The Murder Room

hell.

But Weinstein couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing. None of them could. The detectives were speculating that a mother or father, poor and pushed to the edge, had lost control during a bath and had been surprised trying to give the only burial they could afford. The dead boy somehow represented something beyond their grasp.

Criminals were changing. Everything was changing. Philadelphia had watched Pat Boone sing at President Eisenhower’s inaugural ball the month before, and next month thousands of fans would crowd an Elvis Presley concert in Philadelphia. Everywhere the old order was dying, the new being born. The month before, the actor Humphrey Bogart, an icon of traditional masculinity, had died in Los Angeles the same week the Wham-O company made the first Frisbee for a new and liberated generation. Powerful new currents were upwelling, like an ocean turning over. Freedom and authenticity were the watchwords of the coming Age of Aquarius. Old injustices were being addressed, old boundaries smashed, deep longings unleashed.

Killers were exploring new freedoms, finding deeper and more authentic selves, too.

The patrolman looked into the small blue eyes, the dull orbs reflecting his own, and was overcome by a sadness tempered by thoughts he couldn’t explain. “I saw so much pain and terror there,” he said. The little face seemed to cry out to him. “Why did this happen? Why would someone do this to me?”

His eyes met Palmer’s again with shared emotion: We’ll get the S.O.B., no matter what it takes.

But who was the S.O.B.? What was the answer? Weinstein was a proud man, and it was difficult for him to admit, “I don’t have an answer for that.” He sensed he might never have the answer; it was beyond him. He felt shattered.

The ambulance door slammed shut, and Weinstein looked up at the gray February sky and the rain falling over the field.

• CHAPTER 5 •

COPS AND ROBBERS

The first boy put nickels in the chrome slot and sighed with pleasure as the small glass door opened on a slice of pie. His father turned the crank of the ornate chrome “liquid machine,” and coffee streamed from a dolphin’s head copied from a Pompeian fountain. Dinner with his father at the Horn and Hardart in Philadelphia, America’s first fast-food restaurant, was a special treat.

The Automat is cool, he thought. It was a dazzling display of modern technology as impressive to him as the transistor radio and his father’s electric watch. A clean, orderly glass palace of meat loaf and macaroni and cheese, the Automat inspired an Irving Berlin theme song, “Let’s Get Another Cup of Coffee.” His dad whistled it during the Great Depression, and now it was the jingle for the TV show Father Knows Best.

William (Billy) Fleisher looked forward to Saturday all week long. Saturday mornings in 1957 he went shopping with his mother. But later in the day he got to be with his father, ride with him in the big 1953 Buick sedan to pick up the early edition of the Sunday papers. His father was Dr. Herbert Fleisher, a Navy dentist who came back from the war and opened dental offices in the Nash Building. His father was brilliant, a tall, dark-haired, handsome man who was a double for the actor Robert Taylor. Billy saw him as Lancelot opposite Ava Gardner as Guinevere in the 1953 movie Knights of the Round Table. Herbert Fleisher was named “Philadelphia’s Best-Dressed Man” by the Bulletin. Nearly everybody read the Bulletin, and everybody respected Herbert Fleisher. Billy wanted to be just like him.

His father sat across from him in his suspenders and spats, reading the Sunday Bulletin. Billy had his favorite frizzled beef and creamed spinach. His father was six foot three; Billy was five foot three and had five more inches to go.

“You’re behaving like a bum,” his father said.

Billy cringed as if from a blow, but he loved to listen to his father. His father talked about his important friends at the Celebrity Room. Lawyers. Politicians. Entertainers. Horseplayers. Bookmakers. Craps players. The nightclub was owned by his good friend and patient, the beautiful showgirl Lillian Reis, “Tiger Lil.” Tiger Lil’s boyfriend was famous gangster Ralph “Junior” Staino, ringleader of the famous K & A gang, from right here in Kensington and Allegheny in Philadelphia, the classiest burglary outfit in the country. They wore suits and ties on their jewel jobs.

Tiger Lil was accused of masterminding the $478,000 heist of Pottsville coal baron John B. Rich, but was found innocent after the star witnesses against her drowned and died in a car explosion. She had nice teeth, his father said.

“You’re acting like a loser,” his father said.

His mother, Esther, often told him what his father said when she told him she was pregnant, a joke they loved at the club. “You have a son and daughter, what do you want now?” His dad responded, “I’d prefer a German shepherd.”

Billy was a mistake after Ellis and Gloria. Ellis was six foot three, too, tall and handsome and smart like his father. “You take after my grandmother,” his father said. She was four foot eleven.

His father was right. He was a punk. “You’re an embarrassment to me,” his father said. Billy was a poor student, always talking back, always getting into fights. He didn’t do the things the other kids did. He didn’t follow the Phillies, didn’t read school books or watch TV. He hated Leave It to Beaver. His father didn’t take him to temple services. He didn’t have any interests except reading detective magazines.

On Saturday mornings before his mother took him to the market, he played with his cousins Mark and Glenn. “We’d play until we ended up beating each other up, go out and throw firecrackers on someone’s stoop, shoot a match gun at an ant colony, that kind of thing.” His cousins were his only friends. I could eat nickels and shit out quarters all day and nobody would like me, he thought.

The sidewalk was dark as they walked to the Buick. There were shadows in the city even at night, deeper shadows in alleys and the recesses of doors. When Billy was younger, his mother would scare him by saying, “Seymour Levin will get you if you don’t behave!”

Seymour Levin was a fat pimply kid with glasses who used to live in the neighborhood, and everyone was still afraid of him. On January 9, 1949, the sixteen-year-old Levin went with twelve-year-old Ellis Simons to see A Night at the Opera at the movies, then brought his friend home to play with his chemistry set. Ellis took one look at it and said, “I have better test tubes at home.” Seymour was very fond of his chemistry set. They got in a fight and test-tube glass was everywhere. Seymour got a kitchen knife, made Ellis undress, sodomized him, and then stabbed him more than fifty times through the heart and face and back and all over his body. He tied Ellis’s hands and feet with laundry cord and dragged the body through the house and backyard and dumped it behind the garage.

Seymour could get out of jail at any time.

The police said there was not a drop of blood left in Ellis Simons’s body.

Billy’s mother was cool to him, but not uninvolved like his father.

That Saturday, she left him alone in the Penn Fruit Company market. She went down one of the aisles to do the shopping, leaving him standing there. Billy knew horror stories of what happened to kids left alone at markets. The famous one was Steven Damman, whose mother left him with a stick of licorice to watch the baby at a Long Island grocery store; when she came out the stroller and the baby were there, but Steven and his licorice were gone, and never seen again.

Billy wasn’t afraid. He was older than Damman and could take care of himself, and he loved the trip to the market. He’d lose himself savoring the perfumed air of apples, pears, oranges, and potatoes stacked high on the counters; he’d forget where he was. It was “the greatest smell in the world” because it reminded him of his grandfather Sol, Philadelphia’s largest potato and onion wholesaler. Billy’s grandfather was his best friend, an oasis of love and safety.

Sol’s full name was Solomon Tredwell, but everyone called him “Smiling Jim, the Potato King.” Sol was a gregarious character who had taken the nickname “Smiling Jim” from a handsome Philadelphia mounted policeman