During the period of Mooney’s recuperation, they were both civil, even overly solicitous to each other. Nonetheless, a stiffness and reserve hobbled each daily encounter. On one occasion they spoke of what they called their “Last Supper” brawl the night of Mooney’s attack. But neither of them had broached the subject of the attack itself and the rather indelicate circumstances under which it had occurred.
It was going on five weeks that Mooney had stayed out of work. With each day he grew increasingly restless. It was brilliant October weather. There was a snap in the air. All the trees in the park had gone a vivid wine red, shot through with threads of russet and yellow. Squirrels scampered over the footpaths, trundling off precious cargoes of acorns down winter holes.
Coming in late one afternoon from the park and waiting for Fritzi to get home, he put on the 6:00 P.M. news and was nearly knocked off his seat by a report that the police had had their first major break in the seven-year-old Broadway Bombardier case.
A thirty-year-old itinerant by the name of Gary Holmes from Seattle had been picked up by one of the Special Task Forces men on a West Forty-ninth Street rooftop.
Holmes had a police record. There was a long string of arrests. Ever since his fifteenth birthday he had been in trouble with the police and in and out of various correctional institutions. His crimes had been mostly of a minor order, but more recently, his operations had escalated into armed robbery.
Holmes admitted that he had lived for years on various rooftops round the city. Asked why he chose rooftops he maintained that (1) they were easily accessible, and (2) they were safer than basements or abandoned buildings, both of which frightened him.
Apprehended by two plainclothesmen on a roof in the theater district, Holmes admitted to raining objects down on the crowds below. They were good-sized rocks, however, nothing of the forty-pound cinder-block class. When questioned specifically regarding the cinder-block incidents over the past years, he proudly proclaimed himself to be the Broadway Bombardier but he had no clear recollection of specific events. In addition, he conceded that he suffered from a severe drinking problem, had lapses of memory and couldn’t remember much of what he’d been up to over the past five years. Taken into custody that day, he was now at Bellevue undergoing psychiatric evaluation.
They then showed some footage of rooftops where Holmes had been active. Two or three people were interviewed on the street. They smiled and said they could now breathe a bit more easily, knowing that this “maniac” was in custody.
Next, pictures were shown of Holmes being booked at the station house. He was a lank, scruffy individual with furtive eyes and a huge mop of uncombed hair. All the while he was being booked, there was an idiotic grin on his face—a look of satisfaction as if after a life devoid of any significant accomplishment, he had finally hit the big time.
Mooney watched it all with a sense of mounting anger. Surely a good part of that stemmed from the fact that it had taken place without him. He perceived something unjust in that—even conspiratorial, as if his good friends at Manhattan South had meanly and deliberately stolen his show.
When Dowd came on the screen, expatiating on the ardors of the investigation, which he personally had moved forward, despite one heartbreaking setback after the next, Mooney was nearly purple with rage.
The next day Mooney went back to the cardiologist. An EKG and a series of blood tests were done.
He was weighed, then clapped on the back by the doctor and pronounced fit enough to return to work. On the following day, dressed in blue serge, but still a bit wobbly on his legs, he strode purposefully through the heavy swinging front doors of Manhattan South.
65
Holmes did not look at all like the man Mooney had seen on TV. This was a tall, bony man, all sinew and knots who gave the impression of great physical strength. The first thing Mooney noted were the hands clasped lightly together, as if in prayer, then the face, phlegmatic and dull, staring out at him from behind the wire mesh. The dark, beetled brow and the prognathous jaw created a vaguely simian expression. His large hands moved incessantly, as he spoke nonstop to Mooney, who all the while scribbled into his pad.
“It wasn’t that I disliked any of them,” Gary Holmes’s voice was unexpectedly wispy. “It wasn’t as if I cared one way or the other which one of them or who I got. Just so’s I got me one.”
“Did you plan any of those things?” Mooney asked.
Holmes’s eyes flared with indignation. “Hell. Sure I planned them. I sat down and planned ‘em all. Right down to the last detail. I hadda do it that way. It was that important to me.”
“Important? How?”
“How?” Holmes gaped at him as if he pitied the man’s stupidity. “I wanted to get it right. I was makin’ my statement.”
“Your statement?”
“Sure. Like I told you. About injustice, like, and bigotry and folks beatin’ up on each other. Kids starvin’ like, you know?” Pathetic bravado made him appear to swell behind the mesh screen, and his head nodded as if in passionate agreement with himself.
“What does creaming a crowd with a forty-pound cinder block have to do with starving kids?”
“Can’t you see that?” Holmes snapped. “All them folks comin’ out of theaters. Goin’ to fancy restaurants with their credit cards and all. Feedin’ their faces, like, while little kids starve.”
“What little kids?”
The question appeared to baffle Holmes. He shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. They’re all around.” They were sitting in a small visitors area of the Creedmore Psychiatric Hospital. The room was small, institutional green, with low ceilings and a wire partition dividing the patients’ area from that of the visitors’. On either side of the partition were long green metal tables with hard wood chairs set at intervals down its entire length.
At that moment no one else was in the room, only Mooney and Gary Holmes, the man who had proclaimed himself the Broadway Bombardier. Mooney had been granted a half hour to speak with him and he’d had to fight with Mulvaney for every minute of that time.
“Who was it you confessed to, Gary?”
Holmes’s brows arched as if the question had made him suddenly wary. “How would I know their names?”
Mooney sighed. “When making an arrest, police officers often identify themselves. I was just curious.” Mooney watched him gauging the effect of his words. “Did they?”
“No. They didn’t do nothin’ like that.”
“Never mind. I can find out who they were. How come you let them catch you?”
“I didn’t let them catch me. I was just up on the roof tossin’ rocks …”
“And you tossed a couple and just waited around for someone to come up and get you. Right?”
The intent of the detective’s question appeared to elude him. Mooney attempted to clarify it. “When you toss rocks down on crowds of people, do you generally wait around for the cops to come up and … Never mind. What kind of rocks were these you tossed? How big?”
Holmes’s face flodded with childish animation. “Big as footballs.” He demonstrated the size by spreading his thumb and forefinger. “That big.” Mooney didn’t have to ask the question. He knew very well the size of the missiles, having examined shattered fragments of them closely at the police laboratory. The rocks recovered from the area where Holmes had hurled them down into the theater crowds weighed one or two pounds apiece, certainly nothing of the order of a football. As missiles deigned to be dropped from a height, they might have done damage, but it was doubtful they would have killed.
By this time Mooney had learned quite a bit about Gary Holmes—an itinerant, a bit of plankton that had washed up in the city. As criminal records go, Holmes’s was decidedly small beer. What he did have going for him was a hefty psychiatric dossier. In and out of mental institutions all of his life, he’d been examined on several occasions by state psychiatrists—a number of times for petty theft, and once for having exposed himself to lady passengers on
a subway platform.
“What were you doing up on the roof that night, Gary?”
“I told you, man. I was makin’ my statement.”
“Oh, you mean the starving kids?”
Holmes looked hurt. “That’s right. The starvin’ kids. And you’re part of that same stinkin’ system that takes the food out of their mouths and gives it all to the rich.”
“Okay,” Mooney conceded. “I’m part of that system. Still, if you’ve gotta cream people to make your statement, you could just as well do it on the street. Anyplace. Why does it have to be the roof?”
” ‘Cause I like roofs, man. Like I told you. When I first come to the city I used to live up on the roof. I can breathe up there. I’m free.”
“How long did you live on the roofs?”
Once again Holmes’s eyes narrowed with distrust. “How long? Like ever since I come to New York.”
“When was that?”
“In 1975.”
“When in seventy-five?”
“Hell, I don’t know. The spring sometime.”
“And you got yourself a roof as soon as you arrived?”
“No. Not then.” The questions had started to come a bit too rapidly for Holmes. “When I first come, I lived in the Village.”
“The Village?”
“On Barrow Street. Then after that I lived up in Harlem awhile. It was a lot cheaper but I couldn’t stand the jigs. They’d rip you off for anything up there. For a nickel.”
“So that’s when you took to the rooftops?”
“Sure. Much safer. Safer than bein’ on the goddamn ground.”
“When’d you cream your first victim?”
“In 1977.”
“Who was that? Do you know?”
“Sure. That was Carrera.”
Mooney shook his head. “You mean Catalonia? That was seventy-five.”
Holmes frowned. “Oh, seventy-five? Oh, that’s right. Catalonia was seventy-five.”
“When did you do the second?”
“The second? That was 1976. May thirty-first. That was O’Meggins.”
Mooney’s eyes fluttered. “I gotta hand it to you, Holmes. You know your stuff.”
It was pure ridicule, but Gary Holmes took it as a compliment. He grinned with good-natured idiocy. “I make it my business to know.”
“When’d you first go to Wilmette, Gary?”
“Where?”
“Wilmette. Wilmette, Illinois.”
“Illinois? Never been there.” Holmes leered smugly as if he’d felt he’d just successfully parried a clever investigative thrust.
“When’d you start using the Boyd alias?”
“Who?”
“Boyd. Boyd.” Mooney’s rising bark momentarily stunned him. “When you called yourself Anthony Boyd and were in the import-export business at 3143 Crown Drive, Wilmette.”
Holmes’s confusion deepened. “I never … Say, what the hell is this, anyway?”
“That’s what I’m asking you, Gary. What the hell is this? What the hell are you trying to pull here?” Holmes half rose, then sat, then rose again. “I don’t …”
“Have you ever been hospitalized in New York?” Mooney snapped at him through the cage. “Hospitalized?”
“Have you ever been treated for injuries of any sort at Beth Israel Hospital?”
For the first time, Holmes seemed frightened. “Beth Israel,” Mooney shouted the words at him. “What the hell’s that?”
Mooney stood. “Never mind. You’re a phony, Holmes. You’re nothing.”
“Who the fuck you callin’ nothin’?” The heavy boned face came up close against the wire mesh, sending a blast of warm sour breath against Mooney’s cheek.
“You’re a lot of bullshit,” Mooney snarled. “You did nothing.”
Holmes lunged at the divider, flinging his chair backward against the concrete wall as he did so. Mooney watched the chair shatter. The wire mesh swelled outward toward him, along with Holmes spread-eagled athwart it. His stubby fingers squirmed toward Mooney like serpents through the reticulations.
Mooney stepped back, watching the mesh sag toward him, bearing with it the bulk of Holmes’s big frame splayed wide against it.
“I wasted them fuckers,” Holmes bellowed, “all seven of them. The honeymoon couple last spring. And the guy that’s crippled for life. I suppose you didn’t read about that? I did him, too. That was me.” Mooney watched three guards slip unseen into the inmates’ pen behind him.
“You call that nothin’? Hah! I suppose you didn’t see me on TV. I suppose …”
Mooney watched transfixed as the three guards pounced on the big, flailing figure, wrestling him to the ground. The noise was sickening. Holmes’s bellowing had the sound of a stricken animal being slaughtered.
After, when they’d subdued him and led him off, Mooney slumped back down into a chair. His damp forehead propped in the palm of his hand, he tried to compose himself.
Outside in the hospital parking lot, Michael Defasio watched him climb back into the car, then switched the ignition on. He peered across at the big detective through the gathering dusk. “You look like you seen a ghost.”
They started to roll out down the wide gravel drive, wet and steaming from the recent rain. Out on the Van Wyck Expressway the tires began to whine over the wet macadam. Mooney, who’d been silent, suddenly started to speak. “Don’t tell me you swallowed that bullshit in there? How’d you get this confession? Come on. Out with it. Did Mulvaney put you up to it? How’d they get this phony confession? Come on. Tell me.”
“Phony? Hey, wait a minute …”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t steamroll this poor apehead.”
“No one steamrolled anyone.” Defasio’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. Rain streamed down the windshield, and the wipers, carving clear arcs in the glass, made a high, squeaking sound.
“For one thing, the guy’s a nutso. He’d confess to anything, including snatching the Lindbergh kid. Don’t you see what you’ve done, dummy? You got the wrong fucking guy.”
66
“I don’t care what you tell him, or how. Just so long as you tell him.”
“Why don’t you tell him?”
“If I have to tell him, Mulvaney, you might just as well turn in your shield. You’re of no use to me. I still can’t believe you authorized that visit to Creed-more.”
“I couldn’t very well deny it, could I? As of that moment he was still in charge of the investigation. So far as I knew, right?”
“Well, now you know differently. As of now it’s official,” Commissioner Dowd bellowed into the phone. On the other end Mulvaney winced and yanked the receiver away from his ear. “He’s off the investigation. Now you go tell him.”
The voice continued to rail, but distantly now, into the roiled dusty air of the ancient precinct house.
“I take it you’ll be issuing a directive then, Commissioner?”
“The moment I hang up this phone. And you keep him away from Holmes now. Away from anything that has to do with this case. I don’t care what you tell him. Just keep him out of everyone’s hair. Give him something else to do.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“I don’t care, I told you. That’s your job, Mulvaney. You just keep him off this. As far as we’re concerned the case is closed. Holmes is our man. The investigation is closed. Everything’s peaceful. Everyone’s happy.”
Dowd slammed down the phone. Mulvaney winced again on the other end, but he was smiling. It was a smug little smile, full of triumph and self-vindication. What he’d been telling them all along had finally come to pass. Mooney was a fraud, and now everyone knew that.
Why he continued to insist without qualification that this Mr. A. Boyd, the man in the hospital, and the Phantom Bombardier were one and the same was beyond comprehension. Mulvaney took it to be just one further proof of the stupid, mulish, irrationality that had doomed Frank Mooney’s career from the start.
The Bombardier had done them the singular good turn of surrendering himself and getting everyone off the hook. Mooney, of course, could never be content with that. It had all happened while he was away. Gary Holmes had not even the simple decency to time his surrender so that Mooney could have been there to make the arrest.
Now Mooney was going about discrediting the suspect’s story and, at the same time, the DA’s case. Mooney had to be silenced before he blew the case against Holmes out of the water, causing not only profound embarrassment to the department, but to Mulvaney himself. There was no question of firing Mooney as a means of silencing him. Such actions, Mulvaney knew only too well, would have Mooney out broadcasting his story to every newspaper and network within shouting distance. And there were plenty, with axes to grind, who would be more than happy to tell the story of how the police railroaded a demented itinerant into confessing that he was the Bombardier. It was not that Mulvaney didn’t believe that Holmes was the real Bombardier. He did, but he also understood that there were enough holes in his story to demonstrate effectively that he wasn’t the Bombardier, even if he did toss a few rocks off a rooftop.
The most effective way to silence Mooney, Mulvaney reasoned, was by rewarding him with some new investigation. Even if it was somewhat less than a plum, it had to be all gussied up to look like one. It had to be perceived by one and all as a bonus for superb investigative work on the Bombardier case and not the chastisement and banishment it really was.
Mulvaney lit his cold cigar and buzzed the intercom on his desk. In the next moment a tall, black female police sergeant, who served as Mulvaney’s administrative assistant, poked her head in the door.
“Priscilla—is Mooney still out there?”
The sergeant checked her wristwatch. “He should be. He doesn’t go off duty for another twenty minutes.”
“Send him in, will you please?”
67
The investigation Mooney was reassigned to had been given a Class I priority. A molester of small children rampaging through a low-income West Side housing project was sensational enough for it to have brought out the media in droves. Pressure from parent and school groups had been persistent enough to have earned the investigation its priority rating.
Night-Bloom Page 32