The CBS Murders (16 page)

Monday, April 12. Nash was out of time. It was this day or never. He would begin serving his time the next morning, and by the time he got out, it would be too late for Margolies, for Barbera would have talked before the grand jury by then. Nash had spoken with Margolies once more over the weekend, had heard the rage in his employer's voice, had promised that it would be done on Monday. And the more he thought about it, the more Monday seemed the ideal time. He would do it, get away, get rid of the body, and then, in the morning, report and go to jail. Let people look for him if somehow they stumbled on something, though if all worked as he and Margolies had planned and hoped, nobody would. Barbera would simply have disappeared, and there were few who would miss her immediately. By the time somebody did, no one would be sure just when she had gone. And if nobody looked for her right away, it would not be until the end of the month, when her parking permit expired and her car still was there, that anybody would realize that she was nowhere around. Margolies then would be able to tell the story he had concocted: Barbera had sent Jenny Soo Chin ahead and now she had joined her somewhere, probably in Europe, with all Candor's diamonds and all Candor's cash. And Nash? He would have been in jail. What better place to hide?

At about five in the afternoon, he drove up on the pier.

At about six, Barbera appeared.

PART FOUR

CHASE

18

Tuesday, April 13. The chase was on. There was just one trouble: At this stage, nobody knew whom he was chasing. But the mayor was incensed. This was the kind of thing that just didn't happen in his city, and he wanted action fast. The police commissioner was promising action—publicly, at least—but he knew the kind of action he was going to get right away might well be action for action's sake. The public was outraged. This hadn't been mobsters killing mobsters, something people could basically ignore, could dismiss with a sense that maybe the guys who got it deserved it and the guys who gave it would one day get the same thing in their turn and, besides, good riddance to bad rubbish. This had been the murder, cold-blooded, of three innocent bystanders who had merely tried to come to the, aid of a woman in trouble, and their reward had been a bullet in the head. It gave pause; it gave a feeling that nobody really was safe in this city. The press, especially the sensational press, was at its most sensational, sensationalizing what already was sensational enough. There were a thousand rumors, and most of them appeared in the papers. There had been not one but two or more killers. There had been accomplices overseeing the job and reporting its success, via car telephone, to an unknown employer and referring to the killer as “the fall guy.” It had been a mob hit done by a professional; one detective in the organized-crime task force was quoted as theorizing that the killer was from one of the syndicate families and “he'll probably be dead by the end of the week; mob hits are supposed to be done anonymously; they don't like fanfare.” Almost everybody any reporter talked to had an opinion, and those opinions were diverse, and those opinions were printed.

Nobody but a minor bureaucrat in the criminal-justice system noticed that Donald Nash didn't keep his appointment that morning. He failed to surrender to the authorities to begin serving his term for cloning the cab. That bureaucrat did what he was supposed to do: He went to court and had a judge swear out a bench warrant for Nash's arrest. It was all part of the system, the way things are done and, in the normal course, it would have meant very little. Nash's offense had been so trivial that to expect the cops to go out and look for him on that warrant would have been expecting too much from an already undermanned and overworked department. So nobody then except that bureaucrat thought much about the fact that Nash didn't show when he was supposed to; it happened all the time, and even the bureaucrat probably forgot all about it once he had done his duty and gotten the warrant and filed it.

At Midtown North, the hard and convoluted task of trying to make sense of the pieces that were in hand and trying to find all the missing pieces had begun. Almost the first thing done that morning was to set up a task force to handle the investigation. In the chain of command, Captain Eugene Burke was in charge and Lieutenant Dick Gallagher was assigned to run the operation. But it was, in reality, the case of the men who would go out and run down the leads. There was, of course, Richie Chartrand, and he was joined by Bobby Patterson. John Wales, a cop since 1961, a detective since 1971, much of that time in Midtown North, a large man in size and girth, garrulous, with a thousand stories and anecdotes to illustrate every eventuality and situation, had been off the day of the murders. When he arrived on the thirteenth, he went onto the task force. So, too, did Detective Richie Bohan, another large man and another longtime veteran, and Augie Sanchez, a small, tough cop whose manner was enough to frighten the unwary and those who had something to hide. And Sergeant Tom Kenney was detached from his usual duties for work on the task force. Do a good job, solve this thing and bring in the guy, they were promised, and you'll all get rewards, promotions to the next grade for detectives, pay at the next rank on the official ladder, and more.

By midmorning the FBI showed up, Special Agents Don Richards, Bob Paquette, John Truslow, and others. They offered themselves and all the facilities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, anything they and the agency could do to help. They would be, they explained, a support service in what was about to become a joint investigation of the murders of three innocent bystanders and one, or possibly two, witnesses in a federal investigation. “That is a very fancy way of saying, if you need something, you ask us and we will do it,” says Chartrand. “And this was one of the very few times that I know that the New York City Police Department and the FBI really worked in a very cohesive manner. There was a free-flowing input of information. We all had to introduce ourselves to each other that morning, and we all had to satisfy ourselves that we would trust each other, and we had to establish who was going to handle what. The ground rules were set up. Everything would be handled out of Midtown North, and from that early stage, the federal agents worked out of our office. They would show up at our office on time. They were always ready and willing to assist.”

Assist they did, and without delay. Physically, the FBI wanted its agents, and so, by association, the New York cops, to be comfortable, to have all the best and the most modern, and the FBI has plenty of money to provide. “It was unbelievable,” John Wales remembers. “I never saw anything like it. We got tables, typewriters, telephones, everything. We had telephones with no numbers. The expenses were astronomical and we didn't even get a bill on it. Nothing. And the telephone bill for the first month, I was told, was more than six hundred dollars. Now, the police department, it doesn't go six hundred dollars in six months for the phone, and then it screams. But we got everything instantly. All we had to say is, ‘We need it.' I mean, they pushed buttons and things worked. Like banks. They got us all the records, accounts, everything. Stuff you never could get. You get on a regular homicide, it's impossible, it's on microfilm, they tell you, and we don't know where it is. But this time they pushed the button and we went right down and they had it right waiting for us. But now, anything we wanted, we got. We got a subpoena and it was honored, by the banks and by everybody. I mean, normally I get a subpoena and give it to them and, somehow, they've lost everything. Banks especially. They never really give you anything. But here, anything we requested, we got, with a minimum of trouble.”

Action was what was being demanded, and in those first days, there was plenty of action, running off in every direction. “The only thing we knew for sure,” Wales says, “was that a man who shot some people got into a van and drove away. We had no good identification of the man. And the van, basically, it was white or light-colored with stripes on the side and it had a sliding door on the side. That's it. No year, no make, no license plate at all.”

Maybe, somebody said, some of those people on the
Rotterdam
were taking pictures when the liner was leaving the pier, and maybe they got a shot of the killer waiting in the parking lot. So the word went out. Contact the ship and ask the people who had been taking pictures to turn in the rolls so the cops could go through them. It was a long shot, but at least it was a shot, it was something. (The rolls were turned in, developed, examined, and revealed nothing.)

Maybe, somebody suggested, somebody was looking out of a window in one of the buildings overlooking the pier parking lot, and maybe that somebody saw something and didn't realize what he was seeing, but under questioning he might remember. So detectives were sent to the nearby buildings and talked to tenants from whose windows the surface of the parking lot could be seen. Nobody had seen anything.

Everybody had an idea. “Did anybody check to see if there was an airplane flying overhead?” Wales remembers. “You might say, what a stupid idea. But if one of the big shots suggested it, you did it. God forbid, somebody writes a letter in and says, ‘Dear Police Department, I was going back home on the plane and I was looking out the window and I saw a strange thing. I saw what looked like this man playing tag. It looked like he had something flashing in his hand. I didn't think anything of it until I got home and my cousin told me, gee, you just missed a big shooting in New York. And I said, oh, my God, I saw the whole thing.' If you get that kind of a letter and you didn't go and check the airports, you can imagine. But if it's just me and another guy, you can't waste time going around looking at everything. If you don't have the men, you don't have the time, you can't do that. But if you have so many men, like we did on this thing, you can do it. When you have a million guys, just to keep them going, because they stagnate if they're hanging around, the boss will come in and say, hey, you and you, go and do this, you and you, go and do that. You get things going and everybody keeps going and maybe you come up with something.” But it didn't happen with the planes or the buildings or the ship or nearly anything else.

Still, there was the van. They had that. “My function at the beginning,” Wales says, “was looking for the van. We figured that if we didn't find it in the first day or two or three, that'd be it and we'd never find it. So there was a citywide alarm out on that van. Every single police car in New York City was ordered to survey their sector—that is, drive around their entire sector and look for any van resembling the description of this van. Anything at all and then they would call our office. They had parking lots and garages, they were to survey them. They were to go inside and see if there was anything that fit this description. Then the calls started coming in. We got a call from Brooklyn. They found a van in the parking lot that fits the thing. We went out there. The van's been there for seven days, hasn't been moved, has a flat tire, a broken windshield. It's not our van. Everybody's calling in. We'd rather they call in than pass it, take it on their own. We got vans that had hinge doors instead of sliding doors. We had one van that was down by the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A Volkswagen. But it was a camper. And it had a bed inside. It had all kinds of shit inside. No way in the world that a man could pull a body in.

“So now we're eliminating vans. Anything that seems good, we go and sit down and completely process the van, take prints, examine for blood or red or any stains. Then there was the problem of sanitation. The crushers, where they tow away abandoned cars. That was done. The helicopters were searching the outlying areas, Kennedy Airport, Canarsie, any swamp, anything like where it could possibly be. Everything was checked. And we came up empty.”

The killer himself? It was generally agreed by everybody on the case, the New York City detectives and the FBI agents, that he was a hired gunman. But who had done the hiring? Richards and Paquette had filled in Gallagher, Chartrand, and the others on the details of the Candor swindle, as much as they thought the New York cops needed to know. But for the moment at least, they ruled out Margolies as the man behind the murders. Murder just wasn't something that happened in this kind of a case. It was too extreme, too out-of-the-ordinary. White-collar criminals, swindlers, don't resort to violence. It's not the pattern. But if not Margolies, who? Some of the investigators thought Jenny Soo Chin's husband the most likely suspect, given his wife's disappearance and probable murder, given the relationship between his wife and Barbera, given what they saw as his reaction, or lack of it. Some thought perhaps a spurned boyfriend of Barbera's or someone unknown for some unknown reason.

But for the moment, the man behind the murders, and surely there was one, was less important than the murderer himself, and, despite the rumors, no one had any doubts that there was only one killer. If they could identify and find him, the rest would fall into place.

19

Donald Nash knew he had to run. His only hope was in flight. And he was not sanguine about that. He called Oestericher's private unlisted number. He told Oestericher he was convinced that he was going to get caught. But if Margolies would agree to hire and pay for a lawyer for him and see that his family was taken care of, he would never say a word about who had hired him. Further, he said, he wanted the balance of the $8,000 due him for the murder of Barbera, and he thought he deserved an additional payment for the terrible thing he had to do when those three CBS people walked in on him when he was putting Barbera into the van.

Oestericher listened, said he would contact Margolies and then get back to Nash. He called Margolies, told him what Nash wanted. Margolies said, not a penny more for Barbera. She deserved to be dead because she was not trustworthy and she had proved to be an enemy of his. But, yes, Nash did deserve something extra because of that unexpected snag that had put him in such extreme danger. If Nash were caught and agreed never to talk about the reasons why he had done these dastardly deeds, then Margolies would take care of him: He would find him a lawyer and pay the bill; he would provide for his family; he would pay the balance owed on Barbera; and he would ante up an additional $5,000 for the CBS murders.