Unknown - The Genius

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.

MCGRATH 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 Ar-bus, 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 absent-mindedly 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.”