Bellamy lived in a scruffy little house in Bayside, Queens. It was a two-story, with white shingles. Small, but nice. At least it would’ve been, if it had been kept up. Unfortunately, the exterior showed signs of neglect. The paint was chipped and peeling; the stoop was cracked and needed sweeping. Two large planters held dead plants on either side of the door, and a thin Christmas wreath, less than a foot in diameter, decorated the front door.
It was bright and early and I had an appointment. I checked my watch—saw that I was exactly on time—and went up the steps leading to his front door. I rang the bell and waited. A long minute dragged by. I rang again and another forty seconds crawled past. I glanced at my watch again. This was the time I’d said I’d be there. Maybe, Bellamy had stepped out.
Or maybe, he was inside, watching.
I’d ring one more time. If he didn’t answer, I’d leave.
I pressed the button. Again, no answer. I turned to go and felt, rather than heard, the door open behind me.
“Mrs. Price?”
It was a scratchy voice. Not unpleasant. And somehow young, much younger than I would’ve expected from a cop of retirement age.
I turned to face him.
His watery blue eyes were dark with amusement. I could just about read his thoughts.
Back then, a lot of white folk were taken aback by the very notion of a colored reporter, much less the sight of one. Actually, they were surprised to see black folk at all. We were usually invisible—servants, domestics, cleaning men, laundry women, handymen, and the like. We never spoke and were rarely spoken to. And when we did speak, it was only because we had been spoken to. So it was obvious what Bellamy was thinking: what kind of colored woman would have the audacity to think she could question a white man?
He ushered me in with a tobacco-stained grimace that passed for a smile. He had a bulbous nose with prominent veins and used a walking stick. His wild salt-and-pepper eyebrows needed trimming, and so did his gray nose hairs. He had a little paunch and dirty fingernails, but he wasn’t totally unkempt. His white shirt was pressed and spotless and so were his gray pants. His wavy silver hair was combed and his black leather shoes were worn but polished. So he’d made some kind of effort—but was it out of respect or merely vanity?
He led me into a small square living room, crowded with lace-draped furniture, surprisingly fussy for a man. He gestured toward a small armchair upholstered in worn green velvet. A red-and-green plaid shawl was folded neatly and thrown over the chair’s back.
“Here, take a seat. Never had a spade in here before. Mom would be rolling in her grave if she knew. But I always say, why not? Ain’t nothing wrong with you people. Nothing that a little hard work wouldn’t cure.”
I let the insult slide—it would’ve been counterproductive to challenge it—but I promised myself to get his information and get out.
“Interesting place,” I said, sitting down.
“Oh, you like it?”
The place was neat, outwardly as clean as a whistle. But it stank of stale smoke and it gave off a heavy underlying funk, a mixture of unwashed clothes, hidden dust and hidden memories.
“Looks like you’ve been here awhile.”
“All my life. Took it over when my mom died.” He gripped the cane with one hand and made an expansive gesture with the other. “A place like this is hard to come by. See that old buffet?” He pointed to the large piece just outside what appeared to be the entry to his kitchen. “Solid mahogany. Came with Gramps from Ireland. Some people say I should get rid of it. But not me. Why throw that out, then go and get something half as good? I never been a man to waste money. Didn’t waste the department’s when I was on the force. Don’t believe in wasting mine now.”
Bellamy eased down in the armchair opposite, a large wingback covered with thinning blue brocade. A worn pack of cigarettes lay on a round wooden table nearby. He leaned forward, folded his hands on the handle of his cane and regarded me with puzzled interest.
“You’re really here about the Esther Todd case? You can’t be serious.”
“But I am.”
“That case is … what? Three, four years old? Nobody’s thinking about it anymore.”
“I am.”
He looked me over and then relaxed back in his chair. “What’s your name again?”
A man like Bellamy, someone with thirty years on the force … he’d started having me checked out the minute we hung up the phone. He knew my name, all right, and a whole lot more. If he wanted to play dumb, I could play along. But if he wanted to annoy me, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
“Lanie,” I said. “Lanie Atkins Price. I write a column for the Harlem Chronicle.”
“What’s that?”
“A weekly newspaper.”
“Never heard of it.”
He gave a wicked little smile and a raised eyebrow. He was good at this, the game of provocation. But I was even better at resisting it. I had to be. In those days, for a black person dealing with a cop, even a retired one, knowing when and how to yield was a matter of survival.
“Well,” I smiled back, “take my word for it. It exists. Has a good circulation, too. At least 20,000.”
“Just among shines, though, huh?”
I worked hard to keep the irritation in check. “Just in Manhattan, some parts of Brooklyn and New Jersey.”
“Basically wherever you people are found? I mean, in the New York City area?”
“I guess you could say that.”
He tapped his cane on the floor. He had a white canary in a small cage sitting in the window. The bird gave a pretty chirp, spread its little wings and made an attempt to fly. But it hit the top of the cage with a hard thump and fluttered back to the little wood stick that served as a perch. Sad little thing ... Frustrated. I pulled my gaze away, went into my purse and took out my pad and pencil.
“So are you interested in the robbery or the kidnapping?” he asked.
“I’m writing about the kidnapping. But the kidnapping and the heist have been tied together.”
“That’s right. No way of dealing with one without the other.”
“So the police say.”
His smile turned cynical and he gave a little nod, as though I’d just confirmed a suspicion.
“What you’re here for,” he said, “what you’re really here for is to do another hatchet job on the department. Or is it just on me?” He touched his chest.
“No. Not at all.”
He gave a skeptical grunt.
“You wouldn’t be the first one. The papers printed some nasty stuff about us. Me and Ritchie, we were busting our guts and all we got was grief. Everybody took shots at us. At first you colored said we weren’t doing enough to find her. Then you said we were doing too much for the wrong reason. As for that Park Avenue crowd … Bah!” He gave a dismissive wave. “I used to tell Ritchie to forget about all of you. I used to say, ‘You can’t keep one eye on the evidence and the other on the papers.’”
“With a high profile case like that, that’s what happens. You either solve it or sink it, before it sinks you.”
He didn’t like that. We both knew what the case had done to his career.
“All I know is, you guys made a bad situation worse.”
The bird in the cage made another attempt to fly. Once more, it thumped against the roof and came down. I’ve seen birds go crazy like that, banging their heads and beating their wings against bars until they were stark raving mad.
“Why the sudden interest? After all this time? You digging for some Christmas change, the reward money?”
“Let’s just say I’m doing a favor for a member of the family.”
“Oh,” he nodded. “You mean Ruth Todd? She’s still around? Yeah, I guess she would be. She’s something, isn’t she? Man, oh man, was she a pest. But I guess I can understand it. No doubt, I’d be the same way if it was my sister disappeared like that.”
“Quite honestly, Detective, you surprise me. At the time of Esther’s disappearance, the police showed little empathy for her or her family. All they wanted to do was blame her for the heist.”
“Yeah, I know, but …” he sighed. “Actually, I’m kind of happy to see the case get some attention. It was one of those cases that get a hold of you and don’t let go.” He paused at my expression. “What? You don’t believe me?”
“Like I said, I’m a little surprised. But it’s good to know that you welcome my interest.”
“Ritchie and me, we tried. Boy did we try. But we couldn’t find that one thread that would unravel the knot. We got together a task force. We gave it four months. Full-time, working round the clock. We tracked down just about every contact she had, going up to a year before the robbery. We talked to her pastor, her relatives, friends and co-workers. We checked her mail, her bills, her church donations. We even checked out the books she got from the damn library.”
They ended up, he said, with an extraordinary amount of information on a woman who’d apparently led a very ordinary life. None of it contained a clue to the reason behind her disappearance or an answer as to her ultimate fate.
“We could tell you every step she took from birth to that night, but the page stayed blank after she left her sister and friend. She walked into the darkness ... and stayed there.”
He did sound as though he cared. For a moment my skepticism weakened. Then I remembered that three years earlier he’d been more intent on jailing Esther than on setting her free. I took a moment to check my notes.
After four months, the only evidence Bellamy and Ritchie had to show for their efforts were the thirty-two bullets and shell casings collected after the shoot-out. Some of this evidence would be helpful in a trial, once they had their suspect collared and cuffed, but none of it was helpful in finding the suspect to begin with.
He shook out a cigarette and offered me one. I declined and he lit his own.
“We wondered if the thieves were foreigners,” he said, emitting puffs of smoke. “Everyone noticed how silent they were. Maybe they didn’t want to talk ‘cause they had accents, and that would’ve helped nail them.”
Then the two cops got a lucky break. Bellamy and Ritchie had circulated a list of the stolen jewels to gem dealers and pawnbrokers likely to carry jewelry of high caliber. Months after the robbery, one of the jewelers called in to report. A man in his late twenties had come in and pawned a sapphire and emerald bracelet that matched the description of an item on the list of stolen goods. Bellamy and Ritchie went to work. The identification and personal information the young man had given turned out to be false. That was no surprise. What was a surprise was that the young man apparently knew nothing about fingerprints. He had leaned on the counter and left a perfect set of five. The bracelet itself also yielded partials, some matching the prints taken from the countertop, some not.
“We didn’t dare hope the guy’s prints would be found downtown. I mean, they got hundreds on file at police headquarters. But there’s thousands of crooks.” He tapped his cigarette in the ashtray. “My feeling was that if we was gonna find them, then great. If not, we still had a new witness, the pawnbroker. He’d given us a whale of a description. In thirty years of police work, I’d never seen nothing like it. That guy sat down with Jerry, our artist, and what the two of them came up with—it was better than a photograph.”
Bellamy scratched his knee.
“So, to make a long story short, we soon had a name to go with the prints. And within two days, we had a body.”
“A body?”
“Yeah. A guy by the name of Johnny Knox. A truck hit him. Deader than a bedbug under a fat man’s ass. Happened down on 14th and Broadway. We figured it was the others—the thieves, I mean. Maybe they’d told him to lay low till the stones cooled. But Knox couldn’t wait. He jumped the gun, so they killed him. The thing is, Knox had a brother. They always worked together. Redheads, both of them. Once we knew it was Johnny, it was easy getting a bead on his brother, Jude. Caught up with him in a pool hall over on East 73rd. Unfortunately, he tried to shoot his way out. He didn’t make it.”
What followed was a barrage of embarrassing publicity.
“To hear the newspapers tell it, we’d messed up every chance of solving the crime.”
The brief hope that had flared up and illuminated the investigation died down. A grim determination set in.
Bellamy ground out his cigarette. “We could’ve broke this case—if they’d given us time. If they’d just … But the higher-ups decided otherwise. “
Bellamy’s task force was disbanded. Each investigator resumed his share of taking on other cases. Bellamy was given to understand that he could work the Todd case on the side, but it was no longer his prime responsibility.
“Ritchie and me, we tried to keep it hot. But there was no way. The cases were coming hard and fast, other cases we’d neglected so we could work on this one. And then...” He shrugged.
Then came the day when a prisoner transport went wrong. I’d found a clipping about the officer shooting in my file. The story was short and to the point.
ESCAPING PRISONER KILLS COP
NEW YORK August 10 (AP)—Famed Detective Jack Ritchie was killed yesterday during a shoot-out with an escaping prisoner, police officials said. Ritchie was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival. He was 58.
The gunfight erupted during a prisoner transport in Lower Manhattan when convicted murderer Armand Douglas, 32, originally of Bayside, Queens, got hold of Ritchie’s gun and shot him with it, police officials said. Ritchie’s partner, Detective Frank Bellamy, shot and killed Douglas, who died at the scene.
Normally, a paddy wagon is used for prisoner transport, but Douglas was being transported in a police car. According to Bellamy, Ritchie did not want to wait for the paddy wagon to arrive from the station.
“It was close to the end of the shift,” Bellamy said. “He just wanted to be done with it.”
Douglas sprang from the backseat, grabbed Ritchie’s gun and shot him in the throat, Bellamy said. Sources who prefer anonymity said the prisoner’s hands were not cuffed behind his back, a violation of accepted practice.
Ritchie’s death drove the last nail into the investigation’s coffin. Bellamy buried himself in retirement and any interest in the Todd case went with him.
“What about the people who helped set up the auction?” I asked. “Who knew which jewels would be up for bid? Which families would be invited, how many guards there’d be and where they’d be stationed?”
“I thought you didn’t think Esther had anything to do with the robbery.”
“I don’t believe she did—but I do believe her disappearance did.”
“What?”
“I think it was part of a scheme to send the cops looking for a way to place blame where blame was unjustified.”
“You people,” he said, shaking his head. “You and your conspiracy theories.”
“It’s quite possible that even one of the guests was behind it. Maybe one of the families had hidden financial trouble.”
“No,” he said, “No, no, no. We checked all that out. It was the first thing we checked. Those families were in the black, every single one of them.”
“All right, then. Maybe there’s something else. What about the case files? Did you take them with you when you retired?”
“Thought about it, but I decided not to. I thought some hotshot kid might reopen it. You know, try to break it and make his career.”
“But that’s a long shot.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“The files—could you get them?”
The thought amused him. “What if I could? Would you expect me to give them to you?”
“Why not?”
“Think you can just step in and solve it when we couldn’t?”
“Not to insult you, but maybe a pair of fresh eyes would—”
“I’m not insulted. I’m just telling you it won’t happen.”
“Please. I need details, enough new information to reawaken public interest. Maybe even spark a new effort to find her.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” he said without a trace of regret. “Even if I had them, I wouldn’t let you see ‘em.”
“Department regulations?”
“You said it.”
His gaze held mine. A smile played about his lips.
“I thought you said you were glad the case was getting new attention,” I said.
“I am. But that don’t mean I’m prepared to break the law to make it happen.” He gave me a friendly grin full of brown teeth. “You don’t need those files anyway. I got it right up here.” He tapped his gray-haired temple. “Everything worthwhile, it’s all here.”
“Is it really?”
“Hm-hmm,” he nodded. “And to show you what a right guy I am, I’m gonna give you a tip.”
“Out of the goodness of your heart, right?”
He liked that. “Yeah, out of the goodness of my heart, a bit of information that wasn’t released to the public. You interested?”
I was skeptical, but curious. “Okay, sure.”
“Then listen carefully.” He slid forward in his chair, leaned toward me and dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “You remember hearing about the car being found, right?”
I nodded.
“We got a call after that. As a matter of fact, it came because of all the publicity about the car. You know, the car was, like, proof that Esther ‘kidnapped’ herself? Well, this guy was real pissed over it. Said he’d yanked her. That she had nothing to do with the heist. And that it was useless to keep looking for her. She was dead, very dead. I remember his words like I heard ‘em yesterday. He said he’d warned her and that he’d killed her ‘cause she lied to him.”
The caller said he’d followed Esther by car from the theater. He’d watched her park and followed her on foot to the hospital. He waited outside the hospital, and then stalked her as she walked back to the Packard. He approached her and asked her about her “cheating ways.”
Bellamy winked two fingers to indicate quote marks.
“He told her he had pictures of her loving somebody else. She said he was crazy, so he slapped her. She fought back and things went from there.”
The image he painted was chilling. I could see it happening just as he described.
“What makes you think the call was genuine?”
“He knew about the earring.”
The match to the one I’d found at the crime scene: Only the kidnapper would know about it.
Bellamy lit himself another smoke. “So yeah, she had a man friend, all right. We just couldn’t get a bead on him.” He looked regretful. “The fact is, we didn’t try. But getting the punk who did Esther was not my job. Getting the guy who did the heist was.”
I was amazed, on several levels: by the image he’d conjured, by the magnitude of NYPD’s blunder and by his candor. That call had merited serious attention. How could they have ignored it? And that he would tell me….
Bellamy gazed off into the distance, through his room’s small window. The canary was quiet for the time being, worn out, I suppose. It would rest until frustration or instinct—or both—drove it to try for freedom once more. The old cop cleared his throat.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think things over. And I see things differently than I saw ‘em back then. I mean … I hate to say it—and I trust you’re not gonna go repeating it—but we went wrong early on.”
They fell into the trap of trying to create evidence to match a theory, he said. They couldn’t see the importance of details that didn’t match their expectations, details like the notes and the phone calls. They weren’t overlooked, but their importance was interpreted to fit the theory.
“We talked to all those people—and never once considered the possibility that any one of them might’ve had a sick fix on her. And that’s what bothers me. That’s why I’m talking to you. It bothers me that he might’ve been one of the ones who sat across from us, and talked about what a wonderful person she was, all the time knowing he was the sick fuck who took her, and maybe even still had her, buried in his basement, for all we know.”
When I left, he got to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane and accompanied me to the door. I thanked him for having seen me. He shook his head with regret.
“You know that old saying, that there’s no such thing as the perfect crime? Well, that’s a bunch of malarkey. There’s scads of them, murders that weren’t even recognized as murders and cases, like this one, where the killer just plain old got away. Take my advice, and write about the boyfriend. If you want a new angle, then he’s it.”
My initial plan had been to canvas the guest list, to see if any of them might’ve been tied to the robbery or had unusual contact with Esther. But now I wasn’t so sure. Bellamy’s reminder of the mysterious admirer gave me pause. His regret about not having followed up on the telephone call struck me as genuine. This business about the phantom admirer was a legitimate trail. It deserved time. I would find out as much about him as I could and put that information into my column. Someone who knew him might come forward. Better yet, he himself might be drawn into the open.
For the first time, in a long time, I felt a tremor of excitement, one that went hand-in-glove with a sense of relief. I hadn’t been sure I could find anything that would help me help Ruth. Bellamy had given me a real starting point.
But there was more. Somewhere deep down was a stirring of the hunter’s instinct. It had been years since I’d walked the beat, but the drive was still there, the need to ask questions, track down answers and assemble the delicate human puzzle behind every crime. My mind missed the concentrated effort. My guts missed the thrill of the result, and my nature missed the communion with darkness.
This would be the first time I’d used my column in this way. When I joined the Chronicle, I was tired of reporting on death and misery. I believed I could achieve good by reporting inspiring, positive news about the doings of Harlem’s upper crust, but I’d consistently been reminded that the “light” news often has its dark side, too, and I wasn’t doing anyone a favor by ignoring it. My job in life was to tell both the good and the bad. I had no grand ideas about being the catalyst for lasting change, but I did want to be able to look back and say I’d done my bit to keep the record straight.
Mentally, I was coming full circle. Emotionally, I was going home.