Kool and let the silence develop.
Bender leaned forward into the vacuum, speaking faster and with great enthusiasm.
“Rich, why don’t you come talk to the marshals tonight? I can set it up.”
“I’m afraid not, dear boy. It’s well known I won’t have my libations at the hotel bar interrupted.”
Bender laughed again. Walter took a long draw on a cigarette and turned inward.
At six the next morning, Walter shot out of a deep sleep in his hotel room. The telephone was ringing.
“Hi, Rich!” Bender sounded like he’d had five cups of coffee.
“The marshals want to meet with you today!”
Walter went to breakfast at the Downhome Diner with Bender and Tom Rappone, head of the U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force in Philadelphia, to discuss the Nauss case. Bender played a trick on the somber psychologist. “You’ve got to try scrapple, Rich. It’s a classic Pennsylvania delicacy. You’ll love it.”
“What is it?”
“Meat.” The artist grinned.
Walter looked down at the odiferous brown extrusion of last-chance pork parts, snarled, and pushed his plate a foot away as Bender exploded in schoolyard laughter. Walter quietly took in black coffee and a cigarette, turning a hard flat gaze on the boisterous clown who seemed to be forcing his way into his life. “I was not pleased.”
At four that afternoon, the thin man sat in a conference room at the marshals’ office at Sixth and Market streets with Bender. With them at the table were Rappone and two other deputies.
“Listen up,” Rappone said.
Walter looked down at a yellow pad filled with scribbled notes, and cleared his throat.
“I’ve conducted a brief crime assessment of the Nauss murder,” he said. “Nauss was a closet case in the motorcycle gang in that he was very high up, but he also wanted to be in the mob, a promotion as it were. He had a middle-class background, and he’s going to be a little brighter than your average semi-organized PA killer and he’s going to be clever. He’s going to clean himself up a little bit, be not as scruffy; he’ll have more options available to him.”
Walter looked down at his pad. “Frank Bender is right. He’ll be clean-cut and living in the suburbs. He’ll be married to a compliant woman who has no idea about his past, and present a wholesome image to the community.”
Bender beamed like the father of a newborn son. “I agree with Rich. I think Nauss will be clean-shaven, short-haired, and living in suburbia,” he said. “He’s come from a good family and I think he’ll go back to what he’s known.”
The marshals exchanged doubtful looks across the table. One deputy pointed out that their few leads were consistent with a biker lifestyle. The marshals had set up a cabin in the Poconos for several weeks following a tip that the biker was hiding out in the Pennsylvania mountains. They followed another tip to a Western state, and set up surveillance across from a motorcycle parts distributor, with no luck.
Dennis Matulewicz, one of the lead agents, frowned. “I don’t know about this. A biker is a biker is a biker.”
Walter cleared his throat. “Not only is Frank right that Nauss is hiding in the suburbs, I have some idea what suburbs.”
Rappone leaned forward, his voice nearly caught in his throat. “How do you know that?”
Walter that morning had called the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, with 5,600 inmates, the world’s largest penal institution. The massive 1934-era prison complex, known as “Jacktown,” was one of the most notorious and feared of American prisons. Riots in the 1950s and 1970s had killed a guard and injured dozens of guards and inmates. Walter had recently started working there as a prison psychologist, counseling and evaluating the most depraved criminals in the state.
He had spoken on the telephone that morning with an inmate who had been a member of Nauss’s Pennsylvania motorcycle gang.
A heavy silence came over the table.
“Those guys never talk,” a deputy said.
Walter nodded. “Quite true. It is a fact that a gang member, a criminal biker, is a very rigid, power-based personality. As such he is extremely loyal and pathological in how he counts on the group. He has rigid standards and principles.” Walter paused and raised his eyebrow for dramatic effect. “But one can use that rigidity against him.” The marshals fell silent, waiting.
“I made the point that Nauss had shot somebody,” Walter said. “OK, fine, a real man can shoot someone. But he had shot and killed them in front of their child. It’s not macho to kill people in front of their children. It’s not a good thing; he’d broken a rule. And I used that to break apart the biker’s loyalties. Nauss was not living up to biker standards, Nauss was a bad guy, he’d done bad things, he’d not lived by the code a man must live by. I undermined Nauss’s masculinity to get the guy to talk.”
Walter smiled coldly. “I will sometimes sleep with the devil to get what I want. As it happens, Nauss is living somewhere in Michigan.”
Walter picked up several photographs of Nauss. He noted that the biker always wore a shirt that was patterned on one side and not the other. “It’s part of the personality type. He’s a black and white guy; there are no grays. I’ll tell you that when you find him in Michigan, Nauss will be driving a black Cadillac.”
Rappone’s brow crinkled in puzzlement. “How do you know that?”
“Ah,” Walter said. “Fair enough. We know he liked Cadillacs in the past. Cadillacs are prestige cars and he is a power guy who wants prestige and is cleaning up. Particularly rigid types like dark cars. Given his killer instincts it’d be either white or black, and he’d go for black. It’s declarative, pureness and evil at the same time.”
The faces around the table fell open with something like awe.
Bender’s grin grew wider. The marshals planned to present his finished bust of Nauss to
“It’s not wizardry,” Walter said later as they left the federal building. “It’s all a matter of probabilities. I’ve been around the block a few times.”
“Rich,” Bender said, “you can read criminals’ minds the way I read women.”
Walter’s face darkened around a scowl as Bender’s laugh rang down the gray canyon of Market Street.
In February 1988,
Assuming he was still alive, the escaped prisoner and convicted killer remained at large.
• CHAPTER 15 •
THE RELUCTANT KNIGHT-ERRANT
Richard Walter was sitting in his small, classical white house in Lansing, Michigan, sipping wine and listening to opera in the civilizing presence of his antiques. The scowling, life-size samurai warrior, sword raised to attack, was a particular favorite. He was recalling his chat that day with a serial killer when the telephone rang, and he frowned.
Walter had been promoted to the largest walled prison in the world, the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, from the desolate castle prison on Lake Superior. The high-tech prison gave him remarkable power over the inmates. He could turn off their hot showers by a remote switch, or put them on a diet of “Prison Loaf ”—all their meals blended and baked into a hard, tasteless brick. “You will learn to control yourself or I will control you,” he told them. Control gave him satisfaction, victory over chaos, and thus he found the voice on the telephone disconcerting. It blasted through the line, as loud and excited as a television car pitchman.
“Rich!”
