“You must be Mrs. Whitmore.”
“Bernadine, please,” she answered, stepping through the archway. She gave Justy a malign glance and then added, “You asked to speak with me here in your office.”
“Yes, Mrs. Whitmore, thank you. Please have a seat.”
She sat at the far end of the rectangular table protruding from Mel’s desk. Her back was to the wall, with Justy and Mel seated beside her on either side of the table.
“Mrs. Whitmore, I am Assistant District Attorney Mel Glass and seated across from me is Detective John Justy. I asked you to come here today because I need to find the truth about your son’s case. I want to tell you right now that anything you say here will not be used against him in any way. Also I want to advise you that you do not have to answer any of my questions—you can leave at any time.”
Bernadine tilted her head, fixing her hard, tired brown eyes on him. “You say, Mr. Glass, that you’re searching for truth, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of truth come out of these here courts, so excuse me if I don’t exactly believe that you’re looking for the same truth I am.”
Mel blinked and fixed his eyes on Mrs. Whitmore. “Mrs. Whitmore, I know this is a horrible situation for you, and I know this is probably the last place you’d like to be right now, but you could be very helpful if you answered a few questions for me.”
He paused for a moment and then added, “But it’s entirely up to you. You can walk out right now and not tell me anything.”
Bernadine Whitmore could feel her hands trembling and wondered if ADA Glass and Detective Justy could sense her weakness. She swore she wouldn’t let them see her cry—she swore she wouldn’t let them break her. And yet, as she gazed at Mel Glass, she couldn’t help but think he might be on her side. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something in his eyes told her he was a God-fearing person who, just maybe, meant what he said. There was something about his expression—something in the way he sat, perched tall and thoughtful in his chair—that seemed to embody integrity.
“He didn’t hurt no white girls.”
Her voice began to crumble as she reached into her pocketbook for a handkerchief. Mel grabbed one from inside his jacket and quickly offered it to her. She extended her hand, looked intensely into his eyes and nodded approvingly when she accepted his offer.
“Mrs. Whitmore, please,” he tried, “I just need to ask you a simple question.”
She immediately stiffened and pulled herself together. She shifted in her chair and glanced over at Detective Justy and then back at Mel. Then she opened her mouth and her voice came steadily.
“My son may be slow, but he’s not stupid. He has an excellent memory when he puts his mind to it, and he’s quite a capable artist.” She straightened her spine against the back of the chair and swallowed. “If I put my faith in you, Mr. Glass, what’s to stop you from thinking me a naïve woman, who will be abused by the law just like my son?”
Mel nodded, but he said nothing.
“My George ain’t ever been in Manhattan before, so why anybody thinking he done all these terrible things? Why?”
Her eyes welled up with tears, but she willed herself to hold them back.
“Mrs. Whitmore, I understand you’re upset, I really do, and for good cause. If you put your trust in me, I promise that I will never deceive you. More than anything I’m only interested in finding the truth.”
She watched Mel’s eyes soften. He reached for the file that was situated in front of him on his desk. He opened it and pulled out the photograph of the blonde sitting atop the Pontiac convertible. Mel flipped it over and scanned the handwriting on the back: To George From Louise. Then he handed it to Mrs. Whitmore.
“Please tell me, Mrs. Whitmore, do you know where your son found this photo?”
Mrs. Whitmore glanced up warily. After a moment she accepted the photograph. First she held the side with the handwriting on it up close to her eyes and then she flipped it over, studying the girl in the image. She handed it back to Mel after a few moments and again looked directly into his eyes.
They stared at each other a few seconds more and then Mrs. Whitmore nodded her head. She sniffled, blew her nose with a handkerchief from her purse and then managed to say wearily, “When I first visited my son in jail, I asked him where he found the photograph because the newspapers were making a big deal of it. The police in Brooklyn keep saying he stole it from the girls’ apartment, the ones they say he killed. So I kept saying to him, ‘Just tell me the truth. Where did you find the photograph? ’ My son is a good boy. He would never hurt anyone. He said, ‘Mama, don’t be mad at me. I know you told me so many times not to go to that garbage dump at home and pick through all that trash. But that’s just what I did, and I found the picture there.’
“Oh, Mr. Glass”—she looked at him sorrowfully—“I did tell him plenty of times not to go to that garbage dump in Wildwood. I figured if he found something valuable, it probably belonged to some white folks and they would claim he probably stole it. But George just loved going there—I imagine for the adventure of what he might find. But he wouldn’t lie to me—that’s where he found it.”
Mrs. Whitmore took a deep breath and then continued.
“This girl Louise, whose name appears on the back side of the photo, is a girl from Wildwood, and my George dated her a summer ago. She’s a sweet girl, Mr. Glass, so don’t go stirrin’ up any trouble with her. Lord knows, she ain’t done nothin’.”
Mel nodded his head in earnest appreciation. “Thank you, Mrs. Whitmore. Thank you very much. You have helped me a great deal, and hold me to my promise to you.”
He leaned forward and added with resolution, “I will find the truth.”
Mel stood and extended his hand, which Mrs. Whitmore greeted with hers. Mrs. Whitmore stood up then and slipped her dress gloves back on her delicate fingers. Mel pushed his chair back; it let out a loud screech. Detective Justy walked over to escort her out the door. She gripped her pocketbook with both hands, as if her whole life were stuffed in its contents. She turned and glanced out into the busy hallway, where various members of law enforcement rushed back and forth. Then she jerked her head back around and gazed at Mel. She smiled, a trace of satisfaction; and then, taking a step back toward the archway of his door, she said, “Well, Mr. Glass, you sure got your work cut out for you, ’cause a whole lot of folks mistakenly think my son killed those two girls.”
She paused in his doorway for a second and then added, nodding at him perceptively, “You know what I mean, don’t you?”
He held her steely gaze and gave a gentle nod. “Mrs. Whitmore, I assure you that this office will find the truth, regardless of what others may believe about your son.” Mel watched her as she walked back down the corridor at a steady clip toward the sixth-floor elevator.
Mel shook his head and, not missing a beat, walked back over to his desk. Justy followed. Mel grabbed his magnifier and scanned the image of the two girls and the convertible.
“You know,” he said, pulling the lens forward and backward over the photograph, “I think I ought to speak to an arborist.”
“What?”
Mel waved Justy over and pointed to a blurred area at the right top of the image. “Those look like tall trees.”
Justy scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah, so?” Mel looked at Justy and set the photo and the magnifying glass down. “Well, maybe it’s like Occam’s razor.”
Justy fell back into the chair across from Mel’s desk. “In English, please?”
“If I show this to an arborist, we might be able to save everybody some time and narrow the search for these girls. After all, Mrs. Whitmore corroborates her son’s insistence that he got the photo from the garbage dump in Wildwood.”
“Wow, you’re serious,” he said, trying to keep Mel’s pace, “but just because the photo was in Wildwood doesn’t mean the girls in it are from there.”
In a flash Mel packed up his files, grabbed his jacket and started to head
down the hall. One of the elevator doors was already open as Mel and Justy neared the end of the hall. He quickened to a slight jog and Justy followed suit. Reaching his arm out, Mel caught the closing elevator door on the far right-hand side. He smiled apologetically to the already rushed crowd of law enforcement and citizens in the car and stepped in with Detective Justy. The doors closed and they descended downward to the street.
At ground level Mel searched his pockets for a subway token. Justy held the main door open for Glass and then asked, “Hey, where are you gonna get this arborist?”
Mel stepped out into the noisy downtown street. He glanced back at Justy and grinned. “You know the maxim Occam’s razor,” he stated once more.
“Mel, what the hell is an Occam’s razor?”
Mel folded his jacket on his sleeve and held his briefcase tightly in the other hand.
“My, my . . . famed detective Justy, the maxim is attributed to William of Occam, an English scholastic philosopher who believed that assumptions introduced to explain something must not be multiplied beyond necessity. Simply, John, the simplest explanation in a complicated scenario is usually correct.”
Justy looked truly amazed.
Mel paused and then acknowledged, “I’m going to take the train up to the Museum of Natural History. I happen to know the curator there, who might lead us in the right direction.”
“Sounds like you’re on a roll, Mr. Law Review. Who am I to contradict,” said Justy doubtfully.
“Oh, come on,” Mel countered, “what’s the worst that could happen? I get another shot to see the T. rex, one of my favorite ancient creatures.”
CHAPTER 9
Mel hurried along Central Park West to Seventy-ninth Street. He climbed the museum’s front steps, where he passed the famed ten-foot-tall bronze equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt. At the top of the stairs, he entered the American Museum of Natural History, where outside its walls, engraved amid four giant pillars, were three words Mel knew by heart: “Truth,” “Knowledge” and “Vision.” He stood in the central corridor, where one of the famed dinosaur fossils stretched high into the vaulted ceiling. Tourists and school groups flocked together on benches and spoke in hushed tones; footsteps clicked and echoed. Mel found himself studying a colorful mosaic, one of many that filled the vast halls. Thinking that he might be waiting for a while, he scanned the room for something to read. Over in the far corner sat a wall of exhibit pamphlets, maps and guides. He joined the crowd that had swarmed there and grabbed a few documents. A moment later a young man in a white shirt, tie and black dress pants walked up to Mel.
“Mr. Glass?”
He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, Mel estimated, examining the rosy cheeks, clean-shaven face and slicked-back blond hair of the gentleman standing before him.
“How did you know?”
The kid answered in one long run-on sentence. “People never know where to go here, and I’m always being sent out into the main corridor to recover various individuals scheduled to meet with Dr. St. Helme, and if you don’t mind my saying so, you look like a lawyer.”
Mel stood up and straightened his tie. “I do, do I?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you are?” Mel inquired with a friendly smirk.
“Peter,” he answered brightly, leading Mel down a long hallway, through a narrow door and up a tight, winding side staircase to a very modest landing with three closed doors on the walls facing Mel. The floorboards were wide planks of old dark mahogany that creaked with each step Mel took. A few old red velvet upholstered chairs with brass nail-head trim rested between a long glass coffee table stacked with tattered issues of National Geographic and Life Magazine. Peter motioned for Mel to take a seat.
“Shouldn’t be too long at all, Mr. Glass,” he said, pivoting and disappearing back down the winding marble staircase. Mel wondered where the kid was headed next and then grabbed from his jacket pocket one of the pamphlets he’d snatched. It was all about the “Star of India,” one of the largest gems in the world. Mel recalled it had been stolen from the museum just a few months after the Wylie-Hoffert murders. The story went that thieves unlocked a bathroom window during “open hours.” Then they climbed in at night and managed to seize a number of gems, including the coveted 563-carat, grayish-blue stone, dubbed the “Star of India,” valued at around half a million dollars. While the cat burglar, Jack Murphy, was caught a few days later, the famed jewel wasn’t recovered until a few months later, far away in Miami, Florida, in a locker at the local bus station. Mel grinned at the thought of the thief trying to hide a jewel so big; he was amazed that it managed to escape all the way to the tropics of South Florida. He fanned himself with the pamphlet while glancing at another document advertising a North American Rare Birds exhibit, boasting 160 species. No, thank you, he thought, although he immediately felt guilty remembering a promise to take his wife out to see the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. Somehow he felt as if she had mentioned a bird exhibition at the fair—or perhaps this was it. He flipped the glossy paper over and saw the image of a woman smiling pleasantly back at him. Her face was angular, pretty, with kind eyes. She wore her hair pulled back in a bun. Below the image, in fine print, was a name and identification—Dr. Lucille St. Helme, Ph.D., Yale, 1940, Physical Anthropology. Mel lifted the document closer, examining her cheekbones.
“Are you going to attend my rare-bird exhibit?” came a voice from nearby.
Somewhat startled, Mel jerked his head up and around. Dr. Lucille St. Helme, just as lovely as her photograph, peeked her head from around the corner. Mel stood up.
“How long were you standing there, Miss—”
“St. Helme. Dr. St. Helme.” Her voice was light and airy, and she wore no makeup except for a dab of red lipstick. She stepped forward with her hand out. Her three-inch beige heels clicked and creaked on the floor below. She wore a gray skirt and a matching blazer, with a pair of thick black-rimmed glasses. She had dark hair pulled back tightly in a bun, just like in the photograph.
“Mr. Glass, is it? And you are the assistant district attorney?”
Mel smiled, and his cheeks flushed. “Well, that’s what my mother tells all her friends, but, in fact, I’m just one of about two hundred others.”
He reached out and shook her hand. She had small, thin hands, and her glasses drifted to the bridge of her nose. She laughed and then suggested Mel come into her office. He eagerly followed, stuffing the pamphlets back in his jacket pocket, and entered what was a relatively small but astoundingly spacious office. The floors still creaked, but the walls were white and the ceilings high, perhaps fourteen feet. There were windows on two sides—tall, old windows, with thick moldings. Along the north wall, Dr. St. Helme had a long wooden table piled with various artifacts, models, documents and books. Behind her desk was a wall of books stretching almost to the ceiling. Least impressive was her desk, which was bulky and worn, not unlike Mel’s metal office desk. He admired the globe on the right side and found himself, standing there, spinning the metal orb absently. His index finger landed near Bangkok.
“Please have a seat, and just ignore the mess,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m just back from South America. In fact, I have been doing a fair bit of bird-watching, Mr. Glass.”
“Mel, please.”
She motioned toward a forlorn wooden chair beside her desk.
“And call me Lucille. I’m sorry I can’t offer you a better chair, but we spend our money on other things. . . .”
Mel didn’t even look at the chair . . . he just fell onto it.
Lucille folded her hands and rested them neatly on her desktop. She smiled gently. “Well,” she said slowly, “it isn’t often that we have members of the district attorney’s office up here, so I’m intrigued. I also have heard rumors that you’re directly involved in the Wylie-Hoffert case.”
Mel opened his mouth to speak, but Lucille cut him off.
“I don’t live far from East Eighty-eighth Street.”
>
She stretched her left arm out, resting her palm on a stack of magazines, and sighed. “I just feel awful about those murders—the person who committed those crimes acted like a savage.”
Mel nodded. “Yes, it’s an extremely tragic case, which is why I’m here. I’m hopeful that you can help me achieve some clarity with an important piece of evidence, Dr. St. Helme.”
“Lucille,” she corrected him gently.
“Lucille,” he continued, reaching into his jacket pocket for the photograph in question and holding it out in front of her, “I need to find the location of where this photo was taken, which would be the starting point to find the two girls depicted in it.”
They stared at each other knowingly. Silence fell over the room. After a few seconds, Mel dropped the black-and-white image of the Pontiac convertible on Dr. St. Helme’s desk. She snatched it up and held it closer for a look.
“Are you familiar with W. H. Auden, ADA Glass?”
“Of course,” Mel answered, “the poet.” He then gazed contemplatively and cupped his chin with his left hand. He said, “ ‘A real book isn’t one that we read, but one that reads us.’ ”
It wasn’t every day that her visitors could recite poetry. She was impressed, and she smiled before adding, “He also said that ‘history is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.’ ”
Mel shifted in his chair and pointed his right index finger toward the photograph. “What do you think? Can you help me? I need to know where that photograph was taken.”
Echoes of My Soul Page 8