The Bait

by Dorothy Uhnak

  None of the other Squad members seemed to raise these objections. Not even when Reardon wasn’t around. They did some small piecework: that’s what it was. Christie’s mind seized on it: piecework, like in a factory. I turn the screw to the left and pass it on to the next man; he slips a band around it and the next man tightens the band, then after a while we change places, each of us attending to one small detail, handing it on to Reardon who accepts it without a word and hands you some other small item.

  “Boy, whatever it is, it sure has you sore!”

  Christie, startled, squinted into the high strong sun, but the voice was as familiar as the crushing handshake, from which she had to remove Reardon’s crumpled bit of paper. “Hey, Johnnie, how are you?”

  Detective John Devereaux was a Homicide man and the imprint of his profession, while stamped clearly and permanently on his face, had not touched his voice, which was musically soft and light. He was a bulky man with broad shoulders and a huge barrel of a torso carried on legs that were much too short for the rest of his body so that, sitting down, he gave the appearance of great height, while standing up, he seemed to be in a hole. Not that he was short, just that he looked like a man who, somehow, should be taller.

  “The D.A. got you doing research, Christie?”

  Christie made a face, indicating exactly what she thought of the D.A. and she let Johnnie steer her, with a large and heavy hand, so that she was turned about and heading in his direction. “Got time for coffee and? I been in that mausoleum for two and a half hours. Boy, this sun is hard to take; let’s find some nice dark, cool spot.”

  Leading her through the crowds that surged businesslike across the broad expanse of Fifth Avenue during the brief “Walk” signal, which blinked “Don’t Walk” almost before their feet hit the warm tar, Johnnie pulled her along. Christie winced. This was Johnnie’s friendly grasp; she hated to think what his official in-custody hold was like. He more or less wrenched her into a small bar on Madison Avenue just off 42nd Street. He was apparently known here, for he just held up his finger at the bartender who appeared with a tall highball.

  Christie asked for a Coke, checking the clock on the wall. She’d tackle Reardon’s research in a half hour. Johnnie took his hat off in concession to Christie for he was always a gentleman when confronted by what he defined as a lady and he had known Christie for some four years, having met her when he was on his first assignment with Homicide and the corpse was female—white—age 35—suicide by gas—and the policewoman assigned in uniform was Christie Opara, twenty-two, arriving from the Bureau to search her third corpse, which she did quickly, and finding nothing, had swallowed dryly, told him “Nothing,” then gratefully accepted his cigarette. He had taken solace from her whitened face and tenseness: it eased his own because in Homicide, as he had learned through, the years, you never knew what to expect.

  Sipping his Scotch and soda, his eyes adjusting to the dimness easily, Johnnie looked around. “Nice place, this. Lot of advertising people.” Johnnie Devereaux had a fantastic acquaintance with people in all areas of the city. He could talk intelligently with anyone in politics, clothing manufacturing, advertising, construction, waterfront activities, labor negotiations, religious movements, education, any large industrial or small commercial business. He could blink his eyes and tell in which section of the city, which small, hidden, unknown pocket, you could find a particular group of people, what the ethnic makeup was three blocks to the west or one block to the east. Where to eat authentic Cantonese food, not the American chop suey junk; where to get real Northern Italian cooking or non-commercial, absolutely pure Kosher meals like someone’s Grandma used to put in front of someone’s Grandpa. People and their strange quirks of behavior and their fascinating customs and remnants of blood-culture were Johnnie’s hobby and a knowledge he enjoyed sharing.

  “What has Homicide got their ace looking up in the library?”

  Johnnie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and his voice was sad. “Ah, these murders. These girls: three in three months.” He ticked off the months and the murders with his fingers. “February, March, beginning of this month.”

  Christie recalled the most recent, then remembered the other two only because they had been referred to in the newspapers as being linked to the most recent. “Is there really any connection, John, or is that just a newspaper gimmick?”

  “Well, you know the papers: what sells is what they print. They discover some drab little mouse got bumped off and they print it that way—no sales. So they change her into a bright, blowsy blond and jazz it up like that and it sells papers.” His face was deeply troubled and he shook his head. “But there was no jazzing up these girls, Christie. Nice kids, you know. Clean, really clean, hard-working, good girls. No fooling around, no long lists of boyfriends to check out. All in their early twenties. This last one, the kid in the Bronx: a nice kid.”

  That said it all for Johnnie Devereaux. It was the best word there was for describing a female: nice.

  “But is there a real connection? I mean, there’s a murder every hour somewhere, every day.” She closed her eyes, recalling the newspaper accounts. “First one in Greenwich Village, second, Riverside Drive and third—this last girl, in the Bronx.” She thought a moment, then asked, “Any real connection? Or is it possible that there are three murderers—you know, the first case setting some other psycho into motion, the second giving another fellow the same idea?”

  His voice was cautious; Johnnie Devereaux did not give information relative to his work away freely. “Same age, same type; none of them knew each other, if that’s what you mean, no friends or acquaintances in common. All three were raped and strangled.”

  Christie yawned, excused herself and then, filled with the weariness of her sleepless, interrupted nights, she absently asked, “Any of them get any anonymous phone calls?”

  Johnnie Devereaux was a swarthy man, the darkness of his face making the paleness of his light gray eyes even more startling. They narrowed into bright slits and his voice changed: alert, sharp, demanding. Pure Homicide. “Why?”

  Christie grinned at his reaction. “Why is it that a cop always answers a question with a question?”

  Johnnie’s face relaxed. “Yeah, how come about that?” He held the cold glass between his hands, turning it slowly between his palms. “I wonder how many women in New York City get anonymous phone calls every day of the week.”

  Christie started to speak but her words were held back by the thoughtful expression as Johnnie Devereaux looked up at her again. “Two of the kids got phone calls,” he said. “The third kid, we don’t know—that was the first girl murdered. She was a loner, didn’t confide in anybody.” He shook his head. “Funny calls, too. Not the usual, you know, not obscene. The second girl and the last girl told their friends they had been getting calls, pretty regularly, for a couple of weeks. Some guy would get on, just—you know, talk to them—as if he knew them.”

  With great effort, Christie kept her voice normal; she spoke with nothing more than professional interest. “You mean, just conversational phone calls: hello, how are you, how’ve you been? That kind of thing?”

  Devereaux leaned his shoulders forward and his voice was low and clear. “Yeah. We kept that out of the papers. Christ, imagine the wave of hysteria that would set off. Every woman in New York City would be sure that any wrong number or ‘funny’ phone call was our murderer setting her up.”

  Christie swallowed some Coke and nodded; she was glad she hadn’t told Johnnie about the phone calls which had kept her awake every night for the last few weeks. “The newspapers kept playing it up as if the three girls were definitely the victims of the same man. Is that because it sells papers, Johnnie, or do you think so too?”

  “It’s the same guy,” he said flatly. “There’s something the papers haven’t got hold of. Each one of these kids had a lock of hair hacked from her head.” His fingers reached into his own head, which was scantily covered by the dark remnants of
what had once been thick curls. “From the back of her head”—he held his index finger and thumb before her eyes—“just about an inch or two hacked off.”

  “Hacked off?”

  “Coroner said probably with a knife. He could tell by the way it was cut.” He smiled, admiringly. “That old Doc Mendel, he must be over seventy, but he spotted it with the first girl. What an autopsy that guy does; a real pro. So, of course, we alerted the other coroners to look out for that—hacked hair—on any female homicide of any kind, under any circumstances—anywhere in the city. And sure enough, these two kids: same thing, lived alone, raped, strangled, and the hair cut.”

  The bright glaring sunshine stung Christie’s eyes right through the green sunglasses as she walked rapidly back to the Library. The unseasonably hot temperature made the marble corridor seem air-conditioned and Christie felt a shudder right down to the small of her back. She glanced absently into a glass-enclosed phone booth set against a marble pillar, then watched, fascinated, as a man deposited his dime, waited, then dialed a number.

  Anybody with a dime. It could be anybody with a dime.

  Peering into the viewer in the quiet of the library, where it was darkly cool, Christie didn’t know if she were relieved or not to see the words neatly and precisely encased inside the machine: “Representative Littlejohn Recommends Addition to State Capitol Building.” And the date, she noted with sour triumph: October 17, 1963. She copied down the pertinent facts, then noted the small items relative to sealed bids being accepted and then, some nine months later, the small blurb, on page 36 of the New York Times relative to the Gerardo Construction Company being awarded the bid.

  She asked the librarian, a weary woman who kept breaking into an accommodating smile, if she could look through the 1961-1962 files, and starting in 1961, Christie peered her way through column after column until a small item appeared: “Builder Cleared of Fraud.” The builder’s name was Alfred Gerardo. He had been charged with fraudulently padding his bill on the construction of a city-owned power-plant by indicating items which, in fact, had not been used in the construction. His attorney was Ralph F. Littlejohn.

  Christie’s neck ached and her eyes were moist and her fingers were numb. She hoped she’d be able to read her notes later; they seemed to be getting smaller and smaller and were running off the lines of her notebook. She pressed her hand over her eyes, but she could still see the sharp tiny print behind her lids. She should continue checking back to the time the fraud charges were initiated. She should. But she would do it tomorrow, after giving Reardon her report up to date. Collecting the microfilm, snapping her pen closed, putting the notebook into her pocketbook, Christie pictured Reardon’s face in response to her explanation that the job wasn’t completed: Oh. I see. The rest of the information I need is still in the library. Well, at least it’s in a nice safe place, right?

  Grinding her teeth at Reardon, Christie abruptly thrust the microfilm at the librarian, who looked wounded when there was no smile returned. She quickly muttered, “Thank you very much, ma’am,” and the librarian’s tired smile reappeared briefly.

  Littlejohn-Gerardo-Gerardo-Littlejohn-fraud or whatever. Maybe if she knew why she was looking for something, she would be able to find what she was looking for and maybe if she knew what she was looking for she’d ...

  Christie stopped suddenly in the vastness of the Library’s marble corridor. Her mind was cleared of all the tiny printed words. She leaned against the smooth wall and closed her eyes tightly, forcing herself to slow down: to let all the sounds fill her brain, the low, murmuring voices, the muted echoing footsteps, and then, the voice, soft and intimate, entered her brain in the darkness behind her eyelids, “Hello, Christie Opara. How are you, Christie Opara?” But she did not hear the sound of the voice as she had strained to hear it, to define it, to identify it, night after night. She heard the pronunciation of her name.

  Silently, Christie’s lips formed her name and she opened her eyes and saw another place: the corridor outside of Special Sessions and Frank Santino with his lewd little eyes and she heard Frank Santino say her name with his particular, lazy slurring of the syllables so that it came out sounding neither Irish nor Czech, but like the word “opera.” But it was not Frank Santino who called her every night. It was not Frank Santino’s voice, it was a voice she had never heard before, coming from a man who knew her and who knew how to pronounce her name because he had heard Frank Santino say it.

  Christie bit down hard on her index finger; the sharp pain intensified her sudden, complete awareness: Murray Rogoff.

  Murray Rogoff had called those three girls and raped them and murdered them and hacked off pieces of their hair.

  And now he’s calling me.

  14

  MARTY GINSBURG HAGGLED HIS way down Delancey Street. Haggling is a most joyous thing when done properly and with the whole heart. But there are stringent rules and requirements that must be met in order to fully pursue this ancient, complicated and respectable method of dealing with a fellow human being. The first essential is a loud voice and the second essential is a deaf ear and the third essential is a glass eye.

  With these essentials, the bargainer can outshout his opponent (who does his best to outshout you); let his words of protest bounce unheard right back at him (as he does with yours); and his facial expressions, which range from cunningness to outrage, go unseen (while your expressions are similarly ignored). Of course, haggling ends at the logical, sought-for conclusion: you pay the price you originally had in mind (though well concealed) and your opponent accepts the price he originally decided upon (but would have died before revealing when the contest began). Then, each ignoring the other’s moans of bitterness: Robber, thief, crook, stealing money. for inferior merchandise—Depriver of my family, food from my children’s mouths, roof from my family’s head—the package, containing a length of multicolored material, or sandals for a child’s feet or aprons for a wife’s ample middle or a hundred multi-sized screws and nails, is transferred from the seller to the buyer with glares of mutual hostility but feelings of mutual satisfaction.

  Haggling is a most joyous thing and it hardly exists in its purest form any more. That was one of the reasons Marty Ginsburg loved the East Side: the old East Side which still did exist, but only in smaller and smaller areas, closing in about a tighter and tighter nucleus, hemmed and edged and encroached upon by coffee shops and art supply shops and sandal-makers and copper jewelry craftsmen pushed up from Greenwich Village and twenty-story, terraced and patioed high-rental red brick buildings, gaunt and out of place amid the colorlessness of the honest, old tenements.

  Further up Delancey Street and off on the side streets, the haggling was done more and more in Spanish, furiously delivered by black-eyed, dark-skinned Puerto Ricans who were small and sharp-boned, their shrill voices indignant and righteous. Marty regretted this change with a sense of loss and deprivation. How could he possibly hope to get in on it, when the language was alien to his ear?

  It felt good to dig out the childhood Yiddish, for nothing could “sound as full and rich and furiously angry as bellowing at some old man, who, hawk-eyed, bellowed right back at you, snatching the piece of yard goods between you, each waiting the other out, each stomping away, then turning at just the right moment: a matter of precise timing was involved, then each confronting the other again with continued accusations and with the feigned regret of having to relent a little to the thief before him, but that was life and, God, what else could a man do.

  Slowly he made his way along Delancey, then turned down Sheriff Street. Marty inhaled the warm and heavy air with all the childhood memories filling his large lungs. Not that he had ever lived on the Lower East Side. He hadn’t. But the streets of his childhood Greenpoint, that pocket of Brooklyn, were the same streets after all. Marty sighed nostalgically. His kids, his four sons, were missing a hell of a lot growing up in a five-room apartment in an elevated building in Forest Hills with trees crushing them in and noth
ing but the sounds of jets from Kennedy and LaGuardia and all prices marked clearly on everything and no daily encounters to grow with, to learn from, to measure themselves by.

  Ambling along to Rivington Street, Marty was confronted by a sight that took his breath away and called forth his spirit of challenge. The entire street was lined, on both sides, with cartons containing all manner of things: bargains! Left and right, wary old men and squinty old women alertly guarded their treasures, flexing their voices and strong tough hands against the possibility of customers. Marty advanced steadily, not letting his eyes rest too heavily or with too great an interest on any particular item for they watched your eyes and your eyes could give you away.

  He walked past a display of bright material, ignoring the old woman who glared at him, stopped at a box of handkerchiefs (ten-for-a-dollar-pure-linen). He fingered the handkerchiefs, shrugged at the owner, who snarled at him, then cautiously, Marty worked his way back the few feet to where the yards of bright material, the flowers and color pulling at him, were watched over by a shapeless old woman whose skull was outlined by a safety-pinned kerchief. It was the red material with the blue and green palm trees that pulled at him, so of course, he lifted the corner of the white material with the green and yellow and pink polka dots, narrowing his eyes at it, pulling his mouth down at it, making an unpleasant sound at its lack of quality and beauty. Marty did this to several bolts of material, aware, of the beginning rumbles from deep within the old woman’s throat, until his hand rested lightly on his target, his face screwing into a look of disdain, his hand dropping the material quickly, passing on to the next bolt, then returning again to the target bolt, his mouth now asking, disinterestedly: “How much?”

  The haggling began in earnest and the old woman was a good fighter. Suddenly, she called forth an obscenity of such pure and precise and fantastic clarity that Marty’s blood was warmed and delighted by a surge of half-forgotten memories, and he surrendered for that reason alone. The old woman, suspicious and somewhat flustered, bundled the length of material, folding it at crazy angles, into a used brown paper bag, thrusting it at him and taking his money without respect. She had expected better of him.