1975 - Night of the Juggler (6 page)

Jenny Goldman. Thirteen. Pale, red-haired, solemn as a mouse in her eighth-grade graduation picture. Father a doctor, mother a commercial model. Sexually assaulted, throat slashed, October 15, one year ago.

Looking at Jenny Goldman’s grave little face, with her oddly wise and wistful eyes, hurt Tonnelli so much that it almost made him physically ill, because he and Rusty Boyle had come within minutes of saving Jenny Goldman’s life.

Last year they had almost nailed the Juggler. . . .

They had been cruising on Thirty-ninth between Lexington and Third when a pair of excited kids waved their squad down. “He got Jenny, took her into the basement,” a frightened little Irisher had yelled at them.

Tonnelli and Boyle had stormed into the basement of a brownstone but had arrived too late to save Jenny Goldman her interval of monstrous anguish. She had suffered and died minutes before they had kicked open a bolted door that led to a furnace room thick and blurred with shadows.

In the darkness, they had had only an impression of motion, of fetid air stirring, and then the heavy, powerful figure of a man had smashed them aside, charging with an animal like speed toward the open door.

Tonnelli had fired twice from the floor, but the bullets had struck the sagging door, and the Juggler was gone. . . .

Acting on Tonnelli’s report, Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin, Borough Commander South, had flooded a twelve-square block area (its epicenter at Twenty-ninth and Lexington) with hundreds of uniformed patrolmen and detectives, fleets of motorcycle cops and cruising squads, but this massive and rolling stakeout had been counterproductive, attracting crowds into the area, creating rumors and “tips” that jammed Central’s switchboards. In the confusion of this spasmodic police action, the Juggler had managed to slip through their lines.

The only description they had ever got of the man had come from that excited little Irisher whose name was Joey Harpe and who had directed the detectives to the basement where “the big dirty giant,” in Joey Harpe’s phrase, had taken Jenny Goldman. But patient questioning had developed a few more facts. The man was white, he had a rank odor about him, and he’d been wearing some kind of leather cap. Also, his clothes looked poor. . . .

What had frustrated them from the start of their investigation was that they had found no revealing pattern in the Juggler’s murders. There were no racial or ethnic clues to guide them. He had killed a black girl, a Jewish girl, a Puerto Rican, and a hooker’s daughter who attended a Catholic grammar school. Young females, tortured, raped, and murdered on the fifteenth day of October in widely scattered areas of the borough. That was all they had to go on, but now the description of the little Irisher and the sharp eyes of Max Prima had given them what might be the first lead to their quarry.

If he was right, and it was about a thousand to one he wasn’t, what about him? Big, strong, denims. Wellington boots. Some kind of laborer. Probably poor, probably little education. That was guesswork, but he had to start somewhere. You could figure he’d used loan sharks, Tonnelli thought, and that was something they could check out.

Milky Tichnor in the Village. Ted Chapman on the docks south of Forty-fourth Street, Solly Castro north to the Seventies, Maybelle Cooper with the blacks, and the Puerto Ricans in their barrios in Spanish Harlem. And what was the big spade shylock calling herself these days? Somebody had told the Gypsy. Yes. Samantha Spade.

That was it. He shook his head. Just like her.

Tonnelli handed Max Prima’s report to Scott. “Let’s find this dude, Scotty. Start by calling in Max Prima.”

As Scott gave this message to Sokolsky, who would put it through Central to the patrolman’s home or precinct, Lieutenant Tonnelli, in an automatic but unnecessary reflex, mentally checked the strength and disposition of the extra units which had been assigned to this task force by the assistant chief of Patrols Office.

Standing by in Manhattan’s twenty-odd precincts, and its divisions one through six, were details of uniformed patrolmen who could be alerted and transported to any area of the city within minutes on orders from Tonnelli. Extra squad cars, big and little “trucks,” emergency lighting equipment, two ambulances, and medical orderlies were stationed about the city in patterns which would allow Lieutenant Tonnelli as narrow a lead time as possible to commit those units to a given neighborhood, street, park, or playground.

Attack-trained Dobermans, schooled and handled by Patrolmen Hogan, Platt, and Branch, could also be brought to any area of the city within a matter of minutes.

Three police helicopters, Bell 106-B’s, had been on an alert status for the past week, their pilots and crews awaiting Tonnelli’s orders at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The choppers were equipped with Apollo nets and powerful floodlights in the bellies of their fuselages, any one of which could at night create a noontime brilliance in a square city block.

In addition to this physical muscle and sophisticated equipment, there were the four-star chief inspectors, and below them the four so-called superchiefs and their assistants and deputies and inspectors, down through captains and lieutenants and sergeants and patrolmen, all of this concerned human and mechanical potential at the ready now to spring the trap on the Juggler.

But, Lieutenant Tonnelli thought, it was usually just this way, with all this personnel, all this preparation and equipment, the first break and perhaps the most significant one usually came from some alert, observant cop walking his beat. . . .

Certainly not, however, from Commissioner Joseph Harding, who was presently in Stockholm at an international convention of lawyers and statesmen whose agenda included a discussion of the feasibility of criminal surveillance maintained on special platforms in outer space.

Chapter 3

Detective Sergeant Michael “Rusty” Boyle had personally checked out the alleged rape which the putative victim was willing to swear on her mother’s Bible had occurred in this closed parking lot on West Thirty-fifth. He and Detective Miles Tebbet had made the scene with sirens and red lights because through some confusion (either at Central or from the anonymous tipster) Hilda Smedley’s age had first been reported as sixteen, which had alerted them to the possibility of the Juggler.

Every formation standing in New York for the past ten days, in all divisions and precincts, had been ordered to report any suspicious characters loitering around playgrounds, comfort stations, or public parks; any molestation, rapes, or missing child reports were to be funneled directly to Tonnelli and Boyle’s units. The evaluation of the information was Lieutenant Tonnelli’s responsibility, and he had the authority from both the assistant chief of patrol and the assistant chief of detectives to raise his task force to a Red Alert status if he believed it necessary.

Detective Sergeant Boyle had checked the rape in person and fast and had already reported to Lieutenant Tonnelli through Detective Scott.

This wasn’t the Juggler at work.

The woman’s name was Hilda Smedley, and she had given her age as thirty-four to the patrolmen from the Midtown Precinct, whose squad cars with dome lights revolving were parked at the curb behind Sergeant Boyle’s unmarked car.

Sergeant Rusty Boyle was in his early thirties, tall and wide-shouldered, with the speed and strength of a professional athlete. He had thick red hair, angular features, and a preference for kinky sartorial gear; he favored flared slacks, boots, macho belts, and black leather jackets. Rusty Boyle secretly admired the spade pimps he used to collar around the Times Square area and would have enjoyed wearing huge wide-brimmed hats, boots with silver heels, and ankle-length overcoats.

Regulations frowned on such high-profile outfits unless they were needed as covers. But the real reason was Joyce. She thought they were tacky, and what Joyce thought was the bottom line, the Bible, for Rusty Boyle.

“I told you, he didn’t give me no name,” Hilda was shouting at one of the uniformed officers. She was a mess, Rusty Boyle thought, but with grudging compassion. Tears streaking her makeup, the front of her dress ripped apart to expose pendulous breasts, closer to forty than thirty, Hilda Smedley was a thickening old harpy, who smelled of gin and who would have fallen flat on her face if she hadn’t had a squad car to lean against. There was no tragedy in her violation, Rusty Boyle thought, and realized that that was the tragedy of it.

“We just got talking, the way people will in bars,” she had told Detective Miles Tebbet, who had listened to her with the sympathy and compassion of a man who had once studied for the priesthood.

“He was polite and everything, and he looked kind of Jewish. Maybe he was, but I never had that kind of trouble from a Jewish guy before. Like I told you, he offered to drive me home. Instead he parks in here and goes at me like King Kong.”

While Tebbet listened gravely, Sergeant Rusty Boyle put his hands on his hips and stared at a group of what he judged to be whip-dick hippies bunched together on the sidewalk. They wore ponchos and dirty jeans and were grinning at Hilda Smedley, obviously savoring her flushed, swollen face, ripped blouse, and hysterical tears.

A third-grade detective from the 10th Precinct arrived, Dennis St.

John, a bulky man in his forties who was wearing a windbreaker and a beret. St. John double-parked his car alongside Boyle’s unmarked vehicle, blocking traffic and touching off a fusillade of blasting horns.

Christ, Rusty Boyle thought, with swiftly mounting exasperation and anger. Chaos was part of a police officer’s life, Detective Sergeant Rusty Boyle knew full well; death in its most violent forms, from gunshots, fires and drownings, from knives, razors, the strangling hands of maniacs, these were the items stacked up on the shelves of every policeman’s shop. But Rusty Boyle hated the merchandise he dealt with and traded in and thus tried with all his skill and strength to prevent its occurrence or at least to camouflage it with some semblance of form and discipline. And that was why the present scene so offended him, with its noisy untidiness, its disheveled and violated Hilda Smedley, the gawking street freaks, and the other pedestrians stopping to stare with insulting intensity at the ravaged woman and even, he thought furiously, goddamn dumb Denny St.

John from the 10th, puffing officiously onto the scene and contributing to the turmoil by double-parking his car and blocking traffic all the way back to Sixth Avenue.

Rusty Boyle began shouting orders, beginning with the hippies, and scaring them half out of their wits by bellowing at them in a voice that was like a clap of thunder.

“Get moving, you kinks. Go find some school to drop out of, or I’ll kick your butts up between your shoulders.”

As they backed away from him, covering their embarrassment with awkward grins, Sergeant Boyle turned and stared with cold eyes at the other pedestrians who had stopped to witness Hilda Smedley’s pathetic anguish.

“Everything snap-ass in your homes? Kids all straight-A students? Nobody banging his secretary or sneaking a few belts of whiskey before breakfast? Take care of your own lives. You heard me. Move!”

Dennis St. John tapped Sergeant Boyle on the arm and nodded with an air of gravity and importance toward Hilda Smedley.

“What we got here, Rusty?”

“What the fuck you think we’ve got?” Rusty Boyle said. “I’ll tell you what we got here. We got a fucking traffic jam here. Will you get your car off the street? Pull it into the parking lot.”

There was no reason to shout at him, Sergeant Boyle realized; St. John would probably handle this case, but the detective’s dumbness, which was annoyingly coupled to a manner of pompous self-importance, gave Boyle a pain in the ass.

“I’ll move it,” St. John said. “But I thought something was breaking. That you guys might need some muscle.”

Sergeant Boyle stared in disgust at the backed-up lines of honking automobiles. “What’s breaking are my damned eardrums,” he said.

“Come on, cool it, Sergeant,” St. John said in a petulant voice, and waddled back to his car.

Rusty Boyle noticed then that one man still stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to the parking lot. The man was forty or forty-five, Rusty Boyle judged, wearing slacks and a sweater over a sports shirt. His hair was thinning and gray, and his features were nondescript; a worthy burgher, a taxpaying Mr. Straight, Boyle thought, except there was something haunted in his eyes which were large and clear behind bifocals. He didn’t look the type, Boyle thought, to be getting his jollies at the sight of a sobbing, battered woman, but Boyle had stopped judging people by appearances ever since he collared an altar boy who had hacked a janitor into bloody pieces and then had set fire to him and, in addition to which, had seemed largely pleased by the charred wreckage he had made out of what had once been a human being.

Boyle walked over to the man and said, “Look, the lady’s been through a rough time of it. You’re not helping staring at her.”

“I want to talk to you, Officer,” the man said. “My name is Ransom, John Ransom.” He pointed at the second-story windows of an apartment which overlooked the parking lot. “I heard her scream. I looked out my window just as she was pushed out of the car.”

“You see the guy?”

“Just a glimpse. I couldn’t identify him.”

Well, that figured, Boyle thought with weary exasperation. No way would he get involved. Saw a girl being raped, took his sweet time to come down and lend a hand.

“Was he black or white?” Boyle asked him.

“I’m pretty sure he was white.”

“Any guess on his age?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Ransom said. He fished into the pocket of his slacks, removed a slip of paper with numbers on it, and handed the paper to Sergeant Boyle. “But I got the license number of his car.”

“Well, what were you planning to do? Save it for Christmas?”

“I wasn’t dressed, you see. I just had a robe on. So I had to get on some clothes. That’s why it took me so long to get down here.”

Ransom’s tone was defensive and apologetic. “I got here as soon as I could.”