Blood Innocents

4

The next morning Reardon did not go directly to the precinct headquarters. Instead, he walked to the Children’s Zoo. For a while he sat on a bench opposite the cage of the fallow deer. The bodies had been taken away, and the cages had been meticulously washed of all signs of the violence that had taken place before dawn on Monday morning.

He gazed around the park, trying to determine in which direction the killer might have fled. Then he looked beyond the bars to the chalk-drawn positions where the bodies had been found. The back of the cage was a solid stone wall almost fifteen feet high. Without a ladder or a rope no one could have climbed over it. But in front of the cage two sidewalks led in different directions. The one to the right turned into a winding trail that eventually led all the way to the opposite side of the park. The other led directly to a flight of stairs which ascended to Fifth Avenue. The killer would have taken the route through the park, Reardon thought. He shrugged. It was a mundane assumption. Bloodied as he must have been, of course the killer would not have lurched up onto Fifth Avenue, even between three and three-thirty in the morning.

“Morning, John,” Mathesson said. He stood towering over Reardon, a breeze gently flapping the collar of his coat. He brought his large hands out of his coat pockets and pressed his hat more firmly down on his head.

Reardon had not seen him approach. “Hello, Jack,” he said.

“Trying to think like a freako this morning?”

“No,” Reardon said. “I’m trying to think like an inexperienced murderer.”

“So what did you come up with?”

Reardon smiled at the absurdity of what he had come up with. “That the killer probably took the trail through the park rather than the stairs to Fifth Avenue.”

Mathesson laughed. “That ought to get you a citation,” he said. “How are you this morning, John?”

Reardon knew Mathesson was still bothered by his response to the deer on Monday morning. “I’m fine.”

“Get a good night’s sleep?”

“I guess,” Reardon said. He looked at the cage again. “Did you check with the precinct this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Well, the lab is finished with the autopsy on the deer. There were fifty-seven wounds on one of them and just that one on the other.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, they’re bringing out another crew to look for the weapon. I guess the first crew just did a quick search. Anyway, the first group didn’t come up with anything, so they’re sending out another one.”

“Since when do they send out two separate crews to search for a weapon?” Reardon asked.

Mathesson smiled. “Since Wallace Van Allen got his deer sliced up, that’s since when.” He glanced resentfully at the great houses and luxury hotels that towered over the park. “Don’t this goddamn hubbub about a couple of animals seem a little much to you?”

“I suppose.”

“Two deer!” Mathesson said. “Can you believe that? Can you believe the amount of trouble and expense the department’s going to when it’s not even a murder case yet?”

Reardon said nothing.

“Two lousy deer. And you’d think it was the only crime in the city.” He shrugged and changed the subject. “What’s your plan for today?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Reardon said.

“That ought to please Piccolini.”

“What would you suggest then?”

Mathesson placed his hands in his overcoat pockets and looked helplessly at Reardon.

“Crews are covering the area looking for witnesses, right?” Reardon asked.

“Right.”

“And they haven’t come up with any, right?”

“Right.”

“And crews are looking for the weapon, right? And they haven’t found it yet, right?”

“Yeah,” Mathesson said.

“And there must be crews keeping it out of the papers for a while, right?”

Mathesson smiled and said, “Right.”

“Okay, that’s it. No witnesses, no weapon and no publicity.”

“How about the wounds?” Mathesson asked. “Could they mean anything?”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fifty-seven wounds on one body and just one on the other?” Reardon said. “You’re grabbing for straws, and that’s always a mistake.”

“Yeah,” Mathesson said. He sat down next to Reardon. “Two lousy deer.” He leaned back, arms stretched casually along the backrest of the bench, and stared up through the trees. “You know, old Wallace himself could have been a pretty good witness if he had some binoculars.”

“What do you mean?”

Mathesson pointed to a line of trees at the top of a twenty-five-story apartment house overlooking Fifth Avenue. “See those trees, the ones on top of that building?”

“Yeah,” Reardon answered.

“That’s the Van Allen penthouse.”

Reardon stared for a moment at the building. He could tell that the wind was rustling through the trees that grew incongruously and imperiously hundreds of feet above Fifth Avenue.

When Reardon returned to the precinct house later that morning, he reviewed the arrest sheet for the previous day. For the last twenty-four hours people had been molesting each other in the accustomed fashion. They had been stealing from and killing each other, raping and falsely accusing each other, and running out on debts. Someone named Bill Rob-bins had attacked his mother with a ballpoint pen in a restaurant on 79th Street. Two teenagers named Thompson and Berger had drunkenly run down a pedestrian on Second Avenue. A homosexual had propositioned a plainclothes officer in the washroom of Grand Central Station. Two construction workers had wrecked a bar on First Avenue. At another bar a few blocks away an off-duty policeman had beaten his wife to a pulp in full view of twenty-seven people. Some of them had still been cheering him on when patrolmen arrived and arrested everyone, spectators included, for disorderly conduct.

Reardon wearily ran his fingers through his hair and continued reading the arrest sheet, his eyes reviewing the crimes, roaming up and down the streets and avenues where they were committed, through the roster of whores, pimps, muggers, purse snatchers and drunks, through the embittered marriages, the turncoat friends, amateur arsonists, and everywhere through hopelessly flailing rage. But he did not stop. He was looking for something, and about two-thirds down the third page he found it. The first thing he noticed was the place the arrest had been made: the steps leading up to the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Central Park Zoo on 64th Street. Quickly, he ran his finger across the page for the time of the arrest: Monday… 3:35 A.M. There was little other information available on the report. Someone named Winthrop Lewis Daniels had been arrested for possession of cocaine.

Reardon looked up from his desk. “Mathesson,” he called. Me saw Mathesson turn away from the water cooler in the hall and approach his desk.

“I got something here,” Reardon said.

Mathesson was smiling. “Find some more blood?”

Reardon handed him the arrest sheet. “About a third of the way up from the bottom. That cocaine bust. Take a look at that.”

“Winthrop Lewis Daniels.” Mathesson said. He looked at Reardon. “Who’s that?”

“I don’t know, but look at where that bust was made. Look at when it was made.”

Mathesson’s eyes resumed to the sheet, widened in recognition. “Well, I’ll be goddamned. That puts that hophead close to the deer, don’t it. Shit, he couldn’t have been more than two or three blocks away.”

“That’s right.”

Mathesson smiled. “Now wouldn’t that be a lucky break.”

“It says Langhof made that bust,” Reardon said. “Is he around the precinct house?”

“He’s upstairs.”

“Tell him I want to talk to him.”

When Mathesson had gone Reardon looked at the arrest sheet again. He took a map of Central Park from one of his desk drawers and unfolded it on his desk. The map confirmed what he already knew: that Daniels had been arrested two blocks away from the cages of the fallow deer maybe five minutes or so after they had been killed.

He heard steps coming down the stairway at the rear of the precinct house and turned to see Mathesson and Langhof approaching his desk. Langhof was dressed in a neatly pressed uniform, his cap blocked squarely on his head, with the badge shining brightly from his chest like a small golden flame.

“Mathesson here says you want to talk to me,” he said.

“Yeah,” Reardon said. “I want to talk to you about that cocaine bust you made yesterday.”

“What about it?”

“Where did you pick Daniels up?”

Langhof looked at Reardon suspiciously. “Right on Fifth Avenue. Why?”

Reardon reversed the map on his desk so that Langhof could read it. “Where on Fifth Avenue?”

Langhof placed his finger directly on the steps at 64th Street. “Right there.”

“On the steps?”

“Yeah. Right on the steps.”

“The arrest sheet said you busted him at 3:35 A. M. on Monday morning. Is that right?”

Langhof looked at Reardon. “That’s exactly right. I’m always real careful about the time. I always get that right. A lot depends on that.”

“What was Daniels doing?” Mathesson asked.

“He was standing on top of the stairs. He was kind of leaning on that stone pillar at the top.”

“Just leaning?”

“No, he wasn’t just leaning!” snapped Langhof. “He was snorting coke, the stupid little fuck.”

“On the street?”

“Right there on Fifth Avenue,” Langhof said. “We cruised right up to him in the patrol car. I just kind of looked out the window, just glancing out, you know, not really looking for anything, and there he was. Snorting right on the fucking street.” He shook his head in amazement. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought maybe this was some kind of joke, a come-on, you know, some kind of April fool type thing to make us look stupid. I tapped my partner and pointed to this guy. He says, ‘Do you think that’s for real?’ I couldn’t believe that a guy would just stand around on the street and snort coke. Not even at three or four in the morning.”

Mathesson smiled. “So what did he say, your partner?”

“He said we’d better find out.”

Mathesson seemed delighted with the story. “Then what happened?”

“We both got out of the car. We just strolled over to this guy – what’s his name? – Daniels. We just strolled over to him.”

“He didn’t try to get away?”

“Get away?” Langhof laughed. “He didn’t even know we were around till we were right under his goddamn nose. He was too busy with that fucking coke. He was really into it, you know.” Langhof grinned. “Dumb bastard. No. Not dumb. He just didn’t give a shit. We asked him what he was doing, and he just looked at us. You know, like we were garbage, like what the hell was it our business what he was doing.” He looked at Reardon. “I never seen such a thing in my life. I mean there this little prick was, snorting coke like a bastard, and he just looks at us like we come from Mars or something, like we was spoiling his good time, you know?”

Reardon nodded.

“Then what happened?” Mathesson asked.

“Then my partner says, ‘What you got there, buddy?’ and he still didn’t say nothing. He just stared at us. So I grabbed the bag. The coke was in a little cellophane pouch. So I grabbed it. I took a sniff. Coke. So we busted his little ass.”

“You took him to the precinct house?” Reardon asked.

“Yeah, we shoved him in the patrol car, told him his rights and all that shit, and took him right to the precinct house. And we didn’t touch that little prick either,” Langhof blurted suddenly, angrily. “So if this little third degree we’re having is about police brutality, you can forget it.”

“What makes you think this has anything to do with something like that?” Reardon asked.

“Well, that’s the way it goes, ain’t it?” Langhof said.

“What do you mean?”

“Look, the minute we got that little fucker to the precinct house he says he wants to call his old man. So we let him. That’s his right, right? So we let him. And Jesus Christ, there was three goddamn lawyers down here before we could get the arrest report written out. He was on the streets again in no time.”

“You boys better watch out who you fuck with on the east side of Central Park,” Mathesson kidded. “You’ll be the ones that end up getting your asses busted.”

“Well, it was a solid bust,” Langhof said bitterly, “a solid goddamn bust, whether it sticks or not. No matter what you guys report.”

“We’re not trying to break your bust,” Reardon said.

“You’re not?”

“No, we’re not.”

Langhof seemed to relax. “Hell, I figured the department was embarrassed by it, or something, afraid of all those lawyers or something like that.”

“No,” Mathesson said, “we’re checking into something else. We don’t give a shit about this bust.”

“Did you notice anything strange about Daniels?” Reardon asked.

“No.” Langhof scratched his head, subdued now. “No, nothing that I can think of except the way he just didn’t seem to care about us, about being busted.”

“Did you notice if he looked out of breath, tired, anything like that?” Reardon asked.

“No.”

“How about blood?” Mathesson asked. “Did you notice any blood on him?”

“Blood?”

“Yeah, blood.”

“No, we didn’t see no blood. This guy was very straight-looking. Well dressed. He could have walked right out of a TV commercial. He was no slob.” Langhof stared at Reardon curiously. “What is it with this guy anyway?”

“Reardon thought he might have had something to do with the deer killing,” Mathesson said.

“The deer were killed between three and three-thirty the same morning you made the bust,” Reardon said. “Daniels could have been involved in it and still be on Fifth Avenue by the time you busted him. Or he could have seen something. Maybe he came through the park, you know? He might have passed the deer cages just about the time they were being killed.”

Langhof shook his head. “Well, he didn’t look like he could have killed no deer. He didn’t have no blood on him or look tired or anything like that. He was too cool, man. That’s what we noticed the most. And he didn’t have no blood on him.”

“You sure?” Mathesson said.

“Hell, yes. Come on, Mathesson, don’t you think we’d have noticed something like that?”

“Where is this Daniels now?” Reardon asked.

“At home, I guess.” Langhof pulled a notebook from his back pocket and flipped through it. “Here it is. He lives at Thirty-one East Sixty-Eighth Street.”

“Any apartment number?”

“No, it’s a townhouse I guess.”

Reardon wrote the address in his notebook. “Okay. Thanks.”

“What do you think?” Mathesson asked Reardon after Langhof had gone back upstairs.

“About what?”

“About this guy Daniels?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Reardon said quietly, “but I want to talk to him.”

Mathesson grinned. “You’d better take a dozen or so lawyers with you before you try that.”

Reardon did not smile. “Maybe so.”

“I’ll go talk to Langhof’s partner,” Mathesson said. “Maybe he noticed something.”

“Okay,” Reardon said. “Have him go through the whole thing, just like Langhof.”

“Right.”

After Mathesson had gone, Reardon sat down at his desk and looked at the map again, running his fingers back and forth over the inch of space that divided the stairs at Fifth Avenue from the cages of the fallow deer. He remembered Langhof’s description of Daniels as the two patrolmen had approached him, the way he had leaned casually at the top of the stairs, the way he seemed to regard the police as little more than a brief, irritating intrusion. He wondered how much money it took to buy confidence like that.

Reardon planned to spend the rest of the afternoon interviewing two of the three members of the night crew assigned to the Children’s Zoo. The third regular member, Andros Petrakis, had been working only irregularly of late, since the illness of his wife often made it necessary for him to remain at home. On the Sunday afternoon prior to the killing Petrakis’ daughter had informed the Parks Department that her father would not be coming to work his shift but that he hoped to be back at work within a few days. Consequently, only two people had been scheduled to work in the Children’s Zoo the morning the fallow deer were killed.

Reardon’s first interview was with Gilbert Noble, who had spoken to the patrolmen called to the scene. He was a large black man who had worked for the Parks Department for twelve years. Reardon’s preliminary investigation had established that Noble had no criminal record and that he had never been treated for emotional problems of any kind. He had been hospitalized once for an injury sustained while at work as an employee of the Parks Department, but the department had paid all of Noble’s hospital expenses, as well as his salary during hospitalization. There was no reason to suspect that he held any animosity toward the Parks Department.

“You were working in the zoo the night the fallow deer were killed, is that right, Mr. Noble?” Reardon began.

Noble sat opposite Reardon, his eyes darting from one corner of the room to another. He was nervous, but that was common. In itself, it meant nothing. “That’s right,” he said.

“Were you in the zoo at around three-thirty on Monday morning?” Reardon tried to make his voice as casual as he could.

“Yeah,” Noble said. “Yeah, I was there. I was in the zoo. I got to work a little before midnight.”

“Where were you in the zoo at about that time?”

“I was cleaning the elephant cages.”

Reardon jotted Noble’s answer down in his notebook. “Where are they located?” he asked in the same casual tone with which he might have asked directions from a stranger on the street.

“They’re at the far end of the zoo, behind a big building. The elephants stay in that building at night.”

“How long would you say you were working in the elephant cages?”

“Maybe a half hour or so. Maybe a little more.”

“From when to when?”

“From about three to three-thirty.”

“Did you see anybody in the zoo during that time?”

“No, I didn’t see anybody. I didn’t see nothing while I was in them elephant cages or on the way to them either. I would have remembered seeing anybody in the zoo around then. Ain’t nobody in the zoo that time of night.”

“Did you hear anything while you worked at the elephant cages?” Reardon asked.

“No.”

“Anything at all?”

“No.” Noble paused, gazed toward the ceiling. “Well…”

“Anything at all,” Reardon said, “no matter how insignificant it might seem to you.”

“Well, you know,” Noble said slowly, “I think I did hear something while I was working with them elephants. I’d say it was about… let me see, well, about three o’clock or a little after. Had to be before three-thirty, though.”

“What was it you heard?”

“Well, just a kind of scuffing sound, like something being pushed or dragged on the ground, on the pavement, maybe.” Noble thought for a moment. “I mean, really there was kind of two different sounds.”

“Two sounds?”

“Yeah. One was like… like metal being pushed or dragged along the sidewalk. But the other sound was kind of muffled, you know?”

“Did you hear them at the same time?”

“Yeah, right at the same time. Right together.”

“So whatever was being dragged or pushed was partly covered and partly not covered.”

“That might be right,” Noble said. “I don’t know if it means anything or not.”

Reardon smiled. “Maybe not,” he said, “but we like to know all the details. Do you know where the sound came from?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Noble said. “It was just on the other side of the elephant house, that’s all. But I could hear it pretty good. It’s real quiet in the zoo at that time of the morning and the sounds only lasted a few minutes. I didn’t pay much attention. But it wasn’t like a continuous sound. You’d hear it, then it would stop.”

“There was a pause in between the sounds?”

“Yeah,” Noble said, “like a pause. First you’d hear it, then it would stop, then you’d hear it again.”

“How long did this sound last? How long did you hear it?”

“Just a little while.”

“It passed then?”

“Yeah.”

Reardon nodded and jotted in his notebook. “Did you hear anything else while you were there?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“When did you find the fallow deer?”

“About three-thirty. I went to see if Bryant was around. I figured since Petrakis was out again – I mean since he wasn’t going to come to work – well, maybe Bryant would help me do the deer cage.”

“Clean it?”

“Yeah, clean it.”

“Was Bryant around?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“Where was he?”

Noble shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably working somewhere else around.”

“So you went to clean the deer cage yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“And you found them?”

Noble grimaced. “It was terrible,” he said. “They was beat up awful bad. Just awful. Blood everywhere. I never seen nothing like it.”

“Yes,” Reardon said. “What did you do when you found them like that?”

“I called the police.”

“Immediately?”

“Yeah. I run right to the little workroom in the main building and called the cops. I was real scared myself, you know? I mean, I figured that a guy that would do that to them deer might hang around and do it to a person just as easy, you know? So I just wanted the cops to get on over there in a hurry.”

“Did you see anyone at all in the zoo between, say, midnight and three in the morning?”

“Sure,” Noble said, “there was a couple making out on the bench across from the bird house till about two-thirty.”

“Did you see them leave?”

“Yeah. They went up the stairs to Fifth Avenue.”

“What did they look like?”

“They looked like Puerto Ricans to me,” Noble said with a little grin.

“Anything unusual about them?”

“No. Nothing that I can remember. Just a couple making out.”

“Anybody else?”

“An old man. I remember thinking that that was odd. You know, old people don’t usually come out that time of night.”

“When was he there?”

“Same time as those Puerto Ricans. He came by just before they left.”

“Did he stop?”

“No, he just kept walking right through the zoo and up to Fifth Avenue. He was walking kind of fast. I guess he was a little afraid of being out that time of night.”

“Did anything strike you as unusual about him?” Reardon asked.

“No. And those were the only people I saw.”

“And you’re sure that all of them had left the zoo by two-thirty?”

“Yeah, as far as I know, they was all gone. I didn’t see nobody except Bryant after that.”

The interrogation lasted for another hour. Reardon went over each detail again. He went over the sounds Noble had heard. He asked him to describe the couple. He took him back through his statements about the old man he claimed to have seen and asked him if he knew whether or not either the couple or the old man had gone into any of the buildings on Fifth Avenue. Noble said that they had simply disappeared up the stairs and he had not seen them again. Had he seen any of them before in the zoo? No. Had he noticed anyone spending a lot of time at or near the cage of the fallow deer? No. Reardon asked him what he knew about his fellow workers. Harry Bryant, Noble said, was a “funny guy” who constantly made jokes about the animals, particularly when they were in the process of copulation. Did Bryant show any resentment toward his work? No. Toward the animals? No. Did he ever drink on duty? No. Andros Petrakis was “a nervous type” who did not say much. But as far as Noble knew, Petrakis liked his work, enjoyed the animals as much as could be expected and bore no grudges related to the zoo.

After Noble left, Reardon reviewed the notes he had taken during the questioning. The interrogation of Gilbert Noble had established at least one possibility. If the scuffing sounds that Noble heard were not made by the killer but by someone else, then it was possible that the unknown person might have seen the killing. But what could have made the sounds Noble described? Reardon thought they could have been made by a man with a limp dragging one foot behind him after each step. But there were two sounds, one metallic and harsh and the other muffled, and they had occurred simultaneously. In that case, Reardon thought, Noble may have actually heard the killer dragging two weapons behind him as he walked, one of them wrapped in something, the other uncovered. But the sounds Noble described were not continuous, like objects being dragged. Instead, they were interrupted by pauses.

Reardon went into Piccolini’s office and told him what Noble had described. Piccolini leaned back in his chair and chewed a cigar. Anything less than an arrest seemed uninteresting to him.

“So what do you make of it?” he asked after Reardon had finished.

“I really don’t know,” Reardon said.

Piccolini crushed the stub of his cigar into the ashtray on his desk. “Mr. Van Allen has asked to speak with the head of the investigation. He wants a firsthand report. I made an appointment for you to see him at three-thirty this afternoon.”

“Schedule him for tomorrow morning,” Reardon said. “I’m seeing Bryant this afternoon.”

“No,” Piccolini said. “Schedule Bryant for tomorrow morning.”

“Look, Mario, if Noble heard something it’s just possible that Bryant saw something.”

“It can wait.”

“You’ve been a detective a long time,” Reardon said. “You know better than that.”

Piccolini opened a desk drawer, pulled out some papers and threw them on his desk. He started shuffling through them. “Bryant will have to wait,” he said.

Reardon shrugged. “All right. When is Van Allen coming over?”

“He’s not coming over here. You’re going over there.”

“Where?”

“His place on Fifth Avenue. Right across from the zoo.” Piccolini took a small piece of paper and started to write down Van Allen’s address.

“I know where it is,” Reardon said brusquely, and turned to leave the office. For the first time in all the years he’d worked for Piccolini, he did not close the door behind him.