Night of the Juggler

Chapter 2

The New York police department was not unaware of Gus Soltik. Nor was it unaware of the “lessons” which he had administered to four young girls on four successive years, precisely in the middle of the month of October.

Four in a row, Lieutenant Vincent “Gypsy” Tonnelli was thinking, and this is October, and tomorrow is the fifteenth, and would they nail the psycho bastard then, or would the Juggler make it five in a row?. .

They didn’t know Gus Soltik’s name, and they had only a vague description of him, but they knew certain areas of his MO very well indeed.

The murderer who in the past four years had abducted, mutilated, raped, and then slashed the throats of four young girls in the borough of Manhattan was known to the police as the Juggler because that was the final dreadful gesture in his pattern, a knife ripped across tender jugular veins.

These thoughts were in Lieutenant Tonnelli’s mind as he strode along the corridor of a precinct in the upper Sixties of Manhattan.

This was headquarters of the task force which had been assigned to Lieutenant Tonnelli two months earlier by Assistant Chief of Detectives Walter Greene, a graying veteran with a rasping voice and a head shaped like an artillery projectile. Tonnelli’s second unit was stationed at the 13th Precinct on the East Side and was under the command of Detective Sergeant Michael “Rusty” Boyle.

In each unit of Lieutenant Tonnelli’s task force were two switchboard operators and four detectives, second grade. At headquarters, which was located in the 19th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street, were Detectives Clem Scott, Jim Taylor, August Brohan, and Carmine Garbalotto. On the switchboards were Patrolmen Jules Mackay and August Sokolsky. Collating and indexing the steadily mounting piles of paperwork were two uniformed policewomen, Doris Polk and Rachel Skinner.

In Detective Sergeant Rusty Boyle’s command in the 13th Precinct on East Twenty-first Street were Detectives Miles Tebbet, Jason Corbell, Roger Fee, and Ray Karp. On the switchboard were Patrolmen Joe Knapp and Ed Maurer, and the flow of files and reports was in the competent hands of Patrolwomen Alice Halzer and Melissa Foreberg.

Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli was short and stocky, with a huge chest and heavily muscled arms so thick that he couldn’t wear jackets or sports coats from a rack, but had to have them fashioned by a tailor.

Since he was forced to spend considerable money on his clothes, he had over the years cultivated a certain sartorial elegance; in fact, the lieutenant looked like a prosperous broker with a subdued but excellent sense of fashion rather than a very tough and, in this particular city, a nearly legendary cop.

A bachelor, Lieutenant Tonnelli lived in a modest apartment in the East Thirties and indulged himself in very few extravagances beyond his taste for well-made clothing. His father and mother were dead, and his only living relative was his sister, Adela, who was married to a Greek used-car dealer in Baltimore. She had some kids, he knew, but they didn’t see each other anymore, didn’t even exchange Christmas cards.

Gypsy Tonnelli’s features were usually composed in a deceptively pleasant smile. His eyes were dark brown, and his lips were full and red. A scar coursed from his left temple to the point of his jaw, a vivid cicatrice which he had acquired while subduing a carload of unruly blacks during one of the riots in the late sixties. Lieutenant Tonnelli had once been so ashamed of the scar that he had grown a beard to conceal it. But to his consternation the beard, unlike his coal-black hair, had emerged in an embarrassing pepper-and-salt mixture.

Preferring the scar to a prematurely graying beard, Tonnelli had shaved off the stubble and later had become quite proud of the villainous-looking crease that ran down the left side of his face, for it had become a cherished memento of the citation he had received, a benchmark on the legend that was Gypsy Tonnelli.

And why “Gypsy”? The nickname had been hung on him when he was still in uniform and stemmed from the fact that he was a Sicilian, hence was nurtured by a tradition that believed in evil eyes, believed that good and bad luck could be divined by cloud masses and falling stars, and believed that dogs howling in the night were often predicting their masters’ deaths and that silver bullets and strings of garlic were specifics against vampires and werewolves.

In a word, the Gypsy was superstitious, but he did possess an uncanny ability for predicting the variety of crimes lurking in store for his city, which he knew as a wise old mother knows her children.

Some mysterious sixth sense could warn him that in the weeks ahead they could expect a rise in arson and a decline in murders, a dip in muggings, a surge of bank robbers.

At first, his superior officers didn’t take the Gypsy’s predictions all that seriously, but they couldn’t explain his high percentage of accurate guesses by luck or coincidence. The Gypsy was dead right so often that at last everyone on the force began to respect his Sicilian intuitions.

However, despite the Gypsy’s track record, he hadn’t been able to convince his superiors that more than coincidence was involved in the murders of Encarna Garcia and Bonnie Jean Howell, whose bodies had been tortured and violated and whose throats had been slashed on successive years under the sign of Libra on the nights of October 15.

The following year, again on Libra 15, Trixie Atkins had been murdered after suffering the same sadistic refinements that had been inflicted on the bodies of Encarna Garcia and Bonnie Jean Howell.

Gypsy Tonnelli, in the next year, starting on October 1, had prowled the streets of Manhattan on his off-hours, praying that by luck or coincidence he might get his hands on the Juggler. And after Trixie Atkins’ murder he had demanded and been reluctantly granted a meeting with Deputy Chief of Detectives Walter Greene in the chief’s office at 24 °Centre Street.

What Tonnelli wanted was a task force of experienced detectives to prepare a defense against what he was convinced would be a fourth ritual murder in the coming year.

The chief had said, “Sure, there’s going to be a homicide next October 15. Probably a half dozen or more. We had forty-one a couple years back during that hot spell in July and August. I hear you been putting in overtime without pay on this job, Gypsy. Right?”

Tonnelli wasn’t surprised at the chief’s on-the-mark question; the word of any erratic conduct by a cop (particularly one with Tonnelli’s rank) would inevitably spread through all echelons of the department.

“I worked my shift, Chief,” Tonnelli said with the trace of an edge to his voice. “Then I hit the streets on my own time. Just hoping to get lucky.”

The chief had sighed and stared with a certain weary irritation at the ceiling of his office. “Gypsy, I don’t like my cops running around off duty with this Dick Tracy hero bullshit. You want to moonlight, fine. Do something useful. Drive a hack, or ride shotgun for a numbers runner. Being realistic, Gypsy, the people who pay our salaries, the public, they don’t like dedicated cops either.” The chief’s voice had been threaded with sarcasm. “They think a cop putting in extra time on his own is just looking for a chance to whip some more heads. When my cops are off duty, I want them at ball games or at the beach with their kids so they can come back to the precinct feeling a little bit human.”

But Lieutenant Tonnelli had stubbornly continued to press for manpower and resources to prevent the Juggler from making it four in a row. The raping and mutilation of those tender young bodies had become a consuming obsession with the Gypsy.

At first he hadn’t understood this compulsion. Couldn’t understand why he was knocking on official doors, aggravating his superiors, indulging an almost always fatal professional flaw which was, in effect, a distrust of the department and the corollary conviction that he was the only man who could get the job done. Gypsy Tonnelli in a mano amano against the Juggler, not the city’s thirty thousand cops acting in impersonal concert to trap a killer.

Later he understood his compulsion, but that served only to make it more bitter and relentless.

On one occasion Tonnelli had recklessly driven to Camden, New Jersey, to seek out the New York commissioner of police, who was in that city to speak to a group of the nation’s top law enforcement officers. (The commissioner’s topic was kinky and typical of him: He advocated that bachelors, not having the responsibility of wives and families, should be drafted as reserve police officers certain given hours per month.)

Tonnelli had found the commissioner in his hotel room and had pleaded with him for a special force to stop the Juggler. The commissioner had been impressed by the Gypsy’s zeal but mildly exasperated by the interruption, since at the time he had been putting the finishing touches on his speech. The commissioner’s “mild exasperation” had picked up velocity and strength as it raced back down the channels of the department, and this had ultimately struck Tonnelli like a gale force tornado.

He hadn’t been suspended but had been threatened with that action.

Then Jenny Goldman had been murdered on October 15. And Tonnelli picked up an ally strong enough to break the power of any police department in the free world, said ally being the aroused, challenging, accusing national and international press. And since Tonnelli now had a physical make of sorts on the Juggler, Deputy Chief of Detectives Greene had called the Gypsy into his office one sweltering afternoon in August. “Bunch of goddamn vultures,” the chief had said. “Headlines calling us incompetent because we can’t find a needle in a haystack.”

“You could turn that around, Chief,” the Gypsy had said. “Problem is, we’ve got a million needles in our particular haystack. The job is finding the right one.”

“So what do you want?”

“Two units. One under Rusty Boyle’s command. The other under mine.”

“What kind of troops you talking about?”

“Sixteen second-or third-grade detectives.”

“I’ll give you eight. What else?”

“Reserves of uniformed troops I won’t commit unless we go to a Red Alert. Dispatchers, a few bird cops to handle the paper.”

The chief made notes. “And?”

“On October 8, I want helicopters standing by, attack-trained dogs, light trucks, and a team of marksmen.”

“For Christ’s sake, Gypsy, you sound like you’re going to start a goddamn war.”

“I hope I’m gonna end one.”

Lieutenant Tonnelli and Detective Sergeant Rusty Boyle had selected their staff with extreme care, dipping into precincts in all five boroughs of the city to find the men they needed. What they had to do in the lead time represented by August and September was to redevelop complete biographies of the four dead girls, with a renewed attempt to determine whether or not the victims had traits or flaws in common which appealed to the Juggler’s sadistic needs.

This all had been done before, of course, but by detectives normally and routinely assigned to the task by the department’s table of organization. Now all that mass of official reports would be reworked by a special unit honed and chiseled in advance to stop the Juggler.

Thus, the men Tonnelli and Boyle had selected were chosen for their tact and understanding, in addition to their rigorous efficiency as investigative officers. They must interview once again the parents and relatives of the four dead girls. And this must be done without unduly lacerating the emotions of grieving fathers and mothers. This was not only basic, decent humanity, but it would also help create an almost confessional climate that would allow the parents to re-create the activities and patterns of their children’s lives as accurately as possible.

Detective Second Grade Miles Tebbet in Sergeant Rusty Boyle’s unit had studied for the priesthood until he realized his vocation was not a true one, and at this time he had joined the New York police department. He was twenty-eight, a slender blond who usually wore jeans and a poncho, and was about the best man on the force to talk down a jumper.

Second Grade Detective Clem Scott in Tonnelli’s unit had a bachelor’s degree in urban affairs from Fordham University. Scott was married, with two children, and spent one day a month at a VA hospital typing personal letters for disabled veterans.

The remainder of the units were men of similar bents and endowments. While some were more educated than the others, they shared one thing in common. They were, in Tonnelli’s view, a group that represented the toughest and most dedicated traditions and skills of the department. They were expert marksmen, and Tonnelli knew from their records that they had guts; damned fine men to be at your side if you were going into an alley after a killer.

Carmine Garbalotto, in Tonnelli’s unit, was a veteran of eighteen years on the force, who lived in Brooklyn with a wife and nine children. He was an expert in the areas of perversion and child molestation; he could check a crowded playground at a glance and determine whether it was “clean” or not. Garbalotto’s specialty was movie theaters; his big hand had fallen heavily on the shoulders of hundreds of men he had observed attempting to molest young boys or girls, whose attention was so riveted by what John Wayne or Doris Day might be doing up on the big screen that they were hardly aware of the fingertips probing toward their loins.

Tonnelli and Boyle’s units had processed every sex crime committed in all five boroughs of the city during the past five years, using these profiles as the base of their investigative mosaic. But none matched the Juggler’s MO.

In September, Tonnelli had dispatched Detectives Tebbet and Scott to the morgue of the New York Times to check news stories on October 15 on the years before the murders had commenced their crimson flow through the borough of Manhattan. They were looking for stories which might have triggered a need for revenge: massive lawsuits, bitter, expensive divorces, medical malpractice suits, tragic accidents, suicides, something bizarre or catastrophic that could send someone around the bend, misfortune driving a victim toward a series of paranoid slaughters. Tebbet and Scott had indeed found catalogues of disaster in every edition of the Times published on October 15 in the five years before the Libra murders: rapes, drownings, explosions, hit-run victims, murders by ice pick and fine nylon stockings. But the sheer number and variety of tragedies had been so massively complex and unrelated that the precious hours given to the project had ultimately been unproductive, a sheer waste of time.

Libra-September 24 to October 23. All the murders had occurred on Libra 15. Something dark and hidden and mystical in the mysterious signs of the zodiac, like the movement of a leviathan in fathomless waters, appealed powerfully to the Gypsy’s Sicilian intuitions. But none of the victims had been Libras. Encarna Garcia, Gemini. Trixie Atkins, Aquarius. Bonnie Jean Howell, Capricorn, and Jenny Goldman, Scorpio.

Gypsy Tonnelli wondered at the possible significance of the symbol of Libra, the classic golden scales. Did that suggest a perverted sense of justice or retribution? Or the sinister balance between himself and the man they called the Juggler. . But so far, with all their research, with all the potentials they had explored, with so much talent and dedication going for them, Tonnelli’s task force had come up dry, had drawn blanks.

Yet Gypsy Tonnelli knew in the depths of his Sicilian heart that the Juggler was ready to make his move; he could feel that presentiment in the marrow of his bones, in a cold, painful clench in his guts. The Juggler was out there in the city, living maybe like a stinking animal in somebody’s basement, making his plans, preparing to snatch some young girl and enjoy his sadistic fun with her before slashing her throat. Well, Tonnelli thought, this time he wouldn’t make it. They’d catch him and trash him. The Gypsy felt that, too, in his bones. And there wouldn’t be any bleeding-heart psychiatric apologies for the Juggler. No pleas of temporary insanity, no judicial wrist slap followed by six or seven years in some cozy funny farm. No, when they caught the Juggler, they’d waste him as they would a mad dog. .

Lieutenant Tonnelli walked into the large offices he had been assigned in the upper floors of the 19th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street.

Carmine Garbalotto, huge and balding, with a face like a kind bloodhound, was on the phone reassuring a young mother that she hadn’t caused them any unnecessary trouble.

“Look,” he was saying in his slow, patient voice. “Your daughter comes home from school and uses the back door and falls asleep in her room and you don’t see her. So you’re worried. So you call us. That’s what we’re here for. We sent a couple of cars over to the school, checked the neighborhood. Don’t you worry about us. Any time your kid is missing, irregardless of the hows or whys of it, you give us a holler.”

Gypsy Tonnelli nodded to Sokolsky and Jules Mackay at the switchboards. Detective Clem Scott got up from his desk and joined Tonnelli, who had stopped to stare with bitter eyes at the four large glossy photographs of the girls the Juggler had tortured and murdered. Scott, whose lined and weathered face made him look older than his twenty-nine years, gave Tonnelli a sheaf of reports. The two policewomen clerks were typing in the adjoining office. August Brohan and Jim Taylor were not at their desks.

“Taylor and Augie went up to a school in Harlem.” Scott checked his watch. “Around eight P.M. somebody reported a character bothering black kids playing basketball. Augie just phoned in. It was a fruitcake with a beard down to his balls and a wooden leg. He was passing out Tootsie Rolls to the colored kids because it was his birthday. His daughter made the scene at the same time as our guys and threw a net over him.”

Tonnelli continued to glance through the reports. Drunks for the most part, vagrants, seventeen in all, three or four with records.

B amp;E. GT Auto.

“Sergeant Boyle called in from the Thirteenth,” Scott said. “Rape squeal around Thirty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue. He and Tebbet went out on it.” In response to Tonnelli’s sharp, questioning look, Scott shook his head. “It’s not our stud, Lieutenant. The lady’s in her forties. She’s alive and well and probably won’t be drinking martinis with a stranger until the next time.”

Lieutenant Tonnelli glanced through Max Prima’s report of the hulking figure the patrolman had noted in Central Park earlier that day.

“Max Prima,” Tonnelli said to Scott. “You know him?”

“I think his uncle used to work out of the Fourth Division over on Eighty-second Street,” Scott said. “He made first-grade before he put in his papers. But no, I don’t know Max Prima.”

Tonnelli continued to study Max Prima’s report. “He’s got a good pair of eyes.” Tonnelli said. “And his instincts are right.”

Gypsy Tonnelli frowned and rubbed a hand in a tentative gesture along his scarred cheek. The gesture suggested that he remembered the agony of a cold knife slicing through his flesh; his fingertips were gentle on the old wound, as if loath to stir memories of pain.

He read Prima’s report again, aware of the deliberate beat of his heart. Subject, Caucasian, early thirties, six-three, two-twenty, fast and strong. . thick blond hair. . bulging forehead. . brown sweater, denims, Wellingtons. . yellow leather cap. Staring at the young girls in the children’s zoo. Weirdo. .

Again Gypsy Tonnelli felt the slow stroke of his heart. Some instinct, a premonition, a dark complex of Sicilian superstitions, or simple gut cop instinct, warned Tonnelli that he was close to the Juggler now, so close that he could almost see him and hear him and smell him; he could never explain these almost mystical convictions or calibrate them in any fashion remotely approaching scientific accuracy. But he believed (or wanted to believe) they had been given a sudden glimpse of their quarry, and as that belief grew firm and solid, he could almost feel the Juggler’s thick, corded neck within the grasp of his own big hands.

Gypsy Tonnelli glanced from Max Prima’s neatly written report to the large photographs of the Juggler’s young victims, whose fresh and innocent faces were graced with hope and excitement and bore no shadow of the fates in store for them.

Encarna Garcia. Fourteen, black hair, sparkling eyes, smiling confidently, innocently at the camera. Obviously proud of her frilly new dress, which had been a birthday gift from her father. Reported missing five P.M., October 15, five years ago. Found nine P.M. the same day in a condemned two-story dwelling near Eighty-seventh Street and Broadway. Rope burns on wrists and ankles. Four fingers of the left hand broken. Sexually assaulted, throat slashed.

Bonnie Jean Howell. Thirteen, black. Pigtails, wide grin, white, healthy teeth. Father a Pullman porter. Mother a dentist’s receptionist in Harlem. Bonnie Jean was found in a tool shed on a school playground near 129th Street and Lenox Avenue. Bonnie Jean had been reported missing at six thirty P.M., October 15, four years ago. The coroner’s report was pure Grand Guignol. Both arms broken, left kneecap shattered, burns on abdomen and small of back. Two of those fine healthy teeth broken. Sexually assaulted.

Throat slashed.

Trixie Atkins. Fourteen. White. Lived with her mother, a hooker, in an apartment on West Forty-seventh Street. Trixie was blond, with lively eyes and a big grin for the world. Her mother had gone off with a customer to Detroit, and Trixie wasn’t reported missing until a week after she had failed to show up for school. Then the police got a call on October 22 complaining of an odor stemming from an empty loft in a Greenwich Village apartment building. That’s where they found Trixie Atkins. Rope burns on her thighs, three fingers on her right hand broken, the blood dried and hardened on the gaping wound on her throat.

Jenny Goldman. Thirteen. Pale, red-haired, solemn as a mouse in her eighth-grade graduation picture. Father a doctor, mother a commercial model. Sexually assaulted, throat slashed, October 15, one year ago.

Looking at Jenny Goldman’s grave little face, with her oddly wise and wistful eyes, hurt Tonnelli so much that it almost made him physically ill, because he and Rusty Boyle had come within minutes of saving Jenny Goldman’s life.

Last year they had almost nailed the Juggler. .

They had been cruising on Thirty-ninth between Lexington and Third when a pair of excited kids waved their squad down. “He got Jenny, took her into the basement,” a frightened little Irisher had yelled at them.

Tonnelli and Boyle had stormed into the basement of a brownstone but had arrived too late to save Jenny Goldman her interval of monstrous anguish. She had suffered and died minutes before they had kicked open a bolted door that led to a furnace room thick and blurred with shadows.

In the darkness, they had had only an impression of motion, of fetid air stirring, and then the heavy, powerful figure of a man had smashed them aside, charging with an animal like speed toward the open door.

Tonnelli had fired twice from the floor, but the bullets had struck the sagging door, and the Juggler was gone. .

Acting on Tonnelli’s report, Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin, Borough Commander South, had flooded a twelve-square block area (its epicenter at Twenty-ninth and Lexington) with hundreds of uniformed patrolmen and detectives, fleets of motorcycle cops and cruising squads, but this massive and rolling stakeout had been counterproductive, attracting crowds into the area, creating rumors and “tips” that jammed Central’s switchboards. In the confusion of this spasmodic police action, the Juggler had managed to slip through their lines.

The only description they had ever got of the man had come from that excited little Irisher whose name was Joey Harpe and who had directed the detectives to the basement where “the big dirty giant,” in Joey Harpe’s phrase, had taken Jenny Goldman. But patient questioning had developed a few more facts. The man was white, he had a rank odor about him, and he’d been wearing some kind of leather cap. Also, his clothes looked poor. .

What had frustrated them from the start of their investigation was that they had found no revealing pattern in the Juggler’s murders. There were no racial or ethnic clues to guide them. He had killed a black girl, a Jewish girl, a Puerto Rican, and a hooker’s daughter who attended a Catholic grammar school. Young females, tortured, raped, and murdered on the fifteenth day of October in widely scattered areas of the borough. That was all they had to go on, but now the description of the little Irisher and the sharp eyes of Max Prima had given them what might be the first lead to their quarry.

If he was right, and it was about a thousand to one he wasn’t, what about him? Big, strong, denims. Wellington boots. Some kind of laborer. Probably poor, probably little education. That was guesswork, but he had to start somewhere. You could figure he’d used loan sharks, Tonnelli thought, and that was something they could check out.

Milky Tichnor in the Village. Ted Chapman on the docks south of Forty-fourth Street, Solly Castro north to the Seventies, Maybelle Cooper with the blacks, and the Puerto Ricans in their barrios in Spanish Harlem. And what was the big spade shylock calling herself these days? Somebody had told the Gypsy. Yes. Samantha Spade.

That was it. He shook his head. Just like her.

Tonnelli handed Max Prima’s report to Scott. “Let’s find this dude, Scotty. Start by calling in Max Prima.”

As Scott gave this message to Sokolsky, who would put it through Central to the patrolman’s home or precinct, Lieutenant Tonnelli, in an automatic but unnecessary reflex, mentally checked the strength and disposition of the extra units which had been assigned to this task force by the assistant chief of Patrols Office.

Standing by in Manhattan’s twenty-odd precincts, and its divisions one through six, were details of uniformed patrolmen who could be alerted and transported to any area of the city within minutes on orders from Tonnelli. Extra squad cars, big and little “trucks,” emergency lighting equipment, two ambulances, and medical orderlies were stationed about the city in patterns which would allow Lieutenant Tonnelli as narrow a lead time as possible to commit those units to a given neighborhood, street, park, or playground.

Attack-trained Dobermans, schooled and handled by Patrolmen Hogan, Platt, and Branch, could also be brought to any area of the city within a matter of minutes.

Three police helicopters, Bell 106-B’s, had been on an alert status for the past week, their pilots and crews awaiting Tonnelli’s orders at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The choppers were equipped with Apollo nets and powerful floodlights in the bellies of their fuselages, any one of which could at night create a noontime brilliance in a square city block.

In addition to this physical muscle and sophisticated equipment, there were the four-star chief inspectors, and below them the four so-called superchiefs and their assistants and deputies and inspectors, down through captains and lieutenants and sergeants and patrolmen, all of this concerned human and mechanical potential at the ready now to spring the trap on the Juggler.

But, Lieutenant Tonnelli thought, it was usually just this way, with all this personnel, all this preparation and equipment, the first break and perhaps the most significant one usually came from some alert, observant cop walking his beat. .

Certainly not, however, from Commissioner Joseph Harding, who was presently in Stockholm at an international convention of lawyers and statesmen whose agenda included a discussion of the feasibility of criminal surveillance maintained on special platforms in outer space.