Over our salads, he told me the story of the manuscript. Richard Flynn had died the month before, and his partner, a lady named Danna Olsen, claimed not to have found any trace of the book.
By the time our steaks arrived, Peter had laid out his challenge. He knew I had enough experience as a reporter to tie together the disparate pieces of information. He’d talked to his bosses, and they thought that given the market, the subject had great sale potential. But a fragment of a million-dollar manuscript wasn’t worth a penny on its own.
“I’m ready to talk to Ms. Olsen and come to an agreement,” he told me, goggling at me with those nearsighted eyes of his. “She seems to be a practical woman, and I’m sure that the negotiations will be difficult, but I don’t think she’ll turn down a good offer. Flynn left her all his properties and belongings in his will, apart from a few items he gave to his brother, Eddie. From a legal point of view, an agreement with Ms. Olsen would cover us, do you understand?”
“And just how do you imagine I’m going to be able to track down the rest of the manuscript?” I asked. “Do you think I’m going to discover some secret map on the back of a napkin? Or am I going to fly to a Pacific island and dig beneath the twin palm trees growing to the northwest?”
“Come on, don’t be like that,” he said. “Flynn has already provided lots of clues in the excerpt. We know the characters who were involved, the setting, and the time frame. If you don’t find the manuscript, you can reconstruct the rest of the puzzle, and the fragment will be incorporated into a new book, which you or a ghostwriter will turn out. In the end, readers are interested in the story of Wieder’s murder, and not necessarily in some unknown guy by the name of Richard Flynn. It’s all about reconstructing what happened in the course of Wieder’s last few days, do you understand?”
That verbal habit of his, the constant repetition of “do you understand?,” gave me the unpleasant feeling that he doubted my intelligence.
“I do understand,” I assured him. “But the whole thing might be a waste of time. Flynn probably knew what he wanted to tell the public when he set about writing the book, but we haven’t got a clue what we’re looking for. We’ll be trying to solve a murder that happened over twenty years ago!”
“Laura Baines, another main character, is probably still alive. You can find her. And the case is still in the police files, of that I’m sure. It’s a cold case, as the cops say, but I’m sure they’ve still got the files in their archives.”
Then he gave me a mysterious wink and lowered his voice, as if he was afraid somebody might overhear us.
“It seems that Professor Wieder was conducting secret psychological experiments. Just imagine what you could uncover here!”
He delivered that last sentence in the tone of voice of a mom promising an obstinate kid a trip to Disneyland if he does his math homework.
I was intrigued, but still undecided.
“Pete, has it ever occurred to you that this guy, Flynn, might have just been making it all up? I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but maybe he invented a story about the death of somebody famous so he could sell his project before he passed away. Except that he didn’t have time to finish it.”
“Well, I’ve thought about that possibility. But how can we be sure unless we carry out an investigation? From what I’ve been able to gather up to now, Richard Flynn wasn’t a pathological liar. He really did know and work for Wieder, he did have the keys to his house, and he was treated for a while as a suspect, all of which I found out from the Internet. But I need someone as good as you to uncover the rest of the story.”
I was almost convinced, but I let him sweat a bit. For dessert, I ordered only an espresso, while he had the tiramisu.
I finished my coffee and put him out of his misery. I told him that I’d accept the assignment, whereupon I signed a contract with a nondisclosure clause—he’d brought it with him—and then he produced a stack of papers from his briefcase. Handing it to me, he told me it was a copy of the first chunk of Richard Flynn’s manuscript, plus the notes he’d written in the meantime, which would provide a starting point for my investigation. Together with my copy of the contract, I thrust the papers into my bag, which I’ve always carried with me ever since my days as a reporter and which was equipped with all kinds of compartments and pockets.
I walked him to the subway, went home, and spent the whole evening reading Richard Flynn’s manuscript.
TWO
The next evening I met my girlfriend, Sam, for dinner. She was five years older than me, had majored in English at UCLA, and had moved to New York after working at a number of TV stations on the West Coast. She was a producer for the NY1 morning news, so her day began at five a.m. and usually ended at eight p.m., which was when she crashed, regardless of whether or not I was around. We could rarely talk for more than five minutes without her informing me that she had to take an important call, stuffing the hands-free headset in her ear.
She’d been married for three years to a guy named Jim Salvo, a news anchor for a small TV station in California, the kind of skirt chaser who, once he hit his forties, would be left with nothing but bad habits and a liver drowning in fatty tissue. That’s why she told me from the very start that she had no intention of remarrying before forty and that, until then, all she wanted was no strings attached.
Between phone calls, chiding the waitress for not taking our order sooner, and telling me about some argument she’d had with her editors, Sam listened to my story about Richard Flynn’s manuscript and seemed excited about it.
“John, this could make a splash,” she said. “It’s like something out of Truman Capote, isn’t it? Readers just eat up that kind of stuff.”
This was the best verdict Sam could pronounce on any given topic. To her, anything that didn’t stand a chance of making “a splash” was pointless, whether it be TV news, a book proposal, or having sex.
“Yeah, it could, if only I can find the manuscript or some kind of explanation for the murder.”
“If not, then you’ll write a book based on the partial you have. Wasn’t that what you agreed with Peter?”
“Yes, right, but I’m not really an expert on that kind of thing.”
“Times change, and people have to change with them,” she said sententiously. “Do you think that television today looks anything like it used to fifteen years ago, when I first set foot in a news studio? We all end up having to do things we’ve never done before. To be honest, I’d like it if you don’t find that manuscript, so that in a year or so I’ll see your name on the cover of a book in the window at Rizzoli.”
After we left the restaurant, I went to my lair and got to work. My parents had moved to Florida two years previously, and my older sister, Kathy, had married a guy from Springfield, Illinois, and moved there after she’d graduated from college. I lived in Hell’s Kitchen, or Clinton, as real estate agents call it nowadays, in the three-bedroom apartment where I was raised. It was an old building, the rooms were small and dark, but it was mine, and at least I didn’t have to worry about rent.
I made a start by reading the partial again, highlighting the bits that seemed important in different colors: blue for Richard Flynn, green for Joseph Wieder, and yellow for Laura Baines. I underlined Derek Simmons’s name in blue pen, because near the end Richard claimed that he’d played an important role in the whole affair. I made a separate list of all the other names that were mentioned in the manuscript, hoping that, with a bit of luck, they might be turned into sources of information. As a reporter, I’d learned that most people love to talk about their past, even if they tend to beautify it.
I mapped out three main directions for my investigation.
The first and simplest was to trawl through the deep lake of the Internet to see what I could bring to the surface about the murder and the persons involved.
The second was to track down the people mentioned in the manuscript, especially Laura Baines, and to persuade them to tell me what they kn
ew about the case. Peter mentioned in his notes that Richard Flynn’s partner had told him that shortly before he died, he’d had a tense phone conversation with a woman by the name of Laura, who he claimed had “ruined his life,” adding that “he was going to make her pay for it.” Was this the Laura from the manuscript?
And the third was to go down to the police archives in West Windsor, Mercer County, and try to look up the statements, reports, and interrogation notes collected by the detectives back then. Wieder was a high-profile victim, and the inquiry had probably been carried out by the book, even if it hadn’t come up with anything. My status as a freelance reporter wasn’t going to help me, but if I got stuck, my intention was to ask Sam to call in the cavalry, hinting at the mighty shadow of NY1.
And so I began with Richard Flynn.
All the information I already had on him matched what I found online. He’d worked for Wolfson and Associates, a small advertising agency, and on the company’s site I located a short bio that confirmed some of the details in the manuscript. He’d majored in English at Princeton, graduating in 1988, and earned an MA from Cornell two years later. After a couple of junior positions, he’d moved up into middle management. On other sites I discovered that Flynn had given money to the Democratic National Committee three times, been a member of a sport shooting club, and, back in 2007, had declared himself deeply dissatisfied with the services provided by a hotel in Chicago.
After Santa Google finished delivering his presents about Flynn, I switched to searching for Laura Baines and was surprised to find nothing at all . . . or almost nothing. There were a number of people with the same name, but none of the ones I could turn up information on matched the woman I was looking for. I found her listed among the math graduates of the University of Chicago in 1985 and the psychology master’s students at Princeton in 1988. But after that there wasn’t any clue about what she did or where she lived. It was as if she’d vanished into thin air. I thought to myself that she’d probably gotten married and changed her surname, so I had to find another way of tracking her down, assuming that she was still alive.
As I’d expected, the richest source of information was on Professor Joseph Wieder. There was a detailed page on Wikipedia, and his biography held a place of honor among all the leading figures who had taught at Princeton over the years. I discovered that on Google Scholar there were more than twenty thousand references to his books and papers. Some of the books were still in print and could be purchased from online bookstores.
Among the stuff I’d read, here’s what I found out: Joseph Wieder was born in Berlin in 1931, into a middle-class German Jewish family. In a number of interviews he revealed that his father, a doctor, had been beaten by storm troopers in the spring of 1934, in front of his pregnant mother, dying soon after.
A year later, after the birth of his sister, all three moved to the States, where they had relatives. At first they lived in Boston, then in New York City. His mother got remarried, to an architect by the name of Harry Schoenberg, who was fourteen years older than her. He adopted her children, but they kept their biological father’s name, as a sign of respect for his memory.
Unfortunately, Joseph and his sister, Inge, became orphans just ten years later, after the Second World War, with Harry and Miriam Schoenberg perishing during a trip to Cuba. Harry was a sailing enthusiast, and the yacht they were on, together with another couple from New York, was lost in a storm. Their bodies were never found.
Having come into a large fortune, the two orphans went to live at their uncle’s house upstate and embarked on very different lives. Joseph was studious, attending first Cornell, then Cambridge and the Sorbonne. Inge became a model, achieving some degree of fame in the late 1950s, before marrying a rich Italian businessman and moving to Rome, where she settled permanently.
Over the course of his career, Joseph Wieder had published eleven books, one of which had strongly autobiographical content. It was called Remembering the Future: Ten Essays About a Journey to Myself, and it had been brought out by Princeton University Press in 1984.
I also found loads of reports about the murder.
Wieder’s body had been discovered by Derek Simmons, mentioned in the newspaper stories as the handyman who worked at the victim’s house and a potential suspect. At 6:44 p.m. on December 22, 1987, he called 911 from the professor’s home, telling the operator that he’d found his employer lying in a pool of blood in the living room. The paramedics who arrived at the scene could do nothing, and a medical examiner quickly made the formal pronouncement that the professor was dead.
The coroner discovered at the autopsy that Wieder had died at around two a.m., and concluded that the cause of death was the internal and external blood loss resulting from blows with a blunt object, probably a baseball bat, administered by a single perpetrator around midnight. The first blow, the coroner presumed, had come when the victim was sitting on the couch in the living room; the killer had likely sneaked up behind him, having entered through the front door. The professor, who was in good physical shape, had managed to get up off the couch and tried to flee toward the window overlooking the lake, meanwhile fending off the blows, which fractured both his forearms. Then he’d turned back in the middle of the room to defend himself, and during the struggle with the attacker, the TV set had fallen off its stand, onto the floor. It was there that he’d received the fatal blow in the area of his left temple (from this the investigators concluded that the murderer was most likely right-handed). Wieder died two hours later, as a result of cardiac arrest and the severe cerebral injury caused by the final blow.
Derek declared that the front door had been locked when he’d reached the professor’s house the next morning, and that the windows were also locked, with no sign of forced entry. Under those circumstances, it was supposed that the murderer had keys to the house, which he’d used to get inside, taking Wieder by surprise, and had then locked the door behind himself after he’d committed the killing. Before leaving, he’d rummaged around the living room. The motive couldn’t have been robbery, however. The professor was wearing a Rolex on his left wrist and a precious gemstone on the ring finger of his right hand. In an unlocked drawer, the police found around a hundred dollars in cash. None of the valuable antiques in the house had been stolen.
In the living room the detectives also discovered two recently used glasses, suggesting that the victim had had a drink with one other person that evening. The medical examiner found that the professor had consumed a significant quantity of alcohol before the murder—the alcohol level in his blood was 0.11—but there were no traces of narcotics or medication in his body. Joseph Wieder hadn’t been involved in any known relationship with a woman. He didn’t have a partner or a mistress, he wasn’t dating anybody, and none of his friends or colleagues could remember him being in a relationship recently. It was therefore unlikely to have been a crime of passion, the detectives concluded.
Using what the press reported, I reconstructed roughly what had happened in the period following the murder.
Laura Baines’s name wasn’t mentioned, not even once, in the newspapers, although Richard Flynn’s appeared several times. As I knew from the partial manuscript, Flynn had been treated as a suspect for a while, after Derek Simmons had been eliminated from the inquiry, given that he had “a strong alibi.” There was nothing about Wieder being involved in some clandestine psychological experiments. But it was emphasized continually that Wieder was a well-known figure among the New Jersey and New York police force, as he’d acted as an expert witness in many assessments of the mental health of people accused of felonies.
As for his status as an expert witness in criminal trials, the detectives treated this as a potential lead from the very beginning. They reviewed the cases in which Wieder had testified, particularly those that had had an unfavorable outcome for the accused. But that quickly proved to be a dead end. None of those convicted due to Wieder’s testimony had been released during that time, with the exce
ption of a man named Gerard Panko, who’d been discharged from Bayside State Prison three months before the murder. Almost immediately after his release, however, Panko had suffered a heart attack. He’d left the hospital just one week before the professor was murdered, and in his doctors’ opinion, he wouldn’t have been capable of the physical effort of carrying out the attack; thus the hypothesis that the attacker had been a felon Wieder had helped put away was discarded.
Richard Flynn was interviewed repeatedly but was never officially declared a suspect or charged. He hired an attorney named George Hawkins, who accused the cops of harassment and suggested that they were trying to turn Flynn into a scapegoat, covering up their own incompetence.
What was Flynn’s version of events? What exactly did he tell the detectives and reporters? From the articles I found, it seemed that what he’d said at the time was different from what he’d written in his manuscript.
Firstly, he hadn’t said anything about Laura Baines introducing him to Wieder. He merely said that he’d been introduced to the professor through “a mutual acquaintance,” because Wieder was looking for somebody suitable to do part-time library work. Flynn had worked at the Firestone Library on campus, and Wieder needed somebody capable of organizing his library using a computer system. Wieder had given him a set of keys in case he wanted to work there when the professor wasn’t at home, as he frequently traveled out of town. Flynn had used the keys a couple of times, entering the professor’s house when he was away. On two or three occasions, the professor had invited him to stay for dinner, always for two. One Friday, he’d played poker with the professor and two of his colleagues. (That episode didn’t appear in the manuscript.) He’d met Derek Simmons and had been told Derek’s story by Wieder himself.
The Book of Mirrors Page 9
