The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Moving quickly, Alexandra dressed, rushed the boy who had spent the night with her out of the apartment, and headed downtown for her permit.

  At 7:45 A.M. Detective Mickey McEntee, wearing running clothes, sneakers, and a glittering diamond in his ear, parked his Starion Turbo in the parking lot of the police precinct in Central Park, the Two-Two. McEntee had been with the Central Park Precinct only nine months. Before that he’d been with Bronx Narcotics, where he’d worked undercover, funky dark glasses on his eyes and fake needle tracks on his arms. He made the marks each morning with red ink and a splash of a coagulant that caused skin to shrivel, and he would never forget the way his adrenaline had surged when one of the dealers with whom he was hanging out reached toward his fake scar and started fingering it. He’d reared back, put on his ugliest expression, and shouted, “Get your hands off me, man! That hurts!”

  McEntee missed the action he’d had in the Bronx. Compared to those days, the park precinct was Toys “R” Us. Despite the way the public looked at it. They saw the park as some kind of terror zone. But in fact it had fewer major crimes than any precinct in the city. Which was why he didn’t like it. Yeah, he’d helped look for a guy who’d murdered a homeless man up near the Lasker Pool, and for another who’d killed a homosexual outside the Ramble, and he’d helped catch a weirdo who’d stabbed a hooker forty-three times and left her body, if you could call what he saw a body, in a garbage bag at the northernmost tip of the park. But mostly nothing happened. The guys he worked with in the detective squad almost never needed to put on their homicide suits, the two- or three-piece outfits they wore when they went out to face the public. Their homicide suits, and their homicide hats as well, got so dusty that whenever the guys did need to wear them they had to go over them first with a clothes brush.

  Still, being bored wasn’t what McEntee minded most about the park precinct. What he minded most was that on the rare occasions when something did happen, the boss wouldn’t let him catch the case. Even though it had been his turn up for months. The boss gave the assignments to his partner, Joe Kennedy, because Kennedy had been around a long time and had experience. He just got to watch and do whatever Kennedy told him to do. How was he supposed to get enough experience to catch a case if they wouldn’t give you one because you didn’t have the experience? Catch 22. Catch Two-Two. The only bright side of the park precinct was that it put him in the Great Outdoors, which meant he could barbecue steak in the parking lot for dinner and run around the reservoir before starting work.

  He’d have his run this morning, McEntee planned. Then after the run he’d shower and shave and get into the jeans he used for work clothes. He locked up the car and ambled into the precinct house. He was just inside the door when Kennedy saw him and shouted, “Homicide!”

  “We got a homicide?” he asked incredulously. There hadn’t been one since spring.

  “None of this ‘we’ stuff,” Kennedy said. “‘We’ is a French word. You got a homicide. I’m gonna let you have this one.”

  Yeah, sure, McEntee thought. If the boss don’t volunteer you.

  The thought of the boss brought him up short. The guy wasn’t necessarily there every day, but he’d be in today for sure. He always showed up at homicides. And here he was in his running clothes and without a shave. Racing to his locker, he got out his razor and scraped it hastily across his stubble, bloodying his face in three places before he got himself clean. Then he searched in the locker for some homicide clothes. He didn’t have a homicide suit like Kennedy and the rest of the guys had. He hadn’t gotten around to buying one yet. All he had were his Bronx Narcotics outfits. Dark pants, skinny leather ties, pastel-colored shirts, and a pearl-gray linen jacket. He slipped on black pants, a mauve shirt, and a black leather tie, then pulled the jacket over his shoulders. The outfit would just have to do. Anyway, it wasn’t so bad. It just looked more like Miami Vice than the Central Park detective squad.

  Moments later the boss arrived, and he and Kennedy and their boss jumped into a car and sped to the back of the Museum.

  At a few minutes before 8 A.M., John Cotter, New York Newsday’s new metropolitan editor, reported to the paper’s offices. It was his first day on the job, and when he walked in he had in mind spending the morning taking it easy, getting to know the staff and how the place operated. But even before he reached his desk, a guy at the teletype machine beckoned him over and said, “Looks like a pretty good one at Central Park.”

  Cotter glanced at the release from the police department that was coming over the teletype and knew the guy who’d called it to his attention was right. Yeah, this was a good story. The dead girl was white. The death of a white girl always sells papers. By eight, he was assigning a reporter and a photographer to the story. “Let’s dance with it,” he told them.

  Standing behind The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the grove of trees where the girl’s body had been found, McEntee told himself that no matter how unlikely the prospects of his catching this case were, he was going to make a try for it as soon as the right time came. That wasn’t yet. Right now Nightwatch, which handled the start of all crimes reported between midnight and 8 A.M., was still in charge. Their head, Detective Sergeant Wallace Ziens, was briefing a group of the Central Park detectives. “What we got here,” Ziens was saying, “is a girl. Young. White. We also got tire tracks.” He gestured at an area where the grass was matted down and explained that the biker who had found the body had moments earlier nearly been run down by a brown car traveling against traffic. “It looks as if,” Ziens went on, “whoever this girl is, she was killed by whoever was driving the brown car and then dumped here.”

  To break his tension, McEntee turned to Kennedy and ribbed him. “Naw, some of our own guys were probably sleeping here in a radio car,” he said. “Someone killed the girl. Then our guys woke up and saw the body. And they said, Jeez, it’s a crime. Let’s drive the other way fast.”

  Kennedy laughed, and McEntee felt more relaxed. When the briefing was over, he talked to some of the Nightwatch detectives who’d been on the scene for an hour already, then went to have a look at the body. Detectives from the Crime Scene Unit were working on it, taking photographs and looking for evidence. Hairs. Fluids. Fingerprints. They always got first crack on a case, recording and collecting whatever traces of the killer they could find on the body, and any traces of his or the victim’s presence at the scene of the crime. It was painstaking and time-consuming work, McEntee knew, so they would take a while to finish. He and the other detectives couldn’t examine the corpse until they were done. But in the meantime he could make a few observations. Eager to get going, McEntee stood over the body, which was no longer covered, and tried to figure out what had happened to the girl.

  She’d been strangled. That much was obvious. But she’d probably been assaulted, too. Her face was dirty, as if it had been pushed into the ground, her left eye was swollen, and around her nipples were gouges that looked like bite marks. Most likely she tried to resist her attacker. That’s how she got so marked up. And most likely she was raped. That’s how come her clothes were all shoved up, and her breasts and pubic area exposed.

  He was touched by the girl’s body. She looked so young. And so well groomed. Somehow, cops were always affected when a dead woman looked well groomed. It made them think about their wives or girlfriends. And except for the dirt and marks on her, this girl looked unusually tidy. Her hair was lustrous, and she had a deep tan, one she’d clearly worked hard at getting. It showed the traces of the straps of several different bathing suits. One of the Nightwatch detectives McEntee had talked to had said the girl was probably a hooker, but McEntee didn’t think so now that he’d seen her.

  Anyway, it probably wasn’t the girl’s identity that he’d have to worry about if he caught the case. That would get straightened out when the Crime Scene Unit finished its work and let the rest of the guys search her pockets. There was a jean jacket draped over her arm. Probably there’d be ID in there. The kille
r was another story. Who could he be? Looking at his handiwork, McEntee figured he already knew a bit about him. The guy was a callous sonofabitch. He had to be. Otherwise he’d have covered the girl up when he was done with her. And he was cruel. He had to be in order to strangle her. Take me, McEntee said to himself. I could shoot someone, but if I had to go hand to hand and choke a person to death, I’m not sure I could do it. To choke someone, you had to stand right up close to them and actually squeeze out your victim’s life.

  The clues he was getting made him feel better, even though he knew they weren’t much. But he went on regarding the body, hoping he’d find more. And then something odd struck him. The girl had a pierced ear, but no earring. That in itself wasn’t strange. He didn’t wear his earring all the time. But when he didn’t wear it for a while, the tiny hole in his lobe seemed to tighten up and grow almost imperceptible, whereas when he wore the earring and then removed it, the hole looked slightly stretched for quite a while afterward. The hole in the girl’s lobe had that stretched look he’d seen in his own. “Hey!” he shouted suddenly to the Crime Scene Unit detectives. “You guys remove an earring?”

  They hadn’t.

  After that McEntee decided to search for earrings. He didn’t know why he decided that. Maybe it was because when he turned away from the Crime Scene guys, he noticed a group of news photographers stampeding onto the roadway and said to himself that the last thing the Police Department wants to have are camera crews photographing guys standing around with their hands in their pockets. Whatever the reason, he said to Joe Kennedy, “Hey, she was wearing earrings. I’m sure of it. Let’s look for them.” Kennedy agreed, and the two of them began shuffling around the elm tree, peering into the thick layer of twigs and leaves that covered the ground like a rug.

  They saw nothing, so they kept on looking, moving their search to other trees in the area. They were checking beneath a crab-apple tree about forty-five feet north of the body when they saw something white on the ground. A dirty handkerchief, McEntee thought, and bent toward it. But it wasn’t a handkerchief. It was a pair of soiled panties. He studied the area. A few feet away from the panties, the ground looked peculiar. The twigs and leaves covering it had been scattered, leaving bits of earth visible. Maybe the girl struggled with her killer here, McEntee said to himself, maybe she tussled with him under the crab-apple tree and then ran away, only to be caught and killed under the elm. Or maybe she was even killed here and then dragged to the elm. “C’mere,” he called to the guys from Crime Scene. “Take a picture of this! Looks like there was a struggle here.”

  They refused to come over. “Naw, this was a dump job,” one of them called back. “The girl was dumped from the car that made the tracks.”

  “Her panties are here,” McEntee said. Behind him, cameramen were being kept back by park police and reporters were craning their necks. “How’d her panties get over here if she was dumped where the tracks are?”

  “Those aren’t her panties, that’s how.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “We looked at them. Too soiled. Those panties have probably been here for days. Anyway, we already got panties. A blue pair. From over near the tire tracks.”

  Two pair of panties so close to the scene? The park was really something! No matter. The panties he’d found were the right ones, McEntee was sure. What did the Crime Scene Unit know? They were a bunch of old hairbags. A bunch of guys who’d been on the job so long, they’d forgotten how to think. The girl had to have been over here, under the crab-apple tree. Not far from the panties were other signs. A lipstick case and a little black hairbow. “This wasn’t no dump job,” he grumbled to Kennedy, and Kennedy agreed.

  A few minutes later they discussed their theory with some Night-watch detectives. A couple of them agreed; they, too, had noticed the lipstick, the bow, and the ground disturbance. One of them had even gotten the Crime Scene Unit to dust the lipstick case and the bow for fingerprints. But when none had been found, Crime Scene had refused to collect the items. Still, the Nightwatch detective continued, there were now two factions in Nightwatch, a bunch of guys who believed the body had been dumped dead from the car and another who were seriously considering the idea that dumping wasn’t involved, that the victim had reached the park alive and struggled with someone under the crab-apple tree.

  McEntee was glad to hear about the factions. He felt certain the girl had run, or been dragged, from the crab-apple tree, and he felt absolutely certain the white panties, not the blue ones, were hers. Being something of a dude himself, he knew a bit about how people put their outfits together. The skirt that was pulled up around the girl’s waist was pink and white and made of a knit fabric. She’d never have worn dark blue panties under it. They’d have shown through. If Crime Scene won’t collect the panties, he decided, I’ll just have to do it myself. He bent down and, not wanting to touch them, lifted them up with the eraser end of a pencil. Then he shoved them into an envelope and put it into his pocket.

  By then, the Crime Scene Unit had finished processing the body. It was time to find out who she was. A couple of Nightwatch detectives lifted up the jean jacket draped across the arm and started looking through the pockets. They found a Pierre Cardin wallet with no money except, oddly, half of a dollar bill. But there were free passes to stylish clubs, a check stub from Fluties, and several pieces of identification. One listed the girl’s name and address. She was Jennifer Dawn Levin and she lived in SoHo.

  Once the information was recorded, the contents of the wallet were passed around. McEntee stared at a learner’s permit and a miniature diploma. Both permit and diploma had birthdates on them, but they weren’t the same. The learner’s permit said 1968, which would have made the girl eighteen. The diploma said 1964, which would have made her twenty-two. The diploma was a phony, McEntee thought, made so she could buy drinks. Then he noticed the day of her birth, May 21. “Unbelievable! Whata coincidence,” he said to Kennedy. “Same as my wife’s.”

  “You sure it’s not your wife?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where was your wife last night?”

  Joking about dead people was SOP. McEntee laughed. But he was only listening to Kennedy with half his mind. He was thinking that Nightwatch would be leaving any minute, and Ziens would be turning the case over to the Central Park Precinct. He had to keep his wits about him for that. Had to be ready to reach out for the case the moment Ziens passed it.

  Seconds later, it was time. Ziens called his men over, instructed them to return to headquarters, and told a couple of detectives from the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, a special detective unit assigned to help local precinct detectives do their work, to notify the girl’s family. Nightwatch was pulling out, he said. Then he looked over at McEntee’s boss and shouted, “Whose is this?”

  “Mine,” McEntee yelled. Kennedy looked surprised, but he didn’t say anything. Neither did the boss.

  “Spell your name,” Ziens said.

  McEntee called the letters out loudly. And then he was smiling. His first homicide! The thing had gone down like baseball. Finally it was his turn up.

  Carrying a bag stuffed with rubber gloves, aprons, specimen bottles, death certificates, and an automatic camera, Maria Alandy arrived in the park a little before ten o’clock. She had been with the medical examiner’s office for just two months, but was already well versed in the science of determining the causes of unexpected death. After leaving the Philippines, where she had attended medical school, she’d taken a residency in pathology at New York’s Metropolitan Hospital, and while there she had studied forensic pathology at the ME’s office. When her residency was over in June, the office had given her a fellowship to work downtown with them.

  Virtually every day since her fellowship had begun, she’d had autopsies to conduct or crime scenes to visit, even though summer wasn’t the ME office’s busy season. That was around Christmastime, when there was a rash of traffic accidents and suicides. Or in the sp
ring, when the ice melted and floaters turned up in the rivers. There were lots of floaters. The Hudson alone washed up about a hundred or so bodies every year. It was New York’s Ganges, the watery resting place of numerous dead, many of them victims of stabbings, shootings, and strangulations that had taken place elsewhere. Central Park was like the rivers in that respect, a place where the dead weren’t actually killed so much as deposited afterward.

  The dead girl in the park was Dr. Alandy’s first body of the day. After introducing herself to the police officers at the scene, she got out her camera and took photographs. Then she examined the body, making notes as she did so. The skin was cool. She saw abrasions on the chin and neck, the cheeks, forehead, nose, and right upper thigh. She saw a contusion above the left eye. She lifted the eyelids and saw pinpoint hemorrhages in their linings. The tiny hemorrhages, she knew, indicated that the neck had been compressed, causing an interruption in the blood flow to the brain. Strangulation, she wrote. Then she went on to the next body. She had lots of them on her assignment sheet today.

  Steve Levin was in his office on Lafayette Street, a spacious suite of rooms with an unobstructed, panoramic view of lower Manhattan, when two detectives entered the reception area and asked an assistant, “Can we speak with the boss?” He came out and invited them into the conference room.

  “Better sit down,” they told him.

  He did. Then slow and deliberate, one of them said, “Do you have a daughter named Jennifer?”

  “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” Steve asked.

  “She may be hurt.”

  Hurt? “Where is she?” Steve demanded.

  The second detective drew a breath and said, “Jennifer may not be with us any longer.”

  The detectives showed Steve Polaroid pictures of Jennifer taken in the park. He was stunned when he saw her face staring out at him from the shiny prints. He’d spoken to her less than twenty-four hours ago, told her he loved her, and that he’d see her tonight. For a moment he couldn’t believe that the pictures were really of Jennifer. Then his face crumpled. Beneath his tan, he went deathly pale.