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Those of us who have lived in the same place our entire lives have maps in our heads: the grade school map, the high school map, the first job map. The little dots are layered one on top of the other as if on clear plastic, each new phase superimposed over the last one. I have always lived in New York City, and I have all those maps, but I have another one, too: my murder map.

I was a police reporter at a newspaper called New York Newsday, which closed on July 16, 1995. This was among the most violent periods in the city’s history. In 1992, 1,995 people were killed in New York; last year, by comparison, the number was 540 — still a busy time for the police and the police reporters, the assistant district attorneys and coroners, of course, and still horrible for the families, but nothing like a decade ago.

I worked in a tiny office at 1 Police Plaza and wrote about roughly six hundred homicides. I covered some big stories — the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the firebombing of a downtown Number 4 train — but the vast majority of killings I described merited only a few paragraphs, the details given by the police over the telephone.

But some crimes fell in the middle, and they linger in my mind. This is because my daily travels take me by the places where they occurred — a drycleaner, a diner, a building in Chinatown, a quiet block in the West Village.

We know that police reporters don’t see a lot of gory stuff, that they get there after everything is cleaned up or at least roped off with yellow tape; I usually did.

But not always.

The Park Plaza Diner

To get to my apartment in Brooklyn by car, you take the first exit off the Brooklyn Bridge onto Cadman Plaza South or onto Henry Street. The first route passes the Park Plaza Diner, deep with booths and mirrors and always lit up. As I go by, I often think of Anthony Palumbo and Kathleen D’Angelo.

They were engaged when I got to know them. He was a clerk at the city Board of Elections; she was an aerobics instructor on Long Island. He had recently been promoted, and thought it augured great things, so in August he took her out for a big night to celebrate — a rented limousine; dinner, and champagne; a stop at city hall, the engine idling, so he could show her where he planned one day to work.

But a hint of desperation colored this relationship. He was forty-four, she was forty. Friends would later say that he was abusive, and that they doubted the wedding would ever take place.

When the limousine pulled up outside the diner at 4 a.m., the two seemed to be dozing in the backseat. The chauffeur went to wake them; Palumbo came groggily to life, but neither the driver nor Palumbo could wake D’Angelo. Someone called the police. Soon radio cars with flashing lights crowded Cadman Plaza South and detectives were interviewing the Board of Elections clerk. Kathleen D’Angelo was dead.

Palumbo was held for twelve hours at the 84th Precinct stationhouse near an entrance ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Then they let him go. For a week, the story simmered.

Then the Daily News reported that the medical examiner had ruled the death a homicide — not a criminal charge, but a medical determination that another person had caused D’Angelo’s death (she had been strangled). I responded to the scoop by using a reporting trick known only to veteran journalists: I opened the phone book. Anthony Palumbo was listed in Queens. I called the number. He answered.

“I had nothing to do with it,” he said. He started sobbing. He went on and on. “This woman was my life. This woman was the best woman you would ever want to meet. This is driving me crazy. We opened the back door. She wasn’t breathing. We gave her resuscitation. We tried to put air in her mouth. We tried to wake her up.”

Then he had to go, someone was at the door.

Detectives.

Anthony Palumbo pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree on January 17, 1997, and was sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison.

Best French Cleaners

When I go down Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, I pass the Best Cleaners. This used to be Best French Cleaners, and as I pass I think of the warm spring day in 1994 that I spent here standing behind a police line, the day that Rick Varela shot and killed Sarah Auerbach.

She was a vice president at Salomon Brothers’ World Trade Center financial division; he was a management consultant for Ernst & Young. Another obsessive relationship — they’d gone out for seven months, even taken a trip together to Europe, but she’d broken it off the year before.

Varela couldn’t accept it. He called Auerbach constantly, he showed up outside her apartment. Then, as she was dropping off two silk blouses at the tiny cleaners, he came in wearing a lady’s wig and, with a black Walther semiautomatic handgun, shot her in the ear, chin, neck, chest, hip, and back.

Varela went right back out the door, walking a few blocks to his rental car. He drove it to an Avis outlet in Manhattan and paid with his corporate credit card, then returned to his eleventh-floor apartment on West Fifty-first Street. With the pistol in his pocket, he took the subway to Greenwich Village. He watched The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, he had drinks at a Greenwich Village bar, he called his daughter and ex-wife in Illinois. Then he went back to Brooklyn Heights.

There on the promenade with its spectacular views of downtown Manhattan, the glass facades across the river about to glow with the coming day, he shot himself in the head. His body was discovered just feet from the spot where I used to take my three-year-old son to watch the trucks pounding by on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

The Shiny Shoes

In a tiny storefront social club at 57 Rapelye Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on a frozen November night in 1992, five people were shot, two fatally: Salvatore Sparacino, a longshoreman, who died at Long Island College Hospital, and John Marella, the club’s cook, who was declared dead at the scene. Sparacino’s son, John, was critically wounded but lived.

I stood behind the police tape in the chill with the other reporters. As detectives and police photographers came and went, an officer left the door of the club open for a moment, and we got a glimpse of Marella’s feet spread apart in heavy black shoes pointed at the ceiling. Here was murder at its most cinematic: the bloodiness and gore and bullet wounds were hidden by the door, we saw only enough to know that a man lay there who was very dead.

The plot unfolded backward. Days before, an armed gang had robbed $100,000 from the Sealand shipping terminal in Newark. Investigators looked at a variety of motives for the Red Hook shooting, including a link to the Sealand terminal robbery or a neighborhood dispute.

Someone was very angry and stayed that way. John Sparacino was stabbed on New Year’s Eve 1992, but again survived. He was shot a second time — hit on the forearm — on May 11, 1994, while standing on the corner of Columbia and Rapelye Streets, a few doors down from the club. Finally, that August, his body was found in a burning car in Staten Island with a bullet in the head.

It was a real mess, and no arrests were ever made. But what I remember most were those black shoes, toes pointing straight up, so bright that they must have been shined with care earlier that day, as though the cook had planned to attend a christening or a wedding — or a funeral.

The Mayor of Horatio Street

Blocks have mayors. For forty years, until 1992, the mayor of Horatio Street in the West Village was a woman who lived alone named Lucille Chasin. I had dinner nearby not too long ago and thought of her.

This is a beautiful street: cobblestones, brick row houses, the Hudson River a silver square just down the block. Chasin was a fixture, planting trees, watching children, gossiping. “If you wanted the world to know something, you could telephone, telegraph, or tell Lucille,” one woman told me. Chasin was always out and around, she had strong opinions, she attracted attention to herself, and that’s what got her killed.

The rain came down in cataracts the night Chasin had her throat slashed in her apartment. The man suspected of the crime, Gary Treahy, wanted money and had decided to rob the first person who popped into his mind, the woman he saw every day, the one with strong opinions. But he died of natural causes before he was charged — the police closed the case as something called “exceptional clearance.” No trial. No verdict. No sentence.

Relationships with neighbors are funny things. They aren’t your relatives or friends, but you share a common destiny, as if your block is a ship and everyone on it a passenger. When they are murdered, who remembers them?

The night I thought of Lucille Chasin I wondered if anyone who lives on Horatio Street today knew her, or if all that gossip, all that talking, and all those opinions had simply washed away in the rain.

Forever Peace Travel Agency

My wife likes the rice cakes at the Excellent Dumpling House on Lafayette Street, and so we sometimes make the quick trip into Chinatown. In the glare of the fluorescent lights I appear to be engaged, talking, taking it all in, but at least once a visit my thoughts are down the block, on the third floor of a nondescript office building at 227 Canal Street, in what used to be the Wing On Travel Agency.

On a June night in 1994, John Miller, then the deputy commissioner for public information, called down to the pressroom at 1 Police Plaza and said that two people had been killed in Chinatown. Did anyone want to take a ride? In minutes we were racing through Chatham Square against the traffic, going lights and sirens, as the police like to say.

Radio cars crowded Canal Street, parked at odd angles. The deputy commissioner told me to put my press identification tag away. As we climbed the stairs, a burly captain in a white shirt passed us and said, “This is an interesting one, commissioner. Go have a look.”

The third floor: uniforms and suits crowded around, kneeling men with doctors’ bags brushed white dust onto the door handles and the locks. Miller told me not to touch anything. We pushed our way into the travel agency — the name translates as “Forever Peace” — and then we saw them lying there, Bobby Chan and Lai Wah Chan.

Blood was everywhere, an unbelievable amount of blood. The backs of their heads were gone, just yawning crevices, purple-black. They had been gagged so tightly that the skin on their faces was stretched thin and their lips were pulled back, like in those old photographs of test pilots experiencing g forces. Their neck muscles were taut. Their faces screamed unspeakable fear.

The woman’s skirt was hitched up. A detective next to me was saying that whoever did this probably tied them up, then did stuff to her while Bobby Chan, her fiance, watched. Then they were both shot.

I was barely listening. Up through my stomach and chest and into my throat came the almost overpowering sensation that I was going to throw up; it took every cell in my body to keep it down. That’s all I could concentrate on until we went back down the stairs. I held the railing the whole way.

No half-opened door to hide the dead body. No silver square of Hudson River at the foot of the block. No glittering Manhattan skyscrapers at dawn. Just an unbelievable amount of blood.

On Canal Street I asked Miller if he had any idea what had happened up there. “Who the hell knows; it’s Chinatown” — he’d probably been waiting his whole life to say that. (But in fact, no one was ever arrested.)

He offered me a ride but I said I’d rather walk. The streets were crowded, orange with sunset and warm with the coming summer. I went back to my computer and wrote my story.

It was cut to four paragraphs and played on page twenty-six.

To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.

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