Blood Innocents Read online

  “Still the same old hardtack,” Timothy said.

  “Maybe. Is my whiskey almost ready?”

  “Sure, Abbey will bring it in shortly. We don’t drink Irish whiskey around here, so you should take the bottle with you when you go. It just sits here. Nobody drinks it.”

  “I have a bottle at home,” Reardon said. He did not want his son’s Irish whiskey, or his son’s financial support for retirement, or his son’s way of life.

  Timothy nodded and leaned back in his chair. He seemed as exhausted and impatient with their conversation as Reardon was.

  “How’s your work coming?” Reardon asked dutifully.

  “Fine, fine,” Timothy said. “But sometimes I think our firm should employ some detectives to help us with some of our cases. You know, old-fashioned street cops like yourself who can slice through all the rhetoric and get to the meat of the thing.”

  “The what?”

  “The rhetoric,” Timothy said, “slice through the rhetoric.”

  Reardon nodded.

  “Some of the lawyers on my staff are ineffective at investigation and research. Everything has to be laid out for them.”

  Reardon nodded.

  “They aren’t self-motivated. They have to be told everything. No initiative.”

  Reardon nodded. “Maybe so,” he said.

  That night Reardon had the first dream he could remember in many years. He was sitting on a beach in the fog, smoking a cigarette, when a woman’s body floated quietly up on shore. She lay face down at his feet, the top of her head resting easily on the tip of his shoe. Her hair was long and red and she was wearing a flowered dress. A tide gently swept a single strand of pearls from under her neck and then drew it back again.

  In the dream Reardon was not at all shocked or frightened by the body. It had seemed to come on shore as naturally as a wave, and he stared at it without emotion, as if it were no more than a brightly colored shell. His eyes moved calmly over her dress. He noted the flowers in the design, small red rose buds alternating in diagonal lines with rows of pink dogwood petals. He remembered that he had seen this same dress in a shop window at the corner of 60th Street and Second Avenue almost twenty-five years before and had almost bought it for his wife’s birthday. He wondered how many such dresses had been made and in how many shops they had been sold. He bent over and started to look for a label, but in so doing he touched the woman’s bright-red hair, and a blade of terror pierced his loins and drove upward into his brain. Instantly he tried to run, but the hair transformed itself into a claw and seized his hand and began dragging him into the water. Frantically he tried to pull free, but the claw gripped his hand like a steel vise, and by the time his first scream broke through the fog he was waist-deep in the sea. His eyes ravaged the shore for someone to rescue him, looking for help, overturning garbage cans and stripping wharves. They burned off the surrounding fog and split open the dunes and overturned the cottages behind them, but still there was no one to save him. His last scream was stifled by the salt water flooding his mouth as he went down.

  Reardon woke, gasping for breath, his hand groping in the darkness, at last finding the light switch near his bed. For a while he sat up in bed and allowed his eyes to roam about the room, rooting his mind once again in the familiar, comfortable objects around him. But he could not find comfort in them. He felt almost like an intruder in his own room, as if the old brown suit that hung in his closet had been molded to the body of some other man more composed than himself. He rested his head in his cupped hands and waited for dawn.

  4

  TUESDAY

  The next morning Reardon did not go directly to the precinct headquarters. Instead, he walked to the Children’s Zoo. For a while he sat on a bench opposite the cage of the fallow deer. The bodies had been taken away, and the cages had been meticulously washed of all signs of the violence that had taken place before dawn on Monday morning.

  He gazed around the park, trying to determine in which direction the killer might have fled. Then he looked beyond the bars to the chalk-drawn positions where the bodies had been found. The back of the cage was a solid stone wall almost fifteen feet high. Without a ladder or a rope no one could have climbed over it. But in front of the cage two sidewalks led in different directions. The one to the right turned into a winding trail that eventually led all the way to the opposite side of the park. The other led directly to a flight of stairs which ascended to Fifth Avenue. The killer would have taken the route through the park, Reardon thought. He shrugged. It was a mundane assumption. Bloodied as he must have been, of course the killer would not have lurched up onto Fifth Avenue, even between three and three-thirty in the morning.

  “Morning, John,” Mathesson said. He stood towering over Reardon, a breeze gently flapping the collar of his coat. He brought his large hands out of his coat pockets and pressed his hat more firmly down on his head.

  Reardon had not seen him approach. “Hello, Jack,” he said.

  “Trying to think like a freako this morning?”

  “No,” Reardon said. “I’m trying to think like an inexperienced murderer.”

  “So what did you come up with?”

  Reardon smiled at the absurdity of what he had come up with. “That the killer probably took the trail through the park rather than the stairs to Fifth Avenue.”

  Mathesson laughed. “That ought to get you a citation,” he said. “How are you this morning, John?”

  Reardon knew Mathesson was still bothered by his response to the deer on Monday morning. “I’m fine.”

  “Get a good night’s sleep?”

  “I guess,” Reardon said. He looked at the cage again. “Did you check with the precinct this morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Well, the lab is finished with the autopsy on the deer. There were fifty-seven wounds on one of them and just that one on the other.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, they’re bringing out another crew to look for the weapon. I guess the first crew just did a quick search. Anyway, the first group didn’t come up with anything, so they’re sending out another one.”

  “Since when do they send out two separate crews to search for a weapon?” Reardon asked.

  Mathesson smiled. “Since Wallace Van Allen got his deer sliced up, that’s since when.” He glanced resentfully at the great houses and luxury hotels that towered over the park. “Don’t this goddamn hubbub about a couple of animals seem a little much to you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Two deer!” Mathesson said. “Can you believe that? Can you believe the amount of trouble and expense the department’s going to when it’s not even a murder case yet?”

  Reardon said nothing.

  “Two lousy deer. And you’d think it was the only crime in the city.” He shrugged and changed the subject. “What’s your plan for today?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Reardon said.

  “That ought to please Piccolini.”

  “What would you suggest then?”

  Mathesson placed his hands in his overcoat pockets and looked helplessly at Reardon.

  “Crews are covering the area looking for witnesses, right?” Reardon asked.

  “Right.”

  “And they haven’t come up with any, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And crews are looking for the weapon, right? And they haven’t found it yet, right?”

  “Yeah,” Mathesson said.

  “And there must be crews keeping it out of the papers for a while, right?”

  Mathesson smiled and said, “Right.”

  “Okay, that’s it. No witnesses, no weapon and no publicity.”

  “How about the wounds?” Mathesson asked. “Could they mean anything?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fifty-seven wounds on one body and just one on the other?” Reardon said. “You’re grabbing for straws, and
that’s always a mistake.”

  “Yeah,” Mathesson said. He sat down next to Reardon. “Two lousy deer.” He leaned back, arms stretched casually along the backrest of the bench, and stared up through the trees. “You know, old Wallace himself could have been a pretty good witness if he had some binoculars.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mathesson pointed to a line of trees at the top of a twenty-five-story apartment house overlooking Fifth Avenue. “See those trees, the ones on top of that building?”

  “Yeah,” Reardon answered.

  “That’s the Van Allen penthouse.”

  Reardon stared for a moment at the building. He could tell that the wind was rustling through the trees that grew incongruously and imperiously hundreds of feet above Fifth Avenue.

  When Reardon returned to the precinct house later that morning, he reviewed the arrest sheet for the previous day. For the last twenty-four hours people had been molesting each other in the accustomed fashion. They had been stealing from and killing each other, raping and falsely accusing each other, and running out on debts. Someone named Bill Rob-bins had attacked his mother with a ballpoint pen in a restaurant on 79th Street. Two teenagers named Thompson and Berger had drunkenly run down a pedestrian on Second Avenue. A homosexual had propositioned a plainclothes officer in the washroom of Grand Central Station. Two construction workers had wrecked a bar on First Avenue. At another bar a few blocks away an off-duty policeman had beaten his wife to a pulp in full view of twenty-seven people. Some of them had still been cheering him on when patrolmen arrived and arrested everyone, spectators included, for disorderly conduct.

  Reardon wearily ran his fingers through his hair and continued reading the arrest sheet, his eyes reviewing the crimes, roaming up and down the streets and avenues where they were committed, through the roster of whores, pimps, muggers, purse snatchers and drunks, through the embittered marriages, the turncoat friends, amateur arsonists, and everywhere through hopelessly flailing rage. But he did not stop. He was looking for something, and about two-thirds down the third page he found it. The first thing he noticed was the place the arrest had been made: the steps leading up to the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Central Park Zoo on 64th Street. Quickly, he ran his finger across the page for the time of the arrest: Monday … 3:35 A.M. There was little other information available on the report. Someone named Winthrop Lewis Daniels had been arrested for possession of cocaine.

  Reardon looked up from his desk. “Mathesson,” he called. Me saw Mathesson turn away from the water cooler in the hall and approach his desk.

  “I got something here,” Reardon said.

  Mathesson was smiling. “Find some more blood?”

  Reardon handed him the arrest sheet. “About a third of the way up from the bottom. That cocaine bust. Take a look at that.”

  “Winthrop Lewis Daniels.” Mathesson said. He looked at Reardon. “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know, but look at where that bust was made. Look at when it was made.”

  Mathesson’s eyes resumed to the sheet, widened in recognition. “Well, I’ll be goddamned. That puts that hophead close to the deer, don’t it. Shit, he couldn’t have been more than two or three blocks away.”

  “That’s right.”

  Mathesson smiled. “Now wouldn’t that be a lucky break.”

  “It says Langhof made that bust,” Reardon said. “Is he around the precinct house?”

  “He’s upstairs.”

  “Tell him I want to talk to him.”

  When Mathesson had gone Reardon looked at the arrest sheet again. He took a map of Central Park from one of his desk drawers and unfolded it on his desk. The map confirmed what he already knew: that Daniels had been arrested two blocks away from the cages of the fallow deer maybe five minutes or so after they had been killed.

  He heard steps coming down the stairway at the rear of the precinct house and turned to see Mathesson and Langhof approaching his desk. Langhof was dressed in a neatly pressed uniform, his cap blocked squarely on his head, with the badge shining brightly from his chest like a small golden flame.

  “Mathesson here says you want to talk to me,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Reardon said. “I want to talk to you about that cocaine bust you made yesterday.”

  “What about it?”

  “Where did you pick Daniels up?”

  Langhof looked at Reardon suspiciously. “Right on Fifth Avenue. Why?”

  Reardon reversed the map on his desk so that Langhof could read it. “Where on Fifth Avenue?”

  Langhof placed his finger directly on the steps at 64th Street. “Right there.”

  “On the steps?”

  “Yeah. Right on the steps.”

  “The arrest sheet said you busted him at 3:35 A.M. on Monday morning. Is that right?”

  Langhof looked at Reardon. “That’s exactly right. I’m always real careful about the time. I always get that right. A lot depends on that.”

  “What was Daniels doing?” Mathesson asked.

  “He was standing on top of the stairs. He was kind of leaning on that stone pillar at the top.”

  “Just leaning?”

  “No, he wasn’t just leaning!” snapped Langhof. “He was snorting coke, the stupid little fuck.”

  “On the street?”

  “Right there on Fifth Avenue,” Langhof said. “We cruised right up to him in the patrol car. I just kind of looked out the window, just glancing out, you know, not really looking for anything, and there he was. Snorting right on the fucking street.” He shook his head in amazement. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought maybe this was some kind of joke, a come-on, you know, some kind of April fool type thing to make us look stupid. I tapped my partner and pointed to this guy. He says, ‘Do you think that’s for real?’ I couldn’t believe that a guy would just stand around on the street and snort coke. Not even at three or four in the morning.”

  Mathesson smiled. “So what did he say, your partner?”

  “He said we’d better find out.”

  Mathesson seemed delighted with the story. “Then what happened?”

  “We both got out of the car. We just strolled over to this guy — what’s his name? — Daniels. We just strolled over to him.”

  “He didn’t try to get away?”

  “Get away?” Langhof laughed. “He didn’t even know we were around till we were right under his goddamn nose. He was too busy with that fucking coke. He was really into it, you know.” Langhof grinned. “Dumb bastard. No. Not dumb. He just didn’t give a shit. We asked him what he was doing, and he just looked at us. You know, like we were garbage, like what the hell was it our business what he was doing.” He looked at Reardon. “I never seen such a thing in my life. I mean there this little prick was, snorting coke like a bastard, and he just looks at us like we come from Mars or something, like we was spoiling his good time, you know?”

  Reardon nodded.

  “Then what happened?” Mathesson asked.

  “Then my partner says, ‘What you got there, buddy?’ and he still didn’t say nothing. He just stared at us. So I grabbed the bag. The coke was in a little cellophane pouch. So I grabbed it. I took a sniff. Coke. So we busted his little ass.”

  “You took him to the precinct house?” Reardon asked.

  “Yeah, we shoved him in the patrol car, told him his rights and all that shit, and took him right to the precinct house. And we didn’t touch that little prick either,” Langhof blurted suddenly, angrily. “So if this little third degree we’re having is about police brutality, you can forget it.”

  “What makes you think this has anything to do with something like that?” Reardon asked.

  “Well, that’s the way it goes, ain’t it?” Langhof said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, the minute we got that little fucker to the precinct house he says he wants to call his old man. So we let him. That’s his right, right? So we let him. And Jesus Christ, there was three goddamn l
awyers down here before we could get the arrest report written out. He was on the streets again in no time.”

  “You boys better watch out who you fuck with on the east side of Central Park,” Mathesson kidded. “You’ll be the ones that end up getting your asses busted.”

  “Well, it was a solid bust,” Langhof said bitterly, “a solid goddamn bust, whether it sticks or not. No matter what you guys report.”

  “We’re not trying to break your bust,” Reardon said.

  “You’re not?”

  “No, we’re not.”

  Langhof seemed to relax. “Hell, I figured the department was embarrassed by it, or something, afraid of all those lawyers or something like that.”

  “No,” Mathesson said, “we’re checking into something else. We don’t give a shit about this bust.”

  “Did you notice anything strange about Daniels?” Reardon asked.

  “No.” Langhof scratched his head, subdued now. “No, nothing that I can think of except the way he just didn’t seem to care about us, about being busted.”

  “Did you notice if he looked out of breath, tired, anything like that?” Reardon asked.

  “No.”

  “How about blood?” Mathesson asked. “Did you notice any blood on him?”

  “Blood?”

  “Yeah, blood.”

  “No, we didn’t see no blood. This guy was very straight-looking. Well dressed. He could have walked right out of a TV commercial. He was no slob.” Langhof stared at Reardon curiously. “What is it with this guy anyway?”

  “Reardon thought he might have had something to do with the deer killing,” Mathesson said.

  “The deer were killed between three and three-thirty the same morning you made the bust,” Reardon said. “Daniels could have been involved in it and still be on Fifth Avenue by the time you busted him. Or he could have seen something. Maybe he came through the park, you know? He might have passed the deer cages just about the time they were being killed.”

  Langhof shook his head. “Well, he didn’t look like he could have killed no deer. He didn’t have no blood on him or look tired or anything like that. He was too cool, man. That’s what we noticed the most. And he didn’t have no blood on him.”