Echoes of My Soul

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Dr. St. Helme reached into her desk drawer and fumbled around, searching for her magnifying glass. After a moment her hand emerged holding a modest, circular magnifier with a narrow, brown leather handle. She held the tool close to the image, pulling it toward and away from her eyes.

  “I interned with a famed arborist during my studies at the university—I should be able to sort this mystery out for you.”

  Mel leaned forward anxiously; Dr. St. Helme sighed, her eyes laser focused as she examined the image.

  “That’s a pitch pine,” she announced, pleased with her discovery, then looked up. She studied Mel for a moment with a look of satisfaction in her eyes.

  He waited for her to say something else. When she simply sat there, gazing at him with an excited grin on her face, as if she’d discovered the theory of evolution, Mel said, “Forgive me, Lucille, but I’m a simple guy. I grew up in Brooklyn. What’s a pitch pine?”

  Dr. St. Helme stood up and walked over to the long table by one of her windows. She grabbed a book, leafed through it and then handed it over to Mel.

  He stood up quickly, held the book in his hands and gazed down at the image before him. It was a photograph of a tree. Mel couldn’t help but find it to be a funny-looking plant, with multiple trunks and branches that sprouted oddly. In some ways it looked like a kind of bonsai tree. Dr. St. Helme handed the photograph of the two girls seated in the Pontiac back to Mel.

  “Pitch pines are native to North America. While you can find them in various locations, specifically Maine and even northern Georgia, they thrive best in acidic sandy uplands or swampy lowlands.”

  She leaned against the table behind her, lifted an arm and straightened her glasses.

  “It’s the same type of tree, all right,” Mel agreed, “but where do you suggest I start looking?”

  Dr. St. Helme tilted her head casually and smiled. “Well, can you tell me about any location unique to this photograph that might be helpful?”

  Mel responded, “When the defendant was first asked how he came into possession of the photograph, he said that he found it in a garbage dump in Wildwood, New Jersey. Subsequently I’ve learned from his mother that he told her that’s where he found it. She also confirmed that, indeed, he frequently went to the garbage dump and scavenged around.”

  Dr. St. Helme grinned. “Very interesting. Given that the pitch pine is primarily located in a specific coastal plain, southern New Jersey, in and around the Shore, certainly qualifies as a legitimate site.”

  She turned and began sifting through a pile of rolled-up tubes of paper.

  “It’s here somewhere,” she said absentmindedly. Mel walked over and stood beside her. He couldn’t help but notice a lovely scent of jasmine and freesia. He glanced at her wrist. She wore a delicate Hamilton watch, with a thin white-gold roped band. The sound of paper, rolling and unrolling, echoed throughout the room.

  “Here it is,” she said eagerly, unrolling a wide, long document that revealed a map of the state of New Jersey. Mel leaned in. He could hear the sound of a pigeon cooing at her window. A taxi honked; wind from the fan beside her desk rustled the edges of pinned-down documents. Her finger slid along the delicate paper until it finally stopped at a small land area. The spot was covered with tiny illustrations of pine trees, positioned at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Here,” she said, tapping her finger, “it’s just between Philadelphia and Atlantic City.”

  Mel edged in closer, squinting, trying to get a closer look on the map. “Is it a town?”

  Dr. St. Helme jerked her head up. “No, not really. It’s very rural. Lots of lakes and campgrounds. The ground is acidic and sandy. You can practically drive through and reach the shoreline.”

  She continued speaking. “Mel—in the upper-right portion of the photo is what appears to be a body of water, most likely a lake. Yes, I think the Wildwood area is an excellent starting point for your adventure.”

  Mel glanced back at the photograph of the blonde in the Pontiac convertible and noticed the body of water that appeared through the trees. Lake, campgrounds, sandy areas all around the pitch pines, he ticked off silently.

  “Well, I guess I have what I need,” Mel said aloud.

  “I guess you do,” she answered.

  There was an awkward silence before they both headed toward the door. Just as he was stepping into the hallway, she called him back. He turned. She was leaning in the archway of her door, a book held tightly to her chest.

  “What is that other relevant Auden quote again?” She closed her eyes briefly. “Ah, now I remember. ‘Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures . . .’ ”

  Mel smiled knowingly and continued, “ ‘. . . so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness,’ ” he finished.

  Her eyes beamed. “A pleasure, ADA Mel Glass, ‘one of about two hundred,’ ” she said, extending her arm to shake his hand.

  Mel accepted the gesture. With an affirmative nod, he smiled warmly and said, “Many, many heartfelt thanks, Dr. Lucille St. Helme, chief physical anthropologist, part-time expert arborist and full-time terrific individual. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help. I owe you, big-time.”

  Belleplain State Forest lies to the north and the west of the city of Wildwood in Cape May County, New Jersey. It is a heavily wooded area, sprinkled with a number of lakes and campsites only a stone’s throw from the pretty, bustling oceanfront communities of the Jersey Shore. Lake Nummy was the largest and most visited of the lakes in the region.

  In May of 1956, on the day following the prom, the junior class of Wildwood High School held their annual picnic on the shores of the lake. At first, it appeared as though a downpour of rain might interfere with the planned activities, but, thankfully, as the morning progressed, there was a break in the clouds. The sky lightened, the rain let up and the elusive sun peeked out just before the picnic was under way.

  Abbe Mills held her hand up to her eyes to shield the sun and walked forward, toward the lake, which was stretched out wide and shimmered. She had blond hair, blue eyes and a freckled complexion accentuated by a tan, the result of hours spent at sea aboard her father’s boat. It was cool that morning and she wore a bulky plaid jacket over her cotton navy blue dress. She paused and pushed her short hair behind her ears.

  “Don’t you just want to dive in,” she said, turning back to her friend Jennifer. “I wish I’d brought my bathing suit.”

  Jennifer Holley, a young teen in a sleeveless yellow gingham dress, paired with a white cardigan, rushed toward her. A plane bisected the sky and a male voice hollered, “Abbe! Come on!”

  The blonde turned and hopped eagerly back toward the car.

  “Jennifer,” she called back, “should we take some snapshots?”

  “Oh yes! Definitely,” the brunette said, rushing toward her excitedly.

  Back at the car, Lenny Meyers, Abbe Mills’s date for the prom, was leaned up against the hood of his dad’s brand-new Pontiac convertible. Lenny was a senior, and he’d been accepted into the University of Pennsylvania. He would begin his college education in Philadelphia that fall. He stood with another kid named Ricky Getz, Jennifer’s date. The four of them had arrived at Belleplain well in advance of the bus convoy. Jennifer ran up to the car, reached inside and grabbed a case from the backseat. She pulled the camera out and began directing everyone to stand by the car.

  “I hate having my photo taken,” Lenny grumbled, rolling his eyes at Ricky. He crunched out a cigarette he’d been smoking, walked over and wrapped his arm around Abbe. The camera clicked and Jennifer arranged everyone a few more times before Lenny walked up and snatched the camera from her hands.

  “Come on,” he said, grinning, pointing toward the car, “go get the hell in the shot.”

  Jennifer made a face and then ran up to the car, jumping in the passenger seat up front. Ricky sat at the driver’s seat and Abbe was perched atop in the ba
ck. Lenny began focusing the camera.

  “Come on, sweetie, give me a smile,” he said, shuffling toward the car with the viewfinder against his right eye.

  “Pass me a cigarette before the teachers get here,” Ricky called out, pushing the car door open and darting over to Lenny.

  “Hey, you’re ruining the shot!” Lenny called, although he knew Ricky didn’t care.

  “Just get a shot of the girls,” he said, holding his hand out for a cigarette. Lenny passed him his pack of Lucky Strikes. The pitch pines rose up high over the lake and swayed with a cool gust of wind. It blew Abbe’s hair back and she reached up to hold it in place. Ricky lit his cigarette and Jennifer turned, seeing a bus coming up the unpaved road.

  Lenny crouched down to frame the two girls, but, really, all he cared about was Abbe. She looked so happy, he thought. He reached his head around and winked at her. Just as he did, she called back, “Oh, Lenny, come on! Take the picture!”

  Click. Her lips were parted in response, in a broad smile. Her eyes were squinting from the sun, and a cluster of pitch pines and Lake Nummy framed the background.

  Jennifer had the roll of film developed at Taylor’s Photo Shop in Wildwood. One print was made of each picture. The image of Abbe, reproduced in black and white, on the back of the Pontiac, was placed in an album in the Holley household. It remained there for five years, until 1961, when Jennifer discarded it along with a lot of other refuse. Shortly thereafter, it found its way to the Wildwood City dump.

  CHAPTER 10

  Bernadine Whitmore had great aspirations for her boys; she certainly didn’t want them stuck in a junkyard that made very little money. However, her husband wasn’t the easiest man to get along with, and money was scarce. They fought often over the demands he made of his children, and this created an atmosphere of tension that was always present in the household. On one occasion, of which she chose not to remember, words turned to violence and she lost partial sight in one eye.

  When her husband’s uncontrolled rage endangered her children, Bernadine oftentimes left her house for a few weeks in order to seek refuge with her sister in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. On such trips she would take her younger children, Gerald and Geraldine, and sometimes she even took her teenage son George. He was a quiet, shy, unassuming young man who had very few friends. He liked to be by himself; when he wasn’t searching through the garbage dump, he was drawing pictures. He drew in spite of severe nearsightedness and filled notebooks with various portraits of his family and the scenic views of the seashore, where he lived. He collected photographs, too, ones that had been discarded at the local garbage dump. When he was lucky enough to find a snapshot or two at the dump, he would take it home and render a picture of it.

  Like most of the garbage dumps in the coastal towns of southern New Jersey, the dump in Wildwood attracted hundreds of seagulls, which were content making a home in its stink and clutter. They sat perched, waiting, watching in anticipation of when the city garbage trucks would drive in and unload things to eat. George Whitmore worked his way through the mass of seabirds and trash almost on a daily basis. The Whitmores lived down the road from the city dump in the western part of Wildwood. They occupied a small run-down shack, which looked as though it was about to collapse.

  In the off-season there were no tourists; the town literally shut down when the weather grew cold. From late October on, Wildwood was reduced to its ten thousand permanent residents, who struggled to make a living. In the Autumn of 1963, George Whitmore’s trips to the garbage dump increased. It was cooler; the trash didn’t reek as much; his summer job ended, leaving him with very little else to do. To George, a visit to the garbage dump was something to look forward to. He never knew what he might find or when he might unearth some trinket worth a lot of money, which had been discarded by mistake, or something that had been thrown out by wealthy folks with oceanfront homes.

  One afternoon he found himself kicking his feet back on a pile of worn tires that had been discarded at the dump. In the crisp, breezy air, he imagined himself a famous artist who earned millions of dollars and lived in a giant house with servants. He sat there and thought of all that money, of being able to take care of his mother and father and all his siblings. He conjured up images of his father abandoning the junkyard and, instead, laughing it up with his friends at the Golden Dragon, a nearby bar.

  And then he thought of Louise Orr, a girl from Mayville, a town inland about ten miles. She was a pretty teenager and his mother knew hers; so on an occasional Sunday, the two families would get together. George was shy in Louise’s presence; and while he never really dated her, he thought of her often.

  On that day, though, he was slightly more distracted by a handful of photographs he had unearthed in the mountains of trash. One was the picture of a blond girl sitting on the back of a car. It was the type of picture that a fellow would be proud to carry in his wallet. It was the type of picture that a fellow could boast about to his friends, especially if his friends lived far away and didn’t know the girl. It was the type of picture that a girl would give her boyfriend after she penned a note of endearment on the back. And so, using the sharpest pencil he had, George Whitmore Jr. wrote on the back of the photograph: To George From Louise. He put the picture in his wallet.

  Up on 104th Street, resting like a fortress in Spanish Harlem, sat the headquarters of the Twenty-third Precinct on the island of Manhattan in New York County. A mere three stories high, it was sandwiched between Lexington and Third Avenues. On the second floor, all the windows sat open, as if its insides were choking on the stifling warmth. A metal fan by the left-side window whirred and circulated hot air throughout the room, upending loose papers and forcing weighted ones to flap in the steady current. Detectives John Lynch and Marty Zinkand both had desks positioned by the window, each one facing out, with views of another brick building painted white, its fire escape stretching upward, six floors, in a zigzag pattern. It had now been almost a year since the two detectives first arrived at the crime scene at 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, apartment 3C, where Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert had been brutally murdered. Detective Lynch was also the detective who had the unenviable job of presenting the photograph found in George Whitmore Jr.’s wallet to Max Wylie for confirmation that the individual seated atop the Pontiac convertible was, in fact, his daughter, Janice. And while Mr. Wylie had insisted vehemently that the blonde in the photo held absolutely no resemblance to his daughter, like everyone else, Lynch knew that Whitmore had been arrested and the case was—insofar as he was concerned—closed. Nevertheless, Lynch saw fit to inform District Commander Captain Frank Weldon, who made no further communication of that event.

  Mel Glass arrived at the Twenty-third Precinct and was directed to the second-floor detective squad. He climbed the steps and walked confidently down the hall. In the distance, toward the window, he saw Detective Lynch standing over his metal desk, gathering piles of extraneous paperwork and tossing them into his attaché case. Mel sauntered over as Lynch was shuffling the pile, cornering the edges into a neat stack, and leaned against the side of the desk.

  “Detective Lynch, good to see you,” Mel said brightly.

  A police siren blared from the street below and Lynch jerked his body around and widened his eyes.

  “ADA Glass?” He paused, waving his hand at Detective Marty Zinkand, who glanced up from the adjacent desk.

  “In the flesh,” Mel replied.

  Zinkand bolted up and rushed over to Lynch’s desk. A typewriter nearby clicked heavily and the neighboring phone began ringing. Finally, on the seventh ring, Zinkand leaned over to the empty desk and grabbed it.

  “I’ll call you back,” he said into the phone on the empty desk, slamming the receiver down and gazing back at Lynch, who was scratching the back of his head. Detective Lynch then pulled out the toothpick, which he’d been casually rolling around in his mouth for the last hour, and said, without any further hesitation, “You got here fast.”

>   Mel grinned and quickly shook hands with the pair of detectives. Detective Zinkand plopped himself down in a chair beside Lynch’s desk; Detective Lynch leaned against the wall by the window with his arms folded at his chest and his black work shoes crossed neatly.

  “Are you gentlemen ready?” Mel asked eagerly. “Better have your toothbrushes packed and have filled the gas tank to the brim.”

  “Where in Jersey are we going again?” Lynch asked.

  Without missing a beat, Mel replied, “Wildwood.”

  Zinkand jumped out of his chair, with his mouth agape. He threw his hands up incredulously. “Now?” he asked.

  “Yes, now, Detective,” Mel said with a heavy sigh.

  “But is this really about the Wylie—”

  “Yes, the Wylie-Hoffert case.” Mel nodded.

  “But I thought—” Zinkand added, and stepped over to his desk, where he snatched a thick manila folder, clutching it under his arm.

  “You can forget what you thought,” Mel answered dismissively, “I’ll tell you on the drive down.”

  Detective Lynch reached inside his jacket for his cigarette pack. He held the pack out to Mel, who turned him down with a quick nod. Then he lifted the pack toward Detective Zinkand, who pulled a cigarette out and lit it with a lighter he had in his hand. Detective Lynch also lit his cigarette, took a deep and quick drag and then said, “Wait a second. This is a postindictment case. You must know we’ve got a tremendous caseload at the Two-Three. I just don’t get it. Why take two detectives off their busy chart for this?”

  Before he gave up more information, Mel eyed Lynch and Zinkand, trying to get a sense of just how helpful these two detectives were going to be in the long run. Having read and re-read the case file and related court documents, he had a pretty good idea of just how aberrant most formalities had become among law enforcement where the Wylie-Hoffert case was concerned.