Blood Innocents Part 3

"Good."

Reardon went back to his desk and began typing up a brief account of his investigation so far. He described the condition of the deer, recorded the probable time of death, noted the probable characteristics of the death weapon or weapons. He noted that entry into the cage of the fallow deer would have been possible for anyone within the indent range of height and weight, that no human bloodstains had been located at or near the scene of the crime, and that, thus far, there were no witnesses.

He had recorded such details hundred of times. He had described warehouses of weaponry: pistols of all calibers, shotguns of all gauges, blades of all lengths and widths and adornment, spikes, tire irons, bottles of all shapes and colors, acids, poisons, ropes, chains, wires, torches, bricks, baseball bats * every conceivable object that an agile, enraged and premeditating ape could use to kill another.

He sat, thinking over the details of the case before him, but they did not seem to lead anywhere. Wallace Van Allen had donated two fallow deer and someone had killed them both, one with a ferocious brutality and the other with one devastating blow. Perhaps the killer had been repelled by his slaughter of the first deer and then had impulsively killed the other one out of some deranged fear of leaving any witness, even an animal. Or perhaps the approach of a human witness had frightened him, causing him to cut short the slaughter he had intended for the second deer. If he had bolted from the park someone might have noticed him. And Reardon knew he must have been drenched with blood after the first killing. A slashing killing sent geysers of blood in all directions; spurting vessels, the arcs of the weapon in its rise and fall, the thrashing about of the victim * every act in a slashing killing left a trail of blood. But no amount of blood caked on a killer or oozing from between his fingers would matter if there were no one around to see it. And as yet there were no witnesses. Reardon had already recorded that intolerable fact succinctly in his notebook: "Wit.: 0."

The crime had taken place at about three-thirty in the morning. Still, Reardon's experience had taught him that eyes watched the streets constantly, that in a large city in a public place there were almost no unrecorded acts. He remembered the Ruiz case. If anyone had ever expected to kill invisibly in a city it was Paco Ruiz. Dressed in a business suit although he was a blue-collar worker, Ruiz had escorted a teenage boy to the depths of the city's largest park and in one of its many narrow ravines of granite and underbrush he had soundlessly strangled him to death. It had happened about two hours before dawn on a moonless night in the heart of a supposedly deserted and isolated park, and two separate people had seen it. One was another teenage boy who had run away from his home that afternoon, fleeing the alcoholic rage of his father. The other was a thirty-five-year-old painter who all his life, he told Reardon, had been looking for the darkest place in the world in order to get some understanding of the nature of light. Each witness had been unaware of the other, but both of them had watched Ruiz and the boy approach from the distance, and both had sat in horrified astonishment and watched, from two widely separate angles, a large muscular man strangle a small-framed boy to death.

In any event, Reardon thought, it was too early to tell if there were any witnesses to what had happened in the cage of the fallow deer between three and three-thirty in the morning. Sometimes it took a very long time for witnesses to come forward. Sometimes they never did. Reardon did not intend to become impatient.

3.

Reardon arrived at his son's apartment at exactly seven-thirty. He did not want to spend any more time there than he had to. He had admitted to himself some years ago that he did not like his son very much anymore, or his son's wife or children or friends. They lived in one of the more fashionable areas of the city, where every door had a doorman, and Reardon always felt an intense discomfort at having a man his own age, gray and rather used-up and dressed clownishly in an absurdly ornate uniform, open the door for him, smile artificially and blurt, "Good evening, sir." But this was evidently what his son wanted; it had propelled him to win his Ivy League scholarship, perform masterfully in college, and then seek out and secure a position in what Reardon was told was one of the city's most prestigious law firms. But in the process of all that, Reardon thought, Timothy had lost the ability to distinguish between the things that really mattered in life and those that only seemed to.

Abbey answered the door. "Well, h.e.l.lo, papa," she said.

She was young; that was the most significant thing about her. She had borne two children but still managed to retain a kind of teenage ebullience. Everything she said, she said with enthusiasm; every gesture had a synaptic energy of its own. Her lithe body made Reardon feel dense and heavy. Just being around her made him feel tired.

Reardon removed his hat. "Hi," he said. He did not feel like the bouncy, lovable, garrulous old grandpa he knew she expected him to be.

Abbey took Reardon by the arm and escorted him into the living room of the apartment. It was a place of pastels. Pastel blue walls. Pastel upholstery on the chairs and sofa. Even the paintings were pastel, little girls in soft-colored dresses, their cheeks lightly flushed with pink.

"You look tired," she said after they had both sat down. "Have you been eating regularly?"

Reardon tried to make a joke to please and relieve her. "I eat regularly, six times a day," he said, smiling ludicrously as he patted himself on the stomach.

"Weight becomes you," Abbey said.

Suddenly Reardon remembered her at Millie's funeral, remembered the pained expression that had pa.s.sed over her face when Timothy had performed his counterfeit of grief. Impulsively, he leaned over and kissed her cheek.

"Well, thank you," she said lightly, but Reardon could tell that something in his gesture had alarmed her.

"I have moments a" Reardon heard himself say, knowing that his sudden gesture of affection had surged up from that other part of him that frightened him with its power. "I have moments a" he began again, but the rest of the sentence died in his mouth.

"What?" she asked, clearly concerned now.

"Nothing."

"Are you all right?"

Reardon tried to smile. "Yes, I'm all right." He felt sorry that he had lost control, had imposed himself upon her light-heartedness and goodwill.

"Really?" Abbey said. "You sure?"

Reardon forced a laugh. "Of course, of course. Can't an old man kiss a lovely young lady?"

"Sure," Abbey said brightly. She leaned forward and kissed him. "Can a young lady kiss a great-looking father-in-law?"

"Sure," Reardon said.

"Timothy will be in in a moment," she said. "Would you like a drink?"

"Irish whiskey."

"I'll get it."

She left the room, and Reardon could hear her talking to his son in the next room. There seemed to be some urgency in their voices, but he could not tell what it was all about. He looked down at his hat. Gray and weathered, it looked incongruous on the expensive chair with its lavender silk upholstery. He felt like an intruder, a poor relation swept up to their apartment by some sudden calamity * fire or flood or worse. He did not belong there with the luxurious furniture, the marble and the lace and the delicate vases with flower designs. In his life he had been invited to such rooms only when a dead body lay on the floor, its blood silently staining the Oriental rug.

"How are you, Father?" Timothy asked as he entered the room. He wore a dark-gray pinstripe suit. Below the coat a vest was drawn primly over his stomach. His tie was pulled tightly against his throat as if he were going to a corporate board meeting. He had recently taken to calling Reardon "father," rather than the more familiar "papa."

"h.e.l.lo, Tim," Reardon said.

"How are you?" Timothy sat down in a chair opposite Reardon and sipped casually from a martini gla.s.s.

"Fine. Where are the children?"

"At the symphony."

Reardon nodded, wondering who had taken them, since both parents were at home. But then, he recalled, times were different now; people could be hired to do such things.

"Well, do you like being back at work?" Timothy asked.

Reardon nodded.

Timothy took a long, dark cigar from his coat pocket and handed it to Reardon.

"No, thanks," Reardon said.

"What? My father turning down a good cigar?"

"I've quit smoking."

"Really? Well, give it to one of your a.s.sociates."

a.s.sociates? thought Reardon. "No," he said, "keep it."

"Very well," Timothy said. "I don't smoke them, as you know, but I thought you might like it. Very expensive, you know."

"It would probably be too strong for me, anyway," Reardon said dryly.

Timothy slapped his knees lightly and smiled. "Well, now, how are things on the force?"

"Same as always."

"Murder and mayhem, I suppose."

"The usual."

"Ever thought of an early retirement?"

Here it comes again, Reardon thought. "I like to work, Tim," he said. "I don't want to retire. I've told you that before. What would I do? What is it you think I would do if I retired?"

"Anything," Timothy said. He raised his arm and gently ma.s.saged the back of his neck while he stared absently into Reardon's face.

"No," Reardon said. "I'm not looking forward to retirement. I'll leave when they make me leave."

"Still the same old hardtack," Timothy said.

"Maybe. Is my whiskey almost ready?"

"Sure, Abbey will bring it in shortly. We don't drink Irish whiskey around here, so you should take the bottle with you when you go. It just sits here. n.o.body drinks it."

"I have a bottle at home," Reardon said. He did not want his son's Irish whiskey, or his son's financial support for retirement, or his son's way of life.

Timothy nodded and leaned back in his chair. He seemed as exhausted and impatient with their conversation as Reardon was.

"How's your work coming?" Reardon asked dutifully.

"Fine, fine," Timothy said. "But sometimes I think our firm should employ some detectives to help us with some of our cases. You know, old-fashioned street cops like yourself who can slice through all the rhetoric and get to the meat of the thing."

"The what?"

"The rhetoric," Timothy said, "slice through the rhetoric."

Reardon nodded.

"Some of the lawyers on my staff are ineffective at investigation and research. Everything has to be laid out for them."

Reardon nodded.

"They aren't self-motivated. They have to be told everything. No initiative."

Reardon nodded. "Maybe so," he said.

That night Reardon had the first dream he could remember in many years. He was sitting on a beach in the fog, smoking a cigarette, when a woman's body floated quietly up on sh.o.r.e. She lay face down at his feet, the top of her head resting easily on the tip of his shoe. Her hair was long and red and she was wearing a flowered dress. A tide gently swept a single strand of pearls from under her neck and then drew it back again.

In the dream Reardon was not at all shocked or frightened by the body. It had seemed to come on sh.o.r.e as naturally as a wave, and he stared at it without emotion, as if it were no more than a brightly colored sh.e.l.l. His eyes moved calmly over her dress. He noted the flowers in the design, small red rose buds alternating in diagonal lines with rows of pink dogwood petals. He remembered that he had seen this same dress in a shop window at the corner of 60th Street and Second Avenue almost twenty-five years before and had almost bought it for his wife's birthday. He wondered how many such dresses had been made and in how many shops they had been sold. He bent over and started to look for a label, but in so doing he touched the woman's bright-red hair, and a blade of terror pierced his loins and drove upward into his brain. Instantly he tried to run, but the hair transformed itself into a claw and seized his hand and began dragging him into the water. Frantically he tried to pull free, but the claw gripped his hand like a steel vise, and by the time his first scream broke through the fog he was waist-deep in the sea. His eyes ravaged the sh.o.r.e for someone to rescue him, looking for help, overturning garbage cans and stripping wharves. They burned off the surrounding fog and split open the dunes and overturned the cottages behind them, but still there was no one to save him. His last scream was stifled by the salt water flooding his mouth as he went down.

Reardon woke, gasping for breath, his hand groping in the darkness, at last finding the light switch near his bed. For a while he sat up in bed and allowed his eyes to roam about the room, rooting his mind once again in the familiar, comfortable objects around him. But he could not find comfort in them. He felt almost like an intruder in his own room, as if the old brown suit that hung in his closet had been molded to the body of some other man more composed than himself. He rested his head in his cupped hands and waited for dawn.

4.

TUESDAY.

The next morning Reardon did not go directly to the precinct headquarters. Instead, he walked to the Children's Zoo. For a while he sat on a bench opposite the cage of the fallow deer. The bodies had been taken away, and the cages had been meticulously washed of all signs of the violence that had taken place before dawn on Monday morning.

He gazed around the park, trying to determine in which direction the killer might have fled. Then he looked beyond the bars to the chalk-drawn positions where the bodies had been found. The back of the cage was a solid stone wall almost fifteen feet high. Without a ladder or a rope no one could have climbed over it. But in front of the cage two sidewalks led in different directions. The one to the right turned into a winding trail that eventually led all the way to the opposite side of the park. The other led directly to a flight of stairs which ascended to Fifth Avenue. The killer would have taken the route through the park, Reardon thought. He shrugged. It was a mundane a.s.sumption. Bloodied as he must have been, of course the killer would not have lurched up onto Fifth Avenue, even between three and three-thirty in the morning.

"Morning, John," Mathesson said. He stood towering over Reardon, a breeze gently flapping the collar of his coat. He brought his large hands out of his coat pockets and pressed his hat more firmly down on his head.

Reardon had not seen him approach. "h.e.l.lo, Jack," he said.

"Trying to think like a freako this morning?"

"No," Reardon said. "I'm trying to think like an inexperienced murderer."

"So what did you come up with?"

Reardon smiled at the absurdity of what he had come up with. "That the killer probably took the trail through the park rather than the stairs to Fifth Avenue."

Mathesson laughed. "That ought to get you a citation," he said. "How are you this morning, John?"

Reardon knew Mathesson was still bothered by his response to the deer on Monday morning. "I'm fine."

"Get a good night's sleep?"

"I guess," Reardon said. He looked at the cage again. "Did you check with the precinct this morning?"

"Yeah."

"Anything interesting?"

"Well, the lab is finished with the autopsy on the deer. There were fifty-seven wounds on one of them and just that one on the other."

"Anything else?"

"Yeah, they're bringing out another crew to look for the weapon. I guess the first crew just did a quick search. Anyway, the first group didn't come up with anything, so they're sending out another one."

"Since when do they send out two separate crews to search for a weapon?" Reardon asked.

Mathesson smiled. "Since Wallace Van Allen got his deer sliced up, that's since when." He glanced resentfully at the great houses and luxury hotels that towered over the park. "Don't this G.o.dd.a.m.n hubbub about a couple of animals seem a little much to you?"

"I suppose."

"Two deer!" Mathesson said. "Can you believe that? Can you believe the amount of trouble and expense the department's going to when it's not even a murder case yet?"