Lights Out Summer

by Rich Zahradnik

  “Let’s go to the Oddity.”

  “You’re hungry?”

  “Not really.” Murder didn’t generally put him off food, but he’d liked DeVries. “I need to think. My complex story got turned upside down.”

  “Why’d you help Coogan?”

  “DeVries deserves to appear in the paper. I’m surprised the Times didn’t make it. They don’t miss Park Avenue murders. Not ever. The only murders they really care about.”

  “Didn’t you tell me Saturday’s a bad day to die because of thin staffing at the papers?”

  “Yeah, there’s that.”

  And Son of Sam.

  —New York Times, page 1, June 27, 1977

  —Daily News, page 1, June 27, 1977

  *

  Chapter 19

  The whole press conference was a handful of familiar facts and too many unanswerable questions. Taylor listened and wrote mechanically.

  “Judy Placido, seventeen, and Salvatore Lupo, twenty.”

  “Why can’t you find this guy?”

  “Any identifying evidence at the scene?”

  “How do the parents feel?”

  “Why did these victims escape death?”

  “How long can this go on?”

  “Do you need more cops?”

  “Better cops?”

  “What about the FBI?”

  “Describe the exact wounds.”

  “More detail than that.”

  “How close was the nearest unit?”

  “Were any cops nearby acting as decoys?”

  The answers were what he’d expect. All the specifics were rehashed from the previous shootings. When the questions got really stupid, Taylor got up and phoned in his piece.

  What the hell is wrong with me? There are victims in all these attacks. They count.

  Yeah, but the circus didn’t count them, except as good for the sidebar. The circus wanted the horror show. The fear. The monster. Son of Sam.

  He left the 109th Precinct and stopped off at the 112th on the way back to Manhattan. McCauley was at his desk.

  “Anything on the Gibson murder?” Taylor said.

  “Will you tell me why you still care? Nigger maid with drug dealing going on in the apartment.”

  “You’re not investigating because you’re a bigot? You’re not even on Omega.”

  “Listen to the lefty reporter.” McCauley kept reading a typed report. “We’ve got daughters and sons murdered and wounded. They could be, any of them, my kids. My partner’s kids.”

  “Martha Gibson has parents. I’ve met them. Very nice people. Very sad people now. So let’s ignore your racist views for the moment. It remains the responsibility of the NYPD to investigate her murder. Every murder. To get as many killers convicted as possible. Not focus on one single case because the victims look like your family.”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  “Handful of young White people. Big deal. Black woman who works as maid. No deal.”

  “Say it any way you want.”

  “I’m going to write it anyway I want. Anything you’d like to add to my story, Detective McCauley? I’ve already got the spelling.”

  “You motherfucker.”

  McCauley jumped from his chair, grabbed Taylor by the sport coat and ran him into a filing cabinet. He hit hard. The noise was loud.

  “Shoving me around,” Taylor said as McCauley’s fists closed together on his chin, threatening to tear one or more seams in Taylor’s jacket. “Nice color for the story. That’s color in its proper usage.”

  McCauley slammed Taylor into the steel cabinet, jarring his shoulders and rattling his teeth.

  The detective was pulled off by two others. Another walked Taylor to a chair, where he sat like he was waiting to see the principal. The principal turned out to be Lieutenant Mark Garrison, the officer in charge of the homicide squad.

  “What’s your problem with McCauley?” Garrison said.

  “Besides the fact he slammed me into your furniture?”

  “Yeah, besides that.”

  “He’s a racist, for one.”

  “Noted. Is that your story? Because you could go ’round all the precincts for that one.” Garrison, with a young face made to look older by a nearly bald head, held out his hands like Taylor was welcome to take on that project.

  “I’m working a story on Martha Gibson’s murder.”

  “I’ve got the file right here.”

  “Looks to me like not much is being done. As in nothing. Racism? Because of Son of Sam? You tell me. I’m getting the feeling cases aren’t getting investigated because of the circus out there.” He waved in the direction of Flushing and the 109th, though Garrison could have no idea.

  “You’ve got a feeling? Huh. Is that what you base your stories on. Feelings? Not that I should give a shit. I catch villains, not headlines. You do the opposite.”

  Discomfiting warmth spread across Taylor’s chest and up to his face as he realized he’d let what he thought was going on—and the fact McCauley was an asshole—run well ahead of what he actually could prove. The facts. What else did he have, aside from McCauley?

  Garrison didn’t wait for his answer. “Granted, there are a lot of men on Omega. The public demanded it. They didn’t demand we stop doing our jobs. We’re getting all the overtime we need for this squad and the other squads to chase perpetrators. After that, guys are going off the clock. On the regular squads. On Omega. Volunteering.” He plopped a file in the middle of his desk. “Indicted this one for second-degree murder. Husband-wife beef.” Another file. “Drug shooting.” He kept dropping files. “Conviction, manslaughter. Indictment, man killed his twelve-year-old son.” The litany of death and court action left a six-inch pile. “Martha Gibson’s been tough. I’m gonna admit that. No witnesses. Hit and run shooter. We don’t have a motive. Maybe it was tied up with the sister and her late boyfriend. Boyfriend’s dead. Yeah, McCauley’s got a bad attitude. He’s also overworked, and I’ll admit, like some guys, obsessed with the psycho. There are guys walking around here like zombies. At all the squads. Because we want to grab up all the villains who do murder.” He rolled his chair back. “We’d have lost everything if we let this crazy man not only scare people, but stop us from doing the job. The job. Not on my fucking watch. If there’s a homicide in my zone, I want it solved. I help any squad anywhere else in the city. So if you know something, tell me.”

  “Maybe you’re right. The case may have died with Jerome McGill. At the same time, Martha Gibson worked for the DeVries family in Manhattan. She knew things she shouldn’t. She definitely heard people talking about what sounds like criminal activity, perhaps murder. Probably murder.” Taylor recounted the conversation Martha had overheard in the sitting room. “Edmond DeVries got shot to death last Saturday.”

  Garrison flipped through a file. “We visited the family after Martha’s murder. Didn’t hear anything like that then.”

  “I gave it all to McCauley in April. He wasn’t impressed.”

  Garrison looked up, returned to writing on his steno pad. “We’ll go back. I’ll talk to McCauley. I’ll give the lead to his partner. He’ll get on it. Still, this overheard conversation of yours, that’s secondhand. Martha’s gone. You’re not giving me the source.”

  “No, I’m not. I can’t. Still reason to wonder. DeVries is dead. That’s firsthand.”

  “We’ll call over to Manhattan.”

  “You’re right. Stories aren’t based on feelings,” Taylor stood and offered his hand, “or ought not to be. I shouldn’t have gone with an assumption. I’m sorry.”

  “A reporter who apologizes?”

  “There are a few of us. You’d think there’d be more, since it’s the only job I know of where you’ve got to publish your corrections right out there for the whole world to read.”

  Taylor walked to the subway at about half his normal pace. He’d apologized before. That didn’t bother him. It was what got him to the apology, the headlong charge to not only ge
t the Martha Gibson story, but somehow show the case was part of some bigger problem. If he wanted that story, he should have done the reporting. He rubbed dry hands together. He remembered what his first city editor had told him: “I don’t give a shit what you think. Tell me what you got.”

  He boarded the train. What did he have? By any measure, he’d given the story more time than he should, had, or could afford. The Gibson murder and the DeVries murder, and filling City News Bureau’s bucket tugged his mind in different directions every day, almost stretching his thoughts out of shape. Was that why he’d made the mistake back at the precinct? He couldn’t do it all, and he had no real proof—or, at least, not a single person—connecting the two murders. He almost needed to drop the Gibson story to pursue the DeVries murder and keep Novak happy. He couldn’t, not yet. He’d stretch himself as far as he could. Saturdays, usually half days at the office or out interviewing, would now have him working full-time. Sundays, too, if need be. Samantha wasn’t going to be thrilled. He owed it to DeVries. He liked the guy. Martha Gibson, a stranger, was even more important. There was only one reporter in town on her story.

  On the ride into Manhattan, multiple versions of the same New York Post headline formed a wall across from him as riders read the story he already knew. The train car was steamy, all the windows open, the thunderous noise of the speeding train drowning out everything—everything but his thoughts. His mind couldn’t stop moving. Touching one idea. Moving. Considering a theory. Not for the first time in the past three months, he came back to Carter, Rupert Murdoch’s protégé from the DeVries dinner party. He hadn’t forgotten the offer of a job interview. Like any bargain with the devil, it was hard to let go of because it offered something he wanted so badly. He’d picked up the phone more than once to make an appointment and hung up without dialing. Taylor wanted badly to work at a newspaper, but now all newspapers weren’t newspapers. Was he being a snob? Couldn’t he carve out a place for his stories like he had at the Messenger-Telegram? Yeah, that had taken ten years, and Murdoch, by all accounts, was a hands-on manager who thought news was another form of entertainment. He rewrote heads. Assigned reporters. Killed stories. Taylor might end up doing the same work he saw filling the new Post.

  City News was a small wire, not a big paper, but things had gotten better. He had his choice of stories, because Novak trusted him as long as he filled the bucket every day. The company was doing well. Novak had doubled the service’s subscribers—New York and suburban FM stations, one TV newsroom, and some newspapers in New Jersey and farther upstate. He couldn’t say his stories weren’t getting out there.

  Just not in a New York paper.

  It always had been more than a goal for Taylor; it had been a need. If the Post wasn’t for him and the Times didn’t want him, that meant the Daily News. He’d wait a long time, given the guys in their cop shop. Or he could move to another city.

  Never.

  “I was wrong today.”

  “Shock, horror,” said Samantha, on her third beer. He’d noticed she was drinking more.

  “You should write headlines. You okay?”

  “Why?”

  He nodded at the beer. “You can have as many as you like, but it seems like more lately.”

  “Everything’s so screwed up. It’s not that I’m afraid. That I see myself being attacked by the nut. Those fantasies always end with me taking him out.” She smiled, all confidence at that thought. “It’s like the city is wrapped so tight and scared about him, and at the same time, the old fears are here. New York is still going bust. Crime and arson. They say we’re out of the recession, but homeless people are everywhere. The poor too, crammed into bad housing. Things were supposed to be better by now. They’re not.”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “Son of Sam equals chaos. The whole city is on the edge of his chaos and some bigger chaos.” She slapped the couch to tell Mason he could jump up on it. “After they catch or kill this guy, what gets better?”

  He’d not heard her talk like this. His thoughts were usually the darker ones.

  “There’s us.”

  He took her hand and led her to the bedroom, leaving Mason on the couch.

  Samantha pulled off her blue smiley t-shirt. Taylor stepped close to her. The smell of warm skin and Prell. She kept everything simple. He couldn’t get enough of it. He kissed her, squeezing her rear gently. She pushed him back on the bed.

  “I don’t want to go slow tonight,” she said.

  He pulled off his pants and underwear fast. She didn’t bother to wait for him to get his shirt off. She left her bra on. She straddled him.

  “Couldn’t wait for naked for this escape.”

  She slowly rose and fell.

  She kept going. He started moaning. She joined in.

  Taylor woke up at two a.m., and a half hour later was still awake. He went out to the living room, put on the headphones that made him look like an air traffic controller and slipped in the self-titled cassette Ramones, which the band had finally put out last year after playing live almost constantly since their formation—usually at CBGB. He followed it with the band’s second album, Leave Home, which had come out in January. Next, a bootleg of the Sex Pistols, who had yet to produce an album, and then Patti Smith. The music raged and rattled him. That was okay. He wanted, needed, sought to be rattled. Rattled was different from chaos. Rattling and raging, you were the one in charge. Not with chaos. That happened to you. He worried about Samantha. What she’d said. She was the steady one.

  He came out of a dream that was as realistic as a film of his first Ramones-Patti Smith show, seen with his previous girlfriend. Samantha was shaking his shoulder. The wall clock said 4:20. He went back to bed, finally ready for sleep, and for some reason, guilty like a little kid for letting Laura Wheeler into his dream, though she’d been out of his life for two years.

  Chapter 20

  Taylor’s t-shirt stuck to his skin and the damp soaked through his dark-blue short-sleeved dress shirt. The temperature was going to top the 86 degrees forecast. He was sure of that. The humidity would be about the same, making his walk along Booth Street that much stickier. On one of Taylor’s checkins, Detective Caputo of narcotics in the 112th had told him Abigail Gibson had been seen hanging around Myrtle Avenue and Park Lane South at the edge of Forest Park. Made sense; it was 12 blocks north from Martha Gibson’s apartment. Abigail hadn’t wandered too far.

  “It’s a popular intersection for street sales,” Caputo had said. “I know she’s been there because she got frisked a couple of times. She was lucky. Not holding.”

  “Why don’t you shut the corner down?” Taylor asked. It was an obligation of the job, even though he knew the answer.

  “We do. They come right back. Or jamokes who look just like them.”

  There isn’t just one kind of racism in the NYPD. There are all sorts of flavors.

  Taylor took a seat in a window of Bubbie’s Corner Spot and ordered a cup of coffee as rent for the table. He took off his sport coat, hoping the single rattling fan would cool him.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Abigail appeared across the intersection. She stood by herself, her arms wrapped around her body like the steamy air was somehow cold. Her head turned one way, then the other. Pretty easy to guess she was looking to fix. He’d wait for her to buy, then follow. After ten minutes, she did the unexpected—turned and walked into the park.

  Shit.

  Forest Park was big, and big parks were dangerous any hour of the day.

  He left a quarter tip, hustled through gaps in the traffic and entered at the same gate. His shoulders dropped in relief when he found she hadn’t gone far; instead she was sitting on a bench next to an elliptical walkway that had other benches spaced out around it. To Taylor’s immediate right was a playground, all its pieces rusting. The slide had a hole through it, with crusty black metal around the edges.

  Three or four homeless people—at least judging by the amount of stuff they h
ad—had created an encampment inside a triangle of three large trees on the other side of the ellipse. If Taylor went farther into the park, he’d find more homeless—and likely folks looking to give him trouble. You wouldn’t know it from the kids laughing on the swings and an old couple sitting on a bench to the left. They were still on the edge of civilization. Taylor walked the long way around the ellipse to a seat cattycorner from Abigail. She could see him if she looked over, but he doubted he was in any way on her mind this minute.

  The junkie continued her unceasing search for someone. Someone with something, no doubt. She started rocking as she squeezed herself, a sign of worsening withdrawal.

  A White teenager came down the path, walking in that slouched shamble street operators taught themselves. He wore a leather jacket, which threw Taylor back to the toughs of his teenage years in his Queens neighborhood. Petty criminals, they’d shoplifted, bullied, and drank beer. Heroin was a ways off in the future. This teen circled slowly, passing close enough to the old couple that the man was forced to pull in his feet. For good measure, the kid smacked the newspaper out of the old man’s hands. The man started to lean on his cane to stand up, but his wife pulled at him. From his seat, he picked up the paper and opened it again with a look of angry resignation.

  Abigail straightened up as the teenager approached. She watched him with intensity, still squeezing herself like her own body would escape her grip if she didn’t.

  The boy stopped, held the slouch as he stood in front of her. They were conversing, but Taylor only got the impression of voices. Abigail leaned forward, concern pushing the pain off her face. She reached for the boy’s jeans, gripped them at the sides and tried to pull him closer.

  The slap came with the speed of a snake. A screech of pain. Blood leaked out of Abigail’s mouth as she moved her hand to it. One wasn’t enough. He hit her again. He was probably the type who enjoyed it.

  That was more street theater than Taylor needed. He jumped from the bench, sprinted around the walkway and grabbed the old man’s cane. Improv felt better than judo in this scenario. That didn’t mean he would play fair. He swung the walking stick hard at the teen’s head, delivering a blow that sent the kid staggering sideways. Taylor hooked the kid’s ankle with the cane, pulled him to the ground and shoved the hook onto the boy’s throat.