powerfully to the Gypsy’s Sicilian intuitions. But none of the victims had been Libras. Encarna Garcia, Gemini. Trixie Atkins, Aquarius. Bonnie Jean Howell, Capricorn, and Jenny Goldman, Scorpio.
Gypsy Tonnelli wondered at the possible significance of the symbol of Libra, the classic golden scales. Did that suggest a perverted sense of justice or retribution? Or the sinister balance between himself and the man they called the Juggler. . But so far, with all their research, with all the potentials they had explored, with so much talent and dedication going for them, Tonnelli’s task force had come up dry, had drawn blanks.
Yet Gypsy Tonnelli knew in the depths of his Sicilian heart that the Juggler was ready to make his move; he could feel that presentiment in the marrow of his bones, in a cold, painful clench in his guts. The Juggler was out there in the city, living maybe like a stinking animal in somebody’s basement, making his plans, preparing to snatch some young girl and enjoy his sadistic fun with her before slashing her throat. Well, Tonnelli thought, this time he wouldn’t make it. They’d catch him and trash him. The Gypsy felt that, too, in his bones. And there wouldn’t be any bleeding-heart psychiatric apologies for the Juggler. No pleas of temporary insanity, no judicial wrist slap followed by six or seven years in some cozy funny farm. No, when they caught the Juggler, they’d waste him as they would a mad dog. .
Lieutenant Tonnelli walked into the large offices he had been assigned in the upper floors of the 19th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street.
Carmine Garbalotto, huge and balding, with a face like a kind bloodhound, was on the phone reassuring a young mother that she hadn’t caused them any unnecessary trouble.
“Look,” he was saying in his slow, patient voice. “Your daughter comes home from school and uses the back door and falls asleep in her room and you don’t see her. So you’re worried. So you call us. That’s what we’re here for. We sent a couple of cars over to the school, checked the neighborhood. Don’t you worry about us. Any time your kid is missing, irregardless of the hows or whys of it, you give us a holler.”
Gypsy Tonnelli nodded to Sokolsky and Jules Mackay at the switchboards. Detective Clem Scott got up from his desk and joined Tonnelli, who had stopped to stare with bitter eyes at the four large glossy photographs of the girls the Juggler had tortured and murdered. Scott, whose lined and weathered face made him look older than his twenty-nine years, gave Tonnelli a sheaf of reports. The two policewomen clerks were typing in the adjoining office. August Brohan and Jim Taylor were not at their desks.
“Taylor and Augie went up to a school in Harlem.” Scott checked his watch. “Around eight P.M. somebody reported a character bothering black kids playing basketball. Augie just phoned in. It was a fruitcake with a beard down to his balls and a wooden leg. He was passing out Tootsie Rolls to the colored kids because it was his birthday. His daughter made the scene at the same time as our guys and threw a net over him.”
Tonnelli continued to glance through the reports. Drunks for the most part, vagrants, seventeen in all, three or four with records.
B amp;E. GT Auto.
“Sergeant Boyle called in from the Thirteenth,” Scott said. “Rape squeal around Thirty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue. He and Tebbet went out on it.” In response to Tonnelli’s sharp, questioning look, Scott shook his head. “It’s not our stud, Lieutenant. The lady’s in her forties. She’s alive and well and probably won’t be drinking martinis with a stranger until the next time.”
Lieutenant Tonnelli glanced through Max Prima’s report of the hulking figure the patrolman had noted in Central Park earlier that day.
“Max Prima,” Tonnelli said to Scott. “You know him?”
“I think his uncle used to work out of the Fourth Division over on Eighty-second Street,” Scott said. “He made first-grade before he put in his papers. But no, I don’t know Max Prima.”
Tonnelli continued to study Max Prima’s report. “He’s got a good pair of eyes.” Tonnelli said. “And his instincts are right.”
Gypsy Tonnelli frowned and rubbed a hand in a tentative gesture along his scarred cheek. The gesture suggested that he remembered the agony of a cold knife slicing through his flesh; his fingertips were gentle on the old wound, as if loath to stir memories of pain.
He read Prima’s report again, aware of the deliberate beat of his heart. Subject, Caucasian, early thirties, six-three, two-twenty, fast and strong. . thick blond hair. . bulging forehead. . brown sweater, denims, Wellingtons. . yellow leather cap. Staring at the young girls in the children’s zoo. Weirdo. .
Again Gypsy Tonnelli felt the slow stroke of his heart. Some instinct, a premonition, a dark complex of Sicilian superstitions, or simple gut cop instinct, warned Tonnelli that he was close to the Juggler now, so close that he could almost see him and hear him and smell him; he could never explain these almost mystical convictions or calibrate them in any fashion remotely approaching scientific accuracy. But he believed (or wanted to believe) they had been given a sudden glimpse of their quarry, and as that belief grew firm and solid, he could almost feel the Juggler’s thick, corded neck within the grasp of his own big hands.
Gypsy Tonnelli glanced from Max Prima’s neatly written report to the large photographs of the Juggler’s young victims, whose fresh and innocent faces were graced with hope and excitement and bore no shadow of the fates in store for them.
Encarna Garcia. Fourteen, black hair, sparkling eyes, smiling confidently, innocently at the camera. Obviously proud of her frilly new dress, which had been a birthday gift from her father. Reported missing five P.M., October 15, five years ago. Found nine P.M. the same day in a condemned two-story dwelling near Eighty-seventh Street and Broadway. Rope burns on wrists and ankles. Four fingers of the left hand broken. Sexually assaulted, throat slashed.
Bonnie Jean Howell. Thirteen, black. Pigtails, wide grin, white, healthy teeth. Father a Pullman porter. Mother a dentist’s receptionist in Harlem. Bonnie Jean was found in a tool shed on a school playground near 129th Street and Lenox Avenue. Bonnie Jean had been reported missing at six thirty P.M., October 15, four years ago. The coroner’s report was pure Grand Guignol. Both arms broken, left kneecap shattered, burns on abdomen and small of back. Two of those fine healthy teeth broken. Sexually assaulted.
Throat slashed.
Trixie Atkins. Fourteen. White. Lived with her mother, a hooker, in an apartment on West Forty-seventh Street. Trixie was blond, with lively eyes and a big grin for the world. Her mother had gone off with a customer to Detroit, and Trixie wasn’t reported missing until a week after she had failed to show up for school. Then the police got a call on October 22 complaining of an odor stemming from an empty loft in a Greenwich Village apartment building. That’s where they found Trixie Atkins. Rope burns on her thighs, three fingers on her right hand broken, the blood dried and hardened on the gaping wound on her throat.
Jenny Goldman. Thirteen. Pale, red-haired, solemn as a mouse in her eighth-grade graduation picture. Father a doctor, mother a commercial model. Sexually assaulted, throat slashed, October 15, one year ago.
Looking at Jenny Goldman’s grave little face, with her oddly wise and wistful eyes, hurt Tonnelli so much that it almost made him physically ill, because he and Rusty Boyle had come within minutes of saving Jenny Goldman’s life.
Last year they had almost nailed the Juggler. .
They had been cruising on Thirty-ninth between Lexington and Third when a pair of excited kids waved their squad down. “He got Jenny, took her into the basement,” a frightened little Irisher had yelled at them.
Tonnelli and Boyle had stormed into the basement of a brownstone but had arrived too late to save Jenny Goldman her interval of monstrous anguish. She had suffered and died minutes before they had kicked open a bolted door that led to a furnace room thick and blurred with shadows.
In the darkness, they had had only an impression of motion, of fetid air stirring, and then the heavy, powerful figure of a man had smashed them aside, charging with an animal like speed toward the open door.
Tonnelli had fired twice from the floor, but the bullets had struck the sagging door, and the Juggler was gone. .
Acting on Tonnelli’s report, Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin, Borough Commander South, had flooded a twelve-square block area (its epicenter at Twenty-ninth and Lexington) with hundreds of uniformed patrolmen and detectives, fleets of motorcycle cops and cruising squads, but this massive and rolling stakeout had been counterproductive, attracting crowds into the area, creating rumors and “tips” that jammed Central’s switchboards. In the confusion of this spasmodic police action, the Juggler had managed to slip through their lines.
The only description they had ever got of the man had come from that excited little Irisher whose name was
