Blood Innocents

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Nothing, John,” Steadman said, “and I’ve got a trained eye.” He chuckled. “You never stop being a detective, you know.”

  Reardon smiled indulgently. “Well, which elevator do I take to Van Allen’s apartment?”

  “The penthouse has its own elevator,” Steadman said. “I’ll take you up.”

  Together they rode up in a mahogany-paneled elevator. Reardon, glancing at Steadman’s starched navy blue uniform with its shiny buttons and gilded brocade, saw his future possibilities and did not like them very much. He had hoped that he would be able to retire on a pension sufficient to his needs, at least if it could be augmented by the savings he and Millie had accumulated over the last thirty years, but Millie’s medical bills had virtually devoured the savings.

  When the elevator doors opened Reardon was ushered into the Van Allen apartment by a tall, middle-aged man who had the stiff, laconic manner of someone who had spent his life seeing to the trivial desires of others.

  “Please sit down,” he said. “Mr. Van Allen will be with you in a moment.”

  Reardon did not have to wait long, but while he waited his eyes roamed the room. It had the appearance of absolute stability, the confidence of its owners that they could deal with any conceivable distress.

  “Detective Reardon?” someone said from behind him.

  Reardon stood up. “Yes.”

  “Wallace Van Allen,” said the tall man who had just entered the room. He looked younger than the photographs Reardon had seen of him in the newspapers. He was dressed in a black three-piece suit that looked as if it had never been worn before. He thrust out his hand energetically and Reardon politely shook it.

  “I hear you’re one crack cop,” Mr. Van Allen said.

  “Just an old cop.”

  “That’s not what I hear,” Mr. Van Allen said. “Please sit down, sit down.”

  Reardon sat back down on the sofa. Mr. Van Allen pulled up a chair facing him. “Terrible thing,” he said, “just terrible.” He looked at Reardon. “Psychopath, I suppose.”

  Reardon nodded. He had been examining Van Allen’s face and had only barely heard his voice.

  “The killer must be a psychopath,” Mr. Van Allen repeated enthusiastically, emphasizing the word “killer.” “What else could explain such an atrocious act? He must be mentally ill. No sane person could do such a thing. Don’t you agree?”

  “Maybe,” Reardon said quietly.

  “Well, I’m given to understand that if anyone can catch the poor fellow it is you.”

  “We don’t have much to go on, right now.”

  “No one saw it, I suppose.”

  “Not that we know of.”

  Mr. Van Allen nodded his head sadly. “And no weapon either.”

  “How do you know?” Reardon asked.

  Mr. Van Allen looked embarrassed. “I only assumed.”

  Reardon did not believe him. He suspected that the details of the case were being fed to Van Allen from high police officials downtown.

  “Do you suppose the deer suffered much?” Mr. Van Allen asked.

  A strange question, Reardon thought. “Did you see them?”

  “Oh, no,” Mr. Van Allen said. “I don’t think I could. I suppose you know I donated those deer to the Children’s Zoo in honor of my children’s birthday. Beautiful animals. Very gentle. They were actually raised on our farm in the mountains. You should have seen them when they were young. So graceful, trotting about. I think they were my daughter’s favorite things.”

  “How old is your daughter?” Reardon asked, without really knowing why.

  “Sixteen.”

  “And your other children?”

  “A son. Also sixteen. Why?”

  “Just asking,” Reardon said.

  Mr. Van Allen leaned back in his seat, folding his hands tightly around the arms of his chair. He was suddenly staring at Reardon intently, almost fearfully, as a cautious, punctilious man might take in an unpredictable — and therefore frightening — event. It occurred to Reardon that this man had never experienced a policeman before. This adviser to mayors, senators and presidents had never descended into Reardon’s soiled, awkward, accusing world, had never in his life been suspected — officially suspected — of anything.

  Mr. Van Allen smiled and took a deep breath, but the anxiety was still in his eyes. “Yes,” he said slowly, almost guardedly, “my children are twins. They’re sixteen. They’ll both be off to college next year. Very expensive, as I’m sure you know.”

  Reardon said nothing.

  “Tell me,” Mr. Van Allen said, “do you think we’ll break this case?”

  “I don’t know,” Reardon replied. Most of the time he did not know, could not know. “There are no weapons and no witnesses.” There was no need to hold back information now. He suspected that at that moment Van Allen knew as much about the case as he did.

  “I see,” Mr. Van Allen said.

  “Like I said, not much to go on.”

  “No, it appears that way.”

  Suddenly, Mr. Van Allen slapped his legs and stood up. Reardon recognized it as one of his son Timothy’s new gestures. “Well,” said Mr. Van Allen, “I just want to personally express my gratitude and the gratitude of my family for all you and your colleagues are doing for us and the Children’s Zoo, and, I might add, for the City of New York.”

  It must have been a line he had said a thousand times, Reardon thought. It had been delivered like the concluding line of a campaign oration.

  Reardon stood up. “Sure.”

  Mr. Van Allen thrust out his hand again and Reardon shook it.

  “Thanks so much,” Mr. Van Allen said.

  Reardon nodded and moved toward the door.

  “Poor fellow,” Mr. Van Allen said wearily.

  “Who?” Reardon asked quickly. For a moment he thought the “poor fellow” was himself.

  “The guilty party. The man who harmed those innocent deer.”

  Reardon nodded once more and left the room the way he had come.

  Outside he waited in a narrow hallway for the elevator. The walls were decked with portraits of bearded men in stern black suits and women in dresses with lace sleeves. Porcelain vases rested on the two tables standing on opposite sides of the room. Reardon could not guess how much the tables and vases must have cost, but standing near them made him nervous. He wondered if Timothy could stand in such a room without fear or self-consciousness, without being afraid that with any move or gesture he might send some irreplaceable artifact crashing down on the marble floor. He wondered if his son had come that far and lost that much, but, finally, he could not blame him if he had.

  When the elevator door opened and Reardon stepped into the car with Steadman, he felt as though as had been released from prison.

  “Did you see Mr. Van Allen?” Steadman asked immediately.

  Reardon nodded.

  Steadman pushed a button and the elevator began its descent. “Nice place they got, huh? Did you see the aquarium they got?” Reardon noticed that there was some delight in his voice, as if it were his own aquarium.

  “Nice people, the Van Allens,” Steadman said, “real nice to everybody.”

  “Yeah.”

  When the penthouse elevator door opened Reardon found himself staring almost eye to eye with a young man who bore a striking resemblance to Wallace Van Allen. Reardon stepped aside, following Steadman into the lobby. Without a word, the young man leaped past him and into the elevator. Reardon turned for another look as the door closed.

  “Who’s that?” he asked Steadman.

  “Dwight Van Allen, Mr. Van Allen’s son.”

  “Where’s his sister, the daughter?”

  “She’s a weird one,” Steadman replied with visible caution. “She spends a lot of time in the park.”

  6

  WEDNESDAY

  The next morning Reardon looked up from his morning coffee in the precinct house to see an enormous man looming over his desk. He looked like th
e sort of man who never brought good news to anyone, whose complaints and irritabilities were always as exaggerated as himself.

  “Harry Bryant,” the man said.

  He was one of the largest men Reardon had ever seen. His arms hung massively from his shoulders, and each hand looked large enough to encircle a telephone pole. Reardon quickly surmised that such a man could easily sever the spine of a fallow deer with one blow.

  “Sit down,” Reardon said.

  Bryant sat down, and for a moment Reardon wondered if the chair would support him.

  “Want some coffee?” Reardon asked.

  “Nope.”

  Reardon took a drink from his cup and examined Bryant’s face. He had light brown hair, balding at the top. His eyes were blue and very watery, giving him the appearance of being continually on the verge of tears. He had a small mouth with a thin lower lip and almost no upper lip at all. And there was something beneath the face which Reardon could not touch upon exactly — a kind of boiling honesty in large matters, coupled with heedless deviousness in small ones.

  “I understand that you were on duty the morning the fallow deer were killed?” Reardon began.

  “That’s right.” Bryant took a bent cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. “I was there.” He threw his head back and blew a smoke ring.

  Sometimes, Reardon knew, an unnatural nonchalance while being interrogated was as damning as a fingerprint. But he did not think this was the case with Bryant. Rather, he suspected that Bryant was utterly innocent, knew it, and felt confident in that knowledge.

  “The deer were killed at approximately three-thirty A.M.,” Reardon said. “Were you anywhere near the deer cage at around that time?”

  Bryant looked at Reardon and smiled. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean if I tell the Police Department something, do they have to blab to the Parks Department?”

  “Depends on whether or not what you tell me is relevant to the case.”

  “Well, suppose a guy was guilty of goofing off, and that’s all?”

  “In that case, I would say that it has no relevance.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we can keep a secret.”

  “Well, in that case,” Bryant said with a wink, “I was goofing off.”

  “That’s okay,” Reardon said. “Like I said, that has nothing to do with the case.”

  “I’m not the only slacker, you know. Hell, I bet you soak a little extra time out of the lunch hour, right?”

  “Maybe.” Reardon shifted in his chair, impatient with Bryant’s cheekiness. “While you were in the park did you see anything unusual?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you know of anyone who might have a grudge against the Parks Department?”

  Bryant laughed. “Everybody who ever worked for that bunch of two-bit assholes has a grudge.”

  “Do you know of anybody who might take it out on the fallow deer?”

  “Hell, no!” Bryant exclaimed. “And if I’d seen that son of a bitch, seen him hurting those deer, I’d have broken his goddamn neck! He’d of looked like those deer before I got through with him!”

  “Noble talked about hearing something while he was working in the elephant cages,” Reardon said. “A sound. Two sounds, really. A kind of harsh, grating sound and a kind of muffled one. Noble said it sounded like something being dragged.”

  Bryant took a handkerchief from his back pocket and swabbed his brow. “Noble says he heard something like that?”

  “Yes. Around three or three-thirty, something like that.”

  “Oh, hell,” Bryant said, “that explains why I didn’t hear it. Like I said, I was goofing off.”

  “You were not in the zoo around that time?”

  “No, I was in a coffee shop.”

  “Where?”

  “On Second Avenue, over from the park. All-night place there. But, you know, you might ask Andros. He was on his way to the zoo around that time.”

  “Who was?”

  “Andros,” Bryant said. “You know, Petrakis.”

  “The other workman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought he was out sick.”

  “Well, he was in a way,” Bryant said. “He called in sick on Sunday afternoon, I understand. But I saw him walking by the coffee shop at about three A.M. Maybe a little before.” Bryant stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “Anyway, I called him in. He came in for just a minute, wouldn’t sit down. He’s been real upset lately on account of his wife’s been sick and he’s been thrown out of his apartment.”

  “He was evicted?”

  “Yeah, him and his whole goddamn family. I guess he couldn’t pay the rent because of the medical bills.”

  “So the landlord evicted him?”

  “That’s right,” Bryant said. “Wouldn’t you if you was his landlord?”

  Reardon avoided asking himself that question. “But he came to work that night?”

  “Yeah. He said he’d been busy with his kids, you know. The wife’s been sick and so he had to do all the work in the house.”

  “And you say he was upset?”

  “Yeah,” Bryant said, “upset and mad as hell.”

  “Who was he mad at?”

  “The landlord, who else?”

  Reardon nodded.

  “He was really pissed, you know what I mean?” Bryant said. “He didn’t know what he was going to do. He looked like he was about ready to give up on everything. He borrowed ten bucks from me, and he’s never done that before. I never seen him ask anybody on the job for a penny. But he was broke. I mean broke. So I gave him a ten spot. We was kind of friendly on the job, you know? We used to take our breaks together. We always used to go to this little coffee shop, the one I told you about, the one on Second Avenue.”

  “Did you see where he went when he left the coffee shop?”

  “Yeah, he walked out in the direction of the zoo.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. He crossed the street going toward the zoo, up Sixty-fourth Street,” Bryant said. “The coffee shop is right on the corner of Sixty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. I could see him for a good ways. He was walking toward the park.”

  “Why did he decide to come to work?”

  “Needed the money,” Bryant said. “Why do you decide to come to work?” He looked mockingly at Reardon. “He ran out of vacation time and sick time and all that, but they been letting him kind of work by the hour, you know?”

  “What time did he leave the coffee shop?” Reardon asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. About three A.M. or so, I guess.”

  “How long were you in the coffee shop?”

  “Too long. I should have been doing the aviary at about three.”

  “Why weren’t you?”

  “Have you ever owned a bird?”

  “No,” Reardon said.

  “Well, if you had you’d know they shit all the time, and when you got ten or fifteen birds in a cage, that cage is going to be covered with bird shit no matter how much you clean it. So I decided I’d stay a few extra minutes in the coffee shop and then just hose it down when I got back. That don’t take long.”

  “How long were you in the coffee shop?”

  “Hell, I must have been there for about an hour and a half, from a little before three till about four-thirty.”

  “What were you doing before you left the zoo?”

  “Well, for a while me and Gil was working on some of them monkey cages. Then Gil went to do the elephant cages.” Bryant winked. “He already had his break, you know?”

  Reardon nodded.

  “From about one to two-thirty,” Bryant added impishly.

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe not to you, but to the Parks Department it matters, by God. They’d raise holy shit if they knew.”

  “Uh huh,” Reardon sighed, no longer able to conceal his total indifference.r />
  “Poor old Petrakis,” Bryant said. “He should have stayed out one more night.”

  “Why?” Reardon asked.

  “Because I understand his wife died that night.”

  Reardon spent the rest of the day trying to get in touch with Andros Petrakis. He found the entire Petrakis story suspicious.

  During the early afternoon Reardon called the Petrakis home twenty-three times. There was no answer. The Parks Department informed Reardon that they had not heard from Petrakis since the Monday morning following the killings. At nine A.M. on Monday he had called to tell Mr. Raymond Cohen, his superior in the Parks Department, that his wife had died during the night and that he would not be back to work until the following Monday. The deteriorating condition of Mrs. Petrakis had been well known to Mr. Cohen, and consequently he had not associated the phone call and week’s absence with the slaughter that had taken place in the cage of the fallow deer during the early morning hours of that same day. It was noticed, however, that Petrakis had made his call from a pay phone booth. Petrakis had rambled somewhat in the conversation, using up the time allotted for a pay phone call, and had been interrupted by a recording warning him to terminate the conversation or deposit additional money. At that point, according to Mr. Cohen, Petrakis had quickly finished his conversation and hung up.

  Next Reardon called Harry Bryant to see if he had heard from Petrakis. He had not. Petrakis had not spoken to Bryant since the meeting in the coffee shop.

  “But I got the feeling you two were friendly,” Reardon said.

  “Well, we were in a way,” Bryant said, “but Andros was a kind of close-knit ethnic type. I got the feeling all his friends were Greek.” Bryant did not know any of Petrakis’ Greek friends.

  After speaking to Bryant, Reardon told Mathesson to find out who owned the building from which Petrakis had been evicted. Then he decided to visit the building himself.

  Until the eviction Petrakis and his family had lived at the top of a five-floor walk-up on 90th Street and First Avenue. It was a dirty, steaming tenement, not much different from thousands of others in the city. As he gazed up toward the fifth-floor windows Reardon could not imagine being evicted from such a place, being forcefully excluded from a rat hole like this. Where could a man and his family go, he thought, if they were already at the bottom?