THE DAWN, after a severe summer storm, is sometimes especially beautiful.
And when the wind shifts to the north, as it did, if briefly, on this particular day, the air, so maligned in New York City, can become as clear and bracing as anyplace in the world you can name.
By afternoon, the temperature again crowded the 90’s, and the humidity, so laden with smog it was a visible sea, flooded slowly back, but for a few blessed hours just after daybreak, the air was actually 59°, extraordinary for July, and the torrential rain the night before combined with winds of gale force, had washed Central Park clean. Its midsummer carpet of brown and yellow leaves had been swept away, leaving a soft, fresh color that seemed spring-new, spring-green.
A fat young jogger in gray sweatshirt and ragged shorts found the body—though, finding it, he did not call it by that name simply because the word in no way occurred to him. Beaded with sweat, gulping for air, he merely looked down at a few mysterious, repellent, and quite inexplicable “objects” that were strewn across his usual path. He paused just long enough to realize that he was somehow seeing more than he really cared to, and then moved on.
Some minutes later a cruising police car nosed over a hill, looking so much like a film in slow motion, the jogger knew its occupants must be drinking coffee. He waved as it drew abreast and stopped it, stammering a bit in his perplexity to describe just what it was he had found, but at least telling the two men that there was “something” over there—pointing and locating the area exactly—that “I think you ought to see.”
Coffee, indeed, was the preoccupation of the moment, along with a bagful of Horn & Hardart whole-wheat doughnuts, but one of the officers, clown-mouthed with white powered sugar, nodded okay, meaning, presumably, that they’d investigate; then, before they could detain him with questions he probably couldn’t answer anyway, the jogger ran off. He heard a vague, full-mouthed shout as he disappeared into a wall of bushes at the side of the road, but ignored it, pressing quickly on.
Staring down with considerable amazement, neither of the two officers initially saw it as a “body” either, and would have been at a few moment’s loss for words to write in their notebooks what would in any way approximate the indescribable mass of mangled flesh and bared bone, mud, blood, crushed leaves, exposed roots, even bark-stripped branches that lay, indeed, were scattered about before them.
That there was a torso—a broken birdcage of ribs—was quickly evident however. And limbs of sorts. And something, God help them, round and hard, half-sucked down in a pocket of rosy mud, that looked distinctly like a skull with a few remaining shreds of flesh and hair.
If there was any real doubt, and doubt persisted irrationally simply to inhibit as long as possible the full shocked pain of the truth, six yards away, porcelain-white, exquisite, washed clean by the rain, and completely bled of its color, was a small human hand. It was obviously a woman’s hand, the nails frosted a pale pink, two fingers ringed, all of it gently curled, like petals, around the shattered, crushed remains of a pair of thin, gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
A uniformed governess with a sleeping baby in her arms counted seven, no eight police cars. Eight! Besides the ambulance and, good heavens, four or five other ordinary cars.
“What is it?! What happened?!”
Her voice was shrill, insistent, the accent thickly British, and her hungry eyes virtually prodded and poked at the thin, shirtless man with the bicycle, the nearest bystander to her in the crowd compelled to stand behind the wooden horses of a crude police barrier.
The man shrugged without bothering to look at her.
“I don’t know.” And after an irritating pause: “Somebody got killed.” He seemed only idly curious. “Somebody’s always getting killed.” He either laughed or snorted faintly. “In this park!? At night!? Are you kidding!?”
It was a curious way to express what the governess understood to be a reference to the dangers of Central Park after dark, but she was a visitor to the city and still not used to the many oddities of expression she encountered.
The man’s gaze, which she followed intently with her own, was focused on at least a half a dozen uniformed policemen and others who now, almost desultorily, since the principal search was over, kept pacing back and forth in a clearly aimless, haphazard manner, kicking through grass and underbrush.
“They kept finding things for a while.”
The governess could barely wait.
“Things?”
Now he turned, looking at her and the baby’s sweet sleeping face without even a flicker of expression.
“Yes.”
The corners of his eyes wrinkled ever so slightly as his leg swung over his bicycle.
“—I don’t know what.”
And as he rode off—
“Bloody things.”
A teenage girl who, listening, had moved close to them during their conversation, knew all about the “bloody” things they kept finding and volunteered the information readily.
“Parts of a body. You know—! Hands. Legs. Like that. All chewed up. That’s what I heard one man say.”
Incredulously—
“All what?”
“Chewed up.”
The girl made a growling, grinding bite over a thick wad of pink bubble gum visible between her front teeth, enjoying herself.
“—Like something wild had attacked her; maybe some animal from the zoo. The zoo’s not far. See—” Pointing—“That flag. That’s the top of the main administration building. But all the big animal cages are there too, outside. And every once in a while one of them gets loose, a gorilla or something, or somebody gets hurt, like getting a hand chewed off from getting too near to a cage.”
She glanced idly at the sleeping infant, her tone matter-of-fact, her expression really quite dull, without discernible mischief.
“Once a baby got eaten. Truly. Snatched right out of its mother’s arms through the bars of the cage. I was there. So I know.”
The girl’s eyes seemed as clear as still water, truth sparkling like sunlight. “That time it was a bear. They’re the worst, you know; and the quickest to escape. They’re smart and walk on their hind legs like a man, and grab you and hug you to death before they eat you.”
The story was much too fascinating to let go without hearing the end.
“But how could a bear escape?”
The child’s eyes became wide with absolute belief.
“Oh they do! You read about it all the time. In the papers. Don’t you? I certainly do. Perhaps you don’t turn to the right section. You must look under Animals in the local news index. Or “Animal Escapes . . .” that’s usually the heading. I’ve read about bears many times. I’ve seen accounts of snakes getting loose, too. Surely you’ve seen those! —Huge boa constrictors. They travel through the sewers, you know, and come up right in the apartment where you live. It’s true. You could walk right into your bedroom—tonight!—and there, before you know it, is a big boa constrictor arching up with its jaws unhinged, ready to eat you alive!”
All of which was just a bit too much, and with a weak smile the governess moved quickly away, having covered the baby’s ears for fear some of this unwarranted gore might slip dangerously into the child’s slumbering subliminal.
Sewers and snakes and unhinged jaws! It was not for nothing that the American people were judged to be among the most bloodthirsty and violent on earth!
Isolating herself, she remained content merely to watch—though there seemed now very little left to see. Very few bystanders remained, possibly because the ambulance had long since left—with its obscure and carefully covered remains, whole or parts. Whatever was on the stretcher, it certainly wasn’t body-shaped!
Most of the police cars had left; indeed, the last two were now bumping over a curb, ready to take off.
A doctor remained—at least a white-uniformed somebody, writing in a little book. And over there—why hadn’t she noticed them before?—resting in the shade of a huge overhang of umbrella-shaped rock—were two men whom she surmised to be detectives. What else? Who else? They had that look, and so American: with their ties off, both with their jackets removed.
So untidy! So unlike Scotland Yard!
One was quite young, with blond hair, long and hideously unkempt, but that presumably was the fashion—even for detectives apparently. But she was being unfair. Surely it was the soggy heat, and all that prowling he must have been doing. He was soaked with mud from the knees down and the front of his shirt was brown with dried blood, from the corpse no doubt.
The other detective was a much older man, and had managed to stay cleaner. He was short-haired and sucked on an unlit pipe under a thick, sandy mustache during moments of silence in his dialogue with the other.
A sudden thought struck the governess. She could lip-read! Once years ago she had been governess to two mute, deaf children, and it was necessary that she go to school with them to learn.
She moved closer, as near as the police barricade allowed, and though the distance was great, narrowed her eyes and concentrated.
The young man with the wild hair was speaking and she watched his mouth closely:
“. . . It isn’t as if I really cared; I mean—Hell, Jim— It isn’t prestige or anything like that, and it isn’t jealousy.” The lips were still for a moment. “—Though I think some of the guys think so.”
Staying with the young man, she missed “Jim’s” reply, but it had been brief, whatever it was.
“—Well, let them think so. The only thing that’s really bothering me is the money, and the fact that I did have seniority. Maybe only two weeks, but so what? I was in the department, and working, two weeks before he was. That’s seniority. And another thing . . .”
They weren’t talking about the crime at all! Something dreadfully mundane: work, a job, seniority. How very disappointing!
But anyway, Bonnie Dee was awake; and hungry; and setting up a lusty cry.
Enough of these peculiar Americans and their dismembered corpses in Central Park!
It was time for home, and a bottle.
“Yes, sweetheart? Yes, love?”