Night of the Juggler

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