The Genius (15 page)

“Happy now?” I asked.

“Hold the fucking phone.”

McGrath looked at me. “That’s the day after Alex Jendrzejewski disappeared.”

I reread the journal entry.

“I know,” I said. “So what.”

“So, it’s a difference.”

“Oatmeal? Who gives a shit?” Some part of my brain noted that we’d gotten a lot looser-tongued since our smoking break. “Who cares about fucking oatmeal?”

“It’s a difference, and that’s significant.”

“Not the same thing.”

McGrath told me to lift the Jendrzejewski file out of the box. Inside, I found the familiar snapshot: blunt-cut hair, square teeth, beachball face, pug nose. Little Alex, had he grown up, probably would have turned out plug-ugly, had fate not frozen him cute.

“We talked to the mother,” he said, turning over pages of transcript. “I remember that. She sent the kid to the market. That milk bottle, I remember that.”

“You said you got a footprint.”

“No telling if it was the right guy, though. Lotta people around that area.”

“Then how did he snatch the boy without being seen?”

“Maybe he lured him into a car. He might have offered him a ride home. It was freezing that night. Check the weather book, you’ll see.”

I did. The forecast had called for snow throughout the evening.

“Where are you,” he said to the file box.

“What are you looking for?”

“I’m loo—ah. Here. Listen to this, this is the mother talking. ‘I sent Alex to the store.’ Detective Gordan: ‘What time?’ Pamela Jendrzejewski: ‘About five o’clock. I needed some things.’”

“Who’s Detective Gordan.”

“My old partner,” he said without looking up. His lips moved as he skimmed the transcript. “Mm, mm, mm, come on. I swear to God I remember her saying something about…” He didn’t finish.

“About what.”

“It’s not here,” he said. He found another transcript and let out a triumphant grunt. “This is it.”

I scooted my chair over to have a closer look. The transcript was of an interview conducted by Detectives L. McGrath and J. Gordan, New York Police Department, 114th precinct, January 25, 1967. The interviewee was Charles Petronakis, owner and proprietor of the corner market where Alex’s mother sent him to fetch groceries.

Det McGrath: You remember seeing the boy?
Charles Petronakis: I saw him, yes.
M: When did you see him?
P: He came in about five fifteen.
M: Was there anybody with him?
P: No.
Det Gordan: Was there anyone in the store at the time aside from you?
P: No.
G: Did you notice anything unusual, either with the boy or anyone outside the store?
P: I don’t think so. It was very cold that night, I didn’t see too many people. The boy was the first one I seen all afternoon. I was getting ready to close up when he came in. He wanted some milk, some oatmeal, and sugar. I said I could help him carry it home if he waited a few minutes for me to close up. He told me he couldn’t wait, he had to go or his mother would get mad at him. So he went

I stopped reading and looked at McGrath, who picked up a pencil and drew a circle around the word oatmeal.

I have no early memories of my father. This is because he was most often out of the house. He worked (still does, as far as I know) incredibly hard, sometimes eighteen hours a day, and although I wasn’t around to witness the demise of his first three marriages, I can guess that his habit of sleeping at the office didn’t help. How I even came to be conceived is something of a mystery to me. The age gap between me and my siblings has often led me to believe that I was an accident, and for him, at least, not a happy one.

In his defense—a phrase that rarely crosses my lips, so you can be certain that what I’m about to say is true—it must be said that he singlehandedly restored the Muller name to glory after inheriting a corporate structure swollen with inefficiencies. He downsized before downsizing was downsizing; and he spun off or closed antiquated branches of the company that he had no real business running: a commercial bakery in New Haven, a textile mill in Secaucus. What he understood was real estate, so he focused on that, thereby turning an already healthy sum of old money into a new, towering heap.

It is solely to my mother’s credit that I am not spoiled worse than I am. Despite the lavishness of our surroundings, and the dozens of people who waited on me from the moment I entered the world, she did her best to ensure that I never considered wealth a substitute for decency. It’s hard to be rich and a true humanist. She was. She believed in the inherent value of every human being, taking that as the premise for her actions. Children have exquisitely sensitive bullshit detectors, and that’s why her lessons made an impression on me. If my father had lectured me similarly, I would have seen right through him; he seldom acknowledged the staff, and then only curtly. My mother, on the other hand, did not condescend to the people she employed; at the same time, she didn’t pretend that she was their friend, which is in its own way equally insulting. She always said hello and good-bye and please and thank you; if a door was held open for her, she hurried to step inside. She held a few doors of her own. I once saw her stop and help push a stuck taxi out of a snowbank.

I’ve never fully understood how she tolerated—let alone loved—my father, who could be so indifferent to the distress of others. I can only hope and assume that he was a better man before she died. Either that or she saw in him something invisible to the rest of us. Or maybe she liked a challenge.

My awareness of him thus begins with her death, and the most pungent memory is also the earliest. It was the morning of the funeral and I was getting dressed—or, rather, resisting attempts by the nanny to get me dressed. It’s my fault for throwing a tantrum. I probably should have felt the numbness in the air, known that I had a burden to shoulder. Looking back I realize that I was probably more confused than anything else: for days people had been acting skittish around me, making me feel like
I
was the source of everyone’s misery. I was in no mood to confront the public; I didn’t want anything to do with anybody, and I certainly didn’t want to be forced into a suit and tie.

The service was scheduled for nine A.M., and by eight thirty I was still half-dressed. If the nanny managed to tuck in my shirt, I would untuck it while she reached for the necktie. Then when she began again to tuck it back in I would start unbuttoning it from the top. She was on the verge of tears by the time Tony Wexler arrived to escort me downstairs. He found me pulling off my pants and stepped in to take over, and as he reached for my arm I slugged him in the eye.

Normally Tony was a model of patience. (In later years, he would endure much worse.) But that morning he wasn’t up to the task. He might have yelled or smacked me across the face; he had that kind of authority over me. He might have told the nanny to hold me down. Instead, he took more decisive action: he went for my father.

It was a Friday. My mother had died on the Tuesday prior, after three days in a coma. During those three days I had not been allowed in to see her—something I’ve never forgiven my father for. I think in some idiotic way he intended to protect me, but even thinking about it now makes me tense. Since I had been barred from the room, and he had barred himself inside to watch her slip away, we hadn’t seen much of each other for a week, my father and I; I had been with the nanny or else Tony. So this would be our first moment together as a family, a downsized unit of two. Though too young for symbolism, I had some idea that the conversation about to take place would be a neat preview of life without a mother.

He came into the room silently. That’s his way. My father is tall, like me; like his own father, he has a very slight stoop. He was at the time over fifty, but his hair was still dark and thick, like his mother’s. That morning he wore a black suit, white shirt, and gray tie; what I saw first, however, were the caps of his shoes. I was lying on the ground, refusing to get up, and these two shiny torpedo heads were coming toward me.

I rolled over and buried my face in the carpet. There was a long silence. For a moment I thought he had left. Then I opened my eyes and saw that he was right there, still looking down at me, although now he was holding the pre-knotted tie, as though it were a leash and I a stubborn puppy.

“If you don’t get dressed,” he said, “then you’ll go exactly as you are.”

“Fine,” I said.

The next thing I knew I was being dragged, kicking and screaming, down the hall to the elevator. The nanny had me by one arm, a maid by the other; my father was two steps ahead, never looking back as I howled. You can imagine that the house was especially quiet that morning, so this tantrum sounded even more horrific and piercing than my usual ones. As the four of us stepped into the elevator I saw my father wince. This only encouraged me. Maybe if I shouted loud enough they would let me go. We glided down to the first floor, where the doors parted on a scene that startled me into silence: twenty-some-odd faces—women tearstained, men flushed and grimacing—all staring at me as I thrashed against my captors. The entire house staff had gathered in mourning to see my father and me off.

At that moment I realized what I was doing—what was happening— how I looked—what humiliation I stood to suffer if I didn’t get properly dressed. I began to beg my father to allow me to go back upstairs. He said nothing, just stepped out of the elevator and walked stiffly through the parted ranks of the grieving, again two steps ahead of me and the nanny and the maid, who obeyed my father’s orders by carrying me, half-naked, through that gauntlet of horrified stares and down the front steps to the idling limousine. Tony had my pants waiting in the car.

THE PROBLEM WITH COLD CASES, McGrath explained, was that they didn’t kill anybody. They didn’t crash planes into buildings. They didn’t release toxic gas on the A train, or detonate themselves in the middle of Central Park, or spray bullets into a crowded open-air market. National and local priorities being what they were, it had gotten harder and harder for cold-case detectives to find the time, money, and departmental approval they needed.

McGrath had worked the squad for the last eight years of his career and kept in touch. “Solid bunch, tip to tail,” he said. “They’re dedicated guys, and they don’t like to give up. But it’s not up to them. The world’s a different place.”

Different
meant that old murders got in line and waited. It meant that even as the line grew, the number of detectives working the cases shrank, as the sharpest minds got bounced to counterterrorism or got fed up and left. It meant that literally thousands of boxes of evidence—boxes much like the one McGrath had in his dining room, the box we would spend the next several weeks poring over—had gone unexamined for decades, even though the intervening years had turned the DNA inside to gold.

“Right before I left,” he said, “we got a Justice Department grant. Five hundred grand to use for pulling old DNA. You know what, I
still
don’t think they’ve used all that money. Crap just sits there, waiting for someone to pick it up. They don’t have the manpower. Every time you want something, you have to schlep down to storage, send it to the lab, fill out the paperwork—how the hell are twelve guys supposed to do all that for every unsolved crime in New York? And then we got people breathing down our necks, the Feds whining about port security, the press making noise about stuff that happened last week. You try being the one who gets to approach his commander, ‘Hey, you know what, I have something thirty years old that I think I might
maybe
be able to put a name on. Sure the perp is probably dead, but wouldn’t you like to ease the family’s minds?’ Never gonna happen.”