The Murder Room Read online

  “She moves like sex personified,” he said as he watched her walk away.

  “Jesus, Frank, I don’t know how you get away with it.”

  “Jan wants me to have a few girlfriends,” he said, his tone completely earnest. “She doesn’t like me hanging around the house all the time. She just likes to meet my girlfriends first. I never get involved with someone Jan doesn’t like. Jan likes Joan. It’s Joan who gets jealous of the other girlfriends.”

  Fleisher shook his head. “I can’t keep it all straight.” Fleisher had been married to Michelle for thirty years, and his passions were conventional: Besides nineteenth-century detective stories, they included gourmet dining, travel with Michelle, and spoiling the grandchildren. He teased and joked with Michelle as mercilessly as the day he started courting her; in many ways, he had never stopped courting her.

  Bender never stopped loving his wife, either. He spoke of her with great fondness. He’d stopped sleeping around with strangers, he said. All his girlfriends were close, intimate friends.

  “Let me get this straight,” Fleisher smirked. “In other words, you’re not sowing wild oats anymore. It’s all about relationships now.”

  “Right.”

  Fleisher laughed out loud. “Frank, if you were in my family I’d chase you with a rifle like your father-in-law did. But on a murder case, you’re the best.”

  At this, Bender leaned forward, lowering his voice confidentially. “Bill, listen, I’m working on this case that’s really worrying me,” said Bender. “The marshals are tracking down a fugitive killer, a legendary hit man, and they asked me to be the ‘eyes’ of the task force. They say I have an ability to see faces none of the others have.”

  “Congratulations. It sounds like a fantastic opportunity.”

  Bender frowned. “I’m supposed to do sketches and a bust showing ‘age progression’ so they know what they’re looking for. The marshal deputized me and I’m carrying a gun. They were very upfront about the danger.”

  Fleisher’s eyes widened.

  “I know, I haven’t seen his face up close, but the guy looks just like me. He’s the same size, same age, same body type. He’s also an artist. It’s spooky. I feel like he’s my doppelganger, an evil twin.”

  Fleisher scowled. Bender took a sip of coffee. “I’m not afraid of anybody,” he said. “But I saw him once through a telephoto lens and his eyes were so cold. He knows who I am and the threat I represent to him. I can feel it—he wants me dead.

  “His name is Hans Vorhauer,” Bender continued. “He’s a German American like me, but killing is in his blood. His father was a Nazi S.S. officer. And he’s a genius—he has the highest IQ tested in the history of the Pennsylvania prison system.”

  Fleisher practically lunged out of his chair. “Hans Vorhauer! I can tell you all about Hans Vorhauer. I chased him all over the East Coast in the 1970s for the murder of a federal witness friend.”

  Vorhauer was one of the most wanted and dangerous fugitives at large in the United States. Accused by federal agents in a rare interrogation of killing seventeen people as a hired assassin, Vorhauer openly mocked them. “No,” he smirked, with the arrogance of a man who had never been charged with any of them, “it’s thirty-three.” Vorhauer was a brilliant tactician of murder, a master of disguise, black-market gunsmith, drug dealer, armed robber, and the uber–hit man for East Coast gangsters, elusive as a ghost. A self-taught chemist, he operated one of the largest methamphetamine laboratories on the East Coast until he was finally arrested and convicted of meth possession and armed robbery charges in the late 1970s. Vorhauer was sentenced to twenty years in Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia, the state’s largest maximum-security lockup. A model prisoner, he worked his way into the position of head of the prison shop.

  On November 17, 1983, Vorhauer staged a spectacular escape from Graterford that the headlines called THE BREAKFRONT BREAK-OUT, escaping in the hollow compartment of an armoire he had made in the shop for sale and delivery outside. Crouched with him in the pine armoire—stained to resemble oak to better explain its great weight as it was wheeled outside to a waiting pickup truck—was convicted killer Robert Thomas Nauss, the sadistic leader of the Warlocks biker gang, who had strangled and carved up his beauty-queen girlfriend. An unknown couple driving the pickup truck drove away with the armoire, and the killers were never seen again. It was believed they had separated, but they were considered highly dangerous, and profilers thought it inevitable that they would kill again. The marshals had no higher priority than getting Vorhauer and Nauss off the streets—and they’d recently had a break in the long-dormant case. An old neighbor of Vorhauer’s thought she saw him in Philadelphia, where his wife lived, but she wasn’t sure; she hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. The marshals weren’t sure, either; the problem was photographs of him were seventeen years out of date, and nobody knew what the fugitive looked like—or was even sure he was in Philadelphia until Bender spotted him on a stakeout. Bender’s job was to produce sketches and a bust showing how Vorhauer looked today, and he was stumped. It was his first federal case, his first case of national importance. His future forensic career—and perhaps his life—depended on it. He was stumped.

  “I saw him at a distance, it was way too fuzzy a view,” Bender said glumly. “There’s something I’m missing about him. I need to know more about him, something that will help me capture his look and his personality in my art.”

  Fleisher’s big face was flushed. The memory of the hit man had haunted him for over a decade.

  “I’d do anything to help you get that bastard. He has the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  • CHAPTER 11 •

  DEATH OF A B-GIRL

  Fleisher knocked on the boxer’s door in Queens and stood to the side with the other special agents. The old boxer was saving for his retirement with a part-time job doing Mafia hijackings.

  He answered the door in his underwear. His wife was cooking in the kitchen. The feds said they wanted to talk to him about the murder of a federal informant—one of Fleisher’s informants, the dumbest ever, had told the mob he was talking to the FBI.

  “Can I put some pants on?” the boxer asked.

  “Sure,” the feds said.

  “I’ll go with him,” Fleisher said.

  In the bedroom the boxer reached for his pants, an arm’s length from a rifle against the wall. Fleisher put his hand over his service .38—worn gunslinger style over the groin, with the attitude I’m small and I’m Jewish, make my day—and said, “I hear on the street you’re trying to whack me. Get the rifle and let’s get this over with, mano a mano.”

  The mobster backed down politely: “No, Mr. Fleisher, I’d never do such a thing.”

  Fleisher was soft like the Italians were soft—emotional, wild, a little crazy. The Italians and the street people liked him, a reputation that had led his supervisor, Jim Scanlon, to call him into his office one morning in 1971 at the FBI headquarters in Boston.

  As he sat down, Scanlon said, “I want you to look into the murder of a B-girl in the Combat Zone.”

  Fleisher’s sources included hookers, bouncers, and bar girls. “They all love me there,” he famously bragged to the older agents, leading to the inevitable question, “What do they charge for that? ” Yet in fact the special agent could wheedle information from anybody. He didn’t spend a dime of the thousands of dollars in taxpayer money available to buy off informants. With the sweet smile of a Boy Scout and the street smarts of a bookie, Fleisher got people to open up, then he picked them clean.

  “Her name was Vicki Harbin. She was fiftyish, a dancer working at the 222 Club,” Scanlon said. “They found her in her room at the Avery Hotel. She was lying on the floor near the door, stabbed to death.”

  Fleisher’s eyes narrowed. “An over-the-hill B-girl, still dancing around a pole, hustling drinks, living the life in the Avery.” He shook his head sadly. The Avery was a narrow, ten-story landmark gone to seed, a respectable turn-of-the
-century hotel turned hooker Hilton. In the 1940s and ’50s, Tommy Carr and his orchestra played “Good-bye to Paris” in the Cameo Bar, and vaudevillians Jackie Gleason and Art Carney and actor Jason Robards camped in the hotel’s modest rooms, cheapest in the theater district. Filled with touring young performers, even then the Avery smelled of sex. The line was, “At two in the morning in the Avery a bell rang, and everyone went back to their own rooms.” By the spring of 1971, the Combat Zone’s dozens of adult bookstores, girlie shows, and massage parlors stretched outside the door. “The Avery had the saggy, tattered quality of a locale in a Raymond Chandler novel,” a journalist wrote.

  “A bad john?”

  “No, she wasn’t a prostitute. She was a dancer. You know—the body’s gone, but she’s in it for life. They found her lying on two dollars, the tip she always gave the bellhop for bringing her a bucket of ice at the end of the night.”

  Fleisher’s brown eyes softened. “Everyone dreams of something.”

  “Vicki Harbin was stabbed in the heart. It was a professional hit.”

  “It’s terrible, but so what?” Fleisher shot back. “Is it a white-slavery case? Otherwise, it’s a Boston homicide, a police case.”

  Scanlon frowned. “Until a black man by the name of Orange Harbin—”

  “Orange?”

  “The same. Mr. Orange Harbin, Vicki’s husband and by all accounts a fine gentleman, walks into the Boston PD last week and tells the desk sergeant his wife was killed on orders of the Baltimore gangster Bernie Brown.”

  Fleisher’s eyebrows went up. “Wild Bernie Brown?”

  Scanlon nodded.

  “He’s quite a package,” said Fleisher. “Murder. Extortion. The rackets. Wild Bernie is about as mobbed-up as you can get without being Italian. He’s not a made guy, but he’s kicking money upstairs to someone, paying the street tax. I think he might be Jewish.”

  “Whatever. Baltimore says Vicki was testifying against Brown before a federal grand jury,” Scanlon said.

  Fleisher whistled. “The murder of a federal witness. He thought of a very effective way to shut her up. I guess Bernie’s still not going to choir practice on Sunday. He’s not flossing before he brushes.”

  Scanlon was stone-faced. One of Fleisher’s weaknesses was he thought he was funny. It was part of his charm with informants. A bad joke or pun made them even more comfortable than a good one.

  “They’re bringing in a lot of witnesses to the grand jury, putting the squeeze on him,” Scanlon said. “Bernie’s the king of the bust-out bars. The bar girl hangs on you all night selling a fantasy, but you never go home with her. She just busts out your wallet for watered-down gin. So the grand jury is after the bust-out bar empire, and Wild Bernie is busy knocking off witnesses.”

  “More than one?”

  “Talk to Baltimore. Before Harbin, they put a contract out on another witness down there, some guy involved in the bars. They put a bomb under the seat of his car, enough to obliterate him and a Buick. They didn’t want to kill his wife, so they figured this guy works at night, he’d turn the lights on and—boom—he’s in the next zip code. What they didn’t figure on was the wife, who’s a night person, too, sets the alarm, gets up early the next morning, and takes the car in for inspection. The mechanic checks the lights and boom—”

  “They killed the mechanic?”

  “No, only the blasting cap went off. Moisture might have got in it. It sounded like a cherry bomb, ripped up the seat, burned the guy’s ass, and scared the hell out of him. He was lucky.”

  “So Vicki Harbin saw the handwriting on the wall and ran up to Boston and a new life in the Avery Hotel?”

  “Right. The question is, what crawled out from under a rock and followed her? It’s the $64,000 question.”

  “Nah,” Fleisher said. “It won’t cost that much.” He said he’d work his sources. “I bullshit with them all the time. They like me. Everybody likes me.” He grinned. “I don’t pay for it in the Combat Zone.”

  Fleisher drove to the Bradford Hotel on Tremont Street. A Boston landmark built in the 1920s, the redbrick neoclassical hotel that was once “In the Heart of the City.” In the 1940s, big bands played on the rooftop and in Boston’s largest ballroom. Now the Bradford was a hooker hotel in the heart of a living hell.

  Fleisher had learned from FBI agents in Baltimore that Brown had sent his enforcer, Jack Sugarman, up to Boston to find Harbin. Sugarman was a World War II Marine hero from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who came back from the war and ended up a gangster’s right-hand man. According to informants, Sugarman was the finger man—he went to Boston to find the dancer and point her out to the hit man. The hit man was Hans Vorhauer, whom Fleisher had never heard of. Baltimore said he was the best in the business. When the fax came in from the Baltimore office, Fleisher was chilled by the killer’s eyes in facsimile.

  The Bradford was a sad twin sister to the nearby Avery. He figured it was the most likely place Sugarman would have stayed—if indeed the enforcer had come to Boston.

  He would never stay in the Avery with the victim, and the Bradford is in the area of the Combat Zone, he thought to himself. A lot of hookers, pimps, and miscreants stay here.

  “Hey, Bill, what do you want?” Paul, the hotel manager, a tall, balding man with stooped shoulders, stopped him near the elevators.

  “I need to see the records.” Fleisher shook hands with the manager.

  “More hookers?”

  He nodded, but the manager had already turned around and was briskly leading him downstairs into a gloomy hallway. The hotel manager was a friend.

  He’d helped Fleisher make his name working white-slavery cases. The White Slavery Act made transporting women across state lines for prostitution an interstate, or federal, crime. Along with tax violations, it was a favorite federal tool for tripping up gangsters; Lucky Luciano and Al Capone were arrested on white-slavery charges.

  On one case, Fleisher had approached Paul with photographs, saying, “Have you seen these two women? I have a lead they’re hookers in town from Minneapolis.” To prevent the cops from zeroing in on them in their home cities, white slaves followed a circuit like a troupe—Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans.

  “They’re here right now, come with me!” the manager had cried. He took the elevator to the fifth floor, then walked down the long hallway. Reaching their room, the manager had started banging on the door screaming, “Get out of my hotel, you whores!”

  Now Paul led him to a small, dusty room and put three long cardboard banker’s boxes on a table in front of him. The boxes were stuffed with the hotel’s three-by-five registration cards, stacked and bundled with rubber bands. Fleisher riffled through three stacks of the cards for the previous month with great impatience, working rapidly.

  Three weeks before the murder there was a chicken-scrawl signature reserving three nights: Jack Sugarman.

  Two weeks before the murder, another three nights: Jack Sugarman.

  The week of the murder, just one night: Jack Sugarman.

  Bingo, he thought. I’ve got Sugarman in town. The first time he comes up from Baltimore to stake Vicki out, see what she’s doing. The second time, he works on her schedule, gets her hours and habits down. The third visit is brief—he points her out to Vorhauer. It would be trickier proving Vorhauer’s whereabouts. Vorhauer was a wanted fugitive and master of disguise; he would never have used his real name.

  That evening Fleisher went to the dim, smoky cave of the Caribe Lounge, the best known of the Combat Zone’s nude bars. A young redhead was dancing on a small stage circled with men watching through clouds of cigarette smoke. The redhead would occasionally flash her G-string and pasties—total nudity was banned in Boston—but not with a cop in the room. George Tecci, the owner-manager, stopped him cold near the door.

  “What do you want?” Tecci asked, his lip curled in distaste.

  Fleisher took out his wallet and showed his badge. “FBI, I’m looking fo
r Cinderella.”

  “What about?”

  “I want to talk to her about the murder of Vicki Harbin, who danced at 222.” He showed Tecci a portrait photograph of the dancer, a brunette with a round, aging face. As the manager led him downstairs to the dressing rooms, a tall woman in her twenties, at least six feet in heels, blond and buxom, came walking toward them with a leonine grace that took his breath away. She was the sexiest woman Fleisher had ever seen, and when he studied her face, one of the prettiest.

  “Cinderella, this fellow wants to talk to you,” Tecci said. She smiled—she had high and delicate cheekbones, and her smile was dazzling. The eyes were big and blue and brittle. Fleisher took the portrait out of his folder.

  “I understand you were a friend of Vicki Harbin’s?” Cinderella’s smile disappeared as she led him to her dressing room.

  “I don’t know anything.”

  They sat in the mirror lights, so close Fleisher breathed her scent, and he gave her his warmest, most sympathetic smile. She was a knockout and she was sweet and she liked him; he could feel it behind the hard eyes. Their legs were almost touching. She had incredible legs. He looked closer in the hazy light and focus returned like a blow to the head—Her Adam’s apple is the size of Johnny Appleseed’s, he thought. Her hands are as big as Sonny Liston’s. A fantasy about a he-she, he thought, could wake you up like twenty-four ounces of cold coffee.

  When had she last seen Harbin?

  Her eyes were dead. “I don’t know anything.”

  Was Harbin afraid of Bernie Brown?

  “I don’t know anything.”