Blood Innocents

by Thomas H. Cook

  He opened the door into the hallway that led to the stairs, and the warm, almost sweet smell of urine enveloped him. The hallway was full of debris: a partially burned mattress, beer cans, a disemboweled television, the bare, rusty, wheel-less skeleton of a bicycle. The walls were covered with a dark, murky layer of mold, and the squeaking stairs were littered with the plaster that had fallen from the walls and ceiling overhead. As Reardon made his way toward the fifth floor he could hear the easy frolicking of rats.

  When he reached the Petrakis apartment Reardon knocked lightly on the door, then listened for movement inside the apartment. There was only silence. He knocked again, harder this time, but still there was no response. He turned to the door facing the Petrakis apartment and knocked. Inside he could hear rustling, hurried movement, but the door did not open to him.

  He knocked again.

  “Yes?” a voice said, but still the door did not open.

  “My name is Detective John Reardon, Police Department. I’m looking for Andros Petrakis.”

  “Moved,” the voice said. Reardon could tell that it was the voice of an old man. Each word was preceded and followed by a wheeze.

  “Yes, I know,” Reardon said, “but we can’t get in touch with him. We were wondering if anyone in this building might know where the Petrakis family moved after they left the building.”

  “Took his family,” the voice said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Sick wife. Lots of kids.”

  “Yes, I know,” Reardon said. He did not ask the old man to open the door. He knew that he would not. He did not even want to frighten him by asking. “But do you know any of Mr. Petrakis’ friends? Did he have any friends in this building, anyone who visited him?”

  “Don’t know,” the voice said through a gentle cough. “Don’t know nothing about them. Just lots of kids.”

  “I’m sorry to have troubled you,” Reardon said, giving in, and he touched the door, gently with his fingertips, as he might have soothed a troubled face.

  7

  That night, as Reardon slept, two women were murdered in an apartment on Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, a fashionable area in the center of Greenwich Village. When Smith informed Reardon of the crime the next morning he described it as a “bloody” and told Reardon that Piccolini wanted to talk to him.

  “Have you read the report on the murder of those two girls in the Village?” Piccolini asked. To Piccolini all females were girls, no matter what their age.

  “How old were they?” Reardon asked.

  “Twenties. It’s all in the report. You didn’t read it yet, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s all in there. In the report. It’s on your desk.”

  “I haven’t been to my desk.”

  Piccolini looked irritated. Reardon knew that not going to the desk first thing struck Piccolini as being symptomatic of a serious social maladjustment. “Well, anyway, Mathesson was over there this morning, and there are some strange things about it. It might be a good idea for you to take a look. Like there’s a number scrawled on the wall of their apartment, and it’s the same number.”

  “Two?” Reardon asked.

  “Yes.”

  Reardon felt a wave of tension pass over his body. “A roman numeral?”

  “No, it’s in Spanish. Dos. And it’s written in blood.”

  “What was the weapon?”

  “Probably some kind of broad-bladed knife. And another thing: one of them was hacked up real bad, and the other one was killed with one blow. Just one. That’s it.”

  “Do you have a pathologist’s report?”

  “No. The bodies are still at the apartment.” Piccolini looked pleadingly at Reardon. “Look, why don’t you just go over there. Just go on over there. You’ll get more there than out of me. Talk to Mathesson about the details. He’s been there since early this morning.”

  Reardon nodded.

  “All I’m saying is that we maybe have more than a deer killer on our hands. So if by chance you’ve been feeling deprived of your homicide cases, well, now you’ve got one. If it turns out there’s no connection between the two cases that’s okay, but the burden of proof has to go against the connection.”

  With Piccolini Reardon could never tell whether phrases like “burden of proof” came from reading or television. “I’ll let you know what I find,” he said.

  At the apartment of the murdered women Reardon found the usual swarm of investigators. They were dusting for fingerprints and photographing the bodies from every conceivable angle. A group of uniformed officers stood in corners chatting about baseball scores or comparing arrest records, but otherwise the room was a welter of activity. Mathesson stood near the center of the room writing in his notebook.

  “It doesn’t look like they were sexually abused,” he said as Reardon approached him.

  Reardon scanned the apartment. It looked as if it had been blown up with a hand grenade. Everything was in disarray — overturned, scattered, bloodied. “They look like they were pretty abused without it.”

  “We think they died sometime between midnight and five in the morning,” Mathesson said. “We can’t get much closer than that right now. We’re checking everybody in the building, trying to find out when they got home.”

  “Who were they?” Reardon asked.

  “Two roommates. Both names are on the mailboxes downstairs. One of them is named Lee McDonald, and the other one — the one in the other room — is named Karen Ortovsky.”

  “Anything else?”

  “McDonald worked at a law firm. The other one worked for some fashion place. A designer, maybe. Something like that.” Mathesson’s face turned ruminative. “But there’s something kind of funny.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, we haven’t been able to find any address book or anything like that around here. There’s a lot of cash. Fifty-five dollars in this little desk, another seventy-five in the kitchen, and a hundred and twenty bucks in a night stand in the other room. But no address book at all. No file of telephone numbers. No list of friends. Nothing like that. It don’t seem quite right, to tell you the truth. I mean, hell, every woman has a list of names and telephone numbers.”

  Reardon peered around the room. “Did you check the back of the phone book?”

  “Yeah. Nothing. Blank. No names written in it or circled anywhere in the book.” He looked for some response in Reardon’s face, then he added: “A couple of boys are going through all the clothes in the bedroom, but so far we just got the stuff in their purses, you know. Company ID’s and credit cards. That sort of shit.”

  Reardon took out his notebook. “Give me the names of the companies they worked for.”

  Mathesson took out his notebook and quickly thumbed through it until he reached the correct page. “McDonald worked for a law firm named Bailey, Merritt and White. They’re at 1604 Sixth Avenue. The other one worked at Tristan Designers at 147 West 37th Street.”

  “Okay. And find out which bank they used and check out any safety deposit boxes they might have had. There might be something in them we ought to know about. And keep looking for some kind of address book. I don’t see any signs of a forced entry here so they may have known the killer, may have had his name written down somewhere.”

  “Yeah,” Mathesson said, “like I said, that might explain why they’re missing names and numbers.”

  “Maybe,” Reardon said.

  “Well, I guess you want to look around.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The other one’s tied up in the bedroom closet,” Mathesson said.

  Reardon nodded. He took a deep breath, exhaled quickly, nervously, stepped past Mathesson and walked farther into the apartment. He did not like what he saw.

  Lee McDonald lay near the far wall, opposite the apartment entrance. She had been butchered like a hog on a rack, stabbed in both eyes, her throat cut almost to the spinal column. There were deep slashes in both her thighs and one long
deep cut across her left jaw. One breast had been almost severed from her body and hung like a flap over her rib cage. The other breast had been flayed open by numerous thrusts of the blade. She had been stabbed completely through one hand, splitting it in two between the middle and index fingers.

  “All her clothes were just cut off her,” Mathesson said as he stepped up behind Reardon. “Like opening a package.”

  Slithers of clothing lay scattered about the room like discarded ribbons. All the furniture on the right side of the room — two small chairs and a table — was overturned; one of the chairs had been thrown all the way to the other side of the room and rested on its side near Lee McDonald’s ankles. On the back wall a painting was tipped far to the right, and the small pink sofa that rested below it was dappled with blood. The left wall of the room was covered with blood, but none of the furniture was disturbed.

  From the position of the body and its condition, and from the splotches on the walls, Reardon could visualize what must have happened in that room during the last two or three minutes of Lee McDonald’s life.

  Someone had come through the front and only door of the apartment. He had had with him — under his coat or wrapped like a package or hidden in a newspaper — a broad-bladed knife, perhaps ten to twelve inches long and three to five inches wide at its greatest width. With this weapon, and perhaps some other one — even a gun — he had forced both women into the adjoining bedroom, where he had tied up Karen Ortovsky and dumped her in the bedroom closet like a bag of dirty laundry.

  Then he must have told Lee to come with him into the living room. Either that, or she had attempted flight, tried to make it to the only door. But too late.

  “Where’s the other woman?” Reardon asked.

  Mathesson pointed to the open bedroom door. “In there.”

  Reardon nodded and went into the bedroom.

  In the brutal relativity of murder, Karen Ortovsky had gotten off easier. Her body lay in the bedroom closet adjoining the room in which Lee McDonald had died. She was bound and gagged, her legs bent under her at the knees and tied at the ankles. Her throat had been cut almost to the spinal column. Her eyes were wide open and a piece of tissue paper, part of the gag that had been crammed all the way to the windpipe, dangled ludicrously from the left side of her mouth.

  Reardon stared at the face. It was an ordinary face. But it suddenly appeared to him to be the smallest, most delicately etched and hideously violated face he had ever seen on an adult. With its up-turned nose and small, thin mouth, barely wider than a half-dollar piece, it seemed to retain the features of a child.

  Reardon knelt down beside the slumped body of Karen Ortovsky and with two fingers gently closed her eyes.

  “Well, what do you think?” Mathesson asked as he walked into the bedroom. “Do you think there’s a connection with the deer thing?”

  Reardon stood up slowly, feeling a weakness in his knees. “I don’t know.”

  “Piccolini thinks there is, right?”

  “Yeah.” He looked down again into the face of the body crumpled at his feet. “Sometimes enough is enough,” he whispered.

  “Huh?”

  Somehow, Reardon thought, if the eyes had been closed, like those of Lee McDonald, he could have borne the rest with greater ease. But the eyes of Karen Ortovsky had burned into him like naked light bulbs in a solid darkness, screaming for more than conventional justice could offer. Reardon knew immediately that Karen Ortovsky had been the last to die. He knew that she had cowered, tied like a beast, while the murderous tumult went on in the next room. She had heard each slash of the blade tearing into Lee McDonald’s flesh, had heard her roommate’s body pivot and stagger into tables, overturn chairs, flail wildly against each wall and then finally collapse helplessly to the floor, where only the final whimpering exhalations could be heard above the merciless whirring of the blade.

  Reardon shuddered and quickly walked out into the other room.

  “So now you’re back in homicide,” Reardon heard Mathesson say behind him, but he could not answer. “I knew you would be. I knew it was coming. Just like I said that day at the zoo, about those deer. It’s the same thing. Just like the guy with the cats. A maniac like that will eventually get around to people. It never fails. I’ve never seen it to fail.”

  Reardon stood in the middle of the living room, as silent and immobile as an icon. “She seemed so small,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Mathesson replied, “that little McDonald girl couldn’t of been more than five feet tall.”

  “I meant Karen.” Reardon said. “Her face was so small, like a child’s face.”

  “I didn’t notice, to tell you the truth.” Mathesson took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “But I knew it would come to people in the end. It always does. Just like that scumbag with the cats.”

  Reardon shook his head. He turned toward the entrance of the apartment. “I’ve got to step out for some fresh air,” he said to Mathesson. “It’s stifling in here.”

  He went out and down the stairs and outside into the street. Images came whirling into his mind: Van Allen. The dead fallow deer. Millie. Piccolini. Tim. Finally Karen Ortovsky. He walked a few yards down the street and leaned for support against a parking meter. The meter was cold but he could not let go of it. Over and over his mind kept returning to three phases from his abandoned religion. They seemed to circle in his mind like vultures in a desert sky. They were the last words of excommunication: Ring the bell. Close the book. Quench the candle.

  8

  Later in the morning Reardon joined Mathesson in a canvass of the building in which Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky had been murdered. It was a five-floor walk-up and the two women had lived on the third floor. It had no doorman. Mathesson took the two floors above the third floor; Reardon took the two below it, beginning on the first floor.

  There were two apartments on each landing. Reardon knocked several times at one apartment, but there was no answer. He walked across the hall to the other apartment and knocked on the door there. He waited a moment, then knocked again. After another pause the door opened slightly.

  “Yes?” a voice inquired.

  Reardon could see half a face peering between the two separate lengths of chain that held the door secure. “My name is Reardon,” he said, “New York City Police. I’d like to talk with you a minute.” He took out his shield and presented it.

  “Oh, fine,” the voice said with obvious relief.

  Reardon watched as the chains were undone and the door swung open to allow him in.

  The man inside was short and very fat. His head was completely bald, but his face was covered with a massive black beard. Still, Reardon thought, it was an expressive face, mobile, the eyes darting about constantly like two blue marbles on a roulette wheel.

  The man thrust out his hand. “My name is John Levinson,” he said. He smiled broadly. “Always happy to help the police. Never know when you might need a cop, you know.”

  Reardon shook the outstretched hand. “John Reardon,” he said quietly. Such overt friendliness turned Reardon toward a shy, withdrawn self-consciousness.

  “Have a seat,” Levinson said, pointing to a wicker chair. “Right there’s fine.”

  Reardon sat down. “Thanks.”

  Levinson sat down on a small sofa opposite Reardon and folded his arms across his chest. He looked, to Reardon, like one of those big-bellied Buddhas he had seen displayed in Village novelty shops.

  “What can I do for you?” Levinson asked.

  “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but we had two murders in this building last night.”

  Levinson covered his mouth with his hand. “My God!” he muttered through his fingers. “Who?”

  “Two women on the third floor named Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky. Did you know them?”

  Levinson shook his head. “No. How were they killed?”

  “I can’t go into the details,” Reardon replied.

  Levinson nodded. �
��Brutal?”

  “It wasn’t pretty.”

  “Hm,” Levinson said. “Career girls probably, right?”

  “They had jobs,” Reardon said, growing uncomfortable with the style of Levinson’s interest.

  Levinson suddenly shot out of his chair and went to a bookcase. His eyes moved across one of the shelves until he found what he was looking for. He took a paperback book from the shelf and looked at the cover. “Five hundred thousand copies sold,” he muttered to himself. Then he returned the book to the shelf and sat back down across from Reardon. “That’s really something,” he said, staring at Reardon. “Two white career girls brutally murdered in an exclusive Village brownstone.” He stroked his beard again. “Yeah, that could be something. There could be a book in there. That could really be something. Did you say they lived on the third floor?”

  “Yeah.”

  Levinson slapped his thigh. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said enthusiastically. “Now that you mention it. Two girls on the third floor. I used to see them getting their mail out there in the foyer. Yeah, I used to see them. They were both lookers. Good lookers. Probably photographed well.”

  “When was the last time you saw them?” Reardon asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Levinson said casually. “Several days ago, I guess.”

  “Did you ever see them with anybody else?”

  “No. No. I don’t think so.”

  Reardon stood up. “I guess that’s it, then.”

  Levinson jumped to his feet. “Just a second, Mr. Reardon,” he said, his eyes darting about the apartment. “How about a drink? I got some high-class stuff.”

  “No, thanks.” Reardon said, starting toward the door.

  Levinson grabbed Reardon’s arm. “Uh, wait a minute. I, uh, I might have a proposition to make to you.”

  Reardon stopped and Levinson released Reardon’s arm. “Look,” he said nervously, “I’m a writer. You know? Free-lance. This sounds to me like it could be a real story. A big story. Maybe we could work together on it.”