“Sirlena and I are going to raise them. Thelma wanted it that way. We have two of our own, but we’ll manage,” Hayes said.
“Was there any insurance?” Moose asked.
A sarcastic grin twisted the housing cop’s mouth. “There ain’t no insurance, and there ain’t no estate.”
Marsella gestured to his partner that it was time to leave, then looked at the housing cop and said, “We’ll keep you informed.”
Watching Marsella leaning up against the hallway wall, stretching his overshoes back on, Moose asked, “How much bread you got?”
“About forty bucks.”
“Lemme have a quarter.”
Marsella snapped on his left overshoe, counted out twenty-five dollars, and handed it to his partner. Taking the money and going back into the dining room, Ryan removed a similar amount from his wallet, placed the fifty dollars on the table, and said, “Buy Thelma’s kids a Christmas present from us.”
Sirlena looked up at the detectives, tears brimming in her eyes, took hold of his retreating hand, and said, “God bless you.”
Elegibos, on Hudson Street, just off the corner of King Street, was a restaurant that specialized in Caribbean food and samba-reggae music. Brazilian bands sang in Portuguese and Yoruban, decrying broken promises and telling of love and hope. It was almost eleven o’clock that night when Vinda parked the department car on Hudson Street. Since Jean had died he had been unable to go directly home from the Job. His apartment was too full of memories that would not go away, each shadow a photoplay from the past. He would frequently go to Elegibos, where he would lose himself on the dance floor, dancing alone or with groups of gyrating strangers until he was exhausted and covered in sweat. Only then would he drive home, undress, toss himself into his lonely bed, and fall asleep.
Margareth Loopo, a tall, dark Brazilian beauty with long, twisted braids, owned Elegibos. She stood at the door each night collecting the entrance fee, in cash. When she saw her old friend walk in, she left the woman she had been talking to, and went and threw her arms around Vinda, saying in Portuguese, “It’s good to see you, handsome. Are you okay?”
“I’m trying.”
“Well, if you ever need a warm body to help ease your way back into the world, you can have mine.” Leaning forward, she kissed him, ever so gently piercing his closed lips with her tongue.
“Thanks, Margareth, I needed that,” he said, reaching into his pocket for money.
She grabbed his elbow, stopping him. “Your money is no good here.”
“Thank you,” he said, and walked into the restaurant.
The dance floor was packed with a mosaic of the city’s Third World people: the band was playing “Tudo A Toa,” a samba-funk song whose lyrics expressed disgust with the living conditions in Brazil’s urban slums.
Vinda moved out onto the dance floor, standing there, allowing the music to take control of his body. He closed his eyes and purged his thoughts of homicides, and the Job, and Jean. Slowly his hips began to sway to the beat, and his shoulders rocked in the space around him, his head rolling, his hands shaking above his head, as the lyrics burst from his mouth, “Tudo A Toa.”
All to you, he thought. All to who?
FIVE
Needles of frost glistened off the canopies of buildings on Sutton Place. The CBS Sunday-night news magazine “60 Minutes” had just finished its time slot. People relaxed inside their luxurious co-op apartments snugly protected from the howling winds sweeping in off the East River.
Inside the glass penthouse atop 47 Sutton Place South, Adelaide Webster slammed the telephone down on her now ex-boyfriend and cursed, “You lying son of a bitch.”
Uncoiling herself up from her sofa, she ran into the bedroom, grabbed the photograph of a man in tennis whites off the chest of drawers, and hurled it across the room, defiantly watching as it smashed into the wall, shattering glass over the rug. Rushing over, she fell to her knees, scooped the picture up from among the shards, and tore it into pieces.
“You bastard!”
Getting up, she threw herself across the bed, took the portable phone off the night table, and dialed her girlfriend Beth. For the next ninety minutes, Adelaide tearfully confided how she had caught her boyfriend with another woman. The women commiserated over the immaturity of men, swore they wanted nothing more to do with them, agreed that life must be easier for gay women, and made plans to meet for lunch the next day at the Pierre.
Adelaide put the phone down and remained on the bed, petting her pet black mongrel, Boo. She was never going to trust another man, never, she swore. She pushed herself up and went to look at herself in the mirrored wall. She was wearing a black pleated skirt and a four-ply white cashmere sweater. Running her hands through her long blond hair, she studied her side view. Twenty-two, with a master’s from Penn, a great body, and I still can’t find a man to love me, she lamented. God damn it! She turned abruptly and went into the kitchen, where she took a quart of ice cream out of the freezer. Then she walked back into the living room, spooning peanut-butter crunch into her mouth. She opened the terrace door and stepped out onto the wraparound balcony. Ignoring the battering wind, she ate more ice cream as she stood on the terrace, gazing across the street into other apartments. The man she had named the War Hero was walking around naked in his duplex. Why don’t men know how silly they look with their balls and their things flopping all about? she asked herself, moving around to the river side, looking down into the white billows swirling over the black water. The ring of the telephone brought her back inside, lunging for the instrument. “Hello?”
Beth was calling back to make sure she was okay. Gulping disappointment, she said she was just fine, and they talked for another twenty minutes. Hanging up, she saw Boo sitting by his leash. “Boo, I forgot all about you, honey.” The dog’s tail wagged. She went and opened the closet and took out one of her mink coats. Removing a silk Hermès scarf from the pocket, she slid it around her neck, slipped into the coat, and unwound the leash from the knob.
The sundial at the entrance to Sutton Place Park sat on a tilted pedestal set in cobblestones. The vest-pocket commons was nestled against Adelaide Webster’s cooperative apartment house on the north, and by Fifty-third Street on the south. The park’s eastern wall overlooked the FDR Drive and the East River. Sutton Place South bounded it on the west. Stone planters brimming with carefully trimmed evergreens decorated the park’s entrance, and three stone steps led down to a plot of asphalt bordered by green benches. Pachysandra and rhododendron, green against the black and white of winter, were thickly planted across the front of the park.
A man crouched under the overhanging green umbrella, his back against the wrought-iron fence overlooking the FDR Drive. His hands locked his knees to his chest as his cold eyes studied the whirlpool of debris dancing over the park. An automobile sped down Sutton Place, barely slowing for the stop sign, and turned west into Fifty-third Street. The man’s eyes searched the apartment terraces above him, watching people inside moving about. Doormen in livery waited inside the vast lobbies of the surrounding apartment buildings. The man in the bushes groaned from his hunger and despair. He remained motionless, a watcher in the night.
Voices. Movements. His ears pricked up. A doorman across Sutton Place was holding a door open for an elderly, mink-clad woman and her poodle. He listened to them exchange banalities about the weather, and watched the dog strain at its leash. The woman’s mink hood hid her age. His eyes followed as she left the building and walked carefully and slowly out of the curving driveway to the street. She stopped under a street lamp, and watched as her dog squatted. The pool of light bathed her lined face; he became acutely aware of the pain knotting his stomach.
Then he heard another voice, closer. A young voice, the one he wanted to hear. “Boo, stay in the park.” Her dog bounded down the steps and into the park. A young woman walked past the sundial, making for the steps. His eyes locked on her face and his heart surged. His muscles coiled, ready to str
ike. He looked across the street and saw the old lady and her poodle hurrying back into the lobby.
The young one stood in front of him, the back of her fur coat shining faintly in the streetlights. A leash dangled in her right hand as she watched her pet run free in the park. The dog came over to where the man was hiding in the bushes and stopped, its snout sniffing out the scent. Its tail fell between its hindquarters and it ran off whimpering. “Boo, what’s the matter?”
He struck, springing up and clamping his hand over her mouth, muffling her terrified cries. Hoisting her struggling body aloft, he bent her body to him, and kissed her throat. Pulling back, he looked into her horror-stricken eyes, smiled, and lunged his face forward, biting deep, allowing blood to gush from her throat.
Police floodlights illuminated the crime scene.
Vinda, Ryan, Marsella, and the chief of detectives huddled inside the park, watching the lone photographer move about the frozen zone, taking pictures of Adelaide Webster’s body. She lay in the bushes, her legs and arms unnaturally bent, her torso splayed across her mink bier, her features twisted as though revolted by the dreadfulness of death.
“This one ain’t racial,” Marsella said, gaping down at the body. “She’s white, and rich.”
Vinda nodded silent agreement. He had been on the edge of sleep when Operator 47 telephoned.
Vinda looked across the street. The temporary headquarters trailer and the crime-scene station wagon, along with a phalanx of other police cars, were parked in the cooperative’s curving driveway. Bundled-up people stood on terraces, looking down at the controlled chaos of police work. The people looking down reminded Vinda of Eskimos squatting patiently over a seal’s breathing hole in the ice.
Technicians loitered around the headquarters trailer awaiting their summons into the “frozen zone,” the crime-scene area marked off by orange tape.
Vinda looked at Moose and Marsella. “Whadda we got?”
Consulting his notes, Moose Ryan said, “Female, white, twenty-two, resides alone at Forty-seven Sutton Place South. According to the doorman, she takes her dog for a walk around twenty-two hundred. Forty minutes later she hasn’t returned, which, according to the doorman, is unusual. So the doorman puts on his coat and goes searching for her. He finds her DOA, with her dog crying over her body. He snatches up the dog, runs back into the lobby, and, using the house phone, dials nine-one-one.”
Vinda bent down and examined the spattering of bloodstains circled in yellow chalk on the black asphalt.
“I want you and your people to catch this case, too, John,” Sam Staypress said. “The precinct squad will assist on the preliminary.”
Vinda asked the chief of detectives, “We got help coming?”
“I directed Manhattan North and South to fly in thirty detectives to assist with the initial canvass. I also got the ME out of bed and asked him to assign Dr. Marcal to do the post. This way we’ll have medical continuity in the chain of evidence,” Leventhal said, looking down at the body.
“I don’t see any press,” Vinda observed.
“We got lucky,” Moose said. “There were no radio calls for them to pick up on. All notifications went out over land line. And the guys in the first car on the scene were smart enough to use the lobby phone to notify the desk officer.”
“That’ll buy us some time before the circus starts,” Vinda said. “This is no ghetto. The media will be all over us like flies on shit once they find out a homicide went down on Sutton Place.”
Detectives from outside commands were arriving and reporting in at the temporary headquarters trailer, where their names, shield numbers, commands, and times of arrival were recorded in the headquarters log.
Vinda noticed that there was another entrance to the park on Fifty-third Street. He told Moose he wanted barriers thrown up along the entire front of the park, and at both entrances.
“I’ll telephone the Wagon Board and have them send a truck-load,” Marsella said, hurrying off.
Vinda walked out of the park, crossed the street, and climbed inside the temporary headquarters trailer. Shouldering his way past the crowd into the clerical compartment in the rear, he asked in a loud voice, “Who’s from the local squad?” Looking over the crowd of detective sergeants packed into the small and stifling space, and realizing from the cautious way their eyes met his that they recognized him too, he waited for the local Whip to announce himself.
A tall, wiry man with bulging eyes raised his hand. “Tommy Bowden, Seventeenth Squad, Lou.”
“I want one of your people to maintain the Assignment Log, Tommy.”
“Done.” Bowden slid a stack of department forms from the pigeonhole above the small metal desk and said, “Here are the Thirties.” He was referring to the U.F. 30 Detail Rosters that listed the official “pedigrees” of members flown in to assist.
Vinda looked at the forms. “I want a tight span on this one, one sergeant for every five detectives. And I want every apartment facing …” He picked up on Bowden’s indulgent grin, made a slightly embarrassed gesture with his shoulders, and said, “Do what has to be done, Sarge.” He left the trailer and returned to the park.
The photographer had finished his task. Marsella started to wave another technician into the frozen zone, but Vinda told him to wait. The Whip circled the body, careful not to step into the globs of blood. He bent down and examined the gaping wound in her neck. Carefully he ran his hand below and to the right of the hole, and felt two indentations. They were covered in her blood, but they were right there, in the same place as on the other victims. “Light,” he demanded. Marsella handed him a penlight. He directed the beam into the wound and cursed to himself. He moved the beam up to her face, taking in her grotesque death mask: mouth agape, with teeth half-hidden behind lips purple in the glaring lights, tongue half out of the mouth; eyes wide and blank; pasty skin drained of blood. Adelaide Webster’s legs were spread apart, her skirt up around her stomach, white silk panties showing through the top of black panty hose. He pulled her skirt down and whispered, “Rest in peace, little girl.” He nodded to Marsella; the detective motioned the next technician into the frozen zone.
The technical moved under the orange crime-scene tape and put his kit down. He took out plastic bags and covered the corpse’s hands with them. Using a small clean spoon, he carefully scooped up blood from around the body, and the blood that had splashed on the mink coat. He carefully spooned the blood into test tubes coated inside with a saline solution.
Several minutes later the barrier truck rolled up on the scene; Moose Ryan and Marsella helped the two policemen from the Barrier Section set up the wooden sawhorses.
Leventhal came over to Vinda and said, “John, it’s a little after one and I’ve got an eight A.M. conference with the PC, so I’m going to take off.”
“I’ll keep you informed,” Vinda said, noticing Bowden coming into the park. The chief of detectives and the detective sergeant nodded as they passed each other.
“The assignments have been made and recorded, Lou,” Bowden said, coming over to the Whip.
“What about notification of next of kin?” Vinda asked.
“I’ve got two men inside her apartment now, going through her telephone book. They’ll come up with someone,” Bowden said. “The doorman told one of my guys that her father is a big deal on Wall Street.”
When the lab man finished his work, Vinda told Bowden to send in the sketch man. Vinda had long ago learned that detailed descriptions and accurate measurements were the only safe way to record a crime scene. A camera’s lens cannot capture the exact locations of objects, or their relationship to other objects. A sketch prepared by an expert can.
“What kinda sketch you want, Lou?” asked Bowden.
Vinda surveyed the entire crime scene and said, “Triangulation, using both park entrances as poles, with the triangle’s apex fixed on the body.”
The desk officer’s telephone rang. “Lieutenant Gebheart, Seventeenth Precinct.”
“Lou, this is David Pollack from the Post. I just got a rumble that a truckload of barriers were sent into your precinct. Anything doing?”
“Naw, nothing. A chunk of sidewalk caved in on East Fifty-seven. No injuries, no big deal.”
“Thanks, Lou.”
A self-satisfied smile spread across the lieutenant’s ruddy face as he put the phone down. He got up out of his well-worn swivel chair and walked out from behind his desk. He crossed the muster room and brought his hulk into the sitting room, where two policemen sat at a long table, devouring an anchovy pizza. “Finish eating later,” he ordered, scraping a strand of cheese from the box and swallowing it in one gulp. “I want you to take a ride over to the Sutton Place crime scene and tell the detective Whip that the press has got the scent.”
David Pollack laced his thin fingers behind his head and leaned back in his chair, slowly looking around the empty press room on the mezzanine floor of police headquarters. In the old days, he reflected sadly, there would have been half a dozen cop junkies doing the late tour with him. They’d get through the night drinking booze-laced coffee and regaling each other with ancient cop sagas. Pollack was the last of the old breed still working the cop beat; police reporting no longer fit into the higher priorities of today’s Fortune 500 newspapers.
A gaunt man with an oversized Adam’s apple, he still wore a pearl gray Stetson with its crown creased lengthwise and its brim bowed jauntily on the sides and front. He loved to wear gaudy, oversized bow ties. When he’d started on the police beat over thirty-two years ago, only first-grade detectives and police reporters sported a Stetson; it was a status symbol recognized throughout the Job. You seldom see a cop in a hat today; the new breed wear “gimme caps” that advertise motor oil and soft drinks. So be it, he sighed, looking up at the list of important telephone numbers taped to the wall. “I might be old, but I can still hear the swish of that blue curtain falling over a case,” he said to the empty room. Pollack picked up his Stetson from the desk, set it rakishly on his head, and dialed. A crafty smile pressed his lips together. This was the part of his job he loved best: the cat-and-mouse intrigue of digging out a story. When he finished dialing the night emergency number of the Department of Highways, he drummed his fingers on the desk while he waited for someone to answer. A husky voice finally came on the line: “Highways.”
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