1975 - Night of the Juggler

by William P. McGivern

  Crescent Holloway was making a harried, distracted entrance into the lobby of the Plaza, blinking with jet-lag weariness and irritation at the exploding flashlights of a phalanx of news photographers. In Miss Holloway’s van and wake streamed protective and supportive members of her personal entourage, forces beefed up by baggage-laden bellhops, a brace of assistant managers, and several executives from National Films, whose firm had become a financial phenomenon among the majors by distributing back-to-back smash hits displaying the explosive sexual pyrotechnics of Miss Holloway, who had become known in the trade papers as the Stacked House Kid.

  Directly behind Crescent Holloway, who was shielding her eyes in a pretty gesture against the exploding flashbulbs, stood her personal makeup man, Simon Sachs; her press agent, Nate Sokol; and her bulking and belligerent-looking black maid, Honey Hopper.

  Directly in front of Crescent—the sturdy prow of this harmlessly beleaguered sex boat—stood Rudi Zahn, her lover, her manager, and her producer, although not necessarily in that order.

  Rudi Zahn, a stockily built man in his late thirties, with thinning hair and clear, direct gray eyes, raised both hands and gave the noisy photographers and reporters a friendly, give-us-a-break smile. The smile was not practiced; it was amiable and honest and suggested something true of Rudi Zahn’s character, which tested surprisingly low in the slick cynicism the press expected from Hollywood types.

  The reporters and photographers liked the message they were getting from Rudi Zahn and listened to what he had to say, which was: “It was a bumpy flight with a bomb scare. The movie, I mean.” He mentioned a competitor’s product and got a laugh. “It was so bad that people actually walked out on it.” Another laugh.

  The jokes were old, but no one minded; Rudi didn’t pretend they were otherwise.

  He went on: “We’re tired, but we’ll stay up all night if you’re on deadline. Nate’s got a press kit with some quotes and pix that haven’t been used yet. That’s the bad news.” Another general laugh.

  The good news that Rudi Zahn promised the press corps was an early-morning conference, a screening of key scenes from the Stacked House Kid’s next flick, all this graced by a buffet of delicatessen from the Stage Door with champagne for those who were thirsty and whiskey for those who weren’t. . . .

  Within seconds, Crescent Holloway and her group were streaming toward the elevators amid smiles and an eruption of involuntary whistles from the working press.

  After midnight, when the important day began (although Gus Soltik did not feel it started until there were streaks of dawn on the horizon), he began to feel drowsy, and the infallible indicator of his mind pointed toward “home.” Using a network of streets and alleys that were like the veins of his own huge body, and subway trains, and the rear tailgate of a truck lumbering along the Major Deegan Highway, Gus Soltik reached 135th Street and St. Ann’s Avenue about an hour after leaving the site of the fire on Ninth Avenue in the borough of Manhattan.

  It was very quiet. Rain was falling, and gusts of wind made a noise like scurrying animals in the trash in the curbs and on the sidewalk.

  Housing developments, the color of mud, stood in rows stretching toward a dark sky and between them stretched damp, slimy earth, unrelieved by a tree, a leaf, a stretch of grass, a child’s swing, or a chair for an old man or woman to sit in thin sunlight in these barren yards that bordered prison shafts of public housing.

  Gus was glad he didn’t live there, glad instead to live in the rotting old tenement with Mrs. Schultz. Senor Perez gave her the money that Gus earned, and sometimes she gave him a few dollars and with that money he could buy all he really needed: hot dogs from street vendors, the cold roll heaped high with onions, a cup of snow ice with sweet bright-colored syrups, or roast walnuts and hot pretzels.

  Also, he had a reserve supply of money that no one knew about. Not Senor Perez, not even Mrs. Schultz. Gus had cut a deep flap in the bottom of the heels of his Wellington Boots, and after stuffing these apertures with dimes and quarters, he had pressed the V-shaped pieces of leather back into place, securing them firmly with strips of black friction tape. It gave him a good feeling to know he was walking on his secret money. It was always there if he needed to take a bus or subway or needed to satisfy his sudden, compulsive yearning for things that tasted sweet.

  But Gus Soltik disliked spending those precious quarters. That was why he was glad that the kitten purring against his body in the pocket of his jacket hadn’t cost him anything at all.

  But while it cost nothing, it would solve a problem that had tormented him for months. How to make “greenropes” cross that street.

  Gus Soltik would sleep now, to be wakened by the distant bells of St.

  Stanislaus. He knew he would hear Mrs. Schultz going down the creaking stairs, knowing that in her old hands she would be holding a leather prayer book and the heavy wooden rosary from the old country, on her way to his mother’s dead mass.

  Chapter 6

  Gypsy Tonnelli was a practical cop, who trusted his instincts and knew from experience that it wasn’t only the “facts” or what you learned from informants that solved your cases; rather it was something you ignored or didn’t see until it was too late that often provided directions to solutions. So, pacing the large, high-ceilinged living room of his apartment, he allowed his thoughts to stray, made a conscious attempt not to screen out random reflections but rather permitted external stimuli to play whimsically against all his senses. It was a few strokes after midnight, D-Day Plus One. In each of the previous four years, the Juggler had struck late in the afternoon of October 15. But they couldn’t count on that. As far as Tonnelli was concerned, this was now Red Alert time.

  While he paced, chain-smoked, and constantly refilled his cup of coffee, Tonnelli’s eyes occasionally flicked hopefully to the phone on a table beside a cheap chair, a phone connected directly to his headquarters in the 19th Precinct. As the countdown approached zero, the reports from all five boroughs had increased in volume; so far all had been checked out, and all had proved either inconclusive or negative.

  Tonnelli deliberately allowed his thoughts to wander, hoping that some significant hidden fact would sense his inattention and be trapped into a revealing carelessness of its own; the elusive lead was frequently snared in this fashion, a victim of indirect surveillance.

  Detective Sergeant Boyle was at the 13th Precinct on East Twenty-first Street. He would be on duty there for eighteen straight hours, taking the occasional half-hour sleep break in the precinct-house coffee room. Late in the afternoon Rusty Boyle would break to shower, change clothes and have dinner, at which time he would be at Joyce Colby’s apartment.

  The alleged rape the big Irishman had checked out had developed ramifications. Boyle had told him about it. The license number of the rape suspect’s car had been provided by someone named John Ransom, who had later told Rusty Boyle he was dying of cancer.

  Rusty had given the number to Dennis St. John from the 10th Precinct. St. John checked the tag with Motors, got an address to go with it, hit the suspect’s apartment, found not only the character Hilda Smedley claimed had raped her, but four rooms full of hot TV sets, cameras, and hi-fi equipment. St. John would get all the credit for the collar, and while he had a head of solid bone, he would probably be reviewed and might be bucked up a grade or two. But none of that was Rusty Boyle’s particular concern. His big Irish heart was bleeding for John Ransom, the man dying of cancer, who was forced to lie to his wife about his upholstery sales and make up funny, interesting little stories about his customers, while gnawed and worried sleepless, not about himself, but how to tell his wife he was dying and how to explain to his daughter, who was in premed school, that there was no money to pay the tuition needed for the next five or six years.

  Tonnelli had shocked Rusty by asking him if Ransom had a double indemnity clause in his insurance policy. There was a way to beat those riotous cancerous cells to the finish line by a couple of weeks.


  Rent a sailboat and go over the side. Take a drive into the Catskills, miss a curve, and take the long, final drop into the valley.

  Why not? All he’d lose was hours of agony. His wife would be spared knowledge of his ordeal, and he’d be giving his daughter the biggest break of all, the chance to earn a degree in medicine. Who knows?

  She could wind up with a Nobel Prize.

  But Rusty Boyle, the emotional and romantic optimist, had been staggered and angered by Tonnelli’s proposal.

  “But Jesus Christ! Supposing they discover a cure for cancer the day after he wastes himself?”

  “Hate to break it to you like this, Rusty, but there really ain’t no Easter Bunny.”

  Tonnelli’s phone rang a dozen or more times within the next half hour, and as the reports flowed in, he was able to visualize and analyze the action throughout the city.

  From the 90th in Brooklyn came a signal reporting men lurking in alleys. The 90th was a pigeonhole area filled with Hasidic Jews, Puerto Ricans, and stubbornly nonmobile Italian immigrants.

  Plainclothes and uniform cops picked up the suspects, who turned out to be bullyboy Nazi types on the scene, hoping to whip the heads of some militant Jews.

  At the 48th Precinct in the Seventh Division in the South Bronx, the desk sergeant got a call from a hysterical woman who demanded the police do something about two mysterious men in the apartment above her who for days had been copulating around the clock to the accompaniment of liquid and obscene noises. They were, in fact, operating what ATF (the acronym for the federal agency controlling illegal alcohol, tobacco, and firearms) describes unofficially as a “nigger” still, a phrase pejorative in relation to quantity, although not necessarily to quality.

  In Manhattan North (covering most of Harlem), the 26th Precinct reported a rape in an empty lot west of Tenth Avenue on 128th Street.

  But the girl was in her twenties, and all three of her assailants had been apprehended and they were all black, or all “chocolate,” as the second laconic report had it.

  East Harlem, Second Avenue near 116th Street. Twelve-year-old black girl reported missing. Found forty-five minutes later, stoned out of her skull in the men’s washroom of a hamburger joint near 110th and Central Park West.

  Goddamn her black ass, Tonnelli thought, but he wasn’t thinking of a kid stoned in a hamburger joint, but Maybelle Cooper, who hadn’t returned his call, hadn’t bothered to set up a meeting at her pool hall or his HQ at the 19th. Milky Tichnor had checked in; so had Chapman and Solly Castro. All negative. But Samantha Spade hadn’t checked in.

  He’d collar her for that, and he’d do it with savage pleasure. But why all the heat? he wondered. She probably knew why he never saw Adela anymore. It wasn’t Maybelie Cooper that Gypsy was furious with, the black kid with the computer head, who had taught his dumb sister basic arithmetic. No, it was Samantha Spade, who knew the city and its secrets as profoundly and bitterly as he did and who probably knew damned well that Adela’s Greek husband, Stav Tragis, ran a stolen car ring out of his used-car lots in Baltimore. . . .

  The reports continued to come in, relayed from the switchboard operators of the 13th and 19th precincts to Lieutenant Tonnelli. In the Gypsy’s mind, he could envision the operations and embrace with his imagination the gross sprawl of the dark city. He watched rivers flowing, heard the scream of police sirens, saw the revolving red glare of dome lights, pictured cops in uniform with drawn guns, taking steps two at a time to investigate the tips and squeals now being funneled into the 13th and 19th precincts at what seemed to be a cyclical rate of increase.

  Ninth near Fifth. Black man forcing black girl into a maroon Mark III.

  Checked out negative. A pimp and his prossie.

  Male Caucasian reported in women’s room at comfort station in Central Park. Arrested by a patrolman, cited on morals charge at the 22nd Precinct on Eighty-sixth Street (Central Park’s Transverse Number Three).

  Missing child, Caucasian, male, age eight, residence on Fifty-fourth Street between First and Second avenues. Checked out negative.

  Subject found at Manhattan central bus station, hoping for ride to Detroit to visit divorced father.

  Paul Wayne of the New York Times had called, but Tonnelli had little for him. After the Juggler’s second ritualistic murder, the local press and television corps had scented a story of epic and explosive proportions in the works, given an affirmative to the one conditional “if.” If he killed again. . . .

  That was their morbid but nonetheless professional concern. And so, in the third year, when the body of Trixie Atkins had been found in a loft in Greenwich Village with rope burns on her thighs and a dreadful knife wound across her jugular vein, the thrust of the story had been escalated to intense national coverage. A year later, when Jennie Goldman was murdered on the same date after suffering the agonizing brutalities that had been inflicted on the other three victims, the story had triggered a flamboyant and righteous explosion from the media, with parallels drawn to the Zebra and Zodiac slaughters in San Francisco, accompanied by the inevitable trailing inferences of police and political incompetence. There had been nonsubtle suggestions that if patrolmen weren’t “cooped up” (a police, expression for sleeping on duty) in the lobbies of closed theaters or basements of school buildings, and if the deputy chiefs and assistant chiefs who served at the pleasure of the commissioner, and hence were not protected by Civil Service, had the guts to enforce stringent curfews, to haul in every known sex offender over the past decade, and if the commissioner himself were not so politically ambitious and spent less time at international councils developing his themes of “brotherhood through law and order” and “the tyranny of the philosophy of numbers in police work,” well, the obvious inference was that the Juggler would have been caught long since and that Fun City would again and forever be entitled to its innocent and sustaining nickname.

  The commissioner, in fact, had been in print that morning from Stockholm. On the third page of the Times, below the fold, he’d been quoted as saying to a meeting of delegates: “It has been said that one death is a tragedy, but that a million deaths is a statistic. Yes, that has been said and it was said by a man whose name was Joseph Stalin. And I repudiate his convictions as I repudiate him. . . . ”

  Tonnelli was gut-certain they’d all be handed their heads by most of the media if the Juggler made it five in a row. And they’d deserve it. . . .

  But the hue and cry and bullshit didn’t apply to Paul Wayne. He was a cynical middle-aged pro who knew his job, and Tonnelli trusted him. It was some other papers in town that would sprinkle blood across the front pages of their sheets if it would sell five additional copies.

  So he gave Wayne what he had. The tips, how they checked out, the forces and equipment that were standing by.

  The phone rang again. It was Sokolsky on the switchboard at the 19th.

  “Lieutenant, we got a kid missing over in Brooklyn, from one of them crummy apartment buildings a block north of the Williamnsburg Bridge. Age eleven, a Puerto Rican girl. Cops from the division and precinct are on it.”

  The Juggler had never struck outside Manhattan.

  “What’s the kid’s name?”

  “Trinidad Davoe.”

  “Notify the precinct commander and the division inspector that we’re sending plainclothesmen over from the Thirteenth.”

  “Check, Lieutenant.”

  Before Tonnelli could refill his coffee cup and light another cigarette, Sokolsky was back on the line. “There’s nothing to it, Lieutenant, that Puerto Rican kid over in Williamnsburg.”

  “What was it?”

  “A crazy, I guess,” Sokolsky said. “Seems this kid got killed by a car a few years back. A milk truck, actually. The priest told the old lady that she really hadn’t gone away, lots of the guys in the precinct know about this, so the old lady goes to church and lights vigil lights and keeps reporting her daughter missing. One of the guys told me she keeps the kid’s bed turned down and gets u
p at night and finds it empty and calls the precinct to find her kid. It’s kind of sad.”

  Crazies, a town full of crazies. Paul Wayne at the Times told him the crank calls were starting, and Gypsy Tonnelli thought of these as he looked at the photographs on the walls of his apartment, pictures he took as a hobby on his days off, scenes of the various boroughs that he’d grown up in and worked in and loved, scenes the out-of-towners never saw because all they wanted to do, it seemed to the Gypsy, was get drunk and wander around high-crime-rate areas where they could get mugged so they could tell the folks at home about it.

  The crazies were coming out of the wood.

  “Look, I ain’t talking to no shit secretary or reporter. I want to talk to the editor of the Times, and I’ll stick it in his ear, because if the cops don’t catch that guy who’s murdering all those little girls I ain’t payin’ dime one in state or city taxes anymore.”

  “I’ll connect you to the metropolitan desk, sir.”

  The visitors’ concept of New York never embraced that of neighborhood; their picture was inevitably a stereotype of hostile and highly neurotic people living in apartment buildings one on top of the other and sharing the elevators without ever a “hello” or a “good morning” or “it’s going to be a scorcher, isn’t it?”

  Paul Wayne had told him of one hysterical lady who had told him in shouting Biblical accents that she and she alone was responsible for the deaths of the four girls. They had been punished by a just but Almighty God because she had sinned, had whored around the bars of Third Avenue like a bitch in season, and since she had been the angel of her family before her fall, the vengeance of God had been that much more savage and merciless. “It’s all kind of a preemptive vaginal strike by the Big Cock in the Sky,” Wayne had said wearily.

  But in fact, Tonnelli thought, arms crossed, studying his nearly professional portraits of the boroughs of New York, Manhattan didn’t match the tourist boobs’ concept of it. It was as rich and diverse, as ethnically and racially sustaining as areas of the country where you had Texans and Indians and Mexicans mixed together. Or the fascinating pockets of ethnicity, the colorful and variegated customs that he had observed when he was in the Army, along the frontiers of Holland and Belgium and Italy and France. If you didn’t like the weather, wait a minute and it’d change. True of his city. If you didn’t like the food, the look of the streets, the people, the way they dressed, take a walk and find something else.