Blood Innocents

by Thomas H. Cook

  “You sure?” Mathesson said.

  “Hell, yes. Come on, Mathesson, don’t you think we’d have noticed something like that?”

  “Where is this Daniels now?” Reardon asked.

  “At home, I guess.” Langhof pulled a notebook from his back pocket and flipped through it. “Here it is. He lives at Thirty-one East Sixty-Eighth Street.”

  “Any apartment number?”

  “No, it’s a townhouse I guess.”

  Reardon wrote the address in his notebook. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “What do you think?” Mathesson asked Reardon after Langhof had gone back upstairs.

  “About what?”

  “About this guy Daniels?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Reardon said quietly, “but I want to talk to him.”

  Mathesson grinned. “You’d better take a dozen or so lawyers with you before you try that.”

  Reardon did not smile. “Maybe so.”

  “I’ll go talk to Langhof’s partner,” Mathesson said. “Maybe he noticed something.”

  “Okay,” Reardon said. “Have him go through the whole thing, just like Langhof.”

  “Right.”

  After Mathesson had gone, Reardon sat down at his desk and looked at the map again, running his fingers back and forth over the inch of space that divided the stairs at Fifth Avenue from the cages of the fallow deer. He remembered Langhof’s description of Daniels as the two patrolmen had approached him, the way he had leaned casually at the top of the stairs, the way he seemed to regard the police as little more than a brief, irritating intrusion. He wondered how much money it took to buy confidence like that.

  Reardon planned to spend the rest of the afternoon interviewing two of the three members of the night crew assigned to the Children’s Zoo. The third regular member, Andros Petrakis, had been working only irregularly of late, since the illness of his wife often made it necessary for him to remain at home. On the Sunday afternoon prior to the killing Petrakis’ daughter had informed the Parks Department that her father would not be coming to work his shift but that he hoped to be back at work within a few days. Consequently, only two people had been scheduled to work in the Children’s Zoo the morning the fallow deer were killed.

  Reardon’s first interview was with Gilbert Noble, who had spoken to the patrolmen called to the scene. He was a large black man who had worked for the Parks Department for twelve years. Reardon’s preliminary investigation had established that Noble had no criminal record and that he had never been treated for emotional problems of any kind. He had been hospitalized once for an injury sustained while at work as an employee of the Parks Department, but the department had paid all of Noble’s hospital expenses, as well as his salary during hospitalization. There was no reason to suspect that he held any animosity toward the Parks Department.

  “You were working in the zoo the night the fallow deer were killed, is that right, Mr. Noble?” Reardon began.

  Noble sat opposite Reardon, his eyes darting from one corner of the room to another. He was nervous, but that was common. In itself, it meant nothing. “That’s right,” he said.

  “Were you in the zoo at around three-thirty on Monday morning?” Reardon tried to make his voice as casual as he could.

  “Yeah,” Noble said. “Yeah, I was there. I was in the zoo. I got to work a little before midnight.”

  “Where were you in the zoo at about that time?”

  “I was cleaning the elephant cages.”

  Reardon jotted Noble’s answer down in his notebook. “Where are they located?” he asked in the same casual tone with which he might have asked directions from a stranger on the street.

  “They’re at the far end of the zoo, behind a big building. The elephants stay in that building at night.”

  “How long would you say you were working in the elephant cages?”

  “Maybe a half hour or so. Maybe a little more.”

  “From when to when?”

  “From about three to three-thirty.”

  “Did you see anybody in the zoo during that time?”

  “No, I didn’t see anybody. I didn’t see nothing while I was in them elephant cages or on the way to them either. I would have remembered seeing anybody in the zoo around then. Ain’t nobody in the zoo that time of night.”

  “Did you hear anything while you worked at the elephant cages?” Reardon asked.

  “No.”

  “Anything at all?”

  “No.” Noble paused, gazed toward the ceiling. “Well …”

  “Anything at all,” Reardon said, “no matter how insignificant it might seem to you.”

  “Well, you know,” Noble said slowly, “I think I did hear something while I was working with them elephants. I’d say it was about … let me see, well, about three o’clock or a little after. Had to be before three-thirty, though.”

  “What was it you heard?”

  “Well, just a kind of scuffing sound, like something being pushed or dragged on the ground, on the pavement, maybe.” Noble thought for a moment. “I mean, really there was kind of two different sounds.”

  “Two sounds?”

  “Yeah. One was like … like metal being pushed or dragged along the sidewalk. But the other sound was kind of muffled, you know?”

  “Did you hear them at the same time?”

  “Yeah, right at the same time. Right together.”

  “So whatever was being dragged or pushed was partly covered and partly not covered.”

  “That might be right,” Noble said. “I don’t know if it means anything or not.”

  Reardon smiled. “Maybe not,” he said, “but we like to know all the details. Do you know where the sound came from?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Noble said. “It was just on the other side of the elephant house, that’s all. But I could hear it pretty good. It’s real quiet in the zoo at that time of the morning and the sounds only lasted a few minutes. I didn’t pay much attention. But it wasn’t like a continuous sound. You’d hear it, then it would stop.”

  “There was a pause in between the sounds?”

  “Yeah,” Noble said, “like a pause. First you’d hear it, then it would stop, then you’d hear it again.”

  “How long did this sound last? How long did you hear it?”

  “Just a little while.”

  “It passed then?”

  “Yeah.”

  Reardon nodded and jotted in his notebook. “Did you hear anything else while you were there?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “When did you find the fallow deer?”

  “About three-thirty. I went to see if Bryant was around. I figured since Petrakis was out again — I mean since he wasn’t going to come to work — well, maybe Bryant would help me do the deer cage.”

  “Clean it?”

  “Yeah, clean it.”

  “Was Bryant around?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “Where was he?”

  Noble shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably working somewhere else around.”

  “So you went to clean the deer cage yourself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you found them?”

  Noble grimaced. “It was terrible,” he said. “They was beat up awful bad. Just awful. Blood everywhere. I never seen nothing like it.”

  “Yes,” Reardon said. “What did you do when you found them like that?”

  “I called the police.”

  “Immediately?”

  “Yeah. I run right to the little workroom in the main building and called the cops. I was real scared myself, you know? I mean, I figured that a guy that would do that to them deer might hang around and do it to a person just as easy, you know? So I just wanted the cops to get on over there in a hurry.”

  “Did you see anyone at all in the zoo between, say, midnight and three in the morning?”

  “Sure,” Noble said, “there was a couple making out on the bench across from the
bird house till about two-thirty.”

  “Did you see them leave?”

  “Yeah. They went up the stairs to Fifth Avenue.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “They looked like Puerto Ricans to me,” Noble said with a little grin.

  “Anything unusual about them?”

  “No. Nothing that I can remember. Just a couple making out.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “An old man. I remember thinking that that was odd. You know, old people don’t usually come out that time of night.”

  “When was he there?”

  “Same time as those Puerto Ricans. He came by just before they left.”

  “Did he stop?”

  “No, he just kept walking right through the zoo and up to Fifth Avenue. He was walking kind of fast. I guess he was a little afraid of being out that time of night.”

  “Did anything strike you as unusual about him?” Reardon asked.

  “No. And those were the only people I saw.”

  “And you’re sure that all of them had left the zoo by two-thirty?”

  “Yeah, as far as I know, they was all gone. I didn’t see nobody except Bryant after that.”

  The interrogation lasted for another hour. Reardon went over each detail again. He went over the sounds Noble had heard. He asked him to describe the couple. He took him back through his statements about the old man he claimed to have seen and asked him if he knew whether or not either the couple or the old man had gone into any of the buildings on Fifth Avenue. Noble said that they had simply disappeared up the stairs and he had not seen them again. Had he seen any of them before in the zoo? No. Had he noticed anyone spending a lot of time at or near the cage of the fallow deer? No. Reardon asked him what he knew about his fellow workers. Harry Bryant, Noble said, was a “funny guy” who constantly made jokes about the animals, particularly when they were in the process of copulation. Did Bryant show any resentment toward his work? No. Toward the animals? No. Did he ever drink on duty? No. Andros Petrakis was “a nervous type” who did not say much. But as far as Noble knew, Petrakis liked his work, enjoyed the animals as much as could be expected and bore no grudges related to the zoo.

  After Noble left, Reardon reviewed the notes he had taken during the questioning. The interrogation of Gilbert Noble had established at least one possibility. If the scuffing sounds that Noble heard were not made by the killer but by someone else, then it was possible that the unknown person might have seen the killing. But what could have made the sounds Noble described? Reardon thought they could have been made by a man with a limp dragging one foot behind him after each step. But there were two sounds, one metallic and harsh and the other muffled, and they had occurred simultaneously. In that case, Reardon thought, Noble may have actually heard the killer dragging two weapons behind him as he walked, one of them wrapped in something, the other uncovered. But the sounds Noble described were not continuous, like objects being dragged. Instead, they were interrupted by pauses.

  Reardon went into Piccolini’s office and told him what Noble had described. Piccolini leaned back in his chair and chewed a cigar. Anything less than an arrest seemed uninteresting to him.

  “So what do you make of it?” he asked after Reardon had finished.

  “I really don’t know,” Reardon said.

  Piccolini crushed the stub of his cigar into the ashtray on his desk. “Mr. Van Allen has asked to speak with the head of the investigation. He wants a firsthand report. I made an appointment for you to see him at three-thirty this afternoon.”

  “Schedule him for tomorrow morning,” Reardon said. “I’m seeing Bryant this afternoon.”

  “No,” Piccolini said. “Schedule Bryant for tomorrow morning.”

  “Look, Mario, if Noble heard something it’s just possible that Bryant saw something.”

  “It can wait.”

  “You’ve been a detective a long time,” Reardon said. “You know better than that.”

  Piccolini opened a desk drawer, pulled out some papers and threw them on his desk. He started shuffling through them. “Bryant will have to wait,” he said.

  Reardon shrugged. “All right. When is Van Allen coming over?”

  “He’s not coming over here. You’re going over there.”

  “Where?”

  “His place on Fifth Avenue. Right across from the zoo.” Piccolini took a small piece of paper and started to write down Van Allen’s address.

  “I know where it is,” Reardon said brusquely, and turned to leave the office. For the first time in all the years he’d worked for Piccolini, he did not close the door behind him.

  5

  On his way over to the Van Allen penthouse later in the afternoon Reardon was waiting on the curb at the corner of 68th Street and Park Avenue when the orange “Don’t Walk” sign across the wide avenue changed to “Walk.” He stepped off the curb, and at that instant — and for only a brief moment — he did not know where he was. He looked around in dismay, as if he had been suddenly placed in an unfamiliar universe. The city had taken on an immense and terrifying aspect, its sounds rushing at him like famished beasts. The moment passed so quickly that he did not even have time to tremble or call out, but the terror — as it passed — was overwhelmingly real.

  As he walked across Park Avenue, shaken by the experience, the feeling of having blacked out, if only momentarily, made him think of the Arturo case. He remembered Arturo as a slim, awkward young man who wore an enormous pair of black-framed glasses and seemed extremely interested in police work. For months he had haunted the station house. Week after week Arturo would go directly to the desk sergeant and be waved through the outer vestibule and up the stairs to where the precinct records were kept. He was thought to be a graduate student researching some phase of urban police work. But Benedict Arturo, all those weeks he sat poring over the precinct files, was instead investigating himself — quietly, methodically assembling the evidence that would alter his life forever, evidence from which Reardon had later learned Arturo’s story.

  As a child Arturo had sometimes experienced blackouts. At first these periods were short, no more than a few minutes. But by the time he entered college he was experiencing amnesiac lapses which sometimes lasted as long as seven hours. He could not recall anything that happened to him during these lapses, although friends subsequently assured him that they had seen him eating quietly in the cafeteria or strolling the halls of the library.

  Although confused and frightened by these lapses, Arturo chose to ignore them. Then late one evening he awoke from one of them to find his face badly scratched. He discovered unexplained rips in his clothing, mud on his shoes. After that strange articles began appearing in his room, each time following a period of amnesia. Once it was a red handbag slung over his bedpost. On another occasion he found a single brown high-heel shoe standing upright just inside his door.

  Reardon had always thought that it would not be unusual for an individual faced with things so bizarre to force them from his mind and ignore them. After all, his own wife, Millie, had ignored the cancer she knew was killing her. But Benedict Arturo did not do that. He made charts listing every quarter hour of every day. He carried them with him everywhere, marking the passage of each fifteen minutes. In this way he was able to closely approximate the times during which he was not conscious of his acts. He then compared these times with newspaper reports of crimes, particularly assaults on women. Those details that he could not get from the newspapers he obtained from precinct records. Slowly, meticulously, he convicted himself of at least six assaults, one of which had ended in a brutal murder. The document that emerged from this investigation of himself was a peculiar, brilliant masterpiece of self-incrimination. He turned it over to the police as he might have submitted a master’s thesis. Then he took himself to Bellevue and committed himself to a mental institution for the criminally insane.

  Until now Reardon had never believed that Arturo was quite as mad as he had seemed. He
could accept irresistible compulsions; but to kill while totally unaware, that was further than Reardon had allowed himself to go. Then he had stood on a corner he had passed a thousand times and had not known where he was. It was no comfort to know that anything was possible.

  Before going up to the Van Allen penthouse he walked to the zoo and sat down again on a bench across from the cage of the fallow deer. He reviewed what he had: two dead deer, a sound heard by an employee of the zoo, a couple kissing, and an old man walking quickly through the zoo before the killings; no weapon and no witnesses.

  And then, of course, there was Wallace Van Allen and his children. Van Allen’s wife had died in an air crash in Paris three years before. The Van Allens, Reardon thought: prominent, wealthy, liberal, political. He looked up through the trees to their penthouse above.

  When he reached Van Allen’s building Reardon was astonished to find a familiar face. It was the doorman, Ben Steadman, an old detective who had retired six years earlier.

  Politely, but with an initial, visible embarrassment, Steadman opened the door as Reardon approached.

  “Hello, John,” he said.

  “Hello, Ben,” Reardon replied, trying to conceal his own embarrassment.

  “Who you looking for?”

  “I’m supposed to see Wallace Van Allen this afternoon.”

  “You mean about the deer?” Steadman asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “They transfer you out of homicide?”

  “No,” Reardon said, “they just wanted to put me on this one for a while.”

  “How come?”

  “Because of Van Allen’s money.”

  “Jesus, that’s something, huh?”

  “Did you see anything that night?” Reardon asked, in order to change from an uncomfortable subject.

  Steadman smiled. “This an interrogation, Detective Reardon?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “I told the boys who came over before. I had a bad night that night. Stomach trouble. Something I ate, probably. Anyway, I spent most of the morning on the toilet.”

  “Yeah,” Reardon said, “but did you see anything at all that looked suspicious while you were out here?”