"The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases" - читать интересную книгу автора (Capuzzo Michael)

CHAPTER 2. THE MAN WHO GOT AWAY WITH MURDER

The killer got away with it-that’s what he couldn’t accept. The cops on the take didn’t bother him anymore, though he hoped they would be punished. Nor did the blind coroner, the witnesses who saw nothing, the deaf and dumb DA. He’d forgiven them all, even the hit man who kept his address on file. Lastly his callow lawyer who said, Let it go-there’s too much power against you. Let it go, Antoine. It’s how the world works. It’s the mob, for Chrissake. Which was a good point, an excellent point, except he couldn’t let Paul Bernard Allain go.

Allain’s bloodied face still shimmered in his dreams. His best friend was beaten to death right before his eyes, and he stood there helpless to pull him out of it. He couldn’t sit now and watch Paul go all the way, slip into infinity, unredeemed.

The man who got away with murder was going to pay.

As strong as his feelings were, he didn’t want revenge, only justice. Antoine LeHavre told his story simply and directly. He wanted to convey his gratitude for being granted an audience with the investigators, especially as a private citizen. He thanked Fleisher, who had said, “Don’t worry, we’ll solve it.”

A respectful hush had fallen over the room as LeHavre stood at the lectern. The tall windows reduced the sounds of the city to a distant hum. On the sidewalk below, tourists walking to Independence Hall passed the old brick tavern at Second and Chestnut streets without a glance; once the grandest establishment in the New World, the City Tavern was an Enlightenment castle lost in time. As Fleisher stepped onto the wide-plank floor, he had fallen under the room’s familiar spell. A history lover, Fleisher knew that Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and Franklin had dined here nightly during the Constitutional Convention, enjoying “a feast of Reason and a flow of soul.” The Masons held their first secret rituals on the North American continent in this room.

As LeHavre began his presentation, Fleisher thought of the tavern’s round pediment window, now obscured by taller buildings, which once commanded the New World harbor. It was the Masonic All-Seeing Eye that had blessed the colonies with the benediction Annuit Coeptis, “God is favorable to our undertakings.” He silently prayed that God was still watching.

LeHavre was a furniture manufacturer in Louisiana, a civic leader. In the middle of June seven years earlier, he had taken a dozen of his employees, including Allain, a valuable office manager and a friend, to a minor-league baseball game under the lights. Afterward, they all repaired to a restaurant-bar. There Allain had become inebriated, and, out of character, made a small scene. The last LeHavre saw of him alive, he was being led out a side door by a bouncer. It all happened with a surreal speed. By the time LeHavre located Allain, he witnessed the end of a struggle in which two bouncers beat the young man unconscious. He never regained consciousness. LeHavre had been stunned and confused. Allain had no enemies. He was a young man with a wife and two young children, a churchgoer. The police and a series of private eyes were no help. His best guess was that it was a tragic misunderstanding: Allain, who was rarely inebriated and couldn’t handle it, had acted out and the bouncers overreacted and killed him. He suspected the police and DA had stonewalled the investigation at the request of the bar owners, who had well-known ties to the mob.

LeHavre was giving the presentation he had provided to the police, who had feigned interest seven years earlier. The second slide was even more gruesome: a close-up of the side of Allain’s head, severely battered, leaking what appeared to be cranial fluid. Murmurs swept the tables. Fleisher felt his own indrawn breath, the familiar welling behind the eyes. He couldn’t help himself: The view of a young man’s corpse always reminded him of the yearnings and lost promise of his own youth.

The Vidocq Society had become famous for cracking cases with its freewheeling style of investigation. Now, with a nod from Fleisher, it began.

“Has any DNA testing been done?” Fleisher asked.

“No,” LeHavre said. “Blood and hair samples were lost before there was a chance to do any testing.”

“What do you mean, lost?” asked a Navy intelligence officer.

“There’s a receipt for the samples in the evidence locker. But the samples disappeared. The DA has refused to look into it.”

“Have you tried to exhume the body?” Bender asked.

“Yes,” LeHavre replied. He was awaiting a ruling on his petition to do just that.

At the tables, the detectives shifted and rustled as they studied the police file and coroner’s report. Ressler, the famed FBI agent, leaned over to whisper to Homicide Hal, the white-haired dean of Philadelphia coroners, and Homicide Hal nodded. Walter and Bender kept their own counsel.

The room was silent, “like an ocean drawing back,” Walter recalled. As the last round of coffee was poured, the questions came in a burst, from forensic odontologists and medical examiners, explosives and firearms specialists, FBI, DEA, IRS, forensic anthropologists, ritual-murder experts, and psychiatrists.

“Did the bouncer and Allain have a prior relationship?” asked an NYPD homicide detective.

“No,” LeHavre said.

During the fight, Allain’s body had slammed against a door in the bar, splattering it with blood. “Do you still have the door? Have tests been run on it?”

“No,” LeHavre said. The door was repainted. Tests were never conducted on it, to his knowledge.

“How have you documented the bar’s connection to the mob?”

He hadn’t, but it was well known in the business community.

“How long had you known the victim?”

“I met him when I hired him nine years ago.”

“Were you drinking with him that night?”

“No. I was at a table with other friends and employees.”

“What was your relationship?”

“He was one of my best employees. He came to me without a college education. We hire MBAs out of Vanderbilt and Tulane, but Paul made himself into one of the most capable managers I’ve ever had. He was exceptionally bright and dedicated, a natural leader.”

The grilling continued for half an hour. As the questions and answers volleyed back and forth, LeHavre came alive. He seemed to sense the society’s real interest and a burden lifting. His whole manner had changed; in place of stoic resignation his face brightened, his answers grew more detailed and energetic. After years of carrying the investigative load by himself, stonewalled by the police, he stopped in the middle of the questioning to openly thank the Vidocq Society again. “Frankly, after all this time going it alone, I’m overwhelmed at the level of interest and support.”

This was a common response to the society’s efforts, although stoic law enforcement officers seldom expressed it aloud. Fleisher, right in front of LeHavre at the head table, sat beaming.

By 2 P.M., the men and women at the tables began to rustle in their chairs. Fleisher looked conspicuously at his wristwatch, and looked up and signaled to LeHavre that the session was over.

The VSMs had agencies to run, their own private cases to work, planes to catch. If members were interested enough to form a “working group” to dig deeper into the case, that would come later.

Fleisher joined LeHavre at the lectern. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “We hope we’ve helped provide Mr. LeHavre with some new leads, taken the case a way down the path toward justice. As you know, he has no official help from law enforcement, so if any of you are interested in taking this further, you know where to find me.” He grinned. “Meanwhile, we’d like to give you this small token of appreciation for appearing before the Vidocq Society-the very first tool of deduction.” He opened a small, polished wooden box and held up a wood-handled magnifying glass. For an instant the curved glass blazed with light.

Fleisher put the glass back in its box as the VSMs were standing to leave. “Everybody, wait,” he called out. “Frank has something else.”

Everyone sat down as Bender stood, his pure line of black emphasizing his bald head and white goatee, and waited a bit impatiently for it to be over, although they knew the forensic artist wouldn’t take long. While his partner Richard Walter possessed an arch, erudite, verbose style, Bender was known to be brutally plain and blunt-spoken, true to his Philadelphia row house roots. The muscular artist lowered his head, his eyes disappearing in shadows under the heavy brow, raised his arm to the front of the room, and pointed directly at LeHavre.

“I know who killed Allain,” he said evenly. “You did. For my money, you’re the murderer.”

An uproar swept the room. Fleisher stood and called for order. LeHavre’s face drained of color, but he said nothing. Then all eyes turned to Walter, the blade of a man in a blue suit, as he walked to the front of the gathering and asked for silence.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I might be wrong, OK, but I haven’t been wrong since 1949.” Tittering laughter, a lone guffaw. Walter turned and stared at LeHavre. “My impetuous friend may jump to wild, unsupported conclusions on occasion, but as it happens, in this instance Frank Bender is indeed quite right-you, sir, are quite clearly a psychopath.” The profiler removed his spectacles, revealing small blue eyes set in a baleful stare.

Walter coolly described the presenter as a classic murdering personality who had sex with his employee before he killed him. LeHavre stood at the podium, his face a blank mask, and said nothing.

The first clue, Walter calmly noted, was that he detected “a grand, slightly overinflated presence in our guest. I picked up what I considered to be a covered, macho effeminate voice, just that clip of language that made me raise my eyebrow and look up at him, notice him as it were, in a new way.” Walter arched his left eyebrow for emphasis.

“Studying the photographs of the young man who is the victim in this case, as it happens a young and very handsome man, it became clear to me the nature of the friendship the two men enjoyed, at least for a time. It was clearly a biblical alliance-the young, handsome man and the older, powerful but less attractive boss-and the whole issue of jealousy had come into play. And of course in these situations the guy who is the boss controls the money.”

Walter looked up at the chandelier as if in contemplation. “Now then, many times in such relationships, as one observes them,” he said, “you kiss the hand you dare not bite. But such relationships are notoriously unstable, especially in the homosexual realm. Almost always there comes a time where the young one is unfaithful, untrue, or goes in search of a new alliance, and what we have is punishment coming back-if this guy can’t have him nobody’s going to have him.”

“This is outrageous,” LeHavre said softly, to no one in particular. He gathered his materials and began to move toward the door.

“You see, it never made sense that a bouncer or bouncers had killed Allain,” Walter went on. “What’s in it for them? Bouncers don’t kill people; they throw them out of bars.

“Mr. LeHavre, for the pleasures of power and control, has thrust himself into the police investigation for years,” he added. “He believes he’s smarter than anyone.” He smiled. “He enjoys playing that dangerous game of catch-me-if-you-can. Today we have witnessed an arrogant and vainglorious attempt to brag to a roomful of cops.

“You see, the first rule of murder is the murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is… and you, sir, are attempting to extend the pleasure of murder by exploiting all of us here today. At that, you have failed. You are not smarter than any of us. You are bright but an underachiever, for which the triumph of murder compensates.”

At the door, LeHavre turned back and said, “You have no proof of this, of any of this, none whatsoever. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

Walter spoke over the top of his glasses. “You must have enjoyed it whilst it lasted.”

“Poor guy didn’t even get his magnifying glass,” Fleisher said as he left the room with his partners. “What did I tell you? I told you it was a case that merited attention,” he added, a huge smile creasing his beard. Bender grinned and Walter glared at his partners.

“Another Vidocq Society lunch,” Bender said, “another murder solved.”

Fleisher said he was uncomfortable with his partners’ attack on LeHavre. “I don’t see the evidence for it,” he said.

“You may want to rethink it, Bill,” Walter said. “The guy didn’t get his jollies this time. The urge is insatiable. If he can’t stimulate himself sufficiently with memory, he’ll kill again.”