The Man Who Never Returned

by Peter Quinn

  Q. This occurred over a decade and a half before you joined the NYPD, did it not?

  A. Well, you see, because of Big Tim the city set up a Missing Persons Squad, and here’s where the fluke comes in. I’m not claiming to be a saint, but I made a habit of attending Mass every morning. Still do. Also make it a habit to read from Dante’s Divine Comedy every day, but that’s a tale told another time. Anyways, when I’m walking a beat up in the Bronx, I start each morning by attending Mass, thanks to which I made the acquaintance of Mortimer J. Sullivan, Big Tim’s nephew and a captain in the Chippewa Democratic Club, himself a daily communicant who never touched alcohol.

  Q. Was Mr. Sullivan responsible for your transfer to the Missing Persons Bureau?

  A. Yes. God rest his soul, Mortimer saw to it, but circumstances tied to those times during Prohibition, which you should understand, is what led me to accept his help.

  Q. What circumstances were those?

  A. I’m not talking out of school when I say there was no more anything-goes period in the department’s history than Prohibition. Even abstainers like me saw no sense wringing the country dry because some Fundamentalist tub-thumpers thought it was a one-way ticket to hell. Be hard to go into any speakeasy in those days and not find one or two cops having a gargle or moonlighting as bartenders or bouncers. Corruption gushed out of the booze business like an Oklahoma oil well.

  Q. This was true even in the northeast Bronx?

  A. Truer there than anywhere. Beer was being manufactured and shipped all over the place. Whisky was landing on City Island and Throgs Neck by the vatful. Dutch Schultz and the other booze barons threw money at cops to look the other way or, in some cases, ride shotgun on the shipments. Believe me, no matter what bill of goods some others try to sell you, the Panhandle was awash in booze and bribes.

  Q. Did this include members of the department with whom you were acquainted?

  A. I’m not accusing anybody by name, but I wasn’t comfortable with it, which wasn’t a problem until one day when I’m directing traffic on Tremont Avenue and stop a truck with two men in the cab. The driver, though I didn’t know it, is Mo Geissman, Schultz’s assistant. I don’t like the way he’s acting and tell him to open the back of the truck. Right off, he offers me a grand “to get lost.” I tell him he’s under arrest. He laughs in my face, which is when I cuff him. Put it mildly, when I book him for attempted bribery, carrying a concealed weapon and operating a vehicle filled with cases of illegal gin, I don’t exactly endear myself back at precinct house. Presto, I’m walking a night beat in a part of Pelham Bay nobody’s lived in since the Indians left the Bronx.

  Q. Is this what led you to seek a transfer to Missing Persons?

  A. Missing Persons was Mortimer Sullivan’s idea. I bump into him one day leaving the precinct house and he remarked on not seeing me at Mass. I tell him what’s up, and he volunteers to help. This is September of ’30, when the Judge Crater case first breaks, and Mortimer says to me that Missing Persons is desperate for help, and he’ll speak to somebody he knows there. He was as good as his word, just like his uncle Tim.

  Q. The first case you worked on at Missing Persons was the disappearance of Judge Crater?

  A. Case was two or three weeks old when I got there. Didn’t have time to catch my breath. Nobody did. Up till Judge Crater, Missing Persons was something of a backwater.

  Q. Didn’t the Crater case change Missing Persons from a backwater into a centerpiece?

  A. It was a curse.

  Q. A curse? Why was that?

  A. Like those explorers who opened the tomb of King Tut and all suffered terrible deaths as a result, the Crater case spelled disaster for the detectives who led the investigation, good men whose careers ended because of it. They were mocked in the newspapers or used as fall guys for the politicians who didn’t want Crater found but acted like they did and blamed the detectives for “incompetence.” One got involved on a personal level, which is the absolute worst thing any detective can do.

  Q. Do you have a theory?

  A. Theories are for geniuses like Einstein. A cop sticks to the details.

  Q. What were the most pertinent details of the Crater case?

  A. First, given a whole month went by before his disappearance was reported, the chances of turning up Judge Crater were never better than one in 10,000. Two, dead men tell no tales, and the tales Crater could’ve told meant the number of those with a motive to do him in was legion. These included the governor, mayor and most of the city’s politicians. The judge also turned out to be horny as a toad, and let’s just say none of the girls he used shed tears he was gone. Three, there was something not quite kosher about the case.

  Q. Not kosher?

  A. Like being given a puzzle whose key part is withheld. I had this cop’s hunch thaat we’d been put on the wrong path from the beginning and would never find our way back.

  New York City

  “So to go on, and see this venture through …

  I entered on that savage path and forward.”

  Dante, Inferno, Canto II

  A WELL-DRESSED YOUNG MAN, LEAN, WITH A PAINED FACE AND A constipated smile, approached Dunne as he came up from the tracks. Said he’d been sent by Mr. Mulholland to see to the luggage. Car and driver were waiting outside. Same suite as before was ready at the Savoy Plaza. When Dunne tried to slip a dollar into his hand, he recoiled. “That’s nice of you, Mr. Dunne, but I’m an assistant editor, not a porter, though there are people at Wilkes Communications who have trouble making that distinction.”

  Out front, idling behind a line of taxis, was a black Buick, license plate imprinted with a lone W. The editor/porter sat up front with the driver. Save for an extended sigh, he stayed mute on the ride to the hotel. Finished taking care of the check-in at the front desk, he offered a soft handshake. “Miss Renard,” he paused an instant before squeezing the next words through his lips, “my boss will be in touch later.”

  The grand and immaculate suite echoed with the same vacant, lonely silence as newly entered hotel rooms everywhere, no matter size or daily rate. On the table by the door were two swanky cellophane-wrapped welcome baskets: one cradled a half-dozen bottles of top-shelf booze; the other, expensive toiletries. Beside them, instead of the Herald Tribune, lay a copy of the Standard.

  Without removing his hat or overcoat, he crossed the room, slid back the glass door and stepped onto the terrace. Gray clouds had congealed into a bland, formless emptiness. In the near distance, the windows of Wilkes’s penthouse revealed no life, but neither did any of the other windows in view. It had been sunny for most of the trip, until the train neared the city, where the bleak, desolate marshlands seemed to absorb the sky. Low-key excitement and optimistic anticipation curdled into anxious suspicion. Odds were the search for Crater would be frustrating and fruitless. More likely was the possibility some of Wilkes’s competitors might catch on and turn it into a public joke. Then there was Eddie Moran’s story about Jimmy Bad Tail. Try as he might, he could make no sense of it.

  Back inside, he changed into casual clothes, poured himself a Scotch and sat with the Standard. The headline banged the usual drum—REDS READY TO RAPE LAOS. The accompanying editorial demanded that the US act on Secretary of State Dulles’s threat to use “all means possible against Red aggression,” including its arsenal of “new and improved atomic weapons.” New and improved. Just like shampoo and dish liquid.

  The phone rang. It was Nan Renard. He’d spoken to her office several times but this was the first time he’d heard her voice since the night he walked her home from the Coral. She was business-like, apologizing for not being able to stop by in person as she’d planned, but it was another impossibly hectic day at Wilkes Communications. Besides, Mr. Wilkes had directed her to “leave our detective alone so he can do what he does, but make sure he’s got everything he needs.”

  “So far so good,” Dunne said. “Wired your office a list of names and asked for addresses and phone numbers of th
ose still in New York. They got back to me right away.”

  “That’s the Wilkes Organization for you, we always do as we’re told.”

  Words he’d heard before, but not from Wilkes. Bad Tail’s farewell: Always do as I’m told. Echoed in a dream once. Eddie Moran had brought it back in full. Innocent coincidence? Probably. What if it wasn’t?

  “Fin,” she said, “you still there?”

  On the convoy across the Atlantic, in 1943, the escort destroyers honed in on the slightest hint of something beneath the surface and fired off a barrage of depth charges as the officers on deck counted backwards from ten seconds until the charge went off. He eyed his watch. Ten seconds. “You sound like Jimmy Bad Tail.”

  “Jimmy who?”

  “Malacoda.” Nine, eight, seven seconds …

  “What’s that?”

  “You mean who. Jimmy Malacoda. Bad Tail is a nickname. Somebody else who always ‘does as he’s told.’” Six, five, four, three seconds …

  She laughed. “Good for him. Might like working at Wilkes Communications, but he certainly doesn’t sound like your type.”

  Hesitation but no hint of distress in her voice. “He isn’t.”

  “Look, Fin, I’d love to chat, but I’m busier than ever. If I don’t hear from you in a few days, I’ll call. At the very least, let me buy you dinner at the Coral. This time there’ll be a better ending, I promise. Too many martinis last time. Lesson learned.”

  She sounded sincere. Why shouldn’t she? Or she was doing a convincing job of faking it. Why would she? After he hung up, he ordered dinner from room service and ate in his room. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought up Jimmy Malacoda. But she didn’t seem to sense a challenge. Glad for that. Had to trust somebody and she was the best candidate.

  He sat and reviewed the names he’d compiled for possible interviews. The researchers at Wilkes Communications indicated several were permanently unavailable: Luke Ruppert died of a stoke in 1949; Judge Traglia went from lung cancer a year later; Sylvester Berind, who eventually became a Supreme Court justice himself, keeled over on the eighteenth hole of the St. Andrew’s Golf Club in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

  Cold trail grew ever colder.

  Among the living was Stella Crater, who resided in Greenwich Village. Fred Kipps, ex-cop and Crater chauffeur, was in a Lutheran old folk’s home on upper Broadway. The last two people to see Crater alive were Sam Hechtman, former chief lawyer for the Schumann Theatre Organization, and Patti Leroche, a showgirl, who (depending on the newspaper you read) was either Hechtman’s date or Crater’s. Hechtman had a law office in upper Manhattan. No occupation was listed for Miss Leroche, who lived on Union Street, in Brooklyn. Alexander Von Vogt, the Missing Persons detective who’d led the search, was retired and resided in Far Rockaway.

  The place to start was the Missing Persons Bureau, headed by Jack Cronin—universally referred to in the police department as “Crow”—an acquaintance from the pre-war days when Dunne Detective Agency’s bread-and-butter business involved tracking down absconding spouses and fleeing lovers. Not having talked to him in years, Dunne didn’t know what to expect when he called from Florida. He was pleasantly surprised when Crow not only took his call but agreed to see him the morning after he was scheduled to arrive back in New York.

  He turned on the TV. “The Red Skelton Show” raised his spirits. As he got ready for bed, he had a premonition he was going to dream about Nan Renard. He hoped it would be in an enjoyable way, which is how it turned out.

  Rain, sleet or snow seemed imminent. Dunne took the subway. Crow was at his desk in his second-floor office at police headquarters on Centre Street, a cramped, disheveled room, with files, books and newspapers piled everywhere. Yellowed and brittle as parchment, the shades were half-drawn. Walls were almost the same tint, somewhere between snot and nicotine, the color of most city offices, dispirited and dull five minutes after being slapped on.

  Crow put down his book and rose from his chair in a semi-crouch. He raised a handkerchief stained with yellow blotches to a nose that ended with the prominent hook popular myth described as Jewish but that observation made clear was distributed across a wide human spectrum, from Indian chiefs to Arab sheiks, North African tribesman and Lizzie Scaccio, Grand Street madam. Crow sported the Connemara version, hooked beak that along with his slicked-back, coal-black hair earned him his nickname. He honked into the handkerchief several times, wiped vigorously, and put it away. “I won’t shake your hand,” he said. “I feel a doozer of a cold coming on. It’s all over the city.”

  Slushy mix of rain and ice made a noisy rant against the window. Crow went over and lifted from the only available chair an oak, arch-shaped radio of the type popular before the war. He held the unplugged wire in snake-handler fashion, thumb pressed down behind the head. “I keep meaning to throw the damn thing out. Pulled the plug three years ago, the day they took Fred Allen off the air. Now, with television, the slide toward coast-to-coast idiocy gathers new velocity each day.” He placed it on the floor and pointed at the empty chair. “Have a seat, please.”

  He drew the shades down all the way. Returning to his desk, he picked up the book and turned the spine so Dunne could see the title: The Inferno. “A masterwork of human psychology,” he said. “Even Freud admired it, though he had no use for the theology. Father Alfred DiLascia started me reading Dante back at Regis. I’ve been rereading all three books of The Divine Comedy ever since. Know parts of it by heart. I was in the third circle of hell when you arrived. A favorite spot.”

  He pulled on a leather bookmark and flipped opened to a page that he scanned with his finger. “Here it is: ‘Water sluices through darkened air/ And soaked soil gives off a putrid stench.’ That always makes me laugh. The stink of wet earth is what the Irish call the ‘the sweet aroma of turf,’ fragrance of the Ould Sod. To the Italian nose, it smells like shit.” He swiveled in his chair and pointed to a small plaster bust of a sharp-faced figure, a nose very much like his own, on the bookshelf behind. “For Dante, hell is a cold, rainy place. The center is frozen solid, a little like New York in mid-winter.”

  A clerk entered without knocking, laid a folder on one of the several piles arranged on the desk, and left. Crow took no notice, continuing with his report on the weather in hell. Dunne did his best to look interested. Everybody acquainted with Crow knew about his eccentricities. They also knew he ran a corruption-free bureau whose success in tracking down missing persons guaranteed he’d be in his job as long as he cared to be. Want his cooperation, play by his rules.

  He lifted a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and offered one to Dunne.

  “Thanks, got my own.”

  “You didn’t come to listen to me spout about Dante, did you, Fin? Last I heard you’d made a bundle peddling your outfit to some conglomerate and fled to Florida. Sounded like a good idea to me. Why you back?” He rapped the tip of a cigarette hard against the face of his wristwatch, then lit it.

  As soon as Dunne uttered Crater’s name, he got the response he expected: quizzical look to the effect of you’ve got to be kidding. Once he convinced Crow he wasn’t, an equally expected question followed: How could an experienced, seemingly sane person get mixed up in such an idiotic, useless, hopeless undertaking?

  “Personal favor?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “A client is paying me to.”

  “Who?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  Crow got up and paced the small uncluttered space in front of the windows. Crater was a curse, he said. First case he worked on at Missing Persons. In fact, the reason he was brought in, though as it turned out, he ended up working the other disappearances that continued to happen, ones the press and politicians weren’t interested in, runaway kids, wives fleeing husbands, husbands escaping wives, minor mobsters like Gene Moran who bungled a hit on Legs Diamond’s brother and was never seen again. You could fill a medium-sized telephone directory
with the small-time hoods disposed of in ways that ensured they’d never be found. Then there were the crowds of ordinary folks trying to get away from who they were before, to use the immensity and anonymity of New York to escape their past, or the poor souls—hoboes, drifters, alkies, lonely hearts, bums—who are reported missing but nobody cares if they’re found.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Crow said, “I’d say Dante spent the years before his exile on the missing-persons beat in Florence. Here’s where you see it all, murder, mayhem, malfeasance, the felonies and misdemeanors people flee, bad marriages, embezzlements, embarrassments, broken bonds of family and friendship, illusions and false hopes that lure them on, concentric circles of deceit, of betrayals major and minor, of ‘wounds and woe,’ as Dante puts it, so vast his eyes ‘longed to linger weeping at the sight.’”

  But it was Crater who got the attention, and the brunt of the search was borne by a trinity of senior detectives who’d joined missing persons to get away from the political meddling and triple-spouted font of corruption flowing through the department from booze, prostitution and gambling. Fed up with the hounding he took from the press and higher-ups, Eddie Fitzgerald resigned and moved to Montauk, where he drowned in a boating accident. Billy Moon fell into a funk and found temporary (and toxic) solace in booze and bar girls, dying from cirrhosis. And Alexander Von Vogt, poor Allie, among the most upright cops that ever passed through the department, he did what no cop should ever do—what Virgil warned Dante against as they passed from the Eighth Circle to the Ninth—got personally involved, and it brought him down.

  Crow rubbed out his cigarette on the windowsill and raised the shades. Clatter of icy rain against the glass grew louder. “Citta dolente, city of desolation. Dante described it having four rivers: Acheron, Styx, Phlegeton and Cocytus. So does our city: Hudson, East, Bronx, and Harlem. Coincidence, I suppose.” He stared out the widow. “The damned are best forgotten. Can’t do anybody any good by digging up the Crater case. Leave it be.”