The Murder Room Read Online Free PDF

bullshit!” Fleisher said to his partners as heads turned to their small table. “LeHavre is an innocent man until we prove otherwise. It’ll take a lot more than intuition to convince the police.” The big man’s bearded face was flushed; in political infighting as during interrogations he was an overwhelming and mercurial force, bully, teddy bear, jokester, loyal friend, withering skeptic, con man, tickling feather—a needle poking for truth until it bled.
    Vidocq Society cases were chosen by the founders in consultation with the society’s board of directors. The board included an assistant U.S. attorney, a naval intelligence officer, the security director of Sun Oil Company, an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent, a Philadelphia homicide detective, and an English professor specializing in Shakespeare and literary analysis of bomb threats and suicide notes. But Fleisher was board president as well as commissioner. He had masterfully steered through a quarter century of federal bureaucracy; no case went forward without his blessing.
    Bender’s balding head reddened as it did when his paranormal revelations were questioned, which was almost always among world-weary cops. “Bill, I know the killer was LeHavre,” Bender said. “I know it. Remember our first meeting, in the old Navy yard, this guy got up and spoke and I said, ‘He’s a Russian spy. I can feel it.’ And I was right!”
    Fleisher rolled his eyes, while Walter peered down his horn-rimmed glasses at the artist as if appraising a new species. “Frank, in this case you may be right, but keep your day job. There’s no structure to your thinking. You’re like a fart in a bathtub!” The thin man snorted with derision as Bender’s crimson deepened. Fleisher laughed and slowly shook his head.
    Fleisher marveled at the forces that brought them together, and constantly threatened to tear them apart. By combining his partners’ deduction and intuition with his own leadership and investigative skills, they formed a tripartite Great Detective with skills seldom found in one man.
    “Richard is our Sherlock Holmes,” Fleisher said with genuine admiration. “He has the greatest deductive ability I’ve ever seen. As for Frank, only God can explain the things he does. Me, I’m just a fat Jewish kid who grew up reading true-crime comics and dreaming of being a detective.”
    It was fitting, Fleisher thought, that the idea of the great American detective was born in Philadelphia, just a few miles from where they sat—in a brownstone off Spring Garden Street, where Edgar Allan Poe, in 1841, created the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the first fictional detective—C. Auguste Dupin.
    It was a new character type, which Poe is said to have borrowed from the life of Vidocq, whose memoirs, allegedly ghost-written by his friend Balzac, were an 1829 bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The new type was a darkly eccentric, deductive genius who outsmarted the police. Dupin possessed “a peculiar analytic ability. . . . He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its exercise. . . . He boasted . . . with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs. . . .” This was Vidocq’s life, and the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes and all fictional sleuths to follow.
    It was an archetype made flesh in Richard Walter.
    “You have to be on your game to beat me, Frank, and Bill,” Walter said. “If you knock us off our feet we’ll walk on our knees. If you knock us off our knees we’ll walk on our balls—and our balls have calluses.”
    Now Fleisher scowled at his partners.
    “There’s a reason a case is cold for many years. This isn’t TV. You need the family support, police commitment, the political winds blowing your way,” he said, counting them off on the fingers of a raised hand. “You need