by Peter Quinn
Next year, he was moved to the Bureau’s Transportation Section on Pier 57, at West 15th Street. At the beginning of 1928, he was transferred to the Property Clerk’s Office on Broome Street, across from headquarters. Retired not long after.
Crow returned from the john wiping his hands with a paper towel that he rolled into a ball. “Hand it over.”
Dunne laid the file on the desk. “What was the Transportation Section?”
“The what?” He tossed the paper ball into the wastepaper basket.
“Here.” Dunne placed his finger on the entry. “Says Kipps was transferred to the Bureau of Prohibition’s Transportation Section, on Pier 57.”
“Fancy name for a parking lot. That’s where the Feds kept all the cars, trucks, and even speedboats caught and impounded for transporting booze. At one point, they had a real stagecoach used to promote a rodeo show at the Garden. Oweny Madden had it loaded with his own brew and made deliveries.”
“Taxis, too?”
“Plenty. A favorite way of moving beer and booze.”
“Thanks.” He handed the file to Crow. “One more thing.”
“Always is with you.”
“Initials A-I-M. On that report that was missing, from September 7th, remember?”
“Misfiled.”
“On that misfiled report, any idea?”
“You already asked me that. I told you I don’t know. Could’ve been Anthony Mascone, Austin Murray, Andy Mickelman. On second thought, nix that last one. Andy’s name was Nickelman, not Mickelman. Anyways, they were all detectives around that time. No idea about middle names. And it wasn’t only detectives were drafted into the search for Crater. Especially in those early days, they pulled cops from everywhere, which is how the likes of me and Robert Emmet Murphy wound up here.”
Returning to the file room, Dunne pulled the report filed on September 7th and reread the section initialed by A.I.M, this time carefully:
Re: Anonymous letter addressed to Missing Persons received Sept 6. Handwritten contents as follows: “Judge Crater liked to visit the girls more than once at 39 East 38th Street. Look out for the Supt. That’s a clever one.”
10:30 A.M. Visited premises. Interviewed Mrs. Mary King, superintendent of building for last 5 years. Irishwoman. Widow. Gives age as 51. Makes an account of everyone living on premises. Denied any “disreputable types” reside there. Only “decent people on the up and up.” Calls the allegations of Crater’s visits “a bald-face lie,” typical of the spite directed at her by the wives of the supers on the block who resent her for having a job as good as their husbands.
Building is 4-floor lodging house. 12 rooms. Most tenants at work. Interviewed Mrs. Alma Parker, age 78, widow, tenant in 1B. Lives with crippled daughter, Margaret, age 55. Never saw anybody resembling Crater in the building. Spoke to super in neighboring building. Never saw any sign of Crater in or around 39 East 38th. A.I.M.
A not untypical entry among the hundreds of interviews and visits by the cops in the early day of the investigation, as they struggled to deal with the flood of Crater sightings and tips; but it was the sole one initialed A.I.M. As he went through the files once more, Dunne noticed that it wasn’t the only instance in which a cop had been called in to help Missing Persons follow up a single lead—another indication of how rushed and impromptu the police had to be as they played a seemingly hopeless game of catch-up.
He slipped the page beneath the table, folded it and tucked it in the breast pocket of his jacket. On the way up the stairs, he bumped into Crow on his way down. The shoe box from his desk was under his arm. “Find what you were looking for?”
“Not yet.”
“Could be I got it here.” Crow patted the box.
“Got what?”
“This.” He removed the lid, stuck it beneath his arm and lifted out a dirt-colored skull missing its jaw bone and posterior wall. “Could be Judge Crater or maybe some Canarsie Indian, or unremembered Dutchman. Maybe one of Washington’s soldiers. Or a Hessian. Or a woman buried in one of those private plots that got paved over as the city rushed north. Arrived this morning from a construction site in East Harlem. They sent it to Missing Persons. Go figure. I’m taking it to the forensics lab, where it belongs.”
He raised the skull. “I suppose I could make the same request that Dante did of the dead: “Tell me who and whence you be/ And let not your sad and shameful state prevent/ Your free unfolding of yourself to me.” He rotated it slowly. The bulb in the wall fixture glowed eerily through the sockets. “The difference is, Dante got an answer, and it doesn’t look like I will.” He placed the skull back in the box. “Whoever he was, God’s mercy on him,” he said and went on his way.
Before heading out to Far Rockaway to make a try at talking with Alexander Von Vogt, Dunne paid a visit to 39 East 38th. Neither Mrs. Mary King nor Mrs. Alma Parker was in residence. The building itself, a once-stately four-story brownstone off Fourth Avenue (the local merchants, the Standard reported, were working hard to get the name changed to Park Avenue South), wasn’t going to be around much longer, either. Along with its brownstone neighbors on either side, it was a boarded-up, roofless hulk. A sign mounted atop the plywood wall that corralled the buildings announced:
COMING SOON!
MURRAY HILL MEWS
66 Deluxe Rental Apartments
All Modern Conveniences
Occupancy June 1956
Dust-covered demolition workers banged away with sledge hammers at the interior walls and filled metal carts with the debris. Load by load, they hauled away the remnants of the multiple lives sheltered in what were originally single-family homes, substantial places of permanence and elegance, that were refigured and subdivided to house several generations of transient lodgers.
He walked down Fourth Avenue to 34th Street, turned west and continued to Penn Station. A mild morning ripened into an unseasonably warm day, the sun noticeably stronger than just a few weeks before, winter backpedaling like a fast-tiring boxer entering the late rounds, capable of damaging hooks and punishing jabs, but faced with a relentless, invincible opponent and the inevitable knock out.
He bought a copy of the Standard and entered the Eighth Avenue subway. He didn’t have to wait long for the train to Far Rockaway, one of those far-off corners of the city, like Tottenville or Baychester, which he could locate on a map but had never visited.
Though dented and worn, the subway car didn’t look all that different from when it was put into service in the years before World War I: deep-green iron walls, lacquered wicker seats, leather hand straps. Bare light bulbs overhead periodically dimmed or went out altogether, plunging the car into darkness and interrupting his reading of a feature article about the $3.1 billion for highway construction President Eisenhower was asking Congress for, the first installment in a $30 billion, ten-year road-building effort.
An accompanying map illustrated the projects for the New York region, planned as well as possible: new bridge across the Hudson, another over the Narrows, two across Long Island Sound, inter-borough and cross-town expressways (an answer to Crow’s complaints), an elegant intersection of looping lines, Manhattan at its center like a fat fly caught in the middle of a spider’s web. Not to be outdone, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had announced a $60,000,000 appropriation that would turn Idlewild Airport into “the most beautiful, efficient and functional air transportation center in the world.”
The train emerged from the tunnel and ran as an El above a flat plain dotted with neighborhoods of one- and two-family homes. The car was uncomfortably warm. He took off his overcoat and wrestled the window next to his seat open a few inches. Pungent salt smell of marshland wafted in. Houses grew scarcer. Clusters of shacks and bungalows that clung to the sides of canals and creeks looked better suited to a Louisiana bayou than a borough of New York City.
He went back to the paper. A two-page spread probably commissioned a month or so earlier, in the depths of the cold snap, quoted a number of scie
ntists on the possibility a new Ice Age was on its way. A drawing depicted wooly mammoths on a bleak, icy plain out of which stuck the tops of Manhattan’s skyscrapers.
The train rattled across the trestle over Jamaica Bay and rose to a point where the city was silhouetted in the distance against the cloudless, sea-blue sky, no ice or mammoths in sight. Off to the east, a steady flow of planes descended and ascended from Idlewild, soon to be the world’s most beautiful, efficient, functional airport. He wouldn’t hold his breath. Dunne skipped the horoscope and turned to the sports pages, which featured a picture of Dodger manager Walter Alston at spring training camp in Vero Beach, doing his best not to stare into the yawning cleavage of Miss Florida.
Turning left, the El ran parallel to the beach and the ocean, rows of summer bungalows boarded up for the winter. The Atlantic appeared as tame as Central Park Lake. He got off at Far Rockaway, the last stop, walked aimlessly in and out of stores around the station, making sure he hadn’t been tailed. He stopped at a firehouse and asked about the location of the address he had for Von Vogt.
“Looking for Von Vogt?” the fireman replied.
Taken back, Dunne didn’t hide his surprise. “How’d you know?”
“Short block. Von Vogt’s is the only house on it. You a bill collector?”
“No, an ex-cop, like Von Vogt.”
The fireman gave him directions. “If you don’t want to walk, you can wait for him in Brophy’s.” He pointed at the bar and grill across the street. “He stops in every afternoon at 5:15. We set our clocks by it.”
Von Vogt’s place was a tidy, aluminum-sided cottage converted to year-round use and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Parked under the car porch, a waxed and polished Ford V8, a ’37 or ’38 model, looked as though it had just rolled off the showroom floor. A flag hung limply from the pole in the front yard. Confident it would be better to approach Von Vogt in Brophy’s than knock on his front door, he strolled past.
With three hours to kill, he stopped in a luncheonette for a sandwich and coffee. Afterwards, he cruised the boardwalk. Despite the spring-like weather, it was deserted except for an old man being pushed in a wheelchair. The wind picked up. He kept walking, concentrating on the sea, consciously trying to avoid turning a partial collection of facts into a theory so neat and satisfactory you become wedded to it, choosing to recognize only what bolstered it and letting it lead you further and further from the truth. Cops and prosecutors were particularly susceptible, and there were plenty of innocent people who’d spent long, hard years behind bars as a result.
Edged with a raw, wet chill, the wind grew as daylight diminished, winter rising from the canvas ready to show the wallop it still packed. He reached Brophy’s at five minutes to five, glad to get inside. The lone customer was a woman in her sixties who sat at the bar reading the Daily News. He ordered Scotch with plenty of ice and carried it over to the booth by the window.
The burly bartender shouted over to him, “Hey, bub, beginning at five we got waitress service at the tables. You’re going to have to order from her.”
The customer at the bar turned out to be the waitress. She stood and tied on an apron. “Shout when you’re ready.” She sat down and went back to the paper. The bartender wiped and rewiped the bar with a wet rag. His unhappy, scrutinizing stare made clear he didn’t suffer an excess of excitement at the prospect of a new bit of business. “What brings you here?” he said.
The waitress looked up from her paper. “Brings who?”
“I’m not talking to you, Florrie.”
“Nice day,” Dunne said. “Figured I’d get a taste of ocean air.”
Several customers drifted in, all locals from the way the bartender greeted them. Florrie dropped a menu on the table. “Soup and sandwiches, that’s it. Pie, too. All made on the premises by yours truly.” She checked to see that the bartender was busy with his customers. “Don’t pay no mind to Brophy,” she whispered. “About as friendly as a clam. Like the rest of them, been here all their lives, treat anybody from the city like they got leprosy. They’re worse now, after they’ve been all winter by themselves.”
More customers arrived. Promptly at 5:15, a stout, dignified man in brown fedora and herringbone overcoat arrived, went to the corner farthest from the window, hung coat and hat on wall hook, and sat on a barstool. Running his hand across a closely cropped, transparent topping of white stubble, he nodded wordlessly at Brophy, who mixed and served him a Manhattan.
Though not instantly recognizable as Alexander Von Vogt, the thin, slick-haired detective with the pencil moustache identified in newspaper pictures of a quarter-century ago as lead detective in the Crater case, the facial features were substantially unchanged: thin lips, high cheek bones and forehead, prominent ears, sad, inquisitive eyes.
Brophy climbed atop a stool to turn on the television over the bar. The sound was drowned out by the trio beneath loudly arguing about whether the Giants would repeat their ’54 World Series victory or whether ’55 would bring the Dodgers their first victory ever.
“Don’t matter which of them gets to the Series.” Florrie stopped with a tray of drinks she was delivering to a booth. “The Bronx Bombers will demolish them.”
Gathering coat and hat, Dunne walked to the other side of the bar. He sat on the stool next to Von Vogt.
Von Vogt sipped his Manhattan.
“I’m out for the day,” Dunne said.
“Nice day for it.”
“You a native?”
“Resident.”
“How long?”
“Long.”
Dunne pushed his empty glass forward. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“You walked past my house earlier.” Von Vogt took another sip.
“Didn’t know anybody was watching.”
“Short street, single house, scarcity of passers-by. You weren’t hard to spot.”
Brophy poured Dunne a refill. “Everything okay down here?” His scowl suggested maybe they weren’t.
“Fine,” Von Vogt said. Brophy sauntered away. “You’re the one sent the letter, aren’t you?”
“I wanted to respect your privacy but hoped you’d agree to talk.”
“So much for my privacy. I knew you’d be by sooner or later.”
“All I need is to ask a few questions.”
“You read English, I presume, then you understood my answer. It hasn’t changed.”
“Recognize this?” Dunne reached in his breast pocket, took the paper he’d slipped from the police files and smoothed it on the bar.
“Dunne’s the name, isn’t it?”
“Fintan Dunne, yes.”
Von Vogt drained his drink and stood up.
“I think you were tricked,” Dunne said.
“If you haven’t already, talk with Captain John Cronin at Missing Persons. He knows all there is to know about the case.”
“Look. September 7th. These initials: A.I.M. I think he derailed the investigation.”
Glancing down at the paper, Von Vogt donned coat and hat. “That’s police property, Mr. Dunne. Being a pest isn’t a crime. Purloining official records is.”
Brophy returned. He gripped the bar with hands the size of bear paws. “Something the matter?”
Von Vogt slipped a quarter across. “I’m going to make it an early evening.”
“The cop who reported on his visit to 39 West 38th Street, who was he?”
“You seem like an intelligent man, Dunne. I suggest you find an assignment worthy of your intelligence.” Von Vogt went out the door.
“What’s your problem?” The boom of Brophy’s voice turned the barroom silent.
“No problem.” Dunne put on his overcoat. “Just a private discussion.”
“Ain’t private when you harass a steady customer.”
“Nobody was harassed.”
“Von Vogt’s got an honored place here. Decorated cop. Lost two boys in the war. You made such a nuisance of yourself, you chased him out. That’s harassment.”
“Whatever happened was between him and me.”
“That’s the problem with you pushy city types. You think you can come out here and act however you please.”
The patrons were all watching. Several nodded in agreement. Dunne eyed the door. Shuffle of feet from behind was followed by an angry voice: “Tell him, Brophy, go on, tell him.”
“You float in like the trash that stinks up our beaches and think we got no choice but to stomach it. Well, maybe it’s time you learned a lesson.”
“Past time.” A hand came from behind and took hold of Dunne’s shoulder. He drove his elbow into the soft belly of his attacker, who groaned loudly and doubled over.
Last thought before Brophy’s bat descended: Go for the door. Last feeling: black-and-white tiles of barroom floor against his cheek, cold and unyielding.
Eyes opened, he took a few minutes to bring the object directly overhead into focus. Gradually, a featureless oval gained eyes and lips, and became a face. The waitress’s. It took another minute to remember her name: Florrie. A streetlight shone above. Moths swirling around it turned out to be snowflakes.
“Thank goodness you’re awake. Can you sit up?” She extended her hand.
He was on a bench. Traffic went by in a steady stream. He rolled from side to side, put his feet on the ground, took her hand and pushed with the other. He sat, ran his fingers over the throbbing egg-sized lump on the back of his head.
“They dumped you here, the bums. No need for what they done. You were about to leave on your own.”
“Wasn’t fast enough. Where am I?”
“Block from the train.”
“Any cabs around?” Plump, wet snowflakes fell on his face.
“Car service is across the street.”
He stood. A wave of dizziness surged through his head. He took her arm to steady himself. “Will they take me back to Manhattan?”
“Take you to Manchuria if you pay the fare.”
He checked to make sure he still had his wallet. “I’ll settle for Manhattan.”
