The Murder Room (10 page)

T
he big man, wide and squat, moved powerfully down the cracked and broken city sidewalk, 250 pounds in a hurry. His expansive white shirt was soaked through with sweat, and his jacket flapped, revealing a Walther PPK .380 handgun. The air reeked of garbage and urine; the stench of melting tar trailed his black brogans. He was gasping for breath but moving like a bull that would not be stopped.

It was nearly one hundred degrees at midday, the hottest month in Philadelphia history, and William Fleisher wondered for the hundredth time what brought him obsessively into the bowels of the city, why he left the cool, ordered hallways of the U.S. Custom House for the steaming end of South Street, where chaos ruled.

He passed an old wino, and three homeless men sharing a flattened box in some shade, skeletal dogs feeding in a pile of garbage. Criminals along with the whole human race stagnated in the heat, waiting for dark. He was armed, and remained vigilant. A slasher was stalking poor neighborhoods. Four women, ages twenty-eight to seventy-four, had been stabbed to death and mutilated in a frenzy that recalled Jack the Ripper, their torsos carved open. That summer of 1986, “serial killer” was a new and terrifying term in the United States; Philadelphians in particular spied the dim corners of their old city with fears once unimaginable.

Two miles from his office at the Customs House, the nineteenth-century storefront sagged in the darkness. Once the Victorian butcher shop of a prosperous neighborhood, it now shadowed drug dealers and addicts drifting by in a dank river breeze. Old newspaper, long faded by the sun, covered the storefront windows. The green door appeared abandoned, except for two small signs: PEARLS REQUIRED, and PUT OUT THE CIGARETTE NOW, ASSHOLE. No light or sound came from within; steam quietly rose from the kitchen vent, like breath from a tomb. The city stank from fifteen mountains of garbage uncollected during the garbagemen’s strike. But the stench emanating from the building overpowered all else.

Fleisher knocked on the green door of the dilapidated building at Twenty-third and South.

The door cracked open, and a young blond woman let him in. She was taller and buxom in a white T-shirt that fell to mid-thigh; it was all she was wearing. Fleisher grinned; he was feeling better already. Behind her rose a vast, hidden warehouse studio with a concrete floor and no windows, its bulk concealed from the street. In the high-ceilinged gloom, broken only by light filtering through a row of skylights, were crude wooden shelves lined with sculpted human heads. But next to them was a lovely walnut museum case with a bronze handgun shaped like a penis. The plaque read, THE SEX PISTOL THAT WON THE WEST.

He chuckled. “The sex pistol? At his age, I thought Frank would shoot blanks.”

“He’s been up all night,” she said coolly, leading him through a steel door into the studio. “When he gets going, there’s no stopping him.” The studio was cluttered with nudes of young women, ladders and piles of bricks, erotic Parisian postcards. On the shelves were heads cracked by tire irons; mouths twisted in lipsticked horror; the bald head and psychopathic eyes of a man who had killed his entire family; a Negro slave whose bones had been dug from the grave. It was a gallery of murderers and victims of murder without equal and a somber mood came over him.

An abominable smell floated from the makeshift kitchen in the rear. Frank Bender, shirtless and barefoot on the cement floor, was stirring a huge steel pot. From the pot rack hung ladles, spoons, and a pair of steel handcuffs. A Norman Rockwell calendar looked down on a 1950s aluminum kitchen table.

“Bill!” he cried in the luminous voice of a man high on life. His eyes were unusually bright, like a cloudless sky. More female voices sounded from somewhere in the warehouse.

“What’s cooking? ” Fleisher walked over to the stove. The smell was awful.

“You don’t want to know.” Bender grinned and quickly put the lid on the big pot.

Fleisher recognized the smell. “That’s it. You’re not coming to the potluck.”

Bender didn’t like working with flesh-eating beetles. He boiled his rotting heads: fill water above the head, add half a cup of bleach and a dash of Borax, boil until done.

“I make a mean chicken in this pot,” Bender said. Bender did most of the cooking, and most of it in the same pot. “Jan and Joan hate it when I use it to de-flesh the heads.”

Fleisher rolled his eyes. “Why don’t we go out for lunch.”

T
he Day by Day Café was noisy and crowded with August light filtering through skyscrapers to find the corner plate-glass windows. Outside, winos and addicts slumbered in a church doorway; at a small table in back, Fleisher bent over a cheeseburger while Bender picked at a salad and ogled Wendy, a twentysomething waitress with pale skin and dark hair. Bender’s eyes gleamed in his balding skull like azure marbles. He was trying to persuade her to sit nude for him. She had dropped by the studio for a glass of wine. But he hadn’t yet convinced her to remove her clothes.

“She moves like sex personified,” he said as he watched her walk away.

“Jesus, Frank, I don’t know how you get away with it.”

“Jan wants me to have a few girlfriends,” he said, his tone completely earnest. “She doesn’t like me hanging around the house all the time. She just likes to meet my girlfriends first. I never get involved with someone Jan doesn’t like. Jan likes Joan. It’s Joan who gets jealous of the other girlfriends.”

Fleisher shook his head. “I can’t keep it all straight.” Fleisher had been married to Michelle for thirty years, and his passions were conventional: Besides nineteenth-century detective stories, they included gourmet dining, travel with Michelle, and spoiling the grandchildren. He teased and joked with Michelle as mercilessly as the day he started courting her; in many ways, he had never stopped courting her.

Bender never stopped loving his wife, either. He spoke of her with great fondness. He’d stopped sleeping around with strangers, he said. All his girlfriends were close, intimate friends.

“Let me get this straight,” Fleisher smirked. “In other words, you’re not sowing wild oats anymore. It’s all about relationships now.”

“Right.”

Fleisher laughed out loud. “Frank, if you were in my family I’d chase you with a rifle like your father-in-law did. But on a murder case, you’re the best.”

At this, Bender leaned forward, lowering his voice confidentially. “Bill, listen, I’m working on this case that’s really worrying me,” said Bender. “The marshals are tracking down a fugitive killer, a legendary hit man, and they asked me to be the ‘eyes’ of the task force. They say I have an ability to see faces none of the others have.”

“Congratulations. It sounds like a fantastic opportunity.”

Bender frowned. “I’m supposed to do sketches and a bust showing ‘age progression’ so they know what they’re looking for. The marshal deputized me and I’m carrying a gun. They were very upfront about the danger.”

Fleisher’s eyes widened.

“I know, I haven’t seen his face up close, but the guy looks just like me. He’s the same size, same age, same body type. He’s also an artist. It’s spooky. I feel like he’s my doppelganger, an evil twin.”

Fleisher scowled. Bender took a sip of coffee. “I’m not afraid of anybody,” he said. “But I saw him once through a telephoto lens and his eyes were so cold. He knows who I am and the threat I represent to him. I can feel it—he wants me dead.

“His name is Hans Vorhauer,” Bender continued. “He’s a German American like me, but killing is in his blood. His father was a Nazi S.S. officer. And he’s a genius—he has the highest IQ tested in the history of the Pennsylvania prison system.”

Fleisher practically lunged out of his chair. “Hans Vorhauer! I can tell you all about Hans Vorhauer. I chased him all over the East Coast in the 1970s for the murder of a federal witness friend.”

Vorhauer was one of the most wanted and dangerous fugitives at large in the United States. Accused by federal agents in a rare interrogation of killing seventeen people as a hired assassin, Vorhauer openly mocked them. “No,” he smirked, with the arrogance of a man who had never been charged with any of them, “it’s thirty-three.” Vorhauer was a brilliant tactician of murder, a master of disguise, black-market gunsmith, drug dealer, armed robber, and the uber–hit man for East Coast gangsters, elusive as a ghost. A self-taught chemist, he operated one of the largest methamphetamine laboratories on the East Coast until he was finally arrested and convicted of meth possession and armed robbery charges in the late 1970s. Vorhauer was sentenced to twenty years in Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia, the state’s largest maximum-security lockup. A model prisoner, he worked his way into the position of head of the prison shop.

On November 17, 1983, Vorhauer staged a spectacular escape from Graterford that the headlines called THE BREAKFRONT BREAK-OUT, escaping in the hollow compartment of an armoire he had made in the shop for sale and delivery outside. Crouched with him in the pine armoire—stained to resemble oak to better explain its great weight as it was wheeled outside to a waiting pickup truck—was convicted killer Robert Thomas Nauss, the sadistic leader of the Warlocks biker gang, who had strangled and carved up his beauty-queen girlfriend. An unknown couple driving the pickup truck drove away with the armoire, and the killers were never seen again. It was believed they had separated, but they were considered highly dangerous, and profilers thought it inevitable that they would kill again. The marshals had no higher priority than getting Vorhauer and Nauss off the streets—and they’d recently had a break in the long-dormant case. An old neighbor of Vorhauer’s thought she saw him in Philadelphia, where his wife lived, but she wasn’t sure; she hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. The marshals weren’t sure, either; the problem was photographs of him were seventeen years out of date, and nobody knew what the fugitive looked like—or was even sure he was in Philadelphia until Bender spotted him on a stakeout. Bender’s job was to produce sketches and a bust showing how Vorhauer looked today, and he was stumped. It was his first federal case, his first case of national importance. His future forensic career—and perhaps his life—depended on it. He was stumped.

“I saw him at a distance, it was way too fuzzy a view,” Bender said glumly. “There’s something I’m missing about him. I need to know more about him, something that will help me capture his look and his personality in my art.”

Fleisher’s big face was flushed. The memory of the hit man had haunted him for over a decade.

“I’d do anything to help you get that bastard. He has the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

F
leisher knocked on the boxer’s door in Queens and stood to the side with the other special agents. The old boxer was saving for his retirement with a part-time job doing Mafia hijackings.

He answered the door in his underwear. His wife was cooking in the kitchen. The feds said they wanted to talk to him about the murder of a federal informant—one of Fleisher’s informants, the dumbest ever, had
told
the mob he was talking to the FBI.

“Can I put some pants on?” the boxer asked.

“Sure,” the feds said.

“I’ll go with him,” Fleisher said.

In the bedroom the boxer reached for his pants, an arm’s length from a rifle against the wall. Fleisher put his hand over his service .38—worn gunslinger style over the groin, with the attitude
I’m small and I’m Jewish, make my day
—and said, “I hear on the street you’re trying to whack me. Get the rifle and let’s get this over with,
mano a mano
.”

The mobster backed down politely: “No, Mr. Fleisher, I’d never do such a thing.”

Fleisher was soft like the Italians were soft—emotional, wild, a little crazy. The Italians and the street people liked him, a reputation that had led his supervisor, Jim Scanlon, to call him into his office one morning in 1971 at the FBI headquarters in Boston.

As he sat down, Scanlon said, “I want you to look into the murder of a B-girl in the Combat Zone.”

Fleisher’s sources included hookers, bouncers, and bar girls. “They all love me there,” he famously bragged to the older agents, leading to the inevitable question, “What do they charge for that? ” Yet in fact the special agent could wheedle information from anybody. He didn’t spend a dime of the thousands of dollars in taxpayer money available to buy off informants. With the sweet smile of a Boy Scout and the street smarts of a bookie, Fleisher got people to open up, then he picked them clean.

“Her name was Vicki Harbin. She was fiftyish, a dancer working at the 222 Club,” Scanlon said. “They found her in her room at the Avery Hotel. She was lying on the floor near the door, stabbed to death.”

Fleisher’s eyes narrowed. “An over-the-hill B-girl, still dancing around a pole, hustling drinks, living the life in the Avery.” He shook his head sadly. The Avery was a narrow, ten-story landmark gone to seed, a respectable turn-of-the-century hotel turned hooker Hilton. In the 1940s and ’50s, Tommy Carr and his orchestra played “Good-bye to Paris” in the Cameo Bar, and vaudevillians Jackie Gleason and Art Carney and actor Jason Robards camped in the hotel’s modest rooms, cheapest in the theater district. Filled with touring young performers, even then the Avery smelled of sex. The line was, “At two in the morning in the Avery a bell rang, and everyone went back to their own rooms.” By the spring of 1971, the Combat Zone’s dozens of adult bookstores, girlie shows, and massage parlors stretched outside the door. “The Avery had the saggy, tattered quality of a locale in a Raymond Chandler novel,” a journalist wrote.

“A bad john?”

“No, she wasn’t a prostitute. She was a dancer. You know—the body’s gone, but she’s in it for life. They found her lying on two dollars, the tip she always gave the bellhop for bringing her a bucket of ice at the end of the night.”