At first it was fright that he felt. He’d imagined they’d found something. There’d been a break. He’d been sloppy and had made a mistake. When it became apparent that he hadn’t, that they were as much in the dark as ever, he relaxed and started to enjoy the interview. He liked to hear all the various theories. Sometimes it made him laugh out loud. He was greatly flattered that he could be the focus of so much speculation amongst such seemingly important people.
About the detective, the man in charge of the investigation, he felt a nagging ambivalence. Initially, he disliked the man. Number one, he was the law, and that was reason enough to despise him. Number two, he was Warren’s adversary, the man whose principal responsibility was to seek him out, identify him, and ultimately, put him away where he could no longer harm anyone.
Oddly, however, he wished the man were more impressive. Mooney didn’t strike him as somehow important enough. He felt that the job, particularly the spectacular nature of it, warranted someone more imposing than this coarse, unkempt man who answered questions in a slow, halting way. Warren would have been happier with someone more suave and better dressed. Something more along the lines of William Powell doing his Nick Charles number.
All of this antipathy came at the beginning of the broadcast and in a great rush. Then gradually, the more the detective spoke, the more he felt his feelings swing the other way. He was flattered now to think that this grizzled old cop whom reporters addressed by his first name and cameras filmed could be interested in him. He liked Mooney’s sly smile and the low growl of his voice, that slightly unshaven look, just a tad this side of disreputability. The slow, halting manner of his replies he now took to be shrewdness and caginess; an angler skillfully playing the fish nibbling at the end of his hook.
Warren suddenly felt an unaccountable rush of affection for the man. He imagined they could find much to talk about together. He was sure they had lots in common. He’d love to sit and talk with the detective about some of his cases. There was a thing or two he could tell him about the way things really worked in this city. Things this cop and all the police never suspected and would give their eyeteeth to know.
It would be fun to know this Mooney. He knew there were things he could tell him in the strictest confidence, at which the cop wouldn’t bat an eye or think any the less of him for it.
As he lay back on his pillow, the pounding in his head subsided and he grew drowsy. It occurred to him he hadn’t slept in sixty hours. He’d been up and driving and going about his business all that while. Making his way in the world, just like everyone else.
His eyes fluttered and started to droop. He felt a blessed loosening of the limbs and a letting go. The feeling he experienced almost every waking moment of each day, that someone, something, was pursuing him, some faceless, nameless something he could never identify, for he could never glance back over his shoulder in time to see it — that feeling now at least for the time being had begun to subside.
His eyes closed. The sounds of the old woman moving about in the kitchen below wafted upward through the thick, musty attic air.
That night he dreamed of tall buildings, huge, untenanted shafts of steel and glass, with the sun slanting blindingly off them. Amid them, needle-pointed spires soared dizzyingly upward into a vault of cloudless, enamel-blue sky. Across the spangled water of the harbor, Sweet Liberty, with torch-bearing arm raised on high, watched like a magna mater over the dreaming city.
He slept all night with the lights on. Warren Mars did not like to go to sleep in the dark.
“You think you could pick him out of a lineup?”
“No.”
“I could bring photographs here so you wouldn’t have to —”
“No … I can’t, I said.”
“A few minutes ago you told me you had a general impression of the guy.” Mooney watched the woman as he spoke. She sat listless and unmoving in a rocking chair, her hands folded in her lap. He’d been at it with her the better part of an hour and felt he’d still not asked a third of the questions he’d intended to. That was because of the long pauses between each of his questions and her answers. Then when the answers finally came, they did so falteringly and with great gaps that he was left to fill in for himself. It was not that she was uncooperative; it was more like disinterest. About her was a frightening apathy reflected in the slow monotone of the voice and the dull gaze of her eyes.
They sat in an unlit room as dusk crept on. A single large picture window looked out over the Rockaway inlet where gulls that had fed for the evening now bobbed on the water. Voices could be heard outside in the corridor, and the sounds of an early-evening television game show came muffled through the walls from the room next door.
Just before entering the room, the floor doctor had told Mooney she was sedated. But this was a far cry from any sedation he’d ever seen. It was more a stupor, induced by powerful drugs that had carried her off to a far place where she could feel secure in the knowledge that no one could pursue her there.
The place was not a hospital but a convalescent home, since Mrs. Pell’s injuries were determined to be not of the body — although she’d sustained a number of bruises — but of the mind. Of the morning in Far Rock-away on which her husband had been savagely murdered, then she herself subjected to brutal assault, she could recall little. The doctor had characterized it as a “selective amnesia.” She could recall being attacked, but not what had been done to her.
Mooney shook his head wearily. It was the tag end of a doggish, sultry July afternoon. He’d been working nearly sixteen hours tracking down a flurry of fresh leads that had all come to naught.
“You’ve already told the police he was medium height, slight, dark, nice-looking, but with something off kilter when he smiled.” Mooney looked up at her from the pad out of which he’d read to her his scribbled notes. There was something almost touchingly hopeful in his tired, expectant gaze, as if he’d believed that mere repetition of detail might dislodge the blockage in her recall and dispel the protective fog with which she surrounded herself. “You think that smile had something to do with his teeth?”
He waited for her to reply until at last he realized that she hadn’t heard. Instead, she continued to sit in her chair, slumped and rather smallish, as if she were shrinking before his eyes.
Mooney gazed over his shoulder at Pickering, a gray, boxy presence slouching against the wall in a shadowy corner behind him. He shrugged and the younger man shrugged back.
“Mrs. Pell,” Mooney murmured in a voice unnaturally low, as if he feared he might alarm her. “Mrs. Pell?”
She turned and gazed up at him, on her face a look of startled vacancy. He hovered there in the gathering twilight, uncertain where to go next.
“Mrs. Pell — if you’d like, I could come back when you’re feeling more yourself.”
“More myself.” She repeated the words blankly.
A nurse framed in the orange glow of light from the corridor put her head in to signal their time was up. The doctor was outside as they were leaving. A small, natty man, his manner was curt and bristling with self-importance.
“When do you think she’ll snap out of this, Doc?” Mooney asked.
“When she does, it’s going to be one hell of a shock for her.”
“But you think she will?”
“Eventually.”
Eventually was not good enough for Mooney. “She’s one of the few live witnesses we have to a series of crimes.”
“I’m aware of the case,” the doctor replied coldly. “Then you can appreciate the urgency.”
“I can appreciate it. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about it.”
“I’d like to take her down to a police lineup.”
Hie doctor frowned. “You must be kidding. This woman’s severely traumatized. Her stability, whatever’s left of it, is hanging by a thread. Now you want to put her through a grueling business like a police lineup?”
“It doesn’t have to be grueling,” Moone
y protested. “She’ll sit behind one-way glass. She’d never have to confront these people. I could send a car, an ambulance, if you’d like. She could have a nurse or a doctor with her, or both.” Mooney could hear himself pleading and didn’t particularly care for the sound. “She’s the only hope we have right now. She can do a service. Make an identification that could possibly prevent additional tragedies.” The doctor looked at him skeptically, all about him the busy, distracted air of one who’s already given far more time to something than the matter warranted. “You have any suspects yet?”
The question took the wind out of Mooney’s sail. He grinned sheepishly at the young man. “Not yet.”
“What are we discussing, then?” The doctor shook his head huffily and walked away.
TWELVE
“WE NOW HAVE A POSITIVE ON SEMINAL fluid for Torrelson, Pell, and the old lady in Flatbush.”
“Great.”
“Not so great. We found no sperm in two of the samples and not enough in the other to make a blood grouping.”
“Wasn’t that the same situation with the Bailey girl?”
“With her we found infertile semen around, but not inside her.”
Konig cocked a brow and looked at the young woman sidewards. There was a moment of silence in which their mutual dislike of each other grew vividly apparent. “So we’re looking for one azoospermia. What about the other?”
“We’ve got a couple of AB positive blood groupings down on the record. Most of the other semen samples were just too old to take an accurate reading.”
“You did a Florence?”
“Twice. And confirmed them with a Barbera. It’s semen, all right.”
“But no sperm?”
“No sperm.”
Konig looked dubious. “Not even nonmotile?”
“Nothing.” The young woman shrugged and lit a cigarette. “We’re going to try acid phosphatase and gel diffusions just to make sure.”
Konig slapped his knees and rose. He started to pace the length of the cramped office. “Azoospermia. Haven’t seen one of those in twenty years.”
“You’ve just been out of general practice too long, Doctor.” Joan Winger extinguished her cigarette in a tray full of the cold, reeking stubs of Konig’s cheap cigars. “It’s all around us now. This is the Golden Age of Vasectomy.”
Konig gave a snorting little laugh. “This is no vasectomy. Not with that pattern of assault. Potency is too big a factor in this man’s self-esteem to just voluntarily have himself unwired.” He resumed his pacing, pausing every now and then to view slides under a microscope. “In all probability, one of these Shadow Dancer boys has no idea he’s not producing sperm.”
“Probably not. Unless he’s had a sperm count done recently.”
“Probably urethral. An obstruction of some sort. Seminal vesicles. Sperm ducts. Trauma to the testes, maybe.”
The young woman watched him pace stiffly and recognized his sciatic walk. He tended to lean off to the right side and drag the left leg behind him. “Why don’t you take some codeine for that?”
He stopped abruptly and turned. “And that girl up in the park last winter …”
“The only clothing we ever recovered was a stocking. I already told you: there was semen around, but he’d never penetrated her.”
“You never recovered anything? Vaginal? Anal?”
“Negative. All negative. I said then I thought the reason was probably premature ejaculation, or functional impotence. Now, I’m convinced, at least in the Bailey case, one of these guys is an azoospermia.”
Konig planted a cold half-smoked cigar between his lips and lit it, then resumed his lame pacing. Suddenly tickled by some thought, he laughed aloud. “Well, if that’s the case, it’s a nice break for us.”
She glanced up at him, momentarily puzzled. “Oh, you mean for purposes of an ID. I suppose so; that is, if we’re ever lucky enough to get the azoospermic guy on an examination table and get a semen sample out of him. Then again, it’s hard luck, too.”
Konig stooped his shoulders and lit his cigar. “Oh, sure, you mean the blood grouping. I forgot.”
The young woman nodded. “I thought for sure with the semen specimens we’d gathered off some of the others, we’d have more than just the few firm blood groupings we’ve got.” She shook her head dejectedly. “Where do we go from here?” she asked, in a rare, unguarded moment. Long ago she’d learned never to display doubt or confusion to Konig. Almost certainly he’d use it against her. Sure enough, he did. It came in the form of a taunting little jibe. “Don’t ask me. You’re the professor.”
She caught the tone quickly and felt her color rise. “Let’s not do the professor routine again, please.”
“Who’s doing a routine?”
“And, for God’s sake, don’t smirk like that, as if you had some dazzlingly brilliant insight about what all this means. At this point, you don’t know any more about this than I do. And that is that one of these Dancer guys looks like an AB pos, and the other is probably an azoospermia.”
Konig puffed contentedly, making the tip of his cigar glow. He appeared to be immensely pleased with himself. “You’ve been working hard. A few days off would do you good.”
She rose from her seat, swinging her arms from side to side. “When I’m ready to take time off, I will, thank you. And thank you, too, for absolutely zero guidance in this matter.” She started out the door, but he called after her. “I’m not here as a house mother for any of my deputies. I don’t coddle anyone. We re all grown men — people,” he quickly covered the slip.
Now it was her turn to smile tauntingly. “That’s better. More like it. I prefer you when you’re your genuinely nasty self. I don’t know quite how to deal with all that sticky paternal stuff about my health. If you’ve got anything constructive to add to all this,” she went on, “I’m in my office for the next half hour.” She flung out, slamming the door with a shattering bang behind her.
“This one looks like an old high school buddy of mine, Eddie Carboy.”
“Looks like a road company Sylvester Stallone. Get a load of the sideburns.”
“I used to wear sideburns like that.”
“You would. You’re just the type.”
Pickering frowned. He wasn’t certain if he’d been insulted or merely joshed. It was late and they were sitting in one of the little back rooms in the police photo library on West 48th Street.
On a table before them were stacks of police mug shots, interspersed with the paper cartons and debris of a send-out Chinese supper.
It was dark and airless in the little room. There were no windows, and the only light came from a fluorescent gooseneck desk lamp clamped to the table at which they worked. An ancient ceiling fan drifted listlessly overhead, pushing stale air from one corner of the cubicle to the other. Occasionally, a bit of loose paper would drift from the table to the floor.
“You’re sure all these suckers have busted front teeth?” Mooney asked. Flicking the photographs about the table, he looked dubious.
“Right. Not necessarily the two teeth the M E. said, but they all have some kind of damaged front teeth.”
“You’re sure?”
Pickering sighed and let his head slump forward onto his chest. “You feed your data into the computer and hope for the best.”
“Computers are often wrong.”
“Not the computer, it’s the operator.”
“So the manufacturers would have us believe,” Mooney grumbled. “Hey, geta load o’ this monkey: Luccabrava, Anthony. Age, twenty-seven. Height, six one. Weight, two seventy-three. Convicted nineteen eighty-two, sexual assault. Convicted nineteen eighty-three, sexual assault. Nineteen eighty-four, armed robbery, sodomy, sexual assault and battery. Served thirteen months of an eight-year sentence on Rikers. Released, January ‘eighty-six. Scary lookin’, eh? How’d you like that to come up on you in some dark alley?”
Pickering studied the photo gloomily. “If it was me he wanted, I’d just
drop my pants and let him have his way with me. Hey, Frank. It’s one in the morning. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Mooney disregarded the plaint and continued to flick through mug shots. “Tell me once more what the Motor Vehicle Bureau guys told you.”
Pickering’s tousled head dropped onto the table. A long, hollow moan echoed from somewhere within him. “Nothing. They got no record of any recent theft of a green automobile, vintage sixties or early seventies, possible Chevy, possible Pontiac, possible Buick, possible anything. Nothing of that general description. General being the operative word here.”
“So our guy owns the car himself.”
“They’re checking registrations now for a medium/dark green car of that vintage. They’ll have a list for us next week.”
“What if it’s an out-of-state car?”
“That’s tough patooties.” Pickering flung his hands up in despair. “I’m not checking out the M.V.B.‘s in the other forty-nine states.” He rose suddenly, tipping the chair over behind him. The loud crash that followed reverberated through the vacant cavernous library outside.
“Gee, don’t bust up the place, will you?”
“You really gonna stick around here?”
“I got work to do, my friend.”
Pickering made a pinched, suffering face. “Am I supposed to feel guilty about that?”
“Not at all,” Mooney assured him with a most cordial venom. “You run along home to the little lady, Rollo. I’ll be just fine.”
“I’ll be just fine. I’ll be just fine.” Pickering mimicked the older detective. “Ain’t you some piece of business.” Mooney’s eyes never left the stack of mug shots. He continued to search for some combination of elements he had fixed firmly in his head. “Run along now.”
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