1975 - Night of the Juggler

by William P. McGivern

  “Brown sweater,” Boyd said.

  “The Juggler,” Tonnelli said.

  “And one other thing,” Boyd said. “He wouldn’t have walked into that tree, unless he was looking over his shoulder, worried about something behind him.”

  “What could have stirred him up?”

  “Psychopaths usually have physical compensations.”

  “Better eyes, better ears?”

  “Right. So far, he’s made only one mistake. When I found my daughter’s Scottie, that gave me a direct fix on him. When I heard Kate scream, I ran toward the sound. But I could have missed it by a hundred yards or more if the dog’s body hadn’t given me the line.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Gypsy Tonnelli said softly. “Colonel, compared to you, an iceberg would look like a blast furnace. How can you just stand here?”

  “Because I must,” Luther Boyd said. “Let him calm down. I want my daughter alive.”

  Boyd began to consider options, a tactical administration of his simple strategy. They stood presently on the east-west line of Seventy-third Street. Transverse Three to the north ran a curving course from Fifth Avenue at Eighty-fourth Street to Central Park West, Eighty-sixth Street.

  “Lieutenant, do you have fifty officers in your reserve?”

  “We got a hell of a lot more than that, and I’m taking a hell of a responsibility not committing them.”

  Central Park was about a half mile wide. Fifty times fifty would cover it.

  “Then commit fifty patrolmen to Transverse Three with transistor radios. Post them at fifty-foot intervals. Tell them to take positions north of the transverse, to take cover in shrubbery or shadows, and to turn their radios onto rock stations at full volume.”

  “That going to stop the Juggler?”

  “Lieutenant, we learned a bitter lesson from North Koreans on the psychology of sound in combat. We paid a stiff price for not doing enough research into troop response to unexpected audio impacts. A soldier expects artillery fire, braces himself for it. But if silence is broken by something unexpected, laughter or singing, for instance, it can bring a column of troops to a full halt.

  “You used the phrase ‘a wall of cops.’ I’m proposing a wall of music. It may not stop him, but it will confuse him. He’s bracing himself for sirens, flashing dome lights, police whistles. Not music. It’s a chance to destroy his game plan, take away the north end of the park. Then we’ve got him in a box. And when we make visual contact, you can take him out with one shot.”

  Tonnelli made up his mind with a figurative finger snap. Putting the two-way radio to his lips, he flipped the switch and asked quietly for Sergeant Rusty Boyle.

  Chapter 16

  Kate Boyd was half running to keep up with Gus Soltik’s long strides.

  His huge hand was tight on the collar of her ski jacket and her breathing was labored and difficult. With a flex of his thick wrist, he could strangle her or break her neck, she knew, but an instinct for survival and the genetic temper of her father strengthened her conviction that to show signs of panic and terror or to make any attempt to struggle against him would again create that dreadful response in his body.

  They must be close to Seventy-fifth Street, she thought, trying to anesthetize her torturing fear with distracting considerations. They had already passed the Bethesda Fountain in one of the southern coves of the lake. She had walked the steps to the water there many times and had had ice cream in the fountain café, with the smell of the fresh lake around them and the sun shining on bronze statues. Somewhere off to their right was the Conservatory Pond. She remembered a story about it. Stuart Little had won a race there at the helm of the Wasp. . . . It was a dear book, and she kept it in a drawer beside her bed with the Hobbitt books and the story of Jay Trump, the lovely steeplechaser who had won the Maryland Hunt twice and the Grand National at Aintree, and thinking about this and her room and talking to Tish on the phone brought stinging tears to her eyes.

  Luther Boyd’s estimate of the Juggler’s line of march and his eventual destination had been on the mark; the Juggler was heading north with Kate Boyd, following the East Drive toward the Receiving Reservoir, which was still almost two miles ahead of them. There he planned to swing east to avoid the precinct on Transverse Number Three, skirting the reservoir and continuing on toward the trackless sanctuaries in the jungle above Ninety-seventh Street.

  But a word was forming in Gus Soltik’s mind, a word symbolizing a dangerous, frightening concept. The word that blazed now in the darkness of his mind was “coldness.” It was his surrogate for a dread expectation of shame and punishment. By people angry and loud. He couldn’t always remember who the people were, but he sensed that they were after him now.

  The messages drumming on all of Gus Soltik’s physical receptors warned him that the men who would hurt him were close behind him. Above the sound of sporadic, spiraling winds he had heard someone shouting at the cars on Seventy-second Street, and that voice brought frightening memories of a powerful man with a scarred face who hated him and wanted to make him cry out in pain for mercy.

  This was Gus Soltik’s deepest fear. He knew he deserved to be hurt.

  (His mother and Mrs. Schultz had told him this, and they wouldn’t lie to him.) But the conditions of that punishment, consisting of relentless and endless torments whose nature he could only guess at, on occasion would pull him sharply from sleep, a moan in his throat, icy sweat on his trembling body.

  He knew that he deserved to be beaten unconscious, then revived and hurt still more, but the cruelest terror was that this torture would never end, that there was no way he could be forgiven and allowed to die.

  He stopped, tightening his grip on the collar of the young girl’s ski jacket, and looked back through the darkness toward Seventy-second Street.

  Shadows drifted, and moonlight lay in silver patches on the ground. When he saw his big footprints in one of these pools of light and beside them the impress of the girl’s boots, he nodded then, knowing. . . .

  Gus Soltik steered Kate through a thicket of trees at a right angle to his previous course until he came to a path formed of shale and rock.

  He went north for another fifty yards, dragging the girl along behind him, leaving no trail on the hard surface of the path. The sound of their footsteps was covered by the traffic on the East Drive, which was twenty or thirty yards to their right, with automobile headlights flashing against the trees.

  He was too close to the drive to feel safe. When they stopped following him, he would go back through the trees toward the lake and go north again past the boathouse to the big reservoir.

  Gus Soltik sat in the shadow formed by a thicket of trees and pulled the girl down beside him. He put his airlines bag on the ground and looked at the girl.

  Kate had been trying hard to control her emotions, but the effort was so physically draining that she felt faint and exhausted. There was an aching tension in her stomach, and she was afraid that at any instant she might burst into tears and begin to scream. But she knew that would be dangerous for her; she knew what that would do to him. That was one thing she was certain of.

  She did not know specifically what he wanted to do to her, but her maturing sexual instincts warned her it would be agonizing and obscene.

  She knew nothing about him, his fears, his torments, his rages. She did not know he had never been to a dentist, had never been treated by doctors or psychiatrists with shock therapy or tranquilizers. She did not know that he had dislocated a girl’s shoulder in a playground because she had grinned at him and that as a result he had been thrashed mercilessly by the athletic director of the school while two older boys had held his arms.

  And that girl’s father had come to Mrs. Schultz’s home that night, and Gus, hiding in the basement, had heard the man’s wild, screaming voice declaring that he would kill him like a savage dog if he ever so much as looked at his daughter again.

  As punishment his mother had made Gus Soltik stay outside all night in
the muddy backyard of Mrs. Schultz’s home, wearing only sneakers, jeans, and a thin shirt, with the temperatures dropping below freezing. That was why cold and coldness had become to him surrogates of shame and punishment. The coldness and the shame and that girl’s father and the punishment had been forged into a single mnemonic unit in his brain.

  At the age of eleven Kate Boyd knew the only way she could save her life was to analyze and attempt to apply a diverting therapy to this man who wanted to hurt and kill her.

  Partly by luck and partly by virtue of shrewd female instinct, Kate Boyd composed a question which probed like a lance at a core of fear in Gus Soltik’s dreadfully twisted nature. She managed a tremulous smile and said in a practical voice, “If you wanted a date with me, why didn’t you just call me on the phone?”

  The concept of the word “date” confused Gus Soltik. He felt a warmth on his cheeks. Her question made him uncomfortable. In his dim mind he knew what dating was. He had seen boys and girls, young men and young women, walking with their arms about each other’s waists.

  Their smiles confused him. He saw them going into movie houses, laughing and talking easily, and he couldn’t understand it. The girls had razors and bottles of acid in their purses. They would hurt you if you touched them. He felt sorry for the boys, the young ones. He had wanted to be with a boy, he liked to look at them, an inchoate impulse he did not comprehend; but there was only Lanny, and he was different, he was old.

  Suddenly he saw with a twist of fear that “white legs” carried a green suede purse on a leather strap over her shoulder. With a quick move he snatched it from her, dizzy with relief, convinced he had saved himself from pain and humiliation.

  Kate’s fiercely held composure almost cracked then; she fought back the scream rising in her throat as she felt the awesome power in the hand that ripped the purse from her shoulder.

  Gus Soltik opened it and anxiously inspected its contents in the thin moonlight. He found a clean, neatly folded handkerchief, two pencils and a book with names in it, a wallet with a single dollar in the bill compartment, and a photograph of a little black dog. He had seen the dog before. He had done something to the dog, he remembered vaguely. It was over, and now no one cared. He tore the snapshot of the small black dog into several pieces and dropped them on the ground. But it was bad of her to make him think about it. It was over, and he could forget about it. But she had the picture of the dog.

  Maybe it wasn’t razors or acid; maybe there were other ways they hurt you. But he wasn’t angry with her. The word “date” had started a slow but tantalizing tremor in the sludge of his mind. He wanted to know about dates. She knew about them. His helplessness made him sullen. This time was different from the others. Before, it had been him, and the lessons. And anger.

  Always before, the ferocious exhilaration, the riotous, clamorous release linked to his rage. But now there was an anxiety about what to say. How to ask.

  “Date,” he said, blurting the word out. “Where?”

  She tried very hard not to blink, for she knew that would bring the tears. She could only guess at what his sullen anger at the picture of Harry Lauder had meant and pray that her guess was wrong. She tried to make her mind a blank, attempting with her tone and manner to strike a casual, impersonal note; she realized that she was walking a dangerous tightrope and that any mistake in judgment might be fatal. But even more difficult was finding the will not to think of Harry Lauder.

  “Well, it would depend on whether someone was going out at night or in the daytime,” Kate said. There she stopped, and while she weighed her next words, she felt a cold and painful knot of fear gripping her stomach.

  Kate Boyd knew who and what she was, and liked what she was, with the result that her ego structure was as solid as might be expected in a young and healthy girl who had been exposed to the molding influence of intelligent teachers and parents and to the company of companions whose emotional values were approximately as sane and practical as her own. She and her friends had not been taught that their desires were tainted and evil.

  But there were areas of sexual maturity where Kate had no explicit experience. And this was what frightened her now. In their apartments, with Cokes and bowls of popcorn, she and her friends might talk and laugh about their awareness of one another’s sexuality, making titillating jokes and naughty plays on words. But it was innocent and fun, while this was ghastly and fearful. She felt lost and desperate because she knew of no way to talk about dates with this man. She had no way of knowing how this perverted creature would react to what she might say. To talk about dates meant touching on sexual potentials, and she realized that her life would literally hang in the balance if she said anything that stirred or angered him in ways she couldn’t control.

  “We might just go for a walk and stop somewhere for hot chocolate,” she said.

  His face was sullen, impassive, his eyes glazing as he watched her moving lips, the animation in her expression. He was waiting for her to lie.

  She breathed through her open mouth. This was something her father had taught her once when they were backpacking through a forest where a skunk had laid down his scent. If she breathed through her mouth, she avoided his terrible smell.

  “Would you like that?” she asked him.

  He looked away from her, confused and angry, not at her but at himself. He should say yes or no. But they had told him to say nothing to them. And in his tortured mind there were no words at all. His eyes looked dimly at the dark trees and the glimpse of moonlight he could see on the lake, while that part of him that was pure animal listened for the footsteps he knew were not too far behind. . . .

  Why had he looked away from her? What did that mean?

  “There’s a place on Park called Armand’s,” she said tentatively, while studying his blunted face, the muddy eyes staring off toward the lake.

  “In the window, there’s trays of cookies and cakes and little figures made of marzipan.”

  She sensed a tension in his manner as he looked off into the trees.

  Her purse fell from his limp hand to the ground. She picked it up slowly, carefully, and looped it over her shoulder.

  “Or we could take a boat ride around the island,” she said.

  He saw the word “lake”; he understood “boat,” but he said nothing and did not look at her. How did they know? Boats and water. Places to buy cakes. . . .

  For Gus Soltik’s ignorance of the commonplace was as vast as it was frustrating to him. He did not know why some people wore glasses and others didn’t. He had never fathomed why in the winter men in red suits and white beards stood on street corners ringing bells. He did not know where the people on the screen went when Mrs. Schultz turned the TV off. He had looked behind the set many times but had never found any of them. He did not know where his mother was.

  The word “cold” was blazing again in Gus Soltik’s mind. The wind was rising in the tops of the trees, diminishing what he could hear, and this made him feel tense and vulnerable. In spite of her fear and terror, Kate felt a tiny stab of compassion as she saw the lonely agony in his expression. But as she watched him scenting the wind like a frightened animal, she felt a sudden stir of confidence. Perhaps she could manipulate him now. Perhaps she could even make him take her home. She might convince him he hadn’t done anything really bad yet. He had hit the man who tried to help her, but that was all. No, there was another thing, but she had willed herself not to think of it.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Kate said, smiling to complement what she hoped was a tone of surprise and enthusiasm in her voice. “We could go to my apartment and listen to records. I’d make sandwiches, and there’s Cokes.”

  With growing assurance, she added, “And there’s cold beer, too.”

  Gus Soltik turned to look at her, and there was something blurred and smudged in his expression now; it was as if a huge, flat thumb had exerted pressure against a malleable nose and cheekbones. His shadowed eyes, which gave the haunted impression
that if he ever saw clearly it might be unbearable, were suddenly alert.

  “My father wouldn’t mind, really he wouldn’t. And once you met him you could ask him if you could take me out on a real date. . . .”

  Father and shame and punishment. The coldness was a torturing demon in his skull.

  “My father is—”

  Gus Soltik’s hand moved with blurring speed, flexed powerfully; the collar of Kate’s ski jacket tightened cruelly across her throat, cutting off her words in mid-sentence, and the echo of her single strangled sob faded swiftly in the rising winds. . . .

  Chapter 17

  The New York police department command post had been established at the head of the Mall in the cruciform esplanade bordering the open-air theater, and the scene now was one of disciplined chaos.

  Remote units from the TV networks had flooded the area with their arc lights. Patrolmen Sokolsky and Maurer had been moved to the CP to man portable switchboards. Ambulances with crews at the ready were on the scene.

  Detectives Corbell, Karp, and Fee were standing by for orders, while Sergeant Boyle and Detective Tebbet had proceeded north with fifty-odd patrolmen and a van of transistor radios.

  From Gypsy Tonnelli’s unit Carmine Garbalotto and August Brohan were also standing by, while Detectives Scott and Taylor had joined the skirmish file of uniformed patrolmen who were advancing north to Seventy-second Street at ten-foot intervals, their powerful torchlights probing into every shadow and gully and every pocket of darkness on their line of march. Present also were a hundred-odd patrolmen in uniform. The sniper teams were in cars with motors turning over softly.

  In the northwest corner of the esplanade there was a huge contour map of Central Park so large, in fact, that it was supported on sawhorses placed at six-foot intervals.