Night of the Juggler

Chapter 25

Luther Boyd stopped in the darkness near a massive facing of rock.

From Babe Fritzel’s two-way radio he was monitoring a conversation between Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin and Dispatcher Sokolsky, who manned the switchboard at the command post in Central Park.

Commander Larkin was driving north in his chauffeured sedan from the supermarket in Greenwich Village where the gunman, after improbable intercessions from a pair of street people, had released nineteen hostages unharmed and surrendered himself in tears to the police.

Boyd’s reaction to the following exchanges was tense and expectant, but there was something else in his expression, a challenge to the gods, the sacrilege of hope.

“Sokolsky? I’ve had a report from the Twenty-second that a parks department truck was stolen from the Arsenal approximately the time the super was murdered. Did you have that, Sokolsky?”

“Yes, Chief. I had it.”

There was something close to anger in Larkin’s musical Irish voice.

“Why didn’t you notify all units?”

“Lieutenant Tonnelli gave me a negative on that, Chief. The lieutenant made it a direct order, sir.”

“Is Lieutenant Tonnelli at the CP?”

“No, Chief. He left here a few minutes ago in one of the pool squads.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

The chief’s voice rose sharply. “Central, this is Borough Commander South. Patch me through to Lieutenant Tonnelli, and don’t waste time about it.”

Boyd stood perfectly still, controlling his emotions with a discipline acquired from years of training, while listening to Central’s operator ordering Lieutenant Tonnelli to report his position and destination immediately to Chief Larkin.

There was no answer from the Gypsy. Boyd could envision the situation as clearly as if it were flashing before his eyes on a screen.

The Juggler was in that stolen truck, and Tonnelli was after him.

But Boyd knew what the Juggler wanted, and he knew why. Only one question demanded an answer now: Where would he leave the truck?

With animal cunning, the Juggler might instinctively realize it would point after him like an arrow if he abandoned it near his eventual destination.

So where would be the most obvious and innocent place to hide a truck? Ideally, a gas station or a used-car lot. But the plain fact was there were no such facilities in Central Park. Then the answer hit Boyd so abruptly that it sent a shock wave of hope and excitement through his body.

And considering that Boyd had an almost certain fix on where the Juggler was heading, he could make a shrewd guess at where he would leave the truck, the parking lot closest to the Ramble, that oblong stretch of pavement that abutted the Loeb boathouse just north of the East Drive.

Tonnelli angled his pool squad car toward the curb and stopped near Max Prima and another patrolman who were in position at the East Drive on a line with Sixty-eighth Street.

When he rolled down the window of the car and looked up at Prima, the faint light from a streetlamp ran like quicksilver up and down the scar that streaked across the Gypsy’s cheek.

“You men spot a parks department truck traveling north fifteen or twenty minutes ago?”

Max Prima hesitated a fractional instant. As in any other tightly interwoven organization, gossip and rumor spread like storm fires through the police department. And there was a rumor, an ugly one, that Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli had gone shut-eye, had cut off his radio, and was deliberately refusing to report to Chief Larkin. Sokolsky had asked all units for a make on that particular truck, but almost twenty-odd minutes after it had first been reported missing by officers from the 22nd. It could be out on Long Island by now.

But Max Prima was not staring into the eyes of just another cop, not just a lieutenant in the New York police department. He was looking at a scarred man who was a legend in all five boroughs of the city, and so he said simply, “Yes, Lieutenant. We spotted it. About eighteen minutes ago, heading north.”

“Still got that good pair of eyes, Max,” the Gypsy said.

The parks department truck was at the far end of the boathouse lot, its shiny surfaces partially obscured by the overhanging limbs of immense willow trees.

Luther Boyd approached the truck with the Browning in his hand. He jerked open the door and smelled the rank, fetid odor of the Juggler and saw-as he had guessed-that the cab was empty. There were bloodstains on the leather of the passenger seat.

After checking the rear of the truck and finding it empty, Boyd ran across the pavement of the parking lot to open ground that led toward the Ramble. He came to a thick tangle of hawthorn hedges, stopping at an area which looked ragged and torn, as if a wild animal had charged through it. And as he forced his way through this ragged passage, his flashlight picked up the distinctive prints of the Juggler’s Wellingtons.

Attack now, he thought, and as he bent low and ran swiftly along the line of those tracks, an irrelevant but annealing maxim of war came to his mind: “My center is giving way, my right flank is crushed, situation excellent, I am attacking.” That was Marshal Foch to Paris Headquarters, Second Battle of the Marne.

Within minutes, he spotted a movement far ahead of him in the shadows created by the tossing crowns of great trees. Then Boyd saw him clearly, still hundreds of yards ahead of him, a huge figure lurching across a moonlit meadow. And Boyd could see, even at this distance, the Juggler’s yellow cap and the light flickering on the blade of the knife in his right hand.

Luther Boyd flicked off the beam of his flashlight and ran silently at speed after his quarry.

Lieutenant Tonnelli drove slowly into the boathouse parking lot, and his headlights bathed the sides of the parks department truck, in brilliant illumination. The front door of the truck was open, and the cab was empty, and this confirmed the first estimate of the Juggler’s route: into the Ramble west on a line with Seventy-seventh Street. That was the fix that Luther Boyd had given him. Gypsy Tonnelli didn’t need to track the prints of those Wellingtons, even if he had had the skill to do it. Cutting the headlights of his squad car, Tonnelli drove slowly from the parking lot across a meadow that was flanked by a tangled thicket of low hawthorns. He rounded this hedgerow, which had been torn apart in one area, and drove slowly onto the flatlands of the park, the squad car merging slowly and silently with the shadows of huge trees.