We went into the living room and I sat on the couch, while he brought me a cup of coffee that had a taste of cinnamon. He explained it was a trick he’d learned from Leonora, a Cajun technique. He fixed a cup of coffee for himself and lit a cigarette, dragging closer an already full ashtray.
“I don’t think I’d have recognized you if I’d bumped into you on the street,” he said. “To be honest, I tried to forget the whole thing ever happened. Do you know that a reporter came here asking me about it a couple of months ago?”
“Yes, I know, I spoke with him, too.”
I told him the story of Frank Spoel, referring to the notes I’d jotted down in the notepad I’d been using to organize all the information I had, like I did in the old days. He listened to me carefully, without interrupting, sipping his coffee from time to time and lighting one cigarette after another.
When I finished, he didn’t comment, just asked me if I wanted more coffee. The ashtray was so full of butts that it was on the verge of spilling over onto the mahogany table between us.
“Now do you understand why I wanted to talk to you?” I asked.
“No,” he answered calmly. “Nobody has asked me anything about it for almost thirty years, and now everybody seems interested. I don’t get it, na’mean? It doesn’t give me any pleasure to talk about what happened back then. The professor was the only pal I had.”
“Derek, do you remember what you said in your statement at the time? And what you told the reporter not long ago?”
“Sure.”
“What you said doesn’t add up with what Spoel told me. He claims that on the evening of the crime he was hiding in the backyard, behind the house. You stated that you were hiding there at the same time, nine p.m. How could you have missed each other? You said that the professor was there with Laura Baines and Richard Flynn, who started an argument with Wieder; then, you said, Laura left, though you saw her car parked nearby later. But Spoel said nothing about Laura Baines. He claims that the professor was with Richard Flynn, and that he didn’t notice any disagreement between them.”
I’d written down in my notebook all the discrepancies between the two versions, point by point.
“So what?” Simmons said, not seeming the least bit interested. “Maybe the guy forgot what happened in the meantime, or maybe he’s lying. Why would you believe him and not me? What do you want from me?”
“It’s not hard to guess,” I answered. “One of you isn’t telling the truth, and now I’m inclined to think it’s you. What I’m interested in is why you’d lie to me.”
He grinned, but without any trace of amusement.
“Maybe I’m not lying but I just can’t remember that night well. I’m old—isn’t it normal to forget when you get old?”
“I’m not just talking about what you told Keller a couple of months ago, but also what you told the police at the time, immediately after the murder,” I said. “The two accounts are practically identical. And you told Keller that Wieder and Laura were having an affair, remember?”
“Maybe they were. How do you know that they weren’t?”
“You’re the only person who had claimed back then that Laura Baines and the professor were lovers. And because Flynn was in love with her, that would have given an investigator a reason to presume he’d murdered Wieder in a fit of jealousy—a possible motive.”
“That’s what I always thought, that they were lovers. And I still believe that Richard only pretended to leave that night, but then he came back and murdered the professor. If you weren’t able to prove it, that’s your problem, na’mean? As for their relationship, maybe you didn’t ask the right people.”
“You weren’t hiding behind the house that night, were you, Derek? Why did you try to frame Flynn?”
He suddenly seemed angry and agitated.
“I didn’t try to frame anybody, man. It was exactly like I said: I was there and saw all three of them in the living room.”
“So you’re saying you stood in the snow for almost two hours. What were you wearing?”
“How the hell should I know? Don’t remember.”
“How come you didn’t see Spoel and he didn’t see you?”
“Maybe he’s lying and he wasn’t there, or maybe he got the time wrong. Why should I care?”
“Why did you claim Laura Baines was there?”
“Because I saw her, and her car was parked nearby. You keep making me repeat the same things, like a parrot, man.”
He stood up abruptly.
“I’m sorry, but I promised a customer that I’d finish fixing his car by this evening. It’s in the garage. I’ve got to go. I don’t feel like talking to you—no offense, but I don’t like your tone. Now it’s time to play ball; thank you for your cooperation.”
“What did you say?”
“Yankees versus Baltimore Orioles—I was there when the announcer said it after Thurman Lee Munson, the catcher, got killed in that plane crash. Now, FYI, I’m not going to talk to anybody about Wieder unless that person’s got a warrant. I’ll see you out.”
I left, feeling almost ridiculous, like a kid playing detective who’d just been kicked out of the house by one of the “suspects.” I used to be a cop once, but those times were long gone. Now I was only an old man fooling around, no shield or gun in his belt. I got into my car and tossed the spiral notebook in the glove box.
As I turned onto Valley Road, with the windshield wipers barely able to cope with the downpour, I asked myself where I wanted to go with the whole story. I was almost sure Derek was lying, and that he’d also been lying in the statement he’d made immediately after the murder, but there was nothing I could do about it. Matt had told me that Spoel’s attorney had tried to have the case reopened, without success. I was nothing but a senile ex-cop fooling around.
For the next couple of days, I worked on repairing the roof of my house, then painted the living room, all the while thinking about the case.
That Saturday I cleared the backyard, and on Sunday I crossed the river and visited a former colleague in the city, Jim Foster, who’d survived a heart attack and been released from the hospital a couple of weeks earlier. It was a beautiful day, so we went for a walk, then decided to have lunch at a restaurant on Lafayette Street, sitting at a sidewalk table. He told me all about the drastic diet he was on. I asked him whether he remembered anything about the Joseph Wieder case, and he seemed a little taken aback, saying the name didn’t ring a bell.
“He was that professor at Princeton who was murdered in his own home in December 1987. A death-row inmate in Potosi, Missouri, is claiming he killed him. The guy’s name is Frank Spoel, and he was just twenty-two at the time. I dealt with the case back then.”
“I never did like the name Frank,” he said, looking at the Italian sausages on my plate. “As a kid I read Gone with the Wind, and there was a character named Frank whose breath stank. I don’t know why that detail stuck in my head, but I always remember it when I hear the name. Why are you still interested in this story?”
“Have you ever had a case you were obsessed with, one that you think of all the time, even years later?”
“I had many cases, Roy.”
“Yes, I know, but I’ve realized after all these years that this case still troubles me. I mean, I have the feeling there’s something more down there, something important, waiting for me, you know? I’m not talking about Law & Order crap, but about justice, and about the sense that if I failed, it’d be for good.”
He thought for a few moments.
“I think I know what you’re saying . . . After I moved to the NYPD in the nineties, I worked in narcotics for a while. It was back when we were working with the Feds, battling the Westies in Hell’s Kitchen and Gotti’s boys. There was no time to get bored. The ex of an Irish boss, a young lady named Myra, told us she was ready to spill the beans if we gave her protection. I arranged to meet her in a bar on West Forty-Third Street, called Full Moon. I went with a colleague, Ken Finley, wh
o was killed in a gun fight with some guys from Nicaragua down in Jersey a year later. Now, the lady showed up, we ordered drinks, and I told her what the witness protection program involved, asked if she was ready to work with us. Then she said she had to go to the ladies’ room, so I waited. My team and I sat for ten minutes or so, and then we realized that something was wrong. I asked the barmaid to go into the ladies’ and look for her, but she wasn’t there. Finally, I talked to the manager and we did a search. Nothing, man. There were no windows, and the only way out was down the john or through the air shaft, which wasn’t even big enough for a toddler. We couldn’t understand what was going on: our table was by the restrooms, so if she’d come out, we’d have seen her. Plus, the joint was almost empty, and nobody else had gone in or out of the restroom in the meantime.”
“What a story . . . Did you ever find out what happened?”
He shook his head.
“Perhaps I didn’t feel like thinking about it. It makes my hair stand on end even now. It was like she’d vanished into thin air, just a few feet away from me, and I did nothing. She was never found, dead or alive. For years I’ve beaten my brains trying to understand how it could have happened. Probably every cop has a monkey like that on his back, Roy. Maybe you shouldn’t think too much about yours.”
After I walked Jim back to his home I went to the garage where I’d left my car. As I was passing McNally Jackson Books, I saw a small poster announcing that Dr. Laura Westlake was going to be giving a lecture there on Wednesday afternoon, which was three days from then. I wouldn’t have dared approach her in a private setting, so I thought that maybe I’d be able to have a few words with her after the book signing. The fact that I’d come across that poster felt like a sign to me, and I decided to take my chances.
There was no photo on the poster, so that evening I tried to find one online. I vaguely remembered her—a tall, slim, and self-confident young lady who’d answered all my questions calmly during the interview back then—but I couldn’t bring her face to my mind. I found a few recent photos and studied them for a couple of minutes, noticing her high forehead, cold gaze, and harsh expression of the mouth. She wasn’t pretty in a lot of ways, but I could understand why Richard Flynn had so madly fallen in love with her.
Three months earlier, at John Keller’s request, I’d gone to the archives of the West Windsor Township Police Department and made some copies of the documents from the Wieder case. Now I went to the Princeton Police Department and asked about the Simmons case, the one in which Derek had been accused of murdering his wife. Richard Flynn had mentioned the case in his manuscript only in passing, saying that he’d heard the details from Laura Baines. There was nothing wrong with taking a look at the file. The murder had taken place in 1982, a few years after I’d moved to the West Windsor department.
I talked on the phone to Chief Brocato, who I knew from back in the day, when we’d worked together, and he said he’d let me look through the archives without asking too many questions. A guy in reception gave me a visitor’s badge, and then I went down to the basement, where the archives were kept, alongside the evidence room.
As far as the layout of the archives went, nothing had changed since the years when I’d worked there. An elderly officer, Val Minsky, who I also knew, put an old cardboard box in my arms and took me to a makeshift office where there was a table with a lamp, a tired old Xerox machine, two chairs, and some empty shelves. He told me to take my time looking over the paperwork I’d requested, and after pointing out that smoking wasn’t allowed, he left me to it.
Over the next hour, as I read through the file, I realized that Flynn’s account, although brief, was accurate.
Derek Simmons didn’t admit to the murder, and the judge’s ruling had been not guilty by reason of insanity, following an examination carried out by Joseph Wieder. After his arrest, Simmons was held in New Jersey State Prison, and was then committed to Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, which is where the accident that caused his amnesia happened.
A year later, having recovered physically, he was moved to the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital, from where he was released a few months later. It was also Joseph Wieder who wrote the expert assessments that led to the judge deciding to move Simmons to Marlboro and, later, to release him. After the papers detailing Simmons’s release under supervision, there was just one more document in the file: from 1994, the judge’s order lifting the supervision, also following an expert assessment.
I jotted down the names of the other two experts who, along with Wieder, had signed the report that got Simmons out of jail in 1983. One of them was Lindsey Graff, the other John T. Cooley.
Then I noticed a list of phone numbers.
Simmons hadn’t been arrested right away; instead, he’d been taken in eight days after his wife’s death. The list contained the numbers of the phone calls made and received at the Simmons family home from a week before the murder up until Derek’s arrest. I copied the list and put it in my briefcase.
One of my buddies who’d dealt with the Simmons case, Nicholas Quinn, had died of a heart attack in the 1990s. The other guy on the paperwork had probably joined the department after I’d left. His name was Ian Kristodoulos.
I gave the box of papers back to Officer Minsky, who asked me whether I’d found what I was looking for.
“Don’t know yet,” I said. “Do you know Officer Kristodoulos, one of the guys who worked on the case? I knew the other one, Quinn, but he died about fifteen years ago.”
“Sure I know him. He moved to the NYPD about five years ago.”
“Do you have any idea how I could get hold of him—you maybe got his number?”
“Gimme a sec.”
“Thanks a lot, Val.”
“Anything for a buddy.”
Minsky made a few calls, sprinkled with jokes about cheating wives and drunk moms, during which he kept winking at me like he had a twitch. Finally, his wrinkled, reddish face revealed a triumphant expression, and he wrote a cell phone number on a Post-it and handed it to me.
“He hasn’t retired yet, apparently. He’s with the Sixty-Seventh Precinct in Brooklyn, on Snyder Avenue. Here’s the number.” I entered Kristodoulos’s number in the memory of my cell phone, thanked Minsky, and left.
I arranged to meet Ian Kristodoulos that afternoon at a café near Prospect Park, and in the meantime I tried to track down the two experts.
After much searching online, I found out that there was a psychiatrist named Lindsey Graff who had a practice in the city, on East Fifty-Sixth Street. The practice also had a website, where I had a look at Ms. Graff’s bio. There was a 99 percent chance that I’d hit on the right person—between 1981 and 1985, Lindsey Graff had worked as an expert for the Office of the State Medical Examiner, after which she’d taught at NYU for six years. She’d opened the clinic with two colleagues in 1998.
I called the clinic and tried to get an appointment, but the assistant told me that Dr. Graff wouldn’t be available until sometime in mid-November. I told her that I had a special problem, so I’d like to speak to Dr. Graff over the phone. I left her my number, and she said she’d pass on the message.
I still hadn’t managed to track down John T. Cooley when I arrived for my meeting with Kristodoulos that afternoon. The man was short and stocky, dark-haired, with the kind of beard that shows a day’s worth of growth just an hour after shaving. Over the next hour, he told me in an unfriendly voice what he remembered about the Simmons case.
“It was my first important case,” he said. “I’d been with the department a year and a half and had only dealt with small stuff up to then. I asked Quinn to take me on as his partner when it happened. You know how it is: you never forget your first murder case, the same as you never forget your first girlfriend. But that scumbag Simmons got away with it.”
Kristodoulos said that he’d never doubted that Derek Simmons had killed his wife, the motive being that she was having an affair. Simmons seemed sane but very cunning, so the resu
lt of the psychiatric evaluation had disgusted the entire department.
“The evidence was solid, so if it’d gone to trial he’d have gotten life without parole, no doubt about it. But there was nothing we could do. That’s the law—nobody can override the experts’ verdict. They took him to the hospital, and he got out of there in a couple of years. But I don’t think God was napping, because some guy hit him over the head while he was in the hospital, and then he really did lose his mind, from what I’ve heard. They changed the law just a year later, in 1984, after the guy who’d attempted to kill President Reagan was found not guilty by reason of insanity, when Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act.”
After I left Kristodoulos, I headed home. There, I carried on looking for some trace of Cooley, but without any success. Lindsey Graff didn’t call me, but I wasn’t really expecting her to.
At around ten p.m., while I was watching an old episode of Two and a Half Men, Diana called.
After we exchanged the usual pleasantries, she said, “You promised to do me that favor I asked you.” It had been two or three weeks since we’d last spoken.
It was only then that I remembered what she was talking about. I was supposed to track down a certificate from a company she’d worked for years ago; she needed it for her retirement application. I mumbled an excuse and promised to do it the very next day.
“I was just checking,” she said. “There’s no rush. Maybe I could fly out for a week or so and do it myself in the next few days. You okay?”
Every time I heard her voice I got the feeling that we’d broken up just a few days before. I told her I was fine, that I’d get her the certificate, but that I’d quite simply forgotten and only just remembered now that she’d mentioned it. And then I realized the real reason why she was calling, and asked her, “Matt called you, didn’t he?”
She didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds.
“That bigmouth didn’t have any right to—”
The Book of Mirrors Page 20
