1975 - Night of the Juggler

by William P. McGivern

  The words thrilled her and made her feel strong and invulnerable.

  Tightening her grip on Harry Lauder’s leash, she waited for a break in the traffic and then ran across Fifth Avenue to the sidewalk that flanked Central Park.

  Harry Lauder barked so noisily at the crying kitten that Kate bent and gave him a sharp tap on his muzzle. But then the Scottie began to bark at something or someone in the thick shrubbery behind the four-foot black stone wall bordering this stretch of the park. And when Kate reached down to pick up the kitten, her dog leaped away from her and his leash slipped through her gloved hand. In an instant he was gone, scrambling first onto a park bench and then to the top of the wall, where he jumped from sight into thick tangles of spicebush and shining sumac.

  Kate called for him to come back, her voice high and urgent, but the sound of his thrashing progress through the grove of underbrush warned her that he was already deeper into the park.

  What a mess! she thought. If he got lost, she’d be blamed for it. And she’d deserve it. But if she took time to go and get her father, they might never find him.

  She knew there was an entrance into the park just to her north. Kate hesitated only an instant, and then she put the kitten on the park bench and ran as fast as she could toward the next intersection.

  Calling her dog’s name in a high, anxious voice, Kate ran along a cobbled pathway through the park and when she turned and ran back toward the area where he had got away from her, she was under huge English oaks whose shadows fell about her like great dark wings.

  She stopped at approximately the place where Harry Lauder had scrambled into the park and stood listening for sounds of him above the noise of traffic on Fifth Avenue.

  Then, while she stared about helplessly, she heard the Scottie barking, but he was a long way off, it seemed, his yelping coming faintly from a dark stand of trees near the East Drive.

  Calling his name again, she ran toward the sound of his barking, her slim body blending and finally merging with the shadows until only her fair, streaming hair could be seen reflecting the last of the day’s sunlight.

  And watching the plume of blond hair and waiting for Kate among that thicket of trees stood Gus Soltik, the barking little dog helpless in his huge hands.

  But an additional element had threaded itself into his emotional complex of lusts and compulsions and angers. And that was fear. In his dim mind, he knew someone had told on him. . . . Men who would hurt him had chased him and shouted at him, with guns. . . . He had run away from them in an alley. But they were looking for him. Who had told them? . . .

  But it was all right now. “Greenropes” would follow the sounds of the dog, and he would draw her deeper and deeper into the park to a place he knew that was dark and silent, where no one would ever hear her.

  Chapter 12

  Central Park is potentially one of the more glorious and gratifying natural ornaments in the city of New York.

  A long green rectangle consisting of eight hundred and forty-odd acres, it is enclosed on three sides by what may be the most prestigious and expensive real estate in the world. One might argue that the Rue Faubourg St.-Honoré in Paris is more elegant and graceful or that the immense sweep of the Nash and Royal crescents in Bath, England, is more architecturally impressive and more spiritually satisfying, but the streets and avenues that embrace three sides of Central Park are clearly without peer in the world of commercial fashion and commercial art, in the fields of law and medical research, of finance and entertainment and publishing. In addition to its vast mass of mighty high rises, its shops and restaurants have long been legendary magnets to elite foreigners and Americans with the money to pay for their products.

  The northern end of Central Park at 110th Street runs on a broad half-mile front into the area of Manhattan known as Harlem, an immense ghetto housing the city’s more than million-odd blacks.

  Central Park provides a home and a handsome background for honeysuckle and American elms, ginkgo trees and Atlas Mountain cedars, Osage orange and massive green ash, black locusts, and fragrant tulip trees.

  In most seasons the park is a haven for robins and redwing blackbirds, pied-billed grebes, green herons, spotted sandpipers, yellow and parula warblers, red shouldered and broad-winged hawks, emerald-winged teals, and the normal proliferation of permanent residents, starlings, cardinals, mallards and, of course, the city’s sparrows, owls, and pigeons.

  Originally, the land given to the designers of Central Park in the middle of the nineteenth century was a discouraging expanse of urban litter, studded with squatters’ shacks, hog farms, and bone-boiling works. Also among these malodorous swamplands were sewers and cesspools covered with bramble nearly as impenetrable as huge clusters of rusted iron.

  The granitic bones of the city itself thrust upward through this morass in formations of grotesquely beautiful black rock. These natural constructions create grottoes and escarpments, valleys and gullies choked with vegetation, and caves and ravines so convoluted and labyrinthine in their patterns that guided tours were essential before several decades of order had been imposed upon this rugged, inhospitable landscape.

  The Ramble, a forty-acre area between Seventy-fifth and Seventy-seventh streets, directly north of the lake and boathouse, is a sanctuary for birds and animals, a wild and shadowed expanse of trees, juttings of steep black rock, and terraced serpentine walks which create a mazelike effect but which eventually lead pedestrians to bridges and access routes on a circuitous course toward Central Park West.

  But Central Park, despite its beauty, despite its variety of natural attractions, is usually deserted after dark. Occasionally, couples will stroll along the pathways near the southern end of the park, where there are hansom cabs, the reassuring glitter and crowds of Fifty-ninth Street, and the huge, graceful bulk of the Plaza Hotel.

  But few prudent citizens would consider venturing north beyond the upper Sixties because at night the park is infested by human predators that prey on anyone foolish or reckless enough to stray into their terrain.

  Uninformed or incautious tourists, wandering drunks and questing homosexuals, narcotics pushers, sexual freaks, masochists of all varieties, the strange and lonely neurotics who exist in all sprawling cities—these are the potential victims of the rapists and muggers who are hidden in the nighttime shadows of this immense, graceful sprawl of lakes and meadows and trees.

  In this darkness Central Park (save perhaps for battlefields of warring nations) is potentially one of the more dangerous stretches of real estate in the world.

  Chapter 13

  Luther Boyd checked his wristwatch. It was close to six thirty.

  Barbara was pacing restlessly, her hands locked around her elbows in a curiously defensive and vulnerable gesture.

  They had been circling their problems with words since Kate had gone off with Harry Lauder and still hadn’t come to the heart of it. God knows, it wasn’t all Luther’s fault, she thought, because he had been bred to treat people as statistics.

  Barbara wondered if she were listed in his precise mental files as a slender object which catered to his tastes in food and drink and—asterisk and footnote—object also programmed for sexual activity.

  “Didn’t Kate say she’d be back in about fifteen minutes?” she asked him.

  “Yes,” Boyd said. He had been concerned about her absence for the last ten minutes or so to the extent that he had hardly been listening to Barbara’s catalogue of disillusionments. But he realized now that she had also been participating in the charade; he knew her well and suspected that her present aimless, almost erratic manner reflected an anxiety she was perhaps afraid to articulate.

  It was then the phone rang. Luther Boyd picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?”

  “It’s John Brennan, Mr. Boyd. Is Kate up there with you?”

  “No, she’s not, John.”

  “I had to carry out some luggage for Mrs. Cadwalader, then get her a cab.” The old man sounded worried. “Bu
t I didn’t have my eyes off Kate for more than a minute or so.”

  “She’s not out front on the sidewalk?”

  “No. I figured she went upstairs while I was whistling for a cab.”

  “Any sign of Harry Lauder?”

  “Not as far as I can see, Mr. Boyd.”

  Barbara walked across the room to her husband, her eyes searching his face.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked him. “Is it Kate?”

  “Thanks, John.”

  “I don’t understand this, Mr. Boyd. But I feel terrible about it.”

  “You’ve got responsibilities to all your tenants, not just the Boyd family.” He hung up on John Brennan’s further apologies and looked at Barbara.

  “Kate’s wandered off,” he said.

  “But where?”

  Boyd rubbed his jaw, a gesture which alarmed Barbara, for she knew it was one of his few physical reactions to stress. “You tell me,” he said.

  “Wait. Maybe she went up to see Tish Tennyson.”

  “You have her number?”

  “Yes, I’ll get it.” Barbara hurried along the hall to Kate’s room, collected Kate’s address book, and returned to the drawing room, flipping the pages. “Here it is,” she said, and gave the book to her husband.

  Luther Boyd dialed the number and spoke with Mrs. Tennyson and with Tish. But Kate hadn’t been to the Tennysons’.

  Boyd dropped the receiver into its cradle, and when Barbara noted the stillness of his expression, the cold appraisal in his eyes, she experienced an uncomfortable twist of fear. “This isn’t like Kate, Luther. You know it isn’t.”

  “You stay here in case there’s a phone call.”

  This was not a request or a course of procedure to be discussed; this was a bird colonel talking to the troops, and Barbara nodded quickly.

  In the lobby, Boyd cut off still more apologies from Mr. Brennan.

  “Forget it, John. It’s not important now. But this is: Where was Kate when you saw her last, and what time was it?”

  “She was a half block north of here, on this side of Fifth.” The old man frowned, then nodded with obvious relief. “That would have been just a minute or two before six o’clock. Because Mrs. Cadwalader told me she was giving herself an hour and a half for her seven thirty flight at Kennedy.”

  Boyd checked his watch, noted that it was a few seconds past six thirty-five. Which meant Kate had been off on her own about thirty-seven or thirty-eight minutes.

  He hit the revolving door with the heel of his hand, and it was still spinning when he walked to the curb and looked up and down the avenue. Traffic was normal, a half dozen pedestrians on the sidewalks, a man in uniform removing a box of flowers from the rear of a florist’s van. Boyd noted the chestnut vendor standing beside his cart at the intersection south of their building. He walked to him and said, “Did you see a young girl”—he indicated Kate’s height with his hand—”wearing a red ski jacket and walking a black Scottie?”

  Halfway through the sentence, the old man shook his head helplessly and pointed to his mouth.

  “You can’t speak?” Boyd asked.

  The old man nodded quickly. He repeated Boyd’s gesture by which he had indicated Kate’s height and pointed across the avenue to Central Park.

  “She went into the park?”

  Instead of responding with a nod or headshake, the old man knelt and made a scrambling motion with his fingers on the sidewalk.

  “The dog?”

  The old man nodded rapidly.

  “The dog went into the park?”

  The chestnut vendor put his right forefinger into the palm of his left hand and made a fist over it. Then he abruptly jerked the forefinger free from his own grasp.

  “The dog pulled the leash from the girl’s hand?”

  The old man nodded again.

  “The dog got away from her, ran into the park.”

  Again a quick nod.

  “And she followed him?”

  The old man’s expression reflected impotence and frustration. He pointed across the avenue to the approximate place that Harry Lauder had scrambled across the wall and disappeared into thickets of shining sumac. As Boyd looked at him questioningly, the old man gave him an emphatic shake of his head and pointed north to a footpath which entered the park two blocks from where they were standing.

  Luther Boyd saw exactly what had happened, as clearly as if he were watching the sequence of action on a motion-picture screen.

  He thanked the old man and stared at the sprawl of the park, while he examined the first three scenarios that occurred to him. One, Kate was in the park searching for the Scottie. Two, she was lost and was trying to find her way back to Fifth Avenue. Three, she was in trouble, hurt or restrained, physically unable to leave the park.

  He rapidly sorted out his options: to go after her immediately or risk a few precious moments to prepare himself for potentially dangerous contingencies.

  Luther Boyd had been trained to face facts, and because of that discipline, he had already accepted his third scenario as the most logical explanation for Kate’s absence.

  Barbara turned to him nervously when he let himself into their apartment. “Where is she?”

  “Somewhere in the park.”

  “Oh, God. Why would she do that?”

  Boyd went along the hallway to his bedroom and kicked off his loafers, while Barbara hurried after him, her high heels sounding with a clatter of panic on the parquet flooring.

  “Luther, what’s happening?”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, putting on a pair of tennis shoes. “For some reason, she crossed Fifth Avenue. Harry Lauder got away from her and ran into the park.”

  Luther Boyd stripped off his jacket and pulled on a black windbreaker.

  “The wall is too high for Kate to manage, so she went up a block or so to an entrance.”

  “But when? How long has she been in there?”

  Boyd opened the top drawer of a highboy and removed a Browning 9mm automatic pistol, and after checking the thirteen-shot magazine and the safety, he slipped the piece under the waistband of his slacks.

  From the same drawer he picked up a flashlight and tucked it into his rear pocket.

  Barbara’s eyes were dark and haunted against the natural pallor of her face. “Goddamn it, are you trying to torture me? How long has she been in the park?”

  “Forty minutes,” Boyd said, and went into the bathroom and from the medicine cabinet collected a compact but sophisticated first-aid kit.

  Barbara’s voice was trembling, and her eyes were bright with tears.

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why in God’s name didn’t you?”

  “Hysterics won’t help Kate,” Boyd said, and put his big hands on her shoulders and shook her until the glaze of terror faded from her eyes.

  “Now listen to me and understand me,” he said. “We aren’t calling the police. If she’s in trouble, the faster I get to her, the better her chances are. We don’t want a task force blundering around out there. This is a one-man job. And it requires speed. Whatever’s happened, I’ll find Kate. That’s a promise. This is the kind of shit detail I’m good at.”

  And he was gone.

  In less than three minutes, Luther Boyd had picked up Kate’s trail in Central Park.

  His knowledge and awareness of his daughter’s character and habits were precise. And his tracking abilities and instincts had been honed to near perfection by decades of application and experience.

  He knew Kate would head south on a straight line to where her Scottie had leaped a wall and scrambled into the park.

  As he ran silently and effortlessly through the shadows of huge English oaks, his flashlight picked up the imprint of Kate’s small boot beside a drinking fountain where the earth was especially moist and soggy. When he reached the area where Harry Lauder had entered the park, he heard nothing but the wind high in the crowns of a quarte
t of gum trees and, above that, the muted traffic on the avenue.

  Knowing Kate’s resilience and guts, Boyd realized she wouldn’t give up at this point; she had a dangerous conviction that the world was full of nice people, and she was just reckless enough to continue searching for Harry Lauder through this dark and dangerous jungle.

  Luther Boyd, eyes tracking the ground, ran in slow but ever-widening circles until he picked up another imprint of Kate’s boot, this one pointing at right angles from her original course. She was traveling west now and running, which he determined by the length of her strides.

  He thanked Providence for the drenching afternoon rain which had cleared the park of most pedestrian traffic. Normally, in fair weather, there would be a variety of footprints evident in this safe and attractive area of the park. But much of those signs had been erased by the rain, and the ground was fresh and pristine and so spongy and porous that he could follow the track of his daughter’s small boots as easily as if she were running across wet sand.

  Directly ahead of Boyd, perhaps a hundred yards away, was a tall stand of dark trees. And it was toward these that Kate had been hurrying, obviously following Harry Lauder’s noisy trail. But when he entered the grove of trees (mulberries, he knew from the sandpaper-like touch of the leaves), there were signs of Kate but none of the Scottie, and this puzzled him. If the dog had been underneath these trees, there would be evidence of it, leaves and soil scratched and scattered in a half dozen places. But while he spotted the imprints of Kate’s small boots, he saw nothing to indicate why she had rushed so confidently toward this particular grove of trees.

  He tried to sort it out. Two things would have drawn her here: sight or sound of Harry Lauder. Since she couldn’t see him at that distance at this hour of night, she must have heard him. From which it could be inferred that the Scottie had been among those trees. Then why no sign of him?