The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  He had just finished the Post story when the phone rang and he picked it up to hear Mike Sheehan’s bluff voice. He knew it at once. He and the burly Irish detective were drinking buddies. “You read that thing in the paper about a girl killed in the park?” Sheehan asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Saracco said. “You got something?”

  “Yeah, we got the kid over here.”

  “No shit!”

  “Yeah. And he looks good. He’s got scratches all over him.”

  Saracco wasn’t tired at all anymore. If the kid Mike has really is good, he thought, and I go up to the precinct and take his confession, chances are the case will end up on my plate. And that’s exactly where Saracco wanted it. It already had media. Media cases were manna to ADA’s, no matter how long they’d been around. “You figure it’s him?” he asked eagerly.

  “Yeah. But he’s maintaining he didn’t do it. The boss wants a medical examiner to come up and check out the scratches. See if he was raked by a cat. Or a girl. Can you get us someone?”

  Saracco said he’d get right on it, and he worked it out for Sheehan in no time. A woman on night duty at the ME’s office promised she’d stand by to go up to the precinct. He called Sheehan back and told him the mission was accomplished. Sheehan said, “Great. How about you? Can you come up?”

  Just what Saracco had been hoping for—only there was a problem. He wasn’t on tonight’s chart, the list of ADA’s delegated to report to the precincts. He couldn’t bypass the chart’s red tape on his own, and if he asked his supervisor for the case he could end up looking bad to his colleagues, looking as if he had tried to steal someone else’s stuff. Still, for a good case like this, it was worth making enemies. “I’ll see if I can clear it through channels,” he told Sheehan. “I’ll get back to you.”

  A moment later he was on the phone with his supervisor. He outlined the situation, explained that he’d already done a little work for Manhattan North, and said that while he didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes, he’d sure like to go up to Central Park.

  The red tape didn’t snap right there and then. His supervisor called his supervisor. But after a while Saracco got the go-ahead.

  “Come and get me,” he reported happily back to Sheehan and, hanging up, jumped in the shower.

  Joel Coles, who was a Dorrian’s regular—he’d taken part in the fistfight that had erupted in the bar the night before—and who knew Robert from Hunter College, had been up in Boston all day. He’d driven there after Dorrian’s closed last night. Hot and weary, he’d just returned to his New York apartment, poured himself a cool drink, and stripped down to his undershorts when a friend of his telephoned. “Hey, Joel, didja do her?” his friend asked.

  Do her? Assuming his friend wanted to know if he’d scored with the girl he’d been with at Dorrian’s last night, Joel gave a macho “Yeah,” even though it wasn’t true. She’d turned him down at the end.

  A moment later he was damn sorry he lied. His friend said disdainfully, “Come on! It couldn’t have been you. It must’ve been Robert.”

  Robert? Scoring with his girl? “Whaddya mean Robert?” Joel asked, confused. Then his friend told him that Jennifer was dead and that the cops had picked up Robert and had been holding him all day.

  Joel didn’t have time to digest the information or even to react to it. Before he could get a word out, he heard a loud knock on the door and a loud voice saying, “Police!” He hung up, went to the door, and opened it to two cops. “We just want to ask you a few questions,” one of them said.

  As soon as Joel let them in, the other cop said, “Didja hear about Jennifer Levin’s death?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Joel said. But he couldn’t figure out why the cop was mentioning Jennifer. All he could think was Hey, Joel, whaddid ya do? Whaddid ya do this month that coulda got ya in trouble?

  Then gradually he understood, because the cops kept asking how well he knew Robert and what he was like. One of the cops was real nice. He acted friendly and even agreed to show off his gun. The other one was tough. He just kept glowering. They were playing good cop, bad cop. Just like in the movies.

  Joel answered their questions, but he felt funny talking to them in his undershorts. “Hey, fellas, lemme get dressed,” he said. They told him it was okay but they wouldn’t let him out of their sight. They followed him right into his bedroom. “Hey, fellas!” he said again as he went to his bureau, but they kept on standing there and eyeballing him. Then the bad cop said, “Hey, Joel, you look like a pretty big guy. Whaddya, play football?”

  It scared him. Whadda they, he thought. Trying to implicate me? He pulled open his shirt drawer and then quickly slammed it closed. In the back of the drawer was this copy of Playboy he’d stashed in there, and he just knew that if they saw it they’d think he was some sort of sex fiend or worse.

  He was still edgy when they put him in their car and started driving to the Central Park Precinct. But he felt even worse when he arrived. The place was jammed with cops, and as soon as he walked in the door they all stopped what they were doing and stared at him. Like I did it! Joel worried. But then he was taken into a little room and a detective started asking him questions, and the questions were not about his movements after he let Dorrian’s last night but about what the scene had been like at the bar, and he knew he wasn’t under suspicion.

  He told the detective everything he remembered about Dorrian’s. Told him how everyone had been partying and that he’d seen both Robert and Jennifer there. Then he was asked to write his statement down. He started to write, but as he was doing it the detective said, “This kid Robert was kind of horny, wasn’t he? Whyn’t ya write that down?”

  Joel shook his head. Jennifer had struck him as the horny one.

  “He wanted to meet a woman, right?” the cop went on.

  Joel put down his pen. “I’m not gonna write that,” he said.

  The detective let it go, but Joel felt upset after that. And he would have gone on feeling upset except that afterward, when he was done with the statement, they let him sit out in a corridor, and there he saw a whole bunch of kids he knew from Dorrian’s, even the girl who’d turned him down last night. Everyone was crying. At least the girls were. It was sad. But it was sort of fun, too. The girl who’d turned him down was blushing and giggling and saying, “Hey, Joel, does everyone here know I was fooling around with you last night?” and he talked to her and his friends and in the end decided that the whole thing was, when you got right down to it, sort of an adventure. Just like in the movies.

  Unaware of the crowd from Dorrian’s in the corridor, Robert was being questioned anew, this time by Detective Gill, who had escorted Betsy to the precinct. “Did you leave Dorrian’s with Jennifer?” the rugged-faced Gill inquired.

  “Yes,” Robert said. He’d said as much to Sheehan.

  Gill was extremely relaxed. Unlike McEntee, who was also in the room. And unlike, for that matter, nearly all the other detectives who had been in and out all afternoon and evening. They’d hedged their questions, fearing that if they were too confrontational with Robert they might blow the whole investigation. Make Robert demand an attorney. Gill seemed to have no such fears. Maybe it was because he was due to retire in a couple of weeks. So maybe for him it didn’t matter if the investigation fizzled out and the bosses looked bad. That’s what McEntee thought as he watched the older man, trying to pick up a few tips. “What did you do when you left Dorrian’s?” Gill was asking Robert.

  “I went one way. She went the other way,” Robert said. “To get a pack of cigarettes.”

  Gill gave Robert a skeptical look. “What would you say if I told you that we had witnesses who saw you and Jennifer going off together in the same direction?” he asked. “And that one of them says that Jennifer didn’t smoke?”

  It made Robert amend his previous statement. “Well, we walked away from Dorrian’s heading toward Eighty-sixth Street,” he said.

  “How’d you get that wound on your hand?�
�� Gill asked him next.

  “Same way I got these,” Robert said, indicating the scratches on his face. “I was playing with my cat. I threw her up in the air. And as she came down she clawed me.”

  “Well, you realize,” Gill said slowly, “that there are people who can tell the difference between wounds caused by animals and wounds caused by humans.”

  McEntee, who was perched on the edge of a desk, followed Gill’s lead. “Yeah. Like a medical examiner,” he said ominously.

  Robert hesitated. Then he said in a low voice, “I got the wounds from Jennifer.”

  Confrontation! McEntee thought. He’d wanted to try it hours ago.

  Gill wasn’t blinking an eye. “How did you get the wounds from Jennifer?” he asked.

  Robert began talking animatedly. He and Jen had walked together up to 86th Street, he explained, but there on a corner they’d gotten into an argument because he told her he no longer wanted to see her. “She got very annoyed over this and she scratched my face,” he said.

  “Where on Eighty-sixth Street did this occur?” Gill said.

  “In front of the doughnut shop on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Lexington.”

  “Well,” Gill said, his expression bland and his tone matter-of-fact. “There’s a Spanish fellow I know who works in the doughnut shop. What happens if I interview him and he tells me that he don’t remember any incident or he didn’t see anything like that.”

  “It wasn’t Eighty-sixth and Lexington,” Robert said swiftly. “It was Eighty-sixth and Park.”

  A few moments later Gill went out to tell Lieutenant Doyle that Robert was now admitting he’d been wounded by the dead girl.

  Gill’s really something, McEntee was thinking. I could learn a lot from him. Like that line about knowing someone in the doughnut shop. I gotta use a line like that myself. It was bullshit but it worked. He was sitting opposite Robert, and the room, vacant now of Gill’s commanding presence, had a silent, empty quality. McEntee concentrated on his own thoughts and ignored Robert, who also seemed preoccupied. Then suddenly, shattering the stillness, McEntee heard a round of high-pitched weeping from beyond the door.

  Robert heard it, too. “Is that Jen’s friends?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” McEntee nodded. “We’re talking to everybody.” Then he said, feeling a little like Gill, “You know. Everybody.”

  “They’re outside?” Robert asked.

  Robert’s question has a subtext, McEntee, nodding yes, thought. He’s starting to feel sorry for himself, starting to think of himself as inside and other people as outside. He gave Robert a stare, and when he did, noticed that the young man was breathing heavily and pressing clasped hands to the back of his head, as if to relieve some intense pressure in his skull.

  He’d better tell Doyle about this, McEntee decided, but just then the door swung open and in Doyle walked. Behind him was Gill. The two of them strode up to Robert, and Doyle burst out, “Why’d you change the story you told us all afternoon?”

  Robert shrugged.

  “The story you’re telling now is farfetched,” Doyle said. “I don’t believe it.” Still Robert didn’t reply. “I liked you,” Doyle went on. “I trusted you. I kind of pride myself at being a judge of human nature. But you had me completely fooled. And now I’m plain shocked. And thoroughly disappointed in you.”

  Robert hung his head.

  Doyle had berated Robert as a father might, and now he took a father’s prerogative and offered him redemption. Placing a muscular hand on his shoulder in a gesture of man-to-boy intimacy, he said, “Listen, I can understand you’re very nervous. I have sons of my own. But why don’t you get this off your chest.”

  It was a classic interrogatory technique, this urging of confession as a means to solace a guilty conscience and silence a pounding heart. Both Gill and McEntee recognized it and joined in with it. “Yeah, you’ll feel better,” McEntee said. “Yeah, this is only going to keep bothering you,” Gill said.

  Robert remained silent. But once again he began taking harsh deep breaths. McEntee, some sixth sense telling him a line was about to be crossed, moved closer to Robert. He had learned in the police academy that an interrogator’s physical closeness can still incipient panic.

  Robert didn’t look at him. He didn’t look at any of them. Then he murmured: “I went into Central Park with Jennifer.”

  Robert’s eyes were glassy, Gill noticed. Doyle and McEntee had slipped from the room, and he’d been left to dig the rest of the story from the young man. He waited a moment before he started his questions, and during that moment Robert’s eyes filled with tears. Then the young man said, his voice thick with self-pity, “What’s my mother going to think?”

  “You won’t have to tell her. She’ll know what happened,” Gill said, implying he himself would convey the news to Phyllis and that would make it easier on her. Then he got going. “Where did you go in Central Park?” he asked.

  “We sat on a bench,” Robert said.

  “What happened?”

  “She had an argument with me. She wanted to still go out with me. And I didn’t want to see her anymore. She got very angry. She scratched me on the face.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I got up to leave. She said, ‘Can’t we just stay here and talk?’ I said, ‘Okay but don’t sit next to me. Sit away from me.’ Then she said, ‘Before we start talking, I have to go to the bathroom.’ And she went behind me and went to the bathroom.”

  “What do you mean, she went to the bathroom?” Gill interrupted. “Are there restrooms there?”

  “I don’t know. She just went behind me in the bushes.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The next thing I recall is she grabbed me from behind and tied my arms up behind my back with her panties.”

  “How did she tie your arms up from behind your back? You being as big as you are?”

  “Well, I was leaning back resting. My arms were behind me, and she just grabbed them and tied me up.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, she sort of, like, tackled me, knocked me down on the ground.”

  “Were you complaining? Were you yelling?”

  “No, I thought she was just fooling at first.”

  “What happened at that point?”

  “She sat on my chest.”

  “How was she sitting on your chest? Was she facing you or facing away from you?”

  “She had her ass on my chest with her back toward me. She started to open my pants. She got my pants open and she started to play with my groin.”

  “What do you mean, play with your groin?”

  “She had hold of my dick and she was stroking me.”

  “What do you mean, she was stroking you?”

  “She was stroking me very hard. It was hurting, and then she was grabbing me by my balls and scratching my balls.”

  “Did you tell her to stop?”

  “Yes. I was yelling for her to stop. It really hurt. It got to the point where it hurt so bad that I got one of my hands loose, and I just grabbed her and pulled her off me. And she went back over my shoulder. I got up, I slipped my pants up, I turned around to her and said, ‘Jennifer, come on, let’s go.’ She didn’t answer me.”

  Gill didn’t ask any more questions after that. He went outside and informed Doyle that he’d been successful. He’d gotten a confession. Of sorts.

  Jennifer’s friends didn’t know Robert had confessed. All they knew was that Jennifer was dead.

  Leilia Van Baker, who was up in Vermont, heard the news from her father when she called home to say hello. As soon as she heard it, she began trembling and the phone shook. It virtually rattled in her hand. Jennifer couldn’t be dead. Death didn’t claim people her own age. Death was what happened to old people. But then the news sank in. And when it did, she had a vision of Jennifer’s last moments, of her struggling helplessly against some unknown feral assailant. Begging for her life.

  New York wa
s shit, Leilia decided. New York was filled with psychopaths, strangers who lived by codes totally unlike those she and everyone else she knew had been raised to uphold. New York birthed them by the thousands, nursed them, turned them loose. Jennifer had never quite understood that you had to guard yourself against strangers. No one in their age group really did. Jennifer had trusted strangers, had tried out her halting Spanish on Hispanic workmen and flattered cab drivers by asking them for driving lessons. Probably that’s why she’d gotten killed. She’d been accosted by some stranger, some creep. God, how she hoped the police caught the bastard. If they did, she’d like to see him strung up. Not that it would bring Jennifer back. If only she hadn’t been so trusting. If only she’d stuck to their own kind.

  Carl Morgera, the boy who had given Jennifer piggy-back rides in the park in the days she’d been a newcomer to Manhattan, heard the news from his mother. She called him while he was over at a friend’s house. After he heard it, tears flowed from his eyes and he went into what seemed to him like a coma. But then, to get out of the state he was in, he went to the movies with his friend and a bunch of other guys. Being in the movie theater made him feel worse. It didn’t seem right to be there. And besides, the guys he was with hadn’t known Jennifer. He didn’t want to be with them, Carl realized suddenly. He wanted to be with people who’d known and liked Jennifer as much as he had. Rising, he pushed out to the aisle, went to the lobby, and called his friend Joe. Joe had gone to Baldwin. He’d been Jennifer’s friend, too.

  In a few minutes Joe picked up Carl. They bought a bottle of liquor and drove to Joe’s house. But everything was weird, and Carl kept saying to Joe, “How are we supposed to feel? I don’t know how to feel.”

  “I don’t know either,” Joe said.

  “Should we feel sad? I mean, should we cry?” Carl asked him. “Or shouldn’t we?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then Joe’s girlfriend Fuzzi came over, and they drank the liquor and talked about Jen and the funny things she used to say, and Carl wanted to laugh; but he wasn’t sure he should, and after a while he said to Joe, “You know what? Someday I’m gonna write a play and it’s gonna be just three characters, just you, me, and Fuzzi, and I’m gonna call it When Do We Laugh?”