Matson’s Case No. 2: Matson Case Files, #2

By Pablo Zaragoza

"Set in 1950s NYC, the hero fights crime amid racial tension and the rise of Nazism. A fascinating story, packed with suspense and plenty of intrigue."

 

Matson's forensic boss, O'Neal, a crusty Scotsman, sends Matson to the crime scene in Manhattan, where he learns that three men, all with the same name, are murder victims, suspiciously in a three-block radius of each other.  He hooks up with his former partner, Harvey Smith, and the two cops plug into the world of spies, Nazis, and Operation Paperclip.

 

In their investigation into the three murders, all revealing ties with Hitler, the two cops go to the FDA's animal research facility, site of the three murdered men's work on biological warfare off Lyme, Connecticut, namesake for Lyme disease.

 

Who murdered whom becomes a twisted riddle of love and covert operations—and protection of government secrets. Will the truth ever be known? Matson and Smith, in their search for the answer, venture off to the FDA's Animal research facility, site of the three Nazi scientists' work on bacteriological warfare off Lyme, Connecticut.

 

In the familiar sub-plot to the Matson series, he continues to advance in the police ranks, despite ongoing discrimination during the pre-Civil Rights era of the late 1950s. Sissy, Matson's wife, begins her education in earnest toward becoming a highly respected psychologist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pablo Zaragoza
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393806578

Book preview

Pablo Omar Zaragoza

Susan Giffin, Co-Author

To my family—my children, father, mother, brother, uncles, and

cousins—whose stories inspire me to write

Pablo Omar Zaragoza

To my parents, my brother, sister, cousins, niece, and extended

family for their support and encouragement

Susan Giffin

Table of Contents

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY PABLO ZARAGOZA

COPYRIGHT

PROLOGUE

I have started to look back more in my old age, here in this larger office the city gives me. What I do now is administrate, making sure that policies are followed, paperwork gets done, and the politics of the city do not taint the politics of policing. It wasn’t always that way. In the old days, the mayor could quash a case because it would offend someone. Impellitteri, Wagner, Lindsay, and Beame all contributed their two cents on the occasional case for which the impact hit too close to home, too close to the nasty truth that the city had become a cesspool.

I was not particularly cheerful this morning. Sissy had not made coffee before I left, so I got my first cup out of the machine in the lobby. I hated it when she would rush to make her early morning class. She has a PhD with tenure, heads the Department of Psychology at NYU, and still teaches freshmen. I asked her why, and she told me that it keeps her fresh and alive. She said it was the same as when I took on the occasional case; I didn’t have to, but I did it to keep my hands in the work.

Today was not just any day, however. Today, we had to say goodbye to an old friend. He had built a state-of-the-art crime lab, cobbling fingerprint, fiber, and chemical analysis under one roof. He had created one of the first DNA analysis laboratories for solving crimes in the country. I had worked for him during my early days out of the academy, when he requested that I join him after our work together on the crucifixion murders. Harry O’Neal didn’t want them to put me in the police transit squad where they put blacks, so they could forget about them. O’Neal had other plans for me.

I remember him saying, Laddie, you’re not one of those mindless robots who walk the streets, knocking heads. You’ve got a brain. Since you have a brain, I want you to use it. Remember the evidence talks to us. The men and women who collect it, examine it, and infer from it are the ones that truly solve crimes.

He was right about that. The evidence talks to us if we are willing to listen. Under his tutelage, I learned how to read fibers, how to look at a room and notice that there was something out of place. He showed me the art of collecting evidence, but most importantly, he didn’t put up a roadblock when he saw the color of my skin.

I asked him once why he disregarded my skin color, and he said, We’re all pink on the inside, me boyo. I thought Gonzales had taught you that by now.

Gonzales, that’s another name from the past that haunts me on days like today. He wasn’t around long because by the end of my time at the police academy, he’d put in his paperwork to retire. He made sure that the incoming chief, Dr. Milton Helpern, knew that I wasn’t just the black man that cleaned the floors.

I remember the first time I met Helpern. He walked in, wearing a well-pressed white lab coat, with Gonzales. I had just opened a skull and was gently extracting the brain. Gonzales pointed to a bulge of tissue and asked, Matson, what is that?

You mean the Gasserian ganglion, the sensory part of the trigeminal nerve? I described the motor and sensory portions of the nerve and the motor division of the trigeminal. I gave details of the motor branches and what they inervated.

By the end of it, Helpern walked away, saying to Gonzales, Why wasn’t he born white? If he was a different color, I’d make sure Columbia Medical would take him.

Gonzales retorted, You should know by now, Milton, that we’re all pink and red on the inside. That man is freshly out of the police academy, and he is a vital part of this team.

Helpern was just one in a series of medical examiners I’ve dealt with: DiMalo, Baden, Gross, Hirsh, and now Smith. I miss them all because each one brought to the autopsy table the sense that they spoke for the dead.

I feel like the last man standing, although Smith is still alive and living in Florida. He called to say he’d be here for the funeral, but after him, there ain’t anyone else. No one to tell the ones coming up about the time when police work wasn’t sitting around waiting for the DNA to arrive. Instead, we needed all the branches of the forensic lab and a sixth sense to look inside the criminal’s mind. That legwork—knocking on doors, actually looking at fingerprints instead of letting a machine do the work for us—made it an art. It’s true that the national databank for fingerprints lets us find suspects faster and easier, but we lose so much when we don’t actually feel the card in our hand, look through the magnifying glass, and compare the ridge pattern.

The case of Richard Thompson, the victim found in his apartment, was the one that showed me how important it all was.

CHAPTER ONE

I sat in my office and pored through my case files. The old gray steel filing cabinet held every case I had ever worked. I even had notes on the case Bumpy had given me when I returned to New York. That’s another blast from the past. I remember being in the police station when he staged the sit-down strike to protest police harrassment after he got out of prison.

I was on the street by then, patrolling Harlem in ’68. I’d just taken the detective’s exam and awaited the results, when a kid grabbed me and asked me to come with him. Kids in those days, just like kids today, didn’t trust the cops, but in Harlem, they knew that I was alright. The kid wore a pair of khakis and a white t-shirt, and he ran like the wind. I almost tripped on my shoelaces, as we ran down the street. I remember thinking that if I fell, I’d bust my head on the sidewalk.

I went to Wells Restaurant. By the time I arrived, Junie Byrd Johnson was cradling her husband Bumpy in her arms. The waitress was crying, saying she’d just served him a cup of coffee, a chicken leg, and hominy grits, when he grabbed his chest, rolled over, and hit the floor.

I cleared the room, all except Junie, Finley Hoskins who’d been with Bumpy when it happened, and the waitress. The ambulance came, but Bumpy was already not breathing. They tried to revive him, but it didn’t take. They took him to Harlem Hospital where doctors pronounced him dead.

Helpern was still medical examiner (ME) at the time. He found out that I had been there on the scene, and he asked if I’d help with the autopsy. I’d stopped helping at the ME’s office, but now and then when they were short of staff, I’d come in and assist.

Helpern made his Y-shaped incision, and, pulling back the skin and subcutaneous tissue, he exposed the rib cage. He took a set of pruning shears and clipped each rib to form an inverted V and then pulled the chest plate off. He opened the pericardial sac, exposing a large heart with dilated chambers, the sign of congestive heart failure, which was secondary to cocaine and alcohol abuse during the sixty-two years of Bumpy’s life.

But the Thompson murder case in 1955 was the one I was looking for in my files, the one I wanted to review. It was the one I would use to eulogize my friend and mentor. I dug through the files. The files… one of these days I need to organize them. I didn’t like people going through my things, not even Sissy. I finally pulled the file out. The pages of the report had turned yellow, the manila stiffened.

Case Notes

February 12, 1955

With the file in hand, I remembered the giants on whose shoulders I had stood: Hans Gross, who first began to integrate different disciplines in the detection of crime; Edmond Locard, who developed the exchange principle that says we leave something of ourselves at each place we visit—a hair, a fiber, and now our DNA; Calvin Goddard, who first showed that each gun, each rifle has distinctive marks on the bullets that could help identify the weapon used in the commission of a crime; and Mathieu Orfila, the founder of toxicology, who demonstrated how certain toxins affect animals and who ushered in the physiological approach to the study of poisons. These men and others built the house known as forensic science, but in 1955, the only place we could learn about these things was by reading or by having a mentor like O’Neal. However, to every rule there is an exception; to every scientific experiment, there is an outlier, some measurement that doesn’t fit.

That was the Thompson case. My notes, as I read them, were very sterile. I sounded more like Joe Friday on Dragnet, The facts, ma’am, just the facts. But in my mind, the moments were as clear as if it were yesterday. It’s strange how your mind can take you back in time.

I went to my desk and sat down. The room began to dissolve away, and I saw instead the old apartment’s kitchen and a set of beautiful bare legs cooking at the stove.

Baby, it’s 7:00. Get up, Sissy said. She was cooking eggs in our little basement apartment. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet; she was running late for her early morning class. I came up behind her, wrapped my arms around her waist, and pressed myself against her. I felt her smooth, firm buttocks on my member which rose to attention.

She turned to face me, If you keep that up, I’ll be late to class, the bacon will burn, and you won’t get to work.

Baby, you treat me so rough. All I want to give you is a proper good morning.

Only thing you want to do is get your rocks off before going to work and make me late for class. She smiled and kissed me.

After breakfast, she got dressed and was about to go out the door, when she turned to me and said, If you keep him ready, I’ll play with him when you come home. That would stick in my mind the whole day, as I worked in O’Neal’s section.

After Sissy had left for class, I slowly put on my white shirt, tie and brown suit. O’Neal always wanted his people to look professional. I took the bus to the lab and settled in for the day’s activities.

I was working with the forensic unit, where O’Neal had taken me under his wing. I liked working the field, gathering evidence, taking pictures, and collecting fibers. He was an exceptionally good teacher, and he would always point out where I should do a little more reading.

I’d been dealing with fibers which is much different now. We didn’t have a national database to which manufacturers provided the chemical and microscopic characteristics of every fiber produced around the world. There were databases for buttons, zippers, clasps which makes matching specimens simpler. No, back then, we had to compare fibers microscopically and do melting points to determine what a fiber might be.

About 9:00, if I remember correctly, we got a call about what most likely was a natural, which is a death without the suspicion of foul play. They wanted someone to take photographs, just in case we had to open a file. I was the next one on the list for scut work.

I picked up a camera from the locker and headed to a group of apartments in Chinatown. When I arrived, Smith was already in the room, pacing up and down, waiting for me.

It’s about time, Matson.

Well, good morning to you, too.

Don’t give me a hard time. I hate this sort of shit. The guy was reclining in his chair, reading a book, when he died. Nothing here except paperwork.

I looked at the scene. It wasn’t a typical apartment in a crummy part of the city. The furniture was high-end. The dining table and chairs were Louis XIV. A few paintings on the wall, I could swear were originals. I looked close at the signatures: Rembrandt, Degas, Monet, and Cézanne. It was odd to find these in Chinatown in what appeared, at least from the outside, to be a rundown apartment building. These had to be examined by an expert, but I swear they were the real deal. I ran my finger along the frame and didn’t pick up any dust. There was a Persian rug, not a fake one like those from New Jersey that folks try to pass off as authentic. No, this one was real.

I noticed there were no pictures of family, friends or anything else to give a clue as to who this man was. No radio, just an old Victrola and a selection of classical recordings—Wagner, Vivaldi, Strauss. He had been reading an interesting book, Confessions of Felix Krull, by Thomas Mann, just before he died.

The man, Eric Thompson, was in his mid-forties, about 6’3", and muscular. He had blond hair and blue eyes. His nails were well kept. I took pictures of the corpse sitting in the chair.

I started to look around again, wondering what else I might find. Underneath the dead man’s bed, I found a leather suitcase, recently oiled to make it smooth and soft. I put gloves on to prevent transferring my fingerprints to the case.

As I pulled the case out, I saw the Totenkopf, the skull and crossbones of the German-SS. It was a symbol that this man had been willing to put himself at risk to help his community. Was he a collector of such Nazi trinkets or had he escaped and was in hiding here?

I opened the case. In it was the black uniform of an SS officer, a colonel, from what I remembered. There were multiple decorations on the chest, including the iron cross. The owner of this uniform had been in the thick of the struggle, it seemed from the beginning. I laid the uniform on the bed. At a glance, it appeared that it would fit the corpse. There were two Lugers in the case and a photograph. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like it was of the now-deceased shaking hands with Himmler. The inscription read:

Zu meinem Freund und Kameraden Henrich Mienter

Smith, who, by now, was very curious about the strange contents of the case, asked me, You know what it says?

Yeap.

Well.

To my Friend and Comrade Henrich Mienter.

So, this isn’t Eric Thompson but some Nazi?

Looks like it.

What do you think we should do?

I think we should process this as if it were a crime scene and ask the rest of the team up here. So, I made a phone call to the unit and waited for them.

As we waited, we talked about our new domestic relationships, So, tell me, Matson, you and Sissy okay?

Couldn’t be better. She cooks and I clean. She’s taking psychology classes now.

You’re not worried she’ll analyze you and find out who you really are? We laughed, and I asked about his girl.

If I get a cut, a bruise, or my back aches, she’s all over it. I couldn’t be better.

CHAPTER TWO

When O’Neal came through the door, he had some interesting news. Laddie, do you know that there are two other apparent naturals within a three-block radius?

This is the city. That’s not unusual.

Ah, it’s not, but they all be about forty, all men and all named Thompson. Now you will really make it bizarre if this fellow here is named Eric.

The man’s ID is Eric Thompson, but I found in a suitcase a photograph of a man who looks like the deceased with Himmler, signed to his good friend and comrade, Henrich Mienter.

There are no coincidences, only dots you haven’t connected. I’d like you and Smith to go to the other two addresses. I’ve cleared it with the higher-ups that we are to keep this tight. I’ve got a gut feeling, boyos, that this is going to be strange and twisted.

Smith and I hoofed it over to the second scene. Along the way, we got a hot dog since Smith hadn’t had breakfast. This was before married life had placed an extra forty pounds around his waist, and he started taking pills for diabetes and high blood pressure.

We walked up to the Heavens Arms Apartments on the edge of Chinatown. A porter stood at the door. He was a brown-skinned man with a graying mustache. He smiled and showed a sliver of gold between his front teeth. In a thick Spanish accent, he asked us our business.

New York’s best here, bud. We’re here about a death.

You mean Mr. Thompson?

You know him?

He’s been here five years, and he comes out at 6:45 every morning. A black car waits for him and he goes. He comes back at 5:15 every afternoon. On Sunday, he stays home. At Christmas time, he gives me $1,000. But if anyone asks about him, I should know nothing.

Has anyone ever asked about him? Smith asked.

No, no one asks about him, at least not during my shift. But let me see if Barney wrote anything down.

Anybody new in the building?

Yeah, the eighty-four-year-old man in 2018. He moved in two years ago.

Any service people you don’t recognize?

Who pays attention to service people? They come in and out of the building all the time. Yesterday, we had someone for the heater, a physical therapist, a grocery boy, and one for pizza delivery. All kinds of people come in and out.

You keep a record?

Yeah, we keep records, but they’re not very good because, you know, I go take a pee, I go get coffee or a sandwich from the bodega for a few minutes, and someone comes and goes.

Before we went to the crime scene, the porter had looked at his book. He came back saying that Mr. Thompson had had a visitor, someone interviewing for a job. We thanked the porter and started going upstairs. Smith wanted to take the elevator, but I opted for the stairs. I thought that if someone had gone up to the apartment, he would have used the stairs. It looked like they had been sanitized, as if someone knew that the police would investigate this death.

Smith was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. It’s curious, I said.

What?

The stairwell looks like it’s been sanitized. There isn’t a piece of paper, a discarded napkin, a speck on lint, nothing.

This address isn’t that high class to afford any kind of service.

The hallway had a nice carpet, and the wall had been freshly painted because it had that fresh-paint smell. When I pressed a finger to the wall, paint rubbed off. It had to have been painted after the victim’s death and before anyone reported it to the police. I would have to wait for Helpern to put a thermometer in the victim’s liver to get an estimated time of death and an idea when someone painted this hall.

I went to the third floor and looked at the doorknob for fingerprints, but the brass knob was polished to a shine. I opened the door and immediately got a distinct odor of ammonium and putrefaction.

Smith was already standing in front of the door to the apartment. Took you long enough, buddy.

Looking for clues, friend, looking for clues.

What did you find?

The cleanest stairwell in the city, not even a piece of paper, and it smelled like someone had cleaned up after themselves.

We entered the apartment. It wasn’t as spartan as the first one, with many glass and porcelain figures in several glass cases. The porcelain was unmistakably Lladro, the glass Murano. There were two paintings in the living room, and again I looked at the name: Miro.

The furniture, unlike the other Eric Thompson’s, was modern contemporary with a great deal of glass, metal, and leather. He was sitting in a metal chair, slumped over a glass table in a small balcony off the living room. The view wasn’t particularly great, but at least it wasn’t a pile of garbage or the wall of another building.

I went to the bedroom. The bed had silk bedsheets and pillowcases. Like the other Thompson, there were no photographs of family or friends in the whole apartment. I looked under the bed, but there was no suitcase; that would have been too spooky. He had a small closet for such a large apartment. Smith and I had the same thought and started tapping on the wall, and, sure enough, we heard the hollow sound of a false wall. I felt for some type of mechanism to open it.

Smith flipped the light switch, and the false wall slid open. I didn’t know. I just wanted to get a better view.

A tan leather suitcase similar to the one found at the first Thompson’s apartment was there. On a hook was a black leather coat and the black officer’s hat of an SS officer with Totenkopf staring at us. I took the case out of the room and put it on the bed. I unfastened the straps and opened the case with straps. Inside was a copy of Mien Kampf. I turned the pages, and on the author’s page written in German: Zu Meinem Lieben Freund, den Kampf Aufrechzuerhalten.

What does it say? asked Smith.

To my good friend, keep up the fight.

The signature was unmistakable: Adolf Hitler.

There were two framed photographs, one at Peenemünde where he was with another man identified only as WD on the photo. The other was a photo of him, Hermann Göring, and the man from the first apartment.

Smith had been looking at the doors, looking for signs of forced entry. So far, he had not found any.

There was a phone on the night table, which was a rarity in 1955. Most people used a communal phone in the hall or one at the grocer’s down the street. I made a call to the forensic lab and told Mildred, the unit secretary, to get in touch with O’Neal, that Thompson No. 2 needed to be treated as a crime scene.

I looked at the suitcase more thoroughly. On the outside, it looked bigger than it was on the inside. I felt for a latch and eventually found something hard, which triggered the release of a flap, opening a secret compartment with multiple official documents. They looked like names and locations, but I wasn’t sure what they had to do with the case. Some of the documents were in English, others in German. I would have to send them to a documents expert in order verify what they contained. The expert would give me an idea as to providence, I hoped. I placed the documents in a manila envelope, sealed the contents, dated the envelope, and signed my name, as well identifying the place and time where I had obtained it.

At this point, I felt like Alice going down the rabbit hole into Wonderland with all its mysteries and horrors. We waited for the second team to arrive before we went to the third apartment. The wind was blowing, and snow flurries started falling steadily. Good thing I wore double socks. If not, frostbite would have set in by now. People were rushing by, their heads tucked in, scarfs wrapped around their heads. I could see their breath coming from under their scarfs, and one or two had ice forming on their mustache.

It took us only a few minutes to get to the third apartment. It was very high-end. Instead of a porter in a purple coat like we met at the Heavenly Arms, there were two large gentlemen in red uniforms with brass buttons and red hats. They blocked the