The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

  He was happy to talk to me and confessed that he’d been leading quite a reclusive life since his retirement, and that it was common for an ex-cop not to have many confidants.

  “Why are you interested in this case, John?” he asked.

  He’d suggested that we call each other by our first names. Although there was something about his tone and his appearance that intimidated me a bit, without my being able to explain why, I’d agreed, and now I told him the whole truth. I was tired of inventing stories about imaginary biographies and panoptic histories of unsolved murders and sure that the man in front of me—who’d been kind enough to accept our meeting without even knowing me and who’d shared with me painful details about his life—deserved my full sincerity.

  So I told him that Richard Flynn had written a book about the period and had sent it to a literary agent, but that the rest of the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Having been hired by the agent in question, I was researching—or investigating, one might say—the case in an attempt to reconstruct the facts. I’d already talked to a large number of people, but I hadn’t come up with anything concrete so far; nor could I grasp what it was all about.

  He pointed to the large buff-colored envelope he’d brought with him.

  “I paid a visit to the agency and made some copies for you,” he said. “We didn’t start computerizing our records until the early nineties, so I had to comb through the boxes in the archives. None of them are classified, so it was easy. Take the papers with you and read them,” he urged me, and I put the envelope in my bag.

  Then he walked me briefly through what he remembered—how he’d arrived with the forensic investigators at Wieder’s house, about the storm in the press, and how there hadn’t been any plausible clues to allow them to form a working theory.

  “There were lots of things about the case that just didn’t add up,” he said. “The professor had a quiet life, didn’t do drugs, wasn’t mixed up with hookers, and didn’t hang out in bad places. He hadn’t had any recent conflicts with anybody, lived in a good neighborhood, and his neighbors were decent folks who had all known each other for years, academics and big shots at corporations. And then, all of a sudden, this guy is beaten to death in his own home. There was lots of valuable stuff inside, but nothing was missing, not even the cash or the jewelry. But I remember that somebody had searched the place in a hurry. There were open drawers and papers scattered all over the floor. Though the only fingerprints we found belonged to known persons—a kid who looked after the professor’s library and a handyman who had access and was there often.”

  “About those papers on the floor,” I said. “Were any of them picked up as potential evidence?”

  “I can’t remember details like that. You’ll find everything in those photocopies. I do remember that we found a small safe in the house and nobody knew the combination, so we had to bring in a locksmith. He broke it open, but all we found was some cash, deeds, photographs, that kind of stuff—nothing related to the case.”

  “The professor had just finished writing a book, and it seems that the manuscript vanished.”

  “It was his sister who dealt with his belongings. She arrived a couple of days later from Europe. I remember her well. She acted like a movie star or something. She wore an expensive fur coat and a lot of jewels, like some diva, and she spoke with a foreign accent. She was quite a sight, let me tell you. We asked her a couple of questions, but she just said that she and her late brother hadn’t been very close and she knew nothing about his life.”

  “Her name is Inge Rossi,” I said. “She’s been living in Italy for a long time.”

  “Maybe . . . she’s probably got the manuscript you’re talking about, or maybe somebody else took it. After a couple of days, we cleared all our stuff out of there. His sister didn’t complain about anything being missing, but I doubt she knew much about what her brother kept there. As I told you, she said that they’d never visited each other over the past twenty years or so. She was in a hurry to be done with it all as quickly as possible, and went straight back after the funeral.”

  “I know that a young guy was one of the suspects, Martin Luther Kennet, who was later sentenced for the murder of an elderly couple.”

  “The Eastons, that’s right, a grisly murder. Kennet got life, and he’s still on Rikers Island. But he wasn’t accused of the professor’s murder—”

  “Yes, I know, but he was treated for a while as a prime suspect in the Wieder case, wasn’t he?”

  Freeman shrugged.

  “You know how it goes sometimes . . . Wieder was a celebrity, the press jumped on the story, which went national for a while, so there was pressure on us to solve the case as quickly as possible. We also worked with the sheriff’s office, and the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office assigned a detective from its Homicide Unit, a guy named Ivan Francis. That guy was a ladder-climbing type, if you know what I mean, with very strong political backup. We, the local cops, were just small potatoes, so that guy and the prosecutor pulled all the strings. My opinion, which I wasn’t afraid of expressing at the time, was that the kid, Kennet, had nothing do to with any of it—neither with the Easton murder nor with Wieder’s case, and I’m dead-ass serious. The prosecutor also tried to make him the prime suspect in the Wieder case, as you said, so all the other leads were more or less gradually abandoned. But that was just plain stupid, and we all knew it. Maybe that kid wasn’t too bright, but he wasn’t so dumb as to try to sell the rocks he stole from the victims to a pawnshop just a couple of miles away from the crime scene. What the heck? Why didn’t he go to New York, or to Philly? He was a small-time dealer, true, but he didn’t have any previous conviction for violence. He also had an alibi for the night of the professor’s murder, so the possibility that he might have been the perpetrator in the Wieder case shouldn’t even have been taken into consideration.”

  “I read something about that in the newspapers, but are you sure that—”

  “It was exactly how I’m telling you—he’d been in an arcade. There weren’t security cameras in those days, but two or three guys confirmed that they’d seen him there during the time period in which the killing had been done. Then Ivan Francis went to see them, so they changed their initial statements. In addition, Kennet’s public defender was a moron who didn’t want to argue with anybody. Get it?”

  “So, the Richard Flynn lead was dropped quite quickly?”

  “Yes, right, that was a lead, too. It wasn’t the only one that was dropped ‘quite quickly,’ as you put it. I can’t recall all the details, but I think he was the last person to see the professor alive, so we interviewed him a few times, though we didn’t catch him out on anything. He admitted he’d been there that night, but he claimed he’d left two or three hours before the time of the murder. Does he confess to anything in that book?”

  “Like I said, most of the manuscript’s missing, so I don’t know where he was going with the story. What you didn’t know at the time, because Richard Flynn and Derek Simmons, the other witness, kept their mouths shut about it, was that a grad student by the name of Laura Baines could also have been there that evening. The handyman told me that she and Flynn met with the professor and they had an argument.”

  Freeman smiled.

  “Never underestimate a cop, John. I know that people sometimes think we’re just doughnut-munching idiots who couldn’t even find their dick in their pants. Of course we knew everything about the girl you’re talking about, who was apparently getting it on with the professor, but in the end nothing could be proven. I interviewed her, and she had a solid alibi for the whole evening as far as I remember, so she couldn’t have been at the scene—another dead end.”

  “But that guy, the handyman—”

  “As for the handyman’s statement . . . well . . . What was his name?”

  “Simmons, Derek Simmons.”

  He suddenly stopped talking and stared into empty space for a couple of seconds. Then he took a small prescripti
on bottle out of his pocket, opened it, and swallowed a green pill with a sip of water. He looked embarrassed.

  “Sorry about that, but . . . Well, yes, his name was Derek Simmons, right. I can’t remember what he declared, but there wasn’t much we could do with his statement anyway. The guy was ill, he had amnesia, and I don’t think he had all the tiles on his roof, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, besides the gossip, we didn’t have any proof that the professor and that girl were lovers, and her alibi was strong.”

  “Can you remember who confirmed it?”

  “It’s all in the papers I gave you. I think it was a schoolmate, a girl.”

  “Sarah Harper?”

  “Told you, I can’t remember all the details, but you’ll find all the names in the papers.”

  “Laura Baines had a boyfriend, Timothy Sanders. Maybe he was jealous, thinking that his girlfriend and the professor were having an affair. Did somebody interview him?”

  “Laura Baines wasn’t a suspect, as I told you, so why should we have interviewed her boyfriend? Why, did you find something about that guy?”

  “Nothing related to the case. He was shot dead many years ago in D.C. They said it was a robbery turned into a murder.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  We’d finished eating and we ordered coffee. Freeman looked tired and absent, as if our conversation had emptied his batteries.

  “Why wasn’t Flynn officially charged?” I continued.

  “Don’t remember, but I think a headhunter like Francis would have had good reasons not to bring him up before a jury. The guy was a student with a clean record, minding his own business. He didn’t do drugs or drink excessively, as far as I can remember, he wasn’t violent, so he didn’t fit the profile of a potential murderer. Oh, yes, and he passed the polygraph—did you know that? People like that don’t suddenly go out and commit murders, not even under intense emotional pressure. Some people just aren’t capable of killing another person, not even to save their own lives. I read about a study a few years ago that concluded that most of the guys in World War II shot into the air rather than at the Germans or Japanese. It’s a hell of a difficult thing to beat somebody to death with a bat, not like in the movies. Even if you think the other guy’s raped your daughter. I don’t believe that guy was our man.”

  “Roy, do you think a woman would have been able to do that? Physically, I mean.”

  He thought for a few moments.

  “Well, smashing a guy’s head in with a baseball bat? Don’t think so. Women kill far less frequently than men do, and they almost never commit murders as violent as that. When they kill, women use poison or other bloodless methods. Maybe a gun. On the other hand, in forensic science there are patterns but no certainties, so a detective should never exclude any hypothesis. As far as I remember, Wieder was a strong guy, in good shape, and young enough to fight back if necessary. Yes, he’d been drinking before he was murdered. Blood alcohol level can reveal a lot of things about the condition of a victim in the moment of the attack, but not everything. With the same alcohol level, one person might have almost normal reflexes, while another might be unable to defend himself. It varies from one individual to another.”

  “Was Simmons considered a suspect?”

  “Who’s Simmons? Oh, sorry, the handyman, the guy with a screw loose . . .”

  “Yes. In the past he was accused of murdering his wife and found not guilty by reason of insanity. Why wasn’t he a suspect?”

  “He was very cooperative and had an alibi, so he was considered a potential suspect only at first, like everybody connected in one way or another with the victim. He was questioned a couple of times, but he seemed harmless and we dropped it.”

  He’d come into the city by train, and I gave him a lift back home, to New Jersey. While I drove, he told me about a cop’s life in those days. He lived in an old one-story house surrounded by pine trees at the end of a dirt road, not far off the turnpike. Before getting out of the car, he asked me to keep him up to date with my investigation, and I promised to let him know as soon as I found anything interesting. But I already knew that I was going to abandon the whole thing.

  Still, that evening I read through the papers he’d brought me, though I didn’t discover much I hadn’t known already.

  Richard had been interviewed three times, and on each occasion he’d given clear and straight answers. And as Freeman had said, he’d even agreed to take a polygraph test, which he’d passed.

  Laura Baines’s name was mentioned only in a general report about Wieder’s connections and acquaintances. She hadn’t been cited as a suspect or witness, and she was questioned only once. It seems that there had been some suspicions that she could have been at the scene that evening, leaving the house at around nine p.m., when Richard arrived. But Richard and Laura both denied it. Flynn and the professor had a drink together, and the former claimed that Laura hadn’t been there.

  Later, searching for more information online, my mind half-absent, I thought of Sam: the way she used to smile at me, the changeable color of her eyes, and the small birthmark on her left shoulder. I had the strange feeling that my memories about her had gradually started to obscure themselves already, hidden one by one in that secret chamber of wasted chances, whose key you’d thrown away because the recollections behind its door were too painful.

  I didn’t fall asleep until nearly morning. I could hear the deep breathing of the city, where millions of dreams and stories wove together to form a gigantic ball that slowly rose into the sky, ready to burst at any moment.

  I’d tried a number of times over the previous couple of weeks to get hold of Sarah Harper. She finally called me back the day after I met Freeman, just as I was getting ready to call Peter and wrap up the whole investigation. Harper had a nice voice, and she told me that she wanted to see me as soon as possible, because she was about to leave town for a while. She remembered talking to Harry Miller a couple of weeks ago, and she was curious about what I wanted from her.

  To be honest, I wasn’t interested in meeting her. I’d talked to too many people by then, all of whom had told me conflicting stories, and the breakup with Sam was still too great a shock to allow me to focus on something that had happened so many years ago, something in which I’d lost almost all curiosity. All of a sudden, the events had become like drawings without any depth, like illustrations in a children’s book, two-dimensional and incapable of arousing any enthusiasm in me. I had no interest in going all the way up to the Bronx to meet a junkie who’d probably tell me yet another pack of lies, in the hopes of getting a quick payout so she could score.

  But she offered to come into the city to meet me, so I agreed. I gave her the address of a pub on the corner near my apartment, and she told me she’d be there in about an hour and that I’d be able to recognize her by her green travel bag.

  She arrived ten minutes late, just as I was drinking my espresso. I waved to her and she came over, shook my hand, and sat down.

  She looked completely different from what I’d imagined. She was short and frail, with a body almost like a teenager’s and very white skin, which matched her apricot-colored hair. She was dressed plainly, in a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved “Life is Good” T-shirt, and a distressed denim jacket, but she looked very tidy and gave off a subtle scent of expensive perfume. I offered to buy her a drink, but she said she’d been dry for a year, after her last stint in rehab. She assured me that she’d also been off drugs since then, too. She pointed to her bag, which she’d placed on the chair next to her. “As I told you over the phone, I’m leaving for a while,” she said. “And I thought I’d better talk to you beforehand.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “To Maine, with my boyfriend. We’re going to live on an island. He’s taken a job with a foundation that looks after wildlife sanctuaries. I’ve been waiting to do something like this for a long time, but I wanted to be very sure that I was all right and ready before I left, if you understa
nd what I mean. I’m going to miss New York. I’ve lived here practically my whole life, but it’s a fresh start, isn’t it?”

  She seemed comfortable talking to me, though we’d only just met, and I thought that she probably still attended support groups like A.A. Her face was almost wrinkle-free, but she had deep circles under her turquoise eyes.

  “Thank you for agreeing to talk to me, Sarah,” I said, and I told her briefly about Richard Flynn’s manuscript and my investigation surrounding the events of late 1987. “Before anything else, I’d like to warn you that the agency I work for doesn’t have a large budget for this sort of research, so—”

  She interrupted me with a wave of one hand.

  “I don’t know what that guy, Miller, told you, but I don’t need your money. I’ve managed to save a bit of cash recently, and where I’m going I won’t have much need for it. I agreed to meet you for a different reason. It has to do with Laura Baines, or Westlake, as she calls herself now. I thought it’d be better for you to know a few things about her.”

  “I’m going to get another espresso,” I said. “Would you like one?”

  “A decaf cappuccino would be great, thanks.”

  I went to the bar and ordered our coffees, then returned to the table. It was Friday afternoon, and the pub was beginning to fill up with noisy people.

  “You were talking about Laura Baines,” I said.

  “How well do you know her?”

  “I barely know her. We talked for half an hour, and a couple of times on the phone, that’s all.”

  “And what impression did she make on you?”

  “Not a very good one, to be honest. I got the feeling that she lied to me when I asked her about what happened back then. It’s just a feeling, but I think she’s been hiding something.”