1975 - Night of the Juggler (20 page)

The word “cold” was blazing again in Gus Soltik’s mind. The wind was rising in the tops of the trees, diminishing what he could hear, and this made him feel tense and vulnerable. In spite of her fear and terror, Kate felt a tiny stab of compassion as she saw the lonely agony in his expression. But as she watched him scenting the wind like a frightened animal, she felt a sudden stir of confidence. Perhaps she could manipulate him now. Perhaps she could even make him take her home. She might convince him he hadn’t done anything really bad yet. He had hit the man who tried to help her, but that was all. No, there was another thing, but she had willed herself not to think of it.

“I’ve got an idea,” Kate said, smiling to complement what she hoped was a tone of surprise and enthusiasm in her voice. “We could go to my apartment and listen to records. I’d make sandwiches, and there’s Cokes.”

With growing assurance, she added, “And there’s cold beer, too.”

Gus Soltik turned to look at her, and there was something blurred and smudged in his expression now; it was as if a huge, flat thumb had exerted pressure against a malleable nose and cheekbones. His shadowed eyes, which gave the haunted impression that if he ever saw clearly it might be unbearable, were suddenly alert.

“My father wouldn’t mind, really he wouldn’t. And once you met him you could ask him if you could take me out on a real date. . . .”

Father and shame and punishment. The coldness was a torturing demon in his skull.

“My father is—”

Gus Soltik’s hand moved with blurring speed, flexed powerfully; the collar of Kate’s ski jacket tightened cruelly across her throat, cutting off her words in mid-sentence, and the echo of her single strangled sob faded swiftly in the rising winds. . . .

Chapter 17

The New York police department command post had been established at the head of the Mall in the cruciform esplanade bordering the open-air theater, and the scene now was one of disciplined chaos.

Remote units from the TV networks had flooded the area with their arc lights. Patrolmen Sokolsky and Maurer had been moved to the CP to man portable switchboards. Ambulances with crews at the ready were on the scene.

Detectives Corbell, Karp, and Fee were standing by for orders, while Sergeant Boyle and Detective Tebbet had proceeded north with fifty-odd patrolmen and a van of transistor radios.

From Gypsy Tonnelli’s unit Carmine Garbalotto and August Brohan were also standing by, while Detectives Scott and Taylor had joined the skirmish file of uniformed patrolmen who were advancing north to Seventy-second Street at ten-foot intervals, their powerful torchlights probing into every shadow and gully and every pocket of darkness on their line of march. Present also were a hundred-odd patrolmen in uniform. The sniper teams were in cars with motors turning over softly.

In the northwest corner of the esplanade there was a huge contour map of Central Park so large, in fact, that it was supported on sawhorses placed at six-foot intervals.

Deputy Chief of Detectives Walter Greene stood studying this immense map, which featured all of the park’s terrain and buildings and grottoes. Flanking the deputy chief were Detectives Scott and Taylor. They had all been dubious about Tonnelli’s orders to Boyle.

But Borough Commander South Chief Larkin had overruled them; the chief knew of Luther Boyd, had heard him speak at a police convention in Cincinnati only the year before, and Chief Larkin realized not only that the tactic made sense, but that it stemmed from Luther Boyd rather than Tonnelli.

Rudi Zahn sat in the rear of a squad car with Barbara Boyd. The medics had taped his ribs and applied a bandage to his slashed cheek and had given him an injection to ease the pain temporarily. This sedation, plus his agitated emotional state, had led him into a dark fantasy in which he imagined himself failing again to try to save Ilana.

“You were so brave,” Barbara had told him at least a half dozen times, but he had shaken his head and said in a low, discouraged voice, “I didn’t help her.”

“No one could have done more.”

Paul Wayne of the
Times
had recognized Zahn and was presently on his way to the Plaza Hotel to try to get a story from Crescent Holloway.

Meanwhile, TV cameras were relentlessly probing the expressions and reactions of Borough Commanders Larkin and Slocum, who was an oak of a man, the highest-ranking black in the New York police department, and who held a degree in criminalistics from Stanford University. The commanders were in uniform, their two stars gleaming under the glaring lights and reflectors of the cameras. Reporters held microphones in front of the chiefs and asked them rapid, insistent questions.

“Commander Larkin, can you give us a yes or no on this: Is the girl still alive?”

“We believe that she is.”

“Is that a positive affirmative?”

“Of course it isn’t,” Commander Slocum said. “We’ve got reason to think she’s alive, but we aren’t commenting on those reasons.”

While the questioning went on, Chief Larkin was thinking of that stretch of the park bordered by Seventy-second Street, Transverse Number Three, Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. It was a corridor a dozen street blocks wide and a half mile long, but if they could trap the Juggler in that area, huge as it was, they’d have a chance.

“Commander, if you’ve got a fix on this psycho, why aren’t you using helicopters?”

“At this point, I won’t comment on that,” Chief Larkin said.

“Every year the police budget gets bigger. Isn’t this the time to put the taxpayer’s money to work?”

Chief Slocum was not a political man.

“We’ll spend every goddamn dime of his money if we have to,” he said. “But not till the time is right.”

“You’ll have to excuse us now, gentlemen,” Chip Larkin said, and turned from the mikes and walked through hurrying streams of police personnel to join Deputy Chief Greene at the contour map of Central Park. Chalk marks had been drawn across the map on east-west lines at Seventy-second Street and Transverse Three, which curved from Eighty-fourth Street at Fifth Avenue to Eighty-sixth Street at Central Park West.

Commander Larkin’s mind was like a gridiron with each square flashing its own particular warning lights. The Juggler would be only one of his problems on this particular night. He was presently awaiting reports on the following events: a murder in Greenwich Village; a bank robbery in progress in the financial district; nineteen hostages held by a gunman in an all-night supermarket; a French delegate to the UN and his wife, bound and gagged in their St. Regis suite, a quarter of a million in jewels stolen, the contessa raped; a five-car collision in the Lincoln Tunnel which had backed up traffic for miles on the New Jersey Turnpike in addition to claiming six lives.

There would be, and this was a statistical certitude, more than one hundred stickups and armed robberies throughout Manhattan that night. The police had a profile of the criminals: They were poor, they wore sneakers, could run fast, sixty-two percent of them were black, and most of them used cheap handguns (so-called Saturday Night Specials which frequently exploded upon firing, occasionally killing the would-be robbers as well as their victims).

Deputy Chief Greene glanced toward Chief Larkin and said in his low, growling voice, “The Gypsy just called in. They lost the track of the Juggler.”

“Then dispatch a dozen squads to Fifth Avenue north of Seventy-fourth and a dozen more to strengthen the line from the Seventies to the Eighties on Central Park West. The Juggler may know he’s in a trap. . . .”

Mrs. Schultz was watching the action at the command post on her television set. They didn’t know who he was, but she did. Things were gone from his room. The knife and the rope. She wondered if she had always known, all these years.

It was good they didn’t know who he was. They couldn’t come here with questions.

Sixty-two years ago her father and mother had brought her from Canada to Minnesota without papers. How they had got from Germany to Canada, she never knew. But it was the terror of their lives. No papers. They dreaded signing things. For ration books in the war. For getting gas lines connected. There was always fear they’d ask for papers.

But it wasn’t fair. There were so many of them after him, with speeding police cars and men at switchboards. And the girl. Maybe she was no better than she should be. Why would a girl go into the park after dark? Where was her mother?

In halting English she had been taught by nuns, Mrs. Schultz began to say a Hail Mary for Gus.

At approximately the same time John Ransom sat huddled despondently on a bench in a subway station in the borough of Brooklyn. He had thought it would be so simple and gratifying just to close his eyes and step into triumphant oblivion under the wheels of a hurtling train.

He had planned it with such painstaking care. For one thing, no note.

He had called a friend in Brooklyn to tell him he’d like to stop by for a visit, assuring his wife he’d be home within an hour or so. It would have to be presumed an accident, and all his dreams and the dreams of his wife and daughter would be fulfilled then, paid for by only a split second of pain and the cessation of pain for all eternity. But that thought had raised the specter of his Catholic background. No suicide was welcome in the presence of God.

In his anguish and terror Ransom had stopped a portly middle-aged black man and confessed his torments to him. The black man had been sympathetic, had clucked his tongue, had spoken words of comfort and compassion, but when he realized what Ransom was begging him to do, which was to push him from behind into the path of a speeding train, the big black had reacted at first with astonishment and then with swift, hot anger.

“You think because I’m black that I’d commit a murder just like it was no more than spitting on the sidewalk. You think I’m a dumb nigger without feelings or values. Grab him by the arm and tell him to kill or mug somebody or shoot up a liquor store, and he’ll do it because he’s nothin’ but an animal anyway. Well, you want to die, you jump in front of that train your ownself, you damn honkie bastard.”

The black man strode toward the turnstiles, muttering to himself in tones of outrage and indignation while Ransom slumped in shamed dejection on the wooden bench, tears welling in his pain-haunted eyes and the rank taste of bile rising from his condemned and corroded stomach.

There seemed no strength or purpose in the world, no sanity or kindness now, except the unexpected warmth and compassion that had been tendered him by a complete stranger, the big red-haired cop Sergeant Rusty Boyle.

Chapter 18

On that same night Joe Stegg was working alone in the Loeb boathouse a hundred yards or so north of Seventy-fourth Street. During the working day, from nine A.M. to sunset, Joe Stegg and his staff were often too busy supervising the rental of aluminum and wooden boats to keep their books on an hourly basis, and that was why Joe Stegg was still on the job, totaling the last of the day’s receipts.

All in all, however, he savored his work, even the extra time, because he enjoyed instructing the youngsters who rented boats from the park.

They were a good bunch of kids for the most part. They loved the park and took care of it, and it was the rare boy or girl who would throw candy wrappers or orange peels or soft drink cans into the lake.

Stegg had no children himself, and by now—since he was forty-nine—he had grown used to the idea that he and Madge would have to Darby and Joan it alone in some upstate trailer camp when he retired from the park service.

His thoughts were running to children, he surmised, because there was a kid missing in the park tonight, a little girl. Somebody had got hold of her, and by now cops were swarming all over the place.

It was something he couldn’t understand, that anyone would relish hurting a child. But such devils existed, no doubt of it. And appearances told you nothing. They could be men in business suits with briefcases, construction workers in hard hats, or the character with the duck-tailed haircut who parked cars in basements beneath the big office buildings. Any of them could have a devil inside him where you couldn’t see it.

Sometimes when he read of murders and rapes in the city, he was almost glad he didn’t have kids. How could he stand it if it were his daughter missing out there? Or if his son walked home past leather bars and gay joints and got seduced into that scene of perversion and drugs? He could imagine how Madge would crawl the walls if someone tried to hurt a kid of theirs. When their niece came to visit them from Scranton, Madge didn’t let her out of sight unless she was taking a bath or something.

Joe Stegg put his pencil down and closed the ledger he had been posting figures in and at the same time turned and frowned at the closed and locked door of the boathouse.

Joe Stegg switched off the radio, and when the last rock beat faded into silence, he heard it again, the sound which had alerted him, a child’s voice rising in a thin cry of protest or anger.

Stegg rose swiftly, took a .38 Colt revolver from a drawer, snapped off his desk light, and ran through the darkness to the door of the boathouse. Opening it a cautious inch, he saw nothing but black trees streaked by headlights. But then he heard the girl cry out again, and when he flung the door open, he saw them, traveling north on the path, twenty yards from him, a huge, hulking figure of a man in a brown sweater and a girl he was dragging along by the collar of her red jacket.

“Hold it, damn you!” Joe Stegg shouted at the man. He ran along the pathway, the gun steady in his hand. “Let her go, damn you, or I’ll put a hole in your head.”

Gus Soltik screamed in anger and frustration, his voice raging like some primitive, terrified animal. And with that primal bellow, he hurled Kate Boyd aside as effortlessly as he would a rag doll, and when she struck the ground, stars exploding in her head, Gus Soltik rushed at Stegg, taking a bullet in the upper flesh of his left arm, but before Stegg could fire again, Gus Soltik’s fist had crashed into his face, shattering his nose and cheekbones and slamming him with stunning impact against the wooden planks of the boathouse.