Beyond the Carousel Page 21

  He turned and started toward the door. As he disappeared into the hallway, Emory barely whispered, “God willing,” but Jack never heard it.

  * * *

  At the stationhouse Jack checked his messages, and when there was nothing new he sat at his desk and began browsing through the folder. The newsprint had faded and the paper yellowed with age, but it was all there. A picture of Franklin in a business suit, looking as young as he did on the carousel. The photo of George Feldman said it had been taken from the employee files at the Reliable Steel Company. At the time he had a round face, thinning hair and a look of anger that at first glance marked him as problematic.

  Jack read through the interviews where co-workers called Feldman an ill-tempered fellow who blamed the world for his misfortune. According to Ed Ruppert, the foreman at Reliable Steel at the time, Feldman flew into a rage when told his station was slowing down the line.

  “He turned red in the face and looked like he was going to explode,” Ruppert said. “I was afraid he’d do something to sabotage the whole operation, so I moved him over to the finishing line where a slow-down didn’t affect others.”

  The next-door neighbor was quoted as saying, “Feldman was a man who’d snap off the hand that fed him. Hated the bank; blamed them for causing the crash.”

  Bertha Paulson, who lived directly across the street, said that in her mind George was the reason Anna Feldman was dead.

  As he continued to read, Jack came across the stories of how Franklin was considered fair in every sense of the word. A dozen different people said he’d warned them that the market was extremely volatile the first time it took a dip.

  “To be perfectly honest, Howard and I thought Mister Wilkes was overly cautious,” Emily Dougherty said, “but later on we were mighty glad we’d listened to his advice.”

  In the back of the folder was the small clipping of an obituary saying that Franklin was survived by his wife Laura, a five-year-old daughter and his parents. There was no mention of Emory.

  Jack closed the folder and sat there for several minutes thinking over all he’d read.

  The murder had happened twenty-five years ago. Witnesses move, get married, get divorced, remarry and sometimes die. Even back then when the trail was fresh and everyone was optimistic, George Feldman could not be found and brought to justice. Their efforts had proven fruitless. Yet…

  Jack looked across the desk to Leon Schulte. “How long have you been on the Wyattsville squad?”

  “Eleven years in January. Why?”

  “I wanted to ask about a cold case; see if maybe you remembered it.”

  “So ask.”

  “This one was before your time. It’s a 1930 homicide.”

  Leon laughed. “Lots of luck. The only person here that long is Captain Rogers. Did he assign you the case?”

  Jack shook his head. “This is personal. I promised somebody I’d look into it.”

  “Check Rogers. If he’s got anything, he’ll tell you.”

  Reopening the folder Jack began browsing through the articles again, this time not so much reading as studying faces. He was the new guy on the force, still unproven. How risky was it to take on a case they couldn’t close back then and were less likely to close now that twenty-five years had gone by?

  He thought back on the words Emory had spoken as they’d sat in the dim light of the front parlor.

  “Franklin deserves better.”

  Jack picked up the folder, walked across the room and rapped on the door of Captain Rogers’s office.

  “Got a minute?” he asked.

  Captain Rogers waved him in and said to have a seat. It was his experience that detectives seldom came knocking at his door when there wasn’t a problem.

  “Anything wrong?” he asked.

  “Not wrong,” Jack said, “but probably challenging.” He handed the folder of news clippings across the desk. “This belongs to my wife’s granddaddy. Franklin Wilkes, the victim, would have been my father-in-law.”

  Rogers glanced up with a look of surprise. “Wilkes? The stockbroker?”

  Jack nodded. “I promised that I’d—”

  “That case is twenty-five years old!”

  “I know,” Jack said, “but I was hoping I could look into it. I thought maybe I could poke around a bit and see if Feldman has resurfaced.”

  Rogers gave a tight-lipped look of doubt. “The Wilkes homicide was one of the worst we’ve had here in Wyattsville. I was a rookie patrolman back then, so I didn’t work the case.” He handed the folder back to Jack. “I can’t promise we’ve still got the files, but given that it was such a high profile homicide my bet is we do.”

  “Do I have your okay to look into it?”

  Rogers nodded. “Take Schulte with you and check the Harbor Street warehouse. If we’ve got the files, that’s where you’ll find them.”

  “Thanks, Captain,” Jack said and disappeared out the door.

  The Harbor Street warehouse was on the far side of Dorchester. It was a building with bars on the windows and a padlock on the door but no watchman.

  Schulte unlocked the door, and they stepped inside. The cement building had the musty smell of old paper and years of dust. Ahead of them were rows of metal shelving stacked floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes.

  “Are these alphabetical or by year?” Jack asked.

  Schulte chuckled. “There’s no system. This is the last stop, a holding bin before files are destroyed. Because of the way they’re hauled over here, it’s likely the oldest cases are somewhere further back.”

  Jack walked halfway down the center aisle and brushed a layer of dust from the label on the front of a box. It read “Crimmins – March 1948.”

  He moved two rows back and found files from 1936 and 1937. He was near the end of the last aisle when Schulte hollered, “I got it!”

  The carton marked “Wilkes – January 1930” was on the rack marked Do Not Destroy. It was a large box with considerable weight. They tugged it from the shelf, loaded it into the trunk of the car and headed back to the stationhouse.

  Inside the Box

  For the next two days, Jack sat at his desk reading through witness statements and police reports.

  It appeared that John Carroll, the officer in charge of the investigation, had interviewed everyone with even the remotest connection to George Feldman. Jack read through the statements of neighbors, coworkers, the Reliable plant foreman, an aunt who lived in New Jersey and even a woman who worked in the luncheonette where he was seen earlier in the day. No one had even the slightest inkling of where George Feldman would have gone.

  “He wasn’t a very likeable man,” the foreman said, “and far as I know he didn’t have any friends. At least none here at the plant.”

  Two coworkers claimed they’d seen him with a girlfriend on occasion. One described the woman as a tall blonde; the other said she was redhead. Neither of them knew the woman’s name or her whereabouts.

  The summation report indicated that the house where Feldman lived with Anna Feldman, his mother, was repossessed by the bank. Anna died the same day as the shooting. Albert Feldman, his father, had disappeared years earlier and since that time had no contact with his wife or George. The report listed Albert Feldman as an electrician by trade but with no known employment.

  Each statement seemed to lead to a dead end. The aunt had not seen George since he was a teenager. There was no trace of the girlfriend nor was there proof one ever existed. Based on the fingerprint evidence, a warrant was issued for George Feldman’s arrest. A wanted poster was issued, and along with departmental distribution it went out to all steel mills. At the time it was believed George might look for employment in the industry since he was an experienced cinder-pit man and metal wheeler.

  The last entry in the file was in July of 1935 when Bertha Paulson reported that she thought she’d seen George lurking around the Feldman house.

  “If it’s not him then it’s someone who looks remarkably like him,�
�� she said.

  Two uniformed officers investigated the report and found footprints in the mud behind the house and the lock on the back door broken. However they did not find George Feldman inside or anywhere in the vicinity. The house, which was still empty at that time, burned to the ground that night. There was evidence of arson but no suspect other than the possibility George Feldman had indeed torched his own home.

  Jack went through folder after folder of reports and statements, but in the end he had very little to go on. He jotted down the most relevant names and addresses, figuring he would start by again interviewing the people who had known George.

  First on the list was Bertha Paulson. There was no telephone listing, so Jack and Schulte drove out to the house. The woman answering the door said to the best of her knowledge Bertha had passed away in early 1941.

  “We bought the house from her son that November, and she was already dead then,” she said.

  After thanking her for her time, they moved on.

  “As long as we’re out here, let’s canvass the neighborhood and see if we can find anyone else who might have known Feldman,” Jack said.

  “I’ll take the houses on this side.” Schulte waved a hand toward the other side of the street. “You get those.”

  Jack crossed over and rang the doorbell of the house that had been rebuilt on the Feldman lot. A middle-aged woman answered. Jack flashed his badge then asked how long she’d been there and who she’d bought the property from.

  “What’s this about?” she asked suspiciously.

  “We’re just following up on a 1930 homicide.”

  “That’s twenty-five years ago! We didn’t even buy the lot until nineteen forty-two, and it was nineteen forty-three before the house was finished.”

  “The man we’re looking for lived in the house that burned down,” Jack explained. “Sometimes when a suspect believes you’re no longer looking for them, they come back to an area they’re familiar with. Over the years have you noticed anyone hanging around, maybe asking questions about how you got the house?”

  “Not until now,” she said. “Are we in some kind of danger?”

  “No, no,” Jack replied. “Nothing like that.”

  “If we are then you’ve got to tell me, because I have two girls in high school—”

  “This is a cold case. There’s no danger, I can assure you.”

  “Well, if there’s no danger, then I would think you’d have better things to do than go around scaring people half to death!”

  She abruptly closed the door and left Jack standing on the front porch.

  It was a similar story up and down the block. Almost all of the people living on the street had moved in during the late 1940s when there were more jobs to be had and better pay. The only resident left from 1930 was Wilbur Ross. He’d been in his early twenties at the time of Wilkes murder but remembered reading about it in the newspapers.

  “I wasn’t none too surprised, ’cause George was always kind of strange. He had a look in his eye that made you think maybe he was a little off.”

  Wilbur wriggled a finger toward his skull indicating crazy.

  “I was about ten when his daddy ran off and left them. George was older than me, but I remember how he used to sit on the front steps all the time looking like he thought his daddy would be coming back any minute. Even a fool would have known that man wasn’t ever coming back.”

  “What about since then?” Jack asked. “Have you seen him? Maybe a few years after his mama died?”

  Wilbur shook his head. “Missus Paulson said she saw him, but I never did.”

  Once the interviews were concluded, they returned to the stationhouse. Again reviewing the twenty-five-year-old statements, Jack pulled out the telephone number for the aunt in New Jersey and placed a call. A man answered.

  “May I please speak with Debra Feldman?”

  “There’s no Debra here.”

  “Is this Central 6-4723?”

  “Yep, but there’s no Debra here.”

  Jack glanced down at the statement form then asked, “Are you located at 220 Back River Street, Hackensack?”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” the man snapped. “Now—”

  Jack jumped in. “I should have introduced myself. Detective Mahoney, Wyattsville, Virginia, police department. I’m trying to locate Debra Feldman in regard to a cold case homicide.”

  “Sorry, mac, I can’t help you. I’ve had the same telephone number for over six years and never heard of this Feldman woman.”

  When Jack hung up he penciled “NG” alongside the telephone number on the statement then called information and asked for a Debra Feldman in Hackensack.

  No listing.

  “Try Bergen County,” he said.

  They had a listing for the name in Leonia. Jack took down the number and called it.

  After a lengthy and somewhat confusing conversation, it was determined that the woman was the only child of Harriett and Benjamin Feldman of Rochester. It was sheer coincidence that her name happened to be the same, but she was in no way related to George Feldman.

  Another dead end.

  The next day Jack Mahoney drove out to the Reliable plant alone. Instead of rolled railroad tracks, they were once again manufacturing sheets of steel to be used for refrigerators. He sat across the desk from Ken Gardiner, the personnel manager, and explained that he was looking for information on George Feldman who worked at the plant back in 1930.

  “Ed Ruppert was the foreman back then,” Gardiner said, “but he retired back in forty-nine.”

  Jack rattled off the names of the co-workers who had been interviewed at the time. Not one of them was still working at the plant.

  “Reliable had a lot of layoffs during the Depression years,” Gardiner said. “Very few of those men ever came back.”

  After nearly two hours of searching through old records and names that didn’t have a scrap of familiarity, the only thing Gardiner could provide was Ed Ruppert’s address and he couldn’t say whether the man was still alive. When Jack left the mill, he stopped at a phone booth and called the office.

  “Have you got anything more on any of those names?” he asked Schulte.

  “Nope,” Leon answered. “Came up dry on all of them.”

  “The only thing I got was the foreman’s address,” Jack replied. “It’s in town, so I’ll stop there on my way in.”

  Mahoney rang the bell and waited. After several minutes, a thin silver-haired man wearing a bathrobe opened the door.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said.

  “Ed Ruppert?”

  The man nodded. “What can I do for you?”

  Again flashing his badge, Jack introduced himself then explained that he was investigating a homicide that took place in 1930.

  Ed gave a nod of recognition. “I don’t recall the name, but I bet I know who you’re talking about. The guy was a real wacko.”

  “Feldman, George Feldman,” Jack said. “He worked at Reliable when you were the foreman—”

  Ed cut in. “Yeah, that’s him. A nut case. Wanted a job but didn’t want to work. I should’ve never hired him. You see a man with that look in his eye, you’d best run the other way. He suckered me in. Said his mama was sick and he needed a job, so I gave him a chance.”

  “You ever get to know anything else about him? His friends maybe? Or a girlfriend?”

  Ed shook his head. “I doubt anyone knew anything about him. I only heard him talk about his mama, and it was never anything good.”

  “Was he friendly with any of the other employees? A co-worker, the janitor or maybe a secretary?”

  “Nope,” Ed said and again shook his head.

  After fifteen minutes of questioning, Ed said he’d already told the investigators everything he knew about Feldman.

  “I thought there might be a chance you’d remember something you’d forgotten to mention during the original investigation,” Jack said.

&nbs
p; Ed laughed. “From twenty-five years ago? Not likely.”

  Jack Mahoney

  I’ve hardly gotten any sleep for two nights. I go to bed exhausted; then before I close my eyes I start thinking about this case again. Christine asked me if something was wrong, but I told her no. I’m deliberately not telling her or Emory, because I don’t want them to get their hopes up.

  After going through the evidence box and looking at the crime scene photos, I assure you I’ll never let Christine see them. Emory was the one who found Franklin that night, and now I know why it left such a mark on his heart. Franklin’s chest was torn open from the impact of the bullets. George Feldman had to be standing less than five feet from him when he emptied the gun into his chest. What kind of a monster does something like that?

  Tomorrow I plan to track down the people who were in the building that night: the janitor and a woman who was in one of the offices on the fourth floor. Chances are that after twenty-five years they’re no longer there, but if they’re still alive I’ll find them. Maybe Feldman had a connection in the building, someone who opened the downstairs door and let him in.

  Schulte thinks this is a lost cause. He’s come up with a dozen different reasons why the case is never going to be solved. Time of course is the big factor. Witnesses forget what they might have once known, and the evidence trail grows cold. George Feldman is older; his appearance has no doubt changed, and he was obviously a loner. It would appear the man didn’t have a close connection to anyone other than his mother, but I don’t buy into that. Somewhere there’s someone who knows something about George Feldman; it’s just that we haven’t yet found it.

  Even in a case like this there’s always a loose thread left dangling, a seemingly meaningless thing that was overlooked in the past. A connection no one else saw. It’s my job to find the tail end of that thread. Once I’ve got it, one tug and everything starts to unravel.