“Gladyss!”
I came around slowly . . . to complete and total darkness! When I finally pulled myself off the floor I saw absolutely nothing. I was totally blind.
“My fucking eyes!”
I heard a tense male voice say “Gladyss, talk to me. What’s the situation?”
It was O’Ryan, somewhere behind me.
“Eddie!”
“Where is he?” O’Ryan asked softly.
“I can’t see!”
“What do you mean?”
“I just had an eye operation . . .”
I tried not to panic.
“. . . and he hit me . . . and now I’m . . . I’M FUCKING BLIND!”
“Fuck! Let me see!”
I felt his hands nervously hold my head and tilt it back. He must’ve been staring into my eyes.
“Did you call for backup?”
“Before I came in.”
“Your eyes look fine. Just stay calm. Backup should be here in a minute, along with an ambulance.” He ran his fingers across the back of my head.
“Ow! What the fuck!”
“You have a bloody contusion.” I had my hands cupped over my eyes, hoping and praying that my sight would flip back on, like a light switch being thrown.
“I was up on Twenty-third when I got the 10-13,” Eddie was saying. “I recognized your address. But then as I was coming in . . . I guess it must’ve been him . . .”
“Who?”
“Your actor buddy, Noel. I saw him on the corner of Sixth Avenue. Just now.”
“Shit! He must’ve made bail.”
“If it wasn’t him, it sure as hell looked just like him.”
“What was he doing?”
“Getting into a cab on Sixteenth Street.”
“For God’s sake, check Maggie!” I said feeling around for her.
“Relax,” he said. “She’s right here and she’s breathing, no apparent injuries. From her pupils, it looks like she’s been drugged. And she has this . . .” I heard an odd crinkling sound. “Her ankles and wrists were bound up.”
“But she’s not cut in any way?” I didn’t remember any blood.
“No, she looks okay.”
I heard a faint thump that might’ve come from a neighboring apartment.
“Did you check the bathroom?” Eddie asked quietly.
“No, didn’t get a chance. I heard Crispin Marachino knock and call Maggie’s name, then he went in and it sounded like there was a scuffle and a loud bang. The door opened and slammed shut again, and then a minute or two later I thought I heard a scream.”
At that moment there was another loud bang. I heard Eddie announce, “Police!” and kick open the bathroom door.
“What’s going on?”
“Oh shit!” he said.
“What do you see?” I yelled.
“It’s Marachino. He looks pretty bad. Holden must’ve attacked him too.”
Eddie spoke into his walkie talkie. “Patrol post thirteen, civilian emergency. Need a second EMS forthwith.” He then relayed my address and other information.
I was crouching next to the TV set, which was turned to CNN, and over Eddie’s voice I could just hear the newscaster: “We’re live on Centre Street, where movie star Noel Holden is about to be released on two point five million dollars bail.”
Presumably Eddie could see Noel’s picture on the TV, because he paused abruptly. For a moment I thought he had simply made a mistake. We both listened as the newscaster finished talking about Noel’s imminent release.
“On New Year’s Eve, when you told me you were a virgin, it was snowing outside. Do you remember that?”
The coldness in his voice, its air of stark finality, made me realize it wasn’t an error. I was in serious trouble.
I heard the doorbell buzz in my apartment next door.
“As pure as the driven snow in this filthy, fucked-up city, that’s what I thought. I should’ve just shoved my thick cock into your tight little snatch right then. But . . . I treasured your purity. The fact that someone as beautiful as you, who must’ve had to fight off countless assholes trying to fuck you, had chosen me to give me your gift—”
“I did choose you Eddie!” I tried to focus just on breathing in and out, trying to re-enter the moment, even though I knew he was going to kill me.
“You were so tall and strong . . . and pure of heart . . . I just thought, this blonde beauty is mine to protect and cherish. I know it’s a cliché, but I thought that we really were destined for each other . . .”
As he was talking, I could hear other buzzers being rung from downstairs. They were trying to get into the building.
“I mean, no one is still a virgin at twenty-three. But then what do you go and do? You take your beautiful little rose . . .”
“Eddie, just listen to me, please!” I was still on my knees, my weight resting on my calves. My fingertips slowly stroked the ground around me until I could feel the muzzle of my gun, lying where I had dropped it.
“. . . and you go and find the lowest of the low, and you part your beautiful strong thighs for that vile scumbag. You sacrificed your purity to jackals!”
“Please calm down, Eddie” I managed to say.
“I know I must sound crazy, but here’s the kicker—I’m not.”
“NYPD!” I heard a voice outside the door, and the crackle of radios.
“I want you to put down . . . your weapon,” I said with a tremor. It crossed my mind that if he did shoot me now, at least he’d get caught.
“You don’t even . . . I was still on duty after that fashion show. . . Remember that awful night? Everyone booing you even though you were the only one doing what was right! I should’ve killed all of them right there.”
“Calm down,” I said, to him and myself.
“I was the one who brought you home that night, when you were drunk off your ass and you tried to arrest that dumb crack whore.”
“Tell me that you didn’t kill those people, Eddie.”
“You were so wasted that night, you didn’t even realize that I was the one who put you in a cab, brought you safely home, and carried you up the stairs in my arms.”
“Eddie, I’m grateful for that, but . . .” My hand was trembling. All I could do was focus on his voice.
“I was the one who undressed you and put you to bed like you were my own.”
“Eddie, I . . .”
“I abandoned my post to bring you home, then once you were asleep, I went back to the precinct to sign out.”
“I’m very grateful, but . . .”
“And when I came back to make sure you were okay, what do you think I found?” Now his voice was boiling with rage.
“I don’t care!”
“I found that disgusting creep was doing you!” he screamed. “And I would’ve married you!”
The blast from his Glock knocked me flat. I grabbed my gun and fired three times into the blackness until I heard a gasp, and then a thud.
Feet began kicking at Maggie’s door.
“Hold on!” I fumbled my way across the room until I located the doorknob. I unlocked it, held my hands in the air and said, “I’m a blind cop, don’t shoot.”
“What the hell—” one of them said, presumably seeing Eddie’s uniformed body. I explained what had happened.
“You can’t be blind,” said one of the cops. “He took three bullets to the head.”
Since O’Ryan was in uniform and I wasn’t, they cuffed me. The cops were from the one-zero; none of them were from Midtown. Over the next few minutes I heard more cops pour into the apartment.
All of Eddie’s radio calls had been fake, so we had to wait another five minutes for the paramedics to arrive for poor Maggie. Crispin was dead. One of the officers said his skull had been cracked open like an egg. When Annie showed up and my identity was verified, the cuffs were removed. The medics gently taped bandages over my eyes, and I was finally rushed to Saint Vincent’s Hospital.
An eye surgeon was waiting for me in the ER. When he heard that I’d had Lasik surgery just hours earlier, he examined my eyes and then explained what must have happened, something about rods and cones. I was too frazzled to take it in.
“Will I be able to see again?” That was all I wanted to know right now.
“Oh yes,” he said. “It’ll just require a brief operation.”
I was sedated, and when I awoke the next day, I could see images again, though they were still blurry. I was told that would soon pass. But because of my head injury, I wasn’t going home any time soon.
During my convalescence, Annie told me later, a variety of forensic evidence quickly came to light that proved Eddie was definitely our second killer. For starters, the same roofies that had been used to drug both Jane Hansen and Caty Duffy were also found in Maggie’s system. And although we couldn’t find his knife, blood residues from all three Marilyn victims were found on shoes in O’Ryan’s apartment, though he hadn’t been on duty at any of the crime scenes. In addition, after the news broke about the killer cop, a honeymooning couple from Toronto came forward to say they’d seen a cop going into the Kings Court Hotel at roughly the same time as Caty Duffy’s murder. It had to have been O’Ryan.
But the most damning—and saddest—evidence was found in the meticulously handwritten journals Eddie had kept. Barry said it looked like they had been written in calligraphy. Not only had he kept a diary of the killings, the back pages contained early drafts of the menacing poems he had sent to the Marilyn web site.
Apparently, since I’d been transferred to homicide, Eddie had been lurking in my vicinity every moment when he wasn’t at work or asleep. He kept a watch on my building so he could monitor all my comings and goings. Each time I went to yoga or the corner market, he wrote it down.
His artistic handwriting betrayed a discontent that went way beyond being jealous of Noel; he’d developed paranoid conspiracies about the power of the cult of celebrities, who he felt were constantly undermining American society and morals. I had concerns of my own about the negative effects of our celebrity culture, but I also realized that I had only myself to blame for succumbing to it.
Like Bernie, Eddie had done his research and discovered various details about Noel Holden, including his odd comments about Marilyn Monroe being his mother, and his on-again, off-again affair with Venezia. It appeared that his motive for the killings was to revenge himself for the “abrupt withdrawal of my affection.” That was the phrase he used. Though as I remembered it, he was the one who had done all the withdrawing.
O’Ryan might have been able to continue his murder spree undetected if it hadn’t been for his insane fantasy that Noel and Crispin had worked together to rob him of my virtue. This was what had fueled his final rampage: the murder of Crispin and the attempted murder of Maggie, which was to have been loosely timed to Noel’s release. He hadn’t figured on my walking in on him.
“Not only did you get a plum assignment in Homicide,” Barry said. “At the same time you met and got involved with a Hollywood star. The combined impact of those two things was probably what set him off. There’s evidence in earlier journals that he’d long exhibited a pathological level of envy—now he undoubtedly felt he had been cheated out of his girl and a prospective job at the same time.”
Since we’d never be able to interrogate O’Ryan, it would all remain open to endless speculation.
Despite the ordeal that had landed me there, I fondly remember the time I spent healing in St. Vincent’s back in 2003. Sadly, it’s gone now. After generously serving the Lower West Side of Manhattan since 1849, the hospital abruptly went bankrupt in 2010, prompting an investigation by the DA. Now there are plans to tear it down and build luxury condos—one more thing for O’Flaherty to have gotten mad about, except he died in prison back in 2007.
The evening before I was released from the hospital, Bernie, Alex, and Annie came to visit me and we found ourselves reviewing the case.
“The more I think of what O’Ryan did, the more I appreciate the opportunism of it,” Alex said. “He plugged into an open case that you were assigned to, then subtly twisted the crimes, hoping that we’d arrest Noel, who he believed had displaced him in your heart.”
“And don’t forget, Gladyss,” Annie added, “You were the one who said that Noel was a suspect in the first place. He was just giving you what you were initially looking for.”
It was a painful realization. “Shit, if I had never told him that I suspected Noel, the murders of Jane, Caty, Venezia, and Crispin would never have happened.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Bernie said. “A psychopathic killer is a psychopathic killer. If it hadn’t been this, he would’ve eventually gone after someone else, and instead of four murders it might’ve been forty.”
Annie and Alex headed home after a while to be with their families, so that left me alone with Bernie.
“I talked to Internal Affairs,” he said. “Long story short, I’m back on modified duty pending an investigation.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“They say they have enough evidence to make a case for dismissal and bring me up on charges.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“There’s something called forced retirement—I get three-quarters disability pension if I leave quietly.” He sat on the edge of my bed, looking down. “I guess I’m taking it.”
“I’m sorry, Bernie.”
“No, it’s probably for the best. Hey, I was ready to go last year, but after Bert took sick, I felt like the department wanted to be rid of me too. And I don’t like being pushed.”
“You’ve got to get your health back,” I replied.
“The pulmonologist said my lung capacity is forty percent, and there’s little I can do about that. The last doctor I spoke to recommended having the foot amputated.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He said that’s why it always smells so bad. It’s permanently infected.”
“They can do great things with prostheses nowadays.”
“Smell or no smell, I’m keeping my fucking foot!” he shouted.
“Bernie, you have to do something about the anger.”
“When I came on the force twenty years ago, I was like you, Gladyss—a smart, sexy young cop. Back then, the city was more like I am now—bitter and damaged. It smelled rotten. Midtown was loaded with guys like O’Flaherty. And we all thought the city would only get worse. I never thought it’d turn around like this.”
“But it did. New York’s actually a great place now.”
“Have you traveled much?” he asked.
“Yeah, I went to Europe after college, traveled around the Mediterranean.”
“What did you see?”
“What are you getting at?”
“There was a time when, if you went someplace, you saw distinctive things just there. People dressed a certain way, each place had different music, different food, people spoke a different language. People even behaved a certain way that was their way. I mean, once you homogenize the world until every place is just like every other place, you destroy those distinctions, you destroy the beauty of the place. Yeah, New York was dirty and dangerous back then, but that kept the rich assholes away. And it allowed for a very unique style and character all its own. Times Square was the epicenter of that, at least for me.”
“But surely it’s better now overall,” I argued. “safer, cleaner.”
“It was like some crazy, intense, unique character who was suddenly . . . lobotomized. And now it’s happening to the whole city.”
He rose slowly to his feet and smiled. “Anyway after years of working with Bert, I know for a fact that he never would’ve got out of a warm bed on a freezing cold night, pulled me out of my car, and taken me to his home. Thanks for that.”
“I would’ve taken you to your home if I knew where you lived.”
“More than anything in the entire world, I’m glad that you didn’t know where I live. Otherwise I never would’ve been date-raped. Thank you again for that.”
He gave me a kiss on the cheek, then limped out the door.
Over the course of the next decade, as New York seemed to steadily drain of its New Yorkishness, Bernie must’ve grew increasingly less comfortable, until he finally gave up and tried joining other retired city workers in the relatively neglected outer boroughs. But without a family to put up with him and help him assimilate, what recourse would there be for the old curmudgeon but simply to retreat and become ever more reclusive.
More terrifying still is the realization that I might be on a similar path myself. Initially I liked the fact that New York was getting cleaner and better behaved, but one day I began to realize that the process was continuous. Slowly, as it kept changing, I found myself growing steadily crankier over the years. Whenever I would find myself ranting about how things used to be just a few years earlier—how the glamour of the big city that drew these revolving-door natives here is all bullshit—my current boyfriend, who arrived in the city only five years ago, accuses me of “olding.”
“You can’t look at the city as a finished piece,” he once replied. “You should think of it more as a continuous work in progress.”
After her attack, Maggie had recuperated across town at Beth Israel Hospital, recovering from mild concussion and a damaged voice box. Apparently O’Ryan, while trying to strangle her, had dislocated her larynx. I’d apparently interrupted him when I knocked on her door. Even though her injuries were greater than mine, my insurance was much better than hers, so she was released before I was.
When I finally came home from the hospital, Maggie greeted me with a big hug. In a hoarse whisper she said, “Thank you for saving my life.”
This was the first time I had seen her since the shooting, so I asked her if O’Ryan had surprised her while she was alone with Crispin.
“No, it wasn’t like that,” she began. “In fact, Crispin and I had broken up the day before.”
“Then how did he happen to get you?”
Speaking in a soft, methodical voice that made me wonder if she was overmedicated, she described how O’Ryan had knocked on her door holding a paper bag while I was getting my eye surgery. He claimed to be looking for me. She’d told him where I was and invited him into her place. He’d taken a plastic jug of fresh apple juice out of his bag, saying he’d just bought it at the farmers market in Union Square and didn’t want to drink it alone. She’d brought two glasses and they drank. When she started feeling woozy, he’d pulled out his gun and forced her to call Crispin, who was still in town, and plead with him to take a cab right over.
“Did you wonder why he wanted to see Crispin?”
“I thought it had something to do with the photos. I figured you’d told O’Ryan about them and he was pissed. I sure didn’t think I’d wind up getting Crispin killed,” she whispered sadly.
“What photos?”
“Oh.” She looked away. There was clearly something she had never told me. “Crispin was a freak.”
“A freak how?”
“He knew I had a crush on Noel and kept dangling him in front of me.”
“Dangling him how?”
“Manipulating me.”
“How?” I pushed, but she just looked away and tears started rolling silently down her cheek.
“Just tell me, Maggie!”
“He told me that he wanted to punk you.”
“‘Punk me how?”
“Remember that Bible I had with me when I came over that one time?”
“Yeah.” It was the same Bible I’d seen when I went into her apartment and found her unconscious, only then it was open, revealing that it had been hollowed out.
“Crispin gave it to me.”
“What for?”
“Well, don’t get mad . . . It had a miniature camera in it.”
“Why?”
“Remember that night when we kissed?” she asked.
“Uh huh.”
“He was behind all that.”
“Behind what?”
“Crispin gave me the Bible with the camera hidden in it and told me how to position it. He said it was just going to be a prank. I was going to show it to you later.”
“So there are photos of us kissing?”
“Some joke.”
“He’d wanted me to go all the way.”
“All what way?”
“You know, seduce you.”
“How exactly did Crispin—?”
“He told me to say I’d gotten the role in that soap. And I was suppose to be teaching you to kiss Noel.”
“I remember that. So it was all a lie?”
“Yeah.”
“But I’d been out on a date that night with Noel.”
“Yeah, he called me later and said you were on your way home. And that you’d be tipsy and randy. Those were his exact words.”
I remembered that evening now. I’d arrived late at some ridiculous premiere party on the South Street Seaport; I had forgotten about it, but Maggie talked me into going. Crispin had handed me a tall stein of beer and a Bushmills chaser when I walked in, and he more or less dared me to drink it. Then I remembered her kissing me—and all the while she was photographing it.
“How could you do that?”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “People do dumb things when they’re in love. I mean, that’s probably why O’Ryan did what he did, right?”
“I guess so,” I said tiredly. Sadly.
“Could you do me one favor?” Maggie asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind.”
“What?”
“I just need to talk to Noel one final time. When he calls you, can you ask him to give me a call.”
“Sure,” I said, half-disgusted, half-embarrassed by her pathetic request.
While I was still banged up and medicated, I had rebuffed a half-hearted attempt Noel made to come and visit me in the hospital. I just didn’t want to be seen like that. Given what I had learned about celebrity behavior, I never expected to hear from him again. So I was startled when I woke up one morning roughly a week after I got back home to find a lengthy message from him on my voicemail. He told me he was at a hotel in Saint Bart’s, down in the Caribbean, recuperating. He said he was sorry about my suffering, and grateful that I had spared him a long and costly trial. He claimed he knew there was something off about Eddie when he first was knocked down by him that day we met.
“So I really want to thank you,” he said. “The DA was planning on going after me with everything they had. Hell, they had a witness who was ready to testify that I had left Venezia’s room just prior to her being . . . What I’m trying to say is, I’m deeply grateful.”
He rambled on a while longer, as though I were actually on the other end of the phone. Then he must’ve spotted a sexy girl out his window, because without any transition he abruptly hung up. He didn’t even say goodbye, let alone leave a phone number I could pass along to Maggie. When I checked my phone to see if his number was listed among the incoming calls, I was actually happy to see it said RESTRICTED.
Maggie and I stopped hanging out and just became hi/bye friends, who passed one another in the hallway. Three years later, when she was invited by some casting director to do a fifteen-minute audition for some TV show, she gave up her apartment and moved to LA. Ultimately I think we both were relieved we no longer had to pretend.
As for Noel, after his final phone call I made a point of changing the channel or flipping the magazine page whenever I glimpsed his sharpened face. I just wanted it all behind me. One night in 2007, I accidentally spotted him on a talk show and all the expensive makeup couldn’t hide the fact he’d had a nip and tuck and a dye job. Like all glamour figures, he’d begun his long slide down.
As commercial rents kept rising in the neighborhood, the little yoga studio across the street finally had to say Namaste and fold. When I checked it out online, I found there was more to the story: a sexual harassment suit had been filed by Penrose, the yogarexic instructor, against the owner. Evidently he had not quite renounced everything.
A short time later, a shiny new fitness franchise appeared just around the corner, complete with four yoga classes per day. It had all the old poses I enjoyed without requiring me to think about my seven spinning okras as written in the tantrums, or whatever.
While lying with my eyes closed during final relaxation one day, I tried to summon up the image of the statue of Diana, but to no avail. Instead, an image of Noel in a leotard wearing a cape popped into my head; I had just seen it on the side of a bus. He was playing some comic book superhero. When I considered the Greek myth that best suited him, I didn’t even have to use Google to come up with Narcissus, the legendary egotist. Later though, when I did look it up, a sad story emerged. Narcissus had a relationship with a wood nymph named Echo. But as much as she loved him, he loved himself even more. Slowly Echo withered away, leaving only her reverberating voice behind. It was a classic tale of unrequited love, with Maggie’s name echoing all over it.
My brother Carl returned to New York for Easter, which was spring break for him. I was still on sick leave, and went back to Astoria, Queens, to celebrate the holiday with my family. They had all heard about the murders and my brief fling with the Hollywood Hunk. Over dinner, I filled them in on some of the more interesting details that had never made it into the press.
Toward the end of the evening, after most of my cousins had left and I was planning to do likewise, Carl gave me a hug, something he rarely did. I hugged him back and asked if he was okay.
“I guess I’m just afraid that we’re both getting worse.”
“Worse! I just helped catch a goddamn serial murder!”
“Well . . . which you, kind of . . . caused,” he added sympathetically.
“I caused!”
“I don’t mean deliberately! But for years you protected your virginity like Fort Knox! Then, on New Year’s Eve, you impulsively decide that you’re wasting your innocence, and that very night you go to bed with that creep. Of course, he turns out to be a psycho killer! And you don’t even do it with him, instead you end up giving him a homicidal case of blue balls!” He laughed.
“Because you called! We would’ve done it, but you interrupted!”
“Oh right, blame it on me!”
“It was all just really bad luck,” I amended for the sake of peace.
“Bad luck? Really. Well how about your flaky neighbor who tells you about some mystical brand of yoga that gives you x-ray vision—and suddenly you turn into the goddamned Goddess of the Hunt!”
Instead of pulling out my Glock, I grabbed my coat and left.
Eventually we made up, as usual, but over the last ten years he has grown increasingly combative. He’s always on the side of justice for the little guy, and since I was a cop, what he calls “a security guard for the rich,” I invariably become a piñata for his growing rage.
By October of 2011, he’d become a regular member of Occupy Oakland. The last time he called me was that November night when Bloomberg shut down Zoo-cotti Park. He woke me up in the early morning hours screaming, “The rich have decimated this country, and when we protest that, you oinkers do their dirty work for them!”
I hung up on him. We didn’t have any further communication until a little over a year later at our family’s 2012 New Year’s Eve party, which ended with me storming out the door as he yelled: “Fascist Bloomberg is finally out this year! He can’t buy any more reelections!”
Three months after Crispin’s murder, I was back in Neighborhood Stabilization doing foot patrol in uniform again. It was almost like those four weeks in Homicide had never happened. To make matters worse, I’d been paired up with O’Ryan’s old partner, Lenny Lombardi. Under the circumstances, I was nervous about returning to duty—it’s rare that people who kill their co-workers end up returning to their old position. But when everyone read the news reports of Eddie’s lunacy, they were genuinely sympathetic. Still, that first day back, I kept waiting for Lenny to ask about it, and he didn’t say a single word.
That evening we found ourselves all the way east on Forty-second, passing through Grand Central Station. I looked up at the famous ceiling and stared at those wonderful zodiac signs, drawn out from their starry backdrops. Aries the ram, Taurus the bull, Gemini the twins, Cancer the crab . . . I was amazed by the notion that three thousand years earlier, people had extrapolated their gods from seemingly random dots in the sky.
“You know,” Lenny said, seeing my heavenward gaze. “Someone once figured out that those images are all painted backwards.”
“No fooling.”
“Yeah, and when they asked the Vanderbilt family, who owned the building, what the deal was, one of them said, that’s the perspective from the gods looking down at us.”
“A good spin on a fuck up,” I commented. And since it seemed a natural progression, I asked, “Did you know there’s a Greek myth tie-in to the O’Flaherty murder case?”
When he said that he did not, I told him about the postcard of the Diana statue that was taped up over the killer’s bed.
“That’s it?”
“Well, he had been killing tall blondes, and I’m a tall blonde—which was why I had been brought in in the first place.”
“So it’s like you were the goddess Diana.”
“There were other similarities,” I added, without going into the matter of my recent virginity.
“Well, I guess that would account for your old partner,” he said casually.
“Bernie Farrell?”
“No, Eddie O’Ryan.”
“What about him?”
He pointed up at the constellations on the ceiling again. “Orion’s Belt.”
“Huh?”
“Orion was Diana’s hunting partner. She ended up killing him, too.”