Small Town

A patrolman, months out of the academy, came up with a suggestion. Collect surveillance tapes for the forty-eight hours preceding the massacre from every available source in the neighborhood — ATMs, liquor stores, check-cashing services, building lobbies, everywhere. Security cameras were all over the place nowadays, you couldn’t pick your nose anywhere outside your own house without a good chance of having the moment recorded. Nobody ever looked at all those tapes unless something happened — except for the gimlet-eyed lady at the Sally Ann thrift shop, who evidently had time on her hands. They got recycled, over and over, but maybe there were some that hadn’t been recycled yet, and maybe the Carpenter — the newspapers were still calling him that, and consequently so were the cops — maybe the Carpenter had gotten his picture taken somewhere down the line.

A dozen cops went around collecting tapes. Armed with prints made from the thrift shop tape, they and others sat in front of video screens and looked for the Carpenter. A veteran patrolman named Henry Gelbfuss spotted him, on a tape from a Rite Aid drugstore, and everybody agreed it was the Carpenter. He was the man on the thrift shop tape, no question.

The Rite Aid tape, enlarged and sharpened and defined, was still a far cry from a Bachrach portrait, but it was good enough to release to the media, good enough to show on television, good enough to print on every front page, along with a number to call if you recognized the man in the photo.

A lot of people did.

Nailed!

That was the headline in the Post, accompanied by an artist’s rendition of the man whose security camera photo had appeared prominently throughout the media the day before. The drawing showed a disembodied hand holding a claw hammer, which had evidently been used to drive a nail through the man’s forehead, pinning him to the wall.

The Daily News showed their artist’s rendition of the photo, with the Carpenter, a hammer in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, pinned against a similar wall, but held there in this case by searchlight beams. GOTCHA! cried the headline.

The implication seemed to be that the Carpenter had been captured. This may have been intentional — before they got to the newsstand, many New Yorkers would already have learned from radio or television that the city’s most wanted criminal had been at least tentatively identified. They’d be quicker to buy a paper if it appeared to promise a further development in the story.

The text explained that the Carpenter had been nailed, or gotten, only to the extent that authorities now knew who he was. A variety of callers (our readers, the Post labeled them, staking a claim) had agreed that the man pictured in the press and on TV was one William Boyce Harbinger, sixty-two, the recently retired director of research at Lister Durgen Augenblick/Advertising.

Several of the callers were men and women who had worked with Harbinger at LDA. All had lost touch with him since his retirement in late 2000, and none could offer a clue as to what might have sent him off on a murderous rampage. He was described as a quiet man (“It’s always the quiet ones,” readers all over the city murmured), and none of his coworkers reported having had any contact with him outside the office.

Other callers recognized him from the Upper West Side neighborhood where he had lived for decades, and some were neighbors of the Harbingers in the Amsterdam Avenue apartment building. They agreed that he was quiet, almost reclusive, and no one seemed to recall having seen either Harbinger or his wife in some months.

Police cars from all over Manhattan congregated at the intersection of Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam. Cops surrounded the building, blocked off the exits, filled the lobby. The superintendent, summoned from an evening in front of the television set, said that he hadn’t seen Mrs. Harbinger since sometime late the previous year, when she’d been taken from the building on a stretcher. “They didn’t use no siren,” he said, “so maybe it was too late.”

And he hadn’t seen Mr. Harbinger for a long time, either, though he couldn’t say how long. He hadn’t paid his monthly maintenance charges in a long time, but he’d owned the apartment since it went co-op thirty years ago, and paid rent there before then, and the apartment was a very valuable piece of property, owned free and clear, no mortgage, so you knew he’d pay the maintenance sooner or later.

The super had keys to all the apartments, and at one point, concerned that something might have happened to Harbinger, he’d knocked on the door, then let himself in. There was nobody home, and no signs that anything might be amiss. The place was dusty and the air stale, as if no one had lived there recently.