1975 - Night of the Juggler (28 page)

Gus Soltik drove north on the East Drive, traveling at a conservative speed which in no way reflected the thoughts storming at gale force within his tortured head. The interior of the cab was dark, and his face was only a blur behind the windshield, and this, plus the parks department legend on the doors of the truck, gave him safe-conduct past clusters of uniformed patrolmen who stood with red flashlights at hundred-yard intervals along the drive.

He would leave the truck in the parking lot off the drive. Then he could hide in the darkness and make his way to her.

The headlights of oncoming traffic struck at his face like angry lances, and their glaring attacks intensified his rage and his hungers.

Tonnelli had said to Sokolsky, “First, send a homicide detail to the Arsenal. Lanny Gruber is dead. Then alert every cop and detective in this area that there’s a lion, that’s right, Sokolsky, a
lion,
and it’s loose in the park. The chiefs have dispatched three armored jeeps with marksmen and tranquilizer bullets. Don’t anybody try to stop him with a police special. It won’t.”

After Sokolsky had transmitted these messages to all patrolmen and squads in and around the park, he flicked his receiving switch and gestured to Tonnelli.

“Something else is coming in, Lieutenant.” Sokolsky listened for a few seconds, nodded, then glanced up at Tonnelli. “The same guys from the Twenty-second. They’ve been checking around, found a parks department truck missing. Seems Lanny Gruber usually took a swing through the zoo area around midnight. Then he parked the truck on the south side of the Arsenal, you know, after making sure there was nobody loitering—”

Tonnelli cut him off with a chopping gesture of his hand.

“When did they find it missing?”

“Couple of minutes ago, I guess.”

Potentials and timetables and routes began to form patterns into the Gypsy’s intricate perceptions. Not south but north. He wouldn’t drive south toward that barrier of squad cars on Fifty-ninth Street. North then. At least twenty minutes ago, possibly more. And the Juggler’s destination? Boyd had given him an answer to that.

West across the Ramble on a line with Seventy-seventh Street. If Kate Boyd was alive, that’s where the Juggler was heading. If she were dead, he would travel north inevitably, hoping to escape from the park through the trackless areas that merged with Meer Lake and the edges of Harlem.

Sokolsky flipped a switch and spoke into his mike. “Code Three, all units. . . .” Tonnelli cut him off with an angry headshake.

“Hold it!” Tonnelli said.

Sokolsky looked at him with puzzled eyes. “Sure, Lieutenant. But I thought—”

“We’ll finesse this one,” Tonnelli said. The Gypsy turned and stared north at black stands of trees on the horizon. His expression was hard and cold, and his eyes were narrowing as if he had already caught sight of his quarry.

“Forget the report on that missing truck, Sokolsky. That’s an order.”

“Check, Lieutenant.”

“One more thing. I want every cop and detective out of the Ramble. Instruct them to report to the reserve unit in the Sheep Meadow. Put that signal on the air right now.”

“Check, Lieutenant.”

Tonnelli walked with long, deliberate strides, not to his unmarked sedan, but to a row of pool squad cars which were equipped with standard dome lights and whose interior arsenals included bullhorns and riot guns. Tonnelli jerked a thumb at a young uniformed officer behind the wheel of one of these reserve squad cars. The patrolman slipped hastily from the car, and within seconds Gypsy Tonnelli was driving across the meadow that would lead him to the East Drive.

Gus Soltik crouched low in the dark, warm cab of the parks department truck and watched two young patrolmen crossing the lot in his direction, their red flashlights cutting rhythmic swaths across the paved surface of the parking area. Gus Soltik sat very quietly, but his right hand gripped the handle of his knife with painful intensity.

His thoughts were chaotic, and his body was hot and trembling with his needs.

The red beam of a flashlight flicked across the windshield of the truck; but Gus Soltik’s head was below the dashboard, and the officers continued on toward the East Drive, their lights eventually winking out in the darkness.

With an animal like moan Gus Soltik climbed from the truck and ran swiftly and silently into trees bordering the parking lot.

Chapter 25

Luther Boyd stopped in the darkness near a massive facing of rock.

From Babe Fritzel’s two-way radio he was monitoring a conversation between Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin and Dispatcher Sokolsky, who manned the switchboard at the command post in Central Park.

Commander Larkin was driving north in his chauffeured sedan from the supermarket in Greenwich Village where the gunman, after improbable intercessions from a pair of street people, had released nineteen hostages unharmed and surrendered himself in tears to the police.

Boyd’s reaction to the following exchanges was tense and expectant, but there was something else in his expression, a challenge to the gods, the sacrilege of hope.

“Sokolsky? I’ve had a report from the Twenty-second that a parks department truck was stolen from the Arsenal approximately the time the super was murdered. Did you have that, Sokolsky?”

“Yes, Chief. I had it.”

There was something close to anger in Larkin’s musical Irish voice.

“Why didn’t you notify all units?”

“Lieutenant Tonnelli gave me a negative on that, Chief. The lieutenant made it a direct order, sir.”

“Is Lieutenant Tonnelli at the CP?”

“No, Chief. He left here a few minutes ago in one of the pool squads.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

The chief’s voice rose sharply. “Central, this is Borough Commander South. Patch me through to Lieutenant Tonnelli, and don’t waste time about it.”

Boyd stood perfectly still, controlling his emotions with a discipline acquired from years of training, while listening to Central’s operator ordering Lieutenant Tonnelli to report his position and destination immediately to Chief Larkin.

There was no answer from the Gypsy. Boyd could envision the situation as clearly as if it were flashing before his eyes on a screen.

The Juggler was in that stolen truck, and Tonnelli was after him.

But Boyd knew what the Juggler wanted, and he knew why. Only one question demanded an answer now: Where would he leave the truck?

With animal cunning, the Juggler might instinctively realize it would point after him like an arrow if he abandoned it near his eventual destination.

So where would be the most obvious and innocent place to hide a truck? Ideally, a gas station or a used-car lot. But the plain fact was there were no such facilities in Central Park. Then the answer hit Boyd so abruptly that it sent a shock wave of hope and excitement through his body.

And considering that Boyd had an almost certain fix on where the Juggler was heading, he could make a shrewd guess at where he would leave the truck, the parking lot closest to the Ramble, that oblong stretch of pavement that abutted the Loeb boathouse just north of the East Drive.

Tonnelli angled his pool squad car toward the curb and stopped near Max Prima and another patrolman who were in position at the East Drive on a line with Sixty-eighth Street.

When he rolled down the window of the car and looked up at Prima, the faint light from a streetlamp ran like quicksilver up and down the scar that streaked across the Gypsy’s cheek.

“You men spot a parks department truck traveling north fifteen or twenty minutes ago?”

Max Prima hesitated a fractional instant. As in any other tightly interwoven organization, gossip and rumor spread like storm fires through the police department. And there was a rumor, an ugly one, that Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli had gone shut-eye, had cut off his radio, and was deliberately refusing to report to Chief Larkin. Sokolsky had asked all units for a make on that particular truck, but almost twenty-odd minutes after it had first been reported missing by officers from the 22nd. It could be out on Long Island by now.

But Max Prima was not staring into the eyes of just another cop, not just a lieutenant in the New York police department. He was looking at a scarred man who was a legend in all five boroughs of the city, and so he said simply, “Yes, Lieutenant. We spotted it. About eighteen minutes ago, heading north.”

“Still got that good pair of eyes, Max,” the Gypsy said.

The parks department truck was at the far end of the boathouse lot, its shiny surfaces partially obscured by the overhanging limbs of immense willow trees.

Luther Boyd approached the truck with the Browning in his hand. He jerked open the door and smelled the rank, fetid odor of the Juggler and saw—as he had guessed—that the cab was empty. There were bloodstains on the leather of the passenger seat.

After checking the rear of the truck and finding it empty, Boyd ran across the pavement of the parking lot to open ground that led toward the Ramble. He came to a thick tangle of hawthorn hedges, stopping at an area which looked ragged and torn, as if a wild animal had charged through it. And as he forced his way through this ragged passage, his flashlight picked up the distinctive prints of the Juggler’s Wellingtons.

Attack now, he thought, and as he bent low and ran swiftly along the line of those tracks, an irrelevant but annealing maxim of war came to his mind: “My center is giving way, my right flank is crushed, situation excellent, I am attacking.” That was Marshal Foch to Paris Headquarters, Second Battle of the Marne.

Within minutes, he spotted a movement far ahead of him in the shadows created by the tossing crowns of great trees. Then Boyd saw him clearly, still hundreds of yards ahead of him, a huge figure lurching across a moonlit meadow. And Boyd could see, even at this distance, the Juggler’s yellow cap and the light flickering on the blade of the knife in his right hand.

Luther Boyd flicked off the beam of his flashlight and ran silently at speed after his quarry.

Lieutenant Tonnelli drove slowly into the boathouse parking lot, and his headlights bathed the sides of the parks department truck, in brilliant illumination. The front door of the truck was open, and the cab was empty, and this confirmed the first estimate of the Juggler’s route: into the Ramble west on a line with Seventy-seventh Street. That was the fix that Luther Boyd had given him. Gypsy Tonnelli didn’t need to track the prints of those Wellingtons, even if he had had the skill to do it. Cutting the headlights of his squad car, Tonnelli drove slowly from the parking lot across a meadow that was flanked by a tangled thicket of low hawthorns. He rounded this hedgerow, which had been torn apart in one area, and drove slowly onto the flatlands of the park, the squad car merging slowly and silently with the shadows of huge trees.

Chapter 26

His odor was rank on the air now, and when Luther Boyd stepped from shadows into a moonlit grove, the movement froze Gus Soltik into immobility, and he stared at Boyd in terror, his body trembling and his breath coming so rapidly and harshly that saliva churned into froth on his lips. This was what he had feared this night, the “coldness” that had stalked him so cruelly and relentlessly. His thoughts were like splinters of steel piercing his tormented mind, bringing the redness there, the agonizing memories of the father’s threats and his mother’s punishment, the way they had held him and beat him, and his terrifying conviction that he knew no words to make them stop.

With an inarticulate scream of rage and fear, he jerked the hunting knife from his belt and rushed at Luther Boyd. He raised the knife high in the air, plunging it toward Boyd’s face, but Boyd trapped his wrist in a powerful Y formed by his own crossed forearms. The tip of the blade glittered inches from his eyes, but it was held there finally and forever by the strength of Boyd’s tempered muscle, and when Soltik tried to free himself, Boyd swiftly went to attack, the palm of his right hand going behind Soltik’s neck and the full swing of his arm sending the big man sprawling to the ground.

When Gus Soltik tried to rise to his feet, Boyd kicked him in the stomach with a lightning-fast blow, and an instant later, he broke Gus Soltik’s right wrist with a chop of his hand that sent the hunting knife flying into thick underbrush.

Sobbing with pain, Gus Soltik stumbled backward and collapsed on the ground against the bole of a tree.

He longed for his pain and torments to cease. He wanted it to be over forever. Why was it always like this? Going on and on. While his eyes filled with tears, he looked up and saw that the man standing above him holding that gun was like something carved from rock.

Luther Boyd stared at Gus Soltik’s swollen features, noting narrow eyes the color of mud, slack lips and bad teeth, the bulging forehead behind which stretched the festering swamp of mind. There was nothing there to salvage; this was human refuse. It was so often like this when you had slain your enemy on the battlefield; there was little cause for triumph because what you had destroyed was only another miserable and suffering human being, a youth whose mother went to sleep praying for him or something black and charred in the wreckage of a war machine.

He asked one question in a voice an inquisitor might have applied to a man stretched on a rack.

“Is she alive?”

Gus Soltik nodded dumbly, eagerly, filled with a desperate need somehow to soften the hatred and contempt he saw blazing in the eyes of the man who held the gun in his face.

“Date,” he said, in a hoarse, choked voice.

Luther Boyd put a hand on the man’s shoulder and jerked him to his feet, spinning him around and ramming the muzzle of the Browning against his spine. “Take me there,” Boyd said in the same voice he had used before.

Gus Soltik nodded quickly, almost happily and lurched forward, the gun at his back prodding him into a stumbling run.

The direction the Juggler had chosen coincided exactly with Boyd’s earlier estimate of where his daughter might be, and with the realization that this dreadful night might finally end with Kate alive and warm in his arms, he felt a surge of relief flowing through his veins.