by Len Levinson
“Lemme see the warrant,” the black man said gruffly.
Rackman held up Cynthia Doyle’s bag.
“Where’d you get that?” asked the black man, reaching for it.
Rackman pulled it back. “When’s the last time you saw Cynthia Doyle?”
“What you wanna know for?”
“You live here with her?”
“You ain’t showed me no warrant yet.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. Cynthia Doyle is dead.”
The black man blinked. “Huh?”
“Cynthia Doyle is dead.”
“Dead?”
“As a doornail.”
The black man forced a smile. “You’re shuckin’ me, man.”
“I wouldn’t shuck you about a thing like that.”
The smile evaporated. “She’s really dead?”
“Really.”
The black man’s face became contorted as the reality sank in. He breathed hard and looked scared. “How’d she die?”
“Somebody killed her.”
“Somebody killed her?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Who killed her?”
“I don’t like to talk about things like this in doorways.”
The black man’s hands were trembling. He was bony and around thirty years old. “Come on in.”
Rackman followed him through a vestibule to a living room whose upholstered furniture was stained, torn, and sagging. The air smelled dirty. Rackman sat on the sofa and took out his pack of Luckies. “Want one?”
“No thanks,” replied the black man, sitting opposite him.
Rackman lit his cigarette. “What’s your name?”
“Lorenzo Freeman.”
“When’s the last time you saw Cynthia Doyle?”
“She went to work around seven-thirty. Where is she now?”
“In the morgue.”
“The morgue?”
“That’s where dead people go.”
Freeman closed his eyes tightly, then opened them and stared at the floor. A few minutes passed. Then he looked up and asked, “Who killed her?”
“I don’t know yet. I was hoping maybe you could give me a lead.”
“How’d she get killed?”
“You think you can handle it?”
“I can handle anything,” Freeman replied bravely, but the tremor in his voice said he was shaken badly.
“You sure?”
“Lay it on me.”
“Somebody cut her throat in an alley on Forty-Fifth Street between Ninth and Tenth.”
Freeman’s face collapsed and his eyes went white.
“And punched her out a few times.”
Freeman covered his face with his hands. Rackman sat quietly, puffing his Lucky and observing Freeman. He thought Freeman’s emotion was genuine, that Freeman had not murdered Cynthia Doyle, but he had to get the hard facts.
“Where were you at around four-thirty this morning?” Rackman asked.
“Right here.”
“Alone?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you prove that you were here alone?”
“How can I do that?”
“Did you talk to somebody in the building a little earlier, maybe? Somebody came by selling Girl Scout cookies or something?”
“I didn’t talk to nobody. I watched the tube until around two in the morning and fell asleep.” He looked squarely at Rackman. “You don’t think I did it, do you?”
“I can’t be sure that you didn’t.”
“She was my old lady, man.”
“A lot of guys kill their old ladies.”
“I wouldn’t kill her. She was okay.”
“What did she do for a living?”
Freeman looked away. “She worked in one of them massage parlor places.”
Rackman took out his notepad and pen. “Which one?”
“The Crown Club on West Forty-fifth Street.”
“She wasn’t going to leave you, was she?”
“What for?”
“I’m asking the questions.”
“Nah, she wasn’t going to leave me. We was in love, man.”
“I’m going to be investigating this case, Freeman. If I find you’ve been fighting with her and slapping her around, you’re going to the joint.”
“Nobody’s gonna tell you that unless they’s lying. I never hit her since we was in Cincinnati, and that was over two years ago.”
“Was she having problems with anybody?”
“Not that I know of.”
“If she was having problems with somebody, would she tell you?”
“Sure she’d tell me. We was very close, man.”
“Come on Freeman, she must be having trouble with somebody. Those girls are always having trouble with somebody.”
“There wasn’t nothing big.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
Freeman reflected for a few moments. “Well, she told me she’s been hassling with one of the girls she works with, name of Carmella. And there’s Luke the Duke. He tried to game her, but my baby, she don’t like to work the streets. She likes to stay indoors where it’s dry and warm.”
Luke the Duke was a well-known Times Square pimp, and it was believed that he’d had a few women killed, although there was never enough evidence to charge him. “I’ll check them both out,” Rackman said, making notes.
Freeman looked out the dirty windows at the tenement roofs. “I can’t believe my baby ain’t never coming back,” he said in a spacey way.
Rackman obtained the address of Cynthia Doyle’s family in Cincinnati, gave Freeman his card, and left.
Down on the street, he slid behind the wheel of his Plymouth and looked at his watch. It was eight o’clock in the morning and he’d been on duty since six the previous evening. He was exhausted; his head felt like it was caving in. It was time to finish up and go home.
Driving up Eleventh Avenue, which was rumbling with early morning trucks and cars, he wondered sleepily about Cynthia Doyle and who had killed her. The motive wasn’t robbery, and her boyfriend probably didn’t do it unless she was planning to leave him for somebody else. Rackman would have to check that out. He’d also have to talk to Luke the Duke and the people Cynthia Doyle worked with at the massage parlor. Somebody killed her, and somewhere in the city there was a trail of evidence that led to the murderer. Rackman had to find that trail out of the millions of other trails that crisscrossed the city.
He parked the Plymouth in front of the Midtown North building on West Fifty-fourth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. It was a grim old fortress made of gray stone blocks fifty years ago, and he walked into the main reception area, where a bunch of uniformed cops were hanging out around the sergeant’s desk. He climbed the stairs to the Detective Division, a small room jammed with desks and stinking of cigar smoke. Sitting at his desk, he lit another Lucky and typed his report of the Cynthia Doyle murder, using his forefingers and the hunt and peck method, indicating what he’d found out so far. He dropped the report on Inspector Jenkins’ desk (Jenkins wasn’t in yet), checked Cynthia Doyle’s bag and clothes into the Property Room, and went home before somebody found something else for him to do.
He lived around the corner on West Fifty-fifth Street in an old brick apartment building that had been constructed as a comfortable middle-class residence in 1917, and was still in fairly good shape, although the elevator broke down about once a month, and several times each winter there’d been no heat or hot water. Close to the Broadway theater district, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center, it had become a haven for has-been actresses, would-be dancers, aging producers of forgotten flops, directors with holes in their shoes, various musicians, a few unsuccessful writers, and a number of low echelon office workers.
Rackman unlocked the front door and entered the tiny lobby. He went to the mailroom, opened his box, and took out bills from Con Edison and Master Charge. Returning to the lobby, he waited for th
e shaky old elevator, and then rode it to the eighth floor, the top floor of the building. His apartment was at the corner in the back. Unlocking his door, he stepped into night again, because of thick drapes over the windows. Turning on a few lights, he hung his leather jacket in the closet and peeled off his black turtleneck sweater, which he threw onto a chair that had become the receptacle for so much assorted clothing it looked like a display in a thrift shop.
The living room had a sofa, coffee table, and two matching chairs. He’d bought the stuff at a sale that Macy’s had had at the time his second wife had thrown him out. The furniture wasn’t very good, but Rackman had learned that women usually wind up with a man’s furniture, so it didn’t pay to invest very much in it.
On the wall above the color television set, which he seldom had time to watch, was an eleven by fourteen framed photograph of his twelve-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who lived with her mother, the first Mrs. Rackman and her latest husband, in the Forest Hills section of Queens. Rackman felt guilty whenever he looked at the photograph, because he seldom had time to see the child. Somehow he had to get out there this weekend. Almost six weeks had elapsed since the last visit.
He almost never thought about the second Mrs. Rackman, an airline stewardess to whom he’d been married for less than six months when they’d split up. He couldn’t understand what had happened, so preferred not to think about it. Maybe it had something to do with his emotional immaturity, which is what her laywer had said in court.
He went to his cubbyhole of a kitchen and drank a glass of milk, because he was an insomniac and had read someplace that the calcium in milk helps one to sleep. He’d never had trouble sleeping before he became a cop; the weird hours had screwed him up. After downing the milk he washed his face and hands and brushed his teeth in the bathroom that he told himself he had to clean one of these days because it was starting to smell like an army field latrine. He should find himself a cleaning woman but didn’t know where to look.
He went to the bedroom and took off his clothes. In a silver frame on the wall next to his dresser was the silver pin they awarded him when he qualified as a paratrooper in the US Army. He’d gotten it in 1963, long before the Vietnam War got serious, and he still felt he’d missed something by not being in the fighting. It wasn’t because he thought front line combat was glamorous, or because he’d believed in the war, but because war showed whether you were strong or weak, brave or cowardly, a leader or a follower, quick or dead. Rackman wanted to know these things about himself, and thought battle was the ultimate test of them. Now he’d never know for sure.
The women in his life had often told him how silly his attitudes were about those things, but he thought most women and a lot of men just didn’t appreciate the qualities and shadings of courage.
Naked except for his jockey shorts, he moved toward the bed. On the night table beside it was a sound machine he’d bought from Hammacher-Schlemmer. It imitated the noise of rain falling on a roof or surf on a beach or just made “white sound,” which was similar to the sound of an air conditioner. Rackman needed the machine because there were several stereo enthusiasts in his vicinity, plus one trumpet player who blew his horn as though he was on top of a mountain or in the middle of a forest. The machine blocked out all those sounds and helped him to sleep. He turned it on, crawled into bed, and closed his eyes.
It took a long time for his knots to loosen. He thought about his daughter and his buddies at Midtown North, his girl friend and the four unsolved homicide cases he was working on. The last image in his mind was of the pudgy blonde lying crumpled and bloody in the alley.
Chapter Two
Rackman returned to Midtown North at five thirty in the afternoon. He wore his leather jacket with a blue chambray shirt underneath. Detective Third Grade Johnny Olivero was the only one there, and looked up from his New York Post when he saw Rackman.
“Jenkins wants to see you,” Olivero said.
“What about?”
“How should I know?”
Inspector Jenkins occupied a small private office next to the one used by the detectives he supervised. Rackman knocked on the door.
“Come in,” croaked Jenkins from within.
Rackman entered the office. Jenkins had a piece of correspondence in his hand, and pointed with it to a chair. Rackman sat and crossed his legs. Jenkins was a husky man of fifty-five with a florid Irish face and red hair. His suits were always too big for him and looked as though they also served as his pajamas.
“You see the papers?” Jenkins asked in his gravelly voice.
“I haven’t even seen breakfast yet.”
Jenkins threw him the Post and the News. On the front page of each was a photo of Cynthia Doyle in the alley where she met her death and a big news story. The mayor, Manhattan borough president, police commissioner, and chief of detectives had issued appropriate statements about finding the killer and cleaning up the Times Square area.
Rackman handed back the papers. “I guess the pressure’s on.”
“You’d better believe it.” He picked up a piece of paper. ‘‘The lab report’s in, but I don’t suppose there’s much in it that you don’t know already. I read your report, and I guess Luke the Duke is the best suspect so far.”
“Maybe, but a dead girl can’t make any money for him.”
“She might have put him down in a way that embarrassed him in front of his friends. You know how sensitive those pimps are. They worry more about their image than General Motors.”
“Anybody talk to him so far?”
“Nobody’s been able to find him. He’s like the stars, he only comes out at night. He should be in the Times Square area in a few hours.”
“I know where he hangs out. Anything happen at the massage parlor?”
“There’s a different shift on during the day, so you’ll have to check that one out too. If the management gives you any shit, just call for a backup and bring them all up here.”
“I don’t think I’ll have any trouble. Those people are all afraid of getting closed down. Has any useful information come in while I’ve been off?”
“We’ve been talking to people in the neighborhood all night and all day and nobody saw anything, although several of them heard the screams and called nine-one-one. We also checked out the victim’s boyfriend—we think he’s clean.”
“I’d hoped a lead or two might have come up.
“The only way they’re going to come up is if you dig them up. Anything else?”
“No sir.”
“Then get going.”
Rackman went out to his car and drove cross-town to Broadway, where he parked in front of a hydrant and went into a little restaurant for a breakfast of ham and eggs, coffee, and newspapers. It didn’t escape his notice that the people around him were having dinner, and it made him feel good to be out of sync with the rest of the world, as though he weren’t a member of the great herd.
He returned to his car and drove down Broadway slowly, close to the curb. It was dusk and the area was a pulsating sea of rainbow lights. He looked at pedestrians and the fronts of movie houses, pokerino parlors, penny arcades, and peep shows. Part of him hated the area’s filthy tawdriness, and another part of him was fascinated by it. The weirdest people came here in search of paradise, and some acted as if they’d found it. You could smell crooked money in the air along with the hot dogs, souvlaki, pizza, and exhaust fumes.
At Forty-ninth Street he turned the corner and parked beside a ticket agency closed for the night. It was a no parking zone so he pulled down the Official Police Investigation sign on his visor. It was too early to look for Luke the Duke, so he walked to Broadway and meandered downtown, trying to soak up Cynthia Doyle’s milieu, hoping an inspiration would come from somewhere. People rustled against him, and a guy coming from the opposite direction carried a big portable radio that blasted salsa music.
On the next block was a peep show, and Rackman walked in, following his instincts. It was modern
and clean with chrome and Formica covering the walls and ceiling. Behind the counter was a big black guy and a metal tube filled with quarters. Rackman got two dollars worth, then passed the tables covered with porno books and magazines and entered the area of private booths, where for a quarter you could watch ninety seconds of a hard-core porno film. In front of each booth were large photographs of scenes from the films on display, and Rackman chuckled at the picture of a blonde girl in pigtails sucking two cocks at the same time. The next booth showed a brunette being screwed by a dog. Then he came to a photo of seven lesbians in a big sexual pretzel.
Other men were looking at the photographs and entering or leaving the booths. They didn’t appear filthy or depraved, and probably were ordinary office workers, tourists, students, union members, the guy who lived next door. They came to places like this, got horny, and sometimes visited one of the whorehouses in the neighborhood. Rackman wondered if Cynthia Doyle’s killer had been in a place like this last night, or if he was just a crazy bastard hanging out on West Forty-fifth Street, deciding to commit a murder just as Cynthia Doyle happened along.
At the rear of the peep show area was a series of booths with a sound system playing funky rock and roll. Rackman entered one of the booths, closed the door behind him, and dropped a quarter in the slot. There was a motorized humming sound and a little screen lifted, revealing two naked girls dancing in the small area that the booths enclosed. One of them, a white girl with short dark hair, was hopping around and wiggling her ass, moving from window to window and giving everyone a close-up show of her ass and genitals. The other girl was black and lay on a circular revolving platform in the middle of the floor, spreading her legs and fingering her labia while screaming obscenities.
The dancing girl stopped before Rackman, winked, and whipped her ass around. She spread the cheeks of her ass and pressed it against the window in front of Rackman’s nose.
“How does it look?”
“Okay.”
The girl turned around and dangled her low-hanging breasts in front of the window. “Like ’em?”
“I guess so.”
The motor hummed and the curtain came down. He dropped in another quarter, and up it went again. The girl had moved to the next window, and Rackman could see across the dance area to the windows on the other side, where guys were drooling and ogling the girls. He felt sorry for them because he figured they were lonely and didn’t have women. He’d gone through a long period of loneliness himself, and it’d been awful. All you could think about was women and fucking. Sometimes it got so intense that you’d pay for it, and there was nothing so degrading as paying for it, because it was an admission that you couldn’t get a woman on your own.