The Alice Crimmins Case by Ken Gross

Author:Ken Gross [Gross, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRUE CRIME/Murder/General
Publisher: West 26th Street Press
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

As winter folded over the investigation, the detectives had exhausted the usual investigative techniques, but a solid case still eluded them. They believed they possessed the seed of the answer—but there were blank spots. Gaps. All the inferences seemed to lead to Alice Crimmins. Her frustrating denials and cold silences were maddening.

Nat Hentel had to worry about the election. If he allowed this case to dribble away, he risked being dismissed at the polls as an impotent prosecutor. He faced a formidable adversary, State Senator Thomas Mackell, a widely popular Democrat with a bank balance of friendship all over Queens. Mackell was an organization man who glowed with the reflected blessings of the Kennedys. He had been one of the first state politicians to endorse John Kennedy for President and Robert Kennedy for Senator. He also enjoyed the reputation of being a hard worker with dependable loyalties. In the clubhouses they would speak affectionately of his common touch and his fine Irish voice. And it went without saying that Tommy Mackell was a good family man. He was devoted to his wife, Dorothy. Perhaps a little too devoted, since Dorothy had an amusing innocence and could blurt out mistakes and then Tommy would trail behind her tolerantly repairing her gaffes.

During the early stages of the campaign Mackell boasted that he would make the Crimmins case his first order of business. The culprits would be behind bars in his first season in office, he implied. The case was no mystery in the Mackell household. The night after the children disappeared, Mackell’s wife poked him in the chest and said there was no doubt in her mind—the mother did it. She based the judgment on intuition—and, of course, the reports that the mother would not appear in public without makeup. Mrs. Mackell had developed something of a reputation among friends as an amateur sleuth. Her hunches had the eerie insight of a Miss Marple. The Mackells’ apartment in Rego Park was across the street from Alexander’s parking lot. Late at night Mrs. Mackell would stand at her window and count the cars in the lot, picking out the ones that were stolen. She had been right often enough for the local precinct to send a car around to check. Her husband had learned to accept his wife’s hobby with a certain amount of good-natured kidding, the way some men shrug helplessly at cold remedies. Still, Mackell did not dismiss his wife’s hunches out of hand.

When the gossip coincided with Mrs. Mackell’s hunch about Alice Crimmins, the official viewpoint hardened into virtual certainty. “A great little detective,” Mackell would say with a trace of condescension. And yet the police version and Mrs. Mackell’s hunch were based on the same foundation—an attitude; an unsettling defiance in the stance of Alice Crimmins; the way she took sex like a man, as an appetite to be satisfied without entanglements; her dismissal of faith like another casual lover.

The detectives working on the case sensed Nat Hentel’s vulnerability,

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