The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

“Operator.”

  “Midtown six nine five.”

  “One moment, please.”

  “Department of Investigations, Chief Investigator Tines’s office.”

  “Chief Investigator Tines, please.”

  Chapter 25

  Faith Rapaport had sorted through about half of her father’s file on Victor Ribe when a clerk pushing a mail cart wheeled past her desk. “Miss Rapaport, Mr. Volman told me to tell you, ‘Ten o’clock, State Government Building.’ He said you’d know what for.”

  “Thanks,” Faith said, looking at her watch. It was a little after nine.

  Faith bundled up, stuffed the Ribe file inside her alligator-skin attaché, and made her way to the elevator. When she reached the lobby of the Globe Building, she rode the escalator beside the elevator bank down to the subway station. She dropped her nickel at the stile, and with the sound of clanging signal bells and faint thunderous footsteps filling the graded wooden corridors, she walked to the Blue Line platform, where the train had just pulled into the station. Gum papers and a cloud of dust had been swept up into the air by the oncoming rush of the train. Faith leaned her slim figure through the exiting crowd of an emptying car and managed to find a seat. As the train jerked down the rails, in and out of the wide Blue Line stations, she picked up on the Ribe file where she had left off. She sorted through interviews with Ribe, with witnesses, courtroom notes, variations of stories, all of which left her wondering what it was she should be looking for. When the train pulled into the Commerce Street station seven stops down the line, a handwritten scrap of paper fell out of the folder as she was placing it back into her attaché. She picked up the piece of paper from the floor of the train and read its jottings over a few times as she made her way up to street level. She wasn’t sure what its significance was, wasn’t sure what to make of it, but her gut was telling her that it was something important.

  —According to BR, Lardner beats rap on peddling H in exchange for evidence against syndicate. Lardner’s pharmacy—122 Hatherton Street. Supplied by Eliopoulos Mondays/noon; Crown Crackers delivery; Mann and Roth 20% cut 3rd Wed./month. Suspects ANB takes a nickel on 20. Klempt, Dubrov, Collins on the take? Shortz blind to it?

  The narrow snow-blown lanes all around Commerce Street were bustling with office clerks carrying greasy brown paper bags, traders and bankers and stenographers in heavy black wool overcoats caught with thick flakes of snow. Before she headed over to the State Government Building, Faith decided to make a quick stop into the International Trust Bank to see if she could make use of the key she had found on Murray Crown’s desk earlier that morning.

  The bank was located on Commerce between Shrine and Grand in the shadows of the Exchange. Faith walked through a stand of Corinthian columns into the bank’s lobby. A cupola ceiling ornately frescoed with winged cherubs ascending into the heavens looked down over orderly lines of patrons and pilasters. She followed the signs to the safety deposit vault in the basement and presented her key to a woman with a distant gaze and porcelain skin.

  “Name,” the woman said.

  Faith hesitated, then decided to try her luck. “Faith Rapaport.”

  The clerk lazily got up from her seat and walked to a filing cabinet built into the wall. She opened a drawer, flipped through some papers, then returned to Faith with a form in hand. After glancing at the form, to Faith’s surprise, the woman turned to an old husky security guard leaning against the counter, and said, “Six eighty-four.” She handed the key back to Faith and pointed her chin at the guard. “He’ll take you.”

  With a slow lame gait, the guard led Faith into an open vault behind the clerk’s station. They found box number 684. Faith inserted her key; the guard with a bit of a shaky hand inserted a master key, then removed the box and handed it to Faith. Faith waited for the guard to leave the vault before she sat down and lifted the box’s lid. Inside she found a nicely printed handwritten note addressed to her and paper-clipped to the note a manila envelope. The note read:

  Miss Rapaport,

  The same men who did this to Boris Lardner murdered Murray Crown and your father. There are more photographs that accompany these. If you’re interested in seeing them, be at Prescot Shoe Repair in the Prescot Building at one o’clock.

  B. Rudolph

  Faith wasn’t able to place Rudolph’s name, but she couldn’t help but wonder if he was the BR mentioned in the paper she had just found in the Ribe file. She set the note off to the side and opened the envelope to find two photographs, one of a man, arms flailing, careening down from the el platform. The picture seemed to be taken from the street and captured the man somewhere in the middle of his trajectory. An arrow marked in fresh, slightly smudged ink pointed to the man, and written next to the arrow was Boris Lardner. The other photo, taken from another point of view on the street from a good distance, was an image of Boris only inches away from crashing into the window of Schweitzer’s Piano Shop. Off to the side was another man looking over his shoulder, watching as Boris was about to make his impact. Victor Ribe, it read next to his shoulder in the same smudged ink.

  Faith hurriedly replaced the photos inside the envelope, along with the note, and slipped them into her bag. At the very least, she now knew that her father’s instinct about Ribe was right. If these photos had anything to say about it, he was innocent of killing Lardner. The questions remained: What more did he know? What could he have known to have gotten him killed? What was this B. Rudolph’s relationship to her father? Faith walked out of the narrow confines of the vault leaving the box on the table. The guard was waiting outside for Faith when she stepped out. He escorted her back to the clerk’s desk. “You mind if I have a look at the form you’ve got there?” Faith asked, pointing to the piece of paper the clerk had removed from the filing cabinet.

  “It’s yours for the asking,” the woman said as she handed the form to Faith, her distant gaze focusing on Faith’s eyes for the first time.

  The form showed that Samuel Rapaport and Benjamin Rudolph had rented the box jointly some years before Sam’s death, and recently written in as one of the depositors—in the same hand as the note in the deposit box—was Faith Rapaport.

  “Would you happen to know anything about this man, Benjamin Rudolph?” Faith said to the clerk, pointing at Rudolph’s name on the form.

  The clerk looked at the piece of paper and tilted her head. “No. But it shows here,” she said, pointing to a section on the form, “that he’s been the one making the payments on the box.”

  Faith looked over to the guard, who was staring at her and scratching his beard like he wanted to speak. Faith leaned a little in his direction as if she wanted him to speak.

  “He was just in here yesterday, miss,” the old guard said. “He used to come in here pretty frequent years back. He and Mr. Rapaport—the newspaperman—he and that Mr. Rudolph would sometimes come together. If memory serves right,” the guard said quietly, “I remember him being a private detective.”

  Faith inched a little closer to the guard. “How’s that?”

  “I try not to listen in on what folks talk about back there, but I heard him talking to Mr. Rapaport when they come in together, and I sometimes heard them talking bits and pieces of cases. I thought he was a policeman, but I heard talk about clients and whatnot and figured him for a gumshoe. My brother-in-law, that’s his line, and well I know when I hear it.”

  Faith gave the guard a kind smile and a wink. “Thanks for the tip.”

  Chapter 26

  When Faith reached the State Government Building, the snow seemed to hang suspended between the building’s two pillbox towers. She hurried through the empty front entrance of the south wing and walked into the press gallery, where Harry Shortz was already taking questions. She spotted Owen James, a Globe photographer with whom Faith worked regularly, a scrappy-looking man with a wool suit in need of a good pressing; he was standing in the wings, jotting down notes on a steno pad. When Faith reached him, Owen shot her a wink and hand
ed her his pad and pencil, looking happy to be rid of them. “I owe you one,” Faith whispered as she read over his chicken scratch.

  “I’ll add it to the list of the ones you owe me.”

  “Give me the quick once-over, will you?”

  “It’s all there: they found some foul play in Crown’s room—broken window, bloody straight razor. . . . Tines’s taking over the investigation.”

  “What’s this about Eliopoulos?” Faith asked, flipping a page over on the steno.

  “He skipped town last night, and Mann and Roth—nowhere to be found.”

  Faith nodded along as she absorbed the information from Owen’s notes and lips and listened with half an ear to Shortz speculate about how Crown could have been dragged out a fourteenth-floor window.

  “Don’t you think someone would have seen this?” asked a reporter from the Herald.

  “As I said, no witnesses have come forward yet,” Harry responded.

  “The officers on duty, are they suspected of any wrongdoing?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been questioned by Investigator Tines?”

  “No, but I’m sure I’ll have my turn.”

  “Are you considered a suspect?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Mr. Commissioner!” someone screamed out. “The suicide note. Will you please tell us what it said?”

  “The suicide note,” Harry said, removing the note from his jacket pocket. He read it slowly and with little emotion as the reporters wrote it down on their pads word for word.

  Faith snapped to when she heard it. . . . I couldn’t take the pressure. I couldn’t take living in fear like that anymore. . . . In her head she could see the note under the lamp in Crown’s office; she could see her father staring blind with dead eyes at the ceiling of their apartment; she remembered what the commissioner had said to her about her father the other day on the ferry, on the way to Long Meadow— He always knew how to twist the knife into the right part of the body when he had you in front of the world. He could make it hurt pretty bad when he got in there nice and good. Was it that Sam was onto something rotten in the bureau? she wondered. The moment Harry was through reading, Faith shouted out the first question. “Who exactly was he afraid of, Mr. Commissioner?”

  “I assume that he was referring to Mann and Roth.”

  “Do you think Mann and Roth have left town with Eliopoulos?” another reporter shouted out.

  Before Harry could answer the question, Faith stepped down the aisle and walked toward the front of the gallery so she could more easily be seen. “Considering how much Mann and Roth have invested here in the city,” Harry said with his eyes on Faith as she approached, “I highly doubt it. But, at this point, I’m afraid to say anything absolute about anything.”

  “Mr. Commissioner, if I may follow up . . .” Faith shouted out.

  “Miss Rapaport.”

  “Is it really safe for me and my colleagues here to assume, given that Murray Crown was killed on your watch, that he wasn’t afraid of you and the members of the bureau?”

  The eyes of the room, the eye of a newsreel camera, turned on Faith.

  “What are you trying to say?” Harry asked, the timbre of his voice deepening.

  Faith crossed her arms and took her time now that she felt she had the room’s attention. “No disrespect, Mr. Commissioner, but it seems that the one other time you managed to get someone to turn evidence on Mann and Roth, he ended up dead as well.”

  The room began to murmur.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to, Miss Rapaport.”

  “I’m referring to Boris Lardner, Mr. Commissioner.”

  Harry Shortz looked confused. “What about Boris Lardner?”

  “When I heard about Murray Crown this morning,” she said, “I started doing a little reading down in the Globe’s archives. According to notes made by Sam Rapaport, who covered the story, before Boris Lardner was killed, he was informing for you against the syndicate. Wasn’t he?”

  Harry was slow to answer. The hesitation was registered by all the members of the press, it was so obvious. He turned Crown’s suicide note over on the podium and then turned it over again as he considered his response. “Yes,” he said.

  The gallery murmured again.

  “The connection feels a little similar, don’t you agree?”

  Harry stared Faith down for a long moment as the low roar of the gallery continued. “Let me be clear, Miss Rapaport,” Harry barked over the noise of the room. “Mr. Lardner ended up dead for no reason other than that he serviced dope fiends, like that Victor Ribe who killed him. At which point, I might add, Mr. Lardner was no longer informing for us.”

  “Let me be clear, Mr. Commissioner,” Faith said as she pulled from her pocket the note that had fallen out of the Ribe file. “You’re not denying that Mr. Lardner was playing snitch for you.”

  “He was an informant.”

  “How did he come by that role?”

  “I don’t recall the specifics.”

  “Is it possible,” Faith said as she glanced down at the note, “that Mr. Lardner was selling heroin over the counter of his pharmacy on Hatherton Street? Heroin supplied to him by American Allied Pharmaceutical, delivered by Murray Crown, overseen by Johnny Mann and Jerzy Roth?”

  Harry tried not to look shaken, but his face had fallen a little. “That sounds about right. But as I said, I don’t recall the specifics. It was a long time ago.”

  “Perhaps Mr. Dubrov and Mr. Collins would recall the specifics?”

  Harry started looking around the room for another question, but the gallery was silent. “I fail to see the connection,” Harry said, his eyes still shuffling about, looking for someone to save him.

  “You said that Mr. Lardner had been released from his responsibility?”

  “Yes.”

  “By whom?”

  Harry hesitated again. “By me. He had served his purpose.”

  “If he had served his purpose, why is it that neither Mann, Roth, nor Eliopoulos was ever brought up on charges?”

  “Because we had insufficient evidence to charge them.”

  “From what I understand, Mr. Commissioner,” Faith said, “every Monday at noon Mr. Crown made a delivery to Mr. Lardner’s pharmacy at one-twenty-two Hatherton Street; every third Wednesday of the month Mr. Mann and Mr. Roth collected twenty percent of Mr. Lardner’s proceeds; and every Monday at one,” Faith said, hearing a little quaver in her voice, “Officers Dubrov, Collins, and Klempt took five percent off the twenty. Do you deny this?”

  Harry’s eyes narrowed and his hands took hold of the press gallery podium as if he was going to lift it off the floor. “Miss Rapaport,” he started quietly and harshly, “I have devoted my entire career to getting these guys. When I see an opportunity, I jump. As best I recall, we thought Mr. Lardner had good information, and it turned out he didn’t. Boris Lardner was killed by a junkie while he was selling illegal drugs. And, I’d like to add, that same junkie went on to kill one of my officers. Victor Ribe was tried and convicted. To suggest that I had anything to do with this is obscene and outrageous—not to mention completely irrelevant to today’s events.”

  “I don’t remember mentioning anything about you, Mr. Commissioner,” Faith tried to continue on. Harry turned his body away from her to the other side of the room, where he found Ralph Smith from the Times, an old champion of Harry’s. Faith made her way back to her photographer, knowing from what she saw on the commissioner’s face that she was onto something.

  “Harry,” Smith said as though he were greeting an old friend.

  “Smitty,” Harry said as he pushed up on the knot of his tie.

  “How do you feel about Chief Investigator Tines investigating the Narcotics Bureau? You two aren’t exactly known for seeing eye to eye.”

  “If there’s any wrongdoing, I welcome Mr. Tines to help us unearth it.”

  “Are you nervous that his investigation might
have a negative influence on your run for office?”

  “Right now that’s the least of my worries. The people know my past, know who I am, what I’ve done, what I stand for.” He shot Faith a look when he gave this answer.

  “Where does this leave your case against the syndicate?”

  “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know. With Mr. Crown dead and American Allied out of business, I don’t know if a case will need to be made.”

  “But surely, if Mann and Roth are guilty of the crimes you say they are, they will find a new supplier and drop man.”

  “I have no doubt that would be the case.”

  “Then it isn’t over.”

  “No. Nothing’s over yet.” The gallery started to come back to life. “Lang.”

  “Mr. Commissioner, this morning I heard a rumor that the Southside Docks property was sold by Mr. Eliopoulos to Noel Tersi. Can you confirm this?”

  “No, first I’ve heard of it, but I’ll certainly look into it. If Mr. Tersi has any information about Eliopoulos’s whereabouts, I’m sure he’ll be forthcoming.”

  Everyone started talking again and a few reporters quickly stood up and left the gallery.

  “Mr. Commissioner.”

  “Ted.”

  “If I may—knowing your active interest—I’d like to address a question to you about the impending walkout at Fief Munitions.”

  Harry nodded a little reluctantly.

  “Do you believe that the workers at Fief should be replaced if they follow through with their strike starting Monday?”

  “No, I don’t think that. I think—”

  “Do you think, considering that Fief is working under hostile conditions, that Mr. Fief should be allowed out of his contract with the town of Long Meadow?”

  “I’m not going to speculate about something that none of us know as fact.”

  “But they’ve called for a strike starting Monday, Mr. Commissioner.”

  “Which is absolutely within their rights.”

  “But Mr. Commissioner, isn’t it likely that we’ll be going to war again, and if we do, won’t we need to be as prepared as possible? Isn’t the smooth operation of a company like Fief’s in our best interest?”