LIEUTENANT JAMES SCHRADER had given up two-packs-a-day smoking and was in his third tortured week of total abstinence. In virtually useless compensation, he had chewed yards of sickly gum, sucked with smacking vigor countless pounds of hard candy, eaten everything within reach, and lately, since nothing eaten really seemed to work, had begun taking occasional lung-deep whiffs of strong ammonia from a small vial he carried. Actually, this helped most of all, until some lunkheads on the force were sure he was sniffing coke. This was such an inconvenience and an embarrassment finally, that it was easier to give up the ammonia than keep explaining or sticking the vial under some creep’s nose.
As a last resort, or at least the next illusory compensation, he had taken to the stem of an empty pipe, sucking without the remotest pleasure the stale, slightly woody taste of it, or tapping the tip of it, often unconsciously, against his front teeth like a woodpecker gone mad.
He had crushed three stems between his molars, each time spitting out a mouthful of splinters. He also used the end of the pipe in various fetishes and rituals that included scratching the side of his nose, the back of his head, under his chin, the lobes of his ears—everything but sticking it up his ass! Nothing helped. Giving up smoking was a genuine, deeply felt loss; there was no other word; it was a death in the family; and he grieved, at moments intolerably, actually ready to cry when his chest seemed to burst in its ache to suck down that soothing, loving cloud of nicotine and tar, formaldehyde, carbolic and prussic acids, carbon monoxide, arsenic, and all other and sundry delectable anathemas and sweet, sweet poisons!
Irritably, almost baring his teeth like a teased dog, he heard himself barking: “What!? What!” for he had not really heard much that Art had been saying—something about that seniority business, a subject on which he hadn’t shut up for the last three days.
Also, he was suddenly aware that the woodpecker was tapping like a frenzied idiot, and in a burst of accumulated anger, he tore the mother of a black bastard from its porcelain perch and flung it away.
It landed at the doctor’s feet who, knowing what it was all about, tsk-tsked a few times, shaking his head sadly, and returned it gently to its owner.
They smiled at each other, Jim rather sheepishly. He nodded toward Art, whom the doctor had never met.
“This is Art Davis. We’re together now.” And to Art—
“Dr. Rivers; George Rivers.”
There were handshakes, and nods, and rather grim smiles all around, for the business at hand was now clearly at hand. But the doctor said nothing. Jim had to throw out his hands, affect astonishment of sorts.
“—Well?!”
Prodded, the doctor started to speak; at least he opened his mouth, then closed it, shrugging helplessly. He tried again, this time succeeding, if rather lamely.
“What can I say? Only . . . what I already told you. And what you could see for yourself.” He glanced back at the area where the body had been found, shaking his head. “Fantastic! Unbelievable! Really.”
Jim frowned, dissatisfied and unhappy.
“Tell me again. Tell Art. He didn’t hear.”
The doctor seemed surprised.
“Again?”
Jim nodded.
“Yeah. Why not? That’s the way it works sometimes. We hear the same story again, and again—and maybe suddenly there’s a tiny piece that we didn’t hear before, and it means something. New. Or leads to something.”
The doctor shrugged good-naturedly and glanced at Art.
“You looked at the body?”
Art’s faint smile was puzzled, as if he thought it a stupid question.
“Of course. All of it. Every inch. Every hair.”
“And—?”
Art laughed.
“You mean—you want me to— Me? I’m not a doctor, or a lab man.”
“You don’t need to be.”
“But what can I say?”
“That’s my point exactly! What can anyone say? If we were in Africa, or New Guinea, there’d be no problem.”
The connection eluded Art, who was sometimes a bit slow.
“How’s that?”
The doctor smiled, rather enjoying this pleasantly simple, open-faced young man with disheveled hair, bloodied and mud-splattered from head to toe.
“She was obviously, and please note the word—obviously—attacked, killed, torn apart, the body half eaten by a pack of predatory, carnivorous, half-starved animals.” He turned to face Jim. “I say half-starved because I don’t think more than a third of the corpse is left. He nodded to dispel Art’s look of surprise. “Yes. Much of the bone is exposed and appears to have been gnawed. Visible tooth marks. All the long muscles gone, the fatty tissue. The neck was broken, by the way.”
Jim’s eyebrows raised slightly.
“Oh? You didn’t mention that. Does it mean anything?”
The doctor shrugged.
“I don’t suppose. There’s a lot of embedded rock around. Maybe she just hit the ground with terrific force. If they hit her from the front and she fell backward . . . well, that could have done it.”
Jim’s eyes brightened a bit.
“They? Why do you say they?”
The doctor laughed.
“I must!”—then, teasing—“Or maybe not. Would ‘it’ suit you better?” His eyes played with Jim’s.
“Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
Art was lost.
“What’s that?”
No one would tell him.
“And that’s it—everything?” Jim’s pipe was raised, about to start clicking, but he remembered in time and pocketed it.
“For now.” The doctor walked toward his car. “If the lab turns up anything. I’ll let you know.” He slammed the door of his shiny black Triumph, settled back into its red-leather bucket seat. After it had shot off, revved up to create a momentary spectacular roar, Jim turned to Art with a somewhat sour pout under his bushy mustache.
“What kind of car did you say you owned?”
Art looked thoroughly depressed, picking hopelessly at a few ragged spots of mud and blood on the front of his new three-ninety-five cotton-and dacron drip-dry shirt.
“A 1964 Chevrolet four-door sedan, with one window busted, a fender smashed, and four paper-thin tires.”
They were hot, sticky, indescribably dirty, and bone-tired. Jim’s blue shirt clung wetly to his back from belt to neck, quite as if he had stepped from a river, and Art had a raw itch at one side of his crotch he’d gotten from a pair of too-small swim trunks he had worn to Jones Beach the Sunday before, which, stung with the salt from his sweat, was driving him wild.
Yet they remained, as if some secret were still there, waiting to be found, watching a police truck gather up the last of the wooden barricade horses. Surely they had said everything there was to say, yet Jim persisted with a sigh and mild sarcasm.
“Well, Sherlock? —or do you prefer being called Mr. Holmes?”
Unhearing, bemused, conjuring his own weird pictures while shaking his head in awe, Art did not reply, instead half whispered—“A pack of wild, half-starved animals.”
Jim had decided that his pipe was a menace to his sanity after finding himself thrusting it into an ear, and deliberately broke it in half, throwing the pieces into the underbrush.
“You don’t believe it —The animal part.”
Art shook his head.
“No. I don’t. I mean—” laughing, groping, “I do; yes—in my mind. How can you dispute what the doctor said, and what you could see for yourself. But—” He touched his head. “Something says no; it’s impossible. Jim—” Disarmingly, with such a great staring earnestness it was almost comic—“Jim— This is New . . . York!”
Like a number of irritating people Jim had known, but never before Art, the young man pawed his arm, tugged at his sleeve to guarantee absolute eye-to-eye attention.
“New . . . York . . . City!”
Jim faked alarm, freeing himself as if the other were a raving psychotic.
“All right, all right! I believe you!”
Art turned, lifting his head, looking up and out over the treetops to the long sweep of apartment house buildings that made up the faintly blue, smoke-hazed skyline on the west.
“And to think . . . that it happened here . . . in Central Park . . . where kids play ball . . . and jump rope . . . where kites get busted and balloons fly away. . . .”
“And two lousy cops—” Jim’s face was sour “—can’t come up with even one single mother of a clue.”
“Or even a sister or brother.” Art’s jokes were always pathetic. But his expression was concentrated and strained, the mouth tight, the brow deeply furrowed. Then suddenly his features relaxed, becoming open and smooth as the idea he’d been struggling with burst upon him with the quality of a conversation.
“Do you know what I think?!” Almost shaking with excitement—“Hey! Jim! Listen to this!” Pawing him again—“Did you ever see a dog go bad? I have. Rotten. Mean. They do, you know. What happens— They get lost, or run away, or families abandon them; and then, somehow, they find each other. First there’s a pair, then three or four; maybe more. They live in—”
For a moment he couldn’t think where, but then he got it.
“—Caves; like in the park, some of the rocks are honeycombed; or empty sewers; or beat-up, abandoned buildings, like in Brownsville or parts of Spanish Harlem; you know, the city’s loaded with them; why, I’ve seen streets that look like a bomb had hit.” A moment’s pause. “Well?!” Then rushing on—“That’s where they live, or at least—sleep, in the daytime, hidden away, like vampires. At night they hunt, and they learn to hunt together—for food, garbage mostly, knocking over cans, nosing off the lids, but other things too. They’d attack a human. They would, Jim, you’d better believe it. I know. I seen it. I got followed once by four of them; four: ugliest, mangiest things you ever saw; half crazed from neglect, disease.”
He looked into the older man’s face closely, seeking any motion of muscle or line for reaction, but found none. Jim didn’t seem the slightest impressed. Angered, he added a sadistic nuance—
“One of them was almost hairless, with a running sore on its back as big as a soup plate, like raw meat. . . .”
That part did reach Jim. “Oh come on!” He turned away in pique and disgust.
Vaguely embarrassed, Art lowered his voice, some of the hope and conviction in his tone gone.
“All I’m telling you is God’s truth. And it could happen. Maybe that’s what did. A whole pack of half-crazed dogs! Not three or four, but, who knows, maybe ten—or thirty! And if some woman is nutty enough to wander into the park in the middle of the night, and they corner her. . . .”
He stopped entirely, sighing and discouraged, but secretly convinced it was a brilliant theory.
Jim smiled and placed his hand affectionately on the young man’s shoulder.
“Well—it is an idea, isn’t it. And I’ve come up with nothing better.” He paused, thinking, his eyes sliding in a sly glance at the other. “Of course, there were no animal footprints around . . . only lots of kicked-up mud and countless prints of barefoot kids from the day before. Hm? But it rained crazy hard toward morning, didn’t it—so it’s not easy to tell about anything.”
A sudden wave of desire for a cigarette swept over him, hitting him hard, leaving him breathless and bent over, yet it seemed considerably less severe than the last time and, straightening up, he felt a small wonder and growing pride. What had they been talking about? Ah, yes. He concluded the thought—
“Still—rain or no, you’d think there might be at least one good paw print, wouldn’t you; particularly since there were dozens that children had made. . . .” He paused. “Bit of a puzzle.”
Art was not above sulking. He kicked a stone down the path before them with the anger of a small boy whose father had just told him he was not to get this week’s allowance.
“Well—” He was determined to cling to straws. “I still say it’s possible. Explains a lot of things. You heard the doctor.”
Another kick and another stone plummeted downhill. “—Two-thirds of the body eaten away; the bone exposed and gnawed. My god—!”
Two stones, three stones, four.
“—It’s got to be an animal; it’s got to!”