Unknown - The Genius

I got lost looking for McGrath’s house, ending up on the beach beside a memorial to local firefighters killed at the World Trade Center. I shook out my shoes.

“Lost?”

I turned and saw a girl of about nine in denim shorts over a bathing suit.

“I’m looking for Lee McGrath.”

“You mean the professor.”

I said, “If you say so.”

She hooked a finger and went back into the maze. I tried to keep track of her turns but gave up and let myself be led to a shack with a well-kept front yard, peonies and pansies and a lawn cut golf-course close, good enough to make the cover of Martha Stewart Living. A hammock with a lumpy pillow hung at the far end of the porch, and behind it an old Coca-Cola sign leaned against the wooden siding. The mailbox out front read MCGRATH; underneath, an NYPD decal. In the front window was a sun-bleached poster of the Twin Towers, an eagle, and an American flag.

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 Carre 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.”

“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.