The Alice Crimmins Case Read online

  If the unusual quiet from the children’s room registered with Alice, it was stacked under the other considerations of the day. As she paused to stare at her carefully arranged face under the sprayed frame of strawberry-blond hair, there was one important aspect to her face that could not be disguised by powders and rouge: defiance. In the last few years Alice Crimmins had broken the social taboos of her class, of her religion, and of her sex. But apology was not in her makeup. To do what she had done required an important source of energy. The raw force of her mutiny carried her through.

  When she had completed her face, Alice turned her attention to the creatures who shared her life. Circling her feet impatiently was Brandy, the half-Spitz bitch with weak bowels. “OK,” cooed Alice, clasping on the dog’s leash. A week later Brandy would surprise everyone by giving birth to a single pup. The dog had delivered a litter during the previous winter and had never regained her configuration; her stomach remained low-slung enough to conceal the new pregnancy. Alice, not realizing that Brandy’s recent whimpering was the result of pregnancy, had been dickering with a neighbor to buy another dog—she wanted one for each child.

  This particular day Alice wore her defiance lightly and there was a certain spring to her step as she tugged Brandy around the ragged footpaths of Regal Gardens. She would smile quickly for the men, but wait until the women smiled at her before she replied. Experience had taught her that the women in the neighborhood resented a young, attractive mother who could be seen going in and out of her home with a string of different men. So Alice would hoard her smiles, giving one only in return, like a Christmas card.

  By 8:30 a.m. she could usually hear the clatter from the children’s room. Little Eddie and Missy were exuberant, noisy children. Like many children of preoccupied parents, they had grown self-sufficient. Their mother was absorbed in work and a complicated sex life and so the children were left to explore the world through the window of their room.

  Neighbors heading for work in the mornings would see Eddie and Missy sitting in the window—chubby, smiling, waving happily to anyone. A few times they had climbed down from their perch. Once they had been found on the lawn of the apartment complex, wearing only their pajamas in the snow. Alice had spoken sharply to the children then, but she was not really alarmed. After all, they were far from traffic, protected by the girdle of lawns and mall. And who would harm two such adorable children?

  On the morning of July 14, 1965, Alice Crimmins heard nothing from the children’s room. On most days she could measure the excitement in the rising laughter as the children anticipated their liberation, for Alice kept their door locked by a hook-and-eye on the outside. For Eddie and Missy, the day officially began when their mother unlatched the lock she had installed to keep them out of the refrigerator. But today Alice didn’t hear the familiar laughter as she flicked open the latch.

  The jarring telephone left him trembling. In the furnished room that he had rented less than a mile from his estranged family, Eddie Crimmins was still groggy from his fitful night. Eddie was an airline mechanic at Kennedy Airport, accustomed to working odd shifts. But since the separation, sleep had become elusive.

  “Eddie? Have you got the kids?”

  Even in anger, that voice could tug the limits of Eddie’s grief. Even when all the tenderness had been bled out of their contacts, even when they only exchanged bitter accusations, even then it didn’t matter—he cherished even these.

  “No.” He tried to sound indignant, still not quite grasping the question. He rubbed the sleep out of his face.

  “Eddie, don’t play games with me!”

  They were testing each other, reading voice prints over the telephone. In the breakup stage of their relationship, things did not always mean what appeared on the surface. There were tactics and reprisals involved and each had to be able to read beyond the conversation. This complexity was compounded for Eddie by the emotion he still felt for Alice. In the strange bed, in the unfamiliar room, he was closer and more poignantly involved with the barking voice on the telephone.

  “I don’t have them,” he replied.

  “Eddie! Don’t fool around! Do you have them?”

  In retrospect, Eddie Crimmins remembers that his wife’s voice had taken on a rasp of hysteria. She had begun the conversation in anger and it had risen to fear. “Don’t do this to me, Eddie.” She was starting to believe him.

  “They’re not here, Alice,” he said.

  “Eddie, please don’t do this to me!” She was pleading.

  “They’re not here, Alice!”

  “Eddie, they’re missing!”

  Alice Crimmins would tell people that one of the reasons her marriage failed was that Eddie fell apart when she needed him. They had been married for seven years, and, at twenty-six, she was looking for someone strong, someone she could lean on in a crisis. But in the first stages of this crisis she let Eddie take charge.

  “They’re not in their room? Did you look outside?”

  She had taken a quick look outdoors, she told him.

  “Go look again,” he said. “Check with the neighbors. I’ll be right over.”

  Eddie Crimmins jumped out of bed and headed for the shower. His concern was not overwhelming. The kids had probably climbed out of the window, as they had done before. They were doubtless cadging a free breakfast from a sympathetic neighbor right now. He washed quickly, certain, when he emerged from the shower and heard the telephone, that it would be Alice to tell him gratefully that he had been right, that the kids climbed out in their underwear and were fine. They would have to be stern with the kids. . . .

  “Please, Eddie, if you have the kids, tell me. Please, Eddie, please.”

  “Did you look outside? Did you check the Eybergs’?”

  She had. Her frantic voice told him that the children were truly gone.

  2

  The Queens Criminal Courthouse lies on a hillside overlooking the spokes of the Grand Central Parkway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Long Island Expressway, and Queens Boulevard. There the breezes are always stale with automobile fumes.

  Morty’s Luncheonette, across Queens Boulevard from the courthouse, catches the crosscurrents radiating from that hub. In the mornings policemen sip steaming coffee at the counter beside rubbery junkies; stewardesses who live in the nearby apartment high-rise grab takeout containers to nurse on the ride to the airport, hiding their suffering eyes behind sunglasses; attorneys who handle cases like fast-food chefs chatter carelessly at worried clients.

  Harold Harrison preferred the table in the window. The people who sat there usually had business across the street. They would examine the traffic and the people going in and out of the courthouse like soothsayers studying entrails, trying to read their own future in the flow. On the morning of July 14, Harrison sat with two other men. They spoke to each other, but their eyes were on the action in the street. It was a cozy group—Harold Harrison, an attorney, and two detectives. They seldom found their interests in collision. Indeed, they shared a view of life that was shaped by their mutual experiences. It was a philosophy that was vaguely cynical. They also shared clients. When the detectives arrested someone, they would make a separate evaluation: if the suspect looked as if he/she could afford a fee, the detectives would mention their friend Harold Harrison. When the detectives needed legal help—to draft a will, close a mortgage, settle a suit—Harold Harrison would handle it and there would never be any talk about a fee. It was not an uncommon unspoken arrangement between policemen and lawyers in Queens.

  Detective George Martin was looking forward to an easy day in court. Martin had been a New York City detective for almost a dozen years and had developed an occupational laziness that was a prelude to retirement. The assignment in Queens suited him. In Queens he never heard a shot fired in anger. Queens was a place where policemen lived. Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn were occupation zones where junkies and gamblers operated boldly. But Queens was home turf.
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  Today George Martin had a routine court-calendar case: a burglary committed by a young drug addict, the son of a hard-working laborer. The kid had left behind a complete set of fingerprints. Very sloppy. It was a familiar tragedy for George Martin. The boy was an ungrateful child of the suburbs who had turned to drugs and crime out of sheer boredom. There was little satisfaction for Martin in such work. He regarded junkies as hopeless; and the father of this one was doomed to live out his later years making bewildered apologies in the wake of his son. The courtroom would become the old man’s church where he would perform penance for his mystifying failure. The inevitability of it all left Martin feeling helpless. His single passion was to spend time in his private plane. Flying gave him a sense of control that he could never duplicate on the ground. A terrible tragedy had almost blighted his hobby. One of his daughter’s friends had taken a ride with Martin in his plane. When they landed, she had leaped out and got tangled in the propeller. The girl had been killed. Harold Harrison had taken charge of the legal details, relieving Martin and cementing the relationship between the two men.

  George Martin was an easygoing man. He was not driven—not like his eager partner, Gerard Piering, who was new to the detective division and anxious to prove himself. Jerry Piering was in his thirties, but his moral code, like the bristling crew cut over his sagging boyish face, was somewhat out of sync with the times. Piering was an ardent Catholic, the father of six children. Within the shelter of the church and his family Jerry Piering felt safe. But outside, his values were under siege from forces he found difficult to grapple with.

  It was not always possible to define duty. He could, for example, shrug off a brother officer’s infidelities, but insist that a woman had to remain faithful. Even in repose Piering’s face seemed in a permanent scowl. And he was capable of strange explosions that appeared to come out of nowhere. “I’ll tell you something,” he once told George Martin, “I’ve got six kids at home. If anything happens to them, it’s my wife’s fault. She’s in charge while I’m not there. Anything happens, I blame her.” It was the sort of remark that masked layers of unspoken rage. Martin recalled that Piering often left him feeling uncomfortable. Jerry Piering, he would come to understand, was always looking for someone to blame—and he did not forgive easily. In his next case Piering would get his chance to test himself. All the ingredients of his threatened world would tumble together in a single stew, and he would try to sort it all out.

  “I think I’ll check in,” said Piering before the coffee arrived. Martin, the senior partner of the team, did not object. He had worked with Piering for a year and had surrendered the initiative to this eager beaver long ago.

  “Eager beaver,” said Harrison after Piering left for the telephone, and Martin chuckled at his friend’s ability to read his mind.

  Piering did not sit down when he returned from the telephone. “Couple of kids missing in Kew Gardens,” he said, standing over the table.

  “Well,” replied Martin, “there’s safety in numbers.”

  Piering just stood there. “They got a search going.”

  “It’s bullshit,” said Martin. “Forget it.”

  “I’m gonna go,” said Piering.

  “It’s been my experience that the kids are over in somebody’s basement or in somebody’s attic,” recalled Martin much later. “Or somebody’s house having an ice-cream soda. Or some other bullshit. Particularly if there are two. There is no doubt, the proper hindsight is twenty-twenty, he did the right thing and I didn’t. But this is, you know, it’s not the norm, if you will. It’s not the norm.”

  George Martin fished out the keys to the unmarked police car and handed them to Jerry Piering. “I’ll go over to the courthouse and cancel our cases,” he said. “I’ll meet you over there.”

  Jerry Piering was already out the door.

  Eddie Crimmins had placed the call to the police at 9:44 a.m. The time was registered precisely by the instruments at the Central Switchboard in the Queens Communications Bureau in Jamaica. The men operating the telephones there were trained to drain emotion out of their voices. Accustomed to dealing with hysterical civilians, they would reply with calm authority to instill confidence and allay alarm. Often the people calling in were frantic, reporting robberies in progress, and they would sometimes hang up without giving any address, name, or any other detail. No matter how controlled the voices sounded, the level of excitement was always high.

  “My name is Crimmins, Eddie Crimmins. My children are missing. . . .”

  Eddie had been reluctant to bring in the police. He had hurried over from his rooming house. When he pulled in, he saw Alice coming back from another circuit of the area. She was carrying a bundle—a jacket and shirt she kept in the car. Eddie took her free hand in his. They were both trembling.

  Theresa Costello watched Alice and Eddie go inside. Standing on the mall, she stared at the window of the children’s room. She never passed that window without looking at it; it was almost a reflex to see if the children were there in their spectator seats on the mall. She remembered passing it last night. On her way to a baby-sitting assignment she had passed underneath the window about 8:30 p.m. She had heard Alice’s voice, full of adult reproach: “Now, Missy, say your prayers!” And then she had heard Missy’s tinkling little voice, unable to sound solemn: “God bless Mommy and Daddy. . . .”

  Theresa Costello shivered, experiencing an uncanny fear. It was the last time she had heard Missy’s voice. She hadn’t paid much attention then; she had been rushing to her baby-sitting job and she was very conscientious about her work. At fourteen, Theresa was considered a prize on the mall. Mature beyond her years, she was one of those natural parent substitutes, imbued with good common sense and unflappable. Children sensed an ally in her. Theresa had become particularly fond of the Crimmins children. They were comfortable with each other, and Alice felt safe leaving the children with Theresa.

  On the morning of the disappearance Alice had come to Theresa’s door looking for the children. Theresa had left her breakfast on the table to help look for Eddie and Missy. As Alice and Eddie went through the apartment again before calling the police, Theresa stood on the mall with a few other neighbors, staring at the window as if she had never seen it before. It was wrong. She stared harder and harder, the way some people can repeat a familiar word again and again until it acquires new and strange intonations.

  The casement window was cranked open to about seventy-five degrees—almost the ninety-degree maximum. It had been closed last night when she passed. She remembered that she had heard the voices slightly muffled. It had been closed because there was a hole in the screen and the window had to be kept shut to keep the bugs out. Another thing struck Theresa: The screen was no longer in the window. It was outside leaning against the wall. Next to it was what is known as a porter’s stroller—a converted baby carriage with a box mounted on it. It was directly under the window. She remembered that last night the stroller had been farther down the mall, under another window. All this suggested that, wherever the children were, they had got out through the window. Or, more precisely, been taken out. They couldn’t have moved the stroller over to their window. There had been persistent rumors of prowlers in the neighborhood. A few blocks away, someone had even tried to lure a young boy outside. Theresa was suddenly very frightened for Eddie and Missy.

  There were twenty-five identical three-story buildings in the apartment complex where Alice Crimmins lived. The hedges and occasional splashes of white railing did little to relieve the impact of repetitious, institutional red brick. People often became confused searching for the right address.

  Six minutes after Eddie Crimmins called the police, Patrolmen Michael Joseph Clifford and MacKay Flint double-parked on the street outside 150-22 72nd Drive. It was not difficult for Clifford to pick out the address from a platoon of identical buildings—Clifford lived on 73rd Avenue, three blocks away, and had mastered the coded mysteries of Kew Gardens
addresses.

  Eddie was waiting outside for the police. Clifford paused. “Ed,” he said. “Hello!”

  Clifford, who was twenty-three years old, six years younger than Eddie Crimmins, recognized the man from the neighborhood bars. He had never known his last name, but he remembered long evenings of sitting together and drinking beer in the local pubs. In the dark, anonymous bars the snatches of conversation had been abstract and impersonal. He’d known that Ed was having trouble at home, but he’d been only a sympathetic listener in a bar. Now, as a policeman, it took on professional significance. The first question Clifford asked was if there was a separation and a custody fight.

  When they had moved inside the house Clifford had another jolt: he also recognized Alice. He had worked as a checker in a local A&P before joining the police force, and had seen Alice and the children shopping. She was someone to be noticed. Clifford, a bachelor, had paid particular attention to the striking redhead. But he had never connected her with his drinking partner of the bars.

  Clifford put authority into his voice, pushing away the diverting intimacies of dealing with neighbors. If this is a custody-fight tactic, he warned them, it was a very bad idea.

  “If this is a game, you better stop before it goes too far,” said Clifford.

  It was no game, Eddie and Alice assured him. The children were missing.

  Two or three times they went through the routine. If this is a trick, stop it now before it goes too far. The patrolmen took Eddie and Alice into separate rooms, but both parents insisted they had no idea where the children were. Clifford went to the phone and started to dial the precinct. His finger paused halfway through, giving them one last chance to call it off. Neither moved. Clifford, the son of a detective inspector—ironically, the detective inspector who would be in charge of the case—reached the precinct commander on the phone and said that it appeared to be an authentic disappearance; they would require a lot of manpower for a massive search.