1975 - Night of the Juggler

by William P. McGivern

  Tonnelli felt that his heart might literally explode with frustration. He said bitterly, “Yes, Chief. Tell Garb to send a car for me at Seventy-second Street and the Bethesda Fountain.”

  “One more thing. Bring that goddamn Luther Boyd in with you. I want him out of the park, permanent.”

  “Too late, sir. He’s gone.”

  Retired Detective Samuel “Babe” Fritzel stood in shadows on a serpentine pathway that followed a curving course through Central Park’s forty-odd-acre bird and animal sanctuary. Babe Fritzel had entered the park on Central Park West between Seventy-first and Seventy-second streets. After striking up a pointedly casual conversation with a veteran patrolman named John Moody, Fritzel had shown him his gold badge and mentioned that Lieutenant Tonnelli had asked to meet him at the PD command post.

  It had been that simple. Moody hadn’t known anything about Howard Unruh, and it had been the Babe’s pleasure to brief him on that particular case. (“You guys’ll probably never see anything like it. Man walking down a street with a rifle, blasting people every which way. Thirteen of them in all. Just as cool as if he was in a shooting gallery. Even got an old lady parked at a stoplight. It was an honor, I tell you, like a medal, to be the cop that put the cuffs on Unruh that day.”) Now Babe Fritzel stood with a hand on the butt of his gun, eyes narrowed to catch anything moving in the shadows. He could still show them a thing or two. These young cops thought a guy of seventy-four should be in a cemetery or on display like a freak. He might not make the kill tonight, but he’d be close to it. And that would be like another medal. Babe Fritzel was thinking, and would add a luster to fresh stories he could tell while working the bar in the Elks’ Club.

  At the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, Tonnelli told Prima to stop and pull over to the curb; he had spotted Coke Roosevelt standing on a corner talking with a group of young black studs.

  Tonnelli climbed from the squad and walked across the sidewalk to Coke, who greeted him by touching his fingers to the wide brim of his digger’s hat, a mocking little salute. In the patrol car Prima unholstered his gun and held it just below the window of the passenger seat.

  Tonnelli’s smile was as cold and insincere as Coke’s.

  “Got anything for us, gold-nose?”

  The soft glow of yellow and green fluorescent lights seemed to intensify a jungle tone in these car-infested Manhattan trails. Soul rock blared from music shops, angry and defiant like tribal drums.

  Tonnelli glanced at Coke Roosevelt and the dark, impassive faces of the young men circling him, the odd gold tooth gleaming against red lips and black skins. The city was turning into a nightmare you couldn’t wake up from, he thought, not with rancor but with regret. It was the Gypsy’s city, his fierce Camelot, and he loved it. But the relentless competition for clean space and air and silence was transforming its people into a breed crazed for the simple fundamentals of existence.

  “We got a name,” Coke said. “Like Gus Soltik.”

  “Got an address to go with it?”

  “No, and we ain’t got his Social Security number or his fingerprints,” Coke Roosevelt said dryly.

  Tonnelli looked up and down the street. “Don’t press it, gold-nose. Where’d you get the name?”

  “Sam spread two big ones in the street. Some dude pinned the description to the name. He seen him once up in the Bronx. Remembered his name.”

  “Not that I care, but I’m curious,” Tonnelli said. “Where’d he get the description? It wasn’t on the air, and it’s not in the papers.”

  “Maybe one of your boys in blue talked in his sleep.”

  “One of the black boys in blue?”

  “Now you said that, Lieutenant.” Coke grinned at the young blacks who were watching his performance with wide smiles. “You cats hear me say anything like that?”

  They shook their heads, and one of them said, “Naw, no way,” in a soft, drawling voice.

  “I told you, it didn’t matter,” Tonnelli said. “Tell Samantha thanks.”

  “Why don’t you tell her your own self, Lieutenant?”

  As the squad car rolled south again Tonnelli checked his watch, then asked for Garbalotto on his radio.

  When Garbalotto came in Tonnelli said, “Garb, I got a name for you. Gus Soltik. Could be the Juggler. Start checking Motors, phone books in all boroughs, the FBI, Social Security, criminal records, everything we’ve got.”

  “Right, Lieutenant.” Garbalotto lowered his voice. “Something you should know, Gypsy. Your last orders to me got tipped over by the chiefs. They’ve scrambled the choppers and sent dog teams up to Seventy-fifth Street.”

  “All right,” Tonnelli said, and with a weary sigh broke the connection.

  Glancing at his watch, he saw that Luther Boyd hadn’t got his half hour after all. Just seventeen minutes to be exact, and if Boyd was right, the little girl didn’t have a prayer in hell now.

  Chapter 19

  He had been moving slowly and cautiously through a grove of white trees, his big hand tight on the collar of her ski jacket, when he first heard the strange music on the horizon. It confused and hurt him because its rhythm matched the throbbing pain in his left arm. It had made him anxious and fearful because where he expected comforting silence there was instead a relentless barrier of noise.

  He stopped and listened, his senses alert to danger. Kate twisted her head to look up at him, trying to learn something from the fear and confusion in his face.

  Gus Soltik, still clutching the girl’s collar, made his way west, trying to turn the corner of that sound. Then he retraced his steps, pulling Kate behind him. But there was no break in the wall. The rhythm was relentless, blocking his way and matching the pulsing pain in his arm. The sound made him think, or try to think, which was worse. The security beyond the reservoir, the dark paths, the silent stretch of trees, that was denied to him now, taken from him by the music.

  Music frightened and angered Gus Soltik because he didn’t understand it. Even at the Delacorte clock with Lanny he was puzzled and sometimes angered by people who smiled and snapped their fingers to the music of the prancing little animals. He had never known the thrill of a marching band. He had never shared a song with a girl. He had never been sung to sleep. Thus the sounds that other men smiled at were frightening assaults on his senses. At work, pushing refuse into heaps, browned cabbage leaves, bruised and rotting fruit, he would hear noise from the radio, and one clerk might nod to another and say something like, “Compadre, remember where we go after that night at Joselita’s?” And the reply would be equally unintelligible to Gus Soltik. Perhaps: “Ah, she was bonita, you lucky pavo.” Music evoked a world which Gus Soltik had been forbidden to enter.

  He was like a trapped animal. Something was behind him, the “coldness,” and the frightening noise sounded all around him. If he could make them stop. But they wouldn’t stop hurting him. And they wouldn’t let him die. His mother had told him that.

  “Listen to me,” Kate Boyd said, the words a whisper on the winds.

  She didn’t scream. He felt no fear in her body.

  “You’re hurt,” she said. “Blood is soaking through the sleeve of your sweater. We should go to a hospital.”

  Kate knew there was some kind of trap ahead of them. The loud music stretching the width of the park was no coincidence. Without realizing it, she had become his conspirator. The soft, vulnerable warmth she felt for puppies and kittens made her sorry for this dumb wounded creature and made her hope he might escape. But this hope was more than a budding maternal instinct. It was based on the practical realization that unless both escaped, both would die.

  “I know someone who can help you,” she said.

  He looked down at her, squinting in the darkness, to peer into her eyes. She knew that the mention of the word “dog” had triggered sullenness in him and the word “father” had evoked a dangerous rage. Her throat was dry with fear as she sought a safe way to manipulate him.

  “He�
��s kind and strong. And he’d be good to you,” she said.

  Gus Soltik scratched the thick blond hair at the base of his broad neck. How did she know?

  “Lanny?” he asked her, the word squeezed with an effort from his corded throat muscles.

  Now she could only guess. “Well, he’s like Lanny.”

  But Gus Soltik wasn’t listening to her then. Another sound distracted him. He looked up and saw three helicopters flying toward them, motors thundering, giant beams of light covering the ground, flashing through the tree like brilliant lances.

  His heart pounded with fear and rage. He clamped a hand across Kate’s mouth, and it was then he felt her fear, her terror. As she fought against him, he was shaken by a savage joy. But he must hide now, and he knew where to hide. He set off at a run, sweeping Kate off the ground with his uninjured arm, traveling toward the middle of the park to the Ramble.

  Gus Soltik, with animal instinct, had chosen his terrain with savage, tactical brilliance. In that expanse of gullies and caves and grottoes, all of it hidden by massive trees and choked with foliage, they would never find him and never hear her. . . .

  Sergeant Boyle stood in the shadows of a grove of trees a dozen yards south of Transverse Number Three. He was the point of a skirmish line of patrolmen stretching across the transverse from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West.

  Rock music blasted to the right and left of him, but his eyes were keyed to something several hundred feet away. In a broad meadow dappled with moonlight, the most obvious cover was a towering stand of silver linden trees, ghostly and white in the darkness. Rusty Boyle had thought he had detected someone moving in those trees. But it might have been shadows or tree limbs moving in the wind. Or for that matter, his imagination, his nerves. It was hard to wait. It was easier in action when adrenaline flowed to add power and speed to your reflexes and muscles. But waiting was wearing him down. And John Ransom’s call, patched through to him by Sokolsky, hadn’t helped much. . . . Couldn’t kill himself . . . but grateful to Boyle for caring . . .must thank him . . . must see him. . . .

  Something moved behind the sergeant.

  Rusty Boyle spun around, dropping into a crouch, while his hand moved with blurring speed toward the butt of his gun, but he froze when he saw that the tall man who faced him had extended both hands to indicate that they were empty.

  Sergeant Boyle had an impression of rangy strength, dark hair, and cold, chiseled features that reminded him of portraits he had seen as a boy of Indian scouts.

  “Luther Boyd,” the man said.

  “Boyd? The girl’s father?”

  Boyd was staring with bitter eyes at the helicopters crisscrossing the northern end of the park.

  “Sergeant Rusty Boyle here, sir.”

  “I lost him when your people sent up those goddamn firecrackers,” Boyd said. There was no place in his strategy for anger, but he couldn’t stifle all of it. “Ten minutes more and I’d have had the bastard,” he said. “He doubled on me somewhere in those lindens.”

  “Hold it,” Sergeant Boyle said, his voice suddenly tense with excitement. “I thought I spotted something moving west over there just a minute or so ago.”

  “Give me the line,” Boyd said. “Use your arm as a pointer.”

  Boyle turned and extended his hand toward the tree, then moved it to the right about a dozen inches. “About there, sir.”

  Boyd moved behind the sergeant and took a bearing along his rigidly extended arm. He charted his course on the tallest of the silver lindens, a giant of a tree several degrees to the left of the line Boyd was indicating.

  Boyd dropped to a crouch in a single fluid motion and with the flat of his hand wiped a square of earth free of leaves and twigs. Taking a key ring from his pocket, he used the tip of a key to draw a furrow in the earth eighteen inches long on the east-west line of Transverse Three.

  Puzzled, Rusty Boyle knelt beside him and glanced from Boyd’s lean profile to the mark he had drawn in the ground. Sergeant Boyle believed in this man; there was a rocklike quality about him, a projection of authority you could depend on. He had been impressed by the concept of a wall of music, not only because Chief Larkin had endorsed it, but because it appealed to something mystical in his Celtic spirit.

  Boyd, in turn, liked what he had seen of this sergeant, a tall and resolute man with alert, intelligent eyes.

  “Sergeant, where is the southern line of patrolmen now?”

  “They’re at about Seventy-sixth Street, sir.”

  “Then here’s what we’ll do,” Boyd said, and pointed to the furrow he had drawn in the earth. “Equate that line with your troops alone the transverse. Think of that line as three mobile units, a middle and two flanks. Order the middle to move out south on a straight line, while your east and west flanks move forward at a fifty-five-degree angle toward the middle line. This is a simple enfolding operation. Your east and west wings will eventually link with the line moving north from Seventy-sixth. It’s the fastest, simplest way to take terrain away from that psycho.”

  Never mentions his daughter, just the Juggler, Boyle thought. But it probably wasn’t lack of emotion; it was probably the only way to stay functioning and sane, think of an exercise in tactics, not a small girl screaming, in agony. . . .

  “When I move my men out, I’ll follow your line, sir.”

  “Welcome aboard,” Boyd said. “But let’s not have any surprises out there. If I hear you or anyone else, I’ll say one word: ‘bullet.’ Your countersign is ‘trigger.’”

  “I use it the same way? I say ‘bullet’ and you bounce a ‘trigger’ off me?”

  Boyd simply nodded and was gone toward the stand of silver lindens in long, loping strides, but silent as a cat stalking prey across the mossy floor of a jungle.

  The three Bell helicopters flew crisscrossing patterns above the middle and northern areas of Central Park. The downdraft from their rotary blades lashed at treetops like blasts from miniature hurricanes; their powerful searchlights probed at pathways and stands of trees, brilliant as columns of fire, and the thunder of their engines beat on the ground like flails, and those explosions raced in trembling, diminishing waves along the length and breadth of the park.

  The crews of the helicopters were scanning the grounds rushing beneath them with high-power binoculars. From their vantage point, despite the dizzying, erratic patterns they were flying, they could see the line of police pressing steadily north, individual officers defined by the powerful torchlights they carried. And they could see the east and west flanks of Sergeant Boyle’s troops closing in like great wings on the middle of their own line, slowly but inevitably narrowing the distance between the formations advancing from the opposite directions.

  Police officers in Central Park had already stopped and interrogated dozens of men and women. Prostitutes of both sexes, winos, couples making love in shadows and a half dozen or more types who had managed to slip past police cordons to savor personally the action and excitement in the park and at the command post.

  Another problem confronted New York police that night, an unnecessary problem, although a real and ugly one. That problem was rooted in the human need to witness tragedy, to examine, if possible, the mother’s ravaged face, to speculate with other voyeurs on what peculiar torments might already have been inflicted on the missing child. Instead of following the story on radio and television, there were New Yorkers from all five boroughs converging on Central Park to the disgust and wrath of patrolmen assigned to traffic control.

  Their job was complicated enormously by carloads of flushed and noisy people turned on by the prospect of tragedy unfolding before their very eyes.

  Some of the questions shouted at traffic cops angered and sickened them in almost equal proportions.

  “She dead yet?”

  “The weirdo, Officer. He’s a nigger, right?”

  “Is it true he cut something off her already?”

  “It wouldn’t have happened if she was a God-fearing child
.”

  But there were moments of sanity.

  “I’m a doctor, Officer. Any way I can help?”

  “Look, Mac, I’m on my way home. I’m not rubbernecking. But if you want, I’ll stall this rig right here and block all those crazies behind me.”

  “Thanks, pal, but keep it moving.”

  Old John Brennan stood with his arms crossed and looked with sadness and anger at the streams of cars flowing down Fifth Avenue, circling the park like effing vultures, he thought, adding to the cops’ problems, just for the thrill of seeing somebody shot or killed or a little girl (he crossed himself at the thought) lying dead and bloody somewhere out there in the park’s trees and meadows.

  During a rare break in the traffic John Brennan saw a kitten creeping along on the opposite side of Fifth Avenue. As he walked swiftly across the street, he wondered if this was what had drawn Kate toward the park earlier that evening.

  The little kitten cringed away from John Brennan’s hands but didn’t attempt to run off, and he was able to pick it up and cuddle it against the warmth of the rough fabric of his doorman’s coat.

  As he started back across the street, his way was blocked momentarily by a car halted in the traffic. The driver was a beefy young man with small, lively eyes. He wore a scarf knotted high about his throat, and this gave his narrow head a curios but definite resemblance to that of a turtle.

  “Hey, pop. You’re a doorman. Can you get me up to the roof of your building for a better look? I got binoculars. I ain’t asking favors . . .there’s ten bucks in it for you.”