to thank you and Malone for calling me on the Gavin matter,” Epstein said.

  “Think nothing of it, Doc.”

  “Tell Malone that I received a thank-you card from the Powerhouse.”

  “What was in it? Carving knives?”

  “An appointment to the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.”

  “Is that a good deal?”

  “The tenderloin, my friend. A dream come true.”

  “The Powerhouse always does the right thing.”

  They started on the top floor of Sara Eisinger’s apartment building. Today they were lucky. Most of the people were home. But the results were the same: no one knew the victim. After two hours on the recanvass they were only on the sixth floor. One apartment still had to be done, 6B. O’Shaughnessy rang the pushbutton in the center of the brass peephole and stood back as the chime echoed inside the apartment. No answer. He rang again.