The Genius Read online

  NEVER FORGET

  I knocked, drawing slow footsteps.

  “Thanks for coming.” Though Lee McGrath was not as old as he sounded over the phone, time had not been kind to him. Hairless calves gave him a feminine quality, and slack skin hinted that he had once been a much larger man. He wore a blue terrycloth bathrobe and disintegrating slippers that made a ghostly sound as he turned and shuffled back inside. “Take a load off.”

  The interior of the house smelled of ointments, and its clutter didn’t square with the neatly kept yard. Before seating me at the dining-room table, McGrath spent a good five minutes clearing out a workspace, shuttling piles of unopened mail, half-empty paper cups, and pill bottles to the passthrough, one item at a time, a process maddening to watch. I tried to help him but he waved me off, breathing hard and making small talk.

  “You find your way okay?” he asked.

  “I got help.”

  McGrath cackled weakly. “I told you to take directions. Everyone gets lost the first time. It’s an interesting neighborhood but a bitch to walk around. I’ve been here twenty-two years and I still get confused.” He surveyed the exposed stretch of tablecloth and deemed it sufficient. “Coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “There’s juice and water, too. Maybe some beer, if you want.”

  “I’m okay.” I wanted to leave. Sickness makes me anxious. Watching your mother waste away will do that to you.

  “Speak up if you do. Before we get started, mind giving me a hand?”

  The back room had a threadbare area rug, a rickety-looking desk, a computer, a small television atop a rolling stand, and two large bookcases, one filled with paperbacks and the other with numbered three-ring binders. A yellow La-Z-Boy looked recently vacated, a John le Carré novel splayed on one arm. Along the far wall hung a dozen or so photographs: a younger, more robust McGrath in a police uniform; McGrath holding two squirming girls; McGrath shaking hands with Mickey Mantle. Several framed service commendations had been crowded in at the side of the display, afterthoughts. The adjacent wall was bare, save a laser-printed wanted poster for Osama bin Laden.

  On the floor was a box, cardboard with a woodgrain print. McGrath pointed to it. I hefted it—it weighed a ton—and carried it back to the dining-room table.

  “This is a copy of the file on the man who murdered Eddie Cardinale,” he said, sitting. He began taking out clipboards, manila envelopes tied with string, two-inch-thick police reports held together with alligator clips. He took out a stack of black-and-white crime scene photos and turned them over rapidly—but not so rapidly that I failed to notice the carnage.

  “Here.” He slid a picture across the table. “Look familiar?”

  It did. Every pore on my body opened at once. There was no doubt that the smiling boy in the snapshot was one of the Cherubs from Victor Cracke’s drawing.

  My shock must have been obvious, because McGrath sat back, rubbing his unshaven chin.

  “Thought so,” he said. “At first I figured I was going crazy. Then I said, ‘Hey, Lee, you ain’t that old yet. You got some brains left. Give the man a call.’ ”

  I said nothing.

  He said, “Sure you don’t want some juice?”

  I shook my head.

  “Suit yourself.” He picked up the picture of Eddie Cardinale. “Poor kid. Some things you don’t forget.” He put the photo down, crossed his arms, and smiled at me with an intelligence that belied the Clueless Geezer persona he’d fed me over the phone.

  I said, stupidly, “You’re a professor?”

  His laughter ended in a coughing fit. “Oh, no. They just call me that.”

  “Why?”

  “Hell if I know. I think because of my glasses. I have reading glasses.” He pointed to his head, where said glasses resided. “I used to read on the porch, and the neighborhood kids would see me and call me that. BA from City College, that’s me.”

  “BA in what?” I preferred asking the questions.

  “American history. You?”

  “Art history.” I neglected to mention my lack of degree.

  "Look at us, buncha historians.”

  "Yup."

  "Yup.”

  “You all right? You look perturbed.”

  “I’m not perturbed,” I said. “I am a little surprised.”

  He shrugged. “Look, I don’t know what it means. It might mean nothing.”

  “Then why did you call me up?”

  He smiled. “Retirement bores the shit out of me.”

  “I honestly don’t know how much I can help you,” I said. “Other than what I told you over the phone, I know nothing about the man.”

  I don’t know why I felt so defensive. McGrath hadn’t accused anybody of anything, least of all me. A murder forty years old would have been a bit beyond my reach, unless you believe in karma and reincarnation, and I didn’t have McGrath pegged as the mystic type. (There. I hardboiled a sentence. Aren’t you proud?)

  “You must know a little more,” he said. “You wouldn’t pick up some drawings out of a Dumpster and put them up in your gallery.”

  “That’s essentially what happened.”

  “Did you hope that he’d read the article and show up?”

  I shrugged. “It occurred to me that he might.”

  “But you haven’t put an ad in the paper or anything.”

  “No.”

  “Aha.” I got the sense that he thought I had manufactured the “missing artist” story for publicity. On some level he was right. I wasn’t lying when I told people that Victor was missing. I had stopped looking, though.

  “If that really is the case,” McGrath said, “then I might be wasting your time.”

  “As I told you this morning.”

  “Well, my sincere apologies.” He did not appear sorry at all; he appeared to be sizing me up. “Since you’re here already, let me tell you a little about Eddie Cardinale.”

  EDWARD HOSEA CARDINALE, b. January 17, 1956. Residing 34-17 Seventy-fourth Street, Jackson Heights, Borough of Queens, Queens County, New York City, New York. P.S. 069; good kid; well liked. In his class photo he’s a prepubescent Ricky Ricardo; big, pointy collar and slicked-back hair, smile revealing a slender gap between his two front teeth.

  On the evening of August 2, 1966, a Tuesday night in the middle of a crushing heat wave, Eddie’s mother, Isabel, sits on the stoop of their apartment, her shirt dusty and creased from bending constantly to pick up litter or toys. She is worried. The twins have just learned to walk, and keeping track of them is a full-time job. To give herself room to think, she sent Eddie to the park with his baseball glove, telling him to be back by six.

  Now it is eight thirty and he is nowhere in sight. She asks her next-door neighbor to keep an eye on the twins and goes out looking for her eldest son.

  An hour later Eddie’s father, Dennis, a shift manager at a Brooklyn sugar factory, comes home from work and, upon being told of Eddie’s disappearance, goes out to have a look of his own. Isabel stays back to phone the parents of Eddie’s friends. According to boys who’d been at the park, the game lasted roughly from one until five, when everyone broke up to walk home. Nobody saw Eddie all day.

  At ten P.M. the Cardinales phone the police. Two officers are dispatched to the residence, where they take statements and a description. Patrolmen are notified to be on the lookout for a boy of ten, black hair, wearing a blue shirt and blue jeans and carrying a baseball glove.

  Initially, police speculate that Eddie, unhappy with the amount of time his mother has been spending with his younger brothers, has run away to get attention and will likely turn up within a half-mile radius. The Cardinales adamantly maintain that their son is too mature to pull such a stunt—a belief confirmed in the most gruesome way imaginable three days later, when a caretaker at Saint Michael’s finds a body just outside the cemetery grounds, near the Grand Central Parkway. An autopsy reveals semen on the buttocks and thighs, as well as traces of semen and blood on the
victim’s jeans and underwear. A broken hyoid bone and severe bruising around the neck indicate manual strangulation as the cause of death.

  However sensational and titillating the case might be, it does not spread beyond the local papers. Another, far more sensational crime is already hogging the national news: Charles Whitman’s sniper massacre at the University of Texas, Austin. Only so much dark territory exists in the modern American consciousness, and for a few weeks in the summer of 1966, Whitman has staked out the entire plot. The murder of Eddie Cardinale goes cold.

  MC GRATH SAID, “He wasn’t the first.”

  I did not look up from the stack of crime scene photos, which McGrath had handed to me as he talked. I saw Eddie; Eddie’s mother and father, both of them hollowed out; I saw the body, so ungraceful in death, like a broken violin. According to McGrath, the heat had accelerated decomposition, turning a slender, good-looking boy into a bloated sack, his face inhuman. I decided that the photos were half Weegee and half Diane Arbus, and then I remembered that I was looking at a dead child, a real dead child, not a piece of art. And then I remembered that Weegee and Diane Arbus had been looking at real people, too. Only my lack of familiarity with the subjects made their pictures suitable for looking at. Now that I knew Eddie Cardinale, I found him hard to look at.

  I saw, too, pages of transcripts: interviews with neighbors, with local business owners, with the Cardinales, with Eddie’s friends who had been at the park. I saw the coroner’s report and the accompanying photographs. I saw a map of Queens marked with the location of the body and the location of the Cardinales’ home in Jackson Heights—a distance of less than a mile. Less than a mile from either was another spot, one not marked on the map but whose proximity to Eddie Cardinale’s walk of death was all too clear to me: Muller Courts.

  Finally, I registered McGrath’s words. I looked at him. “Pardon?”

  “There was another before him,” he said. “Nobody connected the two until they assigned a new detective to the case.”

  He didn’t need to tell me that he was the detective in question; I knew it from his proprietary mien. I sound the same way when I talk about my artists.

  “Back then we didn’t have computers. You kept everything on paper, and that made it easy to miss connections, even with a lot of overlap.” He began digging through the file box, removed another large trove of evidence marked STRONG, H. “This kid, Henry Strong, disappeared about a month before Eddie Cardinale, on the Fourth of July. His family was having a party, and he wanders off. Witnesses were all drunk, and nobody can tell us a damn thing, except an uncle, who reports seeing a colored guy in a leather jacket. They never found a body.”

  “Victor Cracke wasn’t colo— black.”

  “You said in the article that you didn’t know what he looked like.”

  “I know he was white,” I said. “That much I know.”

  McGrath shrugged. “All right. Frankly I think the guy who told us that was just trying to make himself feel useful. We never considered it a fruitful line of inquiry.”

  I said nothing.

  “Do you want to see the rest?” he asked.

  I asked how many more he meant by the rest.

  “Three.”

  I took a deep breath and shook my head.

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  He seemed surprised. “If you say so.” He closed Henry Strong’s file and set it back in the box. “Did you have a chance to bring that drawing?”

  At McGrath’s behest, I had brought a color photocopy of the central panel, the one with the five-pointed star and the dancing Cherubs. The original I’d left behind; no reason to overhandle an already delicate piece of art.

  “I forgot it,” I lied.

  If I imagined myself protecting Victor, I thought wrong; lying could only make him—and me—seem more suspect. Immediately I saw the futility of what I’d done, but what could I do at that point? Take it back? Before he could express disappointment I asked for a glass of water.

  “In the fridge,” he said.

  I went to the kitchen and stood in front of the open refrigerator. The house had no air-conditioning and I let the cool roll over me as I absentmindedly touched packages of sliced ham, a half-eaten block of white cheddar, a jar of kosher dills. On the door, adjacent to a carton of OJ and a plastic pitcher full of water, I saw more medications, amber bottles labeled KEEP REFRIGERATED. What did he have? I vowed to be brave enough to ask him.

  But McGrath got the jump on me, and when I returned I almost coughed out my water at the sight of him spreading out photos of the other three victims, lining them up like a team portrait: Victor’s Victims. The phrase flashed through my head and I let out a startled laugh.

  “I…” I began but found I had nothing to say. There was nothing to say. What was there to say? Every one of the murdered boys was a Cherub, a perfect five for five.

  “All strangled, all within seven miles of one another. If you include Henry Strong, that’s starting on July 4, 1966. The last one happens in the fall of 67. Well,” he said, “so far as I know. I’d be willing to bet there’s others that match the MO, later on or in other places. What do you think?”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “Do you think I should cast a wider net?”

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  “Fair enough. Doesn’t hurt to solicit an opinion, right?” He laughed, again dissolving in coughs.

  “Right.” I felt uneasy, as though McGrath was softening me up before springing some trap: the damning revelation that I had Victor Cracke hidden in my walk-in closet.

  Which, of course, I did not. I had nothing to feel guilty about.

  “I wish I could be more helpful,” I said.

  “There’s nothing you know about. The places he liked to hang out, maybe?”

  “I have his address,” I said, before correcting, “where he used to live. He left long before I came on the scene.”

  “Where was that, anyhow? The article said in Queens but didn’t specify where.”

  “It did. Muller Courts.”

  “Did it?” McGrath picked up the Times and slid his reading glasses on. “I must be going senile.” He read. “Indeed. I stand corrected. Weeell”—he tossed the paper aside and picked up the map of Queens—“we can probably guess the punchline.” With a pen he dotted the locations of the other three bodies. They fanned out neatly from Cracke’s neighborhood, as close as a half-mile and as distant as Forest Hills.

  “The last one,” he said. “Abie Kahn.” He picked up a photo of a boy in a yarmulke. Without referring to the file, he told me the date of the disappearance: September 29, 1967. “A Friday afternoon. His father’s a handyman, runs ahead to the synagogue to fix a leak in the rabbi’s office before the Sabbath services. Abie is messing around in the house, his mother finally yells at him to get moving, he’s going to be late. Nobody’s on the street at that time—they’re either already in the synagogue or at home getting dinner ready. Abie sets out on foot and never gets there. He was ten.”

  At that point I began to wonder if McGrath knew I was lying about the drawing—if he meant for the macabre lineup to plumb my conscience.

  “That’s my daughter,” he said, following my gaze, which had until that moment been out of focus. The daughter in question, her picture adjacent to the kitchen, a waify brunette with a studious expression, did not resemble McGrath so much as echo his intensity. On the other side of the doorway hung another photo, also of a woman, similarly shaped but more severe, older than the first by five or six years.

  “My other daughter.”

  I nodded.

  “You have kids?” he asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “There’s time,” he said.

  “I don’t want children,” I said.

  “Well, all right.”

  The crash of the ocean; Springsteen on the radio; gleeful shrieks.

  “My car is waiting for me,” I sai
d.

  McGrath stood. Rising from his chair left him out of breath, rheumy and sallow and smiling like Bela Lugosi.

  “I’ll walk you out,” he said.

  He stopped at the edge of the porch, explaining that if he went down the stairs I’d have to carry him back up, and that didn’t make much sense, now did it?

  I agreed it didn’t.

  “You’ll let me know,” he said, shaking my hand, “if you turn up anything.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “You have my number.”

  I touched my breast pocket, where I’d placed the Post-it he’d given me. “All right, then,” he said. “Drive safe.”

  More time had passed than I realized, and if the driver had in fact decided to come back for me, he was gone by the time I found my way out of the maze and into the cooperative’s parking lot. The pub had swelled with happy-hour patrons, and I encountered a host of curious stares as I entered and asked the bartender for the number of a local car service.

  “You can try,” she said, “but they don’t like to work too much.”

  Thirty minutes later I called the dispatch again, wondering where the fuck my car was. The man at the other end did not seem inclined to help me, so I went back into the bar and got the number for a second service, who told me they had no cars available.

  By that time I had been waiting for over an hour, and my options had dwindled to two: get to the subway—itself a good five miles away—or call a friend. I tried Marilyn, who did not pick up. Nor did any of my other friends who owned cars, friends I could count on one hand. I called Ruby, who offered to get in a cab, drive out, and bring me back; but rush hour meant the outbound portion of the trip alone would take more than an hour. I told her not to go anywhere yet and walked back to McGrath’s house.