Mel took a deep breath and then said very coolly, “Well, for starters, the big boss spoke to the chief of detectives, whom I have been speaking to, so I think you gentlemen can assume that your work today will prove vital to finally resolving some serious issues in the case.”
Lynch and Zinkand sat dazed for a moment. They exchanged curious looks and then their eyes fell back on Mel quizzically.
“But what’s in Wildwood?” Zinkand said, looking uncertain. “That’s a run-down town on the Jersey Shore. Don’t tell me there’s another murder connected to this Whitmore kid, is there?”
“Jesus, I hope not,” Lynch added, widening his eyes. He turned from Mel to Zinkand warily and then said, “That would bring in a whole mob of Jersey detectives. Haven’t we had enough guys digging around in this case?”
Mel shifted his legs and paced beside Lynch’s desk.
“What the hell are we looking for, anyhow?” Zinkand piped in.
Mel placed his hands in his pants pockets and focused on the detectives. Then he held up the now-famous black-and-white photograph of a blonde atop a convertible. Mel pointed to the girl in the photo and said, “We have to find this girl, and we have to find her quick. Now I’ve got reason to believe that she lives, or lived, somewhere near or in Wildwood, New Jersey. Whitmore claimed initially to the Brooklyn PD that he found the photo in the Wildwood dump.”
Detectives Lynch and Zinkand sat wide-eyed, dazed and speechless.
Lynch cleared his throat and jerked his head around, exchanging looks of bewilderment with Zinkand. Then he held up his left hand, as if a student raising his hand in class.
“Yes, Detective Lynch—” Mel joked in his pleasant voice.
“Mel, what are the chances of finding this girl? We don’t even know where this picture was taken.”
Mel scratched the back of his neck and sighed. He stole a look at the desk clock and then carefully managed to say, “For one thing, we’re never gonna find her sitting in our offices, and secondly, for the last several weeks, I’ve been working with a terrific detective in Wildwood and we’ve been checking out various locations, and he’s just let me know some really good news. He’s hot on a tip and it might work out.”
Both detectives nodded absently. Lynch stood up and edged over toward the door where Zinkand was standing.
“And then?” Lynch managed hesitantly.
“And then, my friends,” Mel shot back, “we’ll find the real killer.”
They sailed through the Lincoln Tunnel with the windows down. They looped around the on-ramp and shifted into the left lane on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Zinkand glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Detective Lynch gazing blankly out the window. “Hey, Mel,” Lynch called out, “I thought you were on vacation?”
Seated in the front with Zinkand, Mel half smiled. “What can I say, my friend, when my boss is so interested in a case and finds it necessary to direct the chief of detectives to assign you guys to me, we’re stuck together for the duration.”
Zinkand nodded respectfully. Mel glanced back at the photograph of the girls in the convertible. Maybe she’s gotten married and has crossed state lines, he reasoned. Changed her name and moved out of the country. Who knows? The only thing Glass did know was that she existed once, on one sunny day, and now she existed on black-and-white photo paper, on a white Pontiac convertible, somewhere near a pitch pine and near a lake with a funny name: Nummy.
Zinkand lit a cigarette and glanced over at Mel. “You know, Mel, the chief of detectives called me this morning to say that we’re assigned to work with you. I gotta say your boss carries a lot of weight. I mean, really, one phone call from you and here we are on our way to the Jersey Shore looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Mel gazed at the smoke coming from a nearby rooftop factory. “Could be worse. We could be heading to downtown Newark.”
“Yeah, but, Mel, seriously, this is even more difficult than trying to find a needle in a haystack, if I may be so direct and blunt.”
“I like blunt, go ahead.”
Zinkand cleared his throat. “Let’s face it, we have no idea where this photo was taken. And even if we find the location, we have no idea where the people are.”
Mel smiled. “Good questions, but, like I said, I’ve got a tip—not a big one, but a tip, nonetheless. I’ve already talked to the Wildwood PD and they’re on the case.”
Zinkand sighed, dumping the ashes from his cigarette out the window. Mel rested his right arm on the ledge of the car door.
“Your doubts are well taken, Marty, but I’m telling you this is worth a shot.” Zinkand shifted into the left lane and nodded. As the car zipped down the highway, Mel continued to explain. “If Whitmore didn’t take the photo from the apartment, and we have good reason to believe he didn’t, then his entire Q and A is worthless. Which means, in all likelihood, he’s not our guy on Wylie-Hoffert.”
They’d combed the area twice, and the sun was almost setting. Zinkand weaved his car down an unpaved, yellow sandy road. Lake Nummy shimmered up in the distance. They were eleven miles outside Wildwood in an area known as the Belleplain State Forest. Through Dr. Lucille St. Helme, Mel had learned that the area was located in northern Cape May County and the lake had formerly been a cranberry bog. Up ahead they saw a New Jersey state trooper and another individual. Zinkand pulled up beside the squad car. He turned off the engine and they all stepped out onto the crunchy gravel. It was humid out and Mel waved off a swarm of gnats, which had rushed toward his face.
“Watch it out here, Mel,” said Detective Zinkand. “They’ve got these ticks and I hear you can get a disease.”
Mel smirked, unamused. He walked over to the state trooper, wiping the perspiration off his brow.
The state trooper reached over to shake Mel’s hand.
“Hi, I’m Mel Glass.”
“Roy Edison here,” the state trooper replied. “Hear you’re chasing after a girl.”
Mel nodded, glancing at the second man, who was taller, dark-haired and in need of a shave. This was the man of interest. Detective David Snyder, of the Wildwood Police Department, sauntered up to the out-of-towners.
“Hello, Mel, good to see you again,” Snyder said, holding his hand out. The men all shook hands, and Detective Snyder then reached his arm out, pointing toward the water. “Mel, having studied the copy of the photo you gave me a couple of weeks ago, and having combed the area pretty good, I’d say the water in the background of the photo is from this lake and the trees are definitely pitch pines.”
Mel jerked his head around toward the lake, tapping his foot into the mossy ground.
“You mean, we’re at the location?” he asked, astonished, exchanging glances with Detectives Lynch and Zinkand, who both already had their mouths parted and ready to speak.
“It sure looks like it to me,” Snyder replied.
Trooper Edison remarked, “This girl also looks vaguely familiar.”
“Yeah, I think I might know where this girl lives,” Snyder added.
“Just so it’s clear to us, you’re referring, David, to the blonde in the photo?”
“That would be the one, Mel,” Snyder confirmed.
Detective David Snyder led the way in his car with State Trooper Roy Edison. Mel, with Lynch and Zinkand, followed directly behind. They drove through the center of Wildwood, New Jersey, which reminded Mel a little bit of Coney Island. He could smell the cotton candy and caramel popcorn wafting from the concession stands. Mel glanced at a blinking theater marquee on his right—Bikini Beach, with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. A street vendor selling Italian ices hollered out from behind his cart, “A nickel for an ice!” The salty scent of the coast filled the air and Mel could feel the anticipation and adrenaline coursing through his system as they turned a corner and drove into a residential area, where they finally pulled up to a modest two-story colonial, white with black shutters. Mel practically leapt from the passenger seat up front, slammed the door and da
rted over to Detective Snyder, who was calmly leading the way up the driveway to the front door.
Before they even rang the doorbell, a young woman appeared behind a screened-in door. It was hard to see beyond the metal screen, but Mel noted that she had blond hair—short—similar to the photograph. The woman inched the door open and said, in a slight but friendly voice, “Can I help you?”
Mel edged his way to the front and reached for the photograph once again. He held it up in plain view of the woman, whom he could barely make out through the screen.
“Yes, miss, I believe you can. We’re looking for the woman in this photograph.”
She opened the door and peered out a little bit. Blue eyes, too, Mel thought. The door creaked slightly.
“May I hold that?” she asked gently.
Mel nodded and offered it through the door. After a moment she handed it back. Then she opened the door and stepped out onto the landing.
“Well, yes,” she said curiously, “the girl in that photograph is me. It was taken about eight years ago or so, I guess.”
The detectives exchanged looks of disbelief. Mel steadied himself, took a deep breath and then said, “And do you mind if I ask what your name is?”
She considered him warily. “Am I in trouble?” she plaintively inquired.
Mel grinned. “Not in the slightest.”
“Well, in that case, my name is Abbe Mills Romano.”
CHAPTER 11
October 1964
The midmorning traffic heading downtown on East Broadway was its usual frustrating gridlock. If you were in a hurry, in order to make any progress in a southbound direction, you had to operate your car like a football running back who runs to daylight by zigging and zagging and diving forward, wherever he sees daylight.
Detective Patrick “Paddy” Lappin picked and chose any vacant opening through which to maneuver his official NYPD vehicle. He bobbed in and out of the snarled traffic. As he weaved among the cars, he miraculously avoided contact with other motorists who were of similar minds. So, understandably, he wasn’t paying much attention to the prisoner sitting in the backseat when the younger man spoke.
“Yo, Paddy,” Nathan “Jimmy” Delaney said in a thick New York accent peppered with the hipster slang of the early 1960s. “You know, I think it was JFK who said, ‘Life is unfair.’ ”
Lappin glanced up at the rearview mirror to see Delaney. The scruffy, thin man, who was handcuffed in the backseat of his unmarked squad car, was a well-known figure to the detectives in the Twenty-third Precinct. The thirty-five-year-old had been in and out of jails and prisons for most of his adult life, mostly on small-time drug charges. The veteran detective’s hound dog–like face and doleful brown eyes hardly changed expression as he responded, “Yeah, him and a few others.”
“Let’s face it,” Delaney continued with a sneer, “if I was some silk-stocking type, you’re not my escort to the criminal courts. In fact, now that I think about it, I’d probably be living large in my pad at the Plaza, while my lawyer appeared before some judge to get my case dismissed. Can you dig it, my friend?”
Dead in the water in traffic, and now stopped by a red light, Lappin turned in the driver’s seat and looked over his shoulder at Delaney. The cop shook his head. “Are you kidding me or what, Jimmy? You’ve got a sheet as long as my arm. You shoot heroin and sell that shit to whoever has the dough. You’ve done enough time in the can to get several graduate degrees, and you just stabbed to death one Roberto Cruz, albeit under arguably legit circumstances. And somebody’s doin’ you an injustice? Give me a break!”
“The hell, ‘arguably’! Cruz, the lowlife, slugged me with a steel rod,” Delaney complained. “What was I supposed to do? Ask him if he was agreeable to arbitration? You know damn well it was self-defense.”
“Well, then, my friend, your lawyer better be able to convince the DA or you could be going away for a long time,” Lappin replied as he searched for an opening through which to surge at a moment’s opportunity.
“Hey, listen, Paddy, screw my lawyer!” Delaney exclaimed, leaning forward and speaking urgently. “I can’t afford for this case to go the wrong way. It’d be just my luck to get some hotshot, snot-nosed young DA looking to make a name for himself. No, no lawyer . . . I got something special for the DA, which I plan on telling him myself.”
“Oh yeah?” Lappin said dryly. He was used to prisoners who claimed to have some “special knowledge” to get them out of trouble. “So what are you selling, Jimmy? Care to share your ace with me?”
“Why not? And I’ll up you one,” Delaney retorted. “You can tell the DA that you guys got the wrong cat for the ‘Career Girls Murders,’ and me and my old lady know who did it.”
Lappin looked up again into the mirror and noted the desperation in his prisoner’s eyes, but there was also something in his voice. Almost a cockiness. By the time they reached the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street, that intuition that all good detectives possess was telling him that this wasn’t something to ignore.
The Manhattan House of Detention for Men, the Tombs, is situated at the most northern end of the towering gray Criminal Courts Building complex. On the sixth, seventh and eighth floors of the opposite side of the edifice are the offices of the district attorney of New York County, which is comprised of the island of Manhattan. The middle part of the building houses the criminal courts, with the judges’ chambers sitting on top of them.
After handing Delaney over to the corrections officers (COs) inside the Tombs, Lappin went in search of the detectives he knew were working on the Wylie-Hoffert case with the district attorney’s office. Unable to locate the point man for the investigation, he returned to the Twenty-third Precinct, where he went looking for his squad commander, Lieutenant Thomas Cavanaugh, and told him about his brief conversation with Delaney.
As it turned out, Cavanaugh, a twenty-five-year NYPD veteran, eight of it as a detective squad commander, had his own doubts about the “Brooklyn Psycho,” as some of the media had dubbed George Whitmore Jr.
“Hey, do me a favor, Paddy,” he suggested. “Give Mel Glass a call. I think he and his wife just had a baby and he’s taking some time off, but he’s looking at the Wylie-Hoffert stuff. The scuttlebutt is that the Whitmore case is in trouble.”
“Sure, I know Mel, too,” Lappin replied. “Good guy. I’ve worked with him on some other cases, and he’s real sharp.”
Lappin walked over to his desk and looked through his file cards for the home telephone number of Mel Glass. He dialed the number and was rewarded when the young ADA picked up the phone.
“Mel? This is Paddy Lappin,” the detective said.
“Hello, Paddy, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“It’s been a while, kiddo,” Lappin said, “and I understand congratulations are in order.”
“Yes, yes, thanks,” Glass replied. “My son, Paul, was just born, and I’ve been staying home, taking care of my daughter, Liz. But I’m sure you didn’t just call to congratulate me.”
“Yeah, I hate to disturb you,” Lappin said; then he paused for a moment before going on. “But I heard something regarding Wylie-Hoffert I thought might interest you.”
“Go ahead, I’m all ears,” Glass responded.
“Okay. It may not be much, but my gut tells me it’s worth a look-see,” Lappin said, adopting his official police-speak demeanor. “Here’s what I got. A local dealer up here in the Two-Three named Nathan Delaney—though he goes by Jimmy—recently stabbed another low-life drug dealer to death. From everything I know about the case at this point, the deceased—one Roberto Cruz—hit Delaney on the head with a steel pipe, only to be dispatched by Delaney with a knife to the throat. Unless I get some unforeseen evidence, it looks like a pretty solid case of self-defense. . . . Anyway, on the drive downtown to the Tombs, Delaney tells me we’ve got the wrong guy on Wylie-Hoffert, and he wants to speak to the DA in charge. So here we are.”
“What do we know about Delaney?”
“Several convictions for drug sales and possession, and one attempted robbery. He’s done his share of time. But he’s no skel.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Delaney’s not the usual drug addict off the streets,” Lappin said. “He’s a smart guy—went to City College and has a high IQ—he’s also a marine veteran. I wouldn’t bother you at home, but maybe he’s got something of value . . . or maybe not.”
“It’s definitely worth a shot, Paddy,” Mel replied. “I appreciate you getting in touch. Let’s set up a meeting with Delaney ASAP in my office, and get me the file on the Delaney-Cruz case, if you would.”
A few days later, Mel Glass waited patiently in his office for Lappin to arrive with Jimmy Delaney and his wife, Margie. He glanced at a recent photograph on his desk of his newly expanded family: his wife, Betty, his daughter, Liz, and his newborn son, Paul.
Mel had enjoyed the time he took off to spend with them, as well as putter about their small, cozy home in Queens. He’d particularly liked the family’s evening walks in the neighborhood, with the leaves beginning to turn color as September moved on to October.
He and Betty had even taken the kids to the World’s Fair, held at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. The fair’s theme was “Peace Through Understanding” and was dedicated, according to its advertising, to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.” It was a showcase of American technology and know-how epitomized by a twelve-story-high stainless-steel globe of the Earth called Unisphere.
Still, for all the distractions, Mel often found himself thinking about the Wylie-Hoffert case and making plans for when he returned to the office. In particular, he went over and over in his mind the afternoon they found Abbe Romano, who happened to be visiting at her parents’ home from out of town.
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