“She’s fine, just great,” Tonnelli said quickly, too quickly. Samantha realized, and decided not to press it. She knew, in point of fact, that Adela Tonnelli was married to a Greek used-car dealer who fenced hot heaps up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and the Gypsy must know that, too, which meant he didn’t see his sister or her kids anymore.
Tonnelli wasn’t the worst of them. In fact, he was the best of them, and her need to hurt him was gone.
If there was anything good about cops, it was studs like Gypsy Tonnelli. He was straight and honest and wouldn’t mark a man for life with the butt of his gun for kicks. There was a ton of weary pain in Tonnelli, and that was a town Samantha had played, and she knew all its dirty streets and alleys. At times she was so sick and full of despair from listening to one whining loser after another that it flawed her physically; there were nights when her headaches and muscle cramps almost drove her insane, and it was pills and the bottle then, and not being able to hate Whitey enough, and the annealing but sick and unrealizable dream of being on a warm beach with clean air around her and only the sound of slowly curling waves under a big, blue sky, and maybe-and this was the sickness- having someone like little Manolo to take care of and protect, and hell, maybe even love. .
Tonnelli knew from the masked compassion in Samantha’s expression that she probably knew all about Stav Tragis, his sister’s husband, who fenced hot cars and sold them to red-necks and Okies in North and South Carolina. And he was grateful that she was obviously not going to hit him with it, not sting him with the fact that he couldn’t see his sister or her children anymore because she was married to a common thief.
“You know, Sam, why don’t you try my side of the street for a while?”
Tonnelli asked her. “Who knows, you might get to like it.”
“You forget, Gypsy, us black cats don’t have no spots to change. And for Christ’s sake, Pope, the next time you ask me over, would you spring for a bottle of scotch?”
One of the offices in Tonnelli’s headquarters in the 13th Precinct House had been converted into a “darkroom” by a police sketch artist, Detective First Grade Todd Webb. He had set up a portable screen and a sixteen- millimeter projector, and all functional witnesses were present, save Joey Harpe, who would be along within a few minutes, since the little Irisher and his parents were already en route to the 19th in a squad car.
Lieutenant Tonnelli stood alongside Patrolman Max Prima, whose back was like a ramrod and whose eyes were wide with an almost comical respect, which were his reactions to the top brass on the scene, Deputy Chief of Detectives Walter Greene and, an even more significant figure, the borough commander of South Manhattan himself, a two-star cop, Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin, who, with his slight frame and silver-white hair and rimless spectacles, looked more like a parish priest from his native county of Cork than the chief of all police in the southern half of this sprawling, million-footed city.
Coke Roosevelt and Biggie Lewis stood apart from the police, talking to each other in soft, chuckling voices; if they found it a distinction to be in the presence of such exalted police officers, they were concealing it nicely.
At last-it was then about three fifteen on the morning of October 15-the office door opened, and the little Irish boy, Joey Harpe, came into the room with his vaguely apprehensive parents.
It was Joey Harpe who had seen the man who had murdered Jenny Goldman in the basement of a building on Twenty-ninth Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. .
With all lights turned off, Detective Todd Webb went to work, flashing various shapes of skulls on the screen, long, square, round, and oval, until a consensus was reached by Patrolman Prima, the small Irish boy, and the two big blacks that the man they had all mutually observed had a head that was nearly as round as a bowling ball.
Detective Webb left that outline on the screen and began with deliberate speed to add and subtract from it various kinds and shapes of mouths, noses, and eyes and ears, until at last, after considerable argument and disagreement, the functional group of witnesses settled on a front and profile sketch of a man’s face with these characteristics: small eyes, a heavy forehead, scraggly blond hair, a corded, powerful neck, and comically protruding ears.
Copies of this sketch would be processed and distributed by squad cars to every precinct of every borough of New York City.
They would not be distributed to local newspapers or television stations.
This was Chief Inspector Chip Larkin’s decision.
As an impeccably schooled and highly intelligent police officer Chief Larkin knew that the Juggler could be classified medically as a Constitutional Psychopath Inferior, whose shames and humiliations, whose rages and angers, induced by his own construct of physical chemicals, would helplessly and forever drive him into antisocial violence. They would catch him, of course, because he would continue on his course of savage and sadistic murders until they did.
But Chief Larkin wanted him stopped tonight, not ten years from now.
Ten young girls from now. .
And that was behind his decision not to release the sketches of the Juggler to newsmen. They would need surprise and secrecy to bait traps for the Juggler.
“Thank you, son, and thank you, gentlemen,” Chief Larkin said, and then he turned his parish priest’s smile on Patrolman Max Prima.
“That was a good, sharp bit of work, Officer.”
In a move that surprised all of them, young Joey Harpe whipped out a notebook and a pencil and asked Biggie Lewis and Coke Roosevelt for their autographs.
Chapter 7
The kitten, purring, made its way slowly across the brown blanket of Gus Soltik’s bed, stopping occasionally to peer about alertly and cautiously at its new environment. Near Gus Soltik’s wrinkled and soiled pillow the kitten found a bit of food, a crumb of a doughnut with sugar on it. It sniffed at it, and while it licked at the grains of sugar, the door opened and Gus Soltik came in from the second-floor corridor with a saucer of milk in his big hands. He closed the door, locked it, and placed the dish of milk on the floor.
The room was close and warm, and there was an animal smell to it.
Gus Soltik removed his yellow cap and pulled off his brown sweater, and the light from the single overhead bulb gleamed yellow on Gus Soltik’s thick, wide shoulders, which were spotted with tiny clusters of pimples. He picked up the kitten, which as warm and soft in his great hands, and squeezed it gently, increasing the pressure till the little cat whimpered. “Not hurt,” he said, speaking slowly and quietly, and then he placed the kitten on the floor beside the saucer of milk.
The kitten caused words to form in Gus Soltik’s mind. “Cages” and “Lanny.” The kitten made him think of the “cages.” They roared and frightened people, but Gus Soltik knew in some fashion they were helpless. They were him. Like him. He could frighten, but he was helpless. It created an agony of bewilderment and confusion in his head when he saw clerks making the cash register ring, adding up numbers, changing the paper money into the hard, shiny money. He could lift crates from the floor that none of the others could, but they had to point to where they wanted him to put them down. He never knew.
“Lanny.” And food. Lanny had tried to explain to him about the animals that played the musical instruments around the clock. But he couldn’t understand the music and distrusted it. But Lanny talked quietly. Lanny worked in the big building near the zoo and the pond.
He liked Lanny, and once he had brought a sack of old food from the store. Green stuff and oranges and potatoes they put in the alley when the store closed. The food was for the cages. Gus Soltik wanted to do something for them because Lanny was good to him.
But Lanny explained, slowly and quietly, that only certain people could give food to the cages. He felt none of the helpless anger that was like a fire in him when such things happened. When he didn’t understand, Lanny talked slow and smiled, and it was different. .
And once, and this was their secret, Lanny had shown him how to start and drive the truck.
With the back of his hand, Gus Soltik massaged the welt in his low, round forehead which had been caused by the tight, restricting rim of his yellow leather cap. He spoke again to the kitten, saying, “Not hurt,” and smiled in an earnest and surprised fashion when the little animal began to lap at the milk with its darting pink tongue. It was a pretty cage, he thought, black with a white spot between its eyes.
