Michael Capuzzo - The Murder Room - The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases

He did that best on Tuesdays. Tuesdays were Joan days, and from evening through dawn Wednesday, Bender “downloaded the horror” with her. The pit was sacred space, blindingly white, perfect. They went together naked, hand in hand, down the white wooden stairs, past the white sign painted with black letters, WHITE HIGHWAY CAFÉ. It was white walls, a white bar, and white barstools with a red 1952 model Chevy, a car from his childhood, on a painted highway running down the bar. They sipped Polish vodka, listened to Brubeck, Johnny Rotten, blues, any damn thing. They drank, danced, and made love all night long. He was nearly sixty, and his all-night Bacchanalias gave him more energy than did a good night’s sleep. “It’s how I restore my innocence,” he said. Meanwhile, his wife slept peacefully in their room next to the old meat locker.

Shortly before dawn, he climbed the white stairs into the dim studio gallery. It had been a flawless evening. In the gloom he went to the stove and put water on to boil for coffee. He lifted the lid on the big pot and gave a stir; the head was coming along fine. Joan wrapped her arms around him from behind. Bender lived life ordered purely by his own desires. He didn’t own a watch, and the clocks in the place kept their own separate times. The Norman Rockwell calendar was fifty years behind. Friends had to tell him what day it was. Or he measured time, like Tuesday, by trysts. He floated in a timeless ether of his art, “the mistress I was born to serve,” as one of his role models, Michelangelo Buonarroti, once wrote.

As they sat sipping coffee under the curling Rockwell, the phone rang.

The murky skylights were graying the studio with early light. He could dimly make out the rows of human heads; the women with smudges of red lipstick and rouge and pleading eyes that seemed alive; the wolflike faces and vacant, hollow eyes of sadists, hit men, mass murderers. The mute chorus of the doomed. Visitors were awed, or spooked, by his collection of skulls. It was a sensory overload of darkness. But this was only a museum. They should only see inside his head; that’s where the action was, the active cases, the crowds. The dead appeared in his dreams with their ruined faces, crying for justice, mouthing the names of their killers.

He let the phone ring, running through the possibilities. The hit men who’d vowed to kill him seemed to be placated for now. No husbands were after him at the moment. His father-in-law wasn’t chasing him with a rifle anymore. Things were relatively calm these days. Still, he had a bad feeling. It was nothing he could put a finger on.

His partners had warned him about the physical dangers of murder investigations. Stare into the abyss and it could darken your whole being. Turn away from the pain and suffering, if you were one of those called to it, and you lost your mind. He was the latter. The cops saw it in him. Fleisher said, “We’re all driven to find justice, driven to a fault.” He had been swallowed by it. He was a simple happy-go-lucky sex-loving artist and all-around charming manipulative lothario before he was recruited for something higher. Recruited by fate. He’d never noticed the news racks, the radio, the talk of the abduction and murder of innocents jamming the airwaves of his city, of every metropolis. The numbers meant nothing to him; it was the tortured eyes of the first murder victim that did it, that recruited him, snatched his soul.

The telephone testified to the change. His tape machine, once filled with girlfriends, was crammed with messages from cops, reporters, medical examiners, grieving families seeking help. And here was the rub: The calls wounded him. Injustice made him angry. It pissed him off. But it angered all of them. That’s what kept him going. It angered all of them.

He knew as he listened to the phone ringing under the watchful gaze of the heads that morning that things would never be the same, no matter how many women he bedded. Until the world was a better place, until he did something to knock sense into it, he’d have that bad feeling.

Things were going good. It was just that bad feeling.

He picked up the phone and said, “It’s five in the morning, asshole.”

Richard Walter slept easily in his antique Chinese bed.

He’d retired with a head full of wine. As his head hit the pillow, he said aloud, “And now I enter the arms of Morpheus.” In Greek mythology the three sons of Hypnos all produced dreams. But Phantasos generated tricky, unreal dreams and Phobetor fearsome nightmares.

Morpheus spun the clear-eyed dreams of heroes.

He cherished his solitude.

“I married once, too long ago to recall or discuss. I shan’t make that mistake again. As it happens, I simply loathe cats, dogs, and children. A child should never be present to hear what I have to say.” He had consciously sacrificed the pleasures of life “to be one of the five best in the world.” He believed it was a profound sacrifice, his life a journey marked by loss. “But it is those scars that give us character, that make us who we are.”

He made coffee in the darkness before dawn. The sky was still black when he called Philadelphia.

“Frank? ”

“Richard!” came the manic shout.

“It’s Wednesday morning, remember?”

“Right, Joan and I danced all night. Nineteen sixties rock and Polish vodka. We had an incredible time!”

“Frank, what the fuck are you thinking? Did you sleep at all? Are you alone?”

“Uh, well, no. Joan is leaving soon.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “Christine’s husband is driving her over this morning.”

Walter frowned. “Frank, you’ve had quite enough sex for one twenty-four-hour period. Make a pot of coffee. And try not to let your little head do all the thinking until I get there.”

Bender howled in delight. “Rich, man, you’re just jealous!”

“I think not,” Walter said. He hung up.

The sky was leaden and filled with snow. It’s dark, it’s cold, I’m miserable, the weather is evil, he thought as he swept acorns off the engine block where a squirrel was nesting for the winter. It’s not good. As he drove to the airport and the cabin pleasingly filled with cigarette smoke, he started to feel better. In the cloud of smoke his small blue-white-red gold pin on the lapel of his suit, the badge of les couleurs, rooted in medieval heraldry, was scarcely visible. Each man had a purpose in life, Walter believed; his was to identify, torment, and defeat the most depraved psychopaths on Earth. To be good at it, to be one of the five best in the world, he had rid himself of distractions, had married his profession. Destroying evil gave him the greatest pleasure.

The sky was dreary and the colors of the chivalric code, glory and justice, gods and kings, glittered dully as the old Ford sped down the highway.

On the afternoon of Thursday, September 27, 1990, Joe O’Kane took a bite of chicken almondine and a sip of hot coffee, and looked down at three decaying corpses with their heads plunged into an overflowing tub.

“Nice lunch,” O’Kane said, dabbing the corners of his mustache with a cloth napkin. He gingerly passed the photograph down the banquet table in the Navy Officers’ Club. “I hope this club has a budget for Tums.”

The big federal agent was dressed to kill. He was the picture of a brawny, dandified Irish cop in a custom-tailored, three-piece Italian suit and black alligator cowboy boots. Clipped to a wide, silver-buckled belt was a small Beretta pistol, his “Sunday going-to-church gun.” His big silver beard was neatly trimmed-the final touch that made him Kenny Rogers’s double. With the husky build of a former semi-pro football player and a sweet tenor voice, O’Kane sang at weddings and parties as the country crooner. Special Agent O’Kane was loquacious, brilliant, cocky, a self-described “two-fisted drinker.” He’d signed up for the Vidocq Society for a few laughs. There were enough tears on the job.