The Innocent Victims

Tate had forgotten his carton of cigarettes, had left them in his locker, and that was how he happened to be at precinct when the kid came in, in what the doctor later described as a case of shock. Barney was on the desk and in his heavy-footed way he tried to bully the kid into talking coherently. Tate took a look at her torn clothes and bruised face, and he went over and took the hand and wrist that were like ice and took her over to where she could sit down, winking at Barney as he did so, because he didn’t want Barney sore again.

Once he had her sitting down he went back and asked Barney to get hold of a doctor, asked it in such a way that it became half Barney’s idea. Then Tate went back and sat down beside the shaking kid. She was, he guessed, about fifteen. Two years older than his own Adele, four years older than Mike.

She had so much rumpled up hair it made her thin face look small. She had makeup on her mouth, and her clothes looked cheap and new and too tight for her, and she had bleached a streak back through her brown hair. Little kid out for kicks on a summer evening.

Tate didn’t keep after her. He sat in his quietness and he waited, thinking she was probably from this neighborhood, and this was the neighborhood Adele would be growing up in too, that is unless he could get a better rating, or somebody started doing something about prices.

He got her name and address just before the doctor came. Hazel Lesarta, and she lived with her people at apartment 4 C at 1798 Christholm, which was about five blocks from precinct. Dr. Feltman arrived then and looked at her and decided he better take her on over to Cooper General where he could do a better examination and give her a shot so she could get a night’s sleep. He agreed to hold off on the shot until Tate could talk to her, and Tate said he’d be along after he let the family know about her.

After they went out, with Feltman helping her along, Barney said, “You bucking for corporal?”

“A free gift of my services to this great community. Besides, that stuff, it gets personal with me.”

“I know how you feel, Dan. Thank God I got Deedee married off and living way the hell and gone out in the country. Want I should put you down for this? You and Ricks?”

“Sure.” He phoned Jen and told her he’d be later than usual, and heard her exasperated sigh, and told her solemnly she should have married something she could chain in the cellar, and then when she wanted to feed it on time, she could carry a dish down there. That relaxed her a little.

Carrying the carton of cigarettes he walked the short hot city blocks through the night to where the Lesarta’s lived. The outside door apparently didn’t lock. He walked up to 4 C and knocked, and he could hear music. A man opened the door, a beefy man in a T-shirt with a can of beer in his hand. There was one lamp on over in a corner, and a big television set was turned on. Some kids sat on the floor and a woman turned to look toward the door.

Tate showed the badge and said, “Mr. Lesarta?”

“That’s right. What’s up?”

“I’m sorry, it’s your daughter. Hazel.”

The woman came over fast, squeezing by the big man who nearly blocked the door. “What’s the matter? Where is she? Take me where she is!”

“She’s okay. She’s over at Cooper General. Couldn’t get much out of her when she came running into the precinct station over on Flower Street. It looks like she had some trouble over in the park. It was in the paper to keep young girls out of that park until we nail whoever’s making the trouble.”

The woman sagged against the door frame. “Oh, dear God,” she said. “Oh, dear God. The fiend got her. My poor baby. My poor baby.”

Tate stared at the two of them, and looked in at the kids sitting on the floor, when kids that age should have been in bed two hours ago, not up after eleven ruining their eyes.

“Why didn’t you keep your poor baby out of the park?” he asked mildly.

The big man bristled. “What the hell is that to you? Anyway, what can you do with kids. Lock ’em up? She’s fourteen and looks older. Kids got a right to use that park. Why don’t you people get that fiend? My God, he’s been operating all summer.”

There was no point in going into it. Twenty acres of unfenced park, full of trees and bushes, inadequately lighted at night.

The woman said, “I’ll get shoes on.”

“She’s okay. They’ve given her a shot. She’ll be asleep anyhow. And they don’t like visitors in the wards this time of night. Why don’t you go over in the morning?”

The woman made merely a token struggle. When the door was shut Tate could hear the program through the flimsy panel again.

Tate followed the soft-footed nurse down between the beds of the ten-bed ward. There were white screens around the end bed, a small lamp glowing white through the screen. There was a sound of sleep in the ward. Someone moaned softly with each exhalation.

The nurse turned and they stood outside the screens. She said in a barely audible voice, “This one wasn’t hurt as badly as that last girl. She’s had a pill to quiet her. I’ll give her shot as soon as you leave, Sergeant. And Dr. Feltman said there was quite a bit of tissue under her fingernails. He cleaned it out and said he’d leave it at the police lab on his way home.”

“Thanks.”

“Please be as quiet as you can. If she starts to get too excited, use the call button.”

Hazel opened her eyes as he sat down beside the bed. Someone had fixed her hair, scrubbed off her make-up. Her facial bruises were darker. She looked quite small and young in the bed.

“I saw you at the station. You’re a cop, aren’t you? Gee, my voice is all rusty like. He hurt my throat.”

“I want to ask you about it. Tell me everything you can remember.”

“I don’t care to discuss it.”

He smiled a bit, inwardly, recognizing the ersatz drama of the statement as being right out of almost any movie.

“I know it’s tough, Hazel. It’s a terrible thing. But if you tell me, maybe we can keep it from happening to some other girl.”

He saw her think that over and nod agreement. He suspected she would have been disappointed if she had been denied the chance to report to the police. At the moment her fright and pain were submerged by the drama of the situation. And the heartbreak would come later.

“Well, I went to the Empire with my best girl friend, Rose Merelli. We got out about quarter to ten and there were some boys we knew, just sort of standing around. You know like they do. We kidded around and we said it was shorter to go home walking through the park, but we were scared. Really, we weren’t scared, because Rose and me, we’ve walked there lots of times. But we wanted the boys to walk with us. They’re Hank and Dick. I don’t know their last names, and I don’t think Rose does either, but they’re in third year high. We all sat on one of those benches in the park, and they got sorta fresh, you know. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it was Dick, but I was sorta with Hank and he’s too rough. I got sore and said I was going home alone, and they said go ahead, and I guess they thought I’d come running back, scared of the dark or something. Gee, I wish I had. It was pretty dark, you know like it is in there at night, and when you’re alone you think you keep hearing things, and you get nervous, you know. I was going real fast, almost sorta running, and this arm comes, gee, out of no place and grabs me right around the middle and yanks me back through a couple of those big bushes. I tried to yell and I made one little squeaky sound before he got my throat in his hand. He had sort of turned me around and I clawed him. I clawed him real good while he was carrying me up a sort of little hill away from the path. When he got me up the hill, I guess he was sore because I’d clawed his face. He held me by the throat, but not as tight as before and he hit me all over the face with his other hand until I was so weak and dizzy I hardly didn’t know where I was or anything. Then he... did it, and then I could hear him running away, hear him smashing bushes sort of as he ran away.”

“Then you came to the station.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you see his face?”

“Sort of, but not to know him, gee, if I saw him on the street. When it’s dark like that, a face is just a pale thing.”

“How big was he?”

“Pretty big, I guess.”

“Young or old?”

“I don’t know. I’d guess old. Maybe thirty. But I don’t know why I’d think that.”

“Did he wear a hat?”

“No. I’m sure he didn’t wear any hat.”

“How about his clothes?”

“I think they were dark, sort of.”

“How about his voice?”

“He didn’t say anything. He did kinda grunt when I clawed him down the cheeks with both hands, but that was the only sound he made. I marked him up, you bet.”

“Now, Hazel, I know it was a terrible experience, but I want you to close your eyes and think back. Think of it all over again, and try to remember any little impression you might have had that you haven’t told me. Anything that might help us get a line on him.”

The girl closed her eyes obediently. Her lips were compressed. He added softly, “Go through all the senses. Sound, touch, sight, smell.”

She opened her eyes. “There’s something about smell. Sure. He had some drinks, I guess. I could smell that.” She frowned. “But there’s something else too. I can’t quite remember.”

“Try hard, Hazel.”

“Gee, I am. But I guess it wasn’t a special smell like you could give a name to. He just smelled... well, clean.”

“Clean?”

“Gee, the boys I know. When it’s hot like this, they get a kind of sweaty smell I don’t like. But he smelled... oh, like soap and pine trees and talcum powder. Except for the drinking smell, just... kind of clean.”

Tate questioned her further, but she couldn’t add anything. She hadn’t gotten much, but at least she’d given them two things the others had not been able to do. She had marked him, and she had given a clue to social strata. Up until this incident, they hadn’t known if he was a bum, a tough neighborhood kid, a visitor from the suburbs. And he somehow trusted her estimate of age, though to classify thirty as old made him feel a bit rueful.

He stood up. “Thanks a lot, Hazel.”

“Will someone tell my folks? They’ll wonder where I am.”

“I stopped by. They’ll be over in the morning.”

“Oh. Look, did you have to tell them what... happened to me?”

“I thought they ought to know.”

He saw her eyes fill, and she turned her head away. That gesture seemed to be more that of a woman than a child. He said good night to her, but she didn’t turn back or speak. He looked down at her for a few moments, then patted her lax cool hand a bit awkwardly and left. Benny Darmond of the Bulletin was waiting for him out by the main desk, and fell in step with him.

“Making five in six weeks?” Benny asked.

“Making five. You better come on in with me. Maybe the paper can help, but I got to get permission. And I want to phone Feltman too before I give you the dope — that is, if I can get permission.”

“Can she identify?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to tell me yet.”

“Not yet.”

Benny Darmond waited. Tate made his calls, got his permission, checked with Feltman, went back out and sat down by Benny. “I’ve got permission, but it’s got to go in the other two papers too, Benny.”

“Oh, fine!”

“It’s a public service. Relax. Maybe you can prove newspapers are good for something. Don’t use the girl’s name, of course. She’s got long fingernails. Feltman said she really gouged the guy. There was enough meat under her nails so the lab can get a blood type. Both cheeks she said. So we want it spread around. Be a good citizen. Report immediately to the police if you see or hear of a man with hamburg where his cheeks should be. Anybody with fresh facial bandages. And be on a special lookout for a man who might be around thirty, and who is in a good income bracket. Comfortable, anyway.”

Benny nodded. He looked bored, but his eyes were bright and shrewd. He said, “Once in my gayer more reckless days a young lady sharpened her claws on my kisser. It was a source of painful embarrassment to me. And it took two weeks to heal. I think she had them dipped in some exotic oriental poison. Any thing else?”

“Facial lacerations could be combined with bruised knuckles, but we can’t be sure of that.”

Benny hurried off to the press phones upstairs. Dan Tate went home. Jen sat at the kitchen table. She gave him a long cool look. “Name, please?”

He sat down opposite her and tried to smile. The look of coolness changed to one of concern. “What is it, Dan? What is it, honey?”

“It’s another one.”

She put her hand over his. “I’m... sorry, Dan. It’s sickening. But you’ve got to stop making it a personal crusade. It isn’t worth what it does to you.”

He told her about this one. This scared little kid, who had run up against a dark place in the human soul. He told her about the plan, and he shut his hands hard and he said, “This time we get him. What can he do? Wear a Halloween costume? Hide in the closet until his face heals? This time we get him good.”

The papers cooperated. They all gave it page one-boxes. An hour after the papers hit the streets it became obvious that Tate and Ricks would need five more men in addition to the three extra men assigned. By midnight they had cleared thirty-one men and had a backlog of twenty more. There were absurdities. A man of seventy-eight with a recently lanced boil. A husky twelve-year-old boy whose puppy had bitten him on the cheek. A weighty and indignant banker whose old-fashioned straight razor had slipped. One husky young millworker looked for a time like a hot prospect. But the gouges on both cheeks were in payment for a term of less than endearment that he had used on his young wife, and he was able to prove he had been on night shift, from four to midnight the previous night.

The papers ran it again and again, but in each successive edition they gave it a bit less space. After five days had passed, it was a disconsolate paragraph on page eleven, and Dan Tate realized he was becoming most difficult to live with, even to the extent of snarling at Adele and sending her trotting off in tears.

Tate and Ricks were the only ones still assigned, and it had become a part-time project even for them, and Tate knew that his idea had gone sour to the extent that they were, though not admitting it, merely waiting for the next victim to report, or, as in the case of the second victim of the five, waiting to get the report after the examination of the body of the deceased.

Seven days after the papers gave up, Dan Tate took Jen and the kids on a Sunday picnic out at McGell Falls. He ate hugely of cold chicken and potato salad and stretched out with his head propped against a tree.

How did the guy get away with it? Flesh-colored bandages? No, in those first two days, those would have been spotted. What kind of a job could he have where he didn’t show his face? Deep-sea diver? Not five hundred miles from the ocean.

Try again, Daniel, my boy. Slow and easy. The guy we will say has a good job. A home. Maybe, like some of them, he has a wife and kids of his own. Would the little woman patch him up and hide him? Not very damn likely.

No, he’d just take off. He’d go far far away...

Tate sat up. He stared at Jen.

“What is it, darling?” she asked.

“Kindly kick me in the head. Right here.” He got up and paced back and forth.

Jen sighed at last and said, “Okay, okay. Round up the kids. I had a hunch this couldn’t last.”

Once he got back to town he pried Oscar Wardle out of his comfortable back yard, and made fat Oscar meet him down at Oscar’s small third-floor office in police headquarters.

Tate was waiting when Oscar appeared, puffing from the two flights of stairs. Oscar said, “Young man, you are a dedicated policeman, and you annoy hell out of me.”

“Dedicated only to laying these meat hooks on one citizen. Then I go back to being as lazy as you are, Oscar.”

Oscar unlocked the door and they went in. Oscar, without stirring out of the small office, had located missing persons all over the world. His filing system was his own, and a failure was a personal affront.

He listened to what Tate wanted, and then dug out his files. “Let’s see now. Some cooky who took off on or about the tenth, eh. Let’s see. No, this guy’s wife says he left in 1987, and she’s just beginning to wonder about him. Here’s a missing woman. This might be it right here. James Harrison Vayse. Age 33. Occupation, Industrial Engineer. His wife, Ethel Ann Vayse, who resides at number nineteen South Ridge Terrace, reported him on the eleventh as having done gone, vehicle and all. Seems he never came home on the night of the ninth which was unusual, but not too unusual. Still gone on the night of the tenth. She came in on the afternoon of the eleventh. Nice woman. Concerned, but not all steamed up like some of them get.”

“Got his business address?”

“Delaney and Vayse. The Dover Building. Let’s see, that makes him gone for eighteen days.”

“What have you done?”

“It smelled to me like a wife-trouble thing. Found out the car is in her name, a ’52 Buick Roadmaster, so I put the plates through as hot.”

Tate thanked him for coming down. It was six o’clock when he parked his small car in front of 19 South Ridge Terrace. It was a very different world out there, eight miles from the center of town. Not at all like the short blocks, thick with heat, not like the park. This was a world of curving asphalt roads. The house was of stone and wide vertical boards stained silver grey.

He pushed the bell and waited. A tall woman came around the side of the house and looked at him, and looked at his car and said, “Yes?” She was a woman with a strong-looking body and a look of plainness in her face. She wore tailored blue shorts and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her legs were long and tanned and a bit on the heavy side.

“I’m from the police, m’am. Sergeant Tate. Are you Mrs. Vayse?”

She was quite still for a moment. “You’ve found him.” It was more statement than question.

“No. But there’s a few more questions we’d like to ask. If you don’t mind.”

“Of course. We’re out on the terrace. Won’t you come around this way?”

He followed her. She handled herself gracefully and well, and he saw that though her face looked rather plain, it also was a face with good bones, and a pleasant, quiet dignity. A small dark pretty woman sat in a terrace chair with her knees pulled up, a drink on the wide arm of the chair.

“Betty, this is Sergeant Tate. Mrs. Homer, Sergeant.”

“Have they found Jim?”

“Not yet, Betty,” Mrs. Vayse said.

Betty stood up and finished her drink quickly. “I think it’s perfectly stinking, dear. I’ll see you in the morning. Nice to meet you, Sergeant Tate.”

She went off across the wide lawn, slipped through a gap in the high cedar hedge.

“Please sit down, Sergeant. Can I get you a drink?”

“Not right now, thanks. I... well, I don’t know exactly how to go about this. We picked up the factual information, of course. Now I’d like to go a bit further into the... psychological and emotional factors.”

Mrs. Vayse looked at him steadily. “Of course. What do you want to know?”

“A decision to leave... sometimes they think about it a long time. Sometimes it is something they decided right off.”

She smiled for the first time. “I have to do some soul-baring?”

“I’m sorry. It might help.”

She lit a cigarette with a bit too much care. “It hasn’t been a good marriage for some time, Sergeant. Eight years of it, and the last three have been... disappointing. Having no children might be a factor, of course. Having him leave like that is... almost ludicrous. You see, I was going to do the same thing, though not as furtively. I had very nearly reached a decision to ask for a divorce.”

“In what way weren’t you getting along?”

“That’s what is hard to explain. I married a man with a will, and opinions, and... this sounds crazy, a man who was a human being. About three years ago he began to change. Into sort of a clockwork thing. I’m a strong person. Too strong, maybe. I want my own way. If I get it none of the time, I’m unhappy. If I get it all the time, I’m more unhappy. There stopped being any resistance in Jimmy. As though he had gone away somewhere, and the thing that was left didn’t care to make an issue of anything. A sort of mechanical man.”

“Did you try to ask him about the change?”

“Of course. It was like he didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.”

“Did he go away at times and leave you, with no explanation?”

“Not for quite a long time. Well, we had a lot of friends. But they dropped away. At parties, he’d just sit, or stand, and say nothing, and wear a far-off half smile. When we were home alone here, he’d just sit in a chair. He didn’t read any more, and he gave up his hobbies entirely. I’d ask him what he was thinking about and he’d get a confused look and tell me he wasn’t thinking about anything. I did manage to get him to a doctor about six months ago. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong. But after that he began going out alone without any explanation. I’d be in some other part of the house and hear him drive out. There were never any explanations, before or after.”

“This may sound pretty impertinent, Mrs. Vayse. But it does have a bearing. How about the physical side of your marriage?”

She lit another cigarette and he saw her fingers tremble. “It was never... what I’d hoped marriage would be. I think... either of us would have been better suited to some other person. I think if Jimmy had married some silly little flutter-head, a helpless and dependent sort of person, it would have been better for him. But I seem to have had the effect of... undermining his masculinity. And... for the last six months the physical angle was... nil.”

Tate sat silently for several moments. He asked, a bit harshly, “Do you love the guy?”

“Isn’t that a simplification? There’s a lot of kinds of love, isn’t there? In the way I think you mean, no. I want to divorce him. I’m thirty-two. I’ve got to get out and give myself a chance to have a better kind of love, and kids. But I’d always be interested in Jimmy, and what happens to him, and try to help him in any way I can.”

“I appreciate the way you’ve been frank with me, Mrs. Vayse.”

“I’ve had to take you on trust, Sergeant. Now I think you better tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I think maybe I can. I wasn’t going to. But you do seem to be a strong person.”

“Too strong, perhaps, Sergeant.”

“I think your husband is the man we want for rape and murder.”

He watched her and he could sense how, for her, the whole world seemed to falter and stop, and hang dead and still in the warmness of the fading day. He saw the weak smile of incredulity. He knew that behind that smile the quick strong intelligence was adding all the bits and pieces. And inevitably, the smile faded. The bones of her face looked more prominent then, as though the flesh had sagged. Her lips parted, and she leaned slowly forward, the palms of her hands covering her eyes, her forehead almost touching the round strong brown knees.

“Oh, dear God,” she said softly.

“Can I get you something?”

“I’m all right. Thanks. Give me a minute.”

Tate waited. She sat up finally. Tate thought, “You don’t age a tiny bit every day. You go along just the same, and then in a matter of minutes five years happens to you, happens to your face and your mind and your body.”

She said, “I should be full of protestations. I suppose I should tell you you’re mad. I can’t do that, of course. Because, in some crazy way, it was already in my mind. In my subconscious perhaps. In a little box, carefully sealed. You merely opened the lid, and it all came flooding out. It’s a... sickness in him.”

Tate looked at his fist. “That’s what the mental experts tell us we’re supposed to think. Just a sickness, like measles. And we’re supposed to be kind and loving and understanding, or something. Treat the poor guy. Hold his damn hand.”

“You’re bitter, Sergeant.”

“I guess so.”

“Then he won’t be back? Ever?”

“I’ve figured it out this far. I decided from what the last victim told me, that the man had a position. Then I decided that with his face gouged, he’d run even before we used the papers. He’d be that intelligent. He has a business, and a partner and a home. So I think he’ll be back. His face ought to be healed, nearly healed by now. He’ll be back with some gag line about getting away for a few weeks and thinking about life.”

“So you’ll have somebody watching the house?”

Tate stood up. “And have him spot the stake-out, because he’ll be looking for a stake-out, and then take off without stopping here? You told me you’re a strong woman.”

“How strong do I have to be? Do you want me to be strong enough to... welcome him and smile and... turn him in?”

He took out his notebook and scribbled a number on a back page, tore the sheet out and handed it to her. “This is my home phone. When I’m not there, there’ll be another number to call.”

She looked at the small piece of paper and did not take it.

“They were all young kids,” Tate said. “Young dumb scared kids.”

He dropped the bit of paper into her lap and walked back around the house and slammed the car door hard when he got in, and squealed his tires on the smooth asphalt curves as he drove out of there.

Monday afternoon Tate had lunch with Ricks in a back booth in a cheap restaurant just off Flower Street.

Tate said, “Foster Delaney, his name is. A very calm guy. Too damn calm and too damn cooperative. He said it was a bad time for this Vayse to take off. He said it was a real shame. But he wasn’t upset enough to suit me. I had to get him sore. Hell, to hear him, I was going to be walking a beat where they’ve forgotten to build houses yet. Then it came out. He got a call from Vayse. Woke him up at one in the morning. Here’s what Vayse told him on the phone. Wife trouble. Wanted to get away for a while and think it over. Get squared away with himself. That was the exact words. Apologized to this Foster Delaney for doing it at this time. Said he hadn’t decided where he was going, and maybe it would bring his wife to her senses to just shove off, no message, no nothing. It took some time. But I got it. And it means I was right. It means he has to come back, and wherever he is, you can damn well bet he’s been buying papers from here.”

Ricks stirred his coffee, his heavy red face expressionless. “I don’t like it. That woman. How the hell can you trust her that way? By God, she’s married to the guy.”

“She knows in her heart he’s the one.”

“So she tells him to run like hell before he gets electrocuted, Dan.”

“If they were in an apartment someplace, okay. I’d double check by putting in a request for a stake-out. In that neighborhood it’s a risk. Look, this Vayse is bright. He’s a successful guy. At thirty-three he’s making the kind of dough you and I will never see.”

“I don’t like it,” Ricks said stubbornly.

“Bucky, we’ve been working together three years. Right?”

“Yes, but...”

“Don’t you make a peep. I don’t want this thing big-dealed away from me. It’s mine and I think this is the way to do it, and if I’m wrong, I’ll go open a fruit stand and let you steal apples every day.”

Bucky Ricks sighed. “Okay. You’re just nuts. Every year I run into more crazy people. So I’m going a little crazy too.”...

During the next few days a lot of things were piled on Tate. He built up a lot of mileage. He made out stacks of reports. Yet, all the time, in the back of his mind, one single wire was pulled so tightly that he could hear the thin high note of vibration. When he tried to sleep he’d wake up sweating and sit on the edge of the bed and smoke and listen to Jen’s soft breathing.

On the second day of the new month he was standing, at three in the afternoon, by the desk, listening to Barney grumble about assignments, while he waited for a print report to come back from Identification.

When the phone rang Barney answered it, handed it to Tate. Tate listened and then answered shortly and hung up the phone with great care. He did something he had done very few times before. He took out the Special and swung the cylinder out and looked at the load and snapped the cylinder back in.

Ricks came over from the bench where he’d been talking angrily to Comer about the condition of the vehicle they’d been given. Ricks said, “By God, Dan, if it happens again, I’m going to...” He noticed Tate’s face and said, “That was your call?”

Tate felt as though the skin on his face had shrunk, as though it was pulled too tightly across the bones, as though it was flattening his lips hard against his teeth.

“Let’s go get him, Bucky,” he said. “He’s come home.”