The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo Read Free Book Online

everybody read the Bulletin, and everybody respected Herbert Fleisher. Billy wanted to be just like him.
    His father sat across from him in his suspenders and spats, reading the Sunday Bulletin. Billy had his favorite frizzled beef and creamed spinach. His father was six foot three; Billy was five foot three and had five more inches to go.
    “You’re behaving like a bum,” his father said.
    Billy cringed as if from a blow, but he loved to listen to his father. His father talked about his important friends at the Celebrity Room. Lawyers. Politicians. Entertainers. Horseplayers. Bookmakers. Craps players. The nightclub was owned by his good friend and patient, the beautiful showgirl Lillian Reis, “Tiger Lil.” Tiger Lil’s boyfriend was famous gangster Ralph “Junior” Staino, ringleader of the famous K & A gang, from right here in Kensington and Allegheny in Philadelphia, the classiest burglary outfit in the country. They wore suits and ties on their jewel jobs.
    Tiger Lil was accused of masterminding the $478,000 heist of Pottsville coal baron John B. Rich, but was found innocent after the star witnesses against her drowned and died in a car explosion. She had nice teeth, his father said.
    “You’re acting like a loser,” his father said.
    His mother, Esther, often told him what his father said when she told him she was pregnant, a joke they loved at the club. “You have a son and daughter, what do you want now?” His dad responded, “I’d prefer a German shepherd.”
    Billy was a mistake after Ellis and Gloria. Ellis was six foot three, too, tall and handsome and smart like his father. “You take after my grandmother,” his father said. She was four foot eleven.
    His father was right. He was a punk. “You’re an embarrassment to me,” his father said. Billy was a poor student, always talking back, always getting into fights. He didn’t do the things the other kids did. He didn’t follow the Phillies, didn’t read school books or watch TV. He hated Leave It to Beaver. His father didn’t take him to temple services. He didn’t have any interests except reading detective magazines.
    On Saturday mornings before his mother took him to the market, he played with his cousins Mark and Glenn. “We’d play until we ended up beating each other up, go out and throw firecrackers on someone’s stoop, shoot a match gun at an ant colony, that kind of thing.” His cousins were his only friends. I could eat nickels and shit out quarters all day and nobody would like me, he thought.
    The sidewalk was dark as they walked to the Buick. There were shadows in the city even at night, deeper shadows in alleys and the recesses of doors. When Billy was younger, his mother would scare him by saying, “Seymour Levin will get you if you don’t behave!”
    Seymour Levin was a fat pimply kid with glasses who used to live in the neighborhood, and everyone was still afraid of him. On January 9, 1949, the sixteen-year-old Levin went with twelve-year-old Ellis Simons to see A Night at the Opera at the movies, then brought his friend home to play with his chemistry set. Ellis took one look at it and said, “I have better test tubes at home.” Seymour was very fond of his chemistry set. They got in a fight and test-tube glass was everywhere. Seymour got a kitchen knife, made Ellis undress, sodomized him, and then stabbed him more than fifty times through the heart and face and back and all over his body. He tied Ellis’s hands and feet with laundry cord and dragged the body through the house and backyard and dumped it behind the garage.
    Seymour could get out of jail at any time.
    The police said there was not a drop of blood left in Ellis Simons’s body.
     
    Billy’s mother was cool to him, but not uninvolved like his father.
    That Saturday, she left him alone in the Penn Fruit Company market. She went down one of the aisles to do the shopping, leaving him standing there. Billy knew horror stories of what happened to kids