Frank said he wasn’t afraid of death. “I can’t say, ‘Wow, I wish I had done this or that,’ because I realize what I’ve done. If I go in eight months, I’ll still feel fulfilled.” Death wasn’t something foreign; he’d had his hands on the Reaper for years. And there was a lot of good karma waiting for him wherever it was he was going.
“My father would rather see a victim identified than make money,” their daughter Lisa Brawner, forty-four, told the Inquirer. “It drives my mother crazy, but I know when he gets to heaven, people will be lining up to thank him.”
“In all my dreams,” he said, “the dead protect me.”
That night in the mansion, with the lights and the music floating out over the river, it still all seemed like a dream to him. A friend, VSM Barb Cohan-Saavedra, the former assistant U.S. attorney, warmly congratulated him on his award. She said she always thought of him as a wizard.
“We always knew you were Merlin,” Fleisher quipped. “I’m glad somebody announced it officially from the podium tonight.”
A speaker had told them that men, and now women, had met at round tables to battle evil for a thousand years. There was evidence for a historical King Arthur. Yet, why, he asked, had the Arthurian tales featured three men? Why had these archetypes lasted for ten centuries? Looking at Fleisher, Bender, and Walter, he said there was always in the old stories a wounded king struggling to save the wasteland; his right-hand knight to destroy evil; and the wizard, Merlin, a seer who introduces the life of the spirit, transcendence of good and evil, but is bewitched and finally entrapped by women. Bender grinned, and laughter rippled in the room.
Why did the king keep the seat next to him empty? It was the Perilous Seat, fatal to all but a knight worthy of the journey, who could claim the Holy Grail. More laughter. Fleisher, they knew, kept the seat next to him at the round table empty as a memorial to his late brother-in-law Sal. “That was Sal’s seat, and I loved him. There was nobody like Sal.”
“It’s perfect!” Cohan-Saavedra said. “Frank is Merlin. Richard is Lancelot, and Bill is the Fisher King.” She turned to Bender. “Frank, next year you’ll have to come dressed in a long robe and a tall wizard’s hat.”
“If I make it next year.”
She hadn’t heard. He told her his news, and she didn’t hesitate a second. “Frank, you’ll make it.”
Two men stood nearby, at the edge of the conversation. One short, one tall, both white-haired. Kelly and McGillen were quiet that night. Their table felt empty. Weinstein was gone, having died quietly in his sleep on his seventy-eighth birthday, and Earl Palmer, too. The Vidocq Society Boy in the Box investigative team was the two of them now. Life was pills, prayers, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They were slowing down. But they didn’t stop.
There was a gentle wistfulness about the two old Irishmen, but they were ironweed stubborn. They declined to share the police skepticism about Mary. They had finally talked to the owner of Mary’s old house, who was terrified about what her children and the neighbors would think, into letting them see the basement.
On a fall day when the children were at school, Kelly, McGillen, Detective Augustine, and two police crime technicians arrived at the house in two unmarked cars. The basement walls, floor, and drain seemed just as Mary described. So did the side door that led outside, blocked by shrubs as it opened onto the driveway. Kelly took pictures and the crime tech measured everything. “Those beams show where the coal bin used to be,” said Kelly, who’d tended a coal furnace as a child. “Do you see?” Extra ceiling beams formed a rectangle that looked like it once supported the walls of a coal bin. Augustine said they could go ahead and dig into oil company or real estate records to see if the house once had a coal furnace, but it didn’t matter if they proved that, too. It just didn’t add up. The police closed the case. The old men of the Vidocq Society smiled and nodded, but they knew in their hearts that Mary told the truth.
“We see the boy in three weeks, Bill,” Kelly reminded Bill Fleisher. “The fifty-second year.”
It was just the three of them now at the grave every Veterans Day, the anniversary of the reburial. The park cemetery was gray in the fall, but they brought armfuls of bright flowers. They stood at the tombstone and said a few words to one another and to God. Then they took pictures standing together behind the stone. There were years of pictures like a family album, once five and now three of them standing with the boy in their fedoras and military caps and autumn smiles, guardians of something nameless. It was a private ceremony; the media and public were not invited. They were carrying on Rem Bristow’s thirty-seven years of work, the blue unbroken line. Sometimes Kelly went alone, an errand of joy. The old man leaned down and kissed the stone. “I’ll see you soon, Jonathan.”
Fleisher wasn’t convinced that Mary had told the truth. But he believed “we’re going to get it. The case is solvable.”
Walter wrinkled his nose, as if he smelled sentimentality. “I know who killed the Boy in the Box,” he said, “and Mary’s mother isn’t it.” Walter said it was the young college student who discovered the boy but delayed reporting it for days because the cops had already been hassling him about being a Peeping Tom. The cops at the time couldn’t have understood the significance of the sexual perversion, the signs of the pathology in the suspicious man who discovered the body.
The student admitted he’d spied on the unwed mothers of the Good Shepherd Home, Walter said, and the newspapers in the 1950s didn’t publish the rest of the story: Hidden behind the tree line the young man masturbated as he watched the women across the street. “First, the guy’s an admitted liar and he’s a pervert. The police gave him a rough time about the peeping, but nothing came of it.” With his sexual perversion, he had already entered the Helix, the “House of Sadism.” He was on the growth curve of the sadistic killer.
“This is the guy who found the body,” Walter said. “I don’t believe in coincidences. As it happens, he’s still alive. He’s in his eighties. He’s had a long time to revel in the memory of raping and killing the boy. In fact, he’s still taking pleasure from it. The murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is.”
Fleisher looked over his shoulder to make sure no society women or laymen were in earshot. The Murder Room had unexpectedly rematerialized in the foyer of the Pen Ryn. Sexual sadism hadn’t been on the menu.
“Joe, I’ve got a job for you.” Walter turned to his friend Joe O’Kane, the burly, bearded crooner, poet, and federal agent. “I know where the killer lives. Are you game?”
O’Kane tonight had been singing sad Irish songs he wrote himself to a lovely blond woman, singing with a power that caused her to hold his hand, close her eyes, and tremble with the ancient trails of the O’Kanes. His eyes gleamed with Tullamore Dew, “the milk of my race.”
“I’m there,” O’Kane said in his strong tenor.
Walter had a simple plan. They’d park the Crown Vic on the crowded block in the small eastern Pennsylvania city. He saw it in his mind’s eye. He and the hulking O’Kane would knock on the row house door. An old man, living alone, would peek over the chain, white-haired, probably decrepit and smelling of booze, face tight.
The killer would most assuredly refuse to invite them in. With O’Kane behind him, Walter would set aside his Victorian manners. There was a child to remember, a child who would be a man of fifty-five now, probably a husband and father. It didn’t matter how many years had passed, who forgot or remembered that the boy had ever existed, what the movies and TV news said, who cared or who didn’t. There was fundamental decency at stake. “One is never too old to do the right thing.” He would push his way in, decline a seat if offered. His face would become stone, the prison stare he’d developed in Michigan long ago. Unsmiling, his eyebrow raised up like a blade, he would say, “My dear fellow, it’s high past time you and I had a man-to-boy chat.”