3

New York, 1953

“He went out the window. That much we know for sure. He did go out the goddamned window,” Hogan repeated, rolling his chair back from the desk and slapping the file down. Five inches thick, at least, with the photographs spilling out, recording the same scene Tom had looked at live, a dozen years before.

Abe Reles. AKA Kid Twist. AKA the Little Man Who Would Not Stop Talking.

He lay stretched out on his back in the pictures, shirt split open to his waist. Those grotesque tattoos visible on his bared arms. His left arm flung up over his head, right one pointing down, as if making some last, secret sign.

That was a lie, too, he knew. All the lies upon lies, and here they were hoping they would add up to one big truth in the end.

“They let the doctor turn him over, pull out his jacket and his shirt before the photographer got one goddamned shot,” Hogan recited, his stern, thin mouth widening, one eyebrow hiked skeptically.

“Beside him are the bed sheets, and the insulated wire he was supposed to have used to climb out of a sixth-floor window. Tied-up bed sheets, for chrissakes. They posed them, too. Took the picture with them propped up against a windowsill. They posed the goddamn bed sheets! And for what? To show us what the sheets might have looked like coming out the window?”

“Nobody was thinkin’ very clearly that morning, Boss.”

He could still remember how Charlie’s face looked when he had stopped by the Brooklyn DA’s office on his way to law school that day. Firm-jawed and unruffled, trying to make a show of it for the men—but with every bit of color drained away.

“Nine feet of sheets, tied to four feet of wire—to navigate a drop of forty-two feet,” Hogan told him, though by now the numbers were engraved on his brain, along with every other fact of the case. Including the one he had concealed.

“The FBI lab boys say the whole contraption wouldn’t have held more than a hundred ten pounds. One hundred and ten pounds. When Reles, who knew more about ropes and knots than a goddamned Boy Scout, weighed one seventy. He could’ve told the moment he set foot on the ledge it wouldn’t hold him.”

“That’s right.”

“But laying a finger aside of his nose, out the window he goes!”

Hogan flung himself back into the chair. The pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit jacket tucked away in the closet by now, three-point handkerchief still neatly folded in the breast pocket. The rest of him as meticulous as ever. Starched shirt still held at the wrists by cufflinks, stickpin stuck straight as a rail under a tightly knotted silk tie. A whiff of bay rum from his neck and his face shaved as carefully as a chorine’s leg.

In a moment he was up again, brainstorming over the case the way he liked to do late at night. Fiddling with his pipe, something else he had taught Tom. “Always get yourself a good prop. It helps in court when you can’t figure out what the hell you’re going to say next.” Going over the evidence again and again, gnawing at every contradiction like a dog with an old shoe.

“None of it makes any sense. That theory the Old Man came up with, God bless him? ‘He was doing it for a laugh, a prank.’ Jesus jumped-up Christ. His wife says he was walking in his sleep. The men on duty said he was trying to escape—with two dollars and thirty-five cents in his pocket, and half of Brooklyn thinking they’d be set for life if they dropped a nickel on him!”

“He was sick. The TB.”

“And that was his greatest joy in life. You saw the testimony. Going around, showing everyone each time he coughed up another mouthful of blood. Saving it all in a glass he kept by the window. The man was a human spittoon, Tom. But like so many of us, he was precious in his own eyes.”

“I know it, Boss.”

 

It was after the Kefauver hearings that he decided to go work for the district attorney’s office. The spectacle of his brother exposed before the TV cameras, melting under the light. Dabbing away at his forehead with that handkerchief, the dark splotches growing on his shirt . . .

Natie Cohen was incredulous when he told him. No more so than Hogan’s current assistant DAs. They told one another behind his back—sometimes to his face—that he was a red, a spy, a plant just trying to get information for his brother. Hogan as suspicious as any of them, at the start.

“What, did you run out of government agencies to sue, Mr. O’Kane?” he asked at his interview, leafing through a folder. He was a slight man, thickening a little around the midriff as he pushed fifty, with a once impish face grown a little priggish around the mouth. Hairline just beginning to recede, exposing a faint skirmishers’ line of liver spots. “The feds, the state, the City. The Board of Ed. Met Life—”

“I didn’t realize they were part of the government. Yet.”

Hogan didn’t look up.

“Funny! You sued on behalf of Jewish war refugees. For the rights of a subversive alien operative during wartime—”

“He was a German hotel waiter.”

“—to keep the City from banning a book on Thomas Paine. To integrate Stuyvesant Town, to integrate Levittown, to integrate the major leagues—”

“Is that my FBI dossier you have there?”

“No,” Hogan said, slapping it shut and looking up at him then. “It’s our own. And that’s only about the half of it. Don’t think we don’t know about all that funny business on the docks. Shipping out bazookas to the Haganah so they could use them against this country’s closest wartime ally.”

“Just trying to even the odds a little.”

Hogan gave a little snort. “Actually, I don’t give a good goddamn about your liberal hobbyhorses. I only want to make it clear that the DA’s office is not the place for you to right the ills of the world. We’re here to catch criminals and enforce the law. Do you understand that?”

“I do.”

“I’m also not interested in salvaging your brother’s good name. What I want to do is to break the waterfront rackets, once and for all. I want to make a case, and I want to follow that case no matter where it leads. Is that clear?”

“That’s all I want.”

“What you want doesn’t matter. What matters here is what I want, and I want to make a case. I think you might be useful for that. I think you just might get all sorts of people who won’t talk to us to talk to you.”

“I think so, too.”

“The cops, the rats. Maybe Frank Bals and Jack McGrath. Maybe Neddy Moran, up in Sing Sing. Maybe even your brother.”

“Him, too.”

Hogan’s eyes challenging, aggressive across the desk from him. Tom let him stare.

“No doubt you’re sure he’s innocent, and you want to prove that,” he said.

“No doubt.”

“I can’t sway you from that, I know—not yet at least—and I don’t care. But I don’t want you lifting a finger on his behalf if it means endangering anything to do with this case. You got that?”

“I do.”

“All right. I trust you to be as good as your word. You know I’m sticking my neck out on this, but that’s my concern, not yours.”

He tossed the folder he’d been reading from onto the desk in front of Tom—then pulled two more, much fatter ones from the briefcase on the floor next to his chair.

“Here’s what we have on you, in case you’re interested. And here’s your brother.”

 

He looked down now at his brother’s file, flipping aimlessly for the thousandth time through the clippings, the photographs, the police interrogations. The grand jury minutes. The articles from the tabloids with their headlines half an inch thick. The drawn-in lines and arrows in white chalk, showing Reles’s room on the sixth floor of the Half Moon, and where he had landed on the roof of the hotel’s kitchen, forty-two feet below. The Daily News headline, in gleeful block type, six inches high: THIS BIRD COULD SING BUT HE COULDN’T FLY!

“It’s rotten, Tom. It’s rotten now, and it was rotten then. Abe Reles, the greatest mob witness of all time. The man who put away Murder, Inc. He sent seven men to the chair and made eighty-five capital cases in less than two years—and who knows but he wouldn’t have made two, three dozen more.”

“The man who would’ve sent up Albert Anastasia,” Tom finished, “and brought justice for Peter Panto.”

That gently smiling boy, not yet thirty. Bringing twelve hundred longshoremen to their feet down at the Star Hall. Speaking of justice, and rights, and America there on the waterfront, as if it were a movie. His smiling face, under that silly little black hat. The thin moustache he was so vain about, which Tom used to joke made him look like a gigolo.

Then they were pulling the remains out of the lime pit, on the little man’s say-so. Brown bones and a skull sticking out of the gelatinous earth, while he retched behind the chicken house.

“Charlie wanted that, too, Boss. I know he did.”

“I know you think he did, Tom.”

“I know. I was there.”

Remembering the barely contained panic in his brother’s office that morning the little man went out the window. Uniforms and detectives running up and down the halls, the phones jumping off the hook. Everyone trying to keep it from leaking before they could figure out what the hell to say to the press. Frank Bals wringing his hands, his wide, red face melting like an old woman’s at a funeral.

“I swear to God, Charlie, I don’t know how the hell it coulda happened. I stopped in just before midnight, an’ everything was in order. They had orders to call me at once if anything—anything—went wrong!”

 

“He was being kept under protective custody.”

Hogan was counting the facts off his fingers, the way Tom had watched him do many times before a grand jury. Cherishing the hours they had to work together, especially at night like this, just the two of them. Learning something every time.

He had found the whole experience nearly unbearable at first. The offices up on Hogan’s eighth-floor fiefdom of the Criminal Courts Building more like a library, or the Harvard Yard. Swarms of Ivy League law grads to match the acres of red and gold broadloom on the floor. Nobody speaking above a murmur. Hogan insisting on opening everyone’s mail, issuing statements to the press in pretentious Victorian paragraphs. Displaying the huge plaque on his desk that read COURTESY IS THE GOLDEN KEY THAT OPENS EVERY DOOR.

Yet they had come to an unspoken understanding after their initial, mutual suspicion. Tossing back and forth the Latin aphorisms that both of them loved, two self-made Micks showing off. Tom having to admire how much more efficiently and orderly Hogan ran the DA’s office than his brother had back in Brooklyn. This was not a place where things would go missing. Things like a witness.

“Twenty-four-hour police protection. An entire hotel suite—a whole goddamned wing, for chrissakes!—locked off behind an iron door. Eighteen cops on guard, working in shifts of six, twenty-four hours at a time. Three other witnesses in there with him, fearing for their lives. The iron door bolted and locked from the inside. Nobody gets in without the guards getting a good look at him first through the peephole.”

“That’s right.”

“Detectives supervising every single thing prepared for him down in the kitchen. More uniforms strolling the lobby, and the boardwalk outside. His testimony scheduled each day with no advance warning, no one told when he was coming or going. Taking him back and forth to court in a goddamned armored car, so no one can cut him off, stage an accident.”

“And instead he goes out the window.”

“Instead he goes out the window.”

Hogan sighed and stood up, lacing the fingers of both hands behind his head while he walked around the room. He went back to the file and pulled out the autopsy report—Tom flinching involuntarily, and hoping he hadn’t noticed.

“The autopsy said there was no sign of a struggle. Not a mark on the man—all trauma consistent with death by a fall from high places. No sign he’d been shot, or stabbed, or tapped on his pointy little head before they chucked him out. Nothing on the toxicology report. No one poisoned him or drugged him. Nothing at all—”

“Except the alcohol.”

“Except the alcohol. And not much of that. Only about the equivalent of a shot, the medical examiner said.”

“But it was in his stomach.”

“But it was still in his stomach. Too soon to be absorbed by the brain, where it might do any harm. And how did it get there? There wasn’t a bottle in the whole damned suite.”

“No.”

“And how did he drink it? The guards swore they walked up and down the hall every ten minutes, checking on all the sleeping little squealers. So we’re supposed to believe that—sometime between seven in the morning and seven ten—Abe Reles jumps up out of bed, dresses in his best testifying clothes, ties his bed sheets to a length of wire, ties the whole contraption to his radiator, takes a pop for good luck, and makes the bottle disappear. Then off he goes to join the Flying Wallendas.”

He dropped the autopsy report back onto the desk, Tom’s eyes flicking over at it.

“And that’s all,” Tom said softly.

“That’s all.”

Not quite all. Tom thinking of the little slip of paper he had found tucked away in the autopsy report. Just a loose slip, not even paper-clipped to anything, its one line written in Dr. Robillard’s hand. Enough to hang a man, seen in the wrong light . . .

“It’s the greatest locked-door mystery in the history of the world. And it’s twelve years old.” Frank Hogan sighed, sitting back down.

“At least we got to the bottom of some of it,” Tom said softly.

“I know we did, Tom. And it was because of the work you did.”

“I was just doing my sworn duty.”

“I know you did, and I appreciate your work, Tom. That’s why I want you to go down there and talk to him. That, and to show there’s no hard feelings.”

“He knows that, Boss.”

“I want to make sure he does. Honest to God, Tom, it’s nothing to do with the mayor’s race, or my ambitions. Tell you the truth, I’m just as glad not to have the job,” Hogan told him, leaning forward to impress him with his sincerity, though Tom knew this was a lie, too. Wondering, Does anyone ever tell anything but lies to anyone else? Even those they love most in the world—especially those they love most?

“I have no need to be mayor. I’d be just as happy to stay here till the day I die, putting the bad guys away. It’s nothing personal.”

“I know, Boss.”

Tom the only one in the office able to get away with calling him “Boss.” Unwilling, even after he’d come to respect him, to give in to the airs of some Connecticut Mick like all the other, younger assistant DAs, worshipfully calling him Mr. Hogan. Going so far as to order the same lunch Hogan had Ida bring in every day from Schrafft’s, half the office gulping down a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of coffee.

It was another thing that separated them from Tom. He wasn’t just out of law school but already in his mid-thirties, a veteran, and not inclined to worship anybody anymore. Instead he insisted on using “Boss” with all its sarcastic, Amos ’n Andy connotations—his little way of keeping his independence.

“That’s why I want you to go down there. You know the case better than anyone. And with you he’ll know he’s getting a fair shake.”

“He’ll appreciate that. I appreciate it—I appreciate your trust,” he stammered.

Even if I’ve already betrayed it.

“Good, Tommy.” Hogan squeezed his shoulder across the desk. “Because you know, it’s a risk for you, too, if you ever want to get elected to so much as the school board. You go down there and exonerate him, it’ll be seen as a big whitewash. If it goes the other way—there’s plenty of fellas who’ll never vote for the man who sent away his own brother.”

“I know it. It’s not about that,” Tom told him. “I want to do it. I want to find out the truth.”

“Ah, well, the truth, is it?” Hogan smiled slightly, leaning back in his chair. “Let’s just hope we have a case. Because your brother’s the linchpin to the whole thing. If he can tell us anything, maybe we can clear his name in the bargain. If he can’t—”

“Then the waterfront stays buttoned up. Billy McCormack rides again. And Peter Panto might as well have stayed in his grave.”

The flash of that smile, his kind eyes under the silly black hat. Reles, the little man who wouldn’t stop talking, describing his death so matter-of-factly while he bit into the tuna salad sandwich Charlie had sent out for.

“Mendy said he hated having to put that boy away. Said he fought like a real man. He knew he made a mistake when they brought him up to that house and he tried to fight his way out. Woulda made it, too, if Mendy hadn’t a mugged him.”

The little bits of tuna sticking to his stubbled face, mulched into white gobs in his open mouth. Until Tom had wanted to pick up the closest chair and smash his damned head in.

“Yeah, he almost made it outta there.” He gulped another lump of sandwich, smirked up at their faces. Flashing them his horrible, imp’s grin. “Almost.”

 

“Did you see he was back?”

“Yes.”

Hogan opened the two-page spread of the Daily News before him to the booming caption: MR. BIG IN TOWN TO APPEAR BEFORE WATERFRONT COMMISSION. Looking as hale and hearty as ever despite his nearly seventy years, wearing a splendid new vicuña overcoat and a Stetson fedora. Chest thrust forward, head flung back with his usual combative grin.

 

“Big Bill” McCormack, the alleged “Mr. Big” of the waterfront, leads his family into the sanctuary of Saint Francis of Assisi upon their arrival at Penn Station from the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. McCormack, a Knight of Malta and of the Grand Cross, and a Grand Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, makes a point of always taking his family to pray immediately on their return to the city, to thank the Almighty for their safe journey and abundant blessings . . .

 

“Look at him, the grand knight of the double cross!” groused Hogan. “You know, the Daily News has started calling him ‘the Little Man’s Port Authority’? I wonder what press agent dreamed that up for him.”

“They always do run some sweetheart piece on him when the heat’s on,” Tom agreed, scrutinizing the picture.

Behind McCormack in the picture, filing dutifully into Saint Francis’s, were his wife and daughter. Then the son, Bill Junior bringing up the rear. His face as always the very image of his father’s, but lacking the older man’s ebullience. It was as though they switched places, Tom thought, the younger man always looking more somber, aged—even troubled.

“It’s a simple cash deal. He lets the Daily News trucks take their newsprint off the docks for free. Every other paper has to pay. All hail the power of the free press!” Hogan told Tom. He pointed to McCormack’s liveried chauffeur and bodyguard barely visible at the edge of the picture: “See that one? I happen to know he shot three men up in Providence. Maybe they’re saying a novena for them.”

“You know McCormack’s a daily communicant?”

“Mmm. With the emphasis on the last syllable.”

Hogan slapped the photo with the back of his hand.

“How many years have we been after him now! And nothing, even after the other papers finally picked up that he was Mr. Big. Hell, I remember when we were trying to get him back in 1937. He simply wouldn’t see the investigators. Told them, ‘Mr. McCormack doesn’t care to discuss his affairs’!”

“And he got away with it?”

“Sure. He’s got a hand in every game in town. Sand and gravel. Mixed concrete, dredging the Sound. Real estate, his own bus line now. The biggest chain of filling stations in the state!”

“And the dock unions.”

“The key to the whole City. If they don’t work, nothing runs. Not to mention it’s ten, even twenty thousand votes he can deliver, every time, through King Joe Ryan and his longshoremen. He’s got a hand in the pocket of every businessman and every politician in this town. Little wonder we couldn’t lay a glove on him—”

“Until now.”

“Until now. The governor’s commission will finally make him testify, at least. But that won’t be enough to take him down . . .”

“Unless?”

“Unless we can find out exactly why and how it was that McCormack put Abe Reles out that window, and Peter Panto in the ground. Which is why we need to know everything that your brother knows.”

They were silent for a moment, Hogan’s last words hanging awkward between them.

“Tell me, Tommy,” Hogan said, trying to break the tension. “Tell me, when was it that you knew it was all bad?”

“When I saw the key,” Tom told him, his voice distant. “I guess I knew the moment I saw that key. It just took me twelve years to figure it out.”

 

He could still see it clearly, after all this time. Just weeks before the war. Charlie standing on the kitchen roof at the Half Moon, looking out at the ocean, with all the seabirds whirling and diving against the steel-gray sky.

He rode out to Coney Island with them. Neddy Moran driving as always, a hulking figure up front with Captain Bals. Tom in the back seat with Charlie, eavesdropping as his brother worked the radio car phone, fielding the calls from one frantic cop and assistant DA after another. Listening more than talking, Tom impressed as always by his brother’s ability to know just what to ask, trying to string together some coherent story of what happened. His hands trembling ever so slightly as he lit up a cigarette.

He turned his face to the window, watching the broad, lovely, tree-lined boulevard of Ocean Parkway glide by. The siren off. Neddy stopping for the lights, not wanting to raise even the ghost of a commotion. Tom watching the neighborhood come awake as they passed through it: Orthodox Jews in their yarmulkes and broad hats and black wool coats, striding down the stairs of their nice brick houses to work in their shops or the Diamond District or to spend the day in the rapture of a musty synagogue somewhere, still trying to ferret out what the hell the Almighty was talking about after five thousand years. Kissing goodbye their plump, pretty wives in babushkas with a baby on their hip, striding off to their cars or the subway, and who would ever have believed it back in Lismirrane: a whole city full of Jews, living as well as the English people.

The City made up of worlds within worlds. The idea never ceased to enthrall him. He still stumbled into entire neighborhoods that he never knew existed before—communities a man might live his whole life in New York and never even suspect. The neighborhood of good, God-fearing Jews—and Brownsville, the neighborhood of bad Jews who shot and garroted men in the darkness, and dumped their bodies in the far, lonely reaches of the City. The world of the good Italians, and the world of the bad Italians, and the good colored and the bad colored, and the good and the bad bohunks, and Arabs, and Polacks, and the Chinee, and the Irish in all their possible guises, good and bad. The worlds intermingled, pressed right up against one another, house against house, wall against wall, and all of them going about their business every morning like none of those other worlds next door had anything in the least to do with themselves.

They took the boulevard all the way down to Surf Avenue, then followed it out to Twenty-Ninth Street and the Half Moon Hotel. When they turned, Charlie set down the radio phone and said the only words he spoke to his brother the entire ride: “You know, we had a perfect case of murder in the first degree against Anastasia.”

“Sure. Yeah, I knew that, Charlie,” he replied, perplexed and oddly touched at the same time.

“I just want you to know that. When you hear what people will say.”

“I know that, Charlie. Who cares what they say? You’ll nail him yet.”

His brother gave a half nod in the back of the car, an expression of what looked like gratitude on his face.

“We were close. We were that close. Before all . . . this.”

He stopped talking as abruptly as he had begun, and turned his face to look out the window. Coney Island quiet and desolate in the mid-November morning light. All the fabulous amusements shut up for the season, the crescent moons of Luna Park no longer spinning, and the trellised glass palace of Steeplechase still and unlit behind the grinning idiot’s face and slogan: STEEPLECHASE FUNNY PLACE. The whole cacophony of the penny arcades and the shooting galleries and the funhouses locked away behind their metal shutters. Only the bathhouses still open, and Nathan’s Famous, with a little knot of garbage men and subway conductors and other workingmen in their uniforms standing outside, having their morning coffee and maybe a cruller or a hot dog before they started on the day’s same, monotonous tasks.

The Half Moon was another ten blocks down the beach, snug on the boardwalk. Sixteen stately stories high, and crowned with a gold dome that had begun to peel. Standing out above the apartment houses and the two-family homes and the summer bungalows that sheltered under it like peasant huts against a castle. When they got out of the car, Tom could see the gaggle of cops and hotel employees already clustered around something on top of the kitchen roof, two stories in the air. Just above them a faded mural advertising DIME A DANCE for some long-padlocked clip joint.

Charlie saw them up there, too, and swore aloud.

“Goddammit, do they think it’s a wake? Invite all the neighbors in, and the priest to boot!”

They strode in through the lobby, in its faded, Moorish palace splendor. The décor a leftover from the twenties, an age as long ago now as the Middle Ages. The soft leather chairs and the divans torn and stained, the tiled arches dingy and cracked. They walked past locked and darkened doors advertising the Fabulous Isabella Dining Room, and the Galleon Grille, and the Grand Ballroom, Home of the Half Moon Radio Orchestra, which was where they met Jack McGrath just coming down the steps.

“He’s upstairs, Charlie, on the roof of the kitchen extension,” McGrath told him.

“I know, Jack. I saw the mob scene when we came in.”

“‘Where the vultures are gathered, there you will find the body,’” McGrath said, twisting his mouth in disgust.

The rest of them smiling like idiots anyway. Visibly relieved to see him, their own backs straightening. The Old Man is here, surely everything will be all right now. Still rigid as a parade-ground sergeant at sixty years of age, body broad and burly as a bear’s. His captain’s uniform brimming with department commendations, starched as stiff as a British field marshal’s.

Tom had already heard the stories a hundred times. Jack McGrath, the greatest policeman ever to walk a beat. Who single-handedly drove all the child molesters out of Brooklyn, like Saint Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland.

“The doctor’s on his way—”

“What?” Charlie’s face ruddy. “No doctor’s seen him yet? Jesus, Jack, are ya sure he’s even dead?”

“He ain’t breathin’. And he ain’t movin’.” The Old Man brushed a hand dismissively through the air. “That’s evidence enough for me.”

Out on the roof of the kitchen was a wall of men in blue uniforms and overcoats. Tom noticed the police photographer among them, camera the size of an accordion hanging from his neck. But he wasn’t snapping anything, not with that mob of men all around the body. Charlie swore again, his brow looking red enough to blow off the top of his head.

“Jesus Christ, Jack, half the police brass in New York must be up here!”

“Word’s breakin’, Charlie,” the Old Man warned, putting a hand on his shoulder. “The birds from the press will be here anytime now. You better get upstairs to see the men before they find ’em.”

“All right, Jack. Just gimme a minute here.”

The Old Man had the uniforms push the crowd from the body, and when he saw him lying there, Tom’s first thought was that he looked like everyone else—like a hundred other pictures of the dead he’d seen in his brother’s office. It was the first and only time he ever felt sorry for the man.

He was lying with the left side of his face on the graveled roof, one arm outstretched, one leg tucked up beneath him as if he were still trying to get somewhere. His tongue lolling out over thick, meaty lips, blood smeared beneath his nose and his gray suit pants split down the middle.

Abe Reles. Killer of at least sixty men. The man who brought down Murder, Inc.

“Just like any other shmuck,” one of the cops said with a snicker.

A civilian knelt down next to the body and put the end of a stethoscope next to his chest. Next he gently lifted Reles’s head from the ground, bits of gravel dropping from the pockmarked side of his face.

“Yep, he’s gone,” he said casually, standing up. The Old Man was on him at once.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, grabbing the man by the lapels of his coat, Tom half expecting him to backhand the doctor like he would some sex pervert. “Who are you an’ who sent ya?”

“Dr. Max Silberman, Coney Island Hospital,” the doctor managed to get out in a shaky voice. “The hotel uses me when they have a problem—”

“Jack, that’s enough!” Charlie barked, stepping in between them. “Thank you for your services, Doctor, that’ll be fine now.”

“Don’t you say a word to anyone else!” the Old Man snapped, grabbing the doctor again by his coat as he started to walk away. “No one, you hear me?”

“Jack! Go on upstairs with the men,” Charlie told him. “I’ll be along shortly.”

McGrath did as he was told without another word, his rough, pitted face glaring once more at the doctor before he left. Soon after, Dr. Robillard, the assistant medical examiner, came up, along with the hotel manager, who pushed forward a pale, elderly gentleman with a white brush moustache, who had been the first to spot the body.

“And who are you, sir?” Charlie asked, pumping his hand as if he were at a campaign stop.

“G. Dennis Holt, chief clerk of the draft board. I opened up the office, seven sharp—same as I always do—and I saw him laying there,” he said, his voice shaking. “I didn’t half believe my eyes, sir—”

“Who did you tell about it?”

“Just the desk manager. I called downstairs—”

“Good work, man. An officer will take your full statement.”

Charlie moved away from the scene then, and only later did Tom realize that he had barely looked at it. Dr. Robillard knelt down, turned the body over, and went methodically to work. Gently ripping open Reles’s jacket and shirt, the buttons popping away. Turning down the sleeves to reveal his enigmatic tattoos: the words TRUE LOVE and MOTHER around a weird, naked dwarf of a woman on his right forearm. On the left arm, the one flung over his head, there was a heart with two women’s heads attached to it.

Next he laid a bright white handkerchief out on the roof gravel and began emptying the dead man’s pockets. Dictating everything he found, every move to his assistant leaning over his shoulder and jotting it all down in shorthand on a wide stenographer’s pad.

“No gunshot or knife wounds visible.

“No visible signs of trauma to the head, or beating marks to the body.

“Victim’s coat is turned up on the left side, a gray checkered cap in the left trouser pocket.

“Victim’s trousers are split down the middle seam for approximately ten inches, as are the underdrawers.”

There was another snicker from one of the cops.

“On the victim’s person are: one Waltham pocket watch, with chain. Two dollars and thirty-five cents in one-dollar bills, and change. One key—”

“Hey, Doc, all right I take a picture now?” the police photographer spoke up, his legs bending up and down in place. “It’s gettin’ cold out here.”

The quiet conversations around the roof came to a stop, Dr. Robillard looking up sharply at the photographer through his bifocals.

“You mean you didn’t take a picture already? Before you let me turn the body over?”

“The Old Man told me not to!” the photographer protested. “Said he’d have my nuts if I shot anything before he gave me the okay.”

“My God, what’s going on around here—”

“Just get on with it!” Charlie snapped, stepping back into the scrum around the body. “We all can see where he ended up, can’t we? Makes no difference now.”

Charlie wandered back out to the edge of the roof, while the doctor continued with his inventory of the dead and the quiet conversations rose up around them again. That was when Tom, looking down at the medical examiner’s bright white handkerchief, noticed the room key, and the dark blue letters etched on it: 623.

The key that was the first clue, though he didn’t realize it then.

Why the room key of a man who was being held under twenty-four-hour guard, and checked every ten minutes, was found in his own pocket. Why it was still there after he had supposedly tried to flee for his life . . .

These were things that he would not think to ask about for many years yet. Mostly because he had eyes only for his brother—watching him as he walked to the edge of the roof, and looked out at the flat ocean and the seabirds cavorting against a gray sky. Until a uniformed officer came down and told Charlie that Captain McGrath thought he’d better see the men, and Charlie nodded and went upstairs.