5

It was after midnight when Detectives Bobby Patterson and Eddie Fisher reached quiet, tree-lined Grandview Avenue in Ridgewood, Queens, a modest, middle-class neighborhood. They stopped in front of number 613, a low, nondescript apartment house indistinguishable from those around it, lining the streets of the area. All through the evening, Patterson had been dialing Barbera’s telephone number. There was never an answer. From that and from what had been found on the pier, and from Sicca’s story, it seemed likely that she was the woman who had been abducted and, perhaps, murdered. They had come in person now to find out if, indeed, the apartment was empty and she was missing. Cops from the 104th Precinct, which covered the area, were waiting for them. Patterson had called them to let them know he and Fisher were on the way and, because of jurisdiction, to ask them to meet the Midtown North detectives.

And then the case and the investigation became a little more complex and tangled, took on a new facet. The cops from the 104th knew Barbera, had come to know her very well over the past months. On January 5, her close friend, perhaps her only real friend, Jenny Soo Chin, a forty-six-year-old New Jersey housewife and sometime bookkeeper, had disappeared about seven in the evening after leaving Barbera’s apartment, where she had spent the previous night. When Barbera learned that Chin had never reached her home in Teaneck and that her husband and four children had heard not a word from her, she got very worried. She went to the precinct and demanded an investigation, and in New Jersey, Chin’s family reported her missing to the Bergen County authorities. But Barbera did not stop with a mere report. She posted fliers with Jenny Soo Chin’s photograph and description on trees, lampposts, and in stores throughout Ridgewood, asking for information from anyone who might have seen anything that January evening. She hired a private detective to do a little investigating on his own. And she hounded the cops in the 104th, calling constantly, visiting often, incessantly prodding them to do something, anything, to find Chin.

At the 104th, Detective Rudy Gregorovic caught the missing-persons case. Over the next weeks, he went up and down Grandview Avenue and through the neighborhood, talking to everyone he could find. Nobody had seen anything. He, and the cops in Bergen County, talked to Edward Chin, Jenny Soo’s husband, and to her sister and brother. The sister and brother were very concerned, wanted to help in any way they could, even offered to put up a reward for information. But Gregorovic and the New Jersey police, with whom he compared notes often, were struck by Edward Chin’s stoical manner. He seemed bothered more by his wife’s relationship with Barbera than by her disappearance. During the three years the two women had known each other, his wife had grown ever more dependent on Barbera, had spent more and more time with her, in her home in Teaneck and in Barbera’s apartment in Queens, had taken a job Barbera had gotten for her, one she was not particularly qualified for, had gone on vacations and trips alone with her, had grown increasingly distant from her husband and family.

Nearly a week after Jenny Soo Chin vanished, what had appeared at first to be simply a missing-persons case, where the missing person might well have been missing because of her own actions and for her own personal reasons, took on a more troubling and serious complexion. On January 11, Chin’s red Pontiac station wagon was found, abandoned, far west on Thirty-sixth Street in Manhattan, only a few blocks from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Inside, there were bloodstains on the door and window handles, on the armrest in the front, and on the carpet. And there was a spent .22-caliber shell casing on the floor in the front of the car. There was no sign of Jenny Soo Chin.

It was another two weeks before anyone learned anything more about her disappearance, and what they learned indicated violence, indicated that what had been found in that abandoned car in Manhattan might very well mean that Chin had vanished for good. These were weeks when Barbera did not let up on her steady badgering of the cops, who were making little progress, and of her own private detective, who was making none at all. Two fourteen-year-olds, a boy and a girl, who lived on Grandview Avenue, were out that evening on their way to a friend’s. They saw something that, initially, they paid little attention to. But then they saw the fliers that Barbera had plastered around the neighborhood. They called her. She called the 104th. Gregorovic went to talk to the teenagers. On that January evening, they told him, as they had been walking toward their friend’s house, they had seen a woman who seemed to fit Chin’s description walking along the avenue. A man was following her. She turned the corner into Linden Street and walked toward a station wagon parked a little way along the block. As she bent to unlock the car door, the man came up behind her, grabbed the door and pulled it open, threw her inside across the front seat, and jumped in after her. She screamed. The car door slammed, and a moment later, the car sped away. The man, they said, was tall and slim and had a dark ski mask pulled down over his head and face. Later, under hypnosis, the girl repeated the story and gave essentially the same description.

But when Gregorovic went back to the area and stood in the spot where they had been, at about the same time of night, he wondered about the description. They must have been at least a hundred feet from the station wagon, and the light was very dim. That they had seen something, and probably what they described, he did not doubt. But the description of the man? That kind of lighting can play tricks with the vision.

So Jenny Soo Chin was not only gone but also probably kidnapped and most assuredly seriously injured if not killed. The questions remained: Where was she, or her body? Who had done the violence? Some of the cops who had talked to him began to speculate about a possible role in all this for Edward Chin, given what seemed a very strained relationship with his wife. But it was only speculation, and nobody did much about it since there was nothing except that uneasy sense, and a statement by Barbera to Gregorovic that he ought to ask some hard questions of Edward Chin, to back them up.

By late February, Jenny Soo Chin had been gone for more than six weeks without a trace. Her family in New Jersey, and Barbera, hired a psychic, Dorothy Allison, to go on a hunt. Accompanied by cops from the 104th and from Bergen County, Allison directed a psychic hunt beginning at Barbera’s apartment building in Queens, across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge into Manhattan, and on to the spot on the West Side where the car was found. But all Allison could dig out of her psychic sense was a very strong feeling that Chin was in the water, but what water and where she didn’t know.

More than a month later, that April night on the street in front of 613 Grandview Avenue, Patterson and Fisher heard all this from the cops of the 104th. And they heard something else. During one of her many conversations with Gregorovic and other cops, Barbera had said that she was somehow involved, perhaps as a witness, in a federal investigation. She didn’t go into any detail and they didn’t press the line, since it didn’t seem to have anything to do with what they were investigating, Chin’s abduction and disappearance.

Barbera’s apartment was on the fourth floor of the building. Roused from sleep, the superintendent led them up the stairs and unlocked the door. The apartment was a one-room studio, with separate kitchen and bath. It was, Patterson remembers, “a mess. It was this tiny little apartment but it had like six rooms’ worth of stuff crammed into it. The coffee pot was still going. The iron was plugged in. There was a cup of coffee on a little counter that had like two sips taken out of it. It appeared that somebody had left in a big hurry. We learned later that she had a habit of doing things like that, getting distracted and going out and leaving the iron and things on. She was that kind of person. We didn’t know it then, of course, so we didn’t know what to make of it. But looking around, it was obvious to me that to really do a thorough search of the place would have taken me at least a day, maybe two.”

There wasn’t time for that then, and they weren’t there that night to do it. “We were really there only to look for clues, some identification. After all, we had a person who said he saw a woman being dragged into a van on the pier, and we had her car on the pier and her purse and things like that, and we traced the car back to her. So we figured it had to be her. We didn’t know exactly what had happened to her, but we figured right from the start that she’d been abducted and maybe she was dead. So we were looking to get any information we could as far as her family and background were concerned, and we were looking for something to tie her in with somebody else, like boyfriends. As far as we knew then, it could have been a domestic kind of thing on the pier, a boyfriend who was angry with her or something like that.”

They searched quickly, though “it was a kind of a half-assed search,” Patterson says. When they opened a closet, they were staggered by the accumulation that piled, it seemed, almost from floor to ceiling, from front to back. There were mounds of stamps, for she was a stamp collector. There were piles of coins, for she was a coin collector. There was jewelry, and some of it looked very good and expensive. “We found bank statements all the way back to 1973 that she’d never opened. I guess she never bothered to open her bank statements. She just threw the envelopes into that closet when they arrived and forgot about them. We found income-tax returns she’d done for people and never bothered to send in. We found financial ledgers and records, but we didn’t look through them. We found photographs, lots of them. There were the tourist kind, of things in Europe and other places. There were photos of her, though we didn’t know that for sure at the time, but we figured it was probably her. We found a lot of photos of a Chinese woman, some of her alone and some of the two women together. We didn’t know who the hell the Chinese woman was then. We took a bunch of the photos with us, along with some other stuff, so later we could match things up.”

They found something else in that closet that surprised them and gave them pause. There were dozens of lesbian magazines and books, lavishly and explicitly illustrated and obviously well and often thumbed through.

Everything in that closet, like everything scattered around that small, cluttered apartment, was intensely private, not meant for prying eyes, left as it was because Barbera had not thought when she had closed the door behind her hours before on her way to work that anyone would invade her privacy, that someone would learn the secrets that were meant for no one else. But the dead, especially those who have met violent death, have lost the right of privacy, have no secrets. Their lives, the public and the hidden, are open to the lens of the police microscope, and every corner of their existence is searched minutely. The search, of course, is not one for some vicarious titillation; it is in the hope that behind those now-open doors may lurk the reasons for that sudden death, the clues that will lead to the unraveling of the mystery, the knowledge of what happened and why. So all that Margaret Barbera left behind, confident that it was hers and hers alone, now belonged to the public, the representatives of the public trying to solve her murder, if, indeed, she had been murdered. In the days and weeks to come, in search after search through her possessions and her life, images would form in the minds of those who had not known her while she lived, and in those pictures might loom at least some of the reasons for her violent end.

But that initial search turned up just a little, just enough so that Barbera, if she was found, could be identified and somebody close to her notified. Then Patterson and Fisher locked the apartment and left. They would return if they had to and go through those belongings carefully and slowly. But not this time. Before the night was out, they would be back again, and in the days that followed, they would be in and out of that apartment often.

At about five-thirty that morning, April 13, Manuel Infante, an aspiring abstract artist who supported himself as a bartender, got to his apartment in lower Manhattan after a long night of pouring drinks. He was ready for bed, but his German shepherd demanded a walk first. Infante gave in to the dog’s demands, took him on that stroll through the dark of lower Broadway. At the entrance to Franklin Alley, between Franklin and White Street, the dog began tugging at the leash. Infante gave it its head, followed the dog into the alley, where it began sniffing at a heap off to one side. “I thought it was garbage,” he said. “I went over to stop him. That’s when I noticed the body. At first I thought it was a bum sleeping. When I got close, it didn’t look like she was wearing dirty clothes. They looked expensive. Then I touched the body with my finger and I realized she was dead.”

A few minutes later, in Midtown North, Lieutenant Dick Gallagher heard the news that the body of an unidentified woman had been found in the alley. He had a hunch. He called down to the local precinct. “The body you just found,” he said, “is she wearing shoes?” The woman, he was told, was shoeless. “Don’t do a thing,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

Gallagher sped through the dark streets before dawn, holding the shoes that had been found near Barbera’s purse on the pier. At the alley, he bent and tried the shoes on the body. “They were,” he says, “a perfect fit.”

So Margaret Barbera had been found. She was dead. There was a bullet from a .22-caliber automatic in her head.

Just after nine that morning of April 13, New York City’s chief of detectives, James Sullivan, called the head of the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We had a murder last night, he said, four of them, in fact. The high FBI official had heard. We have a story, Sullivan said, that one of the victims may have been a witness in one of your investigations. Is there any truth to that story? The FBI official said he would check and get back to Sullivan.

Later that morning, FBI supervisor Don Richards and Special Agent Bob Paquette walked into the detectives’ squad room of Manhattan North.