Night of the Juggler

by William P. McGivern

  “Unruh?”

  “Yeah, Unruh, that’s what this guy Fritzel said.”

  “Well, there was a Howard or John Unruh who walked out of his house in Camden on a nice, sunny day, hell, this was before our time, Sokolsky, way back in the fifties, maybe even before that, and he shot and killed thirteen people, a lot of them kids, I remember.”

  Sokolsky seemed pleased to corroborate his lieutenant’s last comment. “This guy, Babe Fritzel, told me one little kid was sitting on a rocking horse in a barbershop waiting to get his hair cut when Unruh blasted him. Fritzel was one of the cops who collared Unruh.”

  “You told him to get lost?”

  “Told Mr. Babe Fritzel to go back to Teaneck and watch the show on TV in living color.”

  “What the hell is wrong with everybody?”

  Sokolsky had hesitated a moment and then, clearing his throat, had said, “Well, Lieutenant, my idea is that-”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Tonnelli said, and put the phone back in its cradle.

  Tonnelli’s doorbell rang. He checked the.38 in the holster on his belt, turned two locks, and opened his front door the six inches allowed by the burglar chain and found himself staring into the luminous, white-circled eyes of Samantha Spade, which were shadowed only slightly by the floppy brim of her red velvet hat.

  “Real big of you to drop by,” he said.

  “Might have something, Lieutenant,” Samantha said. “Buy a lady a drink?”

  “You’re on.” Tonnelli said, and unhooked the burglar chain.

  “It was on Eighth Avenue, up around a Hundred and Eleventh or a Hundred and Twelfth, six-maybe eight-months ago,” Samantha said.

  Samantha still wore her flared black leather coat and the black denim pants suit with sequins glittering in patriotic designs, but she had added a half dozen thick gold bracelets to her wrists.

  “Bourbon all right?”

  “With a splash of water.”

  Tonnelli went into his small kitchen and made two drinks and brought one back to Samantha, who reclined languidly in a deep leather chair, her legs crossed, the overhead lights glistening on her white boots.

  “Go on,” Tonnelli said.

  “Where was I?”

  “Eighth Avenue between a Hundred and Eleventh and a Hundred and Twelfth.”

  “One of my sharks was making loans in that area, laying the bread on the guys from a car. Couple of my studs, Coke and Biggie, were keeping the line nice and orderly, taking down names, addresses, the amount of loot and collecting signatures. Most of the guys were old customers, brothers and a few Puerto Ricans, so this big honkie, well-he stood out. I mean he was like a rebel yell at some spade corn boil. He was big, Gypsy. Six-four, my guys told me. And from what they said, a chest and shoulders like yours. He was wearing a leather jacket and some kind of a funky cap. My studs told me later he looked out to lunch permanent upstairs.”

  Tonnelli was taking notes on a legal pad. “How about his age?”

  “Thirty, thirty-five. Anyway, the big honkie seemed to think it was like Santa Claus handing out the money. When he gets up to the paymaster, he reaches for some loot. They tried to get his name, find out where he worked, but they couldn’t get through to him. Finally, they gave him a piece of paper and a pencil and told him to write all that shit down, and that’s when he went ape.”

  “But did he write anything?” the Gypsy asked her.

  “He tried to, but apparently he didn’t know how, and that’s what sent him around the bend. He just exploded, knocked two of my studs down, and it takes some kind of man to do that little thing. Then he smashed the windshield of the car with his fist and ran south down Eighth Avenue. The brothers took after him, you better believe it, but he split into Central Park. That’s where they lost him.”

  “Where exactly, Maybelle?”

  “There’s an awful lot of hiding places between Central Park West and Harlem Lake. You’d need dogs to find anybody.”

  “Your guys have anything else on his physical description?”

  She frowned faintly and gently rubbed her jaw with long, tapering fingers. “Not really, Vince.” Still frowning, she ticked off items. “He was big. He was white. Leather jacket, silly-looking hat, I think they said yellow.”

  “That’s important. Are you sure they said that? That he was wearing a yellow cap?”

  “How the shit you expect me to be sure of anything happened six months ago?”

  Tonnelli sighed. “You always had a rotten temper and brass knuckles on your tongue.”

  “Hush,” she said, and her expression became thoughtful. “I remember a couple of other things. The one word that came through clear sounded like a man’s name. It was Lanny.”

  “Just that. No last name?”

  She shook her head. “Just Lanny. And one of my guys told me this weirdo had real small eyes and a kind of bulging forehead.”

  “Your people ever see him around again?”

  Samantha shook her head. “And you can believe they were looking.”

  “Fix yourself another drink if you want, the bottle’s in the kitchen. Can’t say for sure, but what you got might be some help.”

  As Tonnelli went to the telephone, Samantha stood with languid, slimly muscled grace and wandered toward the kitchen. Thanks a lot, Gypsy, she was thinking, realizing with an anticipation she dreaded that soon the first fires of migraine would ignite in her head. Emma and Missoura, you lazy niggers, you should have walked home through the rain. .

  Lieutenant Tonnelli gave his orders to the operator at Central. “I want you to patch this description through to every precinct and division, to all boroughs. I want it to go first to Detective Sergeant Boyle at the Thirteenth and to Detective Clem Scott at the Nineteenth. Arrest on sight with drawn guns a male Caucasian, thirty to thirty-five years of age. . ”

  In the neat and functional kitchen, Samantha added a mild splash of bourbon to her drink and strolled back into the living room, looking about curiously at Tonnelli’s photographs, the worn leather furniture, and the framed pictures of Tonnelli’s parents which stood on a marble mantel above the gas-log fireplace.

  Tonnelli replaced the phone in its cradle and glanced appraisingly at Samantha, while the tip of his forefinger ran slowly up and down the scar that streaked the left side of his dark face. She interpreted the question in his eyes and sighed with weary finality.

  “What else you want, Gypsy?”

  “There’s a police sketch artist standing by at my headquarters,”

  Tonnelli said. “Your studs may have spotted the bastard we call the Juggler. My question is: Will they work with a police artist and help us come up with a picture?”

  In for a penny, she thought, and rubbed her forehead as the first needles of pain began their precise probings of her brain.

  “Coke and Biggie’ll help out, Lieutenant,” she said. “I’ll get ‘em over to the Nineteenth.”

  Because of her pain and the knowledge of what caused it, she felt a need to hurt him; her smile became cool and disparaging as she glanced about the room.

  “So this is how the great Vincent Tonnelli winds up, All-State guard, honest cop, a bachelor in a two-room pad with some chairs and sofas that would go under the hammer for about fifty bucks.”

  Tonnelli smiled and flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the sleeve of his cashmere jacket. “I wear it all on my back, Sam.”

  She looked at him curiously. “Saving your ginzo voodoo streak, you usually walk the cool side of the street. What’s your hang-up now? Why you want to nail this bastard to the wall in strips?”

  “I’m a cop. It’s my job.”

  “Bull, baby, I make a living reading people, and knowing you, Gypsy, I could do it by Braille.”

  “It shows then?”

  “Believe it. It comes through.”

  Over the years, Tonnelli had carefully studied his emotions and reactions, well aware that the intensity of his anger could escalate to a dangerous sickness, a platea
u at which it might become a liability rather than an asset. He had seen that happen to cops who had lost their partners and had blamed themselves for it. They wanted victims to ease their rage and guilt. But after a certain point, considerations of innocence and involvement became irrelevant, and any victim would feed their need for revenge.

  At first Tonnelli had believed his passion had been rooted in the simple violations of his turf. The murders had been committed in his village of Manhattan. It was the taboo of territory, of tribe, of temples and shrines.

  But as the years passed, Tonnelli realized it was more than that.

  “Say, how’s that sister of yours?” Samantha asked him. “Adela? I heard she got married and has a lot of kids.”

  That was so close to his pain that her words struck him with an almost physical impact. A lot of kids, sure, he thought bitterly. Three nieces, two nephews. His only kin and blood. When he’d walk by toy stores, he’d stop and look at things he’d like to buy for his nieces and nephews but couldn’t. Big Raggedy Ann dolls, trains, windup animals that jumped through hoops, model airplanes you could fly by remote control. Hell, he’d once thought about getting a department loan and taking them all out to Disneyland. Or having them over here when he had three-day weekends. They could go to restaurants and ride around in his unmarked car and listen to the police calls. He could show them the photograph albums. The old man in his apron and the cheeses hanging from the ceiling in his market on Fulton Street. And the colored photograph of his mother without a streak of white in her hair at sixty and a temper that didn’t go with those big, soulful eyes. And never a crooked dime out of that store or in their home. He knew damn well Adela wouldn’t have any of those pictures, wouldn’t even want them.

  He would never know his nieces and nephews, never hold them in his arms, and that was why he would destroy the Juggler, because that madman’s victims were surrogates for the kin he could never know and love.

  “So how is she, Gypsy?”

  “She’s fine, just great,” Tonnelli said quickly, too quickly. Samantha realized, and decided not to press it. She knew, in point of fact, that Adela Tonnelli was married to a Greek used-car dealer who fenced hot heaps up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and the Gypsy must know that, too, which meant he didn’t see his sister or her kids anymore.

  Tonnelli wasn’t the worst of them. In fact, he was the best of them, and her need to hurt him was gone.

  If there was anything good about cops, it was studs like Gypsy Tonnelli. He was straight and honest and wouldn’t mark a man for life with the butt of his gun for kicks. There was a ton of weary pain in Tonnelli, and that was a town Samantha had played, and she knew all its dirty streets and alleys. At times she was so sick and full of despair from listening to one whining loser after another that it flawed her physically; there were nights when her headaches and muscle cramps almost drove her insane, and it was pills and the bottle then, and not being able to hate Whitey enough, and the annealing but sick and unrealizable dream of being on a warm beach with clean air around her and only the sound of slowly curling waves under a big, blue sky, and maybe-and this was the sickness-having someone like little Manolo to take care of and protect, and hell, maybe even love. .

  Tonnelli knew from the masked compassion in Samantha’s expression that she probably knew all about Stav Tragis, his sister’s husband, who fenced hot cars and sold them to red-necks and Okies in North and South Carolina. And he was grateful that she was obviously not going to hit him with it, not sting him with the fact that he couldn’t see his sister or her children anymore because she was married to a common thief.

  “You know, Sam, why don’t you try my side of the street for a while?”

  Tonnelli asked her. “Who knows, you might get to like it.”

  “You forget, Gypsy, us black cats don’t have no spots to change. And for Christ’s sake, Pope, the next time you ask me over, would you spring for a bottle of scotch?”

  One of the offices in Tonnelli’s headquarters in the 13th Precinct House had been converted into a “darkroom” by a police sketch artist, Detective First Grade Todd Webb. He had set up a portable screen and a sixteen-millimeter projector, and all functional witnesses were present, save Joey Harpe, who would be along within a few minutes, since the little Irisher and his parents were already en route to the 19th in a squad car.

  Lieutenant Tonnelli stood alongside Patrolman Max Prima, whose back was like a ramrod and whose eyes were wide with an almost comical respect, which were his reactions to the top brass on the scene, Deputy Chief of Detectives Walter Greene and, an even more significant figure, the borough commander of South Manhattan himself, a two-star cop, Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin, who, with his slight frame and silver-white hair and rimless spectacles, looked more like a parish priest from his native county of Cork than the chief of all police in the southern half of this sprawling, million-footed city.

  Coke Roosevelt and Biggie Lewis stood apart from the police, talking to each other in soft, chuckling voices; if they found it a distinction to be in the presence of such exalted police officers, they were concealing it nicely.

  At last-it was then about three fifteen on the morning of October 15-the office door opened, and the little Irish boy, Joey Harpe, came into the room with his vaguely apprehensive parents.

  It was Joey Harpe who had seen the man who had murdered Jenny Goldman in the basement of a building on Twenty-ninth Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. .

  With all lights turned off, Detective Todd Webb went to work, flashing various shapes of skulls on the screen, long, square, round, and oval, until a consensus was reached by Patrolman Prima, the small Irish boy, and the two big blacks that the man they had all mutually observed had a head that was nearly as round as a bowling ball.

  Detective Webb left that outline on the screen and began with deliberate speed to add and subtract from it various kinds and shapes of mouths, noses, and eyes and ears, until at last, after considerable argument and disagreement, the functional group of witnesses settled on a front and profile sketch of a man’s face with these characteristics: small eyes, a heavy forehead, scraggly blond hair, a corded, powerful neck, and comically protruding ears.

  Copies of this sketch would be processed and distributed by squad cars to every precinct of every borough of New York City.

  They would not be distributed to local newspapers or television stations.

  This was Chief Inspector Chip Larkin’s decision.

  As an impeccably schooled and highly intelligent police officer Chief Larkin knew that the Juggler could be classified medically as a Constitutional Psychopath Inferior, whose shames and humiliations, whose rages and angers, induced by his own construct of physical chemicals, would helplessly and forever drive him into antisocial violence. They would catch him, of course, because he would continue on his course of savage and sadistic murders until they did.

  But Chief Larkin wanted him stopped tonight, not ten years from now.

  Ten young girls from now. .

  And that was behind his decision not to release the sketches of the Juggler to newsmen. They would need surprise and secrecy to bait traps for the Juggler.

  “Thank you, son, and thank you, gentlemen,” Chief Larkin said, and then he turned his parish priest’s smile on Patrolman Max Prima.

  “That was a good, sharp bit of work, Officer.”

  In a move that surprised all of them, young Joey Harpe whipped out a notebook and a pencil and asked Biggie Lewis and Coke Roosevelt for their autographs.

  Chapter 7

  The kitten, purring, made its way slowly across the brown blanket of Gus Soltik’s bed, stopping occasionally to peer about alertly and cautiously at its new environment. Near Gus Soltik’s wrinkled and soiled pillow the kitten found a bit of food, a crumb of a doughnut with sugar on it. It sniffed at it, and while it licked at the grains of sugar, the door opened and Gus Soltik came in from the second-floor corridor with a saucer of milk in his bi
g hands. He closed the door, locked it, and placed the dish of milk on the floor.

  The room was close and warm, and there was an animal smell to it.

  Gus Soltik removed his yellow cap and pulled off his brown sweater, and the light from the single overhead bulb gleamed yellow on Gus Soltik’s thick, wide shoulders, which were spotted with tiny clusters of pimples. He picked up the kitten, which as warm and soft in his great hands, and squeezed it gently, increasing the pressure till the little cat whimpered. “Not hurt,” he said, speaking slowly and quietly, and then he placed the kitten on the floor beside the saucer of milk.

  The kitten caused words to form in Gus Soltik’s mind. “Cages” and “Lanny.” The kitten made him think of the “cages.” They roared and frightened people, but Gus Soltik knew in some fashion they were helpless. They were him. Like him. He could frighten, but he was helpless. It created an agony of bewilderment and confusion in his head when he saw clerks making the cash register ring, adding up numbers, changing the paper money into the hard, shiny money. He could lift crates from the floor that none of the others could, but they had to point to where they wanted him to put them down. He never knew.

  “Lanny.” And food. Lanny had tried to explain to him about the animals that played the musical instruments around the clock. But he couldn’t understand the music and distrusted it. But Lanny talked quietly. Lanny worked in the big building near the zoo and the pond.

  He liked Lanny, and once he had brought a sack of old food from the store. Green stuff and oranges and potatoes they put in the alley when the store closed. The food was for the cages. Gus Soltik wanted to do something for them because Lanny was good to him.

  But Lanny explained, slowly and quietly, that only certain people could give food to the cages. He felt none of the helpless anger that was like a fire in him when such things happened. When he didn’t understand, Lanny talked slow and smiled, and it was different. .

  And once, and this was their secret, Lanny had shown him how to start and drive the truck.

  With the back of his hand, Gus Soltik massaged the welt in his low, round forehead which had been caused by the tight, restricting rim of his yellow leather cap. He spoke again to the kitten, saying, “Not hurt,” and smiled in an earnest and surprised fashion when the little animal began to lap at the milk with its darting pink tongue. It was a pretty cage, he thought, black with a white spot between its eyes.