Investigation (43 page)

“Come into my office, we’ll talk there.”

The inner office was more cluttered than the outer office. There were stacks of file folders everywhere: on chairs, on the floor, on the surface of the two back-to-back desks, under the desks. He lifted a stack of folders and ledgers from one of the chairs, put them on the floor, indicated the chair for me.

“So, okay. You brought the books, didn’t you?” He looked at me carefully for the first time, leaned forward as I extended my gold shield. “You’re not Stanley Beck?”

“Detective Joe Peters. Queens District Attorney’s Squad.”

Nadler took a long deep breath which seemed to catch in his throat as he tried to exhale. He turned his head away and coughed; dug a handkerchief from a back pocket; dabbed at his mouth, then at the beads of sweat over his upper lip. He balled the handkerchief in his hands and made absolutely no effort to disguise his sudden nervousness and agitation.

Very quietly and calmly, hoping to give him a chance to get a better grip on himself, I said, “It’s all right, Mr. Nadler. You’ve been sort of expecting me for a while now, haven’t you?”

He nodded, then dabbed the damp handkerchief along his forehead. I offered him a cigarette; he didn’t smoke. Since he seemed to be having a little difficulty breathing in the close stale air, I didn’t light up, either.

I leaned forward and said, “You were walking your dog that night, weren’t you?”

Nadler stopped blotting his face and stared at me. “Walking my dog? That night? What walking my dog? Is this ... is this something about my dog?”

Either we were thinking of the same event or we were thinking about two different events, in which case I was as confused as this guy was.

“Mr. Nadler, what do
you
think this is about?”

He was also smart enough to not volunteer anything unless and until asked. “I don’t know what this is about, Mr. ... Detective Peters. Tell me.”

“You moved into your house in Somers almost two weeks before you had planned to, Mr. Nadler. You packed up and moved the weekend after the Keeler children were murdered.”

He nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes, we did. Yes.”

“It was a very sudden decision, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Very sudden.”

“Why, Mr. Nadler?”

“Why? Why? I just wanted to get my family away from there, out to Somers. I just ... wanted to move away from Fresh Meadows, right away.”

“Because you didn’t think it was safe there anymore?”

He nodded.

“Not safe for you? In particular?”

Arnold Nadler stood up and looked around, but there wasn’t any floor space for him to pace, if that’s what he wanted to do, so he just sat down again in his swivel chair and turned first one way, then the other, all the time shaking his head and blotting his damp face. Then he stopped moving around, pulled off his glasses, dug at his exhausted, reddened eyes, smeared at his glasses with his dirty handkerchief.

I just waited him out.

Finally he calmed down, slowed himself down, took a deep breath and said, “Sooner or later, I knew you’d come. If not one of you, my God, maybe one of
them.
I guess I should be glad it’s you instead of them.”

“Well, since
I’m
the one who’s here, how about talking to me? About that night?”

He nodded; bounced his pencil on the surface of his desk. It flew from his fingers and landed somewhere on the floor. He put his hands, palms down, on the desk blotter. It started to get damp.

I helped him. “Let’s start with that night, Mr. Nadler. You took your dog out and ...”

“My dog? My dog? What does Pom-Pom have to do with anything?”

“Tell you what, Mr. Nadler. Let’s do it this way. It’s your story. You tell me what happened the night the Keeler boys were murdered.”

He folded his hands one over the other but couldn’t control the trembling. There was a small tic at the corner of his right eye, and from time to time he reached up, adjusted his glasses and lightly touched the jumping nerve.

“I was coming home. I had parked my car in the parking lot. It was late. In April I work late hours, long hours. People think, after the fifteenth, things slack off, but I have clients who need extensions and I only
begin
to get to work on their taxes after my regulars. And it piles up. So through most of April and May, sometimes even in June, I work late.”

He reached for his calendar appointment book, opened it to the week of April 14–April 20, 1975. The small boxes were filled with an illegible collection of notes. He pointed to Wednesday, April 16.

“All day, I worked. First in the city. Then I had to go over to Brooklyn. Then, in the evening, here, look, see ...” He turned the book toward me and showed me his schedule. “See, ‘P.M.: Christie’s Lounge, N.J.’—I already had a few accounts in Jersey, near Somers. But we were still in Fresh Meadows, so I had to travel. Fifteen, eighteen hours a day in April, May. That’s standard for a C.P.A. at tax time. So that night I had to go to Jersey. And the books were in worse shape than I expected. I just took them on as a new client. What a mess; so it was very late when I came home. Maybe two-fifteen, two-twenty in the morning, so—”

“Wait a minute. Are you sure of the time? Was it that late? Couldn’t have been closer to midnight? Maybe twelve-thirty?”

Nadler shook his head emphatically. “No way. Maybe two-twenty, somewhere around there.”

Which didn’t make much sense; Benjamin picked Kitty up at about twelve-thirty. But then, maybe Nadler had seen Kitty returning home; which had been closer to 3
A.M.

“Could it have been later, Mr. Nadler? Say ... three
A.M.
?”

Nadler looked blank.

“Mr. Nadler, I’m sorry. Look, you just go on and tell me what you saw. We’ll worry about the timing later, okay?”

“Well, so I parked my car in the parking lot and I walked toward my building.”

Which is the building adjoining the Keelers’.

“Before I got to the first court, as I came around the side from the parking lot, I noticed a car. Parked at the curb. The headlights were on and the motor was running. And what made it seem strange to me was that the doors were open. Back door and front door.”

“All of the doors? All four doors?”

He nodded. “Yeah, yeah. No. Not all four doors. Two doors, at the sidewalk side. And ... I would have just kept going, right past, only there were voices. And they sounded, you know, they sounded angry. Very angry.”

“Angry?”

“Like they were fighting. Arguing. They came from the building, a man and a woman, and it was like they’d been arguing inside and just kept on as they walked outside toward the car.”

“What building did they come from?”

“From the building where the Keelers lived.”

Neither Kitty nor Benjamin had said anything about arguing. “All right. Then what? What did you do?”

“Well, I realized they couldn’t see me, I was in the shadow. I guess I took a step or two back, so they wouldn’t see me. You know, I was embarrassed. Maybe I thought they’d be embarrassed, arguing when they thought they were alone, and then, if they saw me, it would be ... embarrassing.”

“Go on.”

“So, anyway, I stepped back and waited. For them to get into the car and drive away.”

“And? Did they get into the car and drive away?”

Nadler didn’t look at me; he looked at his hands.

“Mr. Nadler, what kind of car was it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know cars. Dark. It was a dark car.”

“Big car? Small car? Compact? What?”

“Oh, it was a big car. Big.”

“Big?” A Datsun? Big? “You sure of that? It wasn’t a small car?”

Nadler shook his head. In a dull flat voice he said, “It was a big black car. Cadillac maybe; or a Lincoln. Something like that.”

“A Cadillac or a Lincoln? Not ... not a green Datsun?”

“A Datsun? No. No, that’s a small car. This was a big car.”

He was waiting for me; he would answer whatever I asked him, but he wasn’t going to volunteer on his own.

“Did you speak to either of the people you saw walking toward this car? To the man? To the woman?”

He shook his head. “Oh, no way. No way. I just stood there in the shadows and waited. Until ... until they got into ... until they ...”

“Mr. Nadler.” Those small hairs stood up at the base of my neck; my throat felt dry and tight as Nadler squared his shoulders, licked his lips, and let his hands fall into his lap. There was a kind of final resolve in his posture: a decision finally made. He turned his face toward me and watched me closely.

“Arnold. Tell me
exactly
what you saw and heard that night.” He nodded and kept focused on me. “Get it all out and over with, you’ve been living with it long enough.”

His voice came out steadier than it had been; there was a sound almost of relief at finally telling what he’d kept bottled up.

“I stood and watched them come toward the car. I was not more than ten feet away from them. They each, the man and the woman, they were each carrying something.” He looked down at his hands, sucked in a deep breath. His voice broke, but he kept on. “Detective Peters, they were each carrying a child. They looked like they were sleeping. The children. The man, he ... he was a big man. Very large. Look, I’ll be honest. I was scared to death. Something about him; about both of them. He sort of pushed the woman toward the car, then he, my God, he sort of threw the child he was carrying into the back seat.” Nadler twisted his fingers together and licked at his lips. “There was, like, a thud when he threw the child into the back of the car. The woman said, I don’t know, something like ‘My God, you hit his head.’ ”

The welt on Terry Keeler’s forehead; the unexplained abrasion that was never publicized.

“And what did the man say, or do?”

There were tears streaming down Arnold Nadler’s cheeks. He seemed unaware of them; his voice was ragged and thin. “The man just sort of pushed her into the car, into the back seat, and he said something like ‘What difference does that make now?’ and when the woman got into the back seat, with the child in her arms, he, the man, slammed the back door. Then he slammed the front door and walked around and got into the car, on the driver’s side and drove off. I waited until the car turned the corner. And then ... I went ... I went home. To my apartment.”

Arnold Nadler was soaked by the time he finished talking. I had seen a box of tissues on the gravel-voiced woman’s desk; I stepped into that office and came back with the box, which I handed to him. He took a wad of tissues and blotted his face, blew his nose, then wiped the inside of his shirt collar. His hands trembled so badly that he dropped the tissues onto the floor, started to reach for them, then stopped and held out his hands.

We both watched the terrible trembling. “This is how I’ve been ever since that night. The next day, of course, we all heard about ... about the Keeler boys and all. And then all the newspapers printed stories about ... about Mrs. Keeler and all her ... gangster friends. I was afraid, Detective Peters,” Nadler said. “I was scared to death. I still am.”

I did not want to ask Arnold Nadler one more question. Particularly, I did not want to ask him the
single
most important question. But I asked him.

“Mr. Nadler, did you recognize the woman you saw carrying a child into the back seat of that car?”

“Oh, yes. It was her.”

“Her?”

He nodded and blinked rapidly. “The mother. Kitty Keeler. I recognized her. You know, from the neighborhood. I recognized her right away. I don’t think I’d ever seen the man before. It wasn’t her husband, that much I do know. He was a big, dark, heavyset man. He looked ... like ... a gangster.”

Yes, a police officer did come to his apartment the next day, but he had already left for an early-morning appointment with a client. Nadler showed me his appointment book in confirmation. His wife had nothing to tell the police officer; Nadler didn’t tell her anything until a few days later, when he insisted they move out to New Jersey without delay.

Just out of curiosity, to tie up a dangling loose end, I asked him what kind of dog he had.

“Pom-Pom? Oh, she’s a Pekingese. She’s very old; nineteen years, something like that. My wife had her since before we were married.”

So Arnold Nadler wasn’t even the man with the sheep dog.

And there was still something else he hadn’t told me and wanted to tell. He was just waiting for me to ask.

“Mr. Nadler, what else do you know that might be helpful?”

He knew the license number of the large black automobile that was used to transport the bodies of the Keeler boys to the dumping ground on Peck Avenue.

He might not be on top of all the various makes and models of automobiles, but when it came to numbers, Arnold Nadler had a brain like a computer.

T
HE CAR, A 1975 BLACK
Lincoln Continental, was registered to Lorenzo Pellegrino.

Lorenzo Pellegrino was the companion, bodyguard, chauffeur and henchman of Alfredo Veronne.

I sat in my apartment for hours reading and rereading every report, interview, speculation, confession and statement regarding every aspect of the murder of the Keeler kids.

For the first time, I read Harry Sullivan’s report in its entirety and caught what I had missed by skimming. I underlined the key finding with red pen: “...
therefore it is the conclusion of the undersigned based on the above described tests, that subject revolver has been submerged in salt water solution as described in paragraph 3-subdivision b, for a period of no less than one week and no more than two weeks.”

No more than two weeks.

According to George Keeler’s confession, he had tossed his unregistered .38 revolver into Flushing Meadow Bay on the night of the double murder of his sons: sometime around 3
A.M.
on Thursday, April 17, 1975. Nearly two months ago.

There was a pattern of events dating from May 27, 1975, the date of George’s suicide and detailed confession.

The pages and pages of typed and handwritten reports began to blur; word ran into word; line ran into line. I began to feel disconnected: by fatigue; by an unwillingness to admit and analyze the growing discomfit and suspicion I had been feeling for several days.