The Murder Room Read online

  Had she seen these two men? He took out the faxed photos of Sugarman and Vorhauer.

  “I don’t know anything.” It sounded like a mantra to an empty universe.

  Fleisher knew it would be difficult. According to his sources, Cinderella’s husband was Bobby Urbin, a doorman for Bernie Brown. He watched the gangster’s door in Baltimore and “ran a card game for some wise guys in Boston,” Fleisher said. He and Cinderella traveled the circuit together.

  “You don’t know anything, but now you know this. Let me show you what they did to your friend Vicki.”

  He reached into the folder for the close-up of Harbin with the knife wounds in her heart.

  Cinderella let out a small gasp and put a hand over her mouth; the big blue eyes were moist.

  “I’m trying to find out who killed Vicki. Here’s my name and number. Call me if you want to help.” She said nothing as he gave her his card and left.

  It was time, he thought as he got in his car, to put pressure on Cinderella and her husband.

  At ten that night, he drove to the 222 Club. The bouncer—a squat, heavyset man, five foot three inches tall and nearly as wide—stopped him at the door. He wore thick glasses on a pudgy round face, had hair dyed a shade too dark, a cigarette hung on fleshy lips, and had a blackjack in his back pocket. One of his brown eyes wandered in the socket like a satellite to the moon face.

  “Cockeyed Benny,” Fleisher said in greeting. They shook hands warmly. “I’m looking into the murder of Vicki Harbin, and I’m looking for these guys.” He held up photos of Sugarman and Vorhauer.

  Cockeyed Benny nodded at the picture of Sugarman. “He was here.” Sugarman left the 222 with a hooker, Benny said; he’d watched them walk out. He took her back to the Bradford, and “he paid her with a check that bounced.”

  “Do you know Bobby Urbin?”

  Cockeyed Benny grunted. “Sure. He’s always in here.” Fleisher had never met Cinderella’s husband and didn’t have a photograph of him. He and Cockeyed Benny worked out a signal that evening. Fleisher would sit at a table with a drink, Benny would stand at the bar; when Bobby Urbin walked by, the bouncer would light a cigarette. Just as Urbin strolled by, Benny lit up, but at that moment some guy at the bar passed out, and a crowd formed. Cockeyed Benny waded into the crowd with Fleisher and tapped Urbin on the shoulder; Fleisher said, “FBI. I want to ask you some questions,” and hustled him out of the 222 and into a car. Fleisher sat in the back pumping Urbin with questions, while the street hustler put his hand inside Fleisher’s thigh.

  I’ll let him do it to get the story, he thought, amused. He likes me, too. They all like me. But Urbin refused to talk about the Harbin murder. He had to let him go.

  Frustrated, Fleisher went back to FBI headquarters and called Frank Mulvee, the Boston police detective assigned to the case, and told him Urbin had knowledge of the murder and marijuana in his apartment, a tip he had gleaned on the street.

  The next morning, the police raided Urbin’s apartment; Urbin and Cinderella were both at home, and Mulvee called the FBI agent. Fleisher went to the apartment and tried to get Urbin to cooperate in the Harbin murder. “You don’t know anything,” Fleisher said. “I don’t believe you, and neither do the police. Why don’t you just take a polygraph?”

  “Oh, Bobby, take the test,” Cinderella chimed in. Boston police took him to a private examiner; the polygraphist attached the blood-pressure cuff, the pneumograph tubes across the chest and abdomen, the electric sensor plates on the fingertips. Urbin answered a few questions, then ripped off all the instruments and ran out of the office. They had only one chart on him, but it showed clear deception.

  Fleisher’s head was spinning. He had placed Sugarman, the finger man, in town, but nobody had seen the hit man Vorhauer; Vorhauer was a ghost. Brown’s people were scurrying like rats from a ship. The police couldn’t find Urbin. He had failed to get Harbin’s friends to talk. Finally he got the name of a dancer who knew Vicki intimately—Terri Emanuel, a gorgeous copper-toned young woman, half Filipino, half Cajun American, half man, half woman until recently; now Terri was as pretty as Cinderella. He put her at the top of his interview list.

  That night he was at a bar with two friends, deputy agent in charge U.S. Marshal Mike Assad, and his brother Eddie, a Boston cop, when an extremely shapely woman walked by their table. The three bachelors whistled as they watched her go, then sucked in their breath for a moment of silent contemplation.

  “You think she’s endowed,” Fleisher said, “you should have seen the knockout I interviewed at the Caribe the other night, Cinderella.”

  “Cinderella, pretty name,” Mike said.

  “She makes this one look like a schoolteacher, and she’s a guy.”

  Mike and Eddie groaned.

  “That’s strange,” Eddie said. “We had a job this morning, before dawn, a mysterious death of a woman and she was a he-she, too.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Terri Emanuel.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Fleisher cried. “I’m supposed to interview her.”

  After pressing Eddie for details, Fleisher left the table and called Mulvee from a pay phone. He agreed to meet the Boston detective at police headquarters. At two in the morning, the police report gave them the address where Emanuel’s body was found. She lived in an apartment with some guy named Art Nettles.

  At three in the morning, they knocked on the door and Nettles cheerfully let them in. Art was a brunette, “half man, half woman, not finished with the operation,” Fleisher said. “She had boobs but didn’t have her winky removed yet.” Terri roomed with Art and slept on the sofa. Now Art sat on the sofa in a bathrobe left open to show off the new breasts and was glad to talk about Terri’s death.

  Art and Terri had been frightened at an after-hours club by two very tough-looking Italian guys who wanted to take them home. They were relieved to get away from the men and back to their apartment. In the middle of the night they were awakened by the buzzer, and Art let the caller in. Through the crack in the door she saw the two Italian guys, who pushed their way in. One of them punched Art in the jaw; the other grabbed Terri, who always slept in the nude on the sofa, rolled her in a blanket, and ran out. Art had the presence of mind to yank the fire alarm. As the alarm sounded, the two goons dropped Terri and ran away. Terri and Art went back to sleep, adventure over. In the late morning, a dancer friend from Chicago called and asked Art, “How’s Terri? I had a dream about her and I smelled flowers. Is she all right?” Art went out to the sofa to wake Terri. She was dead. The ME had no idea what killed her.

  The ME was a piece of shit, Mulvee said.

  “Jesus,” Fleisher said. He had a feeling Bernie Brown was trying to erase all his witnesses. But he had nothing close to proof. He’d hit another wall.

  That night, Cinderella called him. She wanted to talk. Yes, she confirmed, Vicki Harbin knew her life was in danger and was afraid; she was looking over her shoulder constantly. The week before she was killed, Harbin had an experience on the stage that terrified her. While dancing, she looked out and saw the big, ugly, scarred face of Jack Sugarman. Sugarman, who won the Navy Cross in World War II for killing 132 Japanese soldiers in one night on Guadalcanal, and whose face had been since rearranged by a baseball bat, was sitting in the pit watching her with a leering smile on his face. Seated next to Sugarman was Bernie Brown’s ace hit man, Hans Vorhauer. She knew them both. Vorhauer was expressionless. His wolf eyes stared through her as if she wasn’t there.

  Scanlon thought Fleisher was “really shaking up the bushes,” but he didn’t feel he had a case until Cinderella cooperated.

  Then, that summer of 1971, the FBI transferred Fleisher to Detroit; he was off the case.

  Bender looked up from his coffee. “Man, that’s frustrating. Wow, I would have loved to have met Cinderella. Did you ever get Vorhauer?”

  Fleisher scowled. “No. We trailed him all over Boston. He was in a lot of bars, but nothing we could nail down. Then
in Detroit I got a call from an agent I’d been working with in Baltimore. He says, ‘Guess what? We got Vorhauer.’ ”

  The FBI had received a tip that Vorhauer, a Most Wanted fugitive, was hiding out in Sugarman’s house in suburban Baltimore. Half a dozen FBI agents and police offers went to the house, heavily armed. Sugarman answered the door and let them in. A middle-aged man with red hair was sitting at the kitchen table, an arm’s length from a brown leather briefcase. None of the agents recognized him; they demanded identification. The man’s driver’s license and Social Security number said Joe Smith; his credit cards and club membership said Joe Smith. The last piece of paper in his wallet was a folded-up Western Union receipt documenting money wired to his mother, Barbara Vorhauer, in Hanau, Germany. Vorhauer’s disguise had fooled all of them. Agents arrested the hit man, and brought Sugarman to Boston for questioning. Sugarman flipped immediately to avoid charges of harboring a fugitive.

  Bernie Brown paid Vorhauer $5,000 to kill Harbin, Sugarman said. Vorhauer scouted the dancer’s movements and knocked on her door in the evening after a show, the finger man said. She must have thought it was the bellhop with her bucket of ice; Vorhauer pushed his way in. He told Sugarman he stabbed Harbin three times in the heart.

  The agents were lucky to arrest the hit man before he reached his brown briefcase. A .22-caliber silencer fired out of the side; there was a ring trigger on the handle. Vorhauer had taken Sugarman into a Baltimore grocery store, said, “Watch this,” and walked down the aisle shooting up the cereal boxes—pfff, pfff, pfff—with the briefcase and walked out calm as a banker on lunch hour. Nobody heard a thing. Vorhauer was a genius, Sugarman said, who created black-market weapons unequaled in the world.

  “Vorhauer is a beast,” Bender said. He glanced over his shoulder as if he expected the hit man to be standing there. “That’s what I thought. He’s brilliant and he’s a psychopath. This will really help the bust.” He shifted uneasily in his seat.

  Fleisher shook his head sadly. “We never did get him. Murder charges were never filed against Vorhauer. There wasn’t enough corroboration, and they let him go. We all have cases we wish we could go back in time and fix. That’s one of mine.”

  They were quiet for a moment, and Fleisher said, “One more thing. It’s strange, but we followed Vorhauer for months, and this is the oddest thing about him. He liked to hang out in gay and transvestite bars.”

  Bender’s face lit up.

  “He wasn’t gay,” Fleisher said. “He recruited disaffected homosexuals as enforcers. Some of them enjoyed hurting heterosexuals.”

  Bender grinned like he wasn’t listening; his eyes were suddenly somewhere else. It was like making eye contact with the Milky Way.

  “Earth to Frank.”

  Wendy had sailed back into the room.

  The ASAC grinned and shook his head once in a swift jerking motion, like he was shrugging off a fly. He often wondered what it felt like to be Frank Bender. Was it like being a bloodhound obsessed with sex and death; did ideas come like radio signals to the teeth?

  Wendy came with the check, and Bender chatted her up, his voice as smooth and warm as grade-A honey, all anxiety gone. The ASAC finished his coffee and laughed.

  “Frank, you’re a hit man yourself.”

  Bender smiled to himself. His mind was wandering in familiar territory. He was thinking about brunettes—brunettes and blondes.

  • CHAPTER 12 •

  THE VISUAL DETECTIVE

  The studio was very still. Far off he heard a sound like the sea breaking, but it was only the ceaseless pounding of cars on the expressway. Above in the dimness, filthy skylights held the dawn. Vorhauer’s face snarled from the shadows, hideous in the slanting red light of the morning star. The face was half-formed, twisted, and grotesque, as if the lump of clay experienced the pain of being pinioned on the steel armature. It reminded Bender of Michelangelo’s slave trapped in rock, mightily struggling to emerge. He looked down at his coffee and back at the face.

  “Aw, hell,” he cursed. He slapped the side of the clay and felt like throwing it. What was missing?

  Bender had made fifteen drawings of Vorhauer in addition to the half-done sculpture. He had obsessively researched the hit man, as he did all his subjects. He’d studied police files, the newspaper, the morgue, the thirteen-year-old photo. He’d annoyed the marshals with endless questions. The official view was one-dimensional—the hit man was as elusive and as pure a distillation of evil as they had ever pursued, end of story. It wasn’t enough to mold into the three dimensions of life. Somehow, he’d failed to capture the essence of the master of disguise.

  Bender had confronted Vorhauer himself on a stakeout and come away shaken in a way secondhand sources couldn’t convey. Vorhauer was “cold as ice, cold, cold, cold,” he said. “I could feel clearly from his eyes that he wanted me dead.” Still Bender searched for a missing ingredient, a clue to Vorhauer’s soul, if he had one. The marshals couldn’t catch what they couldn’t see. Maybe he needed to think like a hit man. He was sipping the cold coffee in front of the head, trying to see the world through the eyes of a cold-blooded assassin, when the doorbell rang.

  A heavyset man of medium height, unkempt gray hair falling over a round face, sized up Bender with a cocksure grin. It was Paul Schneider, a Delaware County detective deputized as a U.S. Marshal. Schneider was one of the best detectives Bender had ever worked with—tough, smart, relentless. “If these TV series wanted a real investigator, it wouldn’t be the good-looking people they always have,” Bender said. “It would be a guy with a gut like Paul Schneider.” Schneider wasn’t just any deputy; he was in charge of the marshals’ Vorhauer task force.

  Schneider’s grin flickered in the gloom. “I saw him, plain as day. I saw Vorhauer.”

  “You’re kidding!” Bender’s face flushed; his eyes flared with excitement. After nine months of futilely chasing the phantom assassin, they finally had a break.

  Schneider gave a short jerk of his head. “He was on Wellington Street an hour ago, a block from the wife’s house. He was getting into a car with another man.”

  Bender’s eyes went inward, a dreamy look, as if the machine inside were suddenly unplugged. Thousands of cops and informants and the nation’s top bounty hunters were on alert in the hunt for Vorhauer. But no one had seen him except Bender. Bender saw him the first time as he stood on a crowded sidewalk outside a pharmacy. Vorhauer wore a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a cigarette on thin lips. Somehow he intuited Bender’s presence raising a camera in a parked car a block away. Vorhauer glared into the telephoto lens for an instant; the hard, mocking face cracked into a smirk and vanished. The film barely registered him, a fuzzy image impossible to sketch, a residue of light and shadow. It felt like ghost hunting, or waiting for a saint’s statue to weep blood.

  Bender’s second sighting was truly frightening. He and Schneider posed as garbagemen to collect Barbara Vorhauer’s trash on Wellington Street. Vorhauer was believed to be hiding out with his wife, a Philadelphia nurse. Bender was extremely cautious; Vorhauer would shoot anybody who threatened him. Dressed in the uniform of a municipal worker, he sat in the passenger seat of the city garbage truck with a loaded shotgun under the floor mat as Schneider steered behind the house. Bender kept his head down so he wouldn’t arouse suspicion as he threw the garbage bags into the compacter. Quickly he pulled a camera from his coveralls and snapped pictures of the back of the house, zooming in on each of the windows in turn. As he focused on a darkened second-story window, he broke out in a cold sweat. The blinds were bent as if someone was peering down at them. Suddenly he felt utterly naked, completely exposed, flushed with terror. His heart accelerated as he waited for the rifle explosion and the darkness at the end of the world. The moment passed. But later when he thought about it his guts seized anew when he realized he had lived, he remained alive, on a killer’s whim.

  Or maybe it was just a suspicious nurse peering out her back window. Vorhauer seemed as real as d
eath, as unreal as a ghost.

  Bender snapped back to the world around him and picked up his pastels. He walked to his easel and said, “Let’s get this down in detail so the task force knows exactly what he looks like. I want to nail the guy.”

  Schneider nodded, and stood behind Bender at the sketch board. The artist’s hand moved rapidly across the white sketch paper, creating a narrow street and a car almost as rapidly as Schneider described the scene. “We were doing surveillance of the wife, waiting for her to come out of the house,” the deputy said. “I saw him on the street getting into a parked car on the right side of the street—”

  “What’d he look like?” Bender’s pulse raced. He felt they were finally zeroing in on their quarry.

  “He looked nasty,” Schneider said.

  Bender nodded impatiently. “I could just see the side of the driver’s face, his ear, as I drove by them,” the marshal continued. “I had an angle on Vorhauer sitting in the passenger seat. Hard, lean, pockmarked face, reddish-brown hair. He was wearing a baseball cap.”

  “What color?”

  “Blue.”

  The sketch quickly filled in to match Schneider’s description.

  Bender turned and looked at Schneider. “Did he know you were around?”

  “No way, partner.” The deputy’s eyes narrowed, as if he had been insulted. “We’ve done this once or twice.”

  Bender lowered his heavy brow until his light blue eyes reduced to slivers of ice. His voice was measured and cool, as if some internal fan had slowed everything down. Bender knew Vorhauer was reputed to have the highest IQ of anybody in the history of the Pennsylvania penal system.

  “He’s extremely street smart. A guy like Vorhauer can sense when he’s being watched—that’s good enough for him.”

  Schneider shrugged. “Not a chance.”

  “What did you do? ” asked Bender, his face flushing with adrenaline.

  Schneider grimaced. “Nothing.”