“From your pseudo-hippy period. Getting with the people didn’t last long. Never understood why you kept it. Had one of my guys bring it over.”
Livingston stepped away from the group. “Stand behind the car.” He unlocked the VW, pulled a big, short-barreled revolver out of his pocket and signaled Taylor to get in the front seat. Taylor couldn’t take his eyes off the gun, even as he sat behind the wheel.
“You know what it is, don’t you?”
Livingston led Audrey around to the other side and ordered her into the front passenger seat. The door slammed. Taylor’s hand automatically rested on the stick shift. Audrey’s returned to clamp on to Taylor’s upper arm.
Livingston was back on Taylor’s side of the car, crouched down to look into the window. “You did recognize it.”
“Hard not to. It’s in the paper every day. Charter Arms Bulldog Forty-Four.”
“We’re not all avid readers of the crime pages. Audrey here works at the New Yorker, after all. They’re still catching up with Prohibition. Who uses this gun?”
“Son of Sam.”
“Correct. We’ve got here a nice car that easily could have come in from the outer boroughs.”
“He’s only killed in the Bronx and Queens.”
“Indeed. Won’t this get the cops going? New angles. New media coverage. Such excitement. The car’s not on the street either, but of course, I couldn’t really pull this off curbside in Times Square.”
“Bobby.” Evangeline DeVries took a step closer to him.
“Hold on, dear. I’m explaining things. Audrey’s close to the perfect age. Hair’s a little short. But I’ve read the stories. The cops have no real idea who this guy is or what he’s up to. Son of Sam, he keeps making changes. Finally, the topper for our little scene. A reporter caught in the middle of Son of Sam’s murderous campaign against the beautiful young women of New York. She is beautiful, isn’t she?”
Evangeline again. “Bobby, please.”
“The ballistics won’t match,” Taylor said.
“I did think about that. The cops, the press, the whole city is wound tight like a spring. They’re going to decide Son of Sam has two guns. A dead couple is going to be found in this car, and they’re going to be the new victims of the city’s favorite psycho-killer. As I understand it, he always comes to the passenger side, gets the girl and then sometimes her beau. They’ll be no sometimes this time.”
Chapter 35
Livingston stood up and walked toward the rear of the VW.
Taylor turned to watch.
“I said Audrey must stay safe,” said Evangeline DeVries. She pulled on Livingston’s arm.
“I told you, honey,” Livingston smacked her across the face, “Audrey doesn’t want to go along with our adventure. She’s become a liability. You don’t want to become a liability too, do you?”
He strolled around the back of the car and appeared outside Audrey’s window, waved with his fingers and went into a shooting crouch.
The black end of the barrel pointed at Audrey’s head. The bullets in the other chambers were huge, even from where Taylor sat. The warheads of ballistic missiles.
She screamed, threw her arms up for protection they couldn’t give, and hunkered down.
Evangeline flew into Bobby.
They tumbled to the ground.
“Duck all the way down … now!” Taylor said.
He jammed his foot onto the clutch, shifted into neutral and released the emergency break. The car started rolling down the steep ramp, picking up speed fast.
The gun went off.
Audrey raised her head and turned. “Mother.”
In the rearview mirror, Evangeline slid slowly off the hood of a Cutlass, leaving a smear of blood.
“Get your head back down!”
Second level.
Livingston started running down the ramp after the rolling car.
Taylor scrunched his head as low as he could and still steer.
First level.
The VW’s rear window blew in, throwing glass all the way to the front seat.
The street came at them fast.
The needle on the speedometer pushed to thirty. He could not brake. There would be no way to regain momentum.
They shot onto 54th with a Yellow cab no more than two car lengths away.
The cabbie hit his horn and brakes at the same time.
Taylor started a turn, but not fast enough. The cab caught the VW in the rear, sent it spinning toward the far curb. The vehicle, facing forward, jumped the curb and hurtled toward the front doors of Studio 54.
Taylor slammed on the brakes and braced himself with the wheel.
The car rammed through the doors with a jarring crash, raining down more glass, and traveled a full length into the entryway before stopping.
“Are you all right?” Taylor opened his door.
Blood ran from Audrey’s nose and a gash on her forehead. “I’m not shot. That’ll do.”
“Move it if we want to avoid that happening.”
Out of the Beetle, they ran down the entranceway and turned into the dark, empty club. It was probably another hour before opening.
Taylor looked back. A shadow moved down the hallway from the front door. Bobby would be coming around the corner any second.
“We won’t get across this big a space in time. Other side of the bar.”
They hopped up on the bar and dropped down behind.
“Well, well. What a nice place to finish things off.” Bobby’s voice from where they’d come in. “Quickly, though. You’ve attracted a whole lot of attention. Somewhere near. Couldn’t have gotten far.”
Now what? Cops and fire were going to get here soon. If they could survive that long, they’d be set. If Bobby found them before that, they’d be dead, and it wouldn’t matter how much evidence this asshole left behind. Not for Taylor and Audrey, at least.
Steps came toward the bar.
I’ve got to stall.
The lowest shelf behind the bar was long, deep, and empty. He signaled for Audrey to crawl on to it. She barely fit.
With his lips almost touching her ear, he whispered, “Don’t move, no matter what.”
Two more steps from the other side.
Taylor picked up a shot glass, edged up for a glimpse, found Livingston turned toward the dance floor, and hurled the glass as hard as he could back down the entrance hall. The gun went off.
Fucking trigger-happy.
Taylor ran low to the other end of the bar, came around the corner, and stood up. Livingston faced the entrance, gun up.
“She got away, Bobby boy. Out the front door. We split up.”
He turned. The .44 was steady, the smile transformed into an angry sneer.
“Then I’ll kill you and hunt her down. You’re the smarter one. It’s not always about class and money. I’ve learned that in my business career. I’ll find her and finish all this.”
“You’ll be finished long before that. She’s going to tell your whole story to the cops. You’ve got nothing over her anymore. You wiped out her family.”
Livingston raised the big gun higher and stepped closer to Taylor.
“How about I don’t care? How about I put a bullet in your head.”
“Long as you saved one for yourself.”
“I’ll get out of this. I’ve been raised to manage this system of ours.”
Movement behind Livingston. A bulky man wearing a Mets cap emerged from the hallway.
“Hay! Who the hell ran that VW in front of my cab? We pushed it to the side, and I need to report this—”
Livingston spun and fired, hitting the cabbie in the chest.
Taylor closed the distance as Livingston was bringing his arm back around. Taylor hurtled into him. The gun roared as Taylor tackled Livingston to the floor.
The world went silent.
One bullet left if he didn’t reload.
Taylor wrestled with Livingston. All his concentration was on the gun
hand. He slammed it once, twice onto the wood dance floor.
Again. As hard as he could. Something cracked in Livingston’s wrist.
Livingston might have been yelling. His mouth was open wide enough. Taylor was deaf from the gunshot. Livingston let loose the gun’s grip. Taylor leaned and stretched and swatted the Bulldog away.
Taylor paid a steep price for that move. Livingston elbowed him in the throat, sending him onto the floor, gasping for air. Livingston landed on top, punched him in the face.
Everything spun.
Taylor bucked. Livingston stayed on top and hit him again. He bucked again but without as much strength. One more punch, and he’d be out of this.
Taylor’s left hand was free. He grabbed for Livingston’s face, reaching for his nose, an eye, anything. Livingston bit his thumb hard. The hand fell away to his chest bleeding. If there was pain, it faded, because Taylor was fading from gray to black. Livingston pulled back for the final punch.
Taylor heard the first sound since Livingston’s revolver had deafened him. Another gunshot. Half of Livingston’s scalp flew into the air like some theatrical string had pulled it. Blood splattered on Taylor’s face. Bobby Livingston collapsed onto Taylor, which did nothing to help him catch his breath and clear his head. He pushed to move Livingston off. Couldn’t. Worked to take in air, let it out again. Spit blood out of his mouth. Woozy spinning.
Audrey appeared in his fuzzy field of vision, almost a magic trick, holding the .44-caliber revolver in one hand, her grip tight like she was certain she’d need to use it again.
The first thing he wanted to do was thank her for not following his orders. His jaw wouldn’t work.
“Are you okay?”
He tried again and got four words out. “Help … get him off.”
In the end, she did all the pushing and dropped the body into a puddle of brains and blood onto the floor.
“Thank …” he took another raspy breath, “you.”
“You saved me first.”
“Put the gun down. Cops coming.”
By the time he was able to sit up, five patrolmen came in, guns out, followed by an engine crew.
There was some discussion about sending Taylor to the hospital, a suggestion he fought with impeded speech and gestures. He didn’t want Audrey going into the precinct by herself. There were two bodies here and one across the street. Bad enough. Worse, this was a complex case. Bobby Livingston had done a merry dance all over the Upper East Side. For Audrey’s sake, Taylor wanted to make sure the detectives heard the same story from both of them—that he put the story in front of them, clear and clean. It was his job, after all. There were things he knew that she could not know about the case.
While they were all conferring, he got Audrey to call Samantha, who arrived within five minutes and bullshitted her way onto the scene.
Precinct first, he told her, then he’d get checked out. Must have been the look in his eyes, because she didn’t argue. In fact, she backed him with the cops.
The ME’s people were starting to do their work, and a lieutenant—a sure sign how serious this was—invited them all to the precinct. Didn’t sound like an invitation.
A slender man in a black silk tie walked into Studio 54.
“What the fuck happened to my club?”
—Daily News, page 1, August 1, 1977
—New York Post, page 1, August 11, 1977
—New York Times, page 1, August 22, 1977
*
Chapter 36
Son of Sam didn’t “celebrate” the July 29th anniversary of the killing of Donna Lauria with a shooting. He waited until two nights later and attacked a couple in a car in a parking area facing Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn. Stacy Moskowitz died from a bullet to the brain. Her date, Robert Violante, was permanently blinded.
The Post’s Steve Dunleavy managed to escort the victims’ parents into a private room in the hospital and shield them from the rest of the press. He shoved a TV crew out of the room to keep things private. He got his scoop. The story began, “For 13½ hours a Post reporter stood at the side of four courageous people in a painful and often stirring vigil—praying, talking about God, and swearing at an unknown madman who has launched a guerrilla war against the young and beautiful of this city.”
His nauseating invasion went on from there. If he didn’t know already, Taylor was now certain he’d made the right decision. There was no good reason for him to work at the new New York Post.
An item as innocent as a parking ticket put on a car near the murder scene led to a man named David Berkowitz in Yonkers. Two Yonkers cops had already been working to link Berkowitz to the shooting of a dog, a fire set in Berkowitz’s apartment building, and strange letters to the dog’s owner and another couple. Berkowitz was arrested for the Son of Sam shootings.
The circus stayed in town.
During Berkowitz’s walk into 1 Police Plaza, the scramble by seemingly every photographer on the East Coast launched cameras into the air, sent photographers crashing to the ground and had them taking pictures of the backs of each other’s heads. One cameraman stepped in front of the police car and was almost flattened. The police escort had to push and shove to inch Berkowitz through the crush.
On the day Berkowitz was being arraigned in Brooklyn Criminal Court, four journalists were arrested for breaking into the gunman’s apartment. Two days later, an attorney who somehow ended up on the initial team representing Berkowitz was being investigated by the U.S. Attorney for pedaling 90 minutes of taped interviews between him and Berkowitz for newspaper serialization and book rights. The price: $100,000.
The August 22nd New York Times, today’s paper, carried a front-page story on how the press had handled the case, concluding the News and the Post had gone beyond reporting by “transforming the killer into a celebrity.”
No shit, Sherlock.
Taylor turned to the jump as he ate his fill of his grandfather’s bacon and cheese omelet. Samantha sat across from him at the Oddity with eggs sunny side up and sausages.
Even the comics had joined this circus, which had grown well beyond three rings. The Doonesbury strip was parodying Jimmy Breslin and his role in the story with a Son of Arnold and Abigail Lieberman calling the News’ promotion department trying to get some attention. The News wouldn’t run the strip. The Post, though it didn’t have the rights, published a few of them on Page 6, including one in which Breslin wrote an open letter to Hollywood because negotiations for the movie rights had broken down. It appeared under the headline BRESLIN TO TINSELTOWN: DROP DEAD.
Audrey DeVries slid into the booth next to Samantha. She’d asked to meet at the Oddity. She’d said on the phone she liked the place. That didn’t surprise Taylor. Everyone fit in at Grandpop’s diner, from cabbies to the ladies of the Upper East Side.
Her face was too pale. She’d lost weight. Sadness radiated off her.
“Thank you for getting together,” she said.
“Of course.”
“I was talking to one of my editors at the New Yorker—”
“You’re back at work?”
“I had to go in. Sitting around thinking was crushing me. Friends don’t know what to talk about. I can tell they’re working on things to say and that brings on more of the crush. I moved out of the apartment. I’m with my aunt. The crazy one who moved to the Westside.” The barest hint of a smile. “I was telling my editor about your Martha Gibson piece. He’d like to do a story on a murder that happened while the city was obsessed with David Berkowitz.”
“I don’t think I write in your style. I don’t know what your style is.”
“Write it your way. Will you, please? This is the first story I’ve pitched that he’s been interested in. A story on Martha would be a small step for me. In a lot of ways.”
“I can put something together. You’ll go over it with me before you turn it in?”
“Deal.”
Things weren’t going in the direction he’d expected, hadn’t for alm
ost two years. Maybe he should let the worrying go for a bit. His series on the DeVries family had been picked up by every City News client, plus some papers that weren’t subscribers. Now, the New Yorker, of all publications. Novak had even mentioned there might be more work and money from WINS. They liked his “gritty newspaper style,” which Taylor took as an insult—the gritty part. He got over it quick enough. He was, by accident, cobbling together a hodgepodge of ways to report his stories. This could be the answer in a city that bounced lower every time he thought it hit bottom.
“You want something to eat?”
“I’ve got to get back to the office. I bury myself in the work—to keep a little of it at bay. It’s Friday, and I’m the only one who hates it. Weekends are awful.”
After she opened the glass door, stepped outside and turned downtown, Samantha said, “She must be pretty strong. She’s going to need more than work to keep going.”
“How do you heal from that?”
“Time heals—”
“A favorite line of my mom’s.”
“What about the city? How long for it to come back?”
“Not sure it’s done hurting itself. Being hurt. Self-inflicted wounds by its own people. Attacking their own in their own neighborhoods. In some ways, all that was worse than Berkowitz. Dodging bankruptcy wasn’t even a beginning of the city’s recovery.” He shook his head. “I can’t wait for this summer to end. Let the next thirty days go by quickly. Cooler weather. Autumn. A fading of some of the fear.”
“Should we move somewhere else?”
“I couldn’t. Could you?”
“No way. Thought I should ask.”
He closed the paper. “I liked that beach out on the Far Rockaways. Let’s spend the afternoon there.”
“You’d skip a day of work?” Her incredulous tone was only half feigned.
“Wouldn’t want to miss this balmy eighty-degree weather.”
Taylor stood. They both waved to Grandpop and walked toward the door.
Photo by Domenica Comfort
Rich Zahradnik is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed Coleridge Taylor Mystery series (Last Words, Drop Dead Punk, A Black Sail, Lights Out Summer).
Lights Out Summer Page 23