Blood Innocents (7 page)

“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.

5

On his way over to the Van Allen penthouse later in the afternoon Reardon was waiting on the curb at the corner of 68th Street and Park Avenue when the orange “Don't Walk” sign across the wide avenue changed to “Walk.” He stepped off the curb, and at that instant — and for only a brief moment — he did not know where he was. He looked around in dismay, as if he had been suddenly placed in an unfamiliar universe. The city had taken on an immense and terrifying aspect, its sounds rushing at him like famished beasts. The moment passed so quickly that he did not even have time to tremble or call out, but the terror — as it passed — was overwhelmingly real.

As he walked across Park Avenue, shaken by the experience, the feeling of having blacked out, if only momentarily, made him think of the Arturo case. He remembered Arturo as a slim, awkward young man who wore an enormous pair of black-framed glasses and seemed extremely interested in police work. For months he had haunted the station house. Week after week Arturo would go directly to the desk sergeant and be waved through the outer vestibule and up the stairs to where the precinct records were kept. He was thought to be a graduate student researching some phase of urban police work. But Benedict Arturo, all those weeks he sat poring over the precinct files, was instead investigating himself — quietly, methodically assembling the evidence that would alter his life forever, evidence from which Reardon had later learned Arturo's story.

As a child Arturo had sometimes experienced blackouts. At first these periods were short, no more than a few minutes. But by the time he entered college he was experiencing amnesiac lapses which sometimes lasted as long as seven hours. He could not recall anything that happened to him during these lapses, although friends subsequently assured him that they had seen him eating quietly in the cafeteria or strolling the halls of the library.

Although confused and frightened by these lapses, Arturo chose to ignore them. Then late one evening he awoke from one of them to find his face badly scratched. He discovered unexplained rips in his clothing, mud on his shoes. After that strange articles began appearing in his room, each time following a period of amnesia. Once it was a red handbag slung over his bedpost. On another occasion he found a single brown high-heel shoe standing upright just inside his door.

Reardon had always thought that it would not be unusual for an individual faced with things so bizarre to force them from his mind and ignore them. After all, his own wife, Millie, had ignored the cancer she knew was killing her. But Benedict Arturo did not do that. He made charts listing every quarter hour of every day. He carried them with him everywhere, marking the passage of each fifteen minutes. In this way he was able to closely approximate the times during which he was not conscious of his acts. He then compared these times with newspaper reports of crimes, particularly assaults on women. Those details that he could not get from the newspapers he obtained from precinct records. Slowly, meticulously, he convicted himself of at least six assaults, one of which had ended in a brutal murder. The document that emerged from this investigation of himself was a peculiar, brilliant masterpiece of self-incrimination. He turned it over to the police as he might have submitted a master's thesis. Then he took himself to Bellevue and committed himself to a mental institution for the criminally insane.

Until now Reardon had never believed that Arturo was quite as mad as he had seemed. He could accept irresistible compulsions; but to kill while totally unaware, that was further than Reardon had allowed himself to go. Then he had stood on a corner he had passed a thousand times and had not known where he was. It was no comfort to know that anything was possible.

Before going up to the Van Allen penthouse he walked to the zoo and sat down again on a bench across from the cage of the fallow deer. He reviewed what he had: two dead deer, a sound heard by an employee of the zoo, a couple kissing, and an old man walking quickly through the zoo before the killings; no weapon and no witnesses.

And then, of course, there was Wallace Van Allen and his children. Van Allen's wife had died in an air crash in Paris three years before. The Van Allens, Reardon thought: prominent, wealthy, liberal, political. He looked up through the trees to their penthouse above.

When he reached Van Allen's building Reardon was astonished to find a familiar face. It was the doorman, Ben Steadman, an old detective who had retired six years earlier.

Politely, but with an initial, visible embarrassment, Steadman opened the door as Reardon approached.

“Hello, John,” he said.

“Hello, Ben,” Reardon replied, trying to conceal his own embarrassment.

“Who you looking for?”

“I'm supposed to see Wallace Van Allen this afternoon.”

“You mean about the deer?” Steadman asked.

“Yeah.”

“They transfer you out of homicide?”

“No,” Reardon said, “they just wanted to put me on this one for a while.”

“How come?”

“Because of Van Allen's money.”

“Jesus, that's something, huh?”

“Did you see anything that night?” Reardon asked, in order to change from an uncomfortable subject.

Steadman smiled. “This an interrogation, Detective Reardon?”

“I just wondered.”

“I told the boys who came over before. I had a bad night that night. Stomach trouble. Something I ate, probably. Anyway, I spent most of the morning on the toilet.”

“Yeah,” Reardon said, “but did you see anything at all that looked suspicious while you
were
out here?”

“Nothing, John,” Steadman said, “and I've got a trained eye.” He chuckled. “You never stop being a detective, you know.”

Reardon smiled indulgently. “Well, which elevator do I take to Van Allen's apartment?”

“The penthouse has its own elevator,” Steadman said. “I'll take you up.”

Together they rode up in a mahogany-paneled elevator. Reardon, glancing at Steadman's starched navy blue uniform with its shiny buttons and gilded brocade, saw his future possibilities and did not like them very much. He had hoped that he would be able to retire on a pension sufficient to his needs, at least if it could be augmented by the savings he and Millie had accumulated over the last thirty years, but Millie's medical bills had virtually devoured the savings.

When the elevator doors opened Reardon was ushered into the Van Allen apartment by a tall, middle-aged man who had the stiff, laconic manner of someone who had spent his life seeing to the trivial desires of others.

“Please sit down,” he said. “Mr. Van Allen will be with you in a moment.”

Reardon did not have to wait long, but while he waited his eyes roamed the room. It had the appearance of absolute stability, the confidence of its owners that they could deal with any conceivable distress.

“Detective Reardon?” someone said from behind him.

Reardon stood up. “Yes.”

“Wallace Van Allen,” said the tall man who had just entered the room. He looked younger than the photographs Reardon had seen of him in the newspapers. He was dressed in a black three-piece suit that looked as if it had never been worn before. He thrust out his hand energetically and Reardon politely shook it.

“I hear you're one crack cop,” Mr. Van Allen said.

“Just an old cop.”

“That's not what I hear,” Mr. Van Allen said. “Please sit down, sit down.”

Reardon sat back down on the sofa. Mr. Van Allen pulled up a chair facing him. “Terrible thing,” he said, “just terrible.” He looked at Reardon. “Psychopath, I suppose.”

Reardon nodded. He had been examining Van Allen's face and had only barely heard his voice.

“The killer must be a psychopath,” Mr. Van Allen repeated enthusiastically, emphasizing the word “killer.” “What else could explain such an atrocious act? He must be mentally ill. No sane person could do such a thing. Don't you agree?”

“Maybe,” Reardon said quietly.

“Well, I'm given to understand that if anyone can catch the poor fellow it is you.”

“We don't have much to go on, right now.”

“No one saw it, I suppose.”

“Not that we know of.”

Mr. Van Allen nodded his head sadly. “And no weapon either.”

“How do you know?” Reardon asked.

Mr. Van Allen looked embarrassed. “I only assumed.”

Reardon did not believe him. He suspected that the details of the case were being fed to Van Allen from high police officials downtown.

“Do you suppose the deer suffered much?” Mr. Van Allen asked.

A strange question, Reardon thought. “Did you see them?”

“Oh, no,” Mr. Van Allen said. “I don't think I could. I suppose you know I donated those deer to the Children's Zoo in honor of my children's birthday. Beautiful animals. Very gentle. They were actually raised on our farm in the mountains. You should have seen them when they were young. So graceful, trotting about. I think they were my daughter's favorite things.”

“How old is your daughter?” Reardon asked, without really knowing why.

“Sixteen.”

“And your other children?”

“A son. Also sixteen. Why?”

“Just asking,” Reardon said.

Mr. Van Allen leaned back in his seat, folding his hands tightly around the arms of his chair. He was suddenly staring at Reardon intently, almost fearfully, as a cautious, punctilious man might take in an unpredictable — and therefore frightening — event. It occurred to Reardon that this man had never experienced a policeman before. This adviser to mayors, senators and presidents had never descended into Reardon's soiled, awkward, accusing world, had never in his life been suspected — officially suspected — of anything.

Mr. Van Allen smiled and took a deep breath, but the anxiety was still in his eyes. “Yes,” he said slowly, almost guardedly, “my children are twins. They're sixteen. They'll both be off to college next year. Very expensive, as I'm sure you know.”

Reardon said nothing.

“Tell me,” Mr. Van Allen said, “do you think we'll break this case?”

“I don't know,” Reardon replied. Most of the time he did not know, could not know. “There are no weapons and no witnesses.” There was no need to hold back information now. He suspected that at that moment Van Allen knew as much about the case as he did.

“I see,” Mr. Van Allen said.

“Like I said, not much to go on.”

“No, it appears that way.”

Suddenly, Mr. Van Allen slapped his legs and stood up. Reardon recognized it as one of his son Timothy's new gestures. “Well,” said Mr. Van Allen, “I just want to personally express my gratitude and the gratitude of my family for all you and your colleagues are doing for us and the Children's Zoo, and, I might add, for the City of New York.”

It must have been a line he had said a thousand times, Reardon thought. It had been delivered like the concluding line of a campaign oration.

Reardon stood up. “Sure.”

Mr. Van Allen thrust out his hand again and Reardon shook it.

“Thanks so much,” Mr. Van Allen said.

Reardon nodded and moved toward the door.

“Poor fellow,” Mr. Van Allen said wearily.

“Who?” Reardon asked quickly. For a moment he thought the “poor fellow” was himself.

“The guilty party. The man who harmed those innocent deer.”

Reardon nodded once more and left the room the way he had come.

Outside he waited in a narrow hallway for the elevator. The walls were decked with portraits of bearded men in stern black suits and women in dresses with lace sleeves. Porcelain vases rested on the two tables standing on opposite sides of the room. Reardon could not guess how much the tables and vases must have cost, but standing near them made him nervous. He wondered if Timothy could stand in such a room without fear or self-consciousness, without being afraid that with any move or gesture he might send some irreplaceable artifact crashing down on the marble floor. He wondered if his son had come that far and lost that much, but, finally, he could not blame him if he had.

When the elevator door opened and Reardon stepped into the car with Steadman, he felt as though as had been released from prison.

“Did you see Mr. Van Allen?” Steadman asked immediately.

Reardon nodded.

Steadman pushed a button and the elevator began its descent. “Nice place they got, huh? Did you see the aquarium they got?” Reardon noticed that there was some delight in his voice, as if it were his own aquarium.