Blood Innocents

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Did you check the phone book again?” Reardon asked.

  “Yeah. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s like those two girls were found in a hotel room on another planet. It’s like they just got into New York the night they got wasted and didn’t know anybody, not a single person in the whole city.”

  Reardon turned back toward the doors to the street.

  “Where are you going?” Mathesson asked.

  “I’m going to check out where they worked.”

  “You want some company?”

  Reardon could see that Mathesson was looking at him worriedly, appraising him, trying to determine if he was still fit enough to be a homicide detective. “No,” he replied, “you go ahead with your other cases. I’ll handle it.”

  Tristan Designers looked to Reardon like a chic setup. The walls of the foyer were covered with mahogany paneling, and everything else looked as if it was either plated with gold or upholstered in silk.

  “May I help you, sir?” the receptionist asked, and it was clear from the abrupt tone of her voice that Reardon did not resemble anyone she thought might have serious, legitimate business there.

  He took out his detective’s shield. “My name is John Reardon. I’m investigating the murder of one of your employees. I’d like to talk to whoever supervised Miss Ortovsky.”

  “That would be Helene Pynchon,” the receptionist said. “You’d like to talk with her now?”

  Reardon gazed patiently at the receptionist. “Well, two women have been murdered,” he said.

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” the receptionist said. “Just a moment, please. Please have a seat over there. I’ll call Miss Pynchon right away.” She sounded to Reardon a lot like his son’s secretary, a person who spent her life protecting somebody who wouldn’t use the same toilet she did.

  When Helene Pynchon walked out into the foyer her appearance did not surprise Reardon. She was tall and dark-haired with thin, pale arms. She was dressed in a loose-fitting pastel blouse and a long skirt. Reardon guessed her age at approximately forty-five. She looked like hundreds of other women Reardon had seen and faintly desired as they walked along Park Avenue or Central Park West.

  “Good afternoon,” she said pleasantly as Reardon rose from his chair. “I’m Helene Pynchon.”

  “My name is Reardon. I’m investigating the murders of Karen Ortovsky and her roommate. Is there someplace we could talk?”

  “Of course. Come into my office, won’t you.”

  In her office Miss Pynchon offered Reardon a chair and seated herself behind the desk.

  “Now,” she said, “how can I help? We were so upset when we found out about Karen this morning. Her death, I mean.”

  “Did you know her very well?”

  “Not very. Only professionally. She did excellent work at Tristan.”

  “Did you ever see her socially?”

  “No. Never. It was purely a professional association. I make it a point never to have personal relationships with anyone on my staff.”

  Reardon nodded. He didn’t go out with the mayor much either. “How about anybody else on your staff?” he asked. “Did she have any close friends here?”

  Miss Pynchon thought a moment. “I believe she and Laura Murray had a nonprofessional relationship.”

  “Nonprofessional? You mean they saw each other away from work?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Do you know of anybody else who might have been a friend of Miss Ortovsky?”

  Miss Pynchon shook her head. “No, I don’t know of anyone else. Laura might know, however.”

  “I’d like to see her.”

  “Surely,” Miss Pynchon said. “Take a right at the end of this hall. Laura’s office will be the fourth one on your left.”

  When Reardon entered her office Laura Murray was busily sketching designs on a pad of unlined paper. Her desk was covered with dress patterns, pencils and pieces of cloth. They seemed to flow over the desk like wax down the sides of a melting candle.

  “Laura Murray?” Reardon asked.

  She looked up quizzically. “That’s me.” She was dressed in a red turtleneck sweater, which in its brightness seemed less modest than the woman who wore it. She had a plain, undistinguished face — one, Reardon knew, that would be difficult to recall without a photograph.

  Reardon pulled out his identification. “My name is John Reardon,” he said. “I’m investigating the murders of Karen Ortovsky and her roommate.”

  He saw her face suddenly tense, but he did not know whether the chance meant fear or embarrassment or sorrow. “I understand that you knew Miss Ortovsky. Socially, I mean. Away from work.”

  “Yes, I did.” She nodded toward an empty chair. “Please sit down.”

  When Reardon had sat down Laura Murray stood up, quietly closed the door of her office, then returned to the chair behind her desk. She folded her hands in front of her and rested them on the desk. Reardon could see that they were trembling very slightly.

  “How well did you know her?” he asked.

  “We were close friends. We met here. She’d been working here for a year when I came. I guess I’ve known her for about four years.”

  Reardon noticed that when Laura Murray spoke to him she seemed to stare over his shoulder or down at some object on her desk, not wanting their eyes to meet. “There’s no reason to be nervous, Miss Murray,” he assured her. “This is just routine. Legwork, that’s all. We have to interview everybody we can find who knew Miss Ortovsky.”

  She snapped a pencil from the top of her desk and rolled it between the fingertips of both her hands.

  “So you knew her for about four years?” Reardon said.

  “Yes. We were close friends.”

  Suddenly the door to the office opened. Laura started in her chair, and Reardon turned to see a short, middle-aged man standing in the doorway, his hand still resting on the doorknob. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you were busy, Laura. Miss Pynchon just wants to know when your sketches will be ready.”

  “This afternoon,” Laura snapped.

  “Thanks,” the man said. He retreated out of the doorway, carefully closing the door behind him.

  Reardon could see that Laura was jittery, almost panicky. “Miss Murray,” he said gently, “would you like to go for a walk with me? Someplace where we can talk privately?”

  She smiled sadly. “Yes, that might be the best thing.”

  “There’s a coffee shop just down the street,” Reardon said. “It should be just about empty this time of day.”

  “Fine,” Laura said.

  At the coffee shop Reardon felt it necessary to make something very clear. “Miss Murray,” he said, “we know a lot about Karen Ortovsky already. Or at least I think we do. What I mean is, we know …” Reardon stopped. He could not think of the right words. “We know her sexual habits.” They were still not the right words, and Reardon knew it.

  Laura looked at him with relief. “I see,” she said. “I’m glad. There’s no point in avoiding anything then. We had — Karen and I — we had the same — as you say — sexual habits.”

  “I’m only interested in this if it could have had anything to do with her death,” Reardon said quickly. “Believe me, Miss Murray, it’s of no importance to me. This is a murder investigation. I’m not concerned with anything else. I just want to know who killed Karen and her roommate.”

  “I didn’t know her roommate very well,” Laura said. “But before Lee came along Karen and I were very close. I don’t know what you think about anything, Mr. Reardon, but Karen was a good person, a sweet person.”

  “I’m sure she was,” Reardon said, and he meant it. He suspected that the same could be said for Laura Murray.

  “I loved her,” she said. “For a while as a lover, then later as a friend. When I first came to New York from Virginia I didn’t know anybody. I’m shy. It’s hard for me to get to know people. For a year I didn’t know anybody except the local grocer, people like th
at. People you just say ‘hello’ and ‘good-bye’ to, and that’s it. Then I came to work at Tristan, and I met Karen. For a long time we were just friends. That’s all. Just friends. We’d go to movies together, or to dinner, things like that. We even double-dated a few times. Then one night — after a double date, as a matter of fact — I stayed at her apartment. It was late and so rather than make my date go all the way to Brooklyn Heights with me on the subway, I just stayed with Karen. It seemed like the most reasonable thing to do.” She stopped and looked at Reardon, evaluating him, then came to some decision in her mind. “We made love that night. I don’t know how it happened. It just did.”

  The tension was gone from her face, and all the nervousness. She sat calmly, glancing occasionally out the window at nothing in particular. For a moment Reardon was lost in the spacious decency of her face. He wondered if that was what it felt like, to be released.

  “When did you see her last?” he asked quietly.

  “Wednesday. The Wednesday before she died. At work. I haven’t seen Karen outside the office for two years. She met Lee, and after that I didn’t see her anymore except at work.”

  “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.