The Murder Room

“No, only the blasting cap went off. Moisture might have got in it. It sounded like a cherry bomb, ripped up the seat, burned the guy’s ass, and scared the hell out of him. He was lucky.”

“So Vicki Harbin saw the handwriting on the wall and ran up to Boston and a new life in the Avery Hotel?”

“Right. The question is, what crawled out from under a rock and followed her? It’s the $64,000 question.”

“Nah,” Fleisher said. “It won’t cost that much.” He said he’d work his sources. “I bullshit with them all the time. They like me. Everybody likes me.” He grinned. “I don’t pay for it in the Combat Zone.”

Fleisher drove to the Bradford Hotel on Tremont Street. A Boston landmark built in the 1920s, the redbrick neoclassical hotel that was once “In the Heart of the City.” In the 1940s, big bands played on the rooftop and in Boston’s largest ballroom. Now the Bradford was a hooker hotel in the heart of a living hell.

Fleisher had learned from FBI agents in Baltimore that Brown had sent his enforcer, Jack Sugarman, up to Boston to find Harbin. Sugarman was a World War II Marine hero from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who came back from the war and ended up a gangster’s right-hand man. According to informants, Sugarman was the finger man—he went to Boston to find the dancer and point her out to the hit man. The hit man was Hans Vorhauer, whom Fleisher had never heard of. Baltimore said he was the best in the business. When the fax came in from the Baltimore office, Fleisher was chilled by the killer’s eyes in facsimile.

The Bradford was a sad twin sister to the nearby Avery. He figured it was the most likely place Sugarman would have stayed—if indeed the enforcer had come to Boston.

He would never stay in the Avery with the victim, and the Bradford is in the area of the Combat Zone, he thought to himself. A lot of hookers, pimps, and miscreants stay here.

“Hey, Bill, what do you want?” Paul, the hotel manager, a tall, balding man with stooped shoulders, stopped him near the elevators.

“I need to see the records.” Fleisher shook hands with the manager.

“More hookers?”

He nodded, but the manager had already turned around and was briskly leading him downstairs into a gloomy hallway. The hotel manager was a friend.

He’d helped Fleisher make his name working white-slavery cases. The White Slavery Act made transporting women across state lines for prostitution an interstate, or federal, crime. Along with tax violations, it was a favorite federal tool for tripping up gangsters; Lucky Luciano and Al Capone were arrested on white-slavery charges.

On one case, Fleisher had approached Paul with photographs, saying, “Have you seen these two women? I have a lead they’re hookers in town from Minneapolis.” To prevent the cops from zeroing in on them in their home cities, white slaves followed a circuit like a troupe—Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans.

“They’re here right now, come with me!” the manager had cried. He took the elevator to the fifth floor, then walked down the long hallway. Reaching their room, the manager had started banging on the door screaming, “Get out of my hotel, you whores!”

Now Paul led him to a small, dusty room and put three long cardboard banker’s boxes on a table in front of him. The boxes were stuffed with the hotel’s three-by-five registration cards, stacked and bundled with rubber bands. Fleisher riffled through three stacks of the cards for the previous month with great impatience, working rapidly.

Three weeks before the murder there was a chicken-scrawl signature reserving three nights: Jack Sugarman.

Two weeks before the murder, another three nights: Jack Sugarman.

The week of the murder, just one night: Jack Sugarman.

Bingo, he thought. I’ve got Sugarman in town. The first time he comes up from Baltimore to stake Vicki out, see what she’s doing. The second time, he works on her schedule, gets her hours and habits down. The third visit is brief—he points her out to Vorhauer. It would be trickier proving Vorhauer’s whereabouts. Vorhauer was a wanted fugitive and master of disguise; he would never have used his real name.

That evening Fleisher went to the dim, smoky cave of the Caribe Lounge, the best known of the Combat Zone’s nude bars. A young redhead was dancing on a small stage circled with men watching through clouds of cigarette smoke. The redhead would occasionally flash her G-string and pasties—total nudity was banned in Boston—but not with a cop in the room. George Tecci, the owner-manager, stopped him cold near the door.

“What do you want?” Tecci asked, his lip curled in distaste.

Fleisher took out his wallet and showed his badge. “FBI, I’m looking for Cinderella.”

“What about?”

“I want to talk to her about the murder of Vicki Harbin, who danced at 222.” He showed Tecci a portrait photograph of the dancer, a brunette with a round, aging face. As the manager led him downstairs to the dressing rooms, a tall woman in her twenties, at least six feet in heels, blond and buxom, came walking toward them with a leonine grace that took his breath away. She was the sexiest woman Fleisher had ever seen, and when he studied her face, one of the prettiest.

“Cinderella, this fellow wants to talk to you,” Tecci said. She smiled—she had high and delicate cheekbones, and her smile was dazzling. The eyes were big and blue and brittle. Fleisher took the portrait out of his folder.

“I understand you were a friend of Vicki Harbin’s?” Cinderella’s smile disappeared as she led him to her dressing room.

“I don’t know anything.”

They sat in the mirror lights, so close Fleisher breathed her scent, and he gave her his warmest, most sympathetic smile. She was a knockout and she was sweet and she liked him; he could feel it behind the hard eyes. Their legs were almost touching. She had incredible legs. He looked closer in the hazy light and focus returned like a blow to the head—Her Adam’s apple is the size of Johnny Appleseed’s, he thought. Her hands are as big as Sonny Liston’s. A fantasy about a he-she, he thought, could wake you up like twenty-four ounces of cold coffee.

When had she last seen Harbin?

Her eyes were dead. “I don’t know anything.”

Was Harbin afraid of Bernie Brown?

“I don’t know anything.”

Had she seen these two men? He took out the faxed photos of Sugarman and Vorhauer.

“I don’t know anything.” It sounded like a mantra to an empty universe.

Fleisher knew it would be difficult. According to his sources, Cinderella’s husband was Bobby Urbin, a doorman for Bernie Brown. He watched the gangster’s door in Baltimore and “ran a card game for some wise guys in Boston,” Fleisher said. He and Cinderella traveled the circuit together.

“You don’t know anything, but now you know this. Let me show you what they did to your friend Vicki.”

He reached into the folder for the close-up of Harbin with the knife wounds in her heart.

Cinderella let out a small gasp and put a hand over her mouth; the big blue eyes were moist.

“I’m trying to find out who killed Vicki. Here’s my name and number. Call me if you want to help.” She said nothing as he gave her his card and left.

It was time, he thought as he got in his car, to put pressure on Cinderella and her husband.

At ten that night, he drove to the 222 Club. The bouncer—a squat, heavyset man, five foot three inches tall and nearly as wide—stopped him at the door. He wore thick glasses on a pudgy round face, had hair dyed a shade too dark, a cigarette hung on fleshy lips, and had a blackjack in his back pocket. One of his brown eyes wandered in the socket like a satellite to the moon face.

“Cockeyed Benny,” Fleisher said in greeting. They shook hands warmly. “I’m looking into the murder of Vicki Harbin, and I’m looking for these guys.” He held up photos of Sugarman and Vorhauer.

Cockeyed Benny nodded at the picture of Sugarman. “He was here.” Sugarman left the 222 with a hooker, Benny said; he’d watched them walk out. He took her back to the Bradford, and “he paid her with a check that bounced.”