1975 - Night of the Juggler

by William P. McGivern

  Deputy Chief of Detectives Walter Greene stood studying this immense map, which featured all of the park’s terrain and buildings and grottoes. Flanking the deputy chief were Detectives Scott and Taylor. They had all been dubious about Tonnelli’s orders to Boyle.

  But Borough Commander South Chief Larkin had overruled them; the chief knew of Luther Boyd, had heard him speak at a police convention in Cincinnati only the year before, and Chief Larkin realized not only that the tactic made sense, but that it stemmed from Luther Boyd rather than Tonnelli.

  Rudi Zahn sat in the rear of a squad car with Barbara Boyd. The medics had taped his ribs and applied a bandage to his slashed cheek and had given him an injection to ease the pain temporarily. This sedation, plus his agitated emotional state, had led him into a dark fantasy in which he imagined himself failing again to try to save Ilana.

  “You were so brave,” Barbara had told him at least a half dozen times, but he had shaken his head and said in a low, discouraged voice, “I didn’t help her.”

  “No one could have done more.”

  Paul Wayne of the Times had recognized Zahn and was presently on his way to the Plaza Hotel to try to get a story from Crescent Holloway.

  Meanwhile, TV cameras were relentlessly probing the expressions and reactions of Borough Commanders Larkin and Slocum, who was an oak of a man, the highest-ranking black in the New York police department, and who held a degree in criminalistics from Stanford University. The commanders were in uniform, their two stars gleaming under the glaring lights and reflectors of the cameras. Reporters held microphones in front of the chiefs and asked them rapid, insistent questions.

  “Commander Larkin, can you give us a yes or no on this: Is the girl still alive?”

  “We believe that she is.”

  “Is that a positive affirmative?”

  “Of course it isn’t,” Commander Slocum said. “We’ve got reason to think she’s alive, but we aren’t commenting on those reasons.”

  While the questioning went on, Chief Larkin was thinking of that stretch of the park bordered by Seventy-second Street, Transverse Number Three, Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. It was a corridor a dozen street blocks wide and a half mile long, but if they could trap the Juggler in that area, huge as it was, they’d have a chance.

  “Commander, if you’ve got a fix on this psycho, why aren’t you using helicopters?”

  “At this point, I won’t comment on that,” Chief Larkin said.

  “Every year the police budget gets bigger. Isn’t this the time to put the taxpayer’s money to work?”

  Chief Slocum was not a political man.

  “We’ll spend every goddamn dime of his money if we have to,” he said. “But not till the time is right.”

  “You’ll have to excuse us now, gentlemen,” Chip Larkin said, and turned from the mikes and walked through hurrying streams of police personnel to join Deputy Chief Greene at the contour map of Central Park. Chalk marks had been drawn across the map on east-west lines at Seventy-second Street and Transverse Three, which curved from Eighty-fourth Street at Fifth Avenue to Eighty-sixth Street at Central Park West.

  Commander Larkin’s mind was like a gridiron with each square flashing its own particular warning lights. The Juggler would be only one of his problems on this particular night. He was presently awaiting reports on the following events: a murder in Greenwich Village; a bank robbery in progress in the financial district; nineteen hostages held by a gunman in an all-night supermarket; a French delegate to the UN and his wife, bound and gagged in their St. Regis suite, a quarter of a million in jewels stolen, the contessa raped; a five-car collision in the Lincoln Tunnel which had backed up traffic for miles on the New Jersey Turnpike in addition to claiming six lives.

  There would be, and this was a statistical certitude, more than one hundred stickups and armed robberies throughout Manhattan that night. The police had a profile of the criminals: They were poor, they wore sneakers, could run fast, sixty-two percent of them were black, and most of them used cheap handguns (so-called Saturday Night Specials which frequently exploded upon firing, occasionally killing the would-be robbers as well as their victims).

  Deputy Chief Greene glanced toward Chief Larkin and said in his low, growling voice, “The Gypsy just called in. They lost the track of the Juggler.”

  “Then dispatch a dozen squads to Fifth Avenue north of Seventy-fourth and a dozen more to strengthen the line from the Seventies to the Eighties on Central Park West. The Juggler may know he’s in a trap. . . .”

  Mrs. Schultz was watching the action at the command post on her television set. They didn’t know who he was, but she did. Things were gone from his room. The knife and the rope. She wondered if she had always known, all these years.

  It was good they didn’t know who he was. They couldn’t come here with questions.

  Sixty-two years ago her father and mother had brought her from Canada to Minnesota without papers. How they had got from Germany to Canada, she never knew. But it was the terror of their lives. No papers. They dreaded signing things. For ration books in the war. For getting gas lines connected. There was always fear they’d ask for papers.

  But it wasn’t fair. There were so many of them after him, with speeding police cars and men at switchboards. And the girl. Maybe she was no better than she should be. Why would a girl go into the park after dark? Where was her mother?

  In halting English she had been taught by nuns, Mrs. Schultz began to say a Hail Mary for Gus.

  At approximately the same time John Ransom sat huddled despondently on a bench in a subway station in the borough of Brooklyn. He had thought it would be so simple and gratifying just to close his eyes and step into triumphant oblivion under the wheels of a hurtling train.

  He had planned it with such painstaking care. For one thing, no note.

  He had called a friend in Brooklyn to tell him he’d like to stop by for a visit, assuring his wife he’d be home within an hour or so. It would have to be presumed an accident, and all his dreams and the dreams of his wife and daughter would be fulfilled then, paid for by only a split second of pain and the cessation of pain for all eternity. But that thought had raised the specter of his Catholic background. No suicide was welcome in the presence of God.

  In his anguish and terror Ransom had stopped a portly middle-aged black man and confessed his torments to him. The black man had been sympathetic, had clucked his tongue, had spoken words of comfort and compassion, but when he realized what Ransom was begging him to do, which was to push him from behind into the path of a speeding train, the big black had reacted at first with astonishment and then with swift, hot anger.

  “You think because I’m black that I’d commit a murder just like it was no more than spitting on the sidewalk. You think I’m a dumb nigger without feelings or values. Grab him by the arm and tell him to kill or mug somebody or shoot up a liquor store, and he’ll do it because he’s nothin’ but an animal anyway. Well, you want to die, you jump in front of that train your ownself, you damn honkie bastard.”

  The black man strode toward the turnstiles, muttering to himself in tones of outrage and indignation while Ransom slumped in shamed dejection on the wooden bench, tears welling in his pain-haunted eyes and the rank taste of bile rising from his condemned and corroded stomach.

  There seemed no strength or purpose in the world, no sanity or kindness now, except the unexpected warmth and compassion that had been tendered him by a complete stranger, the big red-haired cop Sergeant Rusty Boyle.

  Chapter 18

  On that same night Joe Stegg was working alone in the Loeb boathouse a hundred yards or so north of Seventy-fourth Street. During the working day, from nine A.M. to sunset, Joe Stegg and his staff were often too busy supervising the rental of aluminum and wooden boats to keep their books on an hourly basis, and that was why Joe Stegg was still on the job, totaling the last of the day’s receipts.

  All in all, however, he savored his work, even the
extra time, because he enjoyed instructing the youngsters who rented boats from the park.

  They were a good bunch of kids for the most part. They loved the park and took care of it, and it was the rare boy or girl who would throw candy wrappers or orange peels or soft drink cans into the lake.

  Stegg had no children himself, and by now—since he was forty-nine—he had grown used to the idea that he and Madge would have to Darby and Joan it alone in some upstate trailer camp when he retired from the park service.

  His thoughts were running to children, he surmised, because there was a kid missing in the park tonight, a little girl. Somebody had got hold of her, and by now cops were swarming all over the place.

  It was something he couldn’t understand, that anyone would relish hurting a child. But such devils existed, no doubt of it. And appearances told you nothing. They could be men in business suits with briefcases, construction workers in hard hats, or the character with the duck-tailed haircut who parked cars in basements beneath the big office buildings. Any of them could have a devil inside him where you couldn’t see it.

  Sometimes when he read of murders and rapes in the city, he was almost glad he didn’t have kids. How could he stand it if it were his daughter missing out there? Or if his son walked home past leather bars and gay joints and got seduced into that scene of perversion and drugs? He could imagine how Madge would crawl the walls if someone tried to hurt a kid of theirs. When their niece came to visit them from Scranton, Madge didn’t let her out of sight unless she was taking a bath or something.

  Joe Stegg put his pencil down and closed the ledger he had been posting figures in and at the same time turned and frowned at the closed and locked door of the boathouse.

  Joe Stegg switched off the radio, and when the last rock beat faded into silence, he heard it again, the sound which had alerted him, a child’s voice rising in a thin cry of protest or anger.

  Stegg rose swiftly, took a .38 Colt revolver from a drawer, snapped off his desk light, and ran through the darkness to the door of the boathouse. Opening it a cautious inch, he saw nothing but black trees streaked by headlights. But then he heard the girl cry out again, and when he flung the door open, he saw them, traveling north on the path, twenty yards from him, a huge, hulking figure of a man in a brown sweater and a girl he was dragging along by the collar of her red jacket.

  “Hold it, damn you!” Joe Stegg shouted at the man. He ran along the pathway, the gun steady in his hand. “Let her go, damn you, or I’ll put a hole in your head.”

  Gus Soltik screamed in anger and frustration, his voice raging like some primitive, terrified animal. And with that primal bellow, he hurled Kate Boyd aside as effortlessly as he would a rag doll, and when she struck the ground, stars exploding in her head, Gus Soltik rushed at Stegg, taking a bullet in the upper flesh of his left arm, but before Stegg could fire again, Gus Soltik’s fist had crashed into his face, shattering his nose and cheekbones and slamming him with stunning impact against the wooden planks of the boathouse.

  Gus Soltik took the gun away from Stegg’s limp hand and beat him across the head with it until splinters of bone pierced Joe Stegg’s brain, ending forever his errant and mortal thoughts of a sheltered trailer camp and the best ways to teach youngsters about currents and winds and weather. . . .

  Gus Soltik lifted Stegg’s lifeless body high above his head and hurled him with all his strength over a link-chain fence into the shallow water near the pier flanking the boathouse. Then, trembling with fear, his mind in a turmoil of terror, he ran to Kate, who lay dazed on the ground, scooped her up in his arms, and ran north toward his sanctuary, the jungles above the immense reservoir.

  The echoes of the shot which Joe Stegg had fired at Gus Soltik reverberated south to where Luther Boyd had been traveling in wide circles to pick up a sign of the Wellingtons. Boyd estimated the sound due north of them, and within a minute or so, running hard, he and Tonnelli arrived at the boathouse, where the Gypsy’s flashlight after a rapid, circular probe, found and focused on the lifeless body of Joe Stegg, drifting with the sluggish current against the pilings of the pier.

  While Boyd circled the area in front of the boathouse, bending to inspect the ground, Lieutenant Tonnelli spoke rapidly into his two-way radio.

  “Tonnelli here, Sokolsky. I want Garbalotto.”

  Within seconds, the detective’s miniature voice was sounding from Tonnelli’s speaker.

  “Ten-four, Lieutenant.”

  “Garb, we got a dead one, male Caucasian at the Loeb boathouse. That’s where I am. Here’s what I want, and fast. Scramble our helicopters in Brooklyn, tell them to fly north-south patterns at treetop height, with ground beams at full power, starting at Seventy-third Street and crisscrossing the park all the way up to Harlem. I want Patrolman Branch and his crew to bring their dogs up to the boathouse. Make sure everybody snaps ass, Garb. We got him in the cross hairs now.”

  Luther Boyd spun around and stared with cold anger at Tonnelli.

  “Lieutenant, are you out of your goddamn mind? Countermand those orders and countermand them now. ”

  Tonnelli shook his head with hard finality. “This is police business from now on in, Mr. Boyd.”

  “You will countermand those orders, Lieutenant,” Boyd said quietly, and with the words, the Browning automatic came smoothly into his hand in one fluid, disciplined gesture.

  Tonnelli looked at the gun, then stared steadily into Boyd’s eyes.

  “That’s real stupid, Mr. Boyd,” he said.

  “My daughter and that psycho can’t be more than a block or two north of here. You churn the air with choppers, set packs of dogs howling through these woods, he’ll panic. He’ll break my daughter’s neck like a stalk of celery and run for it.”

  “I’ll say it once more,” Tonnelli said, his voice rising angrily. “This is a police show, and I’m running it.”

  “Then you’ll become a statistic, Lieutenant. One more backfire in Central Park.”

  “You’d waste me?” Tonnelli was trembling with fury. “Because I’m doing my job?”

  “Countermand those orders, Lieutenant.”

  Tonnelli’s heart was pounding like a hammer against his massive rib cage, but there was confusion mingling and tempering his rage because his Sicilian instincts warned him there was logic in Boyd’s thinking. And he had to buy that thinking for another reason because he realized that his grip on life was at this instant slippery and tentative. It wasn’t the gun alone that swayed him, but something in Boyd’s eyes and the way he handled that gun.

  The gun appeared to be an extension of Luther Boyd’s character, and Tonnelli knew that no one developed that identity with a weapon, that projection of functional authority, by firing for scores on pistol ranges.

  You acquired it by drawing guns and pointing them at people and killing them, not once or twice, but so often that it became as reflexive as breathing.

  “You know I’m right, Lieutenant,” Boyd said. “I’ll settle for one half hour. On my own. And I want your word on it. But not at gunpoint.”

  To Tonnelli’s total surprise Boyd replaced the Browning beneath the waistband of his slacks, then turned his palms upward in a gesture of powerful supplication.

  Gypsy Tonnelli drew a fingernail slowly down the scar that cut across his cheek. “Jesus Christ, you are something else,” he said.

  “Just remember, she’s our only child. Do I have your word?”

  “Deal,” Tonnelli said, and spoke again into his two-way radio.

  “Garbalotto?”

  “Right here, Lieutenant.”

  “Cancel those last orders. Hold the choppers and dogs.”

  “Any reason? In case the chiefs ask?”

  “Yes. The girl’s safety.” Tonnelli said, and broke the connection.

  “Thank you,” Boyd said.

  “I hope to God you’re as good as you think you are,” Tonnelli said.

  “We just turned off a ton of professional help.”

&nbs
p; “Come over here,” Boyd said, and walked north along the path. When he stopped and pointed at the ground, Tonnelli saw imprints in the soggy ground of the Juggler’s Wellingtons and near them, like rubies in moonlight, drops of blood in stark relief against hoarfrost gleaming on the grass. Boyd bent over and picked from the ground a tuft of brown woolen shreds, darkened with blood.

  “There was only one shot fired,” Boyd said. He looked at the bloody twist of wool in his hand, then threw it aside. “He’s wounded, which could slow him down,” he said. “And since I haven’t been able to find the gun, we can assume he’s armed.”

  “Two things,” Tonnelli said, speaking rapidly and insistently because he knew that Boyd was tensed to run. “You got my word for that half hour. But we got two borough commanders, two-star cops at the command post. They’re in charge; they could countermand me with a finger snap. This is a chance to show taxpayers how their money’s spent. Helicopters, Dobermans, squads racing in and out of CP with dome lights flashing. So you may not get that full half hour, Colonel.

  “And the last thing. We don’t take prisoners tonight. That’s my side of the deal. Whoever finds that bastard wastes him. I don’t have your word on that, you don’t have my word on anything.”

  Boyd bitterly remembered Isaiah: “We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement.”

  “You have my word,” Luther Boyd said.

  “Then let’s go,” Tonnelli said.

  Boyd was off immediately with long, smooth strides, his body merging and disappearing in the shadows of big trees, but before the Gypsy had covered a dozen yards, the growling voice of Deputy Chief of Detectives Walter Greene sounded from his radio, jerking him to a stop like a dog on a taut leash.

  “Tonnelli?”

  “Ten-four, Chief.”

  “Why did you countermand those orders to Garbalotto?”

  Tonnelli swallowed a dryness in his throat. “Colonel Luther Boyd, the girl’s father, believes the Juggler is only a couple of minutes ahead of us.”

  “And since when the fuck is Colonel Luther Boyd running the New York police department!” The chief’s voice was rising in a blend of exasperation and anger. “We got a skirmish line moving north past Seventy-second. We got guys in blue stretched all across Transverse Three. I told you once before I don’t like my lieutenants out on these Dick Tracy hero bullshit deals. We got a hairy night, Gypsy. So get your ass back to the command post. I want you to take the chiefs off my back and run this show you put your neck on the line for. That’s an order. You got it?”