1975 - Night of the Juggler (4 page)

“But it wasn’t your fault that Buddy got killed.”

“I’ll try to explain it to you, although I’m not sure I can,” he said.

“But it wasn’t your fault,” she said, and there was a tone of stubborn loyalty in her voice. “How could it be?”

“That’s one of the questions I’m not sure I can answer,” he said wearily.

After she had gone off with her Scottie, Luther Boyd stood and paced the floor restlessly, rubbing his jaw with the wedge formed by his thumb and forefinger. He tried not to think of Barbara. To distract himself, he thought of General Carmichael, whose problems at least presented a fair and reasonable challenge. One of the general’s most serious flaws stemmed from a paradoxical stylistic ingenuity; he was, in fact, an excellent persuasive writer, but this was a talent best served in the breach in the writing of military manuals. War was not a debate, with issues to be decided by closely reasoned arguments. The object was not to win on paper and lose in combat, or to study maps and ignore the battlefield. He took a volume at random from a shelf and flipped through the pages until he came to this quotation: “The enemy is badly beaten, greatly demoralized and exhausted of ammunition. The road to Vicksburg is open. All we want now are men, ammunition and hard bread. . . .”

That was the kind of writing soldiers understood, clear and unequivocal, General Grant to Sherman.

From another volume he read: “It is 132 miles to the Rhine from here, and if this army will attack with venom and desperate energy, it is more than probable that the war will end before we get to the Rhine. Therefore, when we attack, we go like hell.” General Patton to the 95th Division in October, 1944.

And from yet another volume he read wise words from a statesman who was not only a military but a political strategist: “The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.” That was the British bulldog with the cigar, Sir Winston Churchill.

But as he replaced the volume on the shelf, Luther Boyd realized he was committing a mistake which he would not permit in any officer in his command; he was postponing the decision of what and how much to tell his daughter, Kate, and that was an unforgivable and cowardly indulgence.

John “Buddy” Boyd had been Barbara Boyd’s son by a first marriage to a man who had been killed in an automobile accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when Buddy (then Buddy Shaw) had been four years of age. When Luther Boyd married Barbara Shaw, he had adopted Buddy, and when the boy was old enough to discuss the matter, they had mutually agreed to change his name legally from Shaw to Boyd.

Luther Boyd had loved Buddy as he would have a natural son and had gloried in his triumphs and suffered with his defeats, caring for him as wisely and completely as he cared for their daughter, Kate.

Buddy Boyd had enlisted in the Army four years before, despite a perforated eardrum, which would have automatically exempted him from service, and despite a high draft number, which mathematically excluded him from any chance of conscription.

But Buddy Boyd had ignored his mother’s injunctions to stay in college and had died unspectacularly but with great finality in a two-truck collision during his boot training at Fort Riley, Kansas. At first, Barbara had been a rock of determination and strength. She had packed off Buddy’s clothes and cameras and butterfly collections to Army hospitals, and she had converted his two rooms, which were directly above Luther Boyd’s library, into a ballet suite for Kate and her friends, complete with mirrors and bars and Degas prints. But after the first year, something insidious and virulent eroded her resolution and confidence.

She began to question her son’s death and then her husband’s life. She questioned his decisions, his values, his code of honor, which was the very core of Luther Boyd’s existence. She had come to believe that Boyd’s feverish preoccupation (her phrase) with weapons and falconry and hunting and killing had created an atmosphere that was like a stench of death in their home, and in this noisome air her son had sickened and died. How could the son of Colonel Luther Boyd decide
not
to go to war? Hating it, despising it, fearing it, loathing the guns and the killing. Buddy had nonetheless embraced it with his young life rather than risk Colonel Luther Boyd’s disapproval.

It wasn’t that way, Boyd thought bitterly. He simply was what he was, and there was no way to change that. Barbara could change, but he couldn’t. She could slip into the oblivion of drinks at dusk, she could exercise her grief in these spasms of neurotic indulgence, but there were no such anodynes or escape for Colonel Luther Boyd. He had been bred to take it, to clamp his teeth against any cry of pain or loss, leaving the possibly annealing tears to women and children and cowards.

The front doorbell echoed through the silent apartment. Luther Boyd walked through the corridor and living room and opened the door. Mr. Brennan, the uniformed lobby attendant, stood in the outer hallway.

Behind him the elevator doors were open.

“This just came in special delivery, Mr. Boyd,” Mr. Brennan said, handing Boyd a neatly wrapped package about the size of a deck of playing cards. Luther Boyd took the package but didn’t glance at it; his eyes were fixed hard and straight at Mr. Brennan.

“Did Kate go outside with Harry Lauder?”

“You’d better believe she
didn’t,
Mr. Boyd,” Mr. Brennan said. “She’s waiting right in the lobby for me to come down and keep an eye on her.”

As a young man Mr. Brennan had been a welterweight contender with the ring name of Kid Irish, and at sixty-four he was still in excellent physical condition and would have dearly relished the opportunity to deck any bastard who’d lay a finger on Kate Boyd.

“Well, fine,” Luther Boyd said. “And thanks.”

He closed the door and unwrapped the package. His fingers were a bit clumsy because he recognized Barbara’s handwriting on the heavy brown paper. The package contained a slim cartridge of electronic tape and a note from Barbara.

The note read:

I can’t ever explain anything to you, because I know you’re waiting for me to finish so you can point out in your logical, precise manner how wrong I am. But you do deserve an explanation. And so does poor, dear Kate. I’ve put down some of my feelings on this tape. Whether they “explain” anything, I’m not sure. But please believe that I have tried to be honest.

There was no signature. Luther Boyd stood uncertainly for a moment or so in the dimly lighted living room, tossing the slender cartridge up and down gently in the palm of his hand. At last he came to a decision which gave him very little pleasure. He sighed and walked back to the den, where a tape recorder rested on his desk alongside a neat stack of unanswered correspondence.

Luther Boyd made himself a mild scotch with soda and packed a pipe from a soft leather tobacco pouch. Then he set the tape in its spool, snapped the switch, and watched it begin to spin, his expression hard and thoughtful.

Chapter 2

The New York police department was not unaware of Gus Soltik. Nor was it unaware of the “lessons” which he had administered to four young girls on four successive years, precisely in the middle of the month of October.

Four in a row, Lieutenant Vincent “Gypsy” Tonnelli was thinking, and this is October, and tomorrow is the fifteenth, and would they nail the psycho bastard then, or would the Juggler make it
five
in a row? . . .

They didn’t know Gus Soltik’s name, and they had only a vague description of him, but they knew certain areas of his MO very well indeed.

The murderer who in the past four years had abducted, mutilated, raped, and then slashed the throats of four young girls in the borough of Manhattan was known to the police as the Juggler because that was the final dreadful gesture in his pattern, a knife ripped across tender jugular veins.

These thoughts were in Lieutenant Tonnelli’s mind as he strode along the corridor of a precinct in the upper Sixties of Manhattan.

This was headquarters of the task force which had been assigned to Lieutenant Tonnelli two months earlier by Assistant Chief of Detectives Walter Greene, a graying veteran with a rasping voice and a head shaped like an artillery projectile. Tonnelli’s second unit was stationed at the 13th Precinct on the East Side and was under the command of Detective Sergeant Michael “Rusty” Boyle.

In each unit of Lieutenant Tonnelli’s task force were two switchboard operators and four detectives, second grade. At headquarters, which was located in the 19th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street, were Detectives Clem Scott, Jim Taylor, August Brohan, and Carmine Garbalotto. On the switchboards were Patrolmen Jules Mackay and August Sokolsky. Collating and indexing the steadily mounting piles of paperwork were two uniformed policewomen, Doris Polk and Rachel Skinner.

In Detective Sergeant Rusty Boyle’s command in the 13th Precinct on East Twenty-first Street were Detectives Miles Tebbet, Jason Corbell, Roger Fee, and Ray Karp. On the switchboard were Patrolmen Joe Knapp and Ed Maurer, and the flow of files and reports was in the competent hands of Patrolwomen Alice Halzer and Melissa Foreberg.

Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli was short and stocky, with a huge chest and heavily muscled arms so thick that he couldn’t wear jackets or sports coats from a rack, but had to have them fashioned by a tailor.

Since he was forced to spend considerable money on his clothes, he had over the years cultivated a certain sartorial elegance; in fact, the lieutenant looked like a prosperous broker with a subdued but excellent sense of fashion rather than a very tough and, in this particular city, a nearly legendary cop.

A bachelor, Lieutenant Tonnelli lived in a modest apartment in the East Thirties and indulged himself in very few extravagances beyond his taste for well-made clothing. His father and mother were dead, and his only living relative was his sister, Adela, who was married to a Greek used-car dealer in Baltimore. She had some kids, he knew, but they didn’t see each other anymore, didn’t even exchange Christmas cards.

Gypsy Tonnelli’s features were usually composed in a deceptively pleasant smile. His eyes were dark brown, and his lips were full and red. A scar coursed from his left temple to the point of his jaw, a vivid cicatrice which he had acquired while subduing a carload of unruly blacks during one of the riots in the late sixties. Lieutenant Tonnelli had once been so ashamed of the scar that he had grown a beard to conceal it. But to his consternation the beard, unlike his coal-black hair, had emerged in an embarrassing pepper-and-salt mixture.

Preferring the scar to a prematurely graying beard, Tonnelli had shaved off the stubble and later had become quite proud of the villainous-looking crease that ran down the left side of his face, for it had become a cherished memento of the citation he had received, a benchmark on the legend that was Gypsy Tonnelli.

And why “Gypsy”? The nickname had been hung on him when he was still in uniform and stemmed from the fact that he was a Sicilian, hence was nurtured by a tradition that believed in evil eyes, believed that good and bad luck could be divined by cloud masses and falling stars, and believed that dogs howling in the night were often predicting their masters’ deaths and that silver bullets and strings of garlic were specifics against vampires and werewolves.

In a word, the Gypsy was superstitious, but he did possess an uncanny ability for predicting the variety of crimes lurking in store for his city, which he knew as a wise old mother knows her children.

Some mysterious sixth sense could warn him that in the weeks ahead they could expect a rise in arson and a decline in murders, a dip in muggings, a surge of bank robbers.

At first, his superior officers didn’t take the Gypsy’s predictions all that seriously, but they couldn’t explain his high percentage of accurate guesses by luck or coincidence. The Gypsy was dead right so often that at last everyone on the force began to respect his Sicilian intuitions.

However, despite the Gypsy’s track record, he hadn’t been able to convince his superiors that more than coincidence was involved in the murders of Encarna Garcia and Bonnie Jean Howell, whose bodies had been tortured and violated and whose throats had been slashed on successive years under the sign of Libra on the nights of October 15.

The following year, again on Libra 15, Trixie Atkins had been murdered after suffering the same sadistic refinements that had been inflicted on the bodies of Encarna Garcia and Bonnie Jean Howell.

Gypsy Tonnelli, in the next year, starting on October 1, had prowled the streets of Manhattan on his off-hours, praying that by luck or coincidence he might get his hands on the Juggler. And after Trixie Atkins’ murder he had demanded and been reluctantly granted a meeting with Deputy Chief of Detectives Walter Greene in the chief’s office at 240 Centre Street.

What Tonnelli wanted was a task force of experienced detectives to prepare a defense against what he was convinced would be a fourth ritual murder in the coming year.

The chief had said, “Sure, there’s going to be a homicide next October 15. Probably a half dozen or more. We had forty-one a couple years back during that hot spell in July and August. I hear you been putting in overtime without pay on this job, Gypsy. Right?”

Tonnelli wasn’t surprised at the chief’s on-the-mark question; the word of any erratic conduct by a cop (particularly one with Tonnelli’s rank) would inevitably spread through all echelons of the department.

“I worked my shift, Chief,” Tonnelli said with the trace of an edge to his voice. “Then I hit the streets on my own time. Just hoping to get lucky.”

The chief had sighed and stared with a certain weary irritation at the ceiling of his office. “Gypsy, I don’t like my cops running around off duty with this Dick Tracy hero bullshit. You want to moonlight, fine. Do something useful. Drive a hack, or ride shotgun for a numbers runner. Being realistic, Gypsy, the people who pay our salaries, the public, they don’t like dedicated cops either.” The chief’s voice had been threaded with sarcasm. “They think a cop putting in extra time on his own is just looking for a chance to whip some more heads. When my cops are off duty, I want them at ball games or at the beach with their kids so they can come back to the precinct feeling a little bit human.”