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.”
CHAPTER 3. THE KNIGHTS OF THE CAFÉ TABLE
After lunch, the VSMs exited the eighteenth-century tavern and hurried across the narrow and cobbled streets, making connections to Arizona, England, Egypt, France, and beyond; Fleisher, Bender, and Walter walked to a coffee shop on the corner. “Murder will out,” Chaucer wrote in The Canterbury Tales. “This is my conclusion.” But real life, Walter was fond of saying, was never so easy.
“That’s bullshit!” Fleisher said to his partners as heads turned to their small table. “LeHavre is an innocent man until we prove otherwise. It’ll take a lot more than intuition to convince the police.” The big man’s bearded face was flushed; in political infighting as during interrogations he was an overwhelming and mercurial force, bully, teddy bear, jokester, loyal friend, withering skeptic, con man, tickling feather-a needle poking for truth until it bled.
Vidocq Society cases were chosen by the founders in consultation with the society’s board of directors. The board included an assistant U.S. attorney, a naval intelligence officer, the security director of Sun Oil Company, an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent, a Philadelphia homicide detective, and an English professor specializing in Shakespeare and literary analysis of bomb threats and suicide notes. But Fleisher was board president as well as commissioner. He had masterfully steered through a quarter century of federal bureaucracy; no case went forward without his blessing.
Bender’s balding head reddened as it did when his paranormal revelations were questioned, which was almost always among world-weary cops. “Bill, I know the killer was LeHavre,” Bender said. “I know it. Remember our first meeting, in the old Navy yard, this guy got up and spoke and I said, ‘He’s a Russian spy. I can feel it.’ And I was right!”
Fleisher rolled his eyes, while Walter peered down his horn-rimmed glasses at the artist as if appraising a new species. “Frank, in this case you may be right, but keep your day job. There’s no structure to your thinking. You’re like a fart in a bathtub!” The thin man snorted with derision as Bender’s crimson deepened. Fleisher laughed and slowly shook his head.
Fleisher marveled at the forces that brought them together, and constantly threatened to tear them apart. By combining his partners’ deduction and intuition with his own leadership and investigative skills, they formed a tripartite Great Detective with skills seldom found in one man.
“Richard is our Sherlock Holmes,” Fleisher said with genuine admiration. “He has the greatest deductive ability I’ve ever seen. As for Frank, only God can explain the things he does. Me, I’m just a fat Jewish kid who grew up reading true-crime comics and dreaming of being a detective.”
It was fitting, Fleisher thought, that the idea of the great American detective was born in Philadelphia, just a few miles from where they sat-in a brownstone off Spring Garden Street, where Edgar Allan Poe, in 1841, created the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the first fictional detective-C. Auguste Dupin.
It was a new character type, which Poe is said to have borrowed from the life of Vidocq, whose memoirs, allegedly ghost-written by his friend Balzac, were an 1829 bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The new type was a darkly eccentric, deductive genius who outsmarted the police. Dupin possessed “a peculiar analytic ability… He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its exercise… He boasted… with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs…” This was Vidocq’s life, and the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes and all fictional sleuths to follow.
It was an archetype made flesh in Richard Walter.
“You have to be on your game to beat me, Frank, and Bill,” Walter said. “If you knock us off our feet we’ll walk on our knees. If you knock us off our knees we’ll walk on our balls-and our balls have calluses.”
Now Fleisher scowled at his partners.
“There’s a reason a case is cold for many years. This isn’t TV. You need the family support, police commitment, the political winds blowing your way,” he said, counting them off on the fingers of a raised hand. “You need investigative brilliance-and you need luck. You got about one out of five in this case.”
Walter glared at Fleisher. The psychologist and federal agent complemented each other well, but their differences could be sharp along a philosophical fault line. Walter considered Fleisher a brilliant lawman but naïve about the nature of evil; Fleisher admired Walter’s cold eye for evil, yet the thin man’s Machiavellian view of human nature oppressed Fleisher’s generous heart and hopes for redemption for all men.
Typical Fleisher, Walter thought now, utterly conventional.
Walter looked over at Bender, who seemed to have entirely forgotten about the case, his attention having drifted elsewhere. Bender was brooding over his espresso, his light hazel eyes in the middle distance, where laughter sounded at a table of young women. Fleisher, following his partner’s eyes, quipped, “If I ever stop getting excited about that, shoot me.” Bender returned from his reverie and chuckled.
Walter, with his uncompromising, antiquated code of honor, considered Bender a knight of opposite color-a man who honored little but his own desires, with nearly sociopathic cunning. Yet together Bender and Walter saw around corners that other detectives, Fleisher included, did not. It was the impish Bender, a wizard with the gift of seeing the past and the future, who had brought the three men together and ever conspired to bust them apart. Bender was narcissistic, manipulative, well named; he bent rules and time, the boundaries of the grave and the connubial bed. “Frank,” Walter said, “is a shit stirrer. He thinks our motto is ‘One for all and all for one, and that’s me!’ ”
But nothing happened without Bender, or Walter, or Fleisher. No case went forward without accord between the three. Now they reminded themselves that they couldn’t solve every case. They had no formal subpoena, arrest, or investigative powers; their goal was merely to offer advice and counsel to the police and victims of crime who needed it. “If we help move a case along, we’ve done our job,” Fleisher repeated. In fact, wasn’t the idea originally to be a social club for detectives? To have fun?
By the time they had reached the grounds in their cups, Walter and Bender had decided that Antoine LeHavre, if he had indeed done it, was free to get away with murder as far as they were concerned.
PART TWO. FOUR BOYS