Night of the Juggler

Chapter 3

Detective Sergeant Michael “Rusty” Boyle had personally checked out the alleged rape which the putative victim was willing to swear on her mother’s Bible had occurred in this closed parking lot on West Thirty-fifth. He and Detective Miles Tebbet had made the scene with sirens and red lights because through some confusion (either at Central or from the anonymous tipster) Hilda Smedley’s age had first been reported as sixteen, which had alerted them to the possibility of the Juggler.

Every formation standing in New York for the past ten days, in all divisions and precincts, had been ordered to report any suspicious characters loitering around playgrounds, comfort stations, or public parks; any molestation, rapes, or missing child reports were to be funneled directly to Tonnelli and Boyle’s units. The evaluation of the information was Lieutenant Tonnelli’s responsibility, and he had the authority from both the assistant chief of patrol and the assistant chief of detectives to raise his task force to a Red Alert status if he believed it necessary.

Detective Sergeant Boyle had checked the rape in person and fast and had already reported to Lieutenant Tonnelli through Detective Scott.

This wasn’t the Juggler at work.

The woman’s name was Hilda Smedley, and she had given her age as thirty-four to the patrolmen from the Midtown Precinct, whose squad cars with dome lights revolving were parked at the curb behind Sergeant Boyle’s unmarked car.

Sergeant Rusty Boyle was in his early thirties, tall and wide-shouldered, with the speed and strength of a professional athlete. He had thick red hair, angular features, and a preference for kinky sartorial gear; he favored flared slacks, boots, macho belts, and black leather jackets. Rusty Boyle secretly admired the spade pimps he used to collar around the Times Square area and would have enjoyed wearing huge wide-brimmed hats, boots with silver heels, and ankle-length overcoats.

Regulations frowned on such high-profile outfits unless they were needed as covers. But the real reason was Joyce. She thought they were tacky, and what Joyce thought was the bottom line, the Bible, for Rusty Boyle.

“I told you, he didn’t give me no name,” Hilda was shouting at one of the uniformed officers. She was a mess, Rusty Boyle thought, but with grudging compassion. Tears streaking her makeup, the front of her dress ripped apart to expose pendulous breasts, closer to forty than thirty, Hilda Smedley was a thickening old harpy, who smelled of gin and who would have fallen flat on her face if she hadn’t had a squad car to lean against. There was no tragedy in her violation, Rusty Boyle thought, and realized that that was the tragedy of it.

“We just got talking, the way people will in bars,” she had told Detective Miles Tebbet, who had listened to her with the sympathy and compassion of a man who had once studied for the priesthood.

“He was polite and everything, and he looked kind of Jewish. Maybe he was, but I never had that kind of trouble from a Jewish guy before. Like I told you, he offered to drive me home. Instead he parks in here and goes at me like King Kong.”

While Tebbet listened gravely, Sergeant Rusty Boyle put his hands on his hips and stared at a group of what he judged to be whip-dick hippies bunched together on the sidewalk. They wore ponchos and dirty jeans and were grinning at Hilda Smedley, obviously savoring her flushed, swollen face, ripped blouse, and hysterical tears.

A third-grade detective from the 10th Precinct arrived, Dennis St.

John, a bulky man in his forties who was wearing a windbreaker and a beret. St. John double-parked his car alongside Boyle’s unmarked vehicle, blocking traffic and touching off a fusillade of blasting horns.

Christ, Rusty Boyle thought, with swiftly mounting exasperation and anger. Chaos was part of a police officer’s life, Detective Sergeant Rusty Boyle knew full well; death in its most violent forms, from gunshots, fires and drownings, from knives, razors, the strangling hands of maniacs, these were the items stacked up on the shelves of every policeman’s shop. But Rusty Boyle hated the merchandise he dealt with and traded in and thus tried with all his skill and strength to prevent its occurrence or at least to camouflage it with some semblance of form and discipline. And that was why the present scene so offended him, with its noisy untidiness, its disheveled and violated Hilda Smedley, the gawking street freaks, and the other pedestrians stopping to stare with insulting intensity at the ravaged woman and even, he thought furiously, goddamn dumb Denny St.

John from the 10th, puffing officiously onto the scene and contributing to the turmoil by double-parking his car and blocking traffic all the way back to Sixth Avenue.

Rusty Boyle began shouting orders, beginning with the hippies, and scaring them half out of their wits by bellowing at them in a voice that was like a clap of thunder.

“Get moving, you kinks. Go find some school to drop out of, or I’ll kick your butts up between your shoulders.”

As they backed away from him, covering their embarrassment with awkward grins, Sergeant Boyle turned and stared with cold eyes at the other pedestrians who had stopped to witness Hilda Smedley’s pathetic anguish.

“Everything snap-ass in your homes? Kids all straight-A students? Nobody banging his secretary or sneaking a few belts of whiskey before breakfast? Take care of your own lives. You heard me. Move!”

Dennis St. John tapped Sergeant Boyle on the arm and nodded with an air of gravity and importance toward Hilda Smedley.

“What we got here, Rusty?”

“What the fuck you think we’ve got?” Rusty Boyle said. “I’ll tell you what we got here. We got a fucking traffic jam here. Will you get your car off the street? Pull it into the parking lot.”

There was no reason to shout at him, Sergeant Boyle realized; St. John would probably handle this case, but the detective’s dumbness, which was annoyingly coupled to a manner of pompous self-importance, gave Boyle a pain in the ass.

“I’ll move it,” St. John said. “But I thought something was breaking. That you guys might need some muscle.”

Sergeant Boyle stared in disgust at the backed-up lines of honking automobiles. “What’s breaking are my damned eardrums,” he said.

“Come on, cool it, Sergeant,” St. John said in a petulant voice, and waddled back to his car.

Rusty Boyle noticed then that one man still stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to the parking lot. The man was forty or forty-five, Rusty Boyle judged, wearing slacks and a sweater over a sports shirt. His hair was thinning and gray, and his features were nondescript; a worthy burgher, a taxpaying Mr. Straight, Boyle thought, except there was something haunted in his eyes which were large and clear behind bifocals. He didn’t look the type, Boyle thought, to be getting his jollies at the sight of a sobbing, battered woman, but Boyle had stopped judging people by appearances ever since he collared an altar boy who had hacked a janitor into bloody pieces and then had set fire to him and, in addition to which, had seemed largely pleased by the charred wreckage he had made out of what had once been a human being.

Boyle walked over to the man and said, “Look, the lady’s been through a rough time of it. You’re not helping staring at her.”

“I want to talk to you, Officer,” the man said. “My name is Ransom, John Ransom.” He pointed at the second-story windows of an apartment which overlooked the parking lot. “I heard her scream. I looked out my window just as she was pushed out of the car.”

“You see the guy?”

“Just a glimpse. I couldn’t identify him.”

Well, that figured, Boyle thought with weary exasperation. No way would he get involved. Saw a girl being raped, took his sweet time to come down and lend a hand.

“Was he black or white?” Boyle asked him.

“I’m pretty sure he was white.”

“Any guess on his age?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Ransom said. He fished into the pocket of his slacks, removed a slip of paper with numbers on it, and handed the paper to Sergeant Boyle. “But I got the license number of his car.”

“Well, what were you planning to do? Save it for Christmas?”

“I wasn’t dressed, you see. I just had a robe on. So I had to get on some clothes. That’s why it took me so long to get down here.”

Ransom’s tone was defensive and apologetic. “I got here as soon as I could.”

“You did fine, you did just fine, sir.”

Why the hell am I chewing everybody out? Sergeant Boyle was thinking, in one of his rare but honest moments of self-criticism. First St. John and now this nice John Doe of a citizen.

“Look, sir,” he said by way of making amends. “If everybody in the city did as good as you did tonight, we could close down half our precincts.”

Sergeant Boyle gave the license number to St. John, saying in a pleasant and conciliatory tone, “I’d suggest you get Miss Smedley checked out at the hospital and bust that stud quick.”

“Thanks, Sergeant,” St. John said, staring with grave intensity at the license number. “I’ll call Motors and get a make on this plate.”

Dumb. What was the use? Where else but Motors? The dog pound?

The morgue? Macy’s basement?

“Thanks again, Sergeant,” St. John said. “I’ll get this lady checked out at the hospital and bust the stud quick. I’ll see you around.”

Let’s hope not. .

Sergeant Boyle started for his car but stopped when he noticed that Ransom was standing on the sidewalk outside the parking lot, staring at him with those haunted, pain-bright eyes.

Still feeling a bit repentant, Sergeant Boyle walked back and gave him a pat on the shoulder.

“I’ll say it again, you did beautiful tonight,” he said.

“I’ve got cancer,” Ransom then said, but so simply and unexpectedly that the words struck Sergeant Boyle like blows under his heart.

Thanks, he thought wearily, thanks a lot. I don’t get enough death and shit on this job, bodies in the river, bodies hanging from ropes, heads blown apart by crazies, but I got to have more of it handed to me by a civilian who probably thinks that’s what he pays his taxes for.

“My wife doesn’t know about it,” Ransom said, and smiled uneasily as if to indicate this was a casual oversight on his part. “I sell upholstery fabric for B. Altman, it’s part of their at-home decorator service, but a couple of months back the weight of the fabric case got too much for me. My arm and chest were hurting. I haven’t been working at all for the last three weeks, but I haven’t told my wife that either.” Ransom smiled again, and this time the nervous flicker across his lips suggested that he and the sergeant might be sharing a mild joke at Mrs. Ransom’s expense.

“Jesus,” Sergeant Boyle said, “when are you going to tell her?”

“I just don’t know,” Mr. Ransom said, with another dismissing smile. “I didn’t believe the first doctor I guess nobody does. But the second one said the same thing. I still go out every morning like I used to, and when I get home at night, I have to make up stories for her. That’s the worst part of it. I’m not much good at making things up.”

“What do you mean? Why do you have to make up stories?”

“Well, I tell her about my calls. Our daughter’s away at school, she’s in premed, so there’s just the two of us. So I tell my wife what fabrics people like and any little stories I can dream up, like some lady matching a sofa to her poodle or maybe a redheaded grandchild.

Then I sit at my desk and write up orders on sales that I pretend I made during the day.” He sighed, but his smile and manner remained oddly apologetic. “I just don’t know how to tell her,” he said. “It will be so hard on her. There’s no money for my daughter to finish college, to go on to med school. I really don’t know what to say to her either. My daughter, I mean.”

Police work had not made Detective Sergeant Boyle a fatalist; on the contrary, despite massive evidence which failed to support his view, Rusty Boyle remained an optimistic and charitable human being who detested what seemed to him a manifest unfairness in life. Here was a prime example of it.

Sergeant Boyle’s father had died when Rusty was four years old, and this had seemed a gross unfairness to him, and he had never truly got over it. But the scales had been balanced by his mother, a marvelous person, who had believed that man had no business trying to get up to the moon, but had also quoted Micheas, Chapter Six, Verse Eight, to her son, saying in her musical Irish voice, “What more does the Lord require of you, but to do just, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

He had had all that. And he had Joyce, whose love for him and his for her was much deeper and even more significant than the riotous physical pleasure they took in each other. And he had the Gypsy to work for, while this poor bastard had a body laced and woven with pain and was staring death in the eyes and couldn’t even tell his wife about it. And on top of that, forced to write fake orders and tell her funny stories while his guts were dying inside him.

“Jesus,” Rusty Boyle said again. Then an idea occurred to him. A splendid idea. And when such thoughts occurred to this large emotional Irishman, they struck him with a force of natural laws. He put a big arm around Ransom’s shoulders and gave him a conspiratorial smile.

“Look, where’s your wife now?”

“She’s out shopping.”

“All right. Let’s you and me go across the street and have a couple of beers. A time like this, a guy should have somebody to talk to. So how about it?”

“I’d like that very much,” Ransom said quietly, and then looked off down the street, but not before Rusty Boyle saw the glint of tears in his eyes.

Detective Sergeant Boyle told Tebbet to notify Lieutenant Tonnelli that he’d be out of the office for a half hour or so, but if the Gypsy needed him for anything, he’d be across the street at the Grange Bar.

At approximately the same time that Rusty Boyle and Mr. Ransom entered the Grange, Gus Soltik was prowling the jungles of Manhattan looking for a cat.

The Juggler walked slowly and quietly through a refuse-littered alley in the vicinity of Eleventh Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, his shadow falling massive and tall beyond him, his black silhouette topped by the leather cap with its metal button. They liked cats, he knew, anything small and soft and warm. Like they were. . He heard a faint purring sound and stopped in his tracks, looking about tensely, but finally realized it was only the hum of high winds in the power lines above his head.

Something bothered Gus Soltik. He felt a stir of panic. It wasn’t forgetting his name. He knew that all right. “Gus Soltik,” he said, speaking the two words softly into the winds of the night. It was something else. It wasn’t a cat he wanted. It was something else. He sighed with relief, remembering what it was. A kitten, not a cat. A kitten. He stood then, turning his head slowly, forcing himself to listen, straining to hear the sound of sirens and fire engines. That’s where kittens were. At fires. He had seen the cats carrying the kittens in their mouths, running from fires and streams of water and the sounds of men’s voices echoing hideously from horns. He must find a fire. And then a kitten, Gus Soltik thought. He bobbed his head quickly at these conclusions, pleased that he had forgotten nothing. The knife, the ropes, nothing. . All for what he thought of as “white legs” or “greenropes.”