by Avery Corman
“We’re looking for Alfonse Batrak,” Gomez said. “He lives here, doesn’t he?” and he flashed his badge.
She smiled, taking satisfaction, it seemed, from the moment.
“He in some kind of trouble?”
“Remains to be seen,” Gomez said. “Do you know him?”
“Sure, I know him. I live here. My husband’s the super. What did he do?”
“Is he in?” Santini asked.
“Gets home from work soon.”
“What kind of work is that?” Santini said.
“Painter.”
“And he went to work, far as you know?”
“Saw him leave.”
The partners looked at each other, instinctively knowing what the other was thinking. Unless someone else had been driving the car, this Batrak person undoubtedly killed someone and attempted to kill someone else and he went to work. He painted walls somewhere, his life went on in pure banality. People didn’t necessarily flee after a murder, sometimes they watched television, sometimes they went to the office, sometimes they painted walls.
The woman established for the detectives that Batrak had lived there for two years, and that his wife, “good-looking,” left him a month previously. One day she just walked out the door; long overdue, by the woman’s estimation. They had screaming fights at night everyone complained about. The wife cursed him in Spanish, people heard through the apartments, and she did it in public when people were nearby. Batrak, “some kind of pollock,” didn’t know what the hell she was yelling, a source of amusement to the Spanish-speaking people within earshot. She would scream about the smell of paint on him, and the way he talked, the way he looked. The detectives asked if the wife had any boyfriends. She said it was just the two of them, as far as she knew.
The detectives sat in their unmarked car and waited for Batrak to return home.
“The clues match up, beautiful, and motive drops right in our laps,” Santini said. “Rage against his wife for leaving equals rage against women. And there it is.”
“Can’t be this simple. Maybe he was framed,” Gomez said.
“By who?”
“The wife. The wife’s lover. Could be she had one.”
“She doesn’t have to frame him. She’s out the door.”
“She does it to be vindictive.”
“And gets someone killed she doesn’t know?”
“It’s someone she does know. The woman who died was someone she wanted dead, and she frames her husband,” Gomez said, playing with the possibilities.
“She gets somebody to drive his car and figures out that if he scrapes another car it’ll leave paint samples and if the car hits someone it’ll leave a fabric trace to frame him? You kidding me?”
Gomez said, “I’m done. He did it.”
“Right.”
“But why doesn’t he just go after the wife?” Gomez asked.
“That’s why it isn’t that simple. He moves over one space and kills someone else.”
Alfonse Batrak walked up the street, a strong-looking man of five feet ten, in neatly pressed dark slacks and a striped sports shirt, carrying a small zipper bag, fastidious enough to have changed out of his work clothes after finishing work. As he neared the building, the superintendent’s wife, trying out her adopted role as an undercover agent for the police department, nodded in the direction of the detectives. Santini and Gomez emerged from the car.
“Mr. Batrak?” Santini said.
“Yes.”
“Police department.”
He flashed his badge.
“We need you to come with us,” Gomez said.
“I’m walking. I’m walking home. I’m not bothering anyone.”
“We have your car—the damage. You know what we’re talking about,” Santini said.
“Not bothering anyone. Step in front of me. Stopping me. Not stopping someone bothering someone. Stopping me.” The next was incomprehensible to the detectives, between spoken language and a child’s gibberish, but angry, an angry undertone to the mumbling. And then, “Out of my way. Going home. Shower, I’m going to shower. Watch TV. Not coming with them. Not bothering anyone.”
“Mr. Batrak,” Gomez said and moved closer to him. They were about to handcuff him when Batrak suddenly pulled a metal putty knife out of his back pocket and lashed at Gomez’s face. Gomez, the portlier and less athletic-looking of the two, was a softball player, a serious hitter with a serious hitter’s reflexes. He ducked the weapon, much as he might duck an errant pitch, and now lower than Batrak’s head, in a near crouch, he swung up and hard with his fist into Batrak’s stomach, knocking the wind out of him as the man crumpled, gasping, to the ground. A few seconds and they had handcuffs on him and pushed him into the rear of the car, Batrak mumbling in a fury.
Tabloid headlines followed and then trailed off, the rest of the case relatively routine, bureaucratic, his court-appointed lawyer staking out an insanity defense, resulting eventually in Batrak being remanded to a psychiatric facility.
For Santini and Gomez the case was unchallenging; a good tip, and a direct line to the perpetrator. They would take them all like this; not for the ease of the work, rather for the certainty, the chance to get a psychopath off the streets.
Rourke complimented them and several of their colleagues gave them good wishes, as well. They did not celebrate, not together, or with others, or individually. This is what they did. The man was not going to run down any more women.
Santini gave his wife a report in the dining area of his apartment the night of the arrest after the children went to sleep. They lived in a two-bedroom on Second Avenue and Ninety-fifth Street, their girls, seven and ten, sharing one of the bedrooms. Santini’s wife, Alice, was a nurse at Mt. Sinai Hospital, a petite woman, pale, usually harried trying to keep up, juggling the children’s after-school activities, grateful when her husband’s erratic hours fell in their favor and he could take over with the children. He was matter-of-fact about the arrest, a relatively easy case, a tip from a concerned citizen, a blowup by the suspect. She did not see it quite as casually as he did. Here was his very reason for being—partly hers, too, the wife of a New York City detective—the constant anxiety, young children who needed a father, the tragedy if they all would lose him. This was the justification for the fear and hardships, this thing he did, that he did on this day.
“Someone driving around targeting women. You boys did well.”
“I guess.”
“You did. Ralph this nonchalant about it?”
“He knows it wasn’t exactly the Times crossword puzzle.”
“I’m proud of you,” which she needed to say for both of them, for their life.
“Yeah, he could’ve killed somebody else.”
“Could’ve.”
Gomez lived in Co-op City in the Bronx. His son, a nineteen-year-old, was a junior at SUNY Stonybrook, where he played on the soccer team. He planned to be a physical education teacher and was working as a counselor in a soccer camp in Connecticut. Gomez’s wife died four years earlier, random insanity, a brick thrown from an overpass on the Grand Central Parkway. The person was never found. The window of the car was open because the air conditioner was broken and they were waiting for Gomez’s next paycheck to get it fixed, and she was struck and killed. He was cynical about human behavior before the crime; her death did not improve his worldview.
He called his boy, Eddie, at the camp that night.
“How are you, son?”
“Good, Dad. Good day here.”
“Here, too. That hit-and-run. Broke wide open. Guy practically tumbled into our arms.”
“Dad, that’s terrific.”
“A psycho, but he’s done.”
“Mom would’ve been real happy.”
Gomez bit his lip. A sweet boy, to invoke his mother’s memory and in this context.
The hit-and-run case was over and now they would be able to focus again on the Randall Cummings murder. The hit-and-run victim was an innoc
ent, Cummings was not, he was a satanic cult leader murdered in his church. Gomez supposed some people would make a distinction about these two victims. For him there was a basic overriding fact: You shouldn’t be able to kill people.
The Dark Angel Church had no plan in place for a successor. Cummings ran the operation with Pitalis serving as his office manager. With Cummings’s death, the church was out of business. Cummings’s father brought a lawyer in from Chicago, where the parents lived, and the lawyer teamed up with a New York accounting firm to see what could be learned from the books and to determine the church’s assets. They were limited; not even the real estate of the church itself was an asset, the building was rented space. Pitalis was advised by the lawyer to shut it down and Pitalis sent an e-mail to all congregants that the church no longer existed.
With Cummings and his followers gone, the Anti-Satanist Group disbanded. They were still under scrutiny, were interrogated; they were of little help and little value to the investigation. Wilson seemed primarily interested in having the detectives ask him questions about his flyer, losing the theme, that it was no longer relevant.
When the media coverage of the hit-and-run case marginalized the Cummings murder, Ronnie presumed she was of no further interest to the police concerning her blackout afternoon. This was a miscalculation.
8
EPIDEMICS OF SATANIC POSSESSION in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European convents, the Devil supposedly sweeping through bedrooms, possessing nuns like a vampire in the night, was delicious material to Ronnie. Her strategy was to start the book with a description of these serial possessions, and she began writing the text. She loved the language in the early work by Traugott Oesterreich, “The epidemic spread like a patch of oil …”
A writer couldn’t do a book on this subject, she decided, without giving attention to the most famous of these incidents, the serial possession at the convent at Loudun, France, commencing in 1632. Several nuns were afflicted, the epidemic escaped to the town, the local priest, a sexually freewheeling man, was blamed for being the Devil’s vehicle and burned at the stake, and one of the exorcists brought in for disaster control claimed he himself was possessed. To modern eyes, to her eyes, the events were casebook mass hysteria combined with manipulations by the presiding officials.
Ronnie was working on the material at her computer when the doorman buzzed up to say, “Two men here to see you, Miss Delaney.” She wanted to be immersed in seventeenth-century France, in the world of nuns and hysteria and Catholic tribal rites, and now reality was intruding. She knew the police had caught up with her about that day.
She offered Santini and Gomez bottled water, which she herself needed, and they sat in the living room.
“Ms. Delaney, first of all, have you received any unwanted packages or mail lately?” Santini asked.
“Nothing.”
“That’s good. Obviously, we need to know your movements on the day Randall Cummings was murdered. You were there?” Santini said.
“Yes, I went there.”
“Why?” Gomez asked.
“I didn’t think the police department was doing anything.”
“And what did you have in mind?” Gomez said. “To be a vigilante?”
“To negotiate with him. If he stopped harassing me, I wouldn’t write a piece about the way he was harassing me.”
“And you told him that?”
“I did. And he seemed to agree. He sent a cease and desist to his congregation.”
“Yes, we saw that in his computer files,” Santini said.
She thought, if you knew it, why are you asking; but then these were detectives, they had to ask or they wouldn’t be detectives. She was feeling very uneasy. Eventually, they were going to ask her to account for time she couldn’t account for.
“You went to his office about?” Gomez asked.
“Two-ish.”
“And came out?”
“Also two-ish. I wasn’t there long. A few minutes.”
“Who did you see when you were there?” Santini asked.
“His assistant. He let me in.”
“No one else was on the premises?”
“Not as far as I know, just Cummings.”
“And outside the building, on your way in, anyone suspicious?” he continued.
“Nobody suspicious. A couple of people protesting across the street.”
“Those people, they say they observed you going into the building at two or so, but that you came out much later, an hour and a half later, and that you were walking peculiarly when you came out,” Gomez said.
“I was only there a few minutes.”
“Did he make any sexual advances toward you?” Gomez said.
“What?”
“He didn’t come on to you and you had to fight him off?”
“He came on to me, an earlier time, but it was about dinner, Detective. There was no physical contact between us.”
“Here’s the thing, the protesters, they say you were in there all that time, and according to the coroner’s report, he died around three, so they place you in the building at the time of death,” Santini said.
“Not true. I had long left. Let me ask you something—would you trust those people, with their insane literature, standing out there for hours on end with their dopey banners, to be reliable about anything? I’ve told you really all I know. I hated that Cummings was harassing me, but I never wished him dead. I’m actually pretty concerned about it, that maybe by writing about him, I encouraged some lunatic to go after him, but I don’t know any more than I’ve told you.”
“This is what we do,” Gomez said. “We ask a lot of questions, see a lot of people, poke around. We didn’t want to see Cummings dead either. We don’t want to see anybody dead, and there’s a killer out there, a very bad person, and our job is to find that person and make sure that person doesn’t kill somebody else.”
“I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you,” which was strictly true; she didn’t know any more than what she had told them.
“If anything else occurs to you—” Santini said.
The detectives sat in their car and went over their notes.
“Too bad the coroner didn’t find semen,” Gomez said, “or I’d take a shot at this: they had sex, he went for asphyxiation ecstasy, it went too far, and she choked him to death. Accidentally.”
“Man, that is reaching.”
“He was a Satan guy, he could’ve been into kinky sex.”
“With her? She thought he was messing up her life.”
“So they didn’t have sex and she’s too small to just walk up to him and strangle him, but there’s the Mariano Rivera factor.”
“Mariano Rivera strangled him?”
“Mariano’s just a wiry guy, not too big,” Gomez said. “No way, if you saw him on the street, would you say he can throw ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastballs and break people’s bats with his splitter. Concealed strength. If she was in a rage enough, she might’ve been able to do it. I mean, she is placed there time of death.”
“That’s if the coroner is dead-on accurate and these jerks can be relied on.”
“I wouldn’t dismiss her as a suspect. She seemed really jumpy to me, and they’ve got her there time of death.”
“If you had to put all the people we’ve seen so far in a line, she wouldn’t be the one I’d pick.”
“You know what I know? You never know.”
Ronnie called Nancy at work, could they go to a movie that night, do something, she didn’t want to be alone. Nancy and Bob gathered her up and they went to a neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Nancy and Bob were present the first time she blacked out, but she never told them about the second time, with Cummings. If she told them now and the police at a later date got around to questioning them, it might come out she couldn’t account for her time. The doctor knew and it was in Ronnie’s medical file. The detectives probably wouldn’t know about the doctor, so that area seemed safe. She realized s
he was making sure her tracks were covered when she couldn’t remember the tracks in the first place. She didn’t think she was failing in any civic or moral duty. She had observed nothing that would be of help to the detectives. If she confessed she blacked out she would walk right into becoming a suspect in the case. Even if she were a dubious suspect, did she really want the police barreling into her life? Then, too, she was mortally embarrassed by her inability to be conscious of all her waking hours. The goal, as she saw it, was to keep the police at a distance so she could concentrate on work, write the book, and this would pass, they would find the person who murdered Cummings.
At dinner Bob brought up Cummings’s murder.
“Here’s the tough question,” Ronnie said. “If I had the choice of his still being alive and my still getting horrible things sent to me, versus his being dead and horrible things not getting sent to me—and they aren’t, they seemed to have stopped—which would I choose?”
“It’s no question,” Bob said.
“It’s beyond a non sequitur,” Nancy added.
“It is a question if you think my writing about him contributed to his death.”
“You mean like, oh, here’s an interesting article. I think I’ll kill this person. Ronnie, for a smart girl, you can be a real dumbbell,” Bob said.
“I love you guys.”
“And we love you. Does Richard Smith? Where is he?” Bob asked.
“Europe.”
“He’s not much good to you traveling, is he?”
“That’s very subversive,” Nancy reprimanded.
“He’s just trying to be helpful,” Ronnie said. “Old wounds—his father traveling so much, his mother patient, and then for her patience, he rewards her by upping and leaving.”
“What did you say? How do you know that?”
“Which? About your father traveling? You told me.”
“I never did.”
“One night at the apartment, you had some wine, and you told me.”
“Never.”
“Maybe you don’t remember, Nancy was in the other room and we were talking, you had some wine, absolutely.”
“I never said a word. Nancy, did you know my folks broke up over my father’s absences, and he suddenly left?”