Blood Innocents (12 page)

“Did you know Lee?”

“Lee? I met her a few times when she would meet Karen at the office in the afternoon. That's all. But I know Karen must have been absolutely devoted to her. There was no other way for Karen. It had to be total or nothing.”

“Did she have any other friends at the office?”

“No, not that I know of.”

“Surely she must have been friendly with other people.”

“They had mutual friends, I think. Karen and Lee, I mean. Sometimes they'd mention a name — a Phillip or a John or something like that — and it was obvious they both knew this person. So I guess they had friends, but I didn't know them.”

“Do you know of any list of addresses or anything like that, something that Karen might have had somewhere other than her office or apartment? The police couldn't find anything.”

“I know something about that,” Laura said suddenly. “She didn't write addresses down. She said them over and over again until she had them memorized. A year after she started living with Lee I moved and changed my address. So I wanted Karen to know my new address. You know, in case she ever wanted to get in touch with me, needed help or something like that. But she wouldn't write it down.”

“Did you ask her why?”

“Yeah, I said, ‘Why don't you just write it down? Wouldn't that be easier?'”

“What did she say?”

“Now that you mention it, she looked a little strange when I asked her that, a little frightened or something, like she'd let down her guard or something like that. A little embarrassed maybe. She just said something about always memorizing these things. She said Lee thought it was a good idea. She said it trained her memory or something like that.”

“She said Lee thought it was a good idea?”

“Yes,” Laura said. “She definitely mentioned Lee.”

11

After leaving Laura Murray Reardon went to the city morgue at Bellevue Hospital. He wanted to see the bodies of Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky once again and to see the pathologist's report.

He found Jake Simpson, a morgue attendant he'd known for years, reading a paperback novel at his desk. Years of menial labor at the command of other men vastly better educated and better paid had done a job on Simpson, grinding him down to a fine edge of resentment.

“What can I do for you?” Simpson asked glumly, putting his novel facedown on his desk. The crooked cigarette dangling from his mouth made him look like an aging pool hustler.

“I'd like to take a look at the report on the women in the Village, McDonald and Ortovsky.”

Jake struggled to his feet. “I'll get them.” He went to a gray metal file cabinet and extracted two manila envelopes from one of the drawers. “Here they are,” he said. “Just came in.”

“Thanks,” Reardon said. He took the envelopes and pulled out a chair at an empty desk. “Okay if I sit here?”

“Who gives a shit,” said Simpson, who had gone back to his paperback novel.

Reardon sat down and opened an envelope.

Jake peered up from the book. “She took a dump, you know.”

Reardon looked over at him. “What are you talking about?”

“The one that got her throat cut,” Jake said. “She took a terrible shit. Rothman said he'd never seen so much crap.”

“Karen?”

“The one in the closet. Crapped her pants.”

“She was scared out of her goddamn mind,” Reardon said, feeling the heat of his anger rise in his face.

“Must of been,” Jake said. He smiled. “Not that unusual, you know. Rothman's kind of new around here. Don't know his ass from a hole in the wall.” He went back to his book.

Reardon turned to the first page of the pathologist's report on Lee McDonald. It was the usual, the same sterile language. Each of Lee's major organs had been cut out of her body and weighed in grams: heart, liver, pancreas, kidneys, everything. The lacerations received by each organ were recorded in centimeters. The contents of her stomach and intestines were recorded in cubic centimeters, with references to texture and color. The consistency of her feces was described as part fluid, part pulpy.

Reardon winced but continued reading. Even the arid language of the report suggested that her body had been cut to ribbons. But Mathesson had been right: Lee McDonald had not been sexually abused. There was no residue of semen in or around either the vagina or the anus.

Then he saw it. The definite connection. Lee McDonald had been stabbed fifty-seven times. These were direct, purposeful blows, deep and wide, not the numerous scratches and cuts any victim receives while fending off a blade with bare arms.

Quickly Reardon turned through the report on Karen Ortovsky. She had been stabbed only once.

The pathologist's report made the MO complete. Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky had been slaughtered exactly like the fallow deer.

Reardon walked back over to Jake's desk and handed him the report. “I'd like to see the bodies,” he said.

“Didn't you see them down in the Village?” Jake asked.

“Yeah, but I want to check something.”

“Sure you just don't have a taste for dead flesh?” Jake asked with a grin.

“Where are they?” Reardon said sharply.

Jake stood up. “Feeling kind of humorless today, huh? They caught one of them in Brooklyn, you know. Somebody in the morgue, I mean. Fucking a dead body.”

“Where are they?” Reardon repeated.

Jake's face turned sour. “Follow me.” He led Reardon into the morgue room and pointed down the corridor. “In there. Units 87 and 88. I'll be out at the desk if you need anything. ”

Reardon slowly made his way into the morgue room. It seemed unearthly, fastidiously clean, all scrubbed tile and stainless steel, not at all like a murder room. The bodies were kept in refrigerated vaults that hazily reflected the fluorescent lighting overhead. Unit 87 bore a single identification, a small printed label inserted in a square of aluminum on the door:

City of New York
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
MORTUARY COMPARTMENT CARD

Compartment Number … 87

Name … Patricia Lee McDonald

Age … 25 Color … White

Date of Death … 11/20/77

Received from … New York City Police Dept

Date Received … 11/20/77

Place of Death … 12 W. 12th St.

Reardon placed his hand on the steel handle of the freezer, but he did not open it. He did not want to open it. In all his years on the force he had visited the morgue only once before. Visiting the dead here, in their cold, awesome vulnerability, had always seemed to him like an intolerable violation of that final right to dignity.

The one other time he had been here, five years ago, he had come to see the only human being he had ever put here. He had come late at night and been ushered into the same bright room with its antiseptic smell and garish lighting. His eyes had searched out a different number and a different name:

City of New York
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
MORTUARY COMPARTMENT CARD

Compartment Number … 93

Name … Thomas Frederick Wilson

Age … 29 Color … White

Date of Death … 7/22/72

Received from … New York City Police Dept

Date received … 7/22/72

Place of Death … 274 E. 4th St.

When he had died at twenty-nine, Thomas Frederick Wilson had already assembled a long criminal record. He had turned relatively late to murder. But when he had, Reardon remembered, it was with abandon, killing five people in as many months. His plan had been to leave no witnesses to his robberies.

Wilson had had two problems, Reardon recalled. He had a big mouth and a buddy who liked to listen. In the end Wilson's friend had gone to the local precinct house and told Reardon everything.

That afternoon he and Mathesson had let themselves into Wilson's apartment and were in the midst of searching it when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Reardon retreated behind some of the clothes hanging in the closet and Mathesson ducked behind the sofa. Silently they listened as the sound of footsteps grew more distinct.

When the door opened and Wilson stepped into the apartment, Reardon saw that he was carrying a pistol in his right hand. For a moment Wilson did not move.

Then Mathesson shot up from behind the sofa. “Police!” he shouted. “Don't move!”

Over the barrel of his own gun Reardon saw Wilson level his pistol toward Mathesson and fire and Mathesson's body jerk to the left, tumbling across the edge of the bureau to the floor.

Then Reardon had fired. And for every day of the rest of his life he had recalled the thunderousness of his gun's report, which had seemed to deafen everything, plunging the world into a heavy, mourning silence. Wilson's chest had seemed to explode from below his skin, a bloom of crimson opening across his chest like the petals of a rose. He staggered backward, his face frozen in a look of childlike amazement, and it was the look on that face that had haunted Reardon forever afterward; he had never been able to describe it to anyone, not even to Millie, but he knew it would stay in his mind, like an unanswerable riddle, until the day he died.

It was the chill of the handle on his fingers that brought Reardon's mind back now. He looked at the nameplate on the door. Patricia Lee McDonald. He released the handle and slid his hand deep into the pocket of his overcoat. Patricia Lee McDonald had been violated enough for one life, he thought, and the fallow deer too, and all the others. He turned and left the morgue.

12

WEEKEND

On Saturday morning Mathesson telephoned Reardon to tell him he had not been able to dig anything up on Lee McDonald. Mathesson said that on Friday he had gone to the law firm where she had worked for the last five years, but that no one knew very much about her. She had no friends at the firm and did not seem to have confided anything about her private life to anyone.

“I talked to just about everybody in the office,” Mathesson said, “except for some high rollers off on a junket to Las Vegas.”

“And you got nothing at all?”

“Nothing.”

“All right,” Reardon said. “See you Monday.”

There was still another possibility and late in the weekend Reardon tried it.

On Sunday afternoon funeral services for Patricia Lee McDonald were held at Saint Jude's Catholic Church in Brooklyn. Reardon went. He sat in the back of the church, his hat resting on his lap, his overcoat neatly folded beside him, and listened to the drone of the Mass, the old beseechments for the forgiveness of Lee McDonald's sins and the salvation of her soul. At the front of the church he could see the coffin, closed, unadorned by flowers, resting before the altar. For a moment he imagined the body inside, chill, pallid, bloodless, the pathologist's incisions sewed up with thick black thread.

Besides Reardon and the priest, there were only three other people in the church. Reardon remembered his father's funeral. It had been a crowded affair, cops and their families squeezing together in the pews, and the people from the neighborhood decked out in their Sunday best. His mother had told him at the time it was the kind of funeral that happened only “when a good man dies.”

This funeral was different. When the services were over, Reardon made his way to the front of the church. An older couple he assumed to be Lee McDonald's parents were getting into a car behind the hearse. A younger man stood silently beside a red Volkswagen, waiting for the hearse to leave for the cemetery.

Reardon stood on the church steps beside the priest until the funeral procession had pulled away. Then he took out his gold shield and wordlessly displayed it to the priest.

The priest looked at him. “I see,” he said quietly.

“I wonder if I might have a moment of your time, Father?”

“I have to be on my way to the cemetery shortly,” the priest said.

“I know,” Reardon said. “It won't take long.”

“Go ahead then.” The priest put out his hand. “I'm Father Perry.” He was an old man, but the skin of his face was still tightly drawn across high cheekbones. He had once been a handsome man, Reardon surmised, which, in itself, must have been an almost irresistible occasion for sin. His hair was close-cropped and very white, which gave him the appearance of a retired military officer. He stood erect, but Reardon could detect a certain weakness in his legs, as if they were aging more rapidly than the body they supported.

“Did you know Miss McDonald very well?” Reardon asked. It felt incongruous, this litany of investigation on the steps of a church. On the sunny Brooklyn street cars went past. A boy walked past bouncing a rubber ball.

“I knew Patty all her life,” Father Perry said. “I baptized her.”

“You called her Patty?”

“Everyone did. I understand from her father that later on she started going by her other name. Lee.”

“Why was that?” Reardon asked.

Father Perry cleared his throat. He seemed to be trying to calculate what was proper for him to say and what to hold back. “Well, you see,” he said finally, “Patty had a lot of trouble in her life.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Family trouble,” Father Perry admitted gently. He looked about hesitantly, as if assuring himself that he and Reardon were not being overheard. “Mostly what I see is the sin of gossip,” he said. “You hear so much sometimes that you come to think the walls must be giving up their secrets.”

“What kind of trouble was she having with her parents?” Reardon asked.

“Well, she wanted to go one way. They wanted her to go another way. That sort of thing.”

“What way?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, they wanted her to be just like them. It's very common.” He spoke gently, kindly, like a man who had seen a great deal of distress in his life, none of it very original.

Reardon adopted Father Perry's language. “What way did they want her to go?”