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

He didn’t want Frank to be sick. He didn’t want him to die.

“Richard, if you don’t believe me I can show you the medical report,” Bender said at the next Vidocq Society meeting.

“Not necessary,” Walter said, grabbing his friend’s arm. “Come with me.” He dragged Bender over to talk with Dr. Maryanne Costello, distinguished VSM and former chief medical examiner of the state of Virginia. Dr. Costello was one of the nation’s most esteemed forensic pathologists. The living Sherlock Holmes was investigating, searching for evidence.

“Tell Dr. Costello what your doctors told you.”

Bender launched into detail about his cancer, and the two of them were going back and forth, “using a lot of words I didn’t understand,” Walter said.

Dr. Costello said, “How long did they give you?”

Walter lowered his head. “I knew then that this was real,” he said.

Bender said, “Eight to eighteen months. It’s already destroyed one of my ribs.”

Walter arched an eyebrow. “I’ve got an extra rib,” he said.

Bender stared at him.

“Really. Do you want it?”

“No, thanks, I’m watching my weight.”

They laughed.

“You see, doctor, he’s all about vanity to the end.”

Bender was determined to make his time with Jan sweet time. He knew they’d always been meant to be together, and now he felt it in a deep soul way. He remembered when he was eight years old, standing on the stoop of his row house at 2520 Lithgow Street. A young couple carrying a baby knocked on the door of number 2518 next door, the Schwartzes’ house. The door opened and the Schwartzes excitedly welcomed the couple. Frank saw them carry the baby into the house. Many years later he learned the Schwartzes were Jan’s aunt and uncle. The baby was Jan, on the day of her christening. “I saw my wife when she was just born,” Frank marveled. “Now that’s having history.”

Now they were dying together. The doctors had them going at almost the exact same time. It stunned him, like the plot of an opera. “It’s kind of romantic, in a way.”

Frank poured his energies into taking care of Jan. Sixty-one and very tired, with nerve damage from chemotherapy, she said, “I’m like a fuse that burned out at the tip.” He was still a forensic artist, willing to take on any assignment, hoping the Vidocq Society would need him. But it was harder than ever to find work in a recession.

Bender took up the brushes that had started him in the art world. He began painting again. A watercolor of Jan as a smiling ghostly presence floating above a green field; a stark Gothic sketch of a black-and-gray wasteland above which triumphantly rises a tall church (St. Peter’s Church, the shrine of Saint John Neumann, the miracle worker); a man making love to a young woman on a train.

He’d made seven paintings inspired by Jan when she first got sick, and put them on his Web site with a one-line legend: “And she survived!”

On Halloween 2009, the couple that had had their wedding reception in a graveyard celebrated their thirty-ninth anniversary with the gusto of a first date. They drank and danced to “Nobody Does It Better.”

“They’ve had a rich life,” their daughter Vanessa Bender, thirty-eight, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We wish they had more time.”

Frank said he wasn’t afraid of death. “I can’t say, ‘Wow, I wish I had done this or that,’ because I realize what I’ve done. If I go in eight months, I’ll still feel fulfilled.” Death wasn’t something foreign; he’d had his hands on the Reaper for years. And there was a lot of good karma waiting for him wherever it was he was going.

“My father would rather see a victim identified than make money,” their daughter Lisa Brawner, forty-four, told the Inquirer. “It drives my mother crazy, but I know when he gets to heaven, people will be lining up to thank him.”

“In all my dreams,” he said, “the dead protect me.”

That night in the mansion, with the lights and the music floating out over the river, it still all seemed like a dream to him. A friend, VSM Barb Cohan-Saavedra, the former assistant U.S. attorney, warmly congratulated him on his award. She said she always thought of him as a wizard.

“We always knew you were Merlin,” Fleisher quipped. “I’m glad somebody announced it officially from the podium tonight.”

A speaker had told them that men, and now women, had met at round tables to battle evil for a thousand years. There was evidence for a historical King Arthur. Yet, why, he asked, had the Arthurian tales featured three men? Why had these archetypes lasted for ten centuries? Looking at Fleisher, Bender, and Walter, he said there was always in the old stories a wounded king struggling to save the wasteland; his right-hand knight to destroy evil; and the wizard, Merlin, a seer who introduces the life of the spirit, transcendence of good and evil, but is bewitched and finally entrapped by women. Bender grinned, and laughter rippled in the room.

Why did the king keep the seat next to him empty? It was the Perilous Seat, fatal to all but a knight worthy of the journey, who could claim the Holy Grail. More laughter. Fleisher, they knew, kept the seat next to him at the round table empty as a memorial to his late brother-in-law Sal. “That was Sal’s seat, and I loved him. There was nobody like Sal.”

“It’s perfect!” Cohan-Saavedra said. “Frank is Merlin. Richard is Lancelot, and Bill is the Fisher King.” She turned to Bender. “Frank, next year you’ll have to come dressed in a long robe and a tall wizard’s hat.”

“If I make it next year.”

She hadn’t heard. He told her his news, and she didn’t hesitate a second. “Frank, you’ll make it.”

Two men stood nearby, at the edge of the conversation. One short, one tall, both white-haired. Kelly and McGillen were quiet that night. Their table felt empty. Weinstein was gone, having died quietly in his sleep on his seventy-eighth birthday, and Earl Palmer, too. The Vidocq Society Boy in the Box investigative team was the two of them now. Life was pills, prayers, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They were slowing down. But they didn’t stop.

There was a gentle wistfulness about the two old Irishmen, but they were ironweed stubborn. They declined to share the police skepticism about Mary. They had finally talked to the owner of Mary’s old house, who was terrified about what her children and the neighbors would think, into letting them see the basement.

On a fall day when the children were at school, Kelly, McGillen, Detective Augustine, and two police crime technicians arrived at the house in two unmarked cars. The basement walls, floor, and drain seemed just as Mary described. So did the side door that led outside, blocked by shrubs as it opened onto the driveway. Kelly took pictures and the crime tech measured everything. “Those beams show where the coal bin used to be,” said Kelly, who’d tended a coal furnace as a child. “Do you see?” Extra ceiling beams formed a rectangle that looked like it once supported the walls of a coal bin. Augustine said they could go ahead and dig into oil company or real estate records to see if the house once had a coal furnace, but it didn’t matter if they proved that, too. It just didn’t add up. The police closed the case. The old men of the Vidocq Society smiled and nodded, but they knew in their hearts that Mary told the truth.

“We see the boy in three weeks, Bill,” Kelly reminded Bill Fleisher. “The fifty-second year.”

It was just the three of them now at the grave every Veterans Day, the anniversary of the reburial. The park cemetery was gray in the fall, but they brought armfuls of bright flowers. They stood at the tombstone and said a few words to one another and to God. Then they took pictures standing together behind the stone. There were years of pictures like a family album, once five and now three of them standing with the boy in their fedoras and military caps and autumn smiles, guardians of something nameless. It was a private ceremony; the media and public were not invited. They were carrying on Rem Bristow’s thirty-seven years of work, the blue unbroken line. Sometimes Kelly went alone, an errand of joy. The old man leaned down and kissed the stone. “I’ll see you soon, Jonathan.”