Blood Innocents

1
MONDAY

Watching it from his window, Reardon saw the city only as an immense patchwork of random sound and directionless movement. It had not always been like this for him. In his youth he had walked the streets in his dark-blue uniform with shining badge as a protector of a wild and famous city. He had not forgotten that what he felt then was a rapture so heedless, asking so little, that even the loss and butchery he saw in the course of his duties could not permanently overwhelm it. He had been a serious protector, one who must love what he protects.

He lit a cigarette. The flame gave off a pale, orange aurora in the morning fog. He watched the match burn down almost to his fingertips, then quickly waved it out. He smoked wearily, pleasurelessly. This would be his last cigarette, and because of that he could not savor it. In his mid-fifties now, he had come to fear the slow, strangulating death of lung cancer.

It was cancer that had finally killed his wife, Millie, slowly devouring her bowels inch by inch. Even now, two weeks after her funeral, he sometimes came home to the apartment expecting to find her there and was forced all over again to relive his loss of her. At the funeral he had sat at the front of the church staring at the roses that had adorned her closed coffin. He had ordered her coffin closed because he believed that death was a kind of final privacy, upon which living eyes should not be allowed to intrude. His son, Timothy, had sat beside him, along with his son’s wife, Abbey, and their children. Timothy had kept his hands folded ritually in his lap, his face immobile, but with his eyes darting about as if his mind were still busily examining the law cases in his office. And Reardon had noticed that only when his son looked back over his shoulder and saw the head of his law firm enter the church did his face suddenly change its expression to one of mourning.

Now, standing in his living room, Reardon turned from the window and glimpsed himself in the full-length mirror on the opposite side of the room. He had become much more conscious of his body recently, conscious that it was slowly taking him through that process of things that pass away. He was still powerfully built for a man of ordinary height and weight, but now, staring at himself across the room, he could detect the first curving downward of his shoulders and buckling of his knees.

Quickly he turned from the mirror to the window. Below he could hear the traffic cutting through the wet streets like long knives slicing into melons. He remembered a psychopath he had arrested almost twenty years before. When asked why he had butchered his victim so wantonly the man had replied he was looking for seeds. “You know, like in a watermelon.”

Reardon tapped his cigarette and watched the ashes tumble toward the street. He estimated the distance from his window to the street at about eighty feet. He had heard of infants surviving falls of even more than that distance, but never an adult. Babies survived because they relaxed all the way down. But adult human beings, terrified beyond comprehension, stiffened every muscle, locked every joint, stretched every tendon taut and ground their bones like sticks of chalk into the sidewalk.

Slowly his eyes followed upward the line of windows in the building facing him. He had answered many calls there, mostly inconsequential: family bickerings, lovers’ quarrels, evictions, disorderly conduct complaints, general nuisance behavior; only once a murder. Finally his field of vision passed the highest landing and over the roof, where, in the distance, half blurred by the early morning fog, a sign blinked its certain message that Jesus Saves.

“Got a freako for you this morning, Reardon,” Sergeant Smith said from behind his large wooden desk as Reardon entered the precinct house. For Smith, human crime was divided into three categories: ordinary criminal acts – such as theft, simple battery, rape and common murder – for which no specific designation was required; “bloodies,” which were particularly gruesome murders or assaults; and “freakos,” crimes so bizarre that Smith could not comprehend their source.

“What is it?” Reardon asked.

“Piccolini will tell you,” Smith said teasingly.

“You can tell me.”

“No, let Piccolini. It’s a little different, you know what I mean?” Smith winked at Reardon. “It’s something they think only Detective Reardon can handle. Something they need an expert for.” He motioned toward Piccolini’s office door with a grand, mocking gesture. “You may enter, sir.”

Piccolini sat at a gray metal desk. Each wall was lined with file cabinets and the window behind Piccolini featured a view of the rear alley. Piccolini’s desk was covered with files, and he was furiously applying himself to a stack of papers in front of him when Reardon entered.

“Smith says you want to see me,” Reardon said.

Piccolini did not look up. “Sit,” he said.

Piccolini did everything with the single-minded purpose and intensity of a worker ant. Details were his passion. He believed that if a social security number was recorded incorrectly it could lead to general disorder. For Piccolini great upheavals were nothing more than the accumulated consequence of millions of smart mistakes.

Reardon’s eyes roamed Piccolini’s office. It was a habit of his, looking for evidence even when there was no crime. A small metal bookshelf stood in a corner opposite the door. The books were arranged alphabetically by title. There were codes of conduct, commission reports, manuals of procedure and handbooks on administration: the rules of the game. Places were marked in some of them, Miranda warning cards used as bookmarkers.

“Want coffee?” Piccolini asked without looking up.

“No,” Reardon said.

“Be through in a minute. Just relax. I have to get all this out every Monday morning.”

Reardon did not know very much about Piccolini even though he had known him for years. He knew he was a devout Catholic who believed in an absolute fate, his own and everybody else’s. This, Reardon believed, explained his generally acknowledged fearlessness. Otherwise Piccolini was an enigma. Reardon knew that he was married, but not whether he was happy in that marriage. He knew that he had children, but did not know if they loved their father. He knew that Piccolini drove an expensive car, but he did not know if it was paid for.

Piccolini finished signing the last paper and looked up at Reardon. “I suppose Smith told you we have a bloody for you this morning.”

“He called it a freako,” Reardon said.

“Where does he get those classifications?”

“I don’t know.”

“They always give me the creeps.”

Reardon said nothing.

Piccolini leaned back in his swivel chair and put his hands behind his head. “Have you ever been to the Children’s Zoo?”

“Sure,” Reardon said.

“Well, you remember a few years back when Wallace Van Allen donated two fallow deer to the zoo? It was in all the papers. It was a big event, you know? On television and all that.”

“I remember it.”

“Well, we have an embarrassing situation here,” Piccolini said. “It has to do with those same deer.”

“What about them?”

Piccolini cleared his throat and shifted slightly in his seat. From the earliest days of their association together Reardon had noticed that Piccolini was seldom unnerved by seeing the results of a crime or by the brutal details of investigating it, but that he did not like to describe a crime to others. Rendering it into language removed it from that remote spot it occupied in his mind. It was only in describing a crime that Piccolini seemed compelled by its reality.

“Somebody killed them,” Piccolini said.

“The deer?”

“Yes.”

“Shot them?”

Piccolini shook his head. “No,” he said, “hacked them to death.”

“Hacked them to death?” Reardon had never heard of such a thing.

“That’s right,” Piccolini said. “We think maybe some political types did it. You know, Wallace Van Allen is rich and famous and all that. Very visible, if you know what I mean. Prominent. Always on television doing something. Giving money to this organization, supporting that candidate. Big charity types. Social types too. Big Liberals.”

“So you think it’s a political angle? Political enemies of the Van Allens?”

“Nothing personal,” Piccolini said, “nobody who actually knew Van Allen. But it still could have been radical types, some crazy, off-the-wall radical group maybe. You never know what they might do.”

Reardon nodded. “And they killed a guard, I guess.”

“No, just the deer.”

“But I’m in homicide.”

“Now look,” Piccolini said, “this is a big case. One of the biggest. Some real big people are looking in on this one, interested in it, if you know what I mean. I know you’re in homicide, but this is bigger than a homicide right now, and the people downtown want top people on it all the way.” Piccolini smiled. “And that means you, John. You were recommended for this case, and you’ve got it. Solving it could be a big plus.”

Reardon was fifty-six years old and a detective; he did not need any more big pluses and was surprised Piccolini could think he did. “I have some other cases to clear up first,” he said.

“Forget them,” Piccolini snapped. “As of right now this is your only case. It’s the biggest case in this precinct, and it may be the biggest case in New York right now, and you’re the chief investigating officer on it.”

“But what about the other cases?”

“All your cases have been reassigned,” Piccolini said. “You can take some time and brief the new guys, but after that, get on the deer. And get on it fast, will you, John? Believe me, the precinct is on the line in this one.”

“Sure,” Reardon said dully. He had heard that before. Everybody was on the line in every case.

“This one is for real,” Piccolini said emphatically. “We need to break this one fast, real fast. So forget about homicide for a while and concentrate on collaring the guy who hacked those deer to death.”

Reardon did not reply.

“Go out and see those deer,” Piccolini said sentimentally. “You should see what that guy did to them. And they didn’t even have horns to defend themselves with.”

Reardon nodded but said nothing.

“Well, okay,” Piccolini said, “that’s it. Get on it.”

“I’ll keep you informed,” Reardon said dryly.

“Yeah, I want a regular update on this one. I want to know the moment anything breaks.”

“Sure,” Reardon said.

“Good luck.”

As he closed the door of the office behind him, Reardon could hear Piccolini returning ferociously to the papers on his desk. It sounded like a rat scrambling through dry leaves.

A number of detectives had already assembled around Reardon’s desk in the homicide bullpen by the time he came out of Piccolini’s office. As he seated himself behind his desk they mumbled their good mornings, then slouched casually against the desks that surrounded his. With the exception of Ben Whitlock, they were all younger men than he, leaner too and hungrier for advancement: New York’s finest wolves. There was not one who might not someday be Chief of Detectives, and there was not one, except Whitlock, whom Reardon trusted. In their presence Reardon felt spectacularly out of place. Their youth aged him and their ambition tired him.

He pulled out a group of folders from a side drawer and laid them on top of his desk. “I guess Piccolini sent you here,” he said.

“He said you’d fill us in on your cases,” Larry Merchant said, “the ones we’ll be handling while you’re on the other thing.”

“Right.” Reardon pulled one of the folders from the stack and opened it. “I’ll start with you first,” he told Merchant, “but I want all of you to come in sometime and review all these cases, whether they’re assigned to you or not, just in case you run across something that might be helpful.”

He handed Merchant the folder. “This is the Alverez case. You can check the file for the details, but this is basically it. Maria Alverez was found beaten to death in her apartment on East 71st Street. She was a high-class hooker, not the Eighth Avenue variety. Her pimp was a man named Louis Fallachi. He has a few low-level syndicate connections, but nothing big, nothing fancy. Strictly a ham-and-eggs muscle man, a bone breaker for a few shylocks. We’ve checked him out closely, and there’s no evidence as yet that he had anything to do with the killing. We’ve tried to reconstruct Alverez’s movements the night she died. We know that she wasn’t hooking that night. She went to a movie with a girlfriend. The doorman in her building says that she got home around eleven o’clock. So far he’s the last person to have seen her alive. The next morning she was dead. We have the weapon, a plain carpenter’s hammer. No prints.”

“Any witnesses?” Merchant asked glumly.

“Not so far,” Reardon said, “but this happened only a couple of days ago. The area is still being canvassed. Somebody might turn up who saw something. The main thing at this point is to find out everybody she knows and check them out. She may have known the person who did it, because he probably came through the front door, and there’s no evidence of forcible entry.”

“What’d she look like?” Merchant asked with a grin.

“What difference does it make?” Reardon said coldly.

Merchant shifted his body nervously to the left. “Just curious, that’s all.”

“There are pictures of her in the file,” Reardon said.

“Right,” Merchant said. “I’ll get on it.” He ducked out of the group and quickly marched upstairs to the file room.

Reardon did not know why he disliked Larry Merchant. He thought the reason might be the easy way Merchant took up his cases, as if they were just so many used cars he had to clear off the lot before the Saturday shipment of new ones, or the fact that he took his pay and ran off to the suburbs to spend it, leaving the city to wallow in its squalor like an old whore – used, abused, forgotten.

Reardon picked Charlie Darrow for the David Lowery case because David Lowery had been six years old when he was murdered, and Reardon knew that the killing of a child was a crime that shot Darrow up to a high adrenaline range. Darrow would be relentless in his pursuit, tireless, utterly oblivious to the distinction between being on duty and off duty.

“David Lowery was last seen alive by a few of his playmates in an alley off East 83rd Street,” Reardon began. He handed Darrow the folder. “Three hours later his body was found stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car on 122nd Street. He had been strangled with a jump rope and his body had been sexually abused.”

Darrow’s face hardened. “How old did you say he was?”

“Six years old. He was a small child for his age. Not quite three feet tall.”

“Jesus Christ,” Darrow said.

“The car had been sitting on 122nd Street for a few days,” Reardon said. “The owner is a grocery store manager up in Yonkers. He reported the car stolen quite some time ago. He’s being checked out. He seems to be clean.”

Darrow nodded. “Nothing funny in his background?”

“Not that we’ve been able to uncover yet. Everything that we know about him is in the file. A few people in the neighborhood of 122nd Street saw a man and a boy around the car, but nobody saw the child’s body put into it. There’s also this: two days before the boy was killed the desk sergeant received an anonymous complaint about noisy kids playing in that same car in the afternoon. For now, that’s it.”

“Not much then,” Darrow said disappointedly.

“Not much,” Reardon agreed, “but there’s never very much in the beginning.”

“Sure,” Darrow said, and walked away from Reardon’s desk.

Reardon turned to Wallace Chesterton. “The next one’s for you.”

“All right,” Chesterton said.

Wallace Chesterton was a large, ponderously built man with a fiery temper, a bully who had been formally disciplined several times. He believed that the best way to approach either a witness or a suspect was to assault him, sometimes verbally, sometimes physically. So Reardon gave Chesterton the closest thing he had to a routine gangland killing, because he knew it would probably never be solved. Chesterton would know that too and be less inclined to rough up somebody for nothing.

“This one is strictly by the book, ” Reardon told him. “A routine gangland rubout. Clean. The victim is a guy named Martin Scali. He was found in a parked car near the East River with one bullet through the back of his head. He had two hundred and thirty-eight dollars in his wallet. He has all kinds of gangland connections. As usual, no witnesses. Nobody heard or saw anything. You’ve got a guy with a bullet in his head and that’s it.”

Chesterton frowned. “Shit.”

“Do the best you can.” Reardon handed Chesterton the folder. “There’s not much in it.”

Chesterton shrugged. “Yeah,” he said and stalked out toward the file room.

Reardon gave his last case of the morning to Ben Whitlock, who was neither young nor exceptionally competent but in whom Reardon continued to sense the old, special calling of the law. Whitlock was incorruptible. He had lived through one Police Department scandal after another and had always emerged untouched.

“I guess the last one’s for you, Ben,” Reardon said with a slight smile.

“Why are they pulling you off all these cases, John?” Whitlock asked.

“They’re pulling me off more than these cases,” Reardon said. “They’re pulling me off all my cases.”

“Why are they doing that?”

“Because they want me to handle that deer killing in the zoo. Over in Central Park.”

“That’s not a homicide.” Whitlock looked at Reardon suspiciously. “What the fuck is all this about?”

“You mean why are those deer so important?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s not the deer. It’s who they belonged to.”

“They were just in the zoo, right?”

“They were given to the zoo by Wallace Van Allen.”

Whitlock nodded. “I get it,” he said. “Yeah, that explains it. Some fat cat gets his deer killed, so everyone downtown goes into a panic.”

“That’s about it.” Reardon admitted. He felt a stir of respect for Whitlock, his old colleague, who had triumphed for so long against internal politics and external corruption, like an old mastiff, guardian of the gate, who eats from no man’s hand. “I’m sorry we didn’t work together more all these years.”

“Yeah, me too,” Whitlock said, “but that’s the way it is.”

“Maybe we’ll get a case together someday yet.”

“Maybe. But not likely. They keep assigning me new partners every year or so. It’s always been like that. Ever since I got my gold shield they’ve been jerking me off. Jerking me around from partner to partner.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that.”

“They’ve been trying to get rid of me for twenty years,” Whitlock said wearily.

“Well, you’re still here.”

“Not for long,” Whitlock said. “I think I’m gonna grab the option. Early retirement, you know? I think I’m ready to let go the line, you know what I mean?”

“You mean it?”

“Yeah, I’m tired. Whipped.” Whitlock winked. “Who knows, maybe the wife and me can get to Florida. Somewhere south, out of this. Get some sun, you know, before the last sunset.”

Reardon nodded. He did not know what to say. He knew only that he did not want to see Whitlock go. He had never gone to Whitlock for anything, but he had liked knowing Whitlock was there in case he came across something he could not handle alone.

“Well, what do you have for me?” Whitlock asked.

Reardon glanced down at his desk. “The victim’s name is William Sebastian Falkner. He was murdered in the back of his dry cleaning shop last Thursday. Shot three times in the head and once in the chest with a. 22-caliber pistol. The motive is presumed to be robbery, since all the money in the house and shop was taken.”

Whitlock chuckled. “Yeah, that kind of forces you to presume robbery.”

Reardon smiled. “A local teenager named Culverson was seen hanging around the shop not long before the murder. Culverson is a rough case. He’s got a juvenile record that’s pretty impressive, and he’s been under suspicion for armed robbery in the past. His last address was three blocks from the shop. We’re watching his apartment, but he hasn’t turned up. The details are in the file.” Reardon closed the folder and handed it to Whitlock. “That’s about it.”

“Okay,” Whitlock said. “I’ll check it.”

“Good luck. If you need anything, let me know. I’ll be around.”

Whitlock started to walk away; he stopped at the door and turned back to Reardon. “Sorry to hear about Millie,” he said.

Reardon had not thought about Millie for the past few moments, and suddenly hearing her name again thrust him back into a vague, aching gloom. “Thanks” was all he said.

“It happens to everybody,” Whitlock said. “A vale of tears, you know?”

“Yeah,” Reardon said. He watched Whitlock disappear up the stairs. So that was it, he thought – a bludgeoned prostitute, a strangled child, a dead gangland punk and a murdered shopkeeper.

And two slaughtered deer in the Children’s Zoo.

The whole area around the cage of the fallow deer had been cordoned off by police roadblocks. But even in the chill, late autumn air a crowd had gathered, pressing against the roadblocks and craning their necks over the shoulders of the uniformed patrolmen assigned to keep them back. Another group of police was milling around outside the deer cage, and Reardon could not see inside the cage until they parted to let him pass.

In the cage each of the bodies had been covered by a black tarpaulin. Several rivulets of blood trickled out from beneath one of the tarpaulins and ran in jagged lines to the bars. When blood flowed like that, Reardon knew, it usually meant that many wounds had been inflicted. But the blood ran in one broad swath from beneath the other tarpaulin. That would mean that only one wound had been inflicted, and that it was deep and had brought death almost immediately.

Detective Mathesson was standing calmly between the two bodies of the fallow deer. He was a very large man, but the heavy black overcoat and gray hat made him appear even more massively built. His legs were spread wide apart like a gunslinger’s and he was rubbing his gloved hands together vigorously for warmth. “Hello, John,” he said as Reardon approached.

Reardon nodded.

“Only in New York,” Mathesson said.

“What?”

“Look at it. Only in New York.”

“Oh,” Reardon said, “yeah.”

“At least they’re not people,” Mathesson said, “that’s one good thing.”

Reardon looked down at the body to the left. Covered as it was, it did not look that different from the human bodies he had seen. It was small, crumpled, motionless and, above all, utterly silent.

“In a way I wish they were,” Mathesson said.

Reardon squinted at him. “Why?”

“Because it would mean the killer’s indent, in a way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if this had been done, say, to a couple of people, children or old people or women, then it wouldn’t be that uncommon,” Mathesson said. “We’ve dealt with that sort of thing before. We’re used to it. It’s not that weird. And we’d get the guy that did it. Probably pretty soon, too.”

“Maybe,” Reardon said. It was his favorite response to statements he found either ridiculous or inane.

“But this is real strange,” Mathesson said, his eyes moving back and forth between the two covered bodies, “and it’ll spread to people.”

“You think so?”

“Sure it will,” Mathesson said. “Doesn’t it always?”

“Sometimes.”

“Most of the time.” Mathesson looked at Reardon. “Don’t you remember that guy with the cats? That complaint we got about a guy giving cats baths in hydrochloric acid?”

“Yes,” Reardon said quickly. He did not need to hear it again.

“Well, we collared him a couple of times for that, but you remember it didn’t stop him. Nothing stopped him until he gave the same bath to a ten-year-old girl.”

Reardon said nothing.

“That’s the way it’ll be with this case,” Mathesson said. “Same thing. He won’t stop with animals. He won’t stop with these deer. Not if I know this guy. He’s really weird, and that means he’ll be hard to catch.”

“Well, anyway, let’s get on it,” Reardon said wearily. “We have to catch him sometime.”

“Sure.” Mathesson nodded toward the covered bodies. “You want to see them?”

“Yes,” Reardon said.

Mathesson lit a cigarette and walked over to one body. “This is the worst one.” With one quick gesture he jerked the covering from the body of the fallow deer.

Reardon was jolted by what he saw. The head had been reduced to a pulpy mass. The partition between the nostrils had been severed with one clean blow. One eyeball had been gouged from the head and now dangled by its distended muscles between the socket and the upper jaw. The neck and upper torso were such a patchwork of cuts and bruises that it would have been difficult to tell the color of the deer without looking at its hindquarters. Both front legs were broken and one was almost severed at the knee joint.

Suddenly Reardon was seized by an almost uncontrollable sadness. He stepped back from the body and took a deep breath to stop the shuddering sensation in his chest.

“You all right?” Mathesson asked.

Reardon pressed his fingernails into his palm. Quickly he looked away from the deer, focusing his attention on the crowd in the distance. He tried to find a face to hold on to but the distance was too great, the features too blurred.

“Reardon?” Mathesson took Reardon by the arm. “Hey, you okay?”

Reardon turned away, gesturing for Mathesson to cover the body again. Mathesson swiftly obeyed and Reardon could hear the brittle sound of the tarpaulin unfolding out again, stretching over the body of the deer.

“You came back on duty too soon, John,” Mathesson said. “You should have taken a little more time off. When a man loses his wife he needs some time to take it easy, to adjust, you know?”

Reardon nodded. “I’ll be all right.”

“Sure you will. But still, maybe you should take some extra time off.”

“No,” Reardon said. “It’s okay.”

“But…”

Reardon looked at him intently. “It’s just a little gruesome after you’ve been away from it for a while.” He could feel himself trembling underneath his topcoat. He thrust his hands into his coat, his fingers searching for something to distract him. He grasped a ballpoint pen in one hand and began clicking the point in and out.

“Sure it is,” Mathesson said sympathetically. He smiled. “Christ, this one is a little gruesome even if you haven’t been away from it.”

“Uncover the other one,” Reardon said.

“Go have a cup of coffee first. There’s no big hurry about this, is there?”

“I want to finish it up now.”

Mathesson shrugged. “Okay, John.”

Slowly Mathesson made his way to the other covered body and bent down to pull the tarpaulin back. He looked at Reardon. “This one’s not so bad. Not like the other one. This one went out fast.”

When Mathesson pulled back the covering, Reardon saw what he meant. The deer’s spine had been severed at the neck in one powerful sweep, and the blood had surged from its throat in a broad, deep wave. As Reardon had suspected, death had come instantaneously to this fallow deer.

Reardon nodded for Mathesson to cover the body and gently released the pen in his pocket.

“Now why don’t you go have a cup of coffee?” Mathesson said. “All the legwork is being done. You can take a break. Nothing’s going to happen in the next few minutes.”

Reardon smiled. “Okay, maybe I will.”

As he left the cage, Reardon’s legs felt unstable under him. He was afraid and he knew that he was afraid of something that did not seem to have anything to do with the fallow deer. He was afraid of a surging feeling that had plagued him during the first years of his career, when he had walked the streets as a young policeman. In the neighborhood where he had grown up, in the destitute tenements and littered streets, there had been three avenues of escape: crime, the priesthood or the police force. He had never considered the first, but the decision to choose the police had had much of the priesthood in it. He had wanted to minister to distress, to protect helplessness and innocence from the abuse that constantly threatened them. It had been a romantic notion and he had quickly discarded its more sentimental aspects. But something of it had always lingered in him; nothing could destroy it altogether, and Reardon sensed that he should not let it be destroyed. He suspected that this sensation of protection and guardianship formed the better part of him, and he did not want to lose it. But now its power seemed to be rising in unpredictable and uncontrollable bursts. And he was afraid.