The CBS Murders (13 page)

At the beginning of December, Margolies sat down with Oestericher. They were seeing a lot of each other now, more than usual. Now that he no longer had his own office, he was using Oestericher's as his own, was giving out Oestericher's private unlisted office phone number as the way to contact him.

That day, Margolies began to talk about Barbera, the problem she was posing for him and his future. What he'd like to do, he said, was put the fear of God, or if not God, of Irwin Margolies into her so she would turn back those books and records and forget everything she knew.

Oestericher agreed that that might solve a lot of problems. Without those books and without Barbera's knowledge, the government would have a very hard time proving a criminal case against him, and Maguire would have the same difficulty in a civil suit. It would always be Margolies's word against Barbera's word.

In fact, Margolies said, Oestericher, with all his contacts in the lower levels of society, must know someone, the very person to put that fear into Barbera.

Knowing Margolies so well, Oestericher knew he was serious. He said he would do some checking around.

The place to look, Oestericher decided, was over on the West Side, close by the docks. As it happened, he managed a building there, on West Forty-fifth Street. The superintendent of that building was a man named Alberto Torres. They had known each other for years. Torres had worked for Oestericher in a housing development the lawyer managed in New Jersey, and he had worked for him as superintendent at several apartment buildings and hotels in Manhattan, including the notorious Somerset on Father Duffy Square, and now he was working for him again on Forty-fifth Street. Now Oestericher made the trip across town to see Torres. He had a friend who was having a problem, he told the super.

What kind of a problem? Torres asked.

His friend, Oestericher said, had an employee who was getting way out of line. His friend would like to have someone explain to his employee that what was going on didn't make good sense and that the employee ought to straighten out and get back into line. Did Torres happen to know someone who might be good at doing this kind of explaining?

Torres said he'd ask around and get back to Oestericher.

Torres had an old friend named Donald Nash, who used to be Donald Bowers, of the notorious West Side docks Bowers family, until he took his mother's maiden name as his own. He considered Nash a very nice friendly sort of man, a very good and astute mechanic and jack-of-all-trades. He did a lot of work for Torres and for other people in the neighborhood, repairing electrical fixtures, plumbing, just about anything anybody needed, and he almost never charged for the favors. He had grown up on the West Side and was very knowledgeable about who was who and who would do what. Though he had long since moved to Keansburg, N.J., with his common-law wife and her daughter, whom he adored and both considered and treated as his own, he was frequently around the docks and had not lost his contacts or his friendships. And, for Torres, he was an easy man to reach. He maintained a desk and a telephone in connection with a struggling electrical contracting business at the rear of Vinnie Russo's catering establishment, which happened to be on the ground floor of the building Oestericher managed and Torres took care of.

Nash was the youngest of nine children, his father a bedridden diabetic until his death early in 1952, when Nash was sixteen, and his mother a drunk. At about the time of his father's death, doing very poorly in school and With an I.Q. of 89, he dropped out, worked sporadically as an errand boy and a parking-lot attendant. Mostly he roamed the streets of the neighborhood with his friends, a rather distinctive figure, medium height and stocky, with a drooping, nearly blind right eye, and a crushed cheekbone beneath, the result of having been hit in the eye and face while playing stickball in the streets when he was twelve. He had been in trouble only once with the police, in 1951, when he was picked up for a burglary, sent to juvenile court, and put on probation. Then, in the spring of 1952, he got into serious trouble. While riding the subway one evening, he said, a homosexual tried to pick him up. Nash rewarded the man by beating him severely and then making off with about $450 worth of cash and jewelry the man had on him. Flushed with triumph, he joined a couple of friends for a joyride in a stolen car. The cops picked him up. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to three years at the New York State prison in Elmira. He was a good prisoner, remorseful, and anxious, parole reports said, to make a good adjustment on the outside and not get into trouble again. After eighteen months, he was released on parole.

In the years that followed, Nash worked off and on at various construction jobs, as a cabdriver, at just about anything he could find. Though he was good with his hands and had certain mechanical abilities, he never made much money, and sometimes he turned to extralegal activities to supplement his meager income. Though it would be a long time before he got a prison sentence again, he was arrested at least nine times through the years, for a variety of offenses that included burglary, forgery, grand and petty larceny; he was convicted and fined a couple of times and then released. Still, none of his crimes had been what anyone he grew up with would have considered major. He was, people who knew him said, just another guy trying to make out, always broke or close to it, always trying to do his best to keep a roof over his family's heads, food on the table, and clothes on everybody's back. If he sometimes did things he shouldn't have done to accomplish that, well, a lot of other guys he grew up with were doing the same or a lot worse, and besides, as far as anybody knew, he had never hurt anybody.

One day, soon after his conversation with Oestericher, Alberto Torres cornered Nash as he came into Russo's place and headed for his desk and telephone. Taking Nash off to the side for a private conversation, Torres related what Oestericher had told him and then asked Nash if Nash knew anybody who could use a little muscle in a persuasive manner. Nash thought about it for a moment, asked what it would pay. Torres said he didn't know but he was sure the party who wanted the strong-arming done would make it worthwhile to whomever did it. Nash thought some more and then said he'd take care of it. Later, Torres said he thought Nash meant that he would look around among all the people he knew on the docks and find the right guy. He said he didn't at that moment think that Nash meant he would take care of it personally.

But that was precisely what Donald Nash meant. He was then very broke and very much in need of money. His stepdaughter was pregnant, separated from her husband after a brief and very unhappy marriage, and so Nash felt himself responsible for seeing her through the pregnancy to the birth of the child he would consider his grandson or granddaughter. It would not be a cheap thing to do. But his constructmon and repair work was sporadic at best and not bringing in very much, especially since he constantly charged less than the going rates if he thought his customer couldn't afford higher prices, and often he did the work as a favor. He was constantly borrowing from his nephew, Thomas Dane, who lived close by him in Keansburg, but Dane had only so much to lend.

So desperate had Nash been that a month before Torres cornered him, he had tried a little scam he had attempted a few years earlier and that had backfired then, leading to an arrest and $200 fine. From experience, he knew that cabdrivers could turn a nice living, especially if they owned their own cabs. But a medallion, giving the driver the right to cruise New York City's byways looking for riders, was going for $60,000. That was a lot more than Nash had ever seen at one time in one place in his life. So he did the next best thing: He cloned a cab. For a few hundred dollars, he bought a beat-up 1978 Ford LTD that had once been a cab but had been retired after several hundred thousand miles of bouncing over the city's streets. It was, though, still painted taxicab yellow and could pass anywhere for the real thing. Nash set about making it even more real. He carefully painted the going rates on the side, where they should be. He went out and one dark night spotted a parked and unmanned cab. He pilfered the meter and the rate card and made impressions of the license plates and medallion. Then he went home, took some metal and plastic, and turned out replicas of the plates and medallion, affixed them to his cab, installed the meter and rate card, forged a hack license and installed it, and then went off to see what he could make.

His little foray lasted perhaps a week, perhaps a little more, during which he netted himself as much as $250 or $300 a day. Then it all came to a sudden and decisive climax. In one of those almost unbelievable Dickensian coincidences, Avila Narciso was cruising through midtown Manhattan in his cab early one afternoon when he noticed another cab parked at the curb near Forty-fifth Street on Sixth Avenue. He took another look and slammed on the brakes. The parked cab bore exactly the same license plates as the cab he was driving. It couldn't be; it was impossible. Narciso went looking for a cop, found one, and returned. The cab still was there, and the driver, who happened to be Donald Nash, was sitting behind the wheel. The cop asked a few questions, and it didn't take long to realize that Nash was driving a clone, that the medallion and license plates were phonies, as was the hack license inside, and that the meter and rate card were stolen property that happened to belong to Narciso.

Nash was taken in, charged and booked, released on his own recognizance, and given a date to appear in court to answer the charges. Had he had a good lawyer, the chances are that he would have gotten off with a fine and a warning. He had Oestericher as his lawyer. Oestericher advised him to plead guilty, since he'd been caught with the goods. He pleaded guilty. And he was given a twenty-day sentence at the Manhattan Correctional Center.

But the law, of course, moves slowly, and it always is possible to drag things out and delay and delay, and Nash managed to do just that. It wasn't that he wasn't willing to take his medicine, he pled, but the holidays were coming, he had to make all sorts of arrangements to take care of his wife and daughter, his daughter was expecting a baby and he was responsible for that, and a dozen other excuses to delay even more. All his pleas were listened to and, since his offense was not considered an especially heinous one, granted. He was finally given a date to surrender to begin serving his term. That date was Tuesday, April 13, 1982.

Thus, when Torres told him of Oestericher's friend's need, Nash still had time, and he had an increasingly desperate need for money to take care of his family. Yes, he told Torres, he could take care of the job personally, he would do it himself.

Torres called Oestericher and gave him the news. It didn't go down well. Oestericher, knowing Nash, thought Nash was hardly the right person to fulfill Irwin Margolies's order. But Nash had been approached and Nash had agreed, and so be it.

Oestericher went to Margolies and told him. By now, Margolies had begun to have some new thoughts. A beating wasn't good enough for Margaret Barbera. “Wouldn't it be wonderful,” he told Oestericher, “if there were no witnesses against me?” And so, he said, Barbera had to go. And not just Barbera. Her very dear friend Jenny Soo Chin had to go, too, because Jenny Soo Chin had worked with and for Barbera at Candor, Jenny Soo Chin knew plenty, and if not as much as Barbera, still enough. And, he had heard, he said, that the government was putting pressure on her as well as on Barbera, and Chin was likely to break.

Set up a meeting with this man, Donald Nash, Margolies ordered. Oestericher called Torres. The meeting was set. A little after noon on a cold, raw day in mid-December, Margolies left Oestericher's, and his, office and made a trip across town, to Ike and Mike's Delicatessen diagonally across West Forty-fifth Street from Vinnie Russo's. Margolies went into the back room and sat down. Across the street, Torres and Nash were watching and waiting. When they saw Margolies arrive, they left their building, crossed the street, entered Ike and Mike's, and went to the back room. Torres introduced Nash to Margolies. They did not shake hands. Torres turned and left. Nash sat down. The two men, Margolies and Nash, got right to the point. They talked in whispers and used hand signals and notes, determined that nobody overhear them.

Margolies had thought it out carefully and fully by then, though he explained to Nash only as much as he thought Nash had to know. He had come armed with photographs of Barbera and Chin, a description of Barbera's BMW, and the location of Barbera's apartment in Ridgewood. These he passed on to Nash. Both of them had to go, preferably at the same time. If that proved impossible, then Barbera was the important one and she should go first. That might just possibly obviate the necessity of taking Chin, might frighten her into complete silence. But that was a long shot. Better to plan to send Chin to the same place, for safety's sake. What was essential, though, was that they be taken when alone, when there were no witnesses, nobody to know what had happened. And when they had been taken, their bodies were to be disposed of so thoroughly that they would never be found, that it would appear to anybody who asked, anybody who investigated that they had just disappeared.

It was Margolies's reasoning that if Barbera and Chin vanished, he would be safe, would be utterly free and clear. Their relationship was no secret; nearly everyone who knew them, in Candor and outside, knew that they were lovers. They made no secret of it, made no effort to conceal it. It was common knowledge, too, that they had made trips together, acting almost as if they were going on a honeymoon, to Europe a couple of times, and elsewhere as well. If suddenly both of them vanished, not a few people would believe that they had finally run off together, to begin a new life someplace where they were not known. Margolies, certainly, intended to say just that to all the right people, all the people who were after him. They had run away, eloped, he would say, and they had taken with them all my diamonds, all my gold, all the money they had stolen, without my knowing it, from Maguire. It would finance them for the rest of their new lives together. If you want to find the diamonds, the gold, the cash, go find them, probably in Europe, where Barbera must have opened up secret numbered bank accounts during her trips there, planning all the time to do this. Who would there be to say nay? He would be off the hook.