by Linda Wolfe
Lafferty, finding no mutual interest in the subject of Ireland, switched the topic. “How long ya been goin’ to Dorrian’s?” he asked.
“About a year and a half.”
“Dorrian’s Red Hand.” Now Lafferty had found a good subject. “That’s the Red Hand of Ulster,” he said. “Ya know how the name came about?”
“No.”
“Well, back in the old days in Ireland, there was a king who was in charge of Ulster County. And what happened was, he had two sons. One was a good son, and the other was a bad son. The king was getting on in years, and he had to make a choice on which son was going to be the next king.” Lafferty liked telling stories, and he spun this one out, talking for about fifteen minutes until he reached the part where the king makes his two sons compete for their inheritance by seeing who can swim fastest to a distant shore, and one son lops off his hand with a sword and heaves the bloody member onto the shore in order to have at least a portion of himself touch shore first. “That was the good son,” Lafferty said.
By that time, Doyle had left. He was in charge of the investigation and he couldn’t waste all day listening to Lafferty’s stories. Besides, Lafferty knew what to do next.
A few minutes later, Lafferty gave up the chitchat and slipped into asking Robert questions—the same questions McEntee had. When had he left Dorrian’s? With whom? And what had he done after he left?
Robert wasn’t forthcoming. Despite the softening-up period, he continued to maintain that he hadn’t been with Jennifer and that his wounds had been caused by his cat.
No detective had as yet told Robert that he was being questioned about a dead girl, not a missing one. They hadn’t told him this, because they wanted to keep him talking, wanted to find out as much about his movements last night as they could. And they were afraid that if they dropped their pretense, let him know they’d brought him to the precinct not to help them find somebody but to explain why she was dead, he’d clam up. Maybe even ask for a lawyer.
It wasn’t honest. But it wasn’t illegal.
McEntee didn’t like the idea, but not because he was against playing tricks on people who may have killed others. He just felt talking turkey to Robert might bring him around. Make him come out with the truth, not run for cover. “Lemme confront him,” he begged Doyle after Lafferty’s efforts had failed. “Lemme tell him the girl is dead.”
The older man restrained the novice’s impatience. “Not yet,” Doyle said. “Maybe later.”
At 5 P.M. a crowd of reporters jostled into one of the rooms at the precinct house for a press conference on the killing in the park. The room was only a few feet away from where Robert was being questioned. But the reporters didn’t know about Robert. They knew only that a girl was dead and the police were looking for suspects.
A bemedaled captain filled the reporters in on facts about the dead girl. She’d been a waitress at Fluties until two weeks ago, he said. She’d lived on Mercer Street in SoHo. She’d been about to enter a college in Boston. She was last seen leaving an East Side bar.
“Could this be a ‘Mr. Goodbar’ killing?” one reporter called out. “Could she have picked up her killer in the bar?”
“Could be,” the police captain said.
Several reporters began scribbling leads right on the spot. From the start, what with the girl’s being white and young, the story had been sexy in the sense that editors used that word. Now, with the Mr. Goodbar angle, it would be really sexy.
At times the police left Robert alone, at times as many as half a dozen detectives crowded around him. They continued to question him; and he, apparently believing that they would never dream of connecting him to a killing if he acted polite and cooperative, answered their questions pleasantly as often as they were asked.
But he wasn’t altogether calm. Once while several detectives were in the room with him, he went to the little barred window that looked out onto the park and peered longingly outside. Traffic was snaking through the crosstown drive. “I’d better not stick my head out too far,” he murmured. “The buses come so close they could smash it right off.”
“Whatsa matter with you?” John Cotter shouted at a photographer. The photographer had just returned to Newsday empty-handed. At Fluties he’d asked a barman with a picture of Jennifer at a party if he could shoot the picture. While he’d waited for an answer, a TV reporter had made an exclusive deal for it.
Cotter was furious. Why had the photographer asked if he could shoot the picture, instead of clicking away instinctively? Didn’t the guy know the three rules of photojournalism? Number one was get the picture. Number two was get the picture. Number three was get the picture. If Newsday was going to compete with the other, better-established tabloids, it had to have pictures that could break your heart. The dead girl when she was alive and at a party, that would have done it. But now it looked as if the paper would have to run instead with a shot of paramedics loading her draped body into an ambulance.
Tomorrow, Cotter planned, he’d get in there and teach the photographers their job. Politeness? In journalism? That wasn’t what the work was all about. Especially with a story like this one, which was getting bigger by the hour. It was the kind of story that the middle-class reader could relate to. Something that could happen to any kid running around the pubs. The kind of story that would make people worry about their own kids. In a way, the identity of the girl wasn’t even important. It didn’t matter that her name was Jennifer Levin. She could have been Maggie Jones or Debbie Smith. Anybody. Identities were wood. You had to stack the wood, give the details. That was journalism. But what really mattered was what the story said about kids and bars and late hours.
He checked with his staff to make sure they were stacking up the wood. They were, and he got over his pique. Even without a mug of the dead girl, the story would probably make the front page tomorrow. For one thing, there wasn’t much else going on. There’d been a gas eruption in Cameroon, which had killed a thousand people. And a congress of international scientists in Vienna was theorizing that 24,000 people might die as a result of the recent nuclear accident at Chernobyl. But none of that sold papers. One murdered girl sold papers.
Toward evening, two detectives went to the home of Betsy Shankin. One was a chunky young blond detective named John Mullally. The other was a rugged-faced older man named Martin Gill.
“When was the last time you saw Jennifer?” Mullally said to Betsy when they’d gotten her in a car and were heading uptown to the Central Park precinct house.
“Early this morning.”
“Where?”
“Leaving Dorrian’s.”
“Who was she with?”
“Robert Chambers.”
“Did they go in separate directions?”
“No. They went together. Toward Eighty-sixth Street.”
“Is it possible that she left him and went for a pack of cigarettes?”
“Jen?” Betsy asked, incredulous. “No. She didn’t smoke.”
Gill listened, his eyes on the tangled rush-hour traffic.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Bob Chambers was asking a heavy-set police officer in a building adjacent to the precinct house in Central Park at around the time Betsy was traveling uptown. As soon as he’d gotten home from work, Bob had learned from Phyllis that Robert had been taken to the precinct. But although he’d come directly over, he hadn’t been allowed to see Robert or even to wait in the building where he was being questioned. He’d been sent to an annex, which was empty except for the corpulent officer. “I’m Mr. Chambers,” Bob went on. “My son, Robert, is next door, and I haven’t been able to see him.”
The man he was speaking to wasn’t very interested in his plight. “Well, the detectives over there are handling this, and they should be with you shortly,” he said. Then he started making small talk, asking Bob if he knew anything about hunting and telling him about a shooting trip he was planning.
Bob couldn’t have cared less. “Do you think
my son needs a lawyer?” he asked.
“You could hold off and see how things develop,” the officer said, then returned to the subject of hunting.
He was still talking about it when a few minutes before seven o’clock the phone rang. It was Phyllis. “Have you seen Robert?” she asked Bob.
“I’ve tried to,” he said. “But I haven’t been able.” He would have continued, would have told her how they were keeping him away from Robert, if he hadn’t been speaking to her on the precinct-house phone. It wasn’t private. “I’ll call you back,” he said abruptly and, hanging up, went out of the park to search out a pay phone.
On Central Park West he found one. But he didn’t call Phyllis right away. Instead he dug from his wallet the business card of Henry Putzel, the lawyer she’d hired back in April to represent Robert in the burglary affair. But whether it was because his eyes were tearing or just because it was growing dark, he couldn’t make out the numerals on the card. He had to ask a doorman to decipher the numbers and write them down in larger print.
When he returned to the phone booth and dialed the lawyer, all he got was an answering machine. Disappointed, Bob reported his efforts to Phyllis, then headed back to the park.
By seven o’clock Jennifer’s death had appeared in a late edition of the New York Post and been broadcast on radio and TV. Doyle decided it was time to step up the pressure on Robert, time to stop pretending to him that he was being questioned about a missing, not a dead girl. He’d been at the precinct more than four hours without changing his original story—that he hadn’t seen Jennifer since he left Dorrian’s. Maybe if he knew the police knew she was dead, he’d start talking. In any event, it would be interesting to see how he reacted.
Detective Lafferty, who had earlier tried to relax Robert with the story of how Dorrian’s Red Hand had gotten its name, was the one sent in to deliver the information. “I have some bad news for you,” he said bluntly to Robert. “I have to tell you that Jennifer Levin is dead.”
“Oh, no!” Robert cried out. Then he covered his eyes with his hands and asked, “How did she die?”
Lafferty measured his responses with a practiced eye. “I don’t know,” he said. “They’re doing the autopsy right now.”
Robert took his hands from his eyes. Lafferty saw that they were misty. “Try to relax,” he directed. “Try to relax, but try to think of anything that might be able to help us in this investigation. It’s that much more important now.”
Joan Huey was one of the first of Jennifer’s close friends to hear that she was dead. Joan was at her summer house in Southampton, where she and Jennifer had summered two years earlier. When a girlfriend called her with the news, she refused to believe it and accused her girlfriend of playing some kind of grisly practical joke on her. But when she heard the news on television, she flew into a rage. She began kicking and punching the walls. And all the time she kicked and punched, she kept thinking about Jennifer and how she used to fly into tantrums after fights with her family and bang her fists so hard against walls that her hands would get bruised.
The memory of Jennifer’s excitability made her own seem safe, and she went on punching until at last she stopped, stumbled out of the house, and sobbed in the gathering dusk.
It was nearly dark when Bob Chambers re-entered the grounds of the police precinct. The cars in the parking lot wore shrouds of shadows, and the trees overhead loomed like ominous giants. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” Bob thought, “the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The simple lines—they were known as the serenity prayer in the AA groups to which he belonged—had given him comfort in the past. Now he really needed comfort, needed to be able to think straight. Suddenly he bent his knees right there in the roughly paved parking lot, clasped his hands, rested his elbows against a car fender, and, head bowed, said the poem.
Manhattan North Detective Mike Sheehan, whose family had owned the bar on Third Avenue where Bob used to drink, had been working on the Levin case all day but hadn’t yet met Robert. He’d been at the park all morning and at the medical examiner’s office all afternoon. When he was briefed about the progress of the investigation at the precinct house in the early evening, he wanted to try his hand at doing some questioning. In his dozen years as a detective, he’d taken hundreds of confessions, become adept at gaining the confidence of suspects. The reason, in his opinion, was that he didn’t act superior to the suspects. He tried to make them think he liked and understood them, and sometimes he even tried to make them think that if he’d been in their shoes he’d have done the same rotten things they had. That’s how he’d gotten Manny Torres to confess. Manny had taken a girl up on a roof, stabbed her, and tossed her down into the street like so much garbage. When Manny started to break and said the reason he’d pulled his knife on the girl was because she’d suggested sex and then reneged on the offer, Sheehan hadn’t said what he was thinking, which was You little asshole, you’re full of shit. No, he’d acted as if stabbing a girl who said no was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and murmured, “Yeah, I’d probably have done the same thing.” Guys like Manny, Sheehan always said, believed they were acting within their God-given rights as men when they killed a rejecting girl. So he went along with them, acted friendly, made them think he shared their attitudes.
He was pretty sure he could make Robert Chambers think he shared his attitudes. They even had some things in common. The East Side? He’d grown up there himself, over on 96th and Madison. Dorrian’s? Jeez, he couldn’t say how many times he’d stopped in there. One of his sisters lived right across the street. Of course, according to all his fellow detectives, this Chambers was a rich kid, a preppie. Whereas he himself was just the son of a barkeep. But he was familiar with the Upper East Side rich kids. Knew how to talk to them. His sisters had dated nothing but. And he even knew the town house Chambers had given as his address. Once when he’d been a high school kid, his hair slicked back and his cheeks slathered with Old Spice, he’d gone to that very building to deliver a pair of shoes from the shoemaker he worked for after school. Yeah, maybe he and Chambers would find some things to talk about.
At eight he went in to see Robert. He introduced himself, gave Robert his card with its blue and gold Police Department shield, and said, “How’d you get those scratches?”
“My cat scratched me,” Robert explained patiently.
“Jeez,” Sheehan joked. “I have a cat. It’s like a regular house cat. Whadda you have? A mountain lion?”
Robert laughed, and, encouraged, Sheehan kept up the chatter. “You went to St. David’s?” he said. “I went to St. Francis Xavier. You ever heard of Xavier?”
“Yeah. That was a pretty tough school.”
“Damn right. I wore a uniform every day till I graduated.”
“I wore uniforms, too. I was in the Greys.”
“The Knickerbocker Greys? Jesus! We used to kick their ass.”
Again Robert laughed, so Sheehan went on with the banter, telling stories about the crack Boy Scout unit he’d belonged to as a kid and about growing up Catholic on the WASPy East Side. He shot the breeze for a long time, then turned once again to the subject of the dead girl. “You last saw her when you were leaving Dorrian’s?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Robert said. He sounded calm and relaxed.
Sheehan studied his sapphire eyes. “You know, some of her friends are saying you walked toward Eighty-sixth Street with her,” he said.
Robert was silent for a while. Then he said, “Yeah, well I did leave the bar with her, I guess.”
Sheehan was astonished. It was the first time all day there’d been any deviation in the story. “Come on, Rob,” he pressed ahead familiarly. “Those scratches on your face. The girl got no panties on. All her girlfriends are telling us she wanted to make it with you. Tell me what happened. Maybe she was coming on too strong. Maybe you weren’t in your proper frame of mind. Maybe it was an accident.”
Robert began rubbing his hands together. Then his breathing changed, became audible and irregular.
I did it, Sheehan told himself excitedly. He’s gonna change his story. Self-destruct. But although he’d gotten one new piece of information out of Robert, he couldn’t get anything else. Would the kid break? Or would he just sit tight all night?
Sweaty and hungry, Steve Saracco, an assistant district attorney at the Manhattan DA’s office, arrived home after a ten-hour workday and sank into a dining-room chair, too tired to shower before eating. He revived a little after downing a plate of his wife’s gusty macaroni and meatballs, but he still didn’t feel like stirring, so he stayed where he was and, pushing the dishes aside, spread the late edition of the Post out on the table. He was on page five when his eye lit on a headline that blazoned, WOMAN FOUND RAPED AND SLAIN IN CENTRAL PARK. “It is not known whether the woman was killed in a vehicle or somewhere else,” he read. “Police today are trying to find witnesses.”
Saracco felt a touch of energy returning to him. Although he’d been with the district attorney’s office for ten years and had tried over a hundred felonies, his adrenaline never failed to pump when he heard about a new homicide. An ex-Marine, he was the kind of assistant DA who acted as if each criminal he cross-examined had committed an act that affronted him not merely professionally but personally. In court, his steely face taut and his wiry body tense inside rumpled inexpensive suits, he was shortspoken. Out of court he was expansive, a man as ready to denounce the city’s thugs and muggers, creeps and killers, as any cop. Which was why, he figured, he got on well with cops. He talked their language, wasn’t uptight around them like the new breed of mealymouthed Harvard and Columbia Law ADA’s in the office. No, he was a Villanova Law grad and proud of it. That and his Marine stories went over big with the cops, and sometimes brought him advantages—tips about new cases, gossip about ongoing investigations—that other ADA’s would have given their right arms for.
Reading the story about the dead girl, he wished the cops well. New York had an annual crop of hundreds of unsolved homicides, but it wasn’t the cops’ fault, he thought. It was just that there were too few of them and too many of the lowlifes.