He traced the book’s edges with his fingertips. His “book reports” had started ten months ago, concurrent with his transfer to COINTELPRO. The genesis had been peculiar, to say the least. In June 1961, during his regular perusal of the major East Coast papers, the agent had read an account of an unusual suicide in Boston. A Harvard freshman had thrown himself into the Charles River wearing a trench coat whose pockets were weighted with old-fashioned flatirons. The pockets had been sewn shut so the irons wouldn’t fall out, as had the coat itself, sealed with thick twine from collar to hem, as if the victim wanted to make sure he wouldn’t slip out of the garment underwater; on top of that, his shoelaces had been knotted together, which would have made swimming that much more difficult. The story pricked at BC’s consciousness, and he called the Boston field office and asked them obtain the body for forensic examination before it was interred. It turned out that the victim had freshly broken bones in both hands, which suggested he’d been in a rather serious fistfight, and cast doubt on the idea that he could have sewn himself into his own coat. There was also a note on his person, sealed in wax paper so it wouldn’t deteriorate in the water, in which the victim said he was killing himself because he felt an incestuous attraction to his sister—a rather remarkable claim, since the victim turned out to be an only child. The victim had been a frequent visitor to Harvard’s student counseling center, however, where he was known as a borderline personality with the “potential” for hallucinations, and the Boston office was reluctant to comply with BC’s request that the death be declared a homicide. BC was insistent: the murderer, he said, had recreated a scene from William Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury, in which Quentin Compson, a mentally unbalanced Harvard freshman, kills himself because he feels attracted to his sister Caddy; the crime had even taken place on the same day as Quentin’s suicide, June 2.
With a dearth of forensic evidence and a lack of support from his superiors, BC’s only investigative lead was the press. He looked in the Boston papers first, combing through two years’ worth of issues before casting his net wider. It took nearly a month before he found what he was looking for: a series of three deaths on eastern Long Island—a hit-and-run of a young woman, and a murder-suicide involving a middle-aged man and the husband of the woman who’d died in the hit-and-run. The murdered man had been shot and was found face down in a pool; the suicide—and presumed cuckold—had then shot himself. BC was willing to admit that the tableau from The Sound and the Fury was a bit esoteric, but was surprised no one caught a full-scale reproduction of the climax of Gatsby, especially since it had taken place in Great Neck, the inspiration for Fitzgerald’s fictional town of West Egg. The Gatsby reenactment had occurred almost a year before the Boston murder—at the beginning of fall, just as in the novel. If the Boston drowning was the killer’s first crime since that one, it suggested he worked slowly and methodically, which meant BC should have a few months to catch him before he struck again. But as with the Faulkner recreation, there was no physical evidence. So how to anticipate the killer’s next move?
The only thing to go on was the books themselves. Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Two of the three great American writers of the first half of the century, the third being Ernest Hemingway. BC put out a call for libraries up and down the Atlantic seaboard to be on the lookout for runs on Hemingway’s books. Two weeks later he found what he was looking for: a Providence, Rhode Island, man by the name of Freddie Pyle had spent the past two months reading Hemingway’s complete oeuvre in the public library in Fall River, Massachusetts; before that he’d spent several months reading Faulkner novels, and before that—bingo!—F. Scott Fitzgerald. Agents rushed Pyle’s house, but he’d either spotted them or, even worse, had already departed to commit his next crime. The last book he’d checked out was The First Forty-Nine Stories (an awkward title, BC thought, but he guessed that if you only had forty-nine stories then, well, you only had forty-nine stories, though surely a fiftieth would have come along eventually). The agent spent a feverish day and night scrutinizing every story, every sentence, every word in the volume. The first two crimes had been site-specific, so there was every reason to assume the next one would be as well. The only problem was, Hemingway didn’t seem to have written a story set on the East Coast. It was only on his third go-through that BC realized the story called “The Killers” took place in a town called Summit. There was a Summit, New Jersey, forty-five minutes outside New York City. The Bureau thought it was a long shot and wanted to place a call to the local PD and leave it at that, but BC knew he was right. He took a sick day—his first in four years—and raced to New Jersey.
Pyle had been missing for forty-eight hours, so BC had no idea if he would be in time. The victim in the story was a boxer called Ole Andreson, who was killed by a pair of mob hit men for not agreeing to throw a fight. There was only one boxing club in Summit. BC asked the owner if any of his regulars had failed to show up in the past forty-eight hours, and indeed one, Willie Stevenson, had been conspicuously absent that day. Once the nut was cracked, everything fell into place, but even so, BC wouldn’t have been in time if Pyle hadn’t been so scrupulous in his reenactments. In the story, a pair of killers go to a restaurant called Henry’s Lunch Room, where Ole Andreson normally takes his meals. They hold the “nigger” cook and the soda boy, Nick Adams, for several hours, but when it becomes clear their target isn’t going to come that day, they leave, presumably to look for Andreson elsewhere. BC learned after it was all over that Pyle had gone to a local diner called Hank’s, lingering there for nearly four hours and brazenly telling a fourteen-year-old boy what he was going to do. The boy, Philip Rothman, had not believed him at first, but ultimately decided to look up Pyle’s quarry in the phone book. By the time Philip got to Stevenson’s house, Pyle had subdued his victim, but he was still alive. Philip’s chivalric arrival was a deviation from the script, however—the whole point of the story, Pyle would insist at his trial, was that no one raised a hand to save Ole Andreson’s life (just as, he elaborated, Quentin’s family failed to come to his aid and Nick Carraway was complicit in the cover-up that led to Jay Gatsby’s death). At any rate, Pyle spent nearly an hour deciding how to proceed, finally electing to tie Philip to a chair and force him to watch; at the trial he would say that this seemed most “thematically consistent” with the story’s depiction of young Nick Adams as a passive witness to evil. Before he could kill Stevenson, however, BC arrived and saved the day—and, ironically, ruined his career.
Because it should have been a career-making case. He’d taken a pair of unconnected events separated by ten months and nearly five hundred miles and sniffed out the serialized crimes of a killer with a rather singular read on literature. He had gauged his target’s predilections so accurately that he’d been able to head him off before he could kill again. But unfortunately for BC, Sammy Caputo, the owner of the Summit Boxing Rink, got a little too excited by an FBI agent inquiring into a possible connection between organized crime and the boxers at his gym. He called the Star-Ledger in Newark and told a reporter that “a G-man” was about to “pinch a big-time gangster,” possibly a member of Jersey’s own DeCavalcante family. The reporter, cameraman in tow, had been on Stevenson’s front steps as BC led Pyle out in handcuffs, Stevenson following with a large gash on his forehead, and Philip Rothman staring up at the intrepid, insightful federal agent with worshipful eyes. BC would remember the flash forever, not because he sensed any foreboding in it, but because he hadn’t realized it was dark out. He had been so focused on capturing Pyle that he hadn’t noticed the sun had gone down, as if he had broken the case not with his eyes and ears but some other faculty that operated independently of his senses.