Frank Robinson had gotten to the crime scene an hour after Kennedy had arrived. There had been something new in Kennedy’s face and it must have worried Robinson, because he had dragged him out of the confusing welter of detectives and crime-scene workers in that hot, airless, and unbearably scented room. Out on the street, Robinson had poured a coffee for Kennedy from a flask in the back seat of his squad car.
Kennedy had been speaking in a monotone about the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI at Quantico. He had been musing to himself, in a flat voice, that the FBI had proven the likelihood that the killers would still have the woman’s breasts when they were caught. Robinson, looking for something to say, caught between embarrassment and compassion, brought out the old sustaining delusion, heard in every squad room and every cop’s bar from Yonkers to Raritan Bay.
“Come on, Eddie … lighten up. You think she was still in there, by the time they did that? No way, buddy. She was gone, God bless her. She was far away.”
CHAPTER 11
DUDLEY
A woman pedestrian had been run down by a delivery van on East 34th Street, backing up the traffic. The driver of Kennedy’s taxi, cursing, fought the dust and diesel smoke and a hundred other cars to get a half-block eastward on 34th. An EMS bus took the sidewalk around the jam-up, opening a gap in the pedestrian wall at Park Avenue South and 34th Street. The cabbie cranked his wheel hard, bounced over the curb into an illegal left-hand turn up Park. Kennedy, leaning forward to keep his shirt off the sticky back section of the seat, saw the Church of Our Savior coming up on his right as they neared East 38th Street. On an impulse, he told the driver to stop there. He climbed out onto the wide walk and stood in front of the huge sandstone facade, trying to remember if they heard confessions at 1730 hours on a Wednesday afternoon.
Kennedy’s Catholicism had declined to the status of an empty social gesture many years before, shortly after the introduction of the English Mass. His Latin had always been sketchy, so it came as something of a shock to him to hear the translation of invocations and pleas that had seemed so majestic in an indecipherable tongue, and yet were revealed, in English, as commonplaces.
But the cathedrals retained their power. When Kennedy pushed open the wooden doors, he felt thirty years slipping away into the colonnaded interior. The same amber light filled the scented space. Stained-glass panels graced the clerestory. The stone floor breathed the same old soothing silence. His footsteps echoed in the church as he made his way up the center aisle toward the sanctuary, where a forest of pillars and arches flew upward in a rush into the buttressed dome. In the tenth pew on the left, taken out of habit, he made no attempt to pray. The lights were off above the draped confessionals, which was just as well. The last time Kennedy had tried to make a full confession, he had been quite disappointed when the half-grown priest had stopped him only a minute into his litany. He had worked some ten years on those sins, and he felt they called for something better, or worse, than the Stations of the Cross and a couple of laps around his Rosary beads.
He came here now and then, in times such as these, to try to resurrect some of the old consolations of Catholicism, that evil comes from Lucifer and Leviathan, in this case from Asmodeus, and not from someplace far more frightening, from someplace much closer, completely inescapable, congenitally damned.
When he found himself counting the posts in the Communion railing, he got up and strolled back down the aisle toward the door and the hectic midtown streets. At Pershing Square he gave himself up for damned and used his buzzer to warn the competition off an air-conditioned cab. When it pulled up in front of his apartment building’s canopy, he could see from Calvin’s face that there had been no sign of Dudley.
Holly had talked him into going down to the shelter to get a pet in the first place. He went along with it just to humor her, although he was privately determined that they’d be back at his apartment in a couple of hours with nothing more petlike than a couple of chili dogs from the pushcart vendor at the corner of 74th and Second Avenue.
The shelter had been an animal oubliette, row after row of wire cages holding ragged dogs and moth-eaten cats, even a rabbit and a couple of mongooses. Mongeese? They’d never resolved that question.
The place had a steamy density to it, dog’s breath and closed spaces. It had been winter, and the shelter was overheated and dank. Holly had run from cage to cage, going predictably and nauseatingly gaga over animals Kennedy would have backed over laughing. She was convinced that a pet would go some distance toward improving Kennedy’s tendency to brood. A bird, a dog, even a kitten, might help turn Kennedy, and Kennedy’s ruthlessly neat apartment, into a more malleable, and marriageable, commodity. Kennedy, who loathed any dog that couldn’t bring down a bull elk on the fly, had visions of being stroked and cajoled into bringing home some hideous triumph of decorative genetics. He’d have to take the little brute for walkies on rainy nights and at half time in the Super Bowl.
That wasn’t really fair to Holly, who knew him better than that. She did favor small dogs with big eyes, but she spent a lot of time talking to a couple of Samoyeds and a Rottweiler, for his sake. Kennedy moved away, and something snagged his coat sleeve near a rack of small cages.
He looked down and there was a long furred arm attached to his best leather jacket by a fan of lethal claws. The arm was connected to what was obviously a hydrophobic cat, a damn big hydrophobic cat, as black as midnight, glowering at him from the cage, filling it with ill-will and murder, baring his formidable fangs, emitting a low and sustained hiss like a damaged bagpipe. Kennedy, unable to get the cat to release his jacket, moved in closer to negotiate with the beast. In a blindingly fast move, the cat made a lunge with its other forepaw and actually caught Kennedy’s jacket by the lapel. Now trapped at the cuff and the lapel, Kennedy tried to pull away and the damned thing tried to drag him into the cage. They got into quite a tussle over it, back and forth, until Kennedy put a foot against the stack and shoved backward. His coat gave in several places. The big black cat withdrew into the cage, tatters of leather coat hanging from both forepaws.
“You son of a bitch!” Kennedy had bellowed. “You’re a dead cat, you little bandit.” The cat had only snarled back, all white fangs and defiance in a flare of black fur. An attendant came running. Apologies were offered. Somebody mentioned that the cat was a disagreeable brute who was headed for that great litterbox in the sky, Monday next. The sentence got to Kennedy in some odd way.
Holly was patting a gray mongrel the size of a grizzly and calling out to him. Kennedy moved to within a safe distance and tried to get a better look at this doomed monster.
He was big—that was one thing. He’d be a handful for Holly’s woolly mammoth, maybe. There was something in the cat’s big yellow eyes that reminded Kennedy of Pete Garibaldi, the late demented leader of the now-scattered narcotics unit. The cat had settled down into a sullen indifference, half turned away from the cage-front, watching Kennedy over one bulked shoulder. Beneath this cage, five white kittens tumbled over one another, and above it a cocker pup sat staring down at Kennedy, its head slightly tilted, one eyebrow raised, a sliver of pink tongue sticking out over its baby teeth. Kennedy felt the dog’s look.
“What do you think? You think this bandit ought to go to the green room? Hah?” The cocker raised its other eyebrow and reversed the head tilt. Kennedy put a hand up against the cat’s cage, tentatively, ready to snatch it back if the cat made any move. It blinked at him.
“Your card says you’re Dudley. What’re you in for?”
Nothing.
“Nothing? Yeah, you wuz framed.” He could see the cat’s ears, as chewed and ragged as a wino’s pantscuff. And he had several whiskers missing. And scratches above both eyes. Charmless, lethal, grumpy, and unregenerate. He called the attendant back, indicating the cat.
The boy, a Puerto Rican in a lab coat, had tried to talk sense here.
“You makin’ a mistake about this one, sir. Tha’s a very bad cat. He h
ave mark up all the girls. He don’ like girls very much.” He nodded toward Holly. “The lady, she’s not goin’ be very happy with him. Anyway, I thin’ he’s got bugs but I can’ get close enough to give him no medicine.”
“I’ll give him his medicine. As long as he’s not sick? No distemper, or anything like that?”
The boy shook his head ruefully. “No sir, he ain’ sick. He’s jus’ a mean machine. You wan’ him, sir, I get him ready for you. You sure you don’ wan’ one of those guard dogs? The lady, she’s got a nice Labrador cross over there?”
Holly came over at that point, taking in the cat and the look in Kennedy’s eyes. “Eddie, I thought you hated cats. You can’t want this ugly bugger? At least go for a kitten!”
The attendant came back with leather gauntlets and unlocked the cage. The cat was up on its toes, looking for blood and battle.
“Holly, this is the one I want. Look at him! He doesn’t give a damn if I like him or not. That’s my kind of pet. Hey, Holly, if it’ll make you feel better, we’ll buy the dog too. I think this cat is hungry.”
It took a year for Kennedy and Dudley to learn how to get along with each other. It took less than a month for Dudley to make a name for himself on the block.
In the following ten years, Dudley broke his right foreleg jumping onto a moving car. And then again, jumping out of the second-story window with his leg in a cast. Not to mention about a hundred minor wounds, and the time, three years back, when Dudley had cast a pall over Kennedy’s first evening at home with Trudy the dietician by leaping up on the bed at a critical moment, cursing his cat-curses, sitting on Kennedy’s shoulder, staring down past Kennedy’s neck as Trudy, gathering, cresting, wild, opened her eyes at the sound and saw a huge black cat looking down at her with his left eye torn out and dangling by a vein.
Ten years later Kennedy was seeing little Dudley-clones all around the Upper East Side, many of them living in much better circumstances than the original Dudley or his owner, riding around in the back windows of BMW 320i’s, sauntering along Lexington Avenue sharing leashes with scoliotic grandes dames in Russian sable, even once at the window in Alo Alo, lapping at cream in a Baccarat flute.
Yes, Dudley had left his mark all over the neighborhood, a legacy of bandit cats and bounders who could still be seen along the roof lines and behind the best windows in the area. It had been a privilege just to room with that cat.
For Homicide cops, there are killings and then there are atrocities. Most of the cases, citywide, are depressingly ordinary, in the sense that no great passion, no abyssal evil, shows itself in the deed. People get knifed over Seiko watches in the basement of a parking garage, left to drain into the pavement underneath their Mercedes. Or they turn up shot over a five-dollar heroin deck, or stabbed for their Vuarnets on Lenox Avenue. Domestic tensions exact their price, many times delivering up a killer, drunk, stoned, or merely maudlin, lying in a far corner of a peeling basement apartment in Chinatown, bloody to the wrists, whining about his rights while his common-law wife leaks into a Woolworth bathmat. Bar squabbles, grudge fights, simple juvenile machismo, childish fits of silly pettiness send half-grown boys into death struggles over parking spaces or the affections of a wacked-out hooker in the back of a wrecked De Soto in a junkyard near Jamaica Bay. Husbands throw their pregnant mistresses off bridges or slip them into the current at the foot of Roosevelt Island. Floaters bob in the wake of the garbage scows, purple and festering, fed upon by catfish in the pilings along the Hudson. A flower bed in Long Island City sprouts too quickly in April, and the sniffer-probes catch the vapors of a moldering child three feet down in the gritty clay, her schoolbooks beside her, a stocking still knotted around her neck; fibers convict the parent next door, who has concealed a record for child abuse in another state from his wife and children for thirty years. Little black boys turn up slaughtered and eviscerated, cannibalized and burned, in a litter of white feathers and black candle-bits, in a sunken basement in the South Bronx, sacrificed for Voodoo gods, John the Conjure Root, Walk On Golden Splinters, or the Gris-Gris Man. A three-year-old girl turns up wrapped in a green garbage bag on a rooftop in Harlem. A young girl is raped and killed in Manhattan; the black man accused of her killing snarls into a video camera and the television news team delivers his contorted face as the detectives lead him to a squad car. He says the bitch was asking for it and he gave it to her. Close to two thousand killings in 1985, and over two thousand in 1986. The streets and parks and rivers send down corpse after corpse, a moving beltway of bodies, and any case that takes too much time or too much manpower threatens to back up all the cases coming down after it. The “grounders” they catch on the fly, solving them in hours, off a shortened bat, firing the facts into home plate. The “mysteries” get as much time and manpower as they can find for them—more if the media are hounding the mayor, or the bodies are piling up too fast in an area marked for commercial development, like the Times Square blocks or Trump’s Television City or the Amex complex.
Most of the time, homicide work is business as usual. They do what they can, what is possible in the real world. Each detective brings something personal to an impersonal art, and responds to different atrocities in varying ways. Three kinds of murders draw blood from all the Task Force men: the child-killings, of which there seem to be an endless variety, from simple brutality to kiddie-porn deaths and sexual predation; the death of any law enforcement officer; and rape-homicide atrocities such as the Muro killing.
You could always tell when the squad was viscerally engaged by one of these cases. The mood of the squad room changed. There was no small talk. Off-duty men came in without being asked. Case loads got juggled; court dates were negotiated around it. The whole four-precinct area got involved in the fieldwork. Uniform men volunteered for canvass duty. Plainclothes cops shook up all their finks, registered and unregistered. The Crime Units clamped down on all the minor operations, making life in the blocks intolerable until the criminal community pushed the quarry out into the middle of the street. Interagency experts were called upon for counseling. Stokovich would sit for hours in his study at home, poring over journals or forensic psychology or ballistics charts, leafing through old case files, trying to get some perspective on the thing. Life in the task force got very concentrated, precise, grim.
It got grim on the streets as well. A certain amount of low-level crime goes on in every precinct area, some prostitution, a crap game, even some drug dealing. Cops don’t like to shut it all down, because most of their tips and information come from these people. But if the precinct gets an idea that a killer is being sheltered, or that there’s not enough help, then the hammer comes down.
A lot of talent had been involved in the Muro case. Robinson and Kennedy had the primary responsibility, Robinson as Recorder and Kennedy as the case man. Kennedy had attended the autopsy, overseeing Charlie Marcuse as he took vaginal and anal swabs from the corpse. There had been several distinct bite marks on the victim: one very clear one on the abdomen, a few inches above the pubis, and another one, less distinct, on the neck. Marcuse had used a cotton swab to take wipings of the skin around these bite marks, to provide data for a forensic serologist to develop later. If the killer, or killers, had been secretors—people whose blood type was evident in their semen and saliva, and about eighty percent qualify—then this evidence would provide support for related evidence. It wasn’t conclusive alone, but it helped in those cases where an Assistant DA wanted as much backup as he could get before taking a man into court. There would also be blood cells in the semen. Marcuse had combed out the pubic area as well, collecting a number of hairs that had been left there during the rape. Forensic technicians could make very detailed observations about the age, diet, race, and sex of a suspect, based on pubic hairs.
A forensic odontologist had gotten photographs of the bite marks, black-and-white and color, taken with a centimeter rule in the shot. Additional facts could be developed from bite mark evidence, and unlike serological da
ta, bite mark evidence had been accepted in New York State courts as final and conclusive proof of guilt. There were so many variables in bite size, in wear-patterns, in fillings and occlusions, in the pattern and distribution of teeth, that bite marks were as good as a clear latent print in a court of law. Other psychological factors could be inferred from the clarity of the bite. Had it been delivered in a frenzy, or was it the product of a slow, sadistic attack? The clear detail of the bite mark on Adeline Muro’s belly suggested a deliberately sadistic assault, a contention supported by the fact that the degree of bruising and tissue destruction proved that it had been done while the victim was still living.
An attempt had been made to lift latent prints off the victim’s body, especially from the areas around the neck, the inner thighs, and her wrists. A Crime Scene technician who had been trained in the Kromekote film technique had performed the operation at the scene. But latent prints were useless unless a specific suspect was under investigation. The FBI Latent Print Section in Washington can only search for similarities in a few areas. There is no computerized filing system that can be tapped into for some magical whole-system check. The search must be directed by name and FBI print number.
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