The Man Who Never Returned Read online

  ALSO BY PETER QUINN

  Banished Children of Eve

  Hour of the Cat

  Looking for Jimmy:

  A Search for Irish America

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2010 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Peter Quinn

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-471-8

  For Danny Cassidy,

  my missing pal—

  until we meet again.

  Contents

  Also By Peter Quinn

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  New York City 1955

  Part II

  New York City

  Part III

  Playa de Oro, Florida

  Part IV

  New York City

  Part V

  New York City

  Part VI

  New York City

  Epilogue

  Playa de Oro, Florida

  Author’s Note

  Part I

  Mystery of the Missing Person: An excerpt from Louis Pohl, Going, Going, Gone: Famous Disappearances in American History (Jersey City: The Wildcat Press, 1970).

  Missing persons have been a source of fascination since our ancestors first climbed down from the trees and began their bipedal wanderings across the planet. In some cases, it was obvious that the vanished had been devoured by a predator, swept away by a deluge, or captured by a rival band of primates. In others, the disappearance was less explicable and, without any obvious or easy explanation, those left behind had to struggle to supply one.

  Such incidents gave birth to tales of elves and fairies who kidnapped the unwary and whisked them away to the netherworld. Common to most human cultures, similar yarns have continued to fascinate right down to the present day. They are at the heart of Lewis Carroll’s fanciful masterpiece, Alice in Wonderland, as well as the legendary Bermuda Triangle and numerous accounts of people shanghaied aboard UFOs to the far reaches of the galaxy.

  For the first European settlers who forced themselves on the New World, penetrating its virgin wildernesses, the possibility of being swallowed whole by the vast unknown was especially real. In 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh recruited a party of a hundred or so to establish the first permanent English settlement, the ‘Cittie of Raleigh,’ on Roanoke Island, in the new colony of Virginia. John White, the governor, came with his wife and pregnant daughter, Elizabeth Dare, who on August 18th, 1587, delivered Virginia Dare, the first Anglo-Saxon child born in North America.

  Soon after, John White returned to England on what he planned as a quickly executed attempt to gather more settlers and supplies. But larger forces intervened. White was trapped by Spain’s Great Armada,. and two years passed before he was able to return. When he did, he found the tiny settlement ruined and devoid of any living soul. A single word—“Croatoan”—was carved into a tree. No other trace of Virginia Dare or the other settlers was ever found.

  This warning was fitting prelude to what followed, as myriad opportunities for vanishing were built into the new undertaking. The dense, immense forests stretching into the hinterland were the natural habitat for tribes of “savages” who fell upon settlers with horrifying suddenness, and who were sometimes actively recruited for the work of marauding and kidnapping by the French and Spanish. Settlements swelled with transient strangers who arrived one day and left the next. People disappeared constantly.

  While some fell victim to the resistance of indigenous peoples, others were done in by the greed of fellow settlers, or stumbled off cliffs, or fell into rivers, or perished from exhaustion or thirst, with no trace left behind. Many of those who went missing, however, did so of their own volition. Indentured servants, enslaved Africans, vagabond Irish, debtors, bankrupts, philanderers, convicts, deserters, criminals, heretics, adventurers—those who fled forced labor, stifling conventions and ancient distinctions, or were drawn by the ways of the Indians, or were driven by a hunger for the next horizon—they all shook the dust of civilization from their feet and drank deeply from the pure, swift-flowing waters of the land beyond the pale.

  From the earliest times, then, from Virginia Dare in the 1580’s through the unsolved case of New York jurist Joseph Force Crater in the 1930’s, Americans have been intrigued by those who vanished: Were they victims of malevolence, murdered, scalped, thrown in some gulley or ravine? Did they perish on a lonely mountaintop or sink into the muck of the riverbed? Or did they go off in a self-propelled search of a fresh start, a new destiny, throwing off the ties of family, class, religion, and finding freedom from ordinary drudgery? Whether celebrated or obscure, the mystery of America’s unsolved missing persons will be forever haunted by these questions.

  New York City 1955

  “Sharpen thy sight now, Reader, to regard

  The truth, for so transparent grows the veil,

  To press within will surely not be hard.”

  —DANTE, Purgatorio, Canto VIII

  THE FIRST TELEVISION FINTAN DUNNE VIEWED (THAT’S THE WORD the newspapers kept using, with their regular updates of how many million more sets were sold and how many more television viewers there were) was in Wanamaker’s on Astor Place, just before Christmas, the winter the Red Chinese entered the Korean War. The usual holiday attractions were in place: monorail around the ceiling, ornament-laden tree, cartwheeling midgets from circus winter quarters in Sarasota, Florida, dressed as Santa’s elves cavorting in front of the grand staircase. But it was the television console, resting on a raised crimson-carpeted platform, that commanded attention.

  The placard on the easel beside it gave the details: The Brentwood by Stromberg-Carlson brings television to life as never before. Features include mahogany veneer console, super-powered steady-locked picture, full-floating speaker for superb sound, and unique single-knobbed feature for easy picture adjustment. Visit the new TV WORLD section of our Appliances Department on the first floor for our full line of offerings. WHAT BETTER WAY TO CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS THAN WITH A TV!

  On the round, porthole-like screen, a small gray figure in a dark suit puffed on a cigarette, extolling in clear, solemn tones “its smooth taste and fine tobacco blend.” A crescent of morning shoppers stood in reverent silence, as if war had just been declared or the president had died. Oblivious to the antic blandishments of the elves, a crowd of children was sprawled in front, chins propped on hands.

  More and more, Dunne had found himself leaving his office and wandering into stores like Wanamaker’s with no real purpose except to get out of the office. When he’d returned to civilian life after the war, Dunne had gone back to the private-investigation business. Though he hadn’t planned to build a large operation, it happened anyway. Some clients were still attracted by his pre-war reputation; others came as a result of the extensive contacts he’d made while serving in the Office of Strategic Services. He’d been recruited not long after Pearl Harbor by his former commanding officer, Col. William Donovan, and after nearly two years in Washington, D.C., he had spent the rest of the war overseas.

  Within a few years of re-establishing his business, he’d hired almost a doz
en full-time and half-time assistant investigators to help handle the volume of business. His role quickly evolved into that of desk-bound executive. He affiliated his office with outfits in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City and L.A. as the All-American Detective Agency, an arrangement that led to Louis Pohl showing up in his office in the late fall of 1954 with an unsolicited sugar-plum offer from International Service Corporation—ISC—to acquire their loose association and integrate it into a tightly run national operation.

  It wasn’t until the early summer of 1955 that a highly lucrative deal was worked out on cocktail napkins over a prime-rib-and-scotch lunch at Cavanaugh’s on 23rd Street and Third Avenue. The sums being discussed were unreal to Dunne. The zeroes spelled out more money than he’d ever dreamed of having (or desired, for that matter).

  The terms they finally agreed on were simple enough. He would retire from management of the agency, which would be integrated into ISC over a three-year period. Pohl offered the full price of sale upfront, as well as a “consultant’s fee” paid out for the first three years. This included an agreement not to sign on with any other agency during that time. There was a small banquet in a private dining room at the Hotel Astor for Dunne and the executives at ISC. The cocktail hour went on for two and was followed by champagne and lobster tails. At the end, Pohl handed him an envelope. Inside were all those zeroes once again. This time, instead of a cocktail napkin, they were on a cashier’s check.

  Roberta asked him several times if he was sure he was ready to retire, but she didn’t try to argue him out of it. When he said he thought they should get away from the city, with its sweltering summers and miserable winters, she went and scouted a new home for them in Florida. Without even seeing it, he told her to go ahead and buy it, which she did.

  On their last night in New York, after they’d packed up the apartment in Washington Heights and sent everything ahead, they stayed at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Next morning was hot and close. They threaded their way across Seventh Avenue through a hopeless choke of traffic. The gray-brown brew of car exhaust, humidity and overheated air was the same dull color as the gargantuan Roman-style railroad station. A single honk set off a storm of blaring horns that cascaded up and down the avenue. Roberta put her hands over her ears. Barely able to hear what she was saying, he read her lips: Fin, let’s get the hell outta here.

  The train to Florida gave them a chance to relax. Roberta mostly read. He mostly slept. As soon as they arrived, she got to work fixing up their new house. Dunne thought everything looked fine, but she kept pointing out where she intended to have a wall torn down or a new patio installed. He napped, read, took a long swim in the pool each afternoon, until, gradually, at no particular moment he could recall, it dawned on him that this wasn’t a vacation but a life.

  Sometime in the autumn, he began to have trouble sleeping. Reading didn’t help. He sat by the pool and blew smoke rings at the stars. Roberta urged him to try golf. He quit after three lessons because his right shoulder hurt. She signed them up for weekly dance lessons, an hour of constant motion. Mambo. Conga. Rumba. “Listen to the dance instructor,” she said. Handsome, agile Felipe Calderon. “See, Fin, he never looks at his feet.” Cha cha cha. Left knee bent, left foot forward, right knee bent, left leg straightens to receive the weight. As long as he took time to flex his knees beforehand, he not only enjoyed the class, but it became the high point of the week.

  Early one morning, as the sky grew light and bird chatter became hysterical, he sat by the pool, which was drained for cleaning, resealing and repainting. A horizontal scum line, like a bathtub ring, marked where the water had been. He decided to take a trip. At the behest of the executives at ISC, he told Roberta. They wanted a report on the Chicago regional office, make sure the new guys weren’t screwing up. A white lie—or, more accurately, off-white, like the color she had the bathroom painted above the blue tiles. ISC hadn’t asked, but they hadn’t put the kibosh on his trip either (though admittedly, since he never sought permission, it never had the chance).

  He went by train. Just outside Chicago, he rescued a movie-fan magazine abandoned by a portly woman in a peach-colored coat and matching hat who’d been next to him in the lounge car. He opened to a gushy article about Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall: “True Love Trumps Gap in Age.” Hard not to like Bogart as an actor, despite the way he had ruined the detective trade with that Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe hokum that acted like a magnet for out-of-work, no-talent dreamers who imagined they’d found the easiest way to turn the world’s fastest buck. Never was, especially not now, with independents being eaten up by corporate subsidiaries run by former G-Men and the like, to the point there was no getting through the door without a diploma and government experience, a sure-fire formula for turning out bureaucrats instead of bloodhounds.

  He dropped in unannounced on the Chicago office only to discover the premises had moved from the basement of a building near the Loop to the upper floor of a glass-and-steel crate with dramatic views of Lake Michigan. The receptionist stared blankly when he gave his name. The agency manager was standard military issue from his salt-and-pepper crew cut to his highly polished wingtips, polite in stand-offish G-Man fashion, doing his best to hide his irritation at the surprise visit. After enough time had passed that it wouldn’t seem rude, he fussed with some papers on his desk, mumbled about the need to get back to “implementing the many opportunities for expanding our business,” and stood. Dunne resisted the urge to salute.

  Next morning, before checking out of the Drake, he took a stroll. The day was unseasonably mild until the wind from the lake switched direction and blew in an armada of lead-colored, sleet-laden clouds. By noon, it was wet, blustery, and rapidly getting nastier. He decided to continue his trip, and sent a wire to Roberta to let her know Chicago had gone so well, ISC asked him to drop in on the L.A. office. Then he wired Jeff Wine, a pal from the OSS and head of the ISC’s L.A. office, to inform him he’d be in town on some personal business and would love to get together.

  He booked a compartment on the Super Chief. Except for an occasional foray to the dining car, he mostly slept, soundly and dreamlessly, lullabyed by the monotonous, comforting clickety-clack of train and track.

  Wine met him at L.A.’s Santa Fe station. Tanned and relaxed, with mailbag-sized pouches beneath his eyes and mahogany-dyed, Duco-finished hair, and clad in a green sports jacket with no lapels, Wine was plump and ripe, the epitome of Fred Allen’s quip, “At fifty everybody in California looks like an avocado.” But Wine seemed a most ripe and happy avocado: divorced with grown kids, grateful ISC had left him in his job as local agency head, and infatuated with life in southern California after cold, dark New York. “A yesterday city,” he put it, “if there’s ever been one.”

  Dunne checked in at the Beverly Wilshire and left his winter duds in his valise. Wine took him to buy a new wardrobe of slacks and short-sleeved shirts at Sulka’s. They cruised in Wine’s chrome-rich Studebaker Speedster beneath the stately palms of Beverly Hills. Poking at the car’s push-button radio, he strayed from station to station, never listening for more than a minute, except for Nat King Cole’s rendition of “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup,” which he listened to in its entirety.

  Wine did most of the talking. He had a radio announcer’s voice, as buttery and smooth as Cole’s crooning. Airplane and defense industries, concerned over spying and the stealing of trade secrets by rival companies, were fast becoming the agency’s biggest sources of revenue. But the studios remained big clients. Still reeling from allegations of Communist infiltration and trying to fend off television’s mortal threat with gimmicks like CinemaScope, Cinerama and 3-D, they paid whatever it took to keep tabs on dwindling stables of stars and would-be stars, and to head off scandal.

  Wine kept a special file cabinet under lock and key in a windowless room in the basement beneath the office. Like a Great White Hunter with his wall of stuffed lion and tiger heads, he insisted on displaying his trophies to Dunne, opening fil
e after file of surveillance reports and plucking out photos of various well-known Hollywood personalities, past and present, caught in situations and positions “indelicate, indecent, immoral or illegal—pick your category,” Wine said.

  He removed several glossies from a file and held them to his chest. “These are from the all-of-the-above category.” They were taken some time ago, he said, while the agency kept tabs for a studio on Merry Lane, a promising starlet (improbable as it sounded, Merry Lane was her real name) whose fiery temperament and passion for liquor and South American pool boys incinerated her promise. He laid them out in front of Dunne. Though shot from a distance, they were clearly of a couple enjoying carnal relations on a chaise lounge.

  Wine jabbed a finger at the couple. “Look close.”

  Dunne craned his neck and squinted. What at first appeared a twosome turned out to be a ménage à trois. And the trois had a tail. “Don’t tell me that’s a dog.”

  “Could be a mutt, or maybe a studio executive. It’s not always easy to tell the difference.” Wine put the photos back and locked the cabinet. “Merry was a stunner. Had Hollywood in the palm of her hand but went her own merry way too many times. AWOL from the studio for extended periods. Public spats with lovers. Too much booze. Last I heard she was reading palms in the Silver Moon Tea House, a clip joint on the Strip not far from where the Garden of Allah used to be in the old Hollywood days. Salesmen and tourists go there to get their fortunes told, which sometimes includes a rendezvous with one of the neighborhood B-girls, and musicians from the local clubs stop in to stock up on marijuana cigarettes.”

  Three consecutive nights, they ended up in the same after-hours club, sharing stories from their days in the OSS. Wine reminisced about the troop ship they traveled on to England in 1943 amid a furious winter storm that hit halfway across the Atlantic and sent towering, green-blue waves crashing onto the ship, making it shudder as though hit by a torpedo. “I kept praying a U-Boat would send us to the bottom. That way I wouldn’t be remembered as the guy who died puking his guts out on a Navy tub.” Finger for stirrer, he twirled the remainder of his drink around in the glass, a miniature maelstrom, and shook his head. “Good God, Fin, it’s like it all happened a lifetime ago, not a decade.”