The Murder Room (5 page)

He lay only fifteen feet from the road, but remained unseen. The narrow one-lane road was mostly quiet. The field was a last wild green patch surrounded by city, by hospitals and police stations and thousands of suburban homes. But the surrounding fields had changed little since colonial horses thundered and hounds bayed their call over the Fox Chase Inn. Now and again an automobile tunneled on the road south through the mist to Verree Road, past the woods and fields to the Verree house, still standing, once invaded by the British. Then the road fell quiet again.

It was a remote grave, carefully chosen.

It was warm for February but the rain cut with a raw chill. The land was hushed in an attitude of waiting. There had not been much snow for years but the big storms were coming. The oceans were spinning the thirty-year cycle. Climactic changes that would turn the 1960s into the snowiest decade in a century were already in the air.

The boy was decomposing very slowly in the cold. The animals had not gotten to him yet. Clouds fled; sun dried the eyes and little face. Night came and went. Orion the hunter glittered in the south, Jupiter was bright. The field fell dark and quiet, the boy’s lips white as the moon sailing with the winter stars. The sun rose without warmth. There was no movement left in him except gravity drawing his blood downward in his body.

That Saturday, city people whirred north to a city park with a creek Audubon had admired more than a hundred years earlier. A priest turned in to the quiet Good Shepherd Home for “wayward girls,” deep in the field across the street. In the afternoon John Stachowiak was bicycling by to play basketball at a Catholic church gymnasium, when suddenly he left his bike by the tree line and walked into the field.

He was nervous but excited. Stachowiak was eighteen years old, the son of Polish immigrants who spoke little English, and he was a trapper. He kept nineteen muskrat traps in the woods and field; he lived nearby, they were easy to check. But he hadn’t even set them and the season was almost over. He had been afraid for weeks to set the traps since his older brother discovered a body hanging on the limb of a tree in the nearby woods. The pale dangling man haunted his nightmares. So did the memory of his mother and father when the Philadelphia patrolman came to the house to take a report from his brother about the suicide. Refugees from the Soviet police state, they trembled as if it were Stalin’s dreaded NKVD, who’d snatched many of their friends in the night, never to be seen again.

The dense undergrowth stretching back from the tree line by the road was perfect cover for small game. But the teenager was startled and upset. Two of his muskrat traps were set! Who would have fooled with his traps? Combined with the suicide, the lonely field gave him an eerie feeling. He was about to leave when he saw a long rectangular box in a tangle of vines. The field was a dumping ground, and he was curious to see what was in it. He grabbed it on one end and pulled it upright, but it was heavy and he put it down. Walking around it, he looked into the open end for a long moment. He decided not to play basketball that day. Stachowiak rushed home determined not to tell his brother, his parents, or anyone what he had seen near the woods of the hanging man. He didn’t want the police to return and terrify his family.

Two days later, on the afternoon of Monday the 25th, Frank Guthrum, a junior at LaSalle University, was taking the country road home from classes when he pulled over and parked by the tree line. Guthrum was an older student, in his midtwenties, who’d had trouble adjusting to student life. Two weeks earlier, on February 11, he’d braked for a rabbit that ran in front of his car and into the field. On a whim, he followed the rabbit into the underbrush. He lost sight of the rabbit but found two steel traps and decided to set them. Now it was 3:15, still light enough to see what had been caught in the steel jaws.

He was disappointed to find the traps empty. But about fifteen feet from the road, at the intersection of two footpaths, was a curiosity, a long cardboard box snared by the underbrush. Guthrum leaned down and saw the small head, white as porcelain, the limp figure wrapped in a blanket.

A doll. A big doll.
He looked again at the bruises on the small head, the chopped blond hair.

Guthrum hurried home. That evening he told his brother, who was a priest, what he had seen, but he decided not to call the police. He didn’t want to get involved, and the police were already watching him. They’d recently accused him of being a Peeping Tom, pretending to chase rabbits in the woods in order to spy on the “wayward girls” in the Good Shepherd Home across the street. The last thing he wanted was close questioning about the box.

The next morning, Tuesday the 26th, Guthrum was driving to school when he heard on the car radio that police were searching for possible kidnap victim Mary Jane Barker, four years old, missing from Bellmawr, New Jersey. Bellmawr was just across the river from Philadelphia. When he got to school he sought advice from two faculty advisers, then spoke with his brother again. The priest said, “You know what you have to do.” At 10:10 A.M., he called the police.

The Philadelphia Police Department was headquartered in the French Empire stone edifice of City Hall, with the stone relief of Moses the Lawgiver glowering over the judicial entrance. But despite the antiquated rooms the force was among the most modern in the country. Patrolmen drove red 1955 Chevrolet paneled wagons, among the first heavy-duty cruisers designed especially for police.

Sergeant Charles Gargani took Guthrum’s call in the homicide bureau, then ordered a radio message broadcast to all the red cars: “. . . investigate a cardboard box in the woods of Susquehanna Road, across from the girls’ home. Could be a body inside, or could be a doll . . .”

Patrolman Sam Weinstein was skeptical and annoyed as he trudged into the muddy field through the cold rain. A stout man with a square head and broad nose, Weinstein was a streetwise rookie cop, thirty years old with a wife and two kids. He’d already made his name in the department as a tough guy, quick to use his fists. Weinstein had seen combat in the Pacific in World War II. His father had been murdered when he was in the womb. His mother died when he was a toddler. He’d been raised in South Philadelphia by an uncle and aunt who were Lutheran but kept his dead mother’s wish to raise him Jewish. Weinstein had a surly attitude nobody liked unless he was on their side.

Ahead he saw patrolman Elmer Palmer, a fellow rookie, and called out a friendly greeting. But Palmer was standing quietly by the lopsided cardboard box, his face broken.

Weinstein looked in the box and was staggered. He’d seen enough suffering and death for three lifetimes, but he’d never seen a murdered child. Few cops had in Philadelphia in the 1950s. Murder happened to adults, at the hand of someone they knew—jealous spouse, ex-partner. The rare body in a field was a gin-smelling hobo, an old drifter.

Two homicide detectives joined the group around the body, in their dark overcoats and fedoras, accompanied by Dr. Joseph Spelman, the city’s chief medical examiner. More detectives and street cops arrived, and a captain sent the uniforms into the field in their shiny wet raincoats, kicking the underbrush for evidence. Seventeen feet from the body, they found a men’s blue Ivy League cap, size 7⅛.

The ambulance pulled up, and Weinstein volunteered to take the boy out of the box. He lifted the small corpse gingerly.

“Bruises, all up and down,” Dr. Spelman said. Bruises and cuts too deep for a child to get falling off a bicycle, he said. Deep bruises around the head looked like thumbprints from an adult trying to steady the child for a haircut. It was a violent beating all right, but the medical examiner said he’d need the autopsy to determine cause of death.

Weinstein held the boy, instinctively trying to shield him from the rain. Suddenly he felt anger surging through him. He looked at Palmer and saw the same fury in his friend’s eyes:
Whoever did this should burn in hell.

But Weinstein couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing. None of them could. The detectives were speculating that a mother or father, poor and pushed to the edge, had lost control during a bath and had been surprised trying to give the only burial they could afford. The dead boy somehow represented something beyond their grasp.

Criminals were changing. Everything was changing. Philadelphia had watched Pat Boone sing at President Eisenhower’s inaugural ball the month before, and next month thousands of fans would crowd an Elvis Presley concert in Philadelphia. Everywhere the old order was dying, the new being born. The month before, the actor Humphrey Bogart, an icon of traditional masculinity, had died in Los Angeles the same week the Wham-O company made the first Frisbee for a new and liberated generation. Powerful new currents were upwelling, like an ocean turning over. Freedom and authenticity were the watchwords of the coming Age of Aquarius. Old injustices were being addressed, old boundaries smashed, deep longings unleashed.

Killers were exploring new freedoms, finding deeper and more authentic selves, too.

The patrolman looked into the small blue eyes, the dull orbs reflecting his own, and was overcome by a sadness tempered by thoughts he couldn’t explain. “I saw so much pain and terror there,” he said. The little face seemed to cry out to him. “Why did this happen? Why would someone do this to me?”

His eyes met Palmer’s again with shared emotion:
We’ll get the S.O.B., no matter what it takes.

But who was the S.O.B.? What was the answer? Weinstein was a proud man, and it was difficult for him to admit, “I don’t have an answer for that.” He sensed he might never have the answer; it was beyond him. He felt shattered.

The ambulance door slammed shut, and Weinstein looked up at the gray February sky and the rain falling over the field.

T
he first boy put nickels in the chrome slot and sighed with pleasure as the small glass door opened on a slice of pie. His father turned the crank of the ornate chrome “liquid machine,” and coffee streamed from a dolphin’s head copied from a Pompeian fountain. Dinner with his father at the Horn and Hardart in Philadelphia, America’s first fast-food restaurant, was a special treat.

The Automat is cool,
he thought. It was a dazzling display of modern technology as impressive to him as the transistor radio and his father’s electric watch. A clean, orderly glass palace of meat loaf and macaroni and cheese, the Automat inspired an Irving Berlin theme song, “Let’s Get Another Cup of Coffee.” His dad whistled it during the Great Depression, and now it was the jingle for the TV show
Father Knows Best
.

William (Billy) Fleisher looked forward to Saturday all week long. Saturday mornings in 1957 he went shopping with his mother. But later in the day he got to be with his father, ride with him in the big 1953 Buick sedan to pick up the early edition of the Sunday papers. His father was Dr. Herbert Fleisher, a Navy dentist who came back from the war and opened dental offices in the Nash Building. His father was brilliant, a tall, dark-haired, handsome man who was a double for the actor Robert Taylor. Billy saw him as Lancelot opposite Ava Gardner as Guinevere in the 1953 movie
Knights of the Round Table
. Herbert Fleisher was named “Philadelphia’s Best-Dressed Man” by the
Bulletin.
Nearly everybody read the
Bulletin,
and everybody respected Herbert Fleisher. Billy wanted to be just like him.

His father sat across from him in his suspenders and spats, reading the Sunday
Bulletin.
Billy had his favorite frizzled beef and creamed spinach. His father was six foot three; Billy was five foot three and had five more inches to go.

“You’re behaving like a bum,” his father said.

Billy cringed as if from a blow, but he loved to listen to his father. His father talked about his important friends at the Celebrity Room. Lawyers. Politicians. Entertainers. Horseplayers. Bookmakers. Craps players. The nightclub was owned by his good friend and patient, the beautiful showgirl Lillian Reis, “Tiger Lil.” Tiger Lil’s boyfriend was famous gangster Ralph “Junior” Staino, ringleader of the famous K & A gang, from right here in Kensington and Allegheny in Philadelphia, the classiest burglary outfit in the country. They wore suits and ties on their jewel jobs.

Tiger Lil was accused of masterminding the $478,000 heist of Pottsville coal baron John B. Rich, but was found innocent after the star witnesses against her drowned and died in a car explosion. She had nice teeth, his father said.

“You’re acting like a loser,” his father said.

His mother, Esther, often told him what his father said when she told him she was pregnant, a joke they loved at the club. “You have a son and daughter, what do you want now?” His dad responded, “I’d prefer a German shepherd.”

Billy was a mistake after Ellis and Gloria. Ellis was six foot three, too, tall and handsome and smart like his father. “You take after my grandmother,” his father said. She was four foot eleven.

His father was right. He was a punk. “You’re an embarrassment to me,” his father said. Billy was a poor student, always talking back, always getting into fights. He didn’t do the things the other kids did. He didn’t follow the Phillies, didn’t read school books or watch TV. He hated
Leave It to Beaver.
His father didn’t take him to temple services. He didn’t have any interests except reading detective magazines.

On Saturday mornings before his mother took him to the market, he played with his cousins Mark and Glenn. “We’d play until we ended up beating each other up, go out and throw firecrackers on someone’s stoop, shoot a match gun at an ant colony, that kind of thing.” His cousins were his only friends.
I could eat nickels and shit out quarters all day and nobody would like me,
he thought.

The sidewalk was dark as they walked to the Buick. There were shadows in the city even at night, deeper shadows in alleys and the recesses of doors. When Billy was younger, his mother would scare him by saying, “Seymour Levin will get you if you don’t behave!”