The Murder Room

“Do you know Bobby Urbin?”

Cockeyed Benny grunted. “Sure. He’s always in here.” Fleisher had never met Cinderella’s husband and didn’t have a photograph of him. He and Cockeyed Benny worked out a signal that evening. Fleisher would sit at a table with a drink, Benny would stand at the bar; when Bobby Urbin walked by, the bouncer would light a cigarette. Just as Urbin strolled by, Benny lit up, but at that moment some guy at the bar passed out, and a crowd formed. Cockeyed Benny waded into the crowd with Fleisher and tapped Urbin on the shoulder; Fleisher said, “FBI. I want to ask you some questions,” and hustled him out of the 222 and into a car. Fleisher sat in the back pumping Urbin with questions, while the street hustler put his hand inside Fleisher’s thigh.

I’ll let him do it to get the story, he thought, amused. He likes me, too. They all like me. But Urbin refused to talk about the Harbin murder. He had to let him go.

Frustrated, Fleisher went back to FBI headquarters and called Frank Mulvee, the Boston police detective assigned to the case, and told him Urbin had knowledge of the murder and marijuana in his apartment, a tip he had gleaned on the street.

The next morning, the police raided Urbin’s apartment; Urbin and Cinderella were both at home, and Mulvee called the FBI agent. Fleisher went to the apartment and tried to get Urbin to cooperate in the Harbin murder. “You don’t know anything,” Fleisher said. “I don’t believe you, and neither do the police. Why don’t you just take a polygraph?”

“Oh, Bobby, take the test,” Cinderella chimed in. Boston police took him to a private examiner; the polygraphist attached the blood-pressure cuff, the pneumograph tubes across the chest and abdomen, the electric sensor plates on the fingertips. Urbin answered a few questions, then ripped off all the instruments and ran out of the office. They had only one chart on him, but it showed clear deception.

Fleisher’s head was spinning. He had placed Sugarman, the finger man, in town, but nobody had seen the hit man Vorhauer; Vorhauer was a ghost. Brown’s people were scurrying like rats from a ship. The police couldn’t find Urbin. He had failed to get Harbin’s friends to talk. Finally he got the name of a dancer who knew Vicki intimately— Terri Emanuel, a gorgeous copper-toned young woman, half Filipino, half Cajun American, half man, half woman until recently; now Terri was as pretty as Cinderella. He put her at the top of his interview list.

That night he was at a bar with two friends, deputy agent in charge U.S. Marshal Mike Assad, and his brother Eddie, a Boston cop, when an extremely shapely woman walked by their table. The three bachelors whistled as they watched her go, then sucked in their breath for a moment of silent contemplation.

“You think she’s endowed,” Fleisher said, “you should have seen the knockout I interviewed at the Caribe the other night, Cinderella.”

“Cinderella, pretty name,” Mike said.

“She makes this one look like a schoolteacher, and she’s a guy.”

Mike and Eddie groaned.

“That’s strange,” Eddie said. “We had a job this morning, before dawn, a mysterious death of a woman and she was a he-she, too.”

“What was her name?”

“Terri Emanuel.”

“Jesus Christ!” Fleisher cried. “I’m supposed to interview her.”

After pressing Eddie for details, Fleisher left the table and called Mulvee from a pay phone. He agreed to meet the Boston detective at police headquarters. At two in the morning, the police report gave them the address where Emanuel’s body was found. She lived in an apartment with some guy named Art Nettles.

At three in the morning, they knocked on the door and Nettles cheerfully let them in. Art was a brunette, “half man, half woman, not finished with the operation,” Fleisher said. “She had boobs but didn’t have her winky removed yet.” Terri roomed with Art and slept on the sofa. Now Art sat on the sofa in a bathrobe left open to show off the new breasts and was glad to talk about Terri’s death.

Art and Terri had been frightened at an after-hours club by two very tough-looking Italian guys who wanted to take them home. They were relieved to get away from the men and back to their apartment. In the middle of the night they were awakened by the buzzer, and Art let the caller in. Through the crack in the door she saw the two Italian guys, who pushed their way in. One of them punched Art in the jaw; the other grabbed Terri, who always slept in the nude on the sofa, rolled her in a blanket, and ran out. Art had the presence of mind to yank the fire alarm. As the alarm sounded, the two goons dropped Terri and ran away. Terri and Art went back to sleep, adventure over. In the late morning, a dancer friend from Chicago called and asked Art, “How’s Terri? I had a dream about her and I smelled flowers. Is she all right?” Art went out to the sofa to wake Terri. She was dead. The ME had no idea what killed her.

The ME was a piece of shit, Mulvee said.

“Jesus,” Fleisher said. He had a feeling Bernie Brown was trying to erase all his witnesses. But he had nothing close to proof. He’d hit another wall.

That night, Cinderella called him. She wanted to talk. Yes, she confirmed, Vicki Harbin knew her life was in danger and was afraid; she was looking over her shoulder constantly. The week before she was killed, Harbin had an experience on the stage that terrified her. While dancing, she looked out and saw the big, ugly, scarred face of Jack Sugarman. Sugarman, who won the Navy Cross in World War II for killing 132 Japanese soldiers in one night on Guadalcanal, and whose face had been since rearranged by a baseball bat, was sitting in the pit watching her with a leering smile on his face. Seated next to Sugarman was Bernie Brown’s ace hit man, Hans Vorhauer. She knew them both. Vorhauer was expressionless. His wolf eyes stared through her as if she wasn’t there.

Scanlon thought Fleisher was “really shaking up the bushes,” but he didn’t feel he had a case until Cinderella cooperated.

Then, that summer of 1971, the FBI transferred Fleisher to Detroit; he was off the case.

Bender looked up from his coffee. “Man, that’s frustrating. Wow, I would have loved to have met Cinderella. Did you ever get Vorhauer?”

Fleisher scowled. “No. We trailed him all over Boston. He was in a lot of bars, but nothing we could nail down. Then in Detroit I got a call from an agent I’d been working with in Baltimore. He says, ‘Guess what? We got Vorhauer.’ ”

The FBI had received a tip that Vorhauer, a Most Wanted fugitive, was hiding out in Sugarman’s house in suburban Baltimore. Half a dozen FBI agents and police offers went to the house, heavily armed. Sugarman answered the door and let them in. A middle-aged man with red hair was sitting at the kitchen table, an arm’s length from a brown leather briefcase. None of the agents recognized him; they demanded identification. The man’s driver’s license and Social Security number said Joe Smith; his credit cards and club membership said Joe Smith. The last piece of paper in his wallet was a folded-up Western Union receipt documenting money wired to his mother, Barbara Vorhauer, in Hanau, Germany. Vorhauer’s disguise had fooled all of them. Agents arrested the hit man, and brought Sugarman to Boston for questioning. Sugarman flipped immediately to avoid charges of harboring a fugitive.

Bernie Brown paid Vorhauer $5,000 to kill Harbin, Sugarman said. Vorhauer scouted the dancer’s movements and knocked on her door in the evening after a show, the finger man said. She must have thought it was the bellhop with her bucket of ice; Vorhauer pushed his way in. He told Sugarman he stabbed Harbin three times in the heart.

The agents were lucky to arrest the hit man before he reached his brown briefcase. A .22-caliber silencer fired out of the side; there was a ring trigger on the handle. Vorhauer had taken Sugarman into a Baltimore grocery store, said, “Watch this,” and walked down the aisle shooting up the cereal boxes—pfff, pfff, pfff— with the briefcase and walked out calm as a banker on lunch hour. Nobody heard a thing. Vorhauer was a genius, Sugarman said, who created black-market weapons unequaled in the world.

“Vorhauer is a beast,” Bender said. He glanced over his shoulder as if he expected the hit man to be standing there. “That’s what I thought. He’s brilliant and he’s a psychopath. This will really help the bust.” He shifted uneasily in his seat.

Fleisher shook his head sadly. “We never did get him. Murder charges were never filed against Vorhauer. There wasn’t enough corroboration, and they let him go. We all have cases we wish we could go back in time and fix. That’s one of mine.”