Blood Innocents

13

That night Reardon did not go to bed until almost dawn. Instead he watched television, or at least he stared at the television set. Watching the next program, he could not have described the previous one. The dramas and comedies passed one after the other without for a single moment deflecting Reardon’s mind from the killing of the fallow deer.

Again he went over the details of the case. Two dead deer. Two dead women. Fifty-seven blows on one body and only one massive blow on the other. The word “dos” and Roman numeral “two.” A witness who saw the girls with a third party shortly before they were killed but could not identify the third party. Lesbianism. A sound in the zoo at about the time the deer were being killed, a sound simultaneously muffled and harsh. No weapon. No, witnesses to the crime itself. And Andros Petrakis.

Reardon went over each of the people associated with the case so far. And each time only Andros Petrakis stood out. He had reason to hate Wallace Van Allen, whose associates had evicted him from his apartment. He had openly expressed hatred of his landlord. He had been present near the scene of the crime shortly before it was committed. And there was at least a chance that he had already lied through his daughter. In addition to these tangible connections there was added the fact that he had been under an enormous strain in the past few weeks. The death of his wife had stunned him, and her illness had impoverished him. Cases, Reardon knew, had been built on less material than he had on Andros Petrakis. There was, for example, the case of Kevin Martin Dowd.

The body of twelve-year-old Kevin Dowd had been found in an alley off East 101st Street on a rainy Saturday morning in 1963, the face mutilated almost beyond recognition, the ears actually severed from the head and evidently taken by the killer. There were no clues, and it had struck Reardon at the time that this kind of crime, if not repeated, might easily go unsolved forever.

Then it happened. The odd, unexplainable circumstance which cried out for explanation. Reardon, while routinely going through the personal effects of Kevin Dowd, discovered a school paper, a short book report not unlike thousands of others that public school teachers assigned their students during a school year. On the back of the paper the teacher had assigned the grade “F.” and had written in huge letters across the face of the front page: “STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!” And Reardon had been driven to learn what kind of person would scrawl such an angry and humiliating comment on the insignificant book report of a twelve-year-old boy.

An investigation showed that the teacher, Randolph Devereaux, had repeatedly attacked Kevin Dowd in class, often reducing him to tears. On one occasion Devereaux had forced the boy to stand at the front of the room with his arms outstretched, holding two heavy books in each hand. This had lasted for several minutes until the boy’s arms had collapsed from the strain.

Two weeks later Reardon went to Devereaux’s apartment and introduced himself as a detective from the New York City Police Department. Reardon would always remember how Devereaux’s body had suddenly slumped, every feature of his face sinking downward, and how he had sounded almost relieved when he’d said, “You must be looking for the ears.”

A one-in-a-million chance, thought Reardon, just like Gustave Lamprey.

Whatever fame Reardon had in the New York City Police Department rested in part on the Lamprey case.

While still a uniformed patrolman Reardon had been called to a disturbance in a movie theater in Chinatown. A young man had made a nuisance of himself by continually shouting obscenities at the characters on the screen. Several people in the theater had unsuccessfully attempted to quiet him. Finally an usher was called and when he told Lamprey that he would either have to keep quiet or leave the theater, Lamprey pulled a machete. “I don’t speak Chinese,” he said to the usher, even though the usher had addressed him in English.

The usher quickly apologized for disturbing Lamprey, excused himself, and walked briskly back to the lobby of the theater and called the police.

Reardon and another patrolman, Harry Flynn, arrived at the theater lobby ten minutes later. The usher escorted them down the aisle and pointed to the back of Lamprey’s head. Reardon told Flynn to cover him from behind and cautiously descended the aisle toward Lamprey. As if warned by some private guardian, Lamprey shot out of his seat just as Reardon reached the row where he was sitting. He turned and faced Reardon, not more than four feet away.

Lamprey was very tall, thin and straight as an icepick, with bright, searching eyes. But the thing that Reardon would remember most was that he wore an unusual metal ring shaped into a dragon’s head. The eyes of the dragon were enormous, grotesquely disproportionate with the head, and they were made of deep red glass, the deepest red that Reardon had ever seen. The hand wearing the ring carried a wicked-looking machete.

“Mister,” Reardon said, “there’s another policeman behind you and he’s pointing a pistol right at your head.”

“I don’t speak Chinese,” Lamprey said.

“I’m talking to you in English,” Reardon said. “Now I want you to put your hands behind your head and move very slowly toward me and into this aisle.”

Lamprey cocked his head as if receiving instructions from some invisible force. Then he smiled at Reardon and complied.

Gustave Lamprey was booked for disorderly conduct and possession of a concealed weapon, and Reardon did not expect to ever hear of him again. But almost twenty years later he did.

It was in the summer and he was examining a corpse found on a tenement roof. The body had been deposited on the roof and left there to bake in the hot July sun. It was bloated, blackened, nude except for a pair of socks. It lay on its back, legs together, arms stretched perpendicular to the trunk like the spread wings of a fallen bird. There was nothing unusual except for tiny bits of red glass which had been ground almost to a powder and sprinkled ceremoniously over the dead man’s chest. It was the color of the glass which drew Reardon’s attention. It was not just red, but deep red, and Reardon could not recall where he had seen that color before, if he ever had. He stared at the body for a while, knowing that something was familiar about it, but he could not tell what.

He walked down the stairs to the street, and as he neared the entrance of the building he glanced at the nameplates on the mailboxes. One of them brought the colored glass into rigid focus in his mind. It was printed neatly in black type: “Institute for Chinese Studies – Gustave Lamprey, Director.”

And it was that chance connection – the vague familiarity of the deep red color of glass, and the sudden memory from twenty years before of the minor arrest of a man with an odd name and an obsession with things Chinese – that had led Reardon to a chain of evidence and an airtight case that had made him famous among his peers.

A one-in-a-million chance, Reardon thought again. He did not believe that any sudden revelations would come forth to solve the case of the fallow deer. It was, he knew, the more mundane details that broke a case, or incriminating evidence left at the scene, or obvious motive, or, better yet, eyewitnesses. In the deer case there was none of these. There was only the crime itself, its brutal details, and a floating cryptogram of numbers: fifty-seven, one, two.