A woman pedestrian had been run down by a delivery van on East 34th Street, backing up the traffic. The driver of Kennedy’s taxi, cursing, fought the dust and diesel smoke and a hundred other cars to get a half-block eastward on 34th. An EMS bus took the sidewalk around the jam-up, opening a gap in the pedestrian wall at Park Avenue South and 34th Street. The cabbie cranked his wheel hard, bounced over the curb into an illegal left-hand turn up Park. Kennedy, leaning forward to keep his shirt off the sticky back section of the seat, saw the Church of Our Savior coming up on his right as they neared East 38th Street. On an impulse, he told the driver to stop there. He climbed out onto the wide walk and stood in front of the huge sandstone facade, trying to remember if they heard confessions at 1730 hours on a Wednesday afternoon.
Kennedy’s Catholicism had declined to the status of an empty social gesture many years before, shortly after the introduction of the English Mass. His Latin had always been sketchy, so it came as something of a shock to him to hear the translation of invocations and pleas that had seemed so majestic in an indecipherable tongue, and yet were revealed, in English, as commonplaces.
But the cathedrals retained their power. When Kennedy pushed open the wooden doors, he felt thirty years slipping away into the colonnaded interior. The same amber light filled the scented space. Stained-glass panels graced the clerestory. The stone floor breathed the same old soothing silence. His footsteps echoed in the church as he made his way up the center aisle toward the sanctuary, where a forest of pillars and arches flew upward in a rush into the buttressed dome. In the tenth pew on the left, taken out of habit, he made no attempt to pray. The lights were off above the draped confessionals, which was just as well. The last time Kennedy had tried to make a full confession, he had been quite disappointed when the half-grown priest had stopped him only a minute into his litany. He had worked some ten years on those sins, and he felt they called for something better, or worse, than the Stations of the Cross and a couple of laps around his Rosary beads.
He came here now and then, in times such as these, to try to resurrect some of the old consolations of Catholicism, that evil comes from Lucifer and Leviathan, in this case from Asmodeus, and not from someplace far more frightening, from someplace much closer, completely inescapable, congenitally damned.
When he found himself counting the posts in the Communion railing, he got up and strolled back down the aisle toward the door and the hectic midtown streets. At Pershing Square he gave himself up for damned and used his buzzer to warn the competition off an air-conditioned cab. When it pulled up in front of his apartment building’s canopy, he could see from Calvin’s face that there had been no sign of Dudley.
Holly had talked him into going down to the shelter to get a pet in the first place. He went along with it just to humor her, although he was privately determined that they’d be back at his apartment in a couple of hours with nothing more petlike than a couple of chili dogs from the pushcart vendor at the corner of 74th and Second Avenue.
The shelter had been an animal oubliette, row after row of wire cages holding ragged dogs and moth-eaten cats, even a rabbit and a couple of mongooses. Mongeese? They’d never resolved that question.
The place had a steamy density to it, dog’s breath and closed spaces. It had been winter, and the shelter was overheated and dank. Holly had run from cage to cage, going predictably and nauseatingly gaga over animals Kennedy would have backed over laughing. She was convinced that a pet would go some distance toward improving Kennedy’s tendency to brood. A bird, a dog, even a kitten, might help turn Kennedy, and Kennedy’s ruthlessly neat apartment, into a more malleable, and marriageable, commodity. Kennedy, who loathed any dog that couldn’t bring down a bull elk on the fly, had visions of being stroked and cajoled into bringing home some hideous triumph of decorative genetics. He’d have to take the little brute for walkies on rainy nights and at half time in the Super Bowl.
That wasn’t really fair to Holly, who knew him better than that. She did favor small dogs with big eyes, but she spent a lot of time talking to a couple of Samoyeds and a Rottweiler, for his sake. Kennedy moved away, and something snagged his coat sleeve near a rack of small cages.
He looked down and there was a long furred arm attached to his best leather jacket by a fan of lethal claws. The arm was connected to what was obviously a hydrophobic cat, a damn big hydrophobic cat, as black as midnight, glowering at him from the cage, filling it with ill-will and murder, baring his formidable fangs, emitting a low and sustained hiss like a damaged bagpipe. Kennedy, unable to get the cat to release his jacket, moved in closer to negotiate with the beast. In a blindingly fast move, the cat made a lunge with its other forepaw and actually caught Kennedy’s jacket by the lapel. Now trapped at the cuff and the lapel, Kennedy tried to pull away and the damned thing tried to drag him into the cage. They got into quite a tussle over it, back and forth, until Kennedy put a foot against the stack and shoved backward. His coat gave in several places. The big black cat withdrew into the cage, tatters of leather coat hanging from both forepaws.
“You son of a bitch!” Kennedy had bellowed. “You’re a dead cat, you little bandit.” The cat had only snarled back, all white fangs and defiance in a flare of black fur. An attendant came running. Apologies were offered. Somebody mentioned that the cat was a disagreeable brute who was headed for that great litterbox in the sky, Monday next. The sentence got to Kennedy in some odd way.
Holly was patting a gray mongrel the size of a grizzly and calling out to him. Kennedy moved to within a safe distance and tried to get a better look at this doomed monster.
He was big—that was one thing. He’d be a handful for Holly’s woolly mammoth, maybe. There was something in the cat’s big yellow eyes that reminded Kennedy of Pete Garibaldi, the late demented leader of the now-scattered narcotics unit. The cat had settled down into a sullen indifference, half turned away from the cage-front, watching Kennedy over one bulked shoulder. Beneath this cage, five white kittens tumbled over one another, and above it a cocker pup sat staring down at Kennedy, its head slightly tilted, one eyebrow raised, a sliver of pink tongue sticking out over its baby teeth. Kennedy felt the dog’s look.
“What do you think? You think this bandit ought to go to the green room? Hah?” The cocker raised its other eyebrow and reversed the head tilt. Kennedy put a hand up against the cat’s cage, tentatively, ready to snatch it back if the cat made any move. It blinked at him.
“Your card says you’re Dudley. What’re you in for?”
Nothing.
“Nothing? Yeah, you wuz framed.” He could see the cat’s ears, as chewed and ragged as a wino’s pantscuff. And he had several whiskers missing. And scratches above both eyes. Charmless, lethal, grumpy, and unregenerate. He called the attendant back, indicating the cat.
The boy, a Puerto Rican in a lab coat, had tried to talk sense here.
“You makin’ a mistake about this one, sir. Tha’s a very bad cat. He have mark up all the girls. He don’ like girls very much.” He nodded toward Holly. “The lady, she’s not goin’ be very happy with him. Anyway, I thin’ he’s got bugs but I can’ get close enough to give him no medicine.”
“I’ll give him his medicine. As long as he’s not sick? No distemper, or anything like that?”
The boy shook his head ruefully. “No sir, he ain’ sick. He’s jus’ a mean machine. You wan’ him, sir, I get him ready for you. You sure you don’ wan’ one of those guard dogs? The lady, she’s got a nice Labrador cross over there?”
Holly came over at that point, taking in the cat and the look in Kennedy’s eyes. “Eddie, I thought you hated cats. You can’t want this ugly bugger? At least go for a kitten!”
The attendant came back with leather gauntlets and unlocked the cage. The cat was up on its toes, looking for blood and battle.
“Holly, this is the one I want. Look at him! He doesn’t give a damn if I like him or not. That’s my kind of pet. Hey, Holly, if it’ll make you feel better, we’ll buy the dog too. I think this cat is hungry.”
It took a year for Kennedy and Dudley to learn how to get along with each other. It took less than a month for Dudley to make a name for himself on the block.
In the following ten years, Dudley broke his right foreleg jumping onto a moving car. And then again, jumping out of the second-story window with his leg in a cast. Not to mention about a hundred minor wounds, and the time, three years back, when Dudley had cast a pall over Kennedy’s first evening at home with Trudy the dietician by leaping up on the bed at a critical moment, cursing his cat-curses, sitting on Kennedy’s shoulder, staring down past Kennedy’s neck as Trudy, gathering, cresting, wild, opened her eyes at the sound and saw a huge black cat looking down at her with his left eye torn out and dangling by a vein.
Ten years later Kennedy was seeing little Dudley-clones all around the Upper East Side, many of them living in much better circumstances than the original Dudley or his owner, riding around in the back windows of BMW 320i’s, sauntering along Lexington Avenue sharing leashes with scoliotic grandes dames in Russian sable, even once at the window in Alo Alo, lapping at cream in a Baccarat flute.
Yes, Dudley had left his mark all over the neighborhood, a legacy of bandit cats and bounders who could still be seen along the roof lines and behind the best windows in the area. It had been a privilege just to room with that cat.
For Homicide cops, there are killings and then there are atrocities. Most of the cases, citywide, are depressingly ordinary, in the sense that no great passion, no abyssal evil, shows itself in the deed. People get knifed over Seiko watches in the basement of a parking garage, left to drain into the pavement underneath their Mercedes. Or they turn up shot over a five-dollar heroin deck, or stabbed for their Vuarnets on Lenox Avenue. Domestic tensions exact their price, many times delivering up a killer, drunk, stoned, or merely maudlin, lying in a far corner of a peeling basement apartment in Chinatown, bloody to the wrists, whining about his rights while his common-law wife leaks into a Woolworth bathmat. Bar squabbles, grudge fights, simple juvenile machismo, childish fits of silly pettiness send half-grown boys into death struggles over parking spaces or the affections of a wacked-out hooker in the back of a wrecked De Soto in a junkyard near Jamaica Bay. Husbands throw their pregnant mistresses off bridges or slip them into the current at the foot of Roosevelt Island. Floaters bob in the wake of the garbage scows, purple and festering, fed upon by catfish in the pilings along the Hudson. A flower bed in Long Island City sprouts too quickly in April, and the sniffer-probes catch the vapors of a moldering child three feet down in the gritty clay, her schoolbooks beside her, a stocking still knotted around her neck; fibers convict the parent next door, who has concealed a record for child abuse in another state from his wife and children for thirty years. Little black boys turn up slaughtered and eviscerated, cannibalized and burned, in a litter of white feathers and black candle-bits, in a sunken basement in the South Bronx, sacrificed for Voodoo gods, John the Conjure Root, Walk On Golden Splinters, or the Gris-Gris Man. A three-year-old girl turns up wrapped in a green garbage bag on a rooftop in Harlem. A young girl is raped and killed in Manhattan; the black man accused of her killing snarls into a video camera and the television news team delivers his contorted face as the detectives lead him to a squad car. He says the bitch was asking for it and he gave it to her. Close to two thousand killings in 1985, and over two thousand in 1986. The streets and parks and rivers send down corpse after corpse, a moving beltway of bodies, and any case that takes too much time or too much manpower threatens to back up all the cases coming down after it. The “grounders” they catch on the fly, solving them in hours, off a shortened bat, firing the facts into home plate. The “mysteries” get as much time and manpower as they can find for them—more if the media are hounding the mayor, or the bodies are piling up too fast in an area marked for commercial development, like the Times Square blocks or Trump’s Television City or the Amex complex.
Most of the time, homicide work is business as usual. They do what they can, what is possible in the real world. Each detective brings something personal to an impersonal art, and responds to different atrocities in varying ways. Three kinds of murders draw blood from all the Task Force men: the child-killings, of which there seem to be an endless variety, from simple brutality to kiddie-porn deaths and sexual predation; the death of any law enforcement officer; and rape-homicide atrocities such as the Muro killing.
You could always tell when the squad was viscerally engaged by one of these cases. The mood of the squad room changed. There was no small talk. Off-duty men came in without being asked. Case loads got juggled; court dates were negotiated around it. The whole four-precinct area got involved in the fieldwork. Uniform men volunteered for canvass duty. Plainclothes cops shook up all their finks, registered and unregistered. The Crime Units clamped down on all the minor operations, making life in the blocks intolerable until the criminal community pushed the quarry out into the middle of the street. Interagency experts were called upon for counseling. Stokovich would sit for hours in his study at home, poring over journals or forensic psychology or ballistics charts, leafing through old case files, trying to get some perspective on the thing. Life in the task force got very concentrated, precise, grim.
It got grim on the streets as well. A certain amount of low-level crime goes on in every precinct area, some prostitution, a crap game, even some drug dealing. Cops don’t like to shut it all down, because most of their tips and information come from these people. But if the precinct gets an idea that a killer is being sheltered, or that there’s not enough help, then the hammer comes down.
A lot of talent had been involved in the Muro case. Robinson and Kennedy had the primary responsibility, Robinson as Recorder and Kennedy as the case man. Kennedy had attended the autopsy, overseeing Charlie Marcuse as he took vaginal and anal swabs from the corpse. There had been several distinct bite marks on the victim: one very clear one on the abdomen, a few inches above the pubis, and another one, less distinct, on the neck. Marcuse had used a cotton swab to take wipings of the skin around these bite marks, to provide data for a forensic serologist to develop later. If the killer, or killers, had been secretors—people whose blood type was evident in their semen and saliva, and about eighty percent qualify—then this evidence would provide support for related evidence. It wasn’t conclusive alone, but it helped in those cases where an Assistant DA wanted as much backup as he could get before taking a man into court. There would also be blood cells in the semen. Marcuse had combed out the pubic area as well, collecting a number of hairs that had been left there during the rape. Forensic technicians could make very detailed observations about the age, diet, race, and sex of a suspect, based on pubic hairs.
A forensic odontologist had gotten photographs of the bite marks, black-and-white and color, taken with a centimeter rule in the shot. Additional facts could be developed from bite mark evidence, and unlike serological data, bite mark evidence had been accepted in New York State courts as final and conclusive proof of guilt. There were so many variables in bite size, in wear-patterns, in fillings and occlusions, in the pattern and distribution of teeth, that bite marks were as good as a clear latent print in a court of law. Other psychological factors could be inferred from the clarity of the bite. Had it been delivered in a frenzy, or was it the product of a slow, sadistic attack? The clear detail of the bite mark on Adeline Muro’s belly suggested a deliberately sadistic assault, a contention supported by the fact that the degree of bruising and tissue destruction proved that it had been done while the victim was still living.
An attempt had been made to lift latent prints off the victim’s body, especially from the areas around the neck, the inner thighs, and her wrists. A Crime Scene technician who had been trained in the Kromekote film technique had performed the operation at the scene. But latent prints were useless unless a specific suspect was under investigation. The FBI Latent Print Section in Washington can only search for similarities in a few areas. There is no computerized filing system that can be tapped into for some magical whole-system check. The search must be directed by name and FBI print number.
But a latent print will nail a suspect, once the man has been taken into custody, and a latent print found on the victim is as conclusive as an eyewitness. It’s one more item that a DA can use to convince a jury.
The brutality of the attack, and particularly the mutilations, had prompted Stokovich to contact the New York office of the FBI, to get some advice from the Behavioral Science Unit. The BSU team had been interviewing serial killers for several years, gathering data in an attempt to develop a profile of the typical mass killer. The unit had been involved in the Atlanta child murders, as well as the Ted Bundy sexual homicide investigations. It had also been useful in providing the British police with some projections about the likely domestic patterns and personality problems of the Yorkshire Ripper. That and a hundred other smaller incidents had allowed the unit to offer a forensic resource to any police force with an interest.
The Muro case was an isolated incident, not part of a series of similar attacks, so there was no way in which Stokovich could have persuaded the Department to make an official request for their help. But he did know one of the FBI field men, and he got access to some advice through the old-boy network.
In the meantime, Kolchinski, Fratelli, and several plainclothesmen from Patrol had conducted a major canvass of the apartment block and the streets and alleys surrounding it. They paid special attention to the apartments across the back alley from the Muro apartment, where people had a clear line of sight into the room where she had been killed.
Patrol officers had conducted the initial interviews, merely asking whether or not anyone in the area had seen or heard anything during the hours surrounding the attack. If the officers got a positive response, which was rare, then they would flag that sheet for the attention of the Detective Division. Out of 343 canvass contacts, the officers had found only seven people who had, or seemed as if they might have, relevant information.
A full afternoon and evening shift had been devoted to the Muro case. Physical evidence had been taken by the Crime Scene men, and other blood, semen, hair, and tissue samples had been gathered during the autopsy. The canvass had generated some possible witnesses, and Stokovich had some data concerning the mutilations. At 2345 hours, about sixteen hours after the First Officer had arrived at the scene, Stokovich pulled his Task Force back to the squad room for a conference, to see what they had, what they needed, and what it all meant.
During the conference, while the tired men slouched in chairs or leaned against the walls, and the coffee machine popped and hissed, Stokovich took each team through their actions, making notes in a steno pad.
He knew that serology and the rest of the forensic work was going to take a few days to come together. What the team was looking for at this stage was some anomaly, what the textbooks call “the stressor” in the recent life of Adeline Muro. They were hoping for some unusual occurrence—a fight with a boyfriend, the loss of a job, a new acquaintance, something ordered from a store—anything at all that could suggest the first contact with her killer. Experience had taught them that very few cases of sexual assault took place between absolute strangers. It was a depressing truth that the most likely suspects in any sex killing were members of the immediate family and close associates. The nearest and the dearest. So the first hour of the conference was devoted to analyzing what had been discovered about the last week of Adeline Muro’s life and the people who had been in contact with her during that time. Somewhere in that record there might be a clue to her death.
They got the first clue when Kolchinski and Wolf Maksins reported that Adeline Muro’s husband was serving a sentence for drug trafficking up at Rikers. He was a known associate of several drug runners in Alphabet City.
Fratelli had discovered that Adeline Muro had been making regular purchases of medicinal antiseptics from the Comprehensive Health Services.
Kennedy observed that Marcuse had not found any signs of disease in the victim’s body.
Stokovich noted that the Crime Scene Unit had detected at least five varieties of fingerprints in the primary crime zone: some plastic, some visible, and a couple of latents. Kearny had suggested, off the record, that it looked like two of these sets of prints were from a small child and a young woman. The other three types were typical of adult male prints.
Maksins came back from the phone with the name of Adeline Muro’s husband, a Rubio Joaquin Muro, DOB 05/21/48, with a history of drug and weapons offenses. He was a Cuban who had come across during the great exodus in 1980, when Castro had cleared his prisons and insane asylums and set them all afloat for America from Mariel Harbor.
Robinson presented a Manhattan Human Resources case card in the name of Hermenegildo Muro, DOB 09/06/58, and a CATCH sheet on the man, listing his a.k.a.’s as Zaka, Loco, and Mokie. The card had been found in the spare room.
A Mokie Muro was listed on Rubio Joaquin Muro’s sheet, but improperly, as an a.k.a. The different dates of birth suggested a simple error in filing.
The M.E.’s preliminary report, phoned in to Kennedy in the afternoon, had hinted at two types of semen in the victim’s anal and vaginal canals. And it had been the feeling of the odontologist that there were two distinct bite patterns on the body.
And the material under the nails of the victim was definitely human skin and blood, type AB, which matched the blood type found in one of the semen samples.
Kolchinski had been on the phone to the clerk at the Health Services clinic, and she confirmed that Adeline Muro had been concerned about hepatitis and how infectious it was for children. The paramedic had suggested certain antiseptic procedures and cautioned her against sharing drug paraphernalia. The Muro woman had become angry, insisting she was not a drug user and never would be.
Kolchinski had asked the clerk if there had been any other person named Muro diagnosed as having hepatitis by the clinic. After the need had been explained to her, the woman had pulled the name of Hermenegildo Muro from the files. Hermenegildo was also being treated for the pre-ARC phase of AIDS, which he had contracted during a homosexual liaison with an unidentified Hispanic male. The clerk could not ascertain the name of this third party, nor did she have any idea who could.
The paramedic had concluded by stating that she had inferred from the Muro woman’s manner that there was some degree of tension in the house, arising from the hepatitis and ARC diagnosis of Hermenegildo, and her concerns for the health of her child.
Kennedy quoted from a Crime Scene note, indicating that while there were definite signs of tool-work and force applied to the security bars and window moldings of the fire-escape exit, there was a thick layer of undisturbed dust and mud on the middle flight of iron stairs, which made Kennedy believe that no one had climbed up or down that fire escape in the last few days. The drought, which had been in effect all summer, had left most of Alphabet City coated in dust, and a recent rain had only served to turn the top layer of dust into a thin, delicate shell of mud. Anybody using the fire-escape stairs would certainly have broken that shell.
Robinson contributed the statements of one of the canvass sources, who had said that Adeline Muro had recently broken off “relaciones amorosas” with a man named Fuentes, a delivery driver for a midtown service. Fuentes was nowhere around, and Robinson had put out a call for him.
Robinson also quoted from an interview report wherein a next-door neighbor had recalled a “very bad fight” that had taken place between Adeline Muro and “that boy Mokie.” The neighbor was uncertain as to the exact date of the fight, stating only that she “had heard through the walls a most angry word” and that the boy Mokie had moved out of the apartment the following morning.
Another witness had reported that a “blue car, an old junker” had arrived on the same morning, and that a “fat man” had helped Mokie to take a few possessions away in the back of that car. The witness could give no better description of the car or the vehicle, nor could she remember the license number.
An addict who had been sleeping in the stairwell recalled that a very angry man had come out of Apartment 7C a few days before. The addict thought that the woman had called that man Miguel or Michael, or something similar.
Robinson closed by saying that some legwork had developed a first name for the ex-boyfriend, an employee of a bicycle delivery service whose name was Miguel Fuentes.
The conference broke up after Stokovich summarized things, assigning Robinson to check out Miguel Fuentes and detailing Ben Kolchinski to put a fire under the forensic serologist to get the decision on those blood, semen, and tissue samples as soon as possible. In the meantime, Kennedy and Fratelli could go out on the street and talk to whatever finks and addicts they could put their hands on. And he’d put the word through to Street Narcotics and to the Anti-Crime Units to put some generalized heat on the various numbers dealers and drug traffickers in Alphabet City until somebody came forward with something helpful.
Nothing worth noting had come out of the finks—either the tame ones or the casual informers that Kennedy and Fratelli had on their strings. The NYPD maintained a system of registering their informants, and each detective was required to report any consistently reliable source to the Intelligence Division for approval as a confidential informant. A source was considered to be a potential informant if he had given reliable information about a crime or a pending crime more than once, and if he had asked for money, court consideration, or had a prior criminal history. Once he was approved by the Intelligence Bureau, the confidential informant was given an ID number, made up of the precinct he had been developed in, his file number, the squad that had developed him as a source, and the Criminal Bureau number. This ID number was used to code a complete case file on the informant, and any member of the Department who could show a reasonable need for that informant could apply, through his C.O., to the Intelligence Division for access to that informant. It sounded like a great system. It was a disaster.
The reasons why it was less than efficient were complex, but the bottom line was that no one who makes money by turning in his very lethal buddies is likely to jump for joy when he hears that the Police Department, of whom he is not overly fond, has written his name down somewhere in a computer and that any cop in the city can dig it out and go see him any time of the day or night. Notoriety such as that can make you suddenly dead. Since most informants know, deep in their hearts, that even the cops who run them don’t like them very much, they tend to dry up when they realize that the NYPD has put them on a list.
And detectives don’t like to have to share the sources they develop, especially since some of these sources know as many damaging things about the detective as the detective knows about the fink. If a strange cop can ride into the neighborhood and get permission to rattle another cop’s private finks, many times without the presence of the man who ran that fink, then nobody is safe from the prying eyes of the Internal Affairs Department. Registration of informants was seen by many detectives as just another way for the slicks at Internal to throw their weight around. The basic rule in the detective brotherhood was that a man’s fink was his private property, and you had to ask him unofficially if he would do you the honor of allowing you to relay a few questions, through him, off the record, to his own fink. The result was that most of the confidential informants filed with the Intelligence Division of the NYPD were either well-blown old hacks, or minor shits thrown to the computer because they were of little real value to the detective who had developed them.
Over the weekend the serologist called Kolchinski at home with the news that there had been two secretors involved in the Muro case, and that one of the secretors had type AB blood, which corresponded to the skin samples taken from under Adeline Muro’s nails.
And Maksins’ fink, a small-time break-and-enter man whom Maksins had turned into a pretty good source in exchange for a few dollars a crack and a word in Sorvino’s ear over a Criminal Facilitation beef, reached Wolfie with the news that Hermenegildo “Mokie” Muro had been sharing a needle with a shooter on Avenue D and that shooter had told Wolfie’s snitch that Mokie was “seriously pissed” with his cousin’s “cunt wife” for throwing his ass out in the street and that he was going to do something about it.
Other than that activity, the men of the Task Force spent the weekend cutting their lawns, playing with whatever children they were fortunate enough to have visitation rights to, or simply lying around their apartments tossing rubber mice at their cats, if they had one. That’s what sensible cops do on their days off, and they don’t give up their days off easily.
On Monday afternoon, while Kennedy was watching Charlie Marcuse remove the internal mechanisms of Porfirio Magdalena Ruiz, Miguel Fuentes was giving Frank Robinson a very convincing alibi for his whereabouts on the night Adeline Muro was killed. He had been in an 84th Precinct holding cell for trying to kick a dollar out of a computerized blackjack game in a bar on Flatbush Avenue. It checked out, and Miguel Fuentes was crossed off the list.
The brownies turned out to have cited a battered 1967 Ford Fairlane for sidewalk parking outside the Muro apartment on Thursday, September 12, the morning after (all the best witnesses had stated) Adeline Muro had the big fight with Mokie Muro. The computer gave a registration for the Ford Fairlane, owned by one Salvador Olvera, showing an address on Myrtle Avenue. Salvador Olvera came up on the CATCH system as a small-time drug trafficker with the usual range of penny-ante charges, one anomalous bust for public lewdness and another odd beef—consensual sodomy. Stokovich was surprised to see the charge. The Supreme Court had declared that charge unconstitutional, although it was still technically on the books. The act must have been so outrageous that the arresting officer had laid the charge anyway.
And consensual sodomy seemed to fit the pattern. The Health Services paramedic had reported that Mokie Muro was having a homosexual relationship with an unidentified male. The color of Salvador Olvera’s Ford Fairlane was listed as blue. Salvador had the a.k.a. of Tinto, along with a couple of other Hispanic nicknames, including Reina which was Spanish for “queen.”
The gestation period for the ARC stage of AIDS was considered to be something like three years, so this Olvera guy, homosexual or no, could not have been the source of Mokie’s disease. For that matter, there were enough addicts with AIDS in Alphabet City to give half of Manhattan a good shot at AIDS through their needles, so the ARC thing didn’t really count for much.
The FINEST net had sent around the intriguing notation that a male prostitute named Jesus Rodriguez had been found in possession of a cameo with an inscription reading “para mi corazón Adelina.” It resembled one of the articles a neighbor had described as Adeline Muro’s personal and most treasured belongings. But Jesus Rodriguez had been released on his own recognizance, through a mixup in Communications, and nobody in Midtown North seemed to know where the kid was now.
And finally, Stokovich’s FBI buddy had gotten back to him with the reading from his buddy in the Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico. The fact that Serology had found two types of secretors in the victim’s body did not fit the usual pattern of sexual assault that they had formulated. It was rare that the kind of man who vented his rage at women by mutilating them in a sexual manner could actually perform sexually with a woman. They were usually impotent, and did not have normal sexual lives at all. So the removal of portions of the body did not seem to fit with the obvious traces of two sexually functioning males. He had added, however, that this was only a reading from a distance. If a second murder developed, Stokovich was to be sure to contact Quantico directly.
Thanks, Bruno had said, but the sarcasm was lost.
When Wolfgar Maksins made contact with the addict who had shared a needle with Mokie Muro, the man who had heard him talk about his cousin’s “cunt wife,” the addict was too sick to talk. He needed a hit before he could remember anything. So Wolfie bounced him around in a stairwell until he felt better. When things settled down a little, Maksins acquired the additional information that Mokie had talked about his friend who was a striker—a recruit—for a motorcycle gang in the Bronx. Mokie had said, through a fog of cheap crank and a couple of Quaaludes, that he was going to go up there and be a striker too. That was all the addict could manage to get out before he got the dry heaves, and Maksins left him there, working out his problems.
When they got together again for the Tuesday morning general conference at 0845, most of the Task Force was convinced that the killers of Adeline Muro were Mokie Muro and an “unidentified third party” who was probably this man Salvador Olvera, a.k.a. Tinto. Citywides had been issued on the teletype for both men, and the plainclothes units from Midtown were keeping a special watch for Jesus Rodriguez, who seemed like the best lead so far. Units of the Biker Squad in the Bronx had been contacted about a possible sighting of Mokie Muro, but the Bronx had troubles of its own, and it was probably going to take a personal push from some of the Task Force guys to locate either of the two suspects. Kennedy had his hands full with the Porfirio Ruiz killing. Maksins had a sadistic sex killing in Greenwich Village. Fratelli and Robinson were chasing some demented Armenian bunko artists who had graduated to homicide after a knifing on Van Dam. Kolchinski was up to his bald head in a Hell’s Angels investigation. Natural velocity was pushing the Muro case into the background until the Ruiz case led Kennedy into a brick wall because of the Strike Force operation against some major drug dealers. Stokovich had already decided to hand Kennedy the 23rd Street jumper, which he thought was a grounder, and then turn him loose on the Muro case. Eddie Kennedy didn’t know it, but Stokovich looked on Kennedy as his “silver bullet,” his absolute best man when it came down to bringing in a running man. It was the thing Kennedy did best. His case work was textbook perfect, but out on the chase he had something extra, a sense for where a man will go when he’s running for his life.
Kennedy pushed himself away from the kitchen table. The readout on his microwave maintained that it was only a few minutes after ten in the evening. Kennedy felt as if it were the last hour of the last day in the universe. But the Muro case, rough as it was, had its own power as well. By the time the Force had come to the tentative conclusion that their best bet for the killer was Mokie Muro and an accessory, the inquiry had taken up the time and energy of three hundred people: the patrol officers who responded to the call, the Communications people who relayed the word to the Task Force, the Crime Scene technicians, the DA’s office, Charlie Marcuse and his people, the EMS bus crew, the Forensic lab technicians, some people at the FBI, several platoons of the 9th, duty sergeants, Anti-Crime Units, Street Narcotics Units, assorted finks and snitches, secretaries, clerks, telephone operators, a Health Services paramedic, some people over at MHR, detectives from Midtown North and Midtown South plainclothes divisions, Intelligence. The television image of the lone man doggedly pursuing his maniacal quarry through the Dantean landscape of night, alone, opposed at every step by stupid commanders and witless patrolmen, rumpled and sodden with weariness … well, it was mostly laughable, except for the “rumpled and sodden with weariness” bit.
Kennedy stood in the middle of his living room, weaving slightly, seeing his apartment through the distance of emotional exhaustion. This is it, Eddie. This is what you’re working for. An eggshell shag rug, a burgundy leather and brass couch with a matching leather armchair, a low black marble coffee table, two Orient Express lamps from a mail-order house in San Francisco, a framed diptych print of the Brooklyn Bridge, a low black lacquer credenza with a Panasonic stereo system in flat black metal, satellite speakers in the bedroom, about seven hundred hardcover books, mostly secondhand from the Barnes and Noble Annex down on Fifth Avenue, historical fiction, a set of encyclopedias and the complete mail-order line of Franklin Mint Books, God help him—the “quintessential bourgeois library” was how that dragon lady from Barnard had described it, just before he put her out in the hall. A thirteen-inch Sony Trinitron with a remote control so he could turn the sound off when that godawful commercial for Grind came on, or yet another searing investigative exposé. He had three suits in a closet in his ten-by-twelve bedroom, a blue single-breasted, a gray double-breasted, and a brown. Three sport jackets, various slacks and jeans, his dress uniform, socks and shirts and ties in the shelves above it. A round kitchen table with fake-walnut veneer; four matching chairs, tubular aluminum, with padded seats, one of which had been shredded by Dudley; and a half-full litter box behind the bathroom door. Typical of the little monster. Bail out and leave Kennedy with the cleanup.
It was funny how your life just happened to you, Kennedy was thinking. All his life he’d been making plans and working for one thing or another. The Academy, then his Gold, then Grade Money. A better apartment. Maybe someday a wife, a kid. Some of it he’d gotten. The rest of it … He couldn’t place the day, the year, when he’d given up on that part of the plan. Now he was fat and forty and tired, and the thing he missed most wasn’t even human.
Kennedy woke up during the weather report. Storm Field was the weatherman for this channel, something no one in Manhattan seemed to find odd, and he was talking about a major storm front moving in to the East Coast area, promising celestial brimstone later in the week. Kennedy sat up on the couch and rubbed his eyes. The vision of a heavy storm ripping up Fifth Avenue along Museum Mile, scattering the brittle old ladies, maybe a cyclone sucking up all the Shih Tzus and pekes and Sharpeis … it had some appeal, he had to admit. Pack it in, Eddie. Bedtime.
He found Dudley on the floor of his bedroom closet, lying on his favorite Harris tweed sports coat, on his side, torn up and clotted but still breathing, just barely breathing, and far too hot to the touch. His fur was dull and matted. When Kennedy picked him up, blood ran from his mouth in a viscous strand, like pulled toffee. Dudley’s eye was almost completely closed, but he was watching Kennedy, as if to say, So, Eddie, what’s happening?
A few frantic phone calls later he had located a vet on the West Side. The cabbie got into the spirit of the thing, screaming through Central Park, honking at the limos, keeping up a running commentary on why cats are the best pets in the universe, while Kennedy held the carton fall of Dudley on his lap and watched for a blue-and-white. If they tried to pull him over, he was goddam well going to get a police escort for this run.