by Peter Quinn
“It’s not an orchid. I don’t know what it is. But it’s delicate and beautiful.” She put it to her nose and sniffed. “The fragrance makes me think of funerals.”
“Let’s think of other things.” He raised his glass.
“I can’t have more than one. I’ll fall asleep and have to be carried home.” She tapped her glass to his. “You look tan and rested.”
“Few more days, I’ll be as pale and spent as everybody else.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d come back.” She placed the flower back in the bowl.
“Did my homework.”
“What’d you find?”
“Not much.”
She sighed and closed her eyes, lush, mascara-brushed lashes fluttering, as though fighting back tears. “I’m under more pressure than you can imagine. You saw Mr. Wilkes’s persuasive, gentlemanly side. When it comes to getting what he wants, he’s not always so calm and reasonable. Crater is a long shot, at best. Maybe it’s time to focus on some other cover piece for launching Snap, something less far-fetched.”
“Maybe.” Using the candle, he lit two cigarettes and handed her one. “But maybe not. It isn’t as if some supernatural force whisked Crater away. There was a well-thought-out plan. Cops were beset by all sorts of distractions, false leads and bad luck. The case became a tangle of loose ends. But time cuts both ways. As well as dimming memories and obscuring clues, it can simplify and clarify. Grab hold of the right loose end, it becomes the missing thread.”
“Which loose end?” She brushed her hair back. The fatigue left her face.
“Can’t say yet.”
“You mean won’t.”
“I mean it’s too soon.”
“So Mulholland’s right; you are the luckiest investigator alive.”
“I’m working on it.”
“On being lucky?”
“On staying alive.”
She finished her drink. “We’ve reason to celebrate.”
“Let’s have another.”
“Another reason to celebrate?”
“Another drink.”
“You’ll carry me home?” The gentle shine of candlelight gave her skin a golden hue.
“I’ve had worse assignments.” Turning to signal the waiter, he scanned her face. Her eyes had the same intensity he remembered from that night in Wilkes’s apartment.
One drink turned into two. When they left the Coral, it was misty, warm, spring-like. She slipped her arm into his. They reached the entrance of her building. “Promised to carry me all the way home, remember?”
“We’re there.”
“The National Safety Council claims that nine out of ten serious accidents take place in the home. What if I fall on the way to bed?”
“Be sure you fall onto the bed.”
Her laugh had the raucous pitch of someone not quite drunk but not quite sober. She put her arms around his neck, kissed him on the lips. He kissed her back, long and hard enough so the doorman turned away and pretended not to watch. “I knew you’d come back,” she whispered. “I knew you’d see this to the end. That’s the kind of man you are.”
She went into the building. Almost called out to invite himself up for a nightcap. But didn’t. Roamed aimlessly, not tired, enjoying the unseasonable warmth, the moist kiss of dense night air. New York felt like his city again. Not a ghost town, but alive with excitement and possibility that belonged to him as much as anyone.
Part V
Just the Facts: An excerpt from Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Every scientist knows how difficult it is to remember a moderately large group of facts, before at least some primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is therefore small wonder, and by no means to be blamed on the authors of original papers or textbooks, that after a reasonably coherent theory has been formed, they do not describe bare facts they have found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very useful for remembering the facts in a well-ordered pattern, tends to obliterate the distinction between the actual observation and the theory arisen from them. And since the former always are of some sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities, which, of course, they never do.
New York City
“… This deceitful world whose vanities
Win many souls and ruin all they win.”
—DANTE, Paradiso, Canto XV
THE WAITER WHO DELIVERED BREAKFAST HANDED OVER THREE letters received at the front desk. Recognizing Roberta’s distinctive script, Dunne opened hers first. Brief note. Curt and cold. Fin, going to Tampa to visit Elba and her kids. Felipe Calderon has offered to drive. We need to talk when you get back. Roberta.
He sat on the bed and reread the note several times. Ready to pick up the phone, he resisted. A call would solve nothing. He took the Bible from the night table drawer, opened it and stuck in the note. A match he’d used as a bookmark fell out at the verse Mulholland recommended. He wasn’t sure if his eyes flashed on it or he simply recalled it: vanity of vanities, all is vanity …
He avoided looking at his reflection in the mirror above the bureau; couldn’t avoid the question: what kind of man? Felt like a foolish adolescent even asking but knew the answer: the kind Nan Renard thought he was, the kind who’d see this to the end. Afterward, he’d answer the other questions.
The second, postmarked Far Rockaway, was a reply from Allie Von Vogt to the letter Crow suggested sending. Von Vogt, it seemed, not only “respected forthrightness” but practiced it. His note was even briefer than Roberta’s. And colder. I will not speak to you under any circumstances, so don’t even try.
In the last envelope, folded inside a piece of official ISC stationery, was a ticket to the Golden Gloves quarter-finals that evening at Madison Square Garden. Louie Pohl had scribbled a brief message: See you there! It’s important!
He put the ticket in his wallet. He guessed that Pully wanted an update on the deal with Wilkes and some reassurance that ISC’s interests weren’t being unduly compromised. He’d put him off, if he could, except with the debt he already owed Pully for his assistance and advice, a ticket to the Garden was as good as a summons. Besides, it beat sitting around watching TV and sipping Scotch. Maybe there’d be a real boxer in the mix, somebody worth watching.
Late morning, he left the hotel on the way to pay Stella Crater a visit. Hoping if possible to get a spontaneous, unrehearsed version of events, he didn’t call ahead. He stopped at police headquarters on the way downtown to check with Crow on the Kipps file. Crow was in his office. “I know what you’re here for, and I don’t have it. But I got something else that should make you happy.”
He flipped a piece of paper across the desk. Dunne picked it up: the report from September 7, 1930, that he couldn’t find in the files. Three separate street addresses were listed, each followed by a paragraph about why it had been visited, who’d been interviewed and what, if anything, of interest was found. (In all cases, the leads had proved false.) Each paragraph bore a separate set of initials: R.E.M., A.I.M., F.X.T. At the bottom, it was signed in full by Det. Alexander Von Vogt.
Crow grinned. “I told you it was in there somewhere. Had a clerk look. Found it in with the newspaper clippings.”
“Whose initials are these?” Dunne asked.
“Let me see.”
Dunne handed him back the paper.
“God knows. There was any number of cops who volunteered or were dragooned into helping the Missing Persons Squad during those days. F.X.M.? Francis Xavier Somebody. R.E.M.? My guess is that’s Robert Emmet Murphy. I know he worked the case. A.I.M.? Got me. Von Vogt would probably know, but after all these years, he might have trouble himself.”
Stella Crater, five years younger than her beloved Joe, was sixty and worked part-time as a secretary at the Heal
th Department office on Seventh Avenue and Clarkson Street. After Joe was officially declared dead, she’d been able to collect on his insurance. Along with her job, it was enough to allow a modest existence in a small apartment on Downing Street. (The cabin at Lake Belvedere was sold years before, at the depths of the Depression, for half what Joe paid for it.)
At first, she’d been accessible to anyone who wanted to talk about (or, more often than not, listen to) her take on her husband’s disappearance. But as the years went by, and the stories became fewer but more sensational, with detective and true crime magazines competing to outdo each other in their lurid accounts of Joe’s supposed connections to mobsters, madams, swindlers, etc., Stella Crater stopped talking to the press. The last clip on her in the Standard’s file was a brief piece dated August 6, 1945, the fifteenth anniversary of the case—and the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima: “Judge Crater’s Missus Still Keeps Vigil/ Says ‘Joe Was a Hero.’”
Dunne had a cup of coffee and a sfogliatelle at an Italian bakery across from the office where she worked. At noon, when the office closed for lunch, she wasn’t hard to pick out from the people leaving the building: face predictably older than in the newspaper photographs but easily recognizable; coat, shoes and hat neat but entirely out of fashion, very possibly part of her wardrobe since the days when Joe was on the scene.
He left the bakery and followed her. Passers-by took no notice of the woman once featured in headlines and newsreels, and besieged by a trainload of reporters. Trim, meticulous, slow-moving, in out-of-date clothing that gave her the air of a widow or spinster in no hurry to get to the rooms (or room) where she lived alone, she appeared a full-fledged citizen of the yesterday city, unnoticed and unmissed.
She stopped to look in the window of a florist. He stood next to her. Speaking in a soft, friendly voice, so as not to startle her, he said, “Excuse me, but are you Stella Crater?”
She gazed at his mirrored reflection in the window. “And you are?”
“Fintan Dunne.” He tipped his hat. “I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to look into your husband’s case.”
“Is that so?” Instead of startled, she seemed serene. “By whom?”
“Someone sincerely interested in what happened to your husband.”
“‘Sincerely interested’? I’ve heard that before. She turned and looked at him. “What is it you want?”
“To discuss some aspects of the case.”
“It’s all on the record.” She went back to looking at his faint image in the glass.
“I’ve read the record, police files, newspapers and your articles in the Standard.”
“And what did you learn?”
“Enough to know that the investigation was botched from start to finish.”
“The world’s known that for twenty-five years.” She resumed her stroll.
He fell in beside her. “But the case isn’t without an answer.”
“I agree with you there.”
“Whoever was behind it was careful to erase the trail.”
“And successful.”
“Until now.”
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, took a step back. In bright sunlight, the dusting of powder, rouged cheeks and cherry-colored lips gave her face a doll-like quality. “And you have the answer?” Her sharp, contentious tone didn’t match the face.
“Only the person or persons behind the disappearance have the answer. But others, some without knowing, have the pieces that, when fit together, form an answer.”
“And you think I’m one?”
“I think you recorded the facts exactly as you experienced them.”
“I’m immune to flattery, Mr. Dunne.”
“Is it flattery to point out your story has been dismissed as the deluded fantasies of a hysterical wife?”
“You share that view?”
“No, but the police do.”
“You’ve talked with the police?”
“I’ve met with Captain Cronin, at Missing Persons.”
The one they call ‘Crow’?”
“None other.”
“Typical of his ilk.”
“I don’t agree with him on this case. But he’s an honest cop.”
“It’s his timidity that disturbs me. Always quoting Dante. I think of him as less a crow than as the raven of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem. ‘Quoth the raven, Nevermore.’ If you ask me, he’s afraid of repeating the mistakes of his predecessors. He’d rather do nothing than risk being unsuccessful. That was his attitude as well as the entire police department’s to any attempt to get them to persist with the investigation. ‘Quoth Crow and his cronies, Nevermore.’ They don’t care who suffers as a consequence.”
“I know what you’ve been through, and it’s not my intention to add to your burden. I think your story has never been given the serious scrutiny it deserves.”
“Nobody knows what I’ve been through.” She bit her lip and resumed walking, but at a pace slow enough it was obvious she wasn’t trying to escape.
He walked beside her. “Maybe not. But I’m not here to add to it. If it’s still possible to find the answer, I’ll do my best to find it. If not, I’ll go away.”
“I’ve learned from experience to be frugal with my trust.”
“You know what Ecclesiastes says?” He paraphrased, “There’s a time for everything, a time to save, another to spend.”
“You read the Bible?”
“On occasion.” He felt no need to say what that occasion was. “I’ll be upfront with you, Mrs. Crater. I started this job thinking it was a lost cause. But it’s not a job anymore. I’m after the truth. I can’t guarantee the truth will please you. But isn’t that what you’ve been after all these years: to be done with the uncertainty, to overcome the lies, to know once and for all the truth about what happened to Joe?”
She glanced at her wristwatch. “Perhaps you could come back at a more convenient time?”
“This is as convenient as it gets. I don’t have a lot of time.”
“I’m on my lunch hour.”
“I’ll buy you lunch.”
“I prefer to eat at home.”
“Do as you please. There are a whole lot of other people eager to talk about your husband’s case.”
After several seconds of hesitant silence, she added, “If you don’t mind a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a cup of tea, you can join me.”
Her apartment was up a steep, creaking staircase, on the third floor. Into the small living room was crammed a green-velvet-covered couch in an elaborately carved wooden frame, an easy chair with a similar covering, and a well-worn oriental rug—all that was left, Dunne supposed, of the furnishings from the spacious digs she shared with her husband on Fifth Avenue.
Joe’s portrait hung above the bricked-up fireplace. A painted reproduction of the black-and-white photo taken as his official head shot for his campaign posters—same pose, clothes, prominent eyes, sharp nose—it was obviously the work of a less-than-first-rank portraitist. The only liberty he’d taken in reproducing the photo was that, instead of a phantom grin, he’d spread Joe’s mouth so wide it resembled the lunatic crescent worn by Steeplechase Jack, the long-time symbol of the Coney Island amusement park.
Dunne supposed it was a clumsy attempt to answer Stella Crater’s instruction that Joe be portrayed with the very last expression she’d seen on his face, the “beneficent smile” that “shone like a blessing.” But she seemed happy with the result. Pausing reverently in front of it, she said, “That’s how I remember him.”
She talked the whole time while making the sandwiches and tea, relating her story in practically the same sequence and detail as in the Standard articles. Knees almost touching, they ate at a table that just fit in the kitchen. From where he sat, Dunne could see her bed, which was covered with a red-and-white quilt like the one she mentioned lying on in Lake Belvedere.
He interrupted when she mentioned Kipps’s name. “What’d
you think of him?”
“Of Fred? If ever there was someone who fit the description of ‘a diamond in the rough,’ it was he.” She poured their tea.
“How’d he come to be your chauffeur?”
“We’d just purchased a Chrysler automobile. Neither Joe nor I liked to drive in the city, and his practice was such we could afford a driver.”
“Did Joe know Kipps previously?”
“I’ve no idea. He simply asked around. Someone recommended him, I suspect. He was an ex-policeman. Very reliable. Jobs were already becoming scarce. Fred was grateful for the work.”
“When was he hired?”
“I couldn’t tell you exactly. It was soon after the crash on Wall Street but before Joe went on the bench. Sometime around the autumn or witnter of 1929.”
“Did your husband like him?”
“Joe was upset that one time when he got his finger caught in the car door. But he quickly realized it was his own fault as much as Fred’s. He let it pass. Joe had loftier matters to occupy him.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Like Fred Kipps?”
“Are you suggesting Fred had a role in my husband’s disappearance?”
“No. But I was struck by your account of the way he stood by you.”
“Yes, he did. Through the whole ordeal.” She sipped her tea.
“Did he ever speak to you about what he thought might have happened to Joe?”
“We didn’t have that kind of relationship where we talked about such things. He treated me with the utmost respect. Ours was a warm but proper acquaintance.” She put down her tea cup and studied the wet leaves at the bottom. “There was once …” She stopped herself. “Would you care for more tea?”
“No, thank you. What happened that once?”
“Nothing, really. It was months after Joe disappeared. The police no longer considered me a suspect. I’d put the cabin at Lake Belvedere up for sale and returned to the city. I’d already notified Fred by mail that I could no longer afford a car, never mind a driver. I thanked him for all he’d done and included a check for what we owed him. I was surprised, then, when he showed up one morning at the apartment I’d rented on Bank Street. He wanted to give me back the check. He said I needed it more than he.”