1975 - Night of the Juggler (7 page)

“You did fine, you did just fine, sir.”

Why the hell am I chewing everybody out? Sergeant Boyle was thinking, in one of his rare but honest moments of self-criticism. First St. John and now this nice John Doe of a citizen.

“Look, sir,” he said by way of making amends. “If everybody in the city did as good as you did tonight, we could close down half our precincts.”

Sergeant Boyle gave the license number to St. John, saying in a pleasant and conciliatory tone, “I’d suggest you get Miss Smedley checked out at the hospital and bust that stud quick.”

“Thanks, Sergeant,” St. John said, staring with grave intensity at the license number. “I’ll call Motors and get a make on this plate.”

Dumb. What was the use? Where else but Motors? The dog pound?

The morgue? Macy’s basement?

“Thanks again, Sergeant,” St. John said. “I’ll get this lady checked out at the hospital and bust the stud quick. I’ll see you around.”

Let’s hope not. . . .

Sergeant Boyle started for his car but stopped when he noticed that Ransom was standing on the sidewalk outside the parking lot, staring at him with those haunted, pain-bright eyes.

Still feeling a bit repentant, Sergeant Boyle walked back and gave him a pat on the shoulder.

“I’ll say it again, you did beautiful tonight,” he said.

“I’ve got cancer,” Ransom then said, but so simply and unexpectedly that the words struck Sergeant Boyle like blows under his heart.

Thanks, he thought wearily, thanks a lot. I don’t get enough death and shit on this job, bodies in the river, bodies hanging from ropes, heads blown apart by crazies, but I got to have more of it handed to me by a civilian who probably thinks that’s what he pays his taxes for.

“My wife doesn’t know about it,” Ransom said, and smiled uneasily as if to indicate this was a casual oversight on his part. “I sell upholstery fabric for B. Altman, it’s part of their at-home decorator service, but a couple of months back the weight of the fabric case got too much for me. My arm and chest were hurting. I haven’t been working at all for the last three weeks, but I haven’t told my wife that either.” Ransom smiled again, and this time the nervous flicker across his lips suggested that he and the sergeant might be sharing a mild joke at Mrs. Ransom’s expense.

“Jesus,” Sergeant Boyle said, “when are you going to tell her?”

“I just don’t know,” Mr. Ransom said, with another dismissing smile. “I didn’t believe the first doctor I guess nobody does. But the second one said the same thing. I still go out every morning like I used to, and when I get home at night, I have to make up stories for her. That’s the worst part of it. I’m not much good at making things up.”

“What do you mean? Why do you have to make up stories?”

“Well, I tell her about my calls. Our daughter’s away at school, she’s in premed, so there’s just the two of us. So I tell my wife what fabrics people like and any little stories I can dream up, like some lady matching a sofa to her poodle or maybe a redheaded grandchild.

Then I sit at my desk and write up orders on sales that I pretend I made during the day.” He sighed, but his smile and manner remained oddly apologetic. “I just don’t know how to tell her,” he said. “It will be so hard on her. There’s no money for my daughter to finish college, to go on to med school. I really don’t know what to say to her either. My daughter, I mean.”

Police work had not made Detective Sergeant Boyle a fatalist; on the contrary, despite massive evidence which failed to support his view, Rusty Boyle remained an optimistic and charitable human being who detested what seemed to him a manifest unfairness in life. Here was a prime example of it.

Sergeant Boyle’s father had died when Rusty was four years old, and this had seemed a gross unfairness to him, and he had never truly got over it. But the scales had been balanced by his mother, a marvelous person, who had believed that man had no business trying to get up to the moon, but had also quoted Micheas, Chapter Six, Verse Eight, to her son, saying in her musical Irish voice, “What more does the Lord require of you, but to do just, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

He had had all that. And he had Joyce, whose love for him and his for her was much deeper and even more significant than the riotous physical pleasure they took in each other. And he had the Gypsy to work for, while this poor bastard had a body laced and woven with pain and was staring death in the eyes and couldn’t even tell his wife about it. And on top of that, forced to write fake orders and tell her funny stories while his guts were dying inside him.

“Jesus,” Rusty Boyle said again. Then an idea occurred to him. A splendid idea. And when such thoughts occurred to this large emotional Irishman, they struck him with a force of natural laws. He put a big arm around Ransom’s shoulders and gave him a conspiratorial smile.

“Look, where’s your wife now?”

“She’s out shopping.”

“All right. Let’s you and me go across the street and have a couple of beers. A time like this, a guy should have somebody to talk to. So how about it?”

“I’d like that very much,” Ransom said quietly, and then looked off down the street, but not before Rusty Boyle saw the glint of tears in his eyes.

Detective Sergeant Boyle told Tebbet to notify Lieutenant Tonnelli that he’d be out of the office for a half hour or so, but if the Gypsy needed him for anything, he’d be across the street at the Grange Bar.

At approximately the same time that Rusty Boyle and Mr. Ransom entered the Grange, Gus Soltik was prowling the jungles of Manhattan looking for a cat.

The Juggler walked slowly and quietly through a refuse-littered alley in the vicinity of Eleventh Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, his shadow falling massive and tall beyond him, his black silhouette topped by the leather cap with its metal button. They liked cats, he knew, anything small and soft and warm. Like they were. . . . He heard a faint purring sound and stopped in his tracks, looking about tensely, but finally realized it was only the hum of high winds in the power lines above his head.

Something bothered Gus Soltik. He felt a stir of panic. It wasn’t forgetting his name. He knew that all right. “Gus Soltik,” he said, speaking the two words softly into the winds of the night. It was something else. It wasn’t a cat he wanted. It was something else. He sighed with relief, remembering what it was. A kitten, not a cat. A kitten. He stood then, turning his head slowly, forcing himself to listen, straining to hear the sound of sirens and fire engines. That’s where kittens were. At fires. He had seen the cats carrying the kittens in their mouths, running from fires and streams of water and the sounds of men’s voices echoing hideously from horns. He must find a fire. And then a kitten, Gus Soltik thought. He bobbed his head quickly at these conclusions, pleased that he had forgotten nothing. The knife, the ropes, nothing. . . . All for what he thought of as “white legs” or “greenropes.”

Chapter 4

“I must have understood you when we were younger. Or maybe I just accepted you and was too stupid to ask any questions. At any rate, bein’ a young and dutiful Southern belle”—the voice dropped suddenly into a mocking, mushmouth Southern accent—”Ah just didn’t feel Ah had the right to ask my little ole hubby any questions at all ‘cept did he want anything from me before he went off to beddie-bye and sweet old dreams.”

Luther Boyd sat in his study listening to his wife’s voice as it came to him from the slowly spinning reels of the tape recorder. He sat forward on the edge of the chair, his hands locked tightly together, his elbows resting on his knees. His face was creased in a line of bitter frustration. On the table beside him was an untasted whiskey and soda and pouch and pipe, which he had put aside after listening to his wife’s first words to him: “I expect you’ve got your pipe lighted and a drink in your hand and are prepared to listen with that goddamn respectful and skeptical smile of yours to all my sad stories.”

Luther had played the tape several times and almost knew it by heart.

He punched a button stopping the tape and let it spin forward to her last few paragraphs, which contained the crucial substance of her accusations. Pressing the play button, Boyd settled back in his chair and picked up the drink in which the ice had long ago dissolved, his mood a curious and uncharacteristic blend of defeat and confusion.

He had picked up his wife in mid-sentence. “. . . oh, damn it, I missed my point.” There was silence. Then he heard the clink of ice in a glass, the liquid splash of what he assumed to be vodka, since that was her preference in increasing quantities since Buddy had died. “Yes, I’m having a tall, cold one, Colonel. Well, what was my point? Oh, just this. I could understand a young boy hunting down every animal that moved just so he could kill it. And when you couldn’t do the job personally, you trained dogs and falcons to do it. After all, young boys don’t know any better. And I can understand a youngster going off to the wars. That, except for that shameful pig-sticking in Vietnam, was the patriotic thing to do. But I can’t understand a grown man devoting decades not just to killing animals and men but to teaching others to do the same thing and publishing books with diagrams to make the slaughter ugly and efficient and scientific. That’s what Buddy couldn’t understand either.” Barbara’s voice was rising emotionally. “He went into the Army and got himself killed. Not because he loved and respected you. But because he needed
your
love and respect. And that was the only goddamn way he thought he could get them.”

Luther Boyd heard his daughter Kate’s bedroom door open, followed instantly by a blast of music from her hi-fi set. He winced while quickly punching off the tape recorder. Goddamn it, he thought resentfully—and he was thinking now of both Kate’s music and Barbara’s attitudes—he
was
a square, and he hated that cacophony of raucous noise called rock music, and he
was
a patriot and he loved his country and had fought for it, so why should he be put on trial for his attitudes and convictions?

When Kate ran into the study wearing a quilted red robe and matching slippers, his resentment ebbed at the sight of her rosy, pretty features and her long blond hair which, released from its ponytail, fell smoothly down to her shoulders. While she came over and sat on his knee, he smiled appraisingly at her, judging her points, the soft line of her developing bosom, the good, square shoulders and coltishly slim legs, as he might assess the qualities of a thoroughbred filly. “Well, Miss Katherine Jackson Boyd, let’s see you hollow out your back,” he said.

She smiled at him and sucked in her stomach, squared her shoulders, and put her hands together on the pommel of an imaginary horse.

“How’s this, Daddy?”

“Blue ribbon,” he said, and she relaxed and snuggled herself into his arms.

“Could we talk about Buddy now?” she asked him.

“Do you remember your grandfather, Kate?”

“Just that he was tall and had white hair. And he told me to lean forward and grab my pony’s mane to help him when we were going up a hill.”

Boyd smiled faintly. “Anything else?”

“Well, he always smelled of Pears soap and tobacco.”

“I admired him because, above all, he was fair,” Boyd said. “And I’ve tried to be like him. So I believe we should talk about Buddy sometime when your mother is here. That’s the fairest way to make you understand.”

She sighed and snuggled into his arms.

“But I don’t think she’s being fair,” she said.

“Hush now,” he said and patted her shoulder gently.

And Katherine Jackson Boyd rested in her father’s arms, physically safe and secure and privileged in their electronically guarded apartment building high above the mean streets and alleys where Gus Soltik was looking for a kitten.

Chapter 5

Samantha Spade stood looking out a tenement window in Spanish Harlem, while a pair of her enforcers—black professional muscle, Biggie Lewis and Coke Roosevelt—were systematically and unemotionally smothering a young Puerto Rican boy, Manolo Ramos, who was delinquent by six hundred and ninety dollars in his payments to Samantha, a statuesque black Shylock, whose turf embraced much of Harlem from river to river and south of 125th Street. Samantha was tall, five eleven in white leather boots, with classically chiseled features and wide, luminous eyes, which she enlarged in a startling and almost comic fashion with heavy black liner and silver-white eye shadow. She wore a high-crowned dome-shaped red velvet hat and a flared leather coat over a black denim pants suit, which glittered with sequins forming clusters of patriotic designs, stars and eagles and shoulder patches from the old glory outfits, the 182nd Airborne Division, and the Fourth Infantry, the Ivy Division.

The room was small and filthy and smelled of drains.

Coke Roosevelt and Biggie Lewis were large, powerful young men who amused themselves by dressing with piratical flourishes; they wore silver earrings, Aussie digger hats, tight leather suits with brilliant scarlet kerchiefs wound around their powerfully muscled throats.

With effortless ease, they held young Manolo’s writhing figure on a narrow bed, twisting his slim brown arms high up between his shoulder blades and pressing his curly head and pretty brown face deeply into a soiled and matted pillow.

“All right! That’s enough!” Samantha Spade said abruptly, and Coke Roosevelt and Biggie Lewis immediately released the boy, reacting like well-trained guard dogs to the thread of irritation in Samantha’s voice.

“Mother, Mother, don’t let them hurt me!” Manolo screamed at Samantha.

All this Samantha found degrading. You started with something clean, and while the interest was ball-breaking, they couldn’t go to banks, so they came to her. When they got behind and started hiding, you had to use muscle, or your work and reputation went down the drain.

“We didn’t advertise for you, Manolo.”

“It’s my brother,” Manolo said, barely whispering the words, while watching Samantha’s cold black face as if it were hostile terrain he must try to cross to find sanctuary.