Read Online The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Capuzzo
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gunshots fly, hearing and feeling one slamming the side of his brick row house. His father drinking too much and hitting him. His father hitting and hitting and hitting him.
He’d dreamed of hitting his dad back all those years. Each hit forced the boy’s anger one level higher until it was ready to explode. He’d lifted weights, carefully planning The Punch that would set things right and release the anger once and for all. He was amazed when his father gave him new respect, and he could concentrate on his gifts, his entrance to that other world.
Frank had extraordinary powers and gifts. He was not a student of English or mathematics. He didn’t have a graceful mind, but a mind full of grace. The hands to draw, paint, and sculpt the beauty around him, the eye to see. He started drawing in art classes when he was five years old and had never stopped. And he seemed to possess a third eye, a talent that even when young he knew not to talk about. Sometimes it seemed he could see past and future. Yet with all his abilities, the boy’s anger persisted.
Not long after he knocked his father out cold, Frank, a high school sophomore, won a gold medal in a citywide student art exhibit at a Gimbels department store. In a dream scenario for a young artist, his work was discovered by Walter Stuempfig, a notable realist painter of the midtwentieth century whose oils were compared to Edward Hopper and the Old Masters. Stuempfig offered Frank $5 for his painting and encouraged him to seek a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the famed school that graduated Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt, where Stuempfig had taught for forty years. But Frank, touchy as a water moccasin, grew angry when he never saw the $5 from Stuempfig. Then some of his exhibited paintings were never returned to him, and in a fury he swore off the academy, an art scholarship, and the art world entirely. “I wanted to do art, but I didn’t want it hanging on someone’s wall.” He escaped into the Navy, where, aboard ship, he discovered he had his father’s mechanical talents but obsessively sketched the men he worked with in the engine room.
Back home two years later, facing poverty, he landed a job as a commercial photographer at George Faraghan’s studio at Nineteenth and Arch. Slim with light hazel eyes and curly blond hair, Frank was an artist with the rugged body of a lightweight boxer, a photographer of models and a model himself. He also had a lust for life and an intuitive grasp of the art of seduction. Women threw themselves at him like confetti.
He modeled for the Philadelphia Inquirer fashion section hanging out the window of his own 1947 Plymouth with girls hanging all over him; in Reader’s Digest he dressed as a horned devil posing as the checkout boy for a Miss America contestant.
“I was like a kid in a candy shop. Plus I’d meet girls in bars and other places. I had sex constantly. I never really tried at it, to be honest. Single women, married women, they picked me up as often as I picked them up; it was all chemistry. I had sex in a lot of cars.”
The blond photographer offered a full service to models: composites, head shots, and zipless sex. One day, bored, he wrote down all his trysts on a pad of paper, recalling all the bodies if not the names. He’d had sex with 165 different women. He was twenty-six years old.
Shortly after making The List, a friend introduced him to Jan Proctor, seventeen years old, a slim, pretty, blond go-go girl who’d run away from home in the suburbs and was living alone in the city. Jan had a child, baby Lisa, but didn’t know who the father was. When she’d left home, she’d stolen all the money in her father’s wallet and left Lisa for her parents to raise.
Now she wanted to stop hustling drinks as a stripper and become a model; she needed a composite. She was smart, sassy, and had grown up in the same neighborhood as Frank, in the riverside row houses of old blue-collar
He’d dreamed of hitting his dad back all those years. Each hit forced the boy’s anger one level higher until it was ready to explode. He’d lifted weights, carefully planning The Punch that would set things right and release the anger once and for all. He was amazed when his father gave him new respect, and he could concentrate on his gifts, his entrance to that other world.
Frank had extraordinary powers and gifts. He was not a student of English or mathematics. He didn’t have a graceful mind, but a mind full of grace. The hands to draw, paint, and sculpt the beauty around him, the eye to see. He started drawing in art classes when he was five years old and had never stopped. And he seemed to possess a third eye, a talent that even when young he knew not to talk about. Sometimes it seemed he could see past and future. Yet with all his abilities, the boy’s anger persisted.
Not long after he knocked his father out cold, Frank, a high school sophomore, won a gold medal in a citywide student art exhibit at a Gimbels department store. In a dream scenario for a young artist, his work was discovered by Walter Stuempfig, a notable realist painter of the midtwentieth century whose oils were compared to Edward Hopper and the Old Masters. Stuempfig offered Frank $5 for his painting and encouraged him to seek a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the famed school that graduated Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt, where Stuempfig had taught for forty years. But Frank, touchy as a water moccasin, grew angry when he never saw the $5 from Stuempfig. Then some of his exhibited paintings were never returned to him, and in a fury he swore off the academy, an art scholarship, and the art world entirely. “I wanted to do art, but I didn’t want it hanging on someone’s wall.” He escaped into the Navy, where, aboard ship, he discovered he had his father’s mechanical talents but obsessively sketched the men he worked with in the engine room.
Back home two years later, facing poverty, he landed a job as a commercial photographer at George Faraghan’s studio at Nineteenth and Arch. Slim with light hazel eyes and curly blond hair, Frank was an artist with the rugged body of a lightweight boxer, a photographer of models and a model himself. He also had a lust for life and an intuitive grasp of the art of seduction. Women threw themselves at him like confetti.
He modeled for the Philadelphia Inquirer fashion section hanging out the window of his own 1947 Plymouth with girls hanging all over him; in Reader’s Digest he dressed as a horned devil posing as the checkout boy for a Miss America contestant.
“I was like a kid in a candy shop. Plus I’d meet girls in bars and other places. I had sex constantly. I never really tried at it, to be honest. Single women, married women, they picked me up as often as I picked them up; it was all chemistry. I had sex in a lot of cars.”
The blond photographer offered a full service to models: composites, head shots, and zipless sex. One day, bored, he wrote down all his trysts on a pad of paper, recalling all the bodies if not the names. He’d had sex with 165 different women. He was twenty-six years old.
Shortly after making The List, a friend introduced him to Jan Proctor, seventeen years old, a slim, pretty, blond go-go girl who’d run away from home in the suburbs and was living alone in the city. Jan had a child, baby Lisa, but didn’t know who the father was. When she’d left home, she’d stolen all the money in her father’s wallet and left Lisa for her parents to raise.
Now she wanted to stop hustling drinks as a stripper and become a model; she needed a composite. She was smart, sassy, and had grown up in the same neighborhood as Frank, in the riverside row houses of old blue-collar
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