Peregrine

by William Bayer

  “Come on. Forget about us and yap away. You did it on the peregrine. Relax. Relax. We’ll try again.…”

  She didn’t want to relax. Intensity, passionate delivery, conviction—that’s what worked for her. And this was different from covering the peregrine.

  Then she had really cared. This was hack television work: the sensitive female reporter aroused by the ritualized violence of men.

  She was wondering how she was going to psych herself up, get Joel off her back without hurting his feelings and finish up the job, when their driver came running toward them from the van.

  “Bird attack in Central Park,” he yelled. Pam, Joel, and Steaves looked at one another, then started grabbing up equipment. “Mr. Greene says screw whatever we’re doing and get our asses over there.”

  She was never so furious with New York traffic as she was during the twenty minutes it took them to reach the park. Her heart was pumping, her adrenaline flowing—every second wasted waiting for a light made her want to scream. She was afraid this time she wouldn’t be first, that reporters from other stations would beat her to the scene. She called Herb on the car radio, learned he’d dispatched his “Newsbreak Unit” and a researcher to look for eyewitnesses and get descriptions of the bird. “I’m throwing everything I got at this,” he told her. Channel 8 was out to hold its edge.

  There was a police line at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second detouring cars from the park. Pam was relieved.

  That meant the site was still active, that she hadn’t come too late.

  Tragedies, which occurred so often in New York, were cleaned up extremely fast. It was possible to arrive no more than twenty minutes after a murder to find a splotch of blood being trampled by indifferent pedestrians and the usual traffic whizzing by.

  The driver showed his press pass; their van was waved on through. As they drove up the hill toward the back of the Metropolitan Museum, Pam saw the Newsbreak Unit parked beside the curb. But no sign of any other station— she could hardly believe her luck.

  People in jogging clothes stood in a circle mumbling quietly, several police officers were standing around a figure covered with a blanket, and an ambulance was sitting there, its bored attendants smoking cigarettes. Greg Madden, the Newsbreak Unit manager, came over to the van and explained.

  The police were waiting for a doctor from the medical examiner’s office; until he came, the body could not be moved.

  “How come we’re the only ones?”

  “An eyewitness called us soon as it happened. He’s a fan of yours, Pam, waiting to talk to you. Better hurry so we can get him out of here.”

  Greg led her toward a young man in a navy warm-up who was talking with two police. “Name’s Lee Donaldson. Owns a bookstore on Madison. He’s seen the girl jogging around here before. About half an hour ago he ran by her, then heard her scream. He turned around, saw the bird working her over. When it flew off, he called the cops.”

  “Then he called us?”

  Madden nodded. “Penny intercepted—he asked specially to speak to you. You know, I wonder if we ought to ask him to work up a little sweat. He’d look a hell of a lot better with droplets on his face, like it just happened, if you see what I mean; like we got here so fast he didn’t have time to cool down.”

  “Oh, come on, Greg. That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s the sort of touch Herb likes.”

  “Forget it. What about the girl? Any idea who she is?”

  “Yeah. We’re lucky. Most joggers don’t carry ID, but she was carrying stuff. She works at the D.A.’s office. Larry’s on the phone to them now.”

  Pam walked over to Donaldson and introduced herself. But then she saw that wasn’t necessary, that he, and the cops, too, recognized her face. The police were young and deferential, as shocked by the attack as everybody else. Donaldson told her he’d watched her report the first attack and that was why he’d telephoned Channel 8.

  Joel set them up in a two-shot so they were facing the camera side by side.

  The interview went well—Donaldson was articulate, spoke of the camaraderie of joggers and how they start exchanging smiles.

  “I saw her the first time this morning around Eighty-eighth on the West Drive, and I figured I’d probably see her just about where we met up again—that’s the kind of thing you do when you’re running, when you know the other person moves at approximately your speed. Anyway, I saw her, and she was looking pretty pooped, so I knew she was just about finished up. She smiled at me, the old end-of-the-workout smile. I was flying downhill when I heard her scream. I turned and saw the bird hit her and knock her to the ground.”

  “Did you get a good look at it?”

  Donaldson shook his head. “I saw the film of what happened the other day, so I was really scared. I dodged in among the trees and then ran back up to where she lay. By the time I reached her the bird had taken off. It’s big. Huge. Maybe two, two and a half feet tall.” He looked around, then suddenly he began to sob. “Christ—it was awful.” He shut his eyes. “She smiles at me and a few seconds later she’s lying there all torn up.” He opened his eyes. Tears were running down his cheeks. “She was nice, really nice, always said good-morning.” He shook his head. “I never knew her name.”

  Pam embraced him, held him to her so he could sob against her hair. She patted him gently. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered. “It’ll be okay.”

  She spent the next ten minutes trying various presentations, figuring Herb and the editors could later pick and choose. She did a subjective run-through as if she were the girl— running up the hill, facing the camera as she jogged, stopping just where the bird had hit, reconstructing the attack.

  She knew that some of this was corny, but she wanted to try it anyhow. “This was Anne Stevens’ final run,” she said.

  “She died right here, in full sunlight in Central Park. The killer peregrine hit her right here, a hundred yards from the finest residential buildings in Manhattan, fifty yards from the Metropolitan Museum.” She stopped.

  “Ugh! That stinks! Forget it. I’ll try again.”

  Greg Madden offered to escort Lee Donaldson back to his store, out of solicitude for how shaken up he was, of course, but also to get him away from the scene before the other reporters arrived. They did come, finally, three stations’ worth of them in a pack. The ambulance had left, the joggers had dispersed, the police were letting traffic through, and so there was no scene to background their reports.

  Pam conferred again with Larry, learned that Anne Stevens was to start a prosecution that morning of a man accused of rape. When she hadn’t shown up in court, the defense counsel had tried to have the case dismissed, but the judge refused and the trial had been postponed. Pam also learned that it was Anne Stevens’s first trial on her own.

  She worked that into her location close, then reprieved it in her final line: “Today was to be Anne Stevens’ first day in court,” she said sonorously.

  “It turned out to be her last day on earth.”

  Joel told her that was great, but Pam didn’t like it, wanted to try something else. She did a straight close—” … two attacks in midtown in five days. When will the killer peregrine strike again?”—much more professional, she thought. But on the way back to the station, Joel suddenly slapped his thigh. “Damn!” he said, “that roll was finished. I missed your final take.”

  She looked at him, disgusted. “Let’s go back and do it again.”

  “Forget it. The first one was great. Why go back and waste the time.”

  She nodded, but when they reached the station she turned to him—he had his hands inside his black bag, was unloading film from a magazine.

  “You did that deliberately, didn’t you, Joel?”

  Joel looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Pretending to shoot me when you knew the roll was finished.”

  He shrugged, turned away, then turned back to her and grinned.

  “Don’t ever do anything like that to me aga
in.” She turned her back on him, walked into Channel 8. She was very angry. He was a cameraman and she was a reporter. It was up to her to decide which of her takes was best.

  She worked furiously through the rest of the morning and early afternoon, shaping her story for the six o’clock.

  Herb sent back her drafts with suggestions for hyping them up, but that didn’t bother her—she knew the words were less important than the way she would deliver them on the air. Her taping session with Carl Wendel went well. The huge blow-ups of the falcon showing the jesses on its legs made a stunning background for the interview, and the logo for her report, the profile of the falcon, which emphasized its bloodthirsty eyes, was powerful and haunting too.

  Penny Abrams came down after the taping to tell her Herb loved the piece with Donaldson. “He especially likes the part where he breaks down and you comfort him,” Penny said. “He says it humanizes you, shows you’ve got lots of heart.”

  “Does he think I’m too intense?”

  “No,” Penny said. “But you’re special. There’s a quality in your stuff now that’s completely your own. I don’t know what it is—conviction maybe. You get us involved, make us believe.”

  A nice compliment, and it filled her as she walked back to the newsroom.

  But she warned herself not to start acting like a star. If she started to strut, her colleagues would resent her and they’d be justified. Now she was sorry she’d been high-handed with Joel.

  There were a lot of telephone messages and a pile of letters on her desk. She started going through them, not paying much attention until she found a note written in capital letters in the same hand as the earlier one Joel and Herb had dismissed. This time the letter was specific: It actually prophesied the attack. She examined the postmark, then grabbed it up and ran the length of the newsroom to Herb.

  He read the letter to himself and then aloud, slowly, giving equal emphasis to every word:

  DEAR PAMELA BARRETT:

  TOMORROW I WILL KILL AGAIN, PARTAKE OF THE GREAT GLORY AND MYSTERY OF THE HUNT. I SHALL TOWER AND WHEEL ABOVE THE PARK UNTIL I FIND A QUARRY SUITABLE TO MY INTENT. THEN I SHALL STOOP OUT OF THE SUN AND BIND FIERCELY TO MY PREY. WISH YOU COULD BE THERE TO SEE ME. MAYBE NEXT TIME YOU WILL. IN THE MEANTIME— FOND REGARDS. I AM PEREGRINE.

  “Mailed last night,” she said. Herb examined the postmark, nodded. “Still think it’s from a crank?”

  “Did you keep the other one?”

  “Yeah. Look, Herb, this is crazy. This bird’s under someone’s control.”

  He didn’t respond—he was reading the note again. He ran his hand through his mane. “A guy behind all this— that’s a whole lot different than killer bird.”

  Their eyes met. “I’m scared, Herb.”

  He nodded, buzzed Penny, told her to get him the police. “Now don’t worry, kid,” he said, patting Pam on the cheek. “When we’re through with this, everyone will be just as scared as you.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Janek pressed himself back into his seat. Marchetti was driving sloppily and there was something about his grin and the set of his jaw that told Janek that he’d heard. Someone had told him, and now he was trying to deal with it, or, more likely, get used to the idea.

  Janek had been through this so many times he could read the symptoms right away. A new man came in, behaved a certain way, then someone took him aside. Then the change—some of them became surly; others started brooding; still others were curious and wanted to hear the story firsthand. Marchetti looked like the type who was going to pretend he didn’t care. Fine with me, Janek thought.

  They were driving up Eighth Avenue, running the gauntlet north of Forty-Second Street, the strip of pawnshops and porn-shops, crappy restaurants and whores. But it wasn’t Eighth Avenue that was making Janek nervous, and it wasn’t Marchetti’s driving, either. It was something else, something going on inside, the same thing that was making it hard for him to sleep and then getting him up at five in the morning because he couldn’t bear lying around in bed with his eyes wide open and nothing to do. And even when he was up, there wasn’t anything to do—he didn’t have a dog to walk, and the papers weren’t delivered yet—so he’d started going to morning mass, dawn mass with the devout old ladies in black dresses and the junior-high-school girls who were thinking about becoming nuns, and he felt like a fool among them, a middle-aged cop with a thirty-eight strapped to his ankle, kneeling down and bowing his head and listening to prayers he hadn’t heard in years. He’d kneel there on the worn plush prayer stool, worrying, worrying about himself. He was changing, could feel it happening to that part of him that had been frozen for so long. A stirring inside, an old fierceness becoming aroused. He had a hunch he was going to go through some sort of trial soon, not a courtroom trial but a trial of living that would test him, change his life.

  Maybe that was why he was nervous.

  Or maybe it was just the fear of getting old. Ridiculous! He was fifty-four; as far as he was concerned, the time didn’t pass fast enough. He needed a case now, a real case, not the crap they were flinging at him every day: a “dognap”— pair of ex-lovers fighting over their Dalmatian; an apartment rental scam; a murder in a lesbian bar; and now this, whatever this was supposed to be: letters to some TV reporter from a guy who claimed he was killing girls with his bird.

  “Watch it, Sal! Jesus!” Janek barred his teeth.

  “Getting edgy, Frank.” Marchetti didn’t look at him. “That wasn’t even close.”

  He studied Marchetti—not a bad guy, better than average, decent, could be sensitive, maybe even capable of shedding tears. Janek sometimes wished he could shed a few himself.

  Marchetti had worked narcotics for three years—one too many, according to the brass. Just as he’d gotten the feel of it, they’d pulled him out, on the theory that narcotics contaminated, inevitably made an officer corrupt. So now he was assigned to the Detective Division, and, at twenty-eight, the bitterness had already started to set in.

  Janek hated bitterness and feared it.

  He’d seen too much of it in his career.

  He might not have that much time left, but one thing he knew: He wasn’t going to end up one of those broken detectives who blow their brains out one quiet Sunday morning six months after they’ve retired—a whimpering little end. It frightened him, because it happened so often. There was even a time when he’d been so bitter he actually thought he might do something like that himself.

  They were at Fifty-seventh now, waiting for the light.

  “How you going to get there, Sal?”

  “Throw a left on Fifty-ninth.”

  “Can’t do that. You got to go around the Circle.”

  “Why don’t I put on the siren and hang a left right here?”

  “Why? What’s the rush?”

  “Thought you were in a hurry, Frank.”

  “I’m not in a hurry. I’m nervous, Sal. You’re a detective. You’re supposed to observe those kinds of things.”

  Marchetti grinned.

  Probably thinks I’m crazy, Janek thought; probably thinking about what he’s heard.

  Which version was it, he wondered: Hair-Trigger Janek or Janek, Killer in Cold Blood. The precinct storytellers always simplified—the drama of the choice, to shoot or not to shoot, didn’t interest them. They stuck to the plot, the action, who did what to whom, who fired first and who got killed. If they talked psychology, they started sounding like lawyers, and no cop storyteller ever wanted to sound like one of them.

  They passed a church crammed between two tenements and Janek thought about asking Marchetti to stop so he could go inside and sit down and stare at the crucifix and pray. Pray for what? His salvation, that he wouldn’t lose his sense of right and wrong? Yes, that was it—to pray for his virtue in cold damp churches, kneel on old worn prayer stools, praying for his virtue and himself.

  “That’s it.” Marchetti pointed up the street. There was a marquee sticking out of a warehouse structure with b
ig black letters on it: CHANNEL 8.

  “Want to get yourself some coffee, Sal?”

  “Don’t you want me to come up?”

  “Sure, if you want to. You might enjoy it. Sure.”

  Sal nodded, parked the patrol car in front of the marquee. “Look,” he said. “See that guy?” He pointed to a man with a little red Hitler mustache stumbling his way out into the street.

  “That’s their weatherman. Always thought he acted strange.” Sal looked at his watch. “Jesus, four-thirty and already he’s crocked.”

  “Know this station?”

  “I sometimes watch it, yeah.”

  “Kojak reruns and stuff?”

  Marchetti blinked. “They do a pretty fair job on the news,” he said.

  Suddenly he felt fatherly. He put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder as they walked inside the station. He guided Sal forward so he could deal with the receptionist. Let him flash the shield.

  “Detective Marchetti and Lieutenant Janek here to see Mr. Herbert Greene.”

  Sal put a lot of emphasis on the titles.

  The receptionist, young and pretty, snatched up her phone. Sal probably thought his gold shield impressed her.

  Janek knew better—Greene was the big shot; the girl moved fast when she heard his name, not theirs.

  Janek didn’t like Greene the moment he laid eyes on him: wheeler-dealer, flamboyant outside, cold and self-centered underneath. He was the sort who’d sell his grandmother if he could find a pervert who wanted her. He’d sell anything; he was a pimp.

  The girl was different. Janek wasn’t sure about her. Something confused him; she seemed to be two different things. Anyway, she was beautiful, a perfect American face and wondrous thick brown hair—educated, ambitious, sharp-tongued, attractive, one of those girls who could cook an omelet but couldn’t face the thought of washing clothes.

  He looked at the letters while Greene gushed on: “The station wants to cooperate …. Hope the sharing will be a two-way street.” Janek didn’t nod and he didn’t shake his head.