Night of the Juggler

Chapter 6

Gypsy Tonnelli was a practical cop, who trusted his instincts and knew from experience that it wasn’t only the “facts” or what you learned from informants that solved your cases; rather it was something you ignored or didn’t see until it was too late that often provided directions to solutions. So, pacing the large, high-ceilinged living room of his apartment, he allowed his thoughts to stray, made a conscious attempt not to screen out random reflections but rather permitted external stimuli to play whimsically against all his senses. It was a few strokes after midnight, D-Day Plus One. In each of the previous four years, the Juggler had struck late in the afternoon of October 15. But they couldn’t count on that. As far as Tonnelli was concerned, this was now Red Alert time.

While he paced, chain-smoked, and constantly refilled his cup of coffee, Tonnelli’s eyes occasionally flicked hopefully to the phone on a table beside a cheap chair, a phone connected directly to his headquarters in the 19th Precinct. As the countdown approached zero, the reports from all five boroughs had increased in volume; so far all had been checked out, and all had proved either inconclusive or negative.

Tonnelli deliberately allowed his thoughts to wander, hoping that some significant hidden fact would sense his inattention and be trapped into a revealing carelessness of its own; the elusive lead was frequently snared in this fashion, a victim of indirect surveillance.

Detective Sergeant Boyle was at the 13th Precinct on East Twenty-first Street. He would be on duty there for eighteen straight hours, taking the occasional half-hour sleep break in the precinct-house coffee room. Late in the afternoon Rusty Boyle would break to shower, change clothes and have dinner, at which time he would be at Joyce Colby’s apartment.

The alleged rape the big Irishman had checked out had developed ramifications. Boyle had told him about it. The license number of the rape suspect’s car had been provided by someone named John Ransom, who had later told Rusty Boyle he was dying of cancer.

Rusty had given the number to Dennis St. John from the 10th Precinct. St. John checked the tag with Motors, got an address to go with it, hit the suspect’s apartment, found not only the character Hilda Smedley claimed had raped her, but four rooms full of hot TV sets, cameras, and hi-fi equipment. St. John would get all the credit for the collar, and while he had a head of solid bone, he would probably be reviewed and might be bucked up a grade or two. But none of that was Rusty Boyle’s particular concern. His big Irish heart was bleeding for John Ransom, the man dying of cancer, who was forced to lie to his wife about his upholstery sales and make up funny, interesting little stories about his customers, while gnawed and worried sleepless, not about himself, but how to tell his wife he was dying and how to explain to his daughter, who was in premed school, that there was no money to pay the tuition needed for the next five or six years.

Tonnelli had shocked Rusty by asking him if Ransom had a double indemnity clause in his insurance policy. There was a way to beat those riotous cancerous cells to the finish line by a couple of weeks.

Rent a sailboat and go over the side. Take a drive into the Catskills, miss a curve, and take the long, final drop into the valley.

Why not? All he’d lose was hours of agony. His wife would be spared knowledge of his ordeal, and he’d be giving his daughter the biggest break of all, the chance to earn a degree in medicine. Who knows?

She could wind up with a Nobel Prize.

But Rusty Boyle, the emotional and romantic optimist, had been staggered and angered by Tonnelli’s proposal.

“But Jesus Christ! Supposing they discover a cure for cancer the day after he wastes himself?”

“Hate to break it to you like this, Rusty, but there really ain’t no Easter Bunny.”

Tonnelli’s phone rang a dozen or more times within the next half hour, and as the reports flowed in, he was able to visualize and analyze the action throughout the city.

From the 90th in Brooklyn came a signal reporting men lurking in alleys. The 90th was a pigeonhole area filled with Hasidic Jews, Puerto Ricans, and stubbornly nonmobile Italian immigrants.

Plainclothes and uniform cops picked up the suspects, who turned out to be bullyboy Nazi types on the scene, hoping to whip the heads of some militant Jews.

At the 48th Precinct in the Seventh Division in the South Bronx, the desk sergeant got a call from a hysterical woman who demanded the police do something about two mysterious men in the apartment above her who for days had been copulating around the clock to the accompaniment of liquid and obscene noises. They were, in fact, operating what ATF (the acronym for the federal agency controlling illegal alcohol, tobacco, and firearms) describes unofficially as a “nigger” still, a phrase pejorative in relation to quantity, although not necessarily to quality.

In Manhattan North (covering most of Harlem), the 26th Precinct reported a rape in an empty lot west of Tenth Avenue on 128th Street.

But the girl was in her twenties, and all three of her assailants had been apprehended and they were all black, or all “chocolate,” as the second laconic report had it.

East Harlem, Second Avenue near 116th Street. Twelve-year-old black girl reported missing. Found forty-five minutes later, stoned out of her skull in the men’s washroom of a hamburger joint near 110th and Central Park West.

Goddamn her black ass, Tonnelli thought, but he wasn’t thinking of a kid stoned in a hamburger joint, but Maybelle Cooper, who hadn’t returned his call, hadn’t bothered to set up a meeting at her pool hall or his HQ at the 19th. Milky Tichnor had checked in; so had Chapman and Solly Castro. All negative. But Samantha Spade hadn’t checked in.

He’d collar her for that, and he’d do it with savage pleasure. But why all the heat? he wondered. She probably knew why he never saw Adela anymore. It wasn’t Maybelie Cooper that Gypsy was furious with, the black kid with the computer head, who had taught his dumb sister basic arithmetic. No, it was Samantha Spade, who knew the city and its secrets as profoundly and bitterly as he did and who probably knew damned well that Adela’s Greek husband, Stav Tragis, ran a stolen car ring out of his used-car lots in Baltimore. .

The reports continued to come in, relayed from the switchboard operators of the 13th and 19th precincts to Lieutenant Tonnelli. In the Gypsy’s mind, he could envision the operations and embrace with his imagination the gross sprawl of the dark city. He watched rivers flowing, heard the scream of police sirens, saw the revolving red glare of dome lights, pictured cops in uniform with drawn guns, taking steps two at a time to investigate the tips and squeals now being funneled into the 13th and 19th precincts at what seemed to be a cyclical rate of increase.

Ninth near Fifth. Black man forcing black girl into a maroon Mark III.

Checked out negative. A pimp and his prossie.

Male Caucasian reported in women’s room at comfort station in Central Park. Arrested by a patrolman, cited on morals charge at the 22nd Precinct on Eighty-sixth Street (Central Park’s Transverse Number Three).

Missing child, Caucasian, male, age eight, residence on Fifty-fourth Street between First and Second avenues. Checked out negative.

Subject found at Manhattan central bus station, hoping for ride to Detroit to visit divorced father.

Paul Wayne of the New York Times had called, but Tonnelli had little for him. After the Juggler’s second ritualistic murder, the local press and television corps had scented a story of epic and explosive proportions in the works, given an affirmative to the one conditional “if.” If he killed again. .

That was their morbid but nonetheless professional concern. And so, in the third year, when the body of Trixie Atkins had been found in a loft in Greenwich Village with rope burns on her thighs and a dreadful knife wound across her jugular vein, the thrust of the story had been escalated to intense national coverage. A year later, when Jennie Goldman was murdered on the same date after suffering the agonizing brutalities that had been inflicted on the other three victims, the story had triggered a flamboyant and righteous explosion from the media, with parallels drawn to the Zebra and Zodiac slaughters in San Francisco, accompanied by the inevitable trailing inferences of police and political incompetence. There had been nonsubtle suggestions that if patrolmen weren’t “cooped up” (a police, expression for sleeping on duty) in the lobbies of closed theaters or basements of school buildings, and if the deputy chiefs and assistant chiefs who served at the pleasure of the commissioner, and hence were not protected by Civil Service, had the guts to enforce stringent curfews, to haul in every known sex offender over the past decade, and if the commissioner himself were not so politically ambitious and spent less time at international councils developing his themes of “brotherhood through law and order” and “the tyranny of the philosophy of numbers in police work,” well, the obvious inference was that the Juggler would have been caught long since and that Fun City would again and forever be entitled to its innocent and sustaining nickname.

The commissioner, in fact, had been in print that morning from Stockholm. On the third page of the Times, below the fold, he’d been quoted as saying to a meeting of delegates: “It has been said that one death is a tragedy, but that a million deaths is a statistic. Yes, that has been said and it was said by a man whose name was Joseph Stalin. And I repudiate his convictions as I repudiate him. . ”

Tonnelli was gut-certain they’d all be handed their heads by most of the media if the Juggler made it five in a row. And they’d deserve it. .

But the hue and cry and bullshit didn’t apply to Paul Wayne. He was a cynical middle-aged pro who knew his job, and Tonnelli trusted him. It was some other papers in town that would sprinkle blood across the front pages of their sheets if it would sell five additional copies.

So he gave Wayne what he had. The tips, how they checked out, the forces and equipment that were standing by.

The phone rang again. It was Sokolsky on the switchboard at the 19th.

“Lieutenant, we got a kid missing over in Brooklyn, from one of them crummy apartment buildings a block north of the Williamnsburg Bridge. Age eleven, a Puerto Rican girl. Cops from the division and precinct are on it.”

The Juggler had never struck outside Manhattan.

“What’s the kid’s name?”

“Trinidad Davoe.”

“Notify the precinct commander and the division inspector that we’re sending plainclothesmen over from the Thirteenth.”

“Check, Lieutenant.”

Before Tonnelli could refill his coffee cup and light another cigarette, Sokolsky was back on the line. “There’s nothing to it, Lieutenant, that Puerto Rican kid over in Williamnsburg.”

“What was it?”

“A crazy, I guess,” Sokolsky said. “Seems this kid got killed by a car a few years back. A milk truck, actually. The priest told the old lady that she really hadn’t gone away, lots of the guys in the precinct know about this, so the old lady goes to church and lights vigil lights and keeps reporting her daughter missing. One of the guys told me she keeps the kid’s bed turned down and gets up at night and finds it empty and calls the precinct to find her kid. It’s kind of sad.”

Crazies, a town full of crazies. Paul Wayne at the Times told him the crank calls were starting, and Gypsy Tonnelli thought of these as he looked at the photographs on the walls of his apartment, pictures he took as a hobby on his days off, scenes of the various boroughs that he’d grown up in and worked in and loved, scenes the out-of-towners never saw because all they wanted to do, it seemed to the Gypsy, was get drunk and wander around high-crime-rate areas where they could get mugged so they could tell the folks at home about it.

The crazies were coming out of the wood.

“Look, I ain’t talking to no shit secretary or reporter. I want to talk to the editor of the Times, and I’ll stick it in his ear, because if the cops don’t catch that guy who’s murdering all those little girls I ain’t payin’ dime one in state or city taxes anymore.”

“I’ll connect you to the metropolitan desk, sir.”

The visitors’ concept of New York never embraced that of neighborhood; their picture was inevitably a stereotype of hostile and highly neurotic people living in apartment buildings one on top of the other and sharing the elevators without ever a “hello” or a “good morning” or “it’s going to be a scorcher, isn’t it?”

Paul Wayne had told him of one hysterical lady who had told him in shouting Biblical accents that she and she alone was responsible for the deaths of the four girls. They had been punished by a just but Almighty God because she had sinned, had whored around the bars of Third Avenue like a bitch in season, and since she had been the angel of her family before her fall, the vengeance of God had been that much more savage and merciless. “It’s all kind of a preemptive vaginal strike by the Big Cock in the Sky,” Wayne had said wearily.

But in fact, Tonnelli thought, arms crossed, studying his nearly professional portraits of the boroughs of New York, Manhattan didn’t match the tourist boobs’ concept of it. It was as rich and diverse, as ethnically and racially sustaining as areas of the country where you had Texans and Indians and Mexicans mixed together. Or the fascinating pockets of ethnicity, the colorful and variegated customs that he had observed when he was in the Army, along the frontiers of Holland and Belgium and Italy and France. If you didn’t like the weather, wait a minute and it’d change. True of his city. If you didn’t like the food, the look of the streets, the people, the way they dressed, take a walk and find something else.

Paul Wayne had told him of other calls.

“I marvel at your stupidity, all of you phony liberals, though I am not going to assume your ‘bigotry’ and assert that you are not sincere. But it is so simple it makes me laugh. If ‘they’ would just let James Earl Ray out of solitary, you wouldn’t have a country where four little girls can get their throats slashed by the ‘animals’ that are the darlings of all your Northern cities.”

Lieutenant Tonnelli inhaled deeply on his cigarette and looked at photographs he had taken of Queens around Jackson Heights and the Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn and the playgrounds and wading pools at Hillside Home in the Bronx. Much of the views were imperfect. There was always the evidence of common humanity in graffiti and litter, but there was strength everywhere, too, in an evident will not only to endure but to survive, exemplified nowhere more powerfully than in vistas and scenes that Lieutenant Tonnelli had found in Grymes Hill, Staten Island, a neighborhood still splendored by gulls and water and views of seaports and shipping lanes.

But the tourists saw none of that. Probably because they didn’t want to. New York was a safari for them, with cabdrivers their white hunters, scaring the shit out of them with stories about certain areas of the West Side and Central Park. And it wasn’t just the tourists; it could be pros. Sokolsky had called in earlier tonight to tell him about a retired Camden, New Jersey, detective named Babe Fritzel. Fritzel had come into the 19th Precinct, a well-set-up man despite his seventy-odd years, Sokolsky had reported, with shrewd, tough eyes and a full shock of white hair. Babe Fritzel still had a gun, a gold badge, and a two-way radio, and he’d come over to Manhattan from Teaneck, New Jersey, to offer his service to the NYPD to “get the bastard” who was cutting up little girls in the city.

“You know somebody named Unruh, Lieutenant?”

“Unruh?”

“Yeah, Unruh, that’s what this guy Fritzel said.”

“Well, there was a Howard or John Unruh who walked out of his house in Camden on a nice, sunny day, hell, this was before our time, Sokolsky, way back in the fifties, maybe even before that, and he shot and killed thirteen people, a lot of them kids, I remember.”

Sokolsky seemed pleased to corroborate his lieutenant’s last comment. “This guy, Babe Fritzel, told me one little kid was sitting on a rocking horse in a barbershop waiting to get his hair cut when Unruh blasted him. Fritzel was one of the cops who collared Unruh.”

“You told him to get lost?”

“Told Mr. Babe Fritzel to go back to Teaneck and watch the show on TV in living color.”

“What the hell is wrong with everybody?”

Sokolsky had hesitated a moment and then, clearing his throat, had said, “Well, Lieutenant, my idea is that-”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Tonnelli said, and put the phone back in its cradle.

Tonnelli’s doorbell rang. He checked the.38 in the holster on his belt, turned two locks, and opened his front door the six inches allowed by the burglar chain and found himself staring into the luminous, white-circled eyes of Samantha Spade, which were shadowed only slightly by the floppy brim of her red velvet hat.

“Real big of you to drop by,” he said.

“Might have something, Lieutenant,” Samantha said. “Buy a lady a drink?”

“You’re on.” Tonnelli said, and unhooked the burglar chain.

“It was on Eighth Avenue, up around a Hundred and Eleventh or a Hundred and Twelfth, six-maybe eight-months ago,” Samantha said.

Samantha still wore her flared black leather coat and the black denim pants suit with sequins glittering in patriotic designs, but she had added a half dozen thick gold bracelets to her wrists.

“Bourbon all right?”

“With a splash of water.”

Tonnelli went into his small kitchen and made two drinks and brought one back to Samantha, who reclined languidly in a deep leather chair, her legs crossed, the overhead lights glistening on her white boots.

“Go on,” Tonnelli said.

“Where was I?”

“Eighth Avenue between a Hundred and Eleventh and a Hundred and Twelfth.”

“One of my sharks was making loans in that area, laying the bread on the guys from a car. Couple of my studs, Coke and Biggie, were keeping the line nice and orderly, taking down names, addresses, the amount of loot and collecting signatures. Most of the guys were old customers, brothers and a few Puerto Ricans, so this big honkie, well-he stood out. I mean he was like a rebel yell at some spade corn boil. He was big, Gypsy. Six-four, my guys told me. And from what they said, a chest and shoulders like yours. He was wearing a leather jacket and some kind of a funky cap. My studs told me later he looked out to lunch permanent upstairs.”

Tonnelli was taking notes on a legal pad. “How about his age?”

“Thirty, thirty-five. Anyway, the big honkie seemed to think it was like Santa Claus handing out the money. When he gets up to the paymaster, he reaches for some loot. They tried to get his name, find out where he worked, but they couldn’t get through to him. Finally, they gave him a piece of paper and a pencil and told him to write all that shit down, and that’s when he went ape.”

“But did he write anything?” the Gypsy asked her.

“He tried to, but apparently he didn’t know how, and that’s what sent him around the bend. He just exploded, knocked two of my studs down, and it takes some kind of man to do that little thing. Then he smashed the windshield of the car with his fist and ran south down Eighth Avenue. The brothers took after him, you better believe it, but he split into Central Park. That’s where they lost him.”

“Where exactly, Maybelle?”

“There’s an awful lot of hiding places between Central Park West and Harlem Lake. You’d need dogs to find anybody.”

“Your guys have anything else on his physical description?”

She frowned faintly and gently rubbed her jaw with long, tapering fingers. “Not really, Vince.” Still frowning, she ticked off items. “He was big. He was white. Leather jacket, silly-looking hat, I think they said yellow.”

“That’s important. Are you sure they said that? That he was wearing a yellow cap?”

“How the shit you expect me to be sure of anything happened six months ago?”

Tonnelli sighed. “You always had a rotten temper and brass knuckles on your tongue.”

“Hush,” she said, and her expression became thoughtful. “I remember a couple of other things. The one word that came through clear sounded like a man’s name. It was Lanny.”

“Just that. No last name?”

She shook her head. “Just Lanny. And one of my guys told me this weirdo had real small eyes and a kind of bulging forehead.”

“Your people ever see him around again?”

Samantha shook her head. “And you can believe they were looking.”

“Fix yourself another drink if you want, the bottle’s in the kitchen. Can’t say for sure, but what you got might be some help.”

As Tonnelli went to the telephone, Samantha stood with languid, slimly muscled grace and wandered toward the kitchen. Thanks a lot, Gypsy, she was thinking, realizing with an anticipation she dreaded that soon the first fires of migraine would ignite in her head. Emma and Missoura, you lazy niggers, you should have walked home through the rain. .

Lieutenant Tonnelli gave his orders to the operator at Central. “I want you to patch this description through to every precinct and division, to all boroughs. I want it to go first to Detective Sergeant Boyle at the Thirteenth and to Detective Clem Scott at the Nineteenth. Arrest on sight with drawn guns a male Caucasian, thirty to thirty-five years of age. . ”

In the neat and functional kitchen, Samantha added a mild splash of bourbon to her drink and strolled back into the living room, looking about curiously at Tonnelli’s photographs, the worn leather furniture, and the framed pictures of Tonnelli’s parents which stood on a marble mantel above the gas-log fireplace.

Tonnelli replaced the phone in its cradle and glanced appraisingly at Samantha, while the tip of his forefinger ran slowly up and down the scar that streaked the left side of his dark face. She interpreted the question in his eyes and sighed with weary finality.

“What else you want, Gypsy?”

“There’s a police sketch artist standing by at my headquarters,”

Tonnelli said. “Your studs may have spotted the bastard we call the Juggler. My question is: Will they work with a police artist and help us come up with a picture?”

In for a penny, she thought, and rubbed her forehead as the first needles of pain began their precise probings of her brain.

“Coke and Biggie’ll help out, Lieutenant,” she said. “I’ll get ‘em over to the Nineteenth.”

Because of her pain and the knowledge of what caused it, she felt a need to hurt him; her smile became cool and disparaging as she glanced about the room.

“So this is how the great Vincent Tonnelli winds up, All-State guard, honest cop, a bachelor in a two-room pad with some chairs and sofas that would go under the hammer for about fifty bucks.”

Tonnelli smiled and flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the sleeve of his cashmere jacket. “I wear it all on my back, Sam.”

She looked at him curiously. “Saving your ginzo voodoo streak, you usually walk the cool side of the street. What’s your hang-up now? Why you want to nail this bastard to the wall in strips?”

“I’m a cop. It’s my job.”

“Bull, baby, I make a living reading people, and knowing you, Gypsy, I could do it by Braille.”

“It shows then?”

“Believe it. It comes through.”

Over the years, Tonnelli had carefully studied his emotions and reactions, well aware that the intensity of his anger could escalate to a dangerous sickness, a plateau at which it might become a liability rather than an asset. He had seen that happen to cops who had lost their partners and had blamed themselves for it. They wanted victims to ease their rage and guilt. But after a certain point, considerations of innocence and involvement became irrelevant, and any victim would feed their need for revenge.

At first Tonnelli had believed his passion had been rooted in the simple violations of his turf. The murders had been committed in his village of Manhattan. It was the taboo of territory, of tribe, of temples and shrines.

But as the years passed, Tonnelli realized it was more than that.

“Say, how’s that sister of yours?” Samantha asked him. “Adela? I heard she got married and has a lot of kids.”

That was so close to his pain that her words struck him with an almost physical impact. A lot of kids, sure, he thought bitterly. Three nieces, two nephews. His only kin and blood. When he’d walk by toy stores, he’d stop and look at things he’d like to buy for his nieces and nephews but couldn’t. Big Raggedy Ann dolls, trains, windup animals that jumped through hoops, model airplanes you could fly by remote control. Hell, he’d once thought about getting a department loan and taking them all out to Disneyland. Or having them over here when he had three-day weekends. They could go to restaurants and ride around in his unmarked car and listen to the police calls. He could show them the photograph albums. The old man in his apron and the cheeses hanging from the ceiling in his market on Fulton Street. And the colored photograph of his mother without a streak of white in her hair at sixty and a temper that didn’t go with those big, soulful eyes. And never a crooked dime out of that store or in their home. He knew damn well Adela wouldn’t have any of those pictures, wouldn’t even want them.

He would never know his nieces and nephews, never hold them in his arms, and that was why he would destroy the Juggler, because that madman’s victims were surrogates for the kin he could never know and love.

“So how is she, Gypsy?”

“She’s fine, just great,” Tonnelli said quickly, too quickly. Samantha realized, and decided not to press it. She knew, in point of fact, that Adela Tonnelli was married to a Greek used-car dealer who fenced hot heaps up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and the Gypsy must know that, too, which meant he didn’t see his sister or her kids anymore.

Tonnelli wasn’t the worst of them. In fact, he was the best of them, and her need to hurt him was gone.

If there was anything good about cops, it was studs like Gypsy Tonnelli. He was straight and honest and wouldn’t mark a man for life with the butt of his gun for kicks. There was a ton of weary pain in Tonnelli, and that was a town Samantha had played, and she knew all its dirty streets and alleys. At times she was so sick and full of despair from listening to one whining loser after another that it flawed her physically; there were nights when her headaches and muscle cramps almost drove her insane, and it was pills and the bottle then, and not being able to hate Whitey enough, and the annealing but sick and unrealizable dream of being on a warm beach with clean air around her and only the sound of slowly curling waves under a big, blue sky, and maybe-and this was the sickness-having someone like little Manolo to take care of and protect, and hell, maybe even love. .

Tonnelli knew from the masked compassion in Samantha’s expression that she probably knew all about Stav Tragis, his sister’s husband, who fenced hot cars and sold them to red-necks and Okies in North and South Carolina. And he was grateful that she was obviously not going to hit him with it, not sting him with the fact that he couldn’t see his sister or her children anymore because she was married to a common thief.

“You know, Sam, why don’t you try my side of the street for a while?”

Tonnelli asked her. “Who knows, you might get to like it.”

“You forget, Gypsy, us black cats don’t have no spots to change. And for Christ’s sake, Pope, the next time you ask me over, would you spring for a bottle of scotch?”

One of the offices in Tonnelli’s headquarters in the 13th Precinct House had been converted into a “darkroom” by a police sketch artist, Detective First Grade Todd Webb. He had set up a portable screen and a sixteen-millimeter projector, and all functional witnesses were present, save Joey Harpe, who would be along within a few minutes, since the little Irisher and his parents were already en route to the 19th in a squad car.

Lieutenant Tonnelli stood alongside Patrolman Max Prima, whose back was like a ramrod and whose eyes were wide with an almost comical respect, which were his reactions to the top brass on the scene, Deputy Chief of Detectives Walter Greene and, an even more significant figure, the borough commander of South Manhattan himself, a two-star cop, Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin, who, with his slight frame and silver-white hair and rimless spectacles, looked more like a parish priest from his native county of Cork than the chief of all police in the southern half of this sprawling, million-footed city.

Coke Roosevelt and Biggie Lewis stood apart from the police, talking to each other in soft, chuckling voices; if they found it a distinction to be in the presence of such exalted police officers, they were concealing it nicely.

At last-it was then about three fifteen on the morning of October 15-the office door opened, and the little Irish boy, Joey Harpe, came into the room with his vaguely apprehensive parents.

It was Joey Harpe who had seen the man who had murdered Jenny Goldman in the basement of a building on Twenty-ninth Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. .

With all lights turned off, Detective Todd Webb went to work, flashing various shapes of skulls on the screen, long, square, round, and oval, until a consensus was reached by Patrolman Prima, the small Irish boy, and the two big blacks that the man they had all mutually observed had a head that was nearly as round as a bowling ball.

Detective Webb left that outline on the screen and began with deliberate speed to add and subtract from it various kinds and shapes of mouths, noses, and eyes and ears, until at last, after considerable argument and disagreement, the functional group of witnesses settled on a front and profile sketch of a man’s face with these characteristics: small eyes, a heavy forehead, scraggly blond hair, a corded, powerful neck, and comically protruding ears.

Copies of this sketch would be processed and distributed by squad cars to every precinct of every borough of New York City.

They would not be distributed to local newspapers or television stations.

This was Chief Inspector Chip Larkin’s decision.

As an impeccably schooled and highly intelligent police officer Chief Larkin knew that the Juggler could be classified medically as a Constitutional Psychopath Inferior, whose shames and humiliations, whose rages and angers, induced by his own construct of physical chemicals, would helplessly and forever drive him into antisocial violence. They would catch him, of course, because he would continue on his course of savage and sadistic murders until they did.

But Chief Larkin wanted him stopped tonight, not ten years from now.

Ten young girls from now. .

And that was behind his decision not to release the sketches of the Juggler to newsmen. They would need surprise and secrecy to bait traps for the Juggler.

“Thank you, son, and thank you, gentlemen,” Chief Larkin said, and then he turned his parish priest’s smile on Patrolman Max Prima.

“That was a good, sharp bit of work, Officer.”

In a move that surprised all of them, young Joey Harpe whipped out a notebook and a pencil and asked Biggie Lewis and Coke Roosevelt for their autographs.