1975 - Night of the Juggler (13 page)

“Well, Christ, I
said
was sorry.” Then her temper got the better of her, and she threw her long golden hair back from her forehead and glared at him with what she fancied to be her “tigress” look. “Just who the fuck do you think you are, Rudi Zahn?”

“Very nice display. Very nice and tasteful,” he said quietly.

“Don’t give me that well-bred gentleman shit,” she screamed at him, challenging now, brandishing her sex like a weapon. “Where the fuck would you be without me? Without your sluttish dummy? You’d be hocking around the studios with flop sweat shining on your bald head, laying secretaries to get ten minutes with their bosses.”

She would be all right now, Rudi knew. When he returned, she would be her normal cheerful self. No gloom, no depressions. They would have a pleasant dinner, here or at 21, and she would be happily drunk by bedtime and would be grateful if he made love to her.

“Charming,” he said, and gave her a little bow. “You’re so delightful I’ll let you enjoy yourself without any distractions. I’m going for a walk.”

“Well, take these shitty scripts with you then,” she said, and hurled two of them after him. One of them struck his shoulder and fell to the floor.

He picked it up, put it on a coffee table, and strolled into the living room of their suite.

“Please come back, Rudi.
Please.
” She raised her voice to make sure he would hear her, but her anger had evaporated, and her tone was as pleading and helpless as a frightened child.

When she heard the door of the drawing room open and shut with a dry click of finality, she threw herself sideways on the bed, cradling her face in her crossed arms. She knew that Rudi used her, manipulated her moods and responses, playing her like a goddamn yoyo, but there was little bitterness in her reflections because she knew his private hells.

But it was hard. Hard to be thirty-three and charged with sexual excitement and still have to compete for Rudi’s love with an eight-year-old child who had died almost thirty years ago. Ilana. She was burned into his soul like a brand. He was chained to her memory.

Well, she’d keep trying, get herself beautifully turned out, and when he came back from the park, they’d go to 21 for dinner.

She sat up smiling and poured herself a glass of wine. They’d have champagne with a splash of vodka and maybe Little Neck clams and prime rib.

And then they’d come back here and be so good to each other. . . .

In the East Eighties, between Park Avenue and Lexington, a street vendor sold pretzels and cones of shaved ice liberally drenched with sweet fruited syrups.

The “clock” in Gus Soltik’s head told him there was time. So he bought one of the paper cones of sweet ice, extending his hand and letting the vendor pick the proper coins from his rough palm.

A police car cruised smoothly past the vendor, slowing with the rush-hour traffic.

The patrolman in the passenger seat was a uniformed officer in his forties, Joe Smegelski, a veteran with smoothly tanned features and calm blue eyes.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said quietly, and tapped his partner on the arm. “Pull over to the curb, Abe. Take it nice and slow.”

“What’s up?”

“Just do what I tell you. Nice and easy.” Smegelski opened the glove compartment, pulled out the police artist’s Xeroxed sketch of the Juggler.

“Could be this character’s back there on the southwest corner of Lex and Eighty-third. Check your mirror.”

Abe angled the squad car to the curb and at the same time glanced up at the rear-vision mirror.

“Let’s pick him up,” Smegelski said. “Take the north side of the street; I’ll take the south. Don’t look at him. Play it like it’s coffee-break time.”

The policemen left their squad car and sauntered along opposite sidewalks on a course that would bring them to the hulking figure who resembled the sketch artist’s portrait of the Juggler.

But at this moment, with the interval of savage rapture so close to culmination, Gus Soltik’s instincts were as alert and sensitive as a jackal in the terrain of its predators.

Mingling casually with the normal flow of pedestrians, the policemen were converging casually on him, and when Gus Soltik saw them and sensed their deliberate lack of interest in him, alarm bells clamored through his nervous system. It was like that terrible night in the basement when the big man and the man with a scar had wanted to hurt him. . . .

Gus Soltik turned and bolted south into Lexington Avenue and in his terrified flight collided with a pair of window-shoppers and knocked them sprawling onto the sidewalk.

“Police! Halt!” Smegelski yelled, and drawing his gun, he sprinted to the intersection with Abe close behind him. They ran along the sidewalk twenty or twenty-five yards behind the Juggler, unable to risk a shot because of the crowds.

Gus Soltik plunged from their view into an alley, and by the time the officers reached this narrow passage he was already straddling a ten-foot brick fence.

“Freeze!” Smegelski shouted at him, but the huge man leaped from sight a split second before shots from Smegelski and Abe’s police specials blasted splinters and explosions of red dust from the brick wall.

Chapter 9

In his headquarters at the 19th Precinct, Gypsy Tonnelli gave rapid orders to Sokolsky at the switchboard. “Send a signal to the Fourth Division, the Twentieth, the Twenty-third and the Twenty-fifth precincts.”

Units from the 19th were already in the street, and the forces he was presently committing would box Eighty-third and Lexington on the cardinal points of the compass. While Detectives Clem Scott and Carmine Garbalotto waited for orders (Augie Brohan and Jim Taylor had already gone), Tonnelli mentally checked and rechecked the distributions of his units. Here, the 19th, was the southern flank, the Fourth Division and the 20th Precinct held the western line, while the 23rd and 25th comprised the northern and eastern boundaries.

“Carmine, you and Clem take as many uniformed cops as you need and start rousting the supers. Alert them and their engineering staffs to check the basements of their buildings for signs of forced entry.”

When the detectives had gone, Tonnelli paced the floor, reexamining every decision he had made, trying to be sure he had forgotten nothing. Then he stopped, suddenly becoming aware of a stockily built, neatly groomed white-haired old man standing in the door of his office.

“Yes?” Tonnelli said to him, puzzled by some quality of tension and expectancy in the man’s expression.

“I’m Babe Fritzel,’ the white-haired old man said. Sokolsky looked wearily at the ceiling. “I was here before, talked to your guy on the switchboard. He didn’t seem to understand that I came all the way over from Teaneck, New Jersey, to lend you guys a hand. I was a cop for twenty-eight years in Camden. You may not remember, but I was the guy that finally put the cuffs on Howard Unruh after he’d killed thirteen people. Lot of them kids. One lady he killed in a car waiting for the light to change. He had a firing range in his basement, the wall three feet thick with sandbags.”

Tonnelli stared at him and shook his head slowly. “We took him to Cooper Hospital in Camden,” Fritzel continued, apparently oblivious of Tonnelli’s negative reaction. “They treated him for a minor bullet wound, and then we took him to the New Jersey Hospital for the Insane in Trenton. I still got a gun and a permit to carry it, and a two-way radio. And the way I look at it—”

Tonnelli cut him off with an irritable, chopping gesture of his right hand. “What you got over there in Teaneck, Mr. Fritzel? Chickens or a truck farm?”

“Neither, but I keep busy. Some gunning in the fall, and weekends I help the bartender at the Elks’ Club.”

And, Tonnelli thought, you miss those flashing red dome lights, the smell of cordite after a shoot-out, the good old days.

“Look, you were a cop and obviously a fine one,” Tonnelli said to Fritzel.

“So you know what I got to say. Which is wish us luck and go on home.”

“I figured you’d say that.” Fritzel glanced wistfully around the office, watching with a sadly detached interest as a policewoman, Doris Polk, hurried from her inner office with a memo for Sokolsky.

“Good luck, Lieutenant,” Fritzel said, and with a little salute which indicated Tonnelli, the office, and his own past, he turned and walked slowly toward the elevators.

Sergeant Rusty Boyle found a parking space in front of Joyce Colby’s apartment building, which was in the East Sixties between Park and Madison.

He cut the motor but made no move to leave the car. He sat thinking about what he had decided to do. He didn’t know whether it was right or wrong, but he was determined to do it. Sergeant Boyle sighed and rubbed a hand through his thick red hair. On balance, he was a reasonably uncomplicated human being, but there were times when he didn’t understand a certain compulsive need to render sympathy and compassion to the helpless, shit-upon losers he met as a cop in the crowded and often merciless streets of New York.

Boyle picked up his dashboard phone and asked Central to patch him through to a number he had looked up earlier at the 13th Precinct.

To a certain extent, Tonnelli was undoubtedly right. Ransom should at least be advised of his options. Whether or not he chose to exercise them was another matter. But somebody had to tell him—No, that was too strong. Somebody should just give him a hint there was another way to go, that he just didn’t have to wait until the fire inside him burned up his life.

The connection was made. The phone rang three times. Then he recognized Ransom’s voice.

“Hello?”

“John Ransom?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“John, this is Sergeant Boyle. Rusty Boyle. Remember we had a talk yesterday?”

“Of course.” Ransom’s voice was suddenly warm; Rusty Boyle could imagine that he was smiling.

“Well, here’s why I’m calling. I got to thinking. This is something you might check out. I mean, what hit you is just as much an accident as if it was a truck. Maybe you could ask your doctor about it.”

“I appreciate your interest, but I don’t see what good it would do.”

“Maybe not. It was just a thought. It might have some effect on your pension—”

Ransom laughed weakly. “If I had one, Sergeant.”

Please take the hook, Rusty Boyle thought. Please. Don’t make me a goddamn accessory before and after the fact.

“But I can’t say how much it helps to have you call me like this, Sergeant. I’ve never talked about it with anyone except the doctors. That’s the hardest part of it.” Ransom’s voice was trembling emotionally.

“Carrying it around with you and not being able to talk about it.”

All right, Boyle thought, you’re in this far, so use a sledgehammer.

“I thought ‘accident’ because that might apply if you’ve got a double indemnity clause in your insurance policy. . . .”

Ransom was silent for a dozen or more seconds, but Boyle could hear the altered rate of his breathing; it was ragged and uneven, and unless Boyle was imagining things, it was threaded with a touch of apprehension. At last, Ransom said, “I believe I understand what you mean, Sergeant.”

“It’s just something you might check out. . . .”

“I intend to, Sergeant. Thank you”—Ransom’s voice was close to breaking—”and God bless you.”

As Rusty Boyle let himself into Joyce’s apartment, he was remembering the first time he had met her, five months ago when she had called the precinct to report a burglary. A ring with a sentimental value but very little else was missing. He had filed a report and forgotten about it. But he couldn’t forget Joyce Colby. She was slim and tall, in her late twenties, with a fair complexion that was in flawless complement to her fire-engine red hair. And she was honest and intelligent, and Rusty Boyle loved her so much that she could melt his heart with a laugh or a gesture.

She had been married at eighteen to a construction worker, who had been killed in a fall from the forty-second floor of a building being put up near Times Square. From that experience and from Rusty Boyle’s own occupational hazards, Joyce believed that brave men were always in danger, simply by virtue of their maleness and courage, and she considered it not only her privilege but her duty to reward such men with understanding intelligence and share with them the sexual excitements of her body.

When he closed the door, she called a hello to him from the kitchen.

She was wearing green velvet Levi’s and a white silk shirt buttoned only at the waist, and when he kissed her and took her in his arms, the lovely swell of her breasts charged his whole body with excitement.

When she turned away from him, however, he noted a touch of resignation in her manner.

“Anything wrong?”

She smiled and shook her head slowly.

He picked up a bottle of scotch and two glasses from the bar adjoining the sink, but she shook her head again and put a hand on his arm.

“There’s a steak, an avocado salad, and a bottle of good cold wine,”

she said. “But later.”

“Goddamn it to hell,” he said.

“That’s right. Tonnelli called.”

“Goddamn it,” he said again, but he was already on his way to the front door.

Chapter 10

It was late afternoon on October 15 that Barbara Boyd’s nerve failed her; she told the cabdriver to let her off at Sixty-fifth Street, several blocks from her apartment, and after giving the man a bill without even looking at its denomination, she walked swiftly along the sidewalk toward the Grosvenor Hotel, where she knew there was a small, intimate piano bar just off the lobby.

Luther would have listened to the tapes a dozen times by now, she thought, analyzing and weighing her every word, listening alertly for a revealing pause or stammer, a nervous laugh, or contradictions in what she knew he would think of as her “evidence.”

She sat at the end of the bar with her long legs crossed, twisting the stem of her martini glass with restless fingers, a flex of nervous energy. When she was at ease (which she wasn’t at present), there was a lithe and almost feline grace in her movements, a challenge in the directness of her eyes and in the clean planes of her face. She was wearing a bottle-green tweed suit and a blue scarf knotted loosely about her throat, and if it hadn’t been for the nervous tremor in her fingers, a casual observer would have taken her for an artist or designer or possibly an actress sipping a drink while waiting to keep a rendezvous with some fortunate man.