1975 - Night of the Juggler (25 page)

She was in shock, Crescent realized; her eyes were glazed, and a tiny tic pulled rhythmically at the corner of her lips.

“Did he say where he was going?”

“He just went away. He said he hadn’t done enough. He said he’d never done enough.”

Ilana, Crescent thought, while an anxious fear stirred in her heart.

Was that where Rudi had gone? Into this dark and dangerous park to look for a lost little girl who had disappeared from his life but never his memories almost three decades ago?

Paul Wayne took Crescent’s arm and led her away from the squad car.

“We can check with Lieutenant Tonnelli,” he said.

They found the Gypsy standing with a cluster of detectives and patrolmen studying the brilliantly illuminated contour map of the park.

But Tonnelli had no news of Rudi Zahn. “Thought he was with Mrs. Boyd,” he said, and beckoned to one of the detectives of his unit, Jim Taylor. He told Taylor to pick a detail of men and start looking for Rudi Zahn.

As Taylor went off, Max Prima came hurrying up to Gypsy Tonnelli.

“Got a message from that black lady that shylocks up in Harlem. She wants to talk to you, says it’s important.”

“Where is she?”

“Parked due east of here, on the drive.”

There were two cars parked on the East Drive, Samantha’s green Cadillac and Biggie Lewis’ white Imperial. As Tonnelli crossed the brightly lighted CP with Max Prima, he saw that Biggie, Coke, and Samantha were standing on the lawn beside the cars, and beside them were Manolo Ramos, a faggot hustler, and a pair of young black boys he didn’t recognize.

Prima and Gypsy Tonnelli stopped, and Tonnelli looked at Samantha and drew a thumbnail down the length of his scar.

“What you got?” he asked her.

“Tell him, Hugo.”

“Well, me and Billy were cruising through the Ramble, and we saw this little white girl lying there on the ground all tied up with ropes and a piece of tape over her mouth.”

“When and where was this, son?”

“I’ll wrap it up,” Samantha said. “About thirty minutes ago, east side of the Ramble. About Seventy-fifth, Seventy-sixth. Hugo and Billy here pulled the tape off the little kid’s mouth, and she began to scream, and who could blame her?”

“And that’s the last I saw of the big horse who wants to trick with me,” Manolo said. “We hear somebody screaming and he—”

Tonnelli cut in. “Let’s sort this out,” he said. “You first, Manolo.”

“I’m hustling the park, this big stud comes out of the woods. He don’t talk much, but I know he wants to mess around. He got no money, but I don’t like his looks. So I tell him I’ll meet him later to get rid of him. He says he could get some money, but then we heard her yelling.”

“Big bastard chased us away before we could untie her,” Hugo said, excitement threading his voice.

Tonnelli was staring intently at Manolo. “You said you’d meet him later?”

“Don’t cost me nothing to say that.”

“You could find where you said you’d meet him?”

Manolo was savoring his moment of importance, enjoying Lieutenant Tonnelli’s attention.

“The place, I can find it easy.”

Gypsy Tonnelli glanced at Prima, beckoned to him, and the two officers moved away from the group in front of the big cars. It was worth a try, he thought.

The emotional profile which department psychiatrists had constructed of the Juggler over the past few years placed a primary emphasis on the fact that he was driven by feelings of psychopathic inferiority, but they had also concluded that his compulsions were deeply rooted in latent homosexuality.

“Report to Deputy Chief Greene,” Tonnelli said to Prima. “Tell him we may have a geographical fix on the Juggler. And that I’m alerting our marksmen.”

When Prima went off, Tonnelli walked back to Samantha, who was watching him with cold, suspicious eyes.

“What you setting up, Gypsy?”

“Manolo’s got a date,” Tonnelli said. “Naturally, he’s gonna keep it.”

“No way, unless he wants to.”

“I think he’ll want to,” Tonnelli said. “Otherwise, I know a dozen interesting ways to kick his little ass clear out of New York City.”

“Will you kindly shut up, Pope?” and there was a mix of anger and fear in her voice. She knelt so that her great white-rimmed eyes were on a level with Manolo’s and put her hands gently on his slim shoulders.

“What about it, Manolo. Want to help the Man?”

Manolo looked sullenly at Tonnelli. “What’s he talking about kicking my ass out of New York for?”

“That’s the way Italians talk,” Samantha said. “They don’t know any better.”

“Think I should, Sam?”

“It’s up to you, Manolo.” He was so pretty, she thought, fragile and delicate as a flower. “You could get hurt, and that’s the truth.”

“I’m still short about three hundred, Sam.”

“Do what the lieutenant wants, if
you
want to, then you don’t owe us nothing.”

Tonnelli looked appraisingly at Manolo. “You’re sure this bad-ass will keep this date with you?”

“No way he won’t,” Manolo said.

“I’m asking again. How do you know?”

“I turn on a stud, Lieutenant, he stays turned on,” Manolo said, and gave him a smile of such piercing sweetness and intimacy that Tonnelli experienced an involuntary spasm in his loins and realized guiltily that a tide of color was rising in his cheeks.

Sweet Jesus, not
me!
But the reflection was touched with only a wry amusement, for he had no confusion about his sexual identity.

Nonetheless, Samantha’s needling smile both irritated and embarrassed him.

Well, who could blame anybody, he thought, because this beautiful youngster seemed able to flick a switch that caused an explosion of sensual excitement? This was quality merchandise, a choice package, the white fur jacket and the blue suede skintight trousers, the curly black hair oiled and perfumed, and those eyes like velvet flowers, these were major-league, high hard ones, and the Gypsy was thinking, if we’ve got to bait a trap for a faggot, we’re in luck, because we got a prime piece of ass to do it with.

Chapter 22

Gus Soltik stood motionless on a rocky hill, his huge figure merging with the shadows of trees. His heart was pounding, and his dim thoughts were streaked with panic and confusion. The word forming torturously in his mind charged him with frustration and helplessness.

“Walls . . . walls.”

The hammer and thunder of the police helicopters were gone from the skies above Central Park. The blaring music had faded away, and the sound of yelping dogs had disappeared into the strange and ominous silence that lay with a smothering weight on Gus Soltik’s angry fears and confusions.

He felt at the exact center of that silence, walls. . . . It was difficult and dangerous to move. They would hear. And he knew that “coldness” was close behind.

Not hurt. He hadn’t wanted to hurt him. He was too old, not like Lanny, but he wasn’t good like Lanny. He had a gun and yelled at him. Then he had to hurt him.

He tried to control his growing excitement because he could go to find “black-sweet” now. His mother got angry when he was excited.

Because it led to his rages. But he felt no rage at “black-sweet.” It was a relief, a happiness. And he had money. From the old like Mrs. Schultz that he had hurt.

Even if they caught him now, they would never see “white legs.” He would never tell them where she was, because if he didn’t tell them, no one would ever find her. And so they wouldn’t hurt him.

But Gus Soltik’s dim brain was troubled. Not by the pain in his shoulder or whether they would find “greenropes.” It was the dread of the beginning of pain that tortured his thoughts. Once it was present, wild and living in his body, he could accept it. It wasn’t even the fear of “coldness” that troubled him.

It was the silence. . . .

And it was because of that strange silence that had settled over the park that Luther Boyd made an almost fatal mistake. At that instant he was very close to the Juggler. Boyd was, in fact, slowly and with infinite care, climbing the escarpment of rock on which Gus Soltik was standing.

For the last twenty minutes, Boyd had been trailing the Juggler and Kate across acres of rocky ground, topped with a thick cover of thornbush and gorse.

In three separate places he had found flecks and threads of red nylon from Kate’s ski jacket snagged on spiky underbrush. The last had been impaled on the broken limb of a stunted horse chestnut which was growing out of such a tight crevice of rock that Boyd surmised it had been planted there by a squirrel or blue jay.

Since all those tiny bits of fabric had been snagged approximately six feet above the ground, Boyd knew that the Juggler was still carrying his daughter over his shoulder.

But now Boyd was deeply troubled because sounds he had heard only seconds earlier told him that the Juggler was retracing his original route, which could mean he had abandoned or destroyed Kate at the terminus of that line and was now doubling back in an attempt to slip past the police and out of the park. But now those sounds of his passage through heavy brush had merged into the eerie silence.

The man had stopped moving, was standing above him. Why? Was the psycho stalking him now?

And it was at that instant, climbing the steep angle of the escarpment, that Boyd made a miscalculation. Testing a knoblike tree root for a handhold, he judged it to be strong enough to support his weight, but when he pulled himself up, the rotting wood splintered in his fist, and he slipped a dozen feet down the facing of rock, the sprawling descent of his body creating a miniature avalanche of loose shale and twigs that shattered the silence as dramatically as rifle fire.

Boyd froze his body against the cliff, knowing that any motion would betray him to the man on top of the hill. But his right hand moved silently toward the Browning, which was pressed hard against his stomach by the weight of his own body.

In the shifting shadows created by moonlight and swaying trees, he saw the figure of a huge man high above him on the crest of the hill. The man raised both hands in the air and hurled a large jagged rock at Luther Boyd. The rock struck the side of the hill four feet above Boyd and sent a spray of flintlike splinters into his face and eyes. He threw himself sideways, but not in time; the caroming rock slammed into his left shoulder and knocked him in a breathless, flailing heap to the foot of the cliff.

He bounced from the ground like something made of steel and rubber and dived full length behind the mass of a pair of tangled wild holly bushes. Boyd worked the Browning free from beneath his belt. His mouth and nostrils were full of dust, and he knew his face had been nicked and bloodied by the shower of rock fragments. But it was the shoulder that worried him; if it were broken, the Juggler would have an overwhelming advantage.

Moving with gingerly caution, Boyd climbed to his feet and peered across the tops of the holly bushes. The man was gone. Boyd tested his left arm and shoulder and to his relief felt only the pain of bruised muscles, not the crunch of broken bones.

Then far away to his north and east, Boyd heard someone calling Gus Soltik’s name, the sound high and sweet in the silence, as pretty as circles of silver against the darkness.

Above him and to his right, he heard the pound of distant footsteps, the passage of a big body through grass and bushes. It was the Juggler, he knew, and by the length and speed of those strides, Boyd knew the Juggler was now traveling alone. . . .

With nothing to be gained by silence, Boyd rapidly climbed the escarpment of rock, but when he reached the small clearing on top of the hill, the footsteps of the Juggler had faded off on an eastern line into dark stands of trees.

Luther Boyd stood still for a moment, massaging and kneading the muscles of his left shoulder, while testing freshening winds and the unnatural silence with the antennae of his probing senses. The police tactics had been radically changed, he realized then. They weren’t trying to run the Juggler to the ground. They were setting a different kind of trap for him. And there was a sickening implication there which made it imperative for Boyd to change his own plans. He had been determined to go after Kate because as long as there was a chance she was alive, that was his only priority. She might be bound and gagged in a way that would strangle her unless he got to her in time. Or she might be confined somewhere, smothering for lack of air. Or bleeding. . . .

But he couldn’t go after her now. He had to find the Juggler first because the police might waste him on sight and that psycho was the only person in the world who knew where Kate Boyd was now.

Boyd swept the ground with his flashlight to find the Wellingtons, but something else caught his eye, a large, jagged rock gleaming with blood and a cluster of white hairs. Not Kate’s blond hair, he realized with exquisite relief, but coarse white hair in lacy relief against the shining blood.

He followed drops of blood and the Wellington prints a dozen yards to a mossy ravine, where he found the sprawled body of a white-haired man with a Colt diamond-back .38 revolver lying near his right hand.

The right cheek and skull of the old man had been crushed and bloodied by brutal blows. A wallet lay beside the boy. There was no money in it, but the ID revealed the man’s name to be Samuel Fritzel, with an address in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Protruding from a pocket of Fritzel’s topcoat was a narrow leather case with a carrying strap and Boyd saw that it encased a two-way radio. He pulled it from Fritzel’s pocket, flipped a switch, and spoke urgently into the microphone.

“Lieutenant Tonnelli!”

“Tonnelli here.”

“This is Luther Boyd.”

“I leveled with you, Colonel. The chiefs scrambled those choppers.”

“Why did you discontinue the aerial surveillance?”

“We’ve set a trap for him. We’ve cooled everything, hoping he’ll relax and fall into it.”

“Then goddamn it, listen to me, Lieutenant. The Juggler’s alone, traveling east. Do you understand what that means? He’s either killed my daughter or hidden her someplace where she’s helpless. I’m heading west, on a line with Seventy-seventh Street, trying to find her. But I want your word that you take that bastard alive, Lieutenant. Because he’s the only one who knows where Kate is.”