Blood Innocents Page 14

  18

  TUESDAY

  Toward dawn the walls of Reardon’s apartment seemed to be closing in on him. He had smoked three packs of cigarettes since eight o’clock, and the room floated before him in a haze of smoke. He crushed out the last cigarette of the third pack and walked down to the street.

  Outside the early-morning delivery trucks lined the streets and avenues. The veins of the city were receiving their daily injections of food and drink and produce. The delivery men hustled from their trucks to the stores and back to the trucks again. It seemed to Reardon that they purposely made as much noise as possible, banging their carts on the curb or letting their packages drop from shoulder height to the sidewalk.

  At 86th Street he took the Lexington Avenue express uptown toward the Bronx, something he often did when he felt the need for escape. Soon the train came out of the subway tunnel’s grimy darkness, and he was in open air again. From the tracks he could see the streets below him, but the sounds of the city were distant, less threatening, muffled by the whirr of the train. From the el the world seemed small and salvageable. The complexities of the city, its sprawling, unmanageable life, were reduced to a miniature version of itself. All its problems, and all of his, appeared less colossal from the vantage point of the train.

  For years it had been Reardon’s final escape. It took him above everything, above the bickerings of family life, the rigors of work, the austerities of religion. It was the place where he regained himself, calmed himself, somehow took on the armor of endurance.

  Between the Burnside Avenue and 183rd Street stations the train suddenly stopped. After a few moments the conductor announced over the public address system that there was a train out of service up ahead and that there would be a short delay. Reardon took the delay as a gift, a moment simply to rest, suspended between the city and the sky.

  His eyes patrolled the windows that faced him on the other side of the tracks, probably only fifty feet away. The building was old and weather-beaten, but the apartment windows were large and full. Curtains or Venetian blinds covered most of them, so Reardon’s eyes fastened onto the one window open to his view. He could see a man pacing in a circle around a small boy. The man was dressed in work clothes and was very animated, throwing his arms in the air as he circled the child. Then he hit him, hard, with his open hand, and the child fell back into a chair.

  Reardon stood up, astonished, and bolted across the center aisle to the subway window.

  The man was shouting, but Reardon could not hear what he was saying. The man picked up a large vase and threw it across the room. The child darted behind the chair and squatted, and Reardon could see that he was covering his head with his tiny arms. Instantly the man wrenched the child from behind the chair and lifted him into the air above his head.

  Reardon frantically tried to get the subway window open, but the latches were corroded shut.

  The man threw the boy into the back of the chair, toppling it so that it spilled the child onto the floor.

  Reardon began hitting the window with his fists again and again. “Stop it! Stop it!” he shouted. The other passengers in the train turned to look at him, and then at the scene in the apartment. But their attention returned to him, as if he were the greater threat.

  The man picked the boy up again and slapped him across the room. Then he caught him by the collar and threw him across the legs of the toppled chair. The boy jumped to his feet and ran to a corner of the room, out of Reardon’s sight. The man began to walk slowly toward the corner.

  Reardon’s knuckles were stiff and reddened; he stopped hitting the glass and stood trembling by the window.

  The train jerked forward. Reardon’s eyes burned into the apartment window, but he could see nothing except the legs of the overturned chair, the jagged glass dotting the floor and the blank wall that stood behind it all, featureless and resolute, like a pitiless, refusing hand.

  When the train reached 183rd Street, Reardon got off and called the local precinct to report what he had seen. He did not expect much action to be taken. He could not be that specific as to the location of the building, and he was unable to give a close, detailed description of either the man or the child.

  “Thank you, Detective Reardon,” the desk sergeant at the precinct house said. “We’ll look into it.”

  “I hope so,” Reardon replied, but he knew that the incident would not get a high priority. He had not even been asked to accompany a patrol car to find the building where he had seen the child beaten.

  He took the same track back to Manhattan, but it passed the window so fast that he could not see anything in the room. The light was still on; that was all that he could tell.

  He got off the train at 86th Street and walked to his apartment. The city was coming to life. Some people, Reardon knew, would not be around to see it. Some would be stuffed in car trunks. Others would be hanging in closets. Still others would be floating in bathtubs filled with blood and torn flesh. Mathesson had once referred to such a scene as “Manhattan clam chowder.”

  Reardon wondered about the boy he had seen through the window. He thought of the tiny arms folded around the head. Perhaps, Reardon thought, that was the only appropriate posture for this world. In Catholicism, Reardon knew, there were two unforgivable sins: one of them was despair. Standing on the sidewalk amid the early-morning jostling of pedestrians, his shoulders hunched and combative, his face locked in an animal grimace, Reardon suspected that he might be edging toward the unforgivable.

  19

  When Reardon got to the precinct house later that morning, Mathesson met him at his desk. He stood hesitantly for a moment, as if waiting for the bustle of the precinct house to die down. Then he offered Reardon a slight smile.

  “You’re back on the case,” he said.

  “What?”

  Mathesson’s eyes roamed over Reardon’s face and body. “Jesus, you look busted,” he said.

  “What about the case?”

  “You’re back on it.”

  “Why?”

  Mathesson stepped aside to allow Reardon to get to the chair behind his desk.

  “Well, looks like Piccolini overstepped his authority a little, the prick. He got his ass chewed out. Downtown told that little dago they’d decide when you were off the case.” Mathesson smirked. “That little prick is just a paper pusher, and they know that downtown. He’s just a paper pusher; he don’t break cases. He don’t do anything.” Mathesson grinned. “Well, he got the shit kicked out of him this time.”

  “What about Petrakis?” Reardon asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the clink.”

  “He was arrested?”

  “Damn right,” Mathesson said. “I arrested him, myself, but it’s gonna go out as a real team effort.”

  “Go out?”

  “Haven’t you read the paper this morning?”

  “No,” Reardon said.

  Mathesson took a Daily News from under his arm and gave it to Reardon.

  The whole story was there. The killing of the fallow deer, the investigation, and the arrest of the alleged perpetrator: Andros Petrakis. On the front page, directly under the headline, “Arrest in Deerslaying Case,” there were large full-scale photographs of Wallace, Melinda and Dwight Van Allen. On the inside there was a photo spread of the fallow deer cage, the entrance to the Children’s Zoo and the apartment building in which the Van Allens lived. There was also a picture of Reardon himself. In small type, under Reardon’s photograph, the copy read: “Detective John Reardon headed investigation which led to arrest.” There was a picture of the evening press conference at which the Police Commissioner had announced the breaking of the case. And in the right-hand corner there was a small photograph of Andros Petrakis.

  “Did you meet the Van Allen kids?” Mathesson asked.

  “One of them.”

  “Twins,” Mathesson said.

  “Yes, I know,” Reardon said i
ndifferently. He stared at the pictures of the Van Allen family.

  “That Melinda’s not a bad-looking girl,” Mathesson said.

  Reardon remembered the rather tall, slightly overweight, generally unattractive young woman who had so annoyed and befuddled him a week before. “Not bad,” he said. He looked at Mathesson. “She has a kind face.”

  Reardon’s first act after being reinstated on the case was to visit Petrakis at the Tombs, even though he dreaded seeing him there. If the precinct house had reduced Petrakis to a kind of gelatinous inactivity, he could only imagine what the grinding oppressiveness of the Tombs would do to him. It had been well named, Reardon thought, this prison of the City of New York; it was a place for the dead.

  Petrakis was led out by a guard and seated at a table opposite Reardon. He had not changed much, Reardon saw instantly. The face retained its motionless, stony aspect, the eyes staring rigidly ahead but seeming to comprehend nothing beyond them — not movement or person or meaning.

  “Have you contacted your family?” Reardon asked.

  “No,” Petrakis said dully. He did not seem to see Reardon at all, but only to look through him, as if he were a ghost.

  “Why not? Won’t they worry about you, about where you are?”

  “I tell them I not come back,” Petrakis said in the same granite monotone of the precinct house.

  “When?”

  “Before I come to police.”

  All around them there was sound and movement. Prisoners and their visitors were filing in and out amid a humming welter of hellos and good-byes, but Petrakis did not seem to be aware of any of it. It was as if he had closed himself up in a box of his own making and had sealed all its cracks from light and sound.

  “Mr. Petrakis, did you kill those deer in the Children’s Zoo?”

  “I will die for it,” Petrakis said.

  “Killing animals is not a capital offense in New York State,” Reardon said, “or any place else I know of. You can’t be executed for that.”

  “Then something else,” Petrakis said.

  Instantly Reardon thought of the Village murders. “Have you ever heard the names Karen Ortovsky or Lee McDonald?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you ever go to Greenwich Village?”

  “No.”

  Reardon could never remember having felt such exasperation. There was life all around them, even in the intolerable hurt and confinement of the Tombs. But Petrakis’ heart seemed to beat beneath a breast of stone.

  “Have you done anything that is punishable by death in this state?” Reardon asked.

  Petrakis stared straight ahead. “I do not obey my mother.”

  “Besides that.”

  “That is enough.”

  “But besides that,” Reardon insisted.

  “No.”

  Reardon stood up. “I think you should call your family and let them know where you are. If you want, I will call them for you.”

  “They know where I am,” Petrakis said.

  “They know where you are?”

  “Dead,” Petrakis said.

  Reardon took one of his cards and placed it carefully on the table in front of Petrakis. “Call me if you need anything, or if anything comes to you that can shed some light on this case.”

  Petrakis said nothing.

  “Will you call me?” Reardon asked.

  “I am dead,” Petrakis said.

  “Not yet, Mr. Petrakis,” Reardon said, “not yet.”

  When he reached the door Reardon turned to watch Petrakis disappear behind the door that led to the cells. He glanced at the table where he and Petrakis had talked. His card rested face up on the table like a corpse on a mortuary slab.

  Driving back to the precinct house, Reardon felt the case of the fallow deer plummeting toward him like a bird of prey. He believed Petrakis could be convicted for the killing of the deer on the evidence already assembled. He knew how it would go in the courtroom. Witnesses could place Petrakis at the deer cage with an ax in his hand only moments before they were killed. Bryant would testify that Petrakis was highly agitated, even furious, when he had met him in the coffee shop the morning the fallow deer were killed. On the witness stand Daniels would paint a sinister portrait of Petrakis, one which would doubtless chill the nerves of the jury; the district attorney’s office might even give Daniels a break on the cocaine bust if his testimony was convincing enough. The ax itself would be displayed before the jury, complete with bloodstains. It would be pointed out that Petrakis’ fingerprints were all over it. Worst of all, Reardon knew, Petrakis would probably confess. He had seen far stronger suspects crumble under grueling interrogation. And Petrakis already seemed beyond caring whether he was guilty or not.

  But there were still the murders of Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky. So far the only thing that could connect Petrakis with their deaths was Mathesson’s revenge theory. Reardon knew that still left a lot to be explained. Why were the deer and the women killed in exactly the same way with fifty-seven blows on one body and only one on the other? And what did the roman numeral “two” and “dos” mean?

  Reardon was certain that the deer and the women had been killed by the same person. The deer investigation seemed at a dead end. But the case of McDonald and Ortovsky still had one line of investigation open: Jamie O’Rourke.

  Reardon stopped for a traffic light and glanced through his notebook for O’Rourke’s address. When he had found it he turned his car around and headed toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Time was what he did not have much of, and he felt its movement like an enormous wave thundering toward shore.

  Jamie O’Rourke lived in a Brooklyn row house on a street of Brooklyn row houses, drab, featureless, decaying like a dead body in a warm room. Reardon had seen these neighborhoods before, always feeling that somehow an immense and secret crime had been committed against the residents. They lived like citizens of a besieged city, in constant dread of invasion by any people different from themselves — non-Catholics, nonwhites, both, anything.

  He climbed the steps to the door of O’Rourke’s house and rang the bell. He heard slight movements within the house but no one came to the door. He rang again.

  This time the door opened. “If you’re a Jehovah’s Witness selling God, I ain’t buying none,” said a man dressed in dark-blue pants and a T-shirt, a bathroom towel wrapped loosely around his neck.

  Reardon showed his gold shield. “My name is Reardon,” he said.

  “What do you want?” the man asked harshly. He swabbed the back of his neck with the towel and looked suspiciously at Reardon.

  “Are you Jamie O’Rourke?” Reardon asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “I understand you were married to Patty McDonald.”

  The man pulled the towel from around his neck and wiped his hands. “You think I killed her?”

  “I’m trying to find out who did,” Reardon said.

  “I don’t know nothing about her,” O’Rourke said sharply. “She run out on me a long time ago. I ain’t seen her.”

  “You were at her funeral.”

  O’Rourke looked at Reardon warily. “Well, I got a right to go to her funeral, don’t I? She was my wife.”

  “I’m not here to cause you trouble,” Reardon said.

  “I’m not afraid of trouble.”

  “Well, maybe you wouldn’t mind talking to me about her then.”

  O’Rourke wiped his face with the towel. “I was just shaving,” he said. “I got to go to work tonight.”

  “It won’t take long.”

  O’Rourke studied Reardon’s face, came to some conclusion about him, and opened the door wider. “Come on in then.”

  Inside Reardon quietly viewed the disarray around him. The room was furnished with an overstuffed sofa and two chairs, a heavy coffee table and matching end table. The stuffing of the couch was easily visible through gaping rents in the fabric. The coffee table was spotted with water stains and sca
rred as if raked with a fork. Sheets of floral wallpaper barely hung from the walls, and leaks had caused yellowed paint to peel halfway across the ceiling. There were no curtains; the Venetian blinds which afforded some privacy hung askew from dirty windows. The only signs of habitation were old copies of the Daily News piled on chairs and the floor and four or five crushed Schlitz cans.

  “Sit down anywhere,” O’Rourke said. He looked around the room as if disgusted with it himself. “My old man told me I didn’t give a shit for nothing. That was the only truth that old man ever told me.”

  Reardon grabbed a handful of newspapers from a chair and deposited them on a nearby table. “I’ll just sit here,” he said.

  “Suit yourself,” O’Rourke said. He plopped down on the tattered sofa across from Reardon and stared at him silently, waiting.

  Reardon pulled out his notebook and removed a ballpoint from his shirt pocket.

  “You Irish?” O’Rourke asked suddenly.

  Reardon nodded.

  “From Brooklyn?”

  Reardon shook his head. “Bronx. University Avenue around Fordham Road.”

  O’Rourke grinned. “Jesus Christ, you might as well have been born in the Vatican.”

  Reardon smiled. “Father Zeiser Place, actually.”

  O’Rourke smiled widely. “Good God, how come you ain’t a priest?”

  “Everybody else was,” Reardon said.

  “I’d offer you something to eat,” O’Rourke said, “but I don’t keep no food in the house. Brings rats.” He glanced about the room again. “I know what you must think of this place, but just remember, if you think I like it, you’re wrong.”

  “I’ve seen worse.”

  “You’ve probably seen blood all over the walls,” O’Rourke said darkly.

  “Sometimes.”

  O’Rourke took a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose. “I have a cold all winter,” he explained as he returned the handkerchief to his pocket. “I work as a night watchman in this old warehouse on Flatbush Avenue. They got this one little heater for the whole place. So I’m sick all the time.”

  Beneath the worn, lined face Reardon could see that O’Rourke remained a young man, prematurely aging, strained and slowly breaking under the load.