Murder in Alphabet City - 3. Chapter 3

Theresa and Gustav graduated from CCNY four years earlier. Ken found their high school yearbook extremely helpful, so he hoped that their college yearbook would be even more revealing. He took a chance on one of his hunches and revisited the crime scene. Ken’s hunches were generally spot-on, and he found Gustav’s college yearbook on a bookshelf.

The book did not reveal anything untoward to the veteran detective, but he noticed something interesting. The four middle pages of the book consisted of a collage formed from pictures taken of the graduates over their four-year stint at the college. The uncaptioned pictures did not identify any of the people. Ken could only find two pictures of Theresa Sachs, and one picture of Gustav Hamm. In Theresa’s case she looked pretty cozy with the same boy in both pictures, and he wasn’t Gustav. The picture of Gustav showed him crossing the finish line at the New York City Marathon.

Ken went to the pictures of the graduates. He tried to match the boy in the pictures with Theresa to one of the graduates, but he couldn’t make a positive identification.

Cal Davenport said that Theresa and Gustav had been an item all through high school. So, what happened in college? It appears that Theresa had a different boyfriend, or she could be covering for yet another gay student. Nevertheless, she and Gustav got together again after college. Could the boy in the pictures with Theresa be a person of interest? Ken couldn’t deal with it at that moment. He whipped out his cell phone and took a photo of both pictures in which Theresa appeared with the unknown boy. He planned on putting the boy’s picture through sophisticated facial recognition programs back in forensics.

The facial recognition program came up blank, and everything else seemed to lead to nowhere.

The police investigation seemed to be coming up empty handed, and Tom and George expressed their disappointment to each other. They wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but they even questioned Ken’s ability as an investigator. Ken was not to blame. Since no crime had been committed in Miss Sachs’s apartment, Ken could not examine or remove anything from Theresa’s apartment until he received permission from the courts. The permission for legal entry was exceptionally slow in coming. Tom and George didn’t have the patience to wait until Ken got his search warrant. They decided to play detective and scour Theresa’s apartment for any clues to her murder.

The first Saturday after the semester ended, the boys didn’t have to begin work at Burger King until 4 PM. They could do whatever they wanted to all morning and the early afternoon. At the end of the day, they had to clean up the store, and would not be free to go home until 11 PM, or even as late as 11:30.

That morning, they got up at dawn and took a bus to Alphabet City. They went to Theresa’s building and found the super. Tom began to cry crocodile tears.

“I’m Theresa’s brother,” he sobbed. “I need to get a few family mementos from my dead sister’s apartment,” he told the super. “Please let me into her apartment.”

Unlike the yellow tapes at Gustav’s apartment, this apartment was clear. No crime had been committed there, or at least it could not be determined that a crime had been committed on these premises.

Once again Tom’s beautiful face and his phony tears so moved the super that he let the boys in.

“The door is self-locking,” he informed them. “Just close it when you leave.”

“You should be an actor instead of a detective,” George giggled as soon as the super was gone.

The boys put on surgical gloves they had purchased at Walgreen’s. Tom headed for the bedroom, and George headed for the bathroom. If someone had secrets, they reckoned that the bedroom and bathroom would be where they were hidden. George struck out, but Tom hit the ball out of the park.

He went directly to a desk in Theresa’s bedroom. He opened the middle drawer, and he spotted a bunch of letters. He glanced quickly at one of them. The unsigned letter looked strange to Tom. It had been typed on an ancient typewriter, and he was unfamiliar with the font. The writer boldly threatened to kill Theresa and Gustav if she didn’t dump Gustav and return to him. Tom didn’t have time to read all the letters, so he just stuffed them in his backpack.

He opened the top drawer on the right, and he found a diary. He could see that Theresa made entries in it until the Thursday before Memorial Day. He stuffed the journal in his backpack along with the letters. The two boys quickly examined the rest of the apartment and couldn’t find anything more of interest. They made sure that they left the apartment as neat as they found it and bolted out of there.

When they got home, an incredibly angry Joe confronted them. “Where have you guys been? I called you down for breakfast, and you weren’t here.”

“We decided to celebrate the end of school,” Tom lied, “and we had breakfast out.”

Tom had a talent for lying, but Joe could smell a liar a mile away. He wanted to lash out at the boys, but he remembered that he would be celebrating his thirty-third birthday next week. He thought they might have slipped out to buy him a birthday present. They both wore backpacks, where a present could be hidden. The flaw in his reasoning was that neither boy knew when he celebrated his birthday. They hadn’t lived with him long enough to know when his or Ken’s birthday was.

Joe decided to soften his anger and his fear. “That’s okay,” he said, “but you scared the hell out of me. Next time you do something nuts like that, please let me know.”

“Sorry,” they both murmured together, and bounded upstairs to their room. Joe went into his office and closed the door.

They read the letters first. Every one of them was a clear threat to do bodily harm to Gustav and Theresa, but especially to Gustav. Unfortunately, the unsigned letters did not reveal the writer’s name.

The diary was another story. The journal began shortly after Theresa graduated from college. She noted that she was fearful that ‘Bart’ was going to do harm to Gustav, and maybe to her. She expressed that fear for several months, and then she revealed that ‘Bart’ had stopped threatening her, and now she could love Gustav with all her heart. Finally, about three weeks before the fatal and fateful Memorial Day Weekend, Theresa revealed that the threats had begun again. In the last journal entry, she said that ‘Bart’ was ruining the romantic weekend that she and Gustav had planned. She also stated that she was going to take out a restraining order against him the very day after she returned from the trip.

“None of the letters are signed,” George pointed out. How did she know it was someone named “Bart?”

“I don’t know. We’ll just have to accept that she knew. We’ve got to get all this to Ken,” Tom said, “but we promised to let Joe know when we leave the house. If we leave together, Joe will ask too many questions. You stay here, and I’ll tell him that I have to return some books to the library.”

“He’ll never believe you,” George said. “You do all your reading on the internet.”

“I’ll just have to take the chance. I want to get this to Ken ASAP, and not wait until we get home from work tonight. Maybe Joe doesn’t know that I do all my reading on the internet.”

Apparently, Joe didn’t know.

“Okay,” he said as Tom left the house, but keep your eye on the clock. Remember you have to be at work by 4 PM.”

Tom ran to the police station and made a bee line to Ken’s cubicle. He dumped all his evidence on Ken’s desk. After a quick perusal of the new evidence, Ken asked, “Where did you get this?”

“I can’t tell you, and you don’t want to hear. Let’s just say you received it anonymously.” The words were barely out of his mouth, when he ran out of the station, and headed for home.

After Tom left, Ken read the letters and the diary very carefully. He now knew that someone named Bart had threatened the unhappy lovers. He also reckoned that Bart was the boy with Theresa at school functions, because all the pictures in the collage were taken at college events. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean that Bart was a student at the college. He might just have been Theresa’s date.

He wanted to call the school and request that they fax over a list of the graduates from the year Theresa graduated, and for the three prior years, but he didn’t. He reminded himself that the fax might take too long to get to him, so he decided to visit CCNY himself. He was lucky enough to get a cab right in front of the precinct.

He arrived at the administrative office, flashed his badge, and told the clerk what he needed to see.

“Sure,” the clerk said, and she led him to a computer. She sat down first, clicked on a few icons, and the roster of graduates from Theresa’s year popped up on the screen.

“When you’re done with this year,” she instructed, “click on this icon (she pointed), enter a year, and you’ll get the whole roster from that year.”

Ken still dwelled in the mid-twentieth century when it came to technology. He never realized that the school could have transmitted this information to him in seconds. Well, the records were available to him now, so he got to work the old-fashioned way.

He found no Barts in the year that the doomed lovers graduated, but in the year before that, he found a Bart Pearl, and in the year before that, he found a Barton Smythe-Murray. There were no Barts in the third year back.

At his request, the clerk produced the printed yearbooks of the years that Bart and Barton graduated. Ken snapped a picture of both men. He identified Bart Pearl as the boy in the collage pictures with Theresa. While he was busy with that, the clerk gave him the last known addresses of the two suspects. Only Bart Pearl had provided the college with his social security number, and she gave that information to Ken, as well.

“Thanks,” he said, “you’ve been a big help.”

“It’s always a pleasure to help ‘New York’s Finest,’” she smiled, “especially when they’re as handsome as you are.”

Ken grinned at her and ran out.

Back at the station, he began his task of finding out what happened to the two young men. Ken traced Smythe-Murray with ease. He attended CCNY as an exchange student from Liverpool, England. He went home to The U.K. immediately after graduation, and records indicated that he had never returned to The United States.

Bart Pearl no longer lived at the address, which was given to him, but Ken hoped that armed with his social security number, he could get Bart’s last known address from The Internal Revenue Service. Unfortunately, it was now past 6 PM, and any further research would have to wait until morning.

He ran home, and he and Joe had a delicious dinner that their maid/cook had made before she left for the day.

Joe leered at Ken. The boys won’t be home for another two hours or so. Wanna play?”

“I’d love to, but I have to stay dressed. I intend to go over to the Burger King and see to it that they get home safely.”

“Trust me. They are perfectly safe, and your only duty is to fuck your partner.”

“You didn’t provide them with discreet bodyguards, did you?” Ken smiled.

“I did.”

The two men ran upstairs, disrobed in record time, and fucked themselves into the fourth dimension. They finished making love, and assured each other of how much they loved one another, long before their wards came home, exhausted from several hours of hard labour.

Unlike their guardians, Tom and George were too tired to make love. They went right to sleep.