Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,28
addicts slumbered in a church doorway; at a small table in back, Fleisher bent over a cheeseburger while Bender picked at a salad and ogled Wendy, a twentysomething waitress with pale skin and dark hair. Bender’s eyes gleamed in his balding skull like azure marbles. He was trying to persuade her to sit nude for him. She had dropped by the studio for a glass of wine. But he hadn’t yet convinced her to remove her clothes.
“She moves like sex personified,” he said as he watched her walk away.
“Jesus, Frank, I don’t know how you get away with it.”
“Jan wants me to have a few girlfriends,” he said, his tone completely earnest. “She doesn’t like me hanging around the house all the time. She just likes to meet my girlfriends first. I never get involved with someone Jan doesn’t like. Jan likes Joan. It’s Joan who gets jealous of the other girlfriends.”
Fleisher shook his head. “I can’t keep it all straight.” Fleisher had been married to Michelle for thirty years, and his passions were conventional: Besides nineteenth-century detective stories, they included gourmet dining, travel with Michelle, and spoiling the grandchildren. He teased and joked with Michelle as mercilessly as the day he started courting her; in many ways, he had never stopped courting her.
Bender never stopped loving his wife, either. He spoke of her with great fondness. He’d stopped sleeping around with strangers, he said. All his girlfriends were close, intimate friends.
“Let me get this straight,” Fleisher smirked. “In other words, you’re not sowing wild oats anymore. It’s all about relationships now.”
“Right.”
Fleisher laughed out loud. “Frank, if you were in my family I’d chase you with a rifle like your father-in-law did. But on a murder case, you’re the best.”
At this, Bender leaned forward, lowering his voice confidentially. “Bill, listen, I’m working on this case that’s really worrying me,” said Bender. “The marshals are tracking down a fugitive killer, a legendary hit man, and they asked me to be the ‘eyes’ of the task force. They say I have an ability to see faces none of the others have.”
“Congratulations. It sounds like a fantastic opportunity.”
Bender frowned. “I’m supposed to do sketches and a bust showing ‘age progression’ so they know what they’re looking for. The marshal deputized me and I’m carrying a gun. They were very upfront about the danger.”
Fleisher’s eyes widened.
“I know, I haven’t seen his face up close, but the guy looks just like me. He’s the same size, same age, same body type. He’s also an artist. It’s spooky. I feel like he’s my doppelganger, an evil twin.”
Fleisher scowled. Bender took a sip of coffee. “I’m not afraid of anybody,” he said. “But I saw him once through a telephoto lens and his eyes were so cold. He knows who I am and the threat I represent to him. I can feel it—he wants me dead.
“His name is Hans Vorhauer,” Bender continued. “He’s a German American like me, but killing is in his blood. His father was a Nazi S.S. officer. And he’s a genius—he has the highest IQ tested in the history of the Pennsylvania prison system.”
Fleisher practically lunged out of his chair. “Hans Vorhauer! I can tell you all about Hans Vorhauer. I chased him all over the East Coast in the 1970s for the murder of a federal witness friend.”
Vorhauer was one of the most wanted and dangerous fugitives at large in the United States. Accused by federal agents in a rare interrogation of killing seventeen people as a hired assassin, Vorhauer openly mocked them. “No,” he smirked, with the arrogance of a man who had never been charged with any of them, “it’s thirty-three.” Vorhauer was a brilliant tactician of murder, a master of disguise, black-market gunsmith, drug dealer, armed robber, and the uber–hit man for East Coast gangsters, elusive as a ghost. A self-taught chemist, he operated one of the largest methamphetamine laboratories on the East Coast until he was finally arrested and convicted of meth possession and armed robbery charges in the late 1970s. Vorhauer was sentenced to twenty years in Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia, the state’s largest maximum-security lockup. A model prisoner, he worked his way into the position of head of the prison shop.
On November 17, 1983, Vorhauer staged a spectacular escape from Graterford that the headlines called THE BREAKFRONT BREAK-OUT, escaping in the hollow compartment of an armoire he had made in the shop for sale and delivery outside. Crouched with him in the pine armoire—stained to resemble