The Central Park precinct house, erected in 1870, was built as a stable for the horses that were helping maintain the new park by pulling grass-cutting machines and wagonloads of earth and plants. Sixty years later, with animal power long replaced by gas-fueled vehicles, the Police Department inherited the stable. A handsome building, its Victorian lines are still graceful and complex, its walls made of brick and brownstone, its roofs tiled in multihued slate. Inside, however, the rooms are cramped, the floorboards rotting. Few traces of nineteenth-century splendor remain except for a tall receiving desk made of carved mahogany.
Mickey McEntee was standing beside the desk when Detective Genova and his partner arrived with Chambers in tow. McEntee saw the scratches on the young man’s face, but like Genova, he didn’t say anything. He just led Robert into a room off the reception area—a small room with two banged-up metal desks and a tower of chipped lockers that were plastered with stickers saying, “Police!! Don’t Move!!!” He gave him a chair, perched himself informally on a desktop, and said, “I’m going to ask you some questions about this girl who’s disappeared.” A moment later he glanced down at the young man’s hands. Like his face, they, too, were scratched. Or bitten. There was a deep gouge on the middle finger of his right hand.
Maybe he shouldn’t question Chambers just yet, McEntee decided. Maybe he’d better read him his rights first. Retrieving a copy of the Miranda warnings from the room next door, he began reciting them. “You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer questions,” he said. “Do you understand?”
Chambers nodded yes.
“You have the right to an attorney if you want one now, or in the future. Do you understand?”
Chambers nodded yes again.
McEntee finished the warnings, then asked about the girl.
Yes, he knew her, Chambers said. They’d had sex together earlier in the summer. And he’d seen her at Dorrian’s last night. But he hadn’t spent much time with her. She’d been circulating through the bar, talking to a lot of different people. “Floating around” was the phrase he used.
“Did you leave with her?” McEntee, taking notes, asked.
“No. She was in the vestibule of Dorrian’s when I left. She said she was going across the street to the Korean deli. To buy cigarettes. I don’t know where she went after that. Maybe to her boyfriend Brock Pernice’s.”
“What did you do?”
“Went to a doughnut shop on Eighty-sixth Street and Lexington. Then went home. Watched The Price Is Right on television, and a movie, I forget its name, about some kid who was all fucked up.”
“How’d you get those scratches on your face?”
“My cat scratched me.”
“What happened to your hand?”
“I was sanding floors for a woman who lives upstairs from me, and the sanding machine jumped around and cut my fingers.”
This guy’s really cool, McEntee thought. So cool that even though he’s clearly been in a hell of a serious struggle, he’s not even the least bit nervous. McEntee kept at him, but he felt his first homicide investigation was going nowhere, that even if Robert had killed Jennifer, he wasn’t going to crack.
An hour or so after Robert’s departure for the precinct house, Phyllis grew concerned about his absence. She’d expected when he left the apartment with the two detectives that he’d be back soon or, failing that, would call. Why hadn’t she heard from him? Dialing Dorrian’s Red Hand, she asked Jack Dorrian, the proprietor, whom she had occasionally telephoned in the past when she was looking for Robert, if he knew anything about what was going on.
“Phyllis, haven’t you heard?” Dorrian said to her cautiously. A police officer was standing at his elbow.
“Heard what?” she asked.
“Didn’t you hear the news?”
“No, I did not.”
“Well, a girl has been found dead in Central Park.”
She didn’t see the connection at first. “What has Robert got to do with that?” she asked.
“I hope to God nothing,” Dorrian said.
Around four in the afternoon, Jennifer’s grandfather Arnold Domenitz and her uncle Dan Levin entered the lobby of the morgue and were assigned what the medical examiner’s office ceremoniously calls a death counselor, a case worker whose job it is to shepherd the relatives of the dead through the identification process. Jennifer’s body had just reached the building. All afternoon it had been in the ambulance, one of several bodies the driver had had to pick up, each in its turn, from various locations around the city.
The death counselor asked Domenitz and Levin about their relationship to the dead girl and how well they had known her, then gave them reassurances about what they would be seeing, promising there’d be no other bodies in view and that they wouldn’t be exposed to unnecessary gore. The counselor also promised that the identification process would be quick and easy. “You will be taken down a set of stairs,” the counselor explained. “You will be shown the face of the deceased. We will try to minimize the amount of whatever else you must see. There will be a doctor present. There will be a mortuary assistant with you. And I’ll be with you.”
The routine assurances never altogether calmed the relatives of the deceased, and consequently the medical examiner’s office frequently got complaints from people who felt they’d been treated insensitively.
They hadn’t been, morgue staffers believed. That was just their perception. The problem was Quincy. On Quincy, people identified their dead relatives on a closed-circuit televison screen. The Manhattan ME’s office didn’t have closed-circuit television. It was too expensive, and the identification wasn’t very good. People were always not recognizing bodies they knew very well, or thinking a perfect stranger was a friend. Manhattan didn’t even have a glassed-in viewing area, the way Brooklyn and Queens did. Manhattan just took the families to a window first and showed them through the glass what they were about to see, so that when they actually saw the dead bodies of their relatives, it wasn’t really so much of a shock.
It worked out that way with Levin. The grandfather and uncle looked at the body, said who she was, and left. There were no complaints.
Balding John Lafferty of the Manhattan North Homicide Squad and silver-haired Lieutenant John Doyle, the squad’s commanding officer, had, between them, more than forty years’ experience in the arcane labor of crime detection. Hearing of McEntee’s travails with Robert, they decided as the afternoon was drawing to a close to talk to Robert. They’d use a technique young McEntee couldn’t. They’d be avuncular. It might relax Robert, make him let his guard down. Together, they went into the room in which he was sitting.
Doyle spoke first. “Where’d you go to school?” he asked.
Robert mentioned Choate.
“I had a niece who went there,” Doyle said. “She started around three years ago. Maybe you knew her?”
Robert said he hadn’t.
Lafferty thought Choate was in Vermont, so he asked how the skiing up in Vermont was.
He’d enjoyed it very much, Robert said.
Doyle asked him about his other schools. “How’d you like Boston University? What kind of a school is it?”
“Very Jewish,” Robert commented. Then he said he’d partied a lot while he was up there and received poor grades.
The conversation rambled on. The detectives didn’t record it. Robert wasn’t a suspect. Not officially. “What kind of a name is Chambers?” Doyle asked.
“Irish.”
“Really? I always thought it sounded more English.”
“No, it’s Irish.”
“Are your mother and father from Ireland?”
“No. But my grandmother is.”
“What part of Ireland?” Lafferty interjected.
“Donegal, I think,” Robert said. He pronounced it with the emphasis on the first syllable.
Doyle’s ear was offended. “Donneygaal,” he said. “Donneygaal.”
“Donegal is where my father comes from,” Lafferty said. “Maybe we’re related. What town did your grandmother come from?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You ever been to Ireland?” Doyle asked.
“No,” Robert said, the senseless lie leaping to his lips.
Lafferty, finding no mutual interest in the subject of Ireland, switched the topic. “How long ya been goin’ to Dorrian’s?” he asked.
“About a year and a half.”
“Dorrian’s Red Hand.” Now Lafferty had found a good subject. “That’s the Red Hand of Ulster,” he said. “Ya know how the name came about?”
“No.”
“Well, back in the old days in Ireland, there was a king who was in charge of Ulster County. And what happened was, he had two sons. One was a good son, and the other was a bad son. The king was getting on in years, and he had to make a choice on which son was going to be the next king.” Lafferty liked telling stories, and he spun this one out, talking for about fifteen minutes until he reached the part where the king makes his two sons compete for their inheritance by seeing who can swim fastest to a distant shore, and one son lops off his hand with a sword and heaves the bloody member onto the shore in order to have at least a portion of himself touch shore first. “That was the good son,” Lafferty said.
By that time, Doyle had left. He was in charge of the investigation and he couldn’t waste all day listening to Lafferty’s stories. Besides, Lafferty knew what to do next.
A few minutes later, Lafferty gave up the chitchat and slipped into asking Robert questions—the same questions McEntee had. When had he left Dorrian’s? With whom? And what had he done after he left?
Robert wasn’t forthcoming. Despite the softening-up period, he continued to maintain that he hadn’t been with Jennifer and that his wounds had been caused by his cat.
No detective had as yet told Robert that he was being questioned about a dead girl, not a missing one. They hadn’t told him this, because they wanted to keep him talking, wanted to find out as much about his movements last night as they could. And they were afraid that if they dropped their pretense, let him know they’d brought him to the precinct not to help them find somebody but to explain why she was dead, he’d clam up. Maybe even ask for a lawyer.
It wasn’t honest. But it wasn’t illegal.
McEntee didn’t like the idea, but not because he was against playing tricks on people who may have killed others. He just felt talking turkey to Robert might bring him around. Make him come out with the truth, not run for cover. “Lemme confront him,” he begged Doyle after Lafferty’s efforts had failed. “Lemme tell him the girl is dead.”
The older man restrained the novice’s impatience. “Not yet,” Doyle said. “Maybe later.”
At 5 P.M. a crowd of reporters jostled into one of the rooms at the precinct house for a press conference on the killing in the park. The room was only a few feet away from where Robert was being questioned. But the reporters didn’t know about Robert. They knew only that a girl was dead and the police were looking for suspects.
A bemedaled captain filled the reporters in on facts about the dead girl. She’d been a waitress at Fluties until two weeks ago, he said. She’d lived on Mercer Street in SoHo. She’d been about to enter a college in Boston. She was last seen leaving an East Side bar.
“Could this be a ‘Mr. Goodbar’ killing?” one reporter called out. “Could she have picked up her killer in the bar?”
“Could be,” the police captain said.
Several reporters began scribbling leads right on the spot. From the start, what with the girl’s being white and young, the story had been sexy in the sense that editors used that word. Now, with the Mr. Goodbar angle, it would be really sexy.
At times the police left Robert alone, at times as many as half a dozen detectives crowded around him. They continued to question him; and he, apparently believing that they would never dream of connecting him to a killing if he acted polite and cooperative, answered their questions pleasantly as often as they were asked.
But he wasn’t altogether calm. Once while several detectives were in the room with him, he went to the little barred window that looked out onto the park and peered longingly outside. Traffic was snaking through the crosstown drive. “I’d better not stick my head out too far,” he murmured. “The buses come so close they could smash it right off.”
“Whatsa matter with you?” John Cotter shouted at a photographer. The photographer had just returned to Newsday empty-handed. At Fluties he’d asked a barman with a picture of Jennifer at a party if he could shoot the picture. While he’d waited for an answer, a TV reporter had made an exclusive deal for it.
Cotter was furious. Why had the photographer asked if he could shoot the picture, instead of clicking away instinctively? Didn’t the guy know the three rules of photojournalism? Number one was get the picture. Number two was get the picture. Number three was get the picture. If Newsday was going to compete with the other, better-established tabloids, it had to have pictures that could break your heart. The dead girl when she was alive and at a party, that would have done it. But now it looked as if the paper would have to run instead with a shot of paramedics loading her draped body into an ambulance.
Tomorrow, Cotter planned, he’d get in there and teach the photographers their job. Politeness? In journalism? That wasn’t what the work was all about. Especially with a story like this one, which was getting bigger by the hour. It was the kind of story that the middle-class reader could relate to. Something that could happen to any kid running around the pubs. The kind of story that would make people worry about their own kids. In a way, the identity of the girl wasn’t even important. It didn’t matter that her name was Jennifer Levin. She could have been Maggie Jones or Debbie Smith. Anybody. Identities were wood. You had to stack the wood, give the details. That was journalism. But what really mattered was what the story said about kids and bars and late hours.
He checked with his staff to make sure they were stacking up the wood. They were, and he got over his pique. Even without a mug of the dead girl, the story would probably make the front page tomorrow. For one thing, there wasn’t much else going on. There’d been a gas eruption in Cameroon, which had killed a thousand people. And a congress of international scientists in Vienna was theorizing that 24,000 people might die as a result of the recent nuclear accident at Chernobyl. But none of that sold papers. One murdered girl sold papers.
Toward evening, two detectives went to the home of Betsy Shankin. One was a chunky young blond detective named John Mullally. The other was a rugged-faced older man named Martin Gill.
“When was the last time you saw Jennifer?” Mullally said to Betsy when they’d gotten her in a car and were heading uptown to the Central Park precinct house.
“Early this morning.”
“Where?”
“Leaving Dorrian’s.”
“Who was she with?”
“Robert Chambers.”
“Did they go in separate directions?”
“No. They went together. Toward Eighty-sixth Street.”
“Is it possible that she left him and went for a pack of cigarettes?”
“Jen?” Betsy asked, incredulous. “No. She didn’t smoke.”
Gill listened, his eyes on the tangled rush-hour traffic.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Bob Chambers was asking a heavy-set police officer in a building adjacent to the precinct house in Central Park at around the time Betsy was traveling uptown. As soon as he’d gotten home from work, Bob had learned from Phyllis that Robert had been taken to the precinct. But although he’d come directly over, he hadn’t been allowed to see Robert or even to wait in the building where he was being questioned. He’d been sent to an annex, which was empty except for the corpulent officer. “I’m Mr. Chambers,” Bob went on. “My son, Robert, is next door, and I haven’t been able to see him.”
The man he was speaking to wasn’t very interested in his plight. “Well, the detectives over there are handling this, and they should be with you shortly,” he said. Then he started making small talk, asking Bob if he knew anything about hunting and telling him about a shooting trip he was planning.
Bob couldn’t have cared less. “Do you think my son needs a lawyer?” he asked.
“You could hold off and see how things develop,” the officer said, then returned to the subject of hunting.
He was still talking about it when a few minutes before seven o’clock the phone rang. It was Phyllis. “Have you seen Robert?” she asked Bob.
“I’ve tried to,” he said. “But I haven’t been able.” He would have continued, would have told her how they were keeping him away from Robert, if he hadn’t been speaking to her on the precinct-house phone. It wasn’t private. “I’ll call you back,” he said abruptly and, hanging up, went out of the park to search out a pay phone.
On Central Park West he found one. But he didn’t call Phyllis right away. Instead he dug from his wallet the business card of Henry Putzel, the lawyer she’d hired back in April to represent Robert in the burglary affair. But whether it was because his eyes were tearing or just because it was growing dark, he couldn’t make out the numerals on the card. He had to ask a doorman to decipher the numbers and write them down in larger print.
When he returned to the phone booth and dialed the lawyer, all he got was an answering machine. Disappointed, Bob reported his efforts to Phyllis, then headed back to the park.
By seven o’clock Jennifer’s death had appeared in a late edition of the New York Post and been broadcast on radio and TV. Doyle decided it was time to step up the pressure on Robert, time to stop pretending to him that he was being questioned about a missing, not a dead girl. He’d been at the precinct more than four hours without changing his original story—that he hadn’t seen Jennifer since he left Dorrian’s. Maybe if he knew the police knew she was dead, he’d start talking. In any event, it would be interesting to see how he reacted.
Detective Lafferty, who had earlier tried to relax Robert with the story of how Dorrian’s Red Hand had gotten its name, was the one sent in to deliver the information. “I have some bad news for you,” he said bluntly to Robert. “I have to tell you that Jennifer Levin is dead.”
“Oh, no!” Robert cried out. Then he covered his eyes with his hands and asked, “How did she die?”
Lafferty measured his responses with a practiced eye. “I don’t know,” he said. “They’re doing the autopsy right now.”
Robert took his hands from his eyes. Lafferty saw that they were misty. “Try to relax,” he directed. “Try to relax, but try to think of anything that might be able to help us in this investigation. It’s that much more important now.”
Joan Huey was one of the first of Jennifer’s close friends to hear that she was dead. Joan was at her summer house in Southampton, where she and Jennifer had summered two years earlier. When a girlfriend called her with the news, she refused to believe it and accused her girlfriend of playing some kind of grisly practical joke on her. But when she heard the news on television, she flew into a rage. She began kicking and punching the walls. And all the time she kicked and punched, she kept thinking about Jennifer and how she used to fly into tantrums after fights with her family and bang her fists so hard against walls that her hands would get bruised.
The memory of Jennifer’s excitability made her own seem safe, and she went on punching until at last she stopped, stumbled out of the house, and sobbed in the gathering dusk.
It was nearly dark when Bob Chambers re-entered the grounds of the police precinct. The cars in the parking lot wore shrouds of shadows, and the trees overhead loomed like ominous giants. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” Bob thought, “the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The simple lines—they were known as the serenity prayer in the AA groups to which he belonged—had given him comfort in the past. Now he really needed comfort, needed to be able to think straight. Suddenly he bent his knees right there in the roughly paved parking lot, clasped his hands, rested his elbows against a car fender, and, head bowed, said the poem.
Manhattan North Detective Mike Sheehan, whose family had owned the bar on Third Avenue where Bob used to drink, had been working on the Levin case all day but hadn’t yet met Robert. He’d been at the park all morning and at the medical examiner’s office all afternoon. When he was briefed about the progress of the investigation at the precinct house in the early evening, he wanted to try his hand at doing some questioning. In his dozen years as a detective, he’d taken hundreds of confessions, become adept at gaining the confidence of suspects. The reason, in his opinion, was that he didn’t act superior to the suspects. He tried to make them think he liked and understood them, and sometimes he even tried to make them think that if he’d been in their shoes he’d have done the same rotten things they had. That’s how he’d gotten Manny Torres to confess. Manny had taken a girl up on a roof, stabbed her, and tossed her down into the street like so much garbage. When Manny started to break and said the reason he’d pulled his knife on the girl was because she’d suggested sex and then reneged on the offer, Sheehan hadn’t said what he was thinking, which was You little asshole, you’re full of shit. No, he’d acted as if stabbing a girl who said no was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and murmured, “Yeah, I’d probably have done the same thing.” Guys like Manny, Sheehan always said, believed they were acting within their God-given rights as men when they killed a rejecting girl. So he went along with them, acted friendly, made them think he shared their attitudes.
He was pretty sure he could make Robert Chambers think he shared his attitudes. They even had some things in common. The East Side? He’d grown up there himself, over on 96th and Madison. Dorrian’s? Jeez, he couldn’t say how many times he’d stopped in there. One of his sisters lived right across the street. Of course, according to all his fellow detectives, this Chambers was a rich kid, a preppie. Whereas he himself was just the son of a barkeep. But he was familiar with the Upper East Side rich kids. Knew how to talk to them. His sisters had dated nothing but. And he even knew the town house Chambers had given as his address. Once when he’d been a high school kid, his hair slicked back and his cheeks slathered with Old Spice, he’d gone to that very building to deliver a pair of shoes from the shoemaker he worked for after school. Yeah, maybe he and Chambers would find some things to talk about.
At eight he went in to see Robert. He introduced himself, gave Robert his card with its blue and gold Police Department shield, and said, “How’d you get those scratches?”
“My cat scratched me,” Robert explained patiently.
“Jeez,” Sheehan joked. “I have a cat. It’s like a regular house cat. Whadda you have? A mountain lion?”
Robert laughed, and, encouraged, Sheehan kept up the chatter. “You went to St. David’s?” he said. “I went to St. Francis Xavier. You ever heard of Xavier?”
“Yeah. That was a pretty tough school.”
“Damn right. I wore a uniform every day till I graduated.”
“I wore uniforms, too. I was in the Greys.”
“The Knickerbocker Greys? Jesus! We used to kick their ass.”
Again Robert laughed, so Sheehan went on with the banter, telling stories about the crack Boy Scout unit he’d belonged to as a kid and about growing up Catholic on the WASPy East Side. He shot the breeze for a long time, then turned once again to the subject of the dead girl. “You last saw her when you were leaving Dorrian’s?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Robert said. He sounded calm and relaxed.
Sheehan studied his sapphire eyes. “You know, some of her friends are saying you walked toward Eighty-sixth Street with her,” he said.
Robert was silent for a while. Then he said, “Yeah, well I did leave the bar with her, I guess.”
Sheehan was astonished. It was the first time all day there’d been any deviation in the story. “Come on, Rob,” he pressed ahead familiarly. “Those scratches on your face. The girl got no panties on. All her girlfriends are telling us she wanted to make it with you. Tell me what happened. Maybe she was coming on too strong. Maybe you weren’t in your proper frame of mind. Maybe it was an accident.”
Robert began rubbing his hands together. Then his breathing changed, became audible and irregular.
I did it, Sheehan told himself excitedly. He’s gonna change his story. Self-destruct. But although he’d gotten one new piece of information out of Robert, he couldn’t get anything else. Would the kid break? Or would he just sit tight all night?
Sweaty and hungry, Steve Saracco, an assistant district attorney at the Manhattan DA’s office, arrived home after a ten-hour workday and sank into a dining-room chair, too tired to shower before eating. He revived a little after downing a plate of his wife’s gusty macaroni and meatballs, but he still didn’t feel like stirring, so he stayed where he was and, pushing the dishes aside, spread the late edition of the Post out on the table. He was on page five when his eye lit on a headline that blazoned, WOMAN FOUND RAPED AND SLAIN IN CENTRAL PARK. “It is not known whether the woman was killed in a vehicle or somewhere else,” he read. “Police today are trying to find witnesses.”
Saracco felt a touch of energy returning to him. Although he’d been with the district attorney’s office for ten years and had tried over a hundred felonies, his adrenaline never failed to pump when he heard about a new homicide. An ex-Marine, he was the kind of assistant DA who acted as if each criminal he cross-examined had committed an act that affronted him not merely professionally but personally. In court, his steely face taut and his wiry body tense inside rumpled inexpensive suits, he was shortspoken. Out of court he was expansive, a man as ready to denounce the city’s thugs and muggers, creeps and killers, as any cop. Which was why, he figured, he got on well with cops. He talked their language, wasn’t uptight around them like the new breed of mealymouthed Harvard and Columbia Law ADA’s in the office. No, he was a Villanova Law grad and proud of it. That and his Marine stories went over big with the cops, and sometimes brought him advantages—tips about new cases, gossip about ongoing investigations—that other ADA’s would have given their right arms for.
Reading the story about the dead girl, he wished the cops well. New York had an annual crop of hundreds of unsolved homicides, but it wasn’t the cops’ fault, he thought. It was just that there were too few of them and too many of the lowlifes.
He had just finished the Post story when the phone rang and he picked it up to hear Mike Sheehan’s bluff voice. He knew it at once. He and the burly Irish detective were drinking buddies. “You read that thing in the paper about a girl killed in the park?” Sheehan asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Saracco said. “You got something?”
“Yeah, we got the kid over here.”
“No shit!”
“Yeah. And he looks good. He’s got scratches all over him.”
Saracco wasn’t tired at all anymore. If the kid Mike has really is good, he thought, and I go up to the precinct and take his confession, chances are the case will end up on my plate. And that’s exactly where Saracco wanted it. It already had media. Media cases were manna to ADA’s, no matter how long they’d been around. “You figure it’s him?” he asked eagerly.
“Yeah. But he’s maintaining he didn’t do it. The boss wants a medical examiner to come up and check out the scratches. See if he was raked by a cat. Or a girl. Can you get us someone?”
Saracco said he’d get right on it, and he worked it out for Sheehan in no time. A woman on night duty at the ME’s office promised she’d stand by to go up to the precinct. He called Sheehan back and told him the mission was accomplished. Sheehan said, “Great. How about you? Can you come up?”
Just what Saracco had been hoping for—only there was a problem. He wasn’t on tonight’s chart, the list of ADA’s delegated to report to the precincts. He couldn’t bypass the chart’s red tape on his own, and if he asked his supervisor for the case he could end up looking bad to his colleagues, looking as if he had tried to steal someone else’s stuff. Still, for a good case like this, it was worth making enemies. “I’ll see if I can clear it through channels,” he told Sheehan. “I’ll get back to you.”
A moment later he was on the phone with his supervisor. He outlined the situation, explained that he’d already done a little work for Manhattan North, and said that while he didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes, he’d sure like to go up to Central Park.
The red tape didn’t snap right there and then. His supervisor called his supervisor. But after a while Saracco got the go-ahead.
“Come and get me,” he reported happily back to Sheehan and, hanging up, jumped in the shower.
Joel Coles, who was a Dorrian’s regular—he’d taken part in the fistfight that had erupted in the bar the night before—and who knew Robert from Hunter College, had been up in Boston all day. He’d driven there after Dorrian’s closed last night. Hot and weary, he’d just returned to his New York apartment, poured himself a cool drink, and stripped down to his undershorts when a friend of his telephoned. “Hey, Joel, didja do her?” his friend asked.
Do her? Assuming his friend wanted to know if he’d scored with the girl he’d been with at Dorrian’s last night, Joel gave a macho “Yeah,” even though it wasn’t true. She’d turned him down at the end.
A moment later he was damn sorry he lied. His friend said disdainfully, “Come on! It couldn’t have been you. It must’ve been Robert.”
Robert? Scoring with his girl? “Whaddya mean Robert?” Joel asked, confused. Then his friend told him that Jennifer was dead and that the cops had picked up Robert and had been holding him all day.
Joel didn’t have time to digest the information or even to react to it. Before he could get a word out, he heard a loud knock on the door and a loud voice saying, “Police!” He hung up, went to the door, and opened it to two cops. “We just want to ask you a few questions,” one of them said.
As soon as Joel let them in, the other cop said, “Didja hear about Jennifer Levin’s death?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Joel said. But he couldn’t figure out why the cop was mentioning Jennifer. All he could think was Hey, Joel, whaddid ya do? Whaddid ya do this month that coulda got ya in trouble?
Then gradually he understood, because the cops kept asking how well he knew Robert and what he was like. One of the cops was real nice. He acted friendly and even agreed to show off his gun. The other one was tough. He just kept glowering. They were playing good cop, bad cop. Just like in the movies.
Joel answered their questions, but he felt funny talking to them in his undershorts. “Hey, fellas, lemme get dressed,” he said. They told him it was okay but they wouldn’t let him out of their sight. They followed him right into his bedroom. “Hey, fellas!” he said again as he went to his bureau, but they kept on standing there and eyeballing him. Then the bad cop said, “Hey, Joel, you look like a pretty big guy. Whaddya, play football?”
It scared him. Whadda they, he thought. Trying to implicate me? He pulled open his shirt drawer and then quickly slammed it closed. In the back of the drawer was this copy of Playboy he’d stashed in there, and he just knew that if they saw it they’d think he was some sort of sex fiend or worse.
He was still edgy when they put him in their car and started driving to the Central Park Precinct. But he felt even worse when he arrived. The place was jammed with cops, and as soon as he walked in the door they all stopped what they were doing and stared at him. Like I did it! Joel worried. But then he was taken into a little room and a detective started asking him questions, and the questions were not about his movements after he let Dorrian’s last night but about what the scene had been like at the bar, and he knew he wasn’t under suspicion.
He told the detective everything he remembered about Dorrian’s. Told him how everyone had been partying and that he’d seen both Robert and Jennifer there. Then he was asked to write his statement down. He started to write, but as he was doing it the detective said, “This kid Robert was kind of horny, wasn’t he? Whyn’t ya write that down?”
Joel shook his head. Jennifer had struck him as the horny one.
“He wanted to meet a woman, right?” the cop went on.
Joel put down his pen. “I’m not gonna write that,” he said.
The detective let it go, but Joel felt upset after that. And he would have gone on feeling upset except that afterward, when he was done with the statement, they let him sit out in a corridor, and there he saw a whole bunch of kids he knew from Dorrian’s, even the girl who’d turned him down last night. Everyone was crying. At least the girls were. It was sad. But it was sort of fun, too. The girl who’d turned him down was blushing and giggling and saying, “Hey, Joel, does everyone here know I was fooling around with you last night?” and he talked to her and his friends and in the end decided that the whole thing was, when you got right down to it, sort of an adventure. Just like in the movies.
Unaware of the crowd from Dorrian’s in the corridor, Robert was being questioned anew, this time by Detective Gill, who had escorted Betsy to the precinct. “Did you leave Dorrian’s with Jennifer?” the rugged-faced Gill inquired.
“Yes,” Robert said. He’d said as much to Sheehan.
Gill was extremely relaxed. Unlike McEntee, who was also in the room. And unlike, for that matter, nearly all the other detectives who had been in and out all afternoon and evening. They’d hedged their questions, fearing that if they were too confrontational with Robert they might blow the whole investigation. Make Robert demand an attorney. Gill seemed to have no such fears. Maybe it was because he was due to retire in a couple of weeks. So maybe for him it didn’t matter if the investigation fizzled out and the bosses looked bad. That’s what McEntee thought as he watched the older man, trying to pick up a few tips. “What did you do when you left Dorrian’s?” Gill was asking Robert.
“I went one way. She went the other way,” Robert said. “To get a pack of cigarettes.”
Gill gave Robert a skeptical look. “What would you say if I told you that we had witnesses who saw you and Jennifer going off together in the same direction?” he asked. “And that one of them says that Jennifer didn’t smoke?”
It made Robert amend his previous statement. “Well, we walked away from Dorrian’s heading toward Eighty-sixth Street,” he said.
“How’d you get that wound on your hand?” Gill asked him next.
“Same way I got these,” Robert said, indicating the scratches on his face. “I was playing with my cat. I threw her up in the air. And as she came down she clawed me.”
“Well, you realize,” Gill said slowly, “that there are people who can tell the difference between wounds caused by animals and wounds caused by humans.”
McEntee, who was perched on the edge of a desk, followed Gill’s lead. “Yeah. Like a medical examiner,” he said ominously.
Robert hesitated. Then he said in a low voice, “I got the wounds from Jennifer.”
Confrontation! McEntee thought. He’d wanted to try it hours ago.
Gill wasn’t blinking an eye. “How did you get the wounds from Jennifer?” he asked.
Robert began talking animatedly. He and Jen had walked together up to 86th Street, he explained, but there on a corner they’d gotten into an argument because he told her he no longer wanted to see her. “She got very annoyed over this and she scratched my face,” he said.
“Where on Eighty-sixth Street did this occur?” Gill said.
“In front of the doughnut shop on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Lexington.”
“Well,” Gill said, his expression bland and his tone matter-of-fact. “There’s a Spanish fellow I know who works in the doughnut shop. What happens if I interview him and he tells me that he don’t remember any incident or he didn’t see anything like that.”
“It wasn’t Eighty-sixth and Lexington,” Robert said swiftly. “It was Eighty-sixth and Park.”
A few moments later Gill went out to tell Lieutenant Doyle that Robert was now admitting he’d been wounded by the dead girl.
Gill’s really something, McEntee was thinking. I could learn a lot from him. Like that line about knowing someone in the doughnut shop. I gotta use a line like that myself. It was bullshit but it worked. He was sitting opposite Robert, and the room, vacant now of Gill’s commanding presence, had a silent, empty quality. McEntee concentrated on his own thoughts and ignored Robert, who also seemed preoccupied. Then suddenly, shattering the stillness, McEntee heard a round of high-pitched weeping from beyond the door.
Robert heard it, too. “Is that Jen’s friends?” he asked.
“Yeah.” McEntee nodded. “We’re talking to everybody.” Then he said, feeling a little like Gill, “You know. Everybody.”
“They’re outside?” Robert asked.
Robert’s question has a subtext, McEntee, nodding yes, thought. He’s starting to feel sorry for himself, starting to think of himself as inside and other people as outside. He gave Robert a stare, and when he did, noticed that the young man was breathing heavily and pressing clasped hands to the back of his head, as if to relieve some intense pressure in his skull.
He’d better tell Doyle about this, McEntee decided, but just then the door swung open and in Doyle walked. Behind him was Gill. The two of them strode up to Robert, and Doyle burst out, “Why’d you change the story you told us all afternoon?”
Robert shrugged.
“The story you’re telling now is farfetched,” Doyle said. “I don’t believe it.” Still Robert didn’t reply. “I liked you,” Doyle went on. “I trusted you. I kind of pride myself at being a judge of human nature. But you had me completely fooled. And now I’m plain shocked. And thoroughly disappointed in you.”
Robert hung his head.
Doyle had berated Robert as a father might, and now he took a father’s prerogative and offered him redemption. Placing a muscular hand on his shoulder in a gesture of man-to-boy intimacy, he said, “Listen, I can understand you’re very nervous. I have sons of my own. But why don’t you get this off your chest.”
It was a classic interrogatory technique, this urging of confession as a means to solace a guilty conscience and silence a pounding heart. Both Gill and McEntee recognized it and joined in with it. “Yeah, you’ll feel better,” McEntee said. “Yeah, this is only going to keep bothering you,” Gill said.
Robert remained silent. But once again he began taking harsh deep breaths. McEntee, some sixth sense telling him a line was about to be crossed, moved closer to Robert. He had learned in the police academy that an interrogator’s physical closeness can still incipient panic.
Robert didn’t look at him. He didn’t look at any of them. Then he murmured: “I went into Central Park with Jennifer.”
Robert’s eyes were glassy, Gill noticed. Doyle and McEntee had slipped from the room, and he’d been left to dig the rest of the story from the young man. He waited a moment before he started his questions, and during that moment Robert’s eyes filled with tears. Then the young man said, his voice thick with self-pity, “What’s my mother going to think?”
“You won’t have to tell her. She’ll know what happened,” Gill said, implying he himself would convey the news to Phyllis and that would make it easier on her. Then he got going. “Where did you go in Central Park?” he asked.
“We sat on a bench,” Robert said.
“What happened?”
“She had an argument with me. She wanted to still go out with me. And I didn’t want to see her anymore. She got very angry. She scratched me on the face.”
“What happened then?”
“I got up to leave. She said, ‘Can’t we just stay here and talk?’ I said, ‘Okay but don’t sit next to me. Sit away from me.’ Then she said, ‘Before we start talking, I have to go to the bathroom.’ And she went behind me and went to the bathroom.”
“What do you mean, she went to the bathroom?” Gill interrupted. “Are there restrooms there?”
“I don’t know. She just went behind me in the bushes.”
“Then what happened?”
“The next thing I recall is she grabbed me from behind and tied my arms up behind my back with her panties.”
“How did she tie your arms up from behind your back? You being as big as you are?”
“Well, I was leaning back resting. My arms were behind me, and she just grabbed them and tied me up.”
“What happened then?”
“Well, she sort of, like, tackled me, knocked me down on the ground.”
“Were you complaining? Were you yelling?”
“No, I thought she was just fooling at first.”
“What happened at that point?”
“She sat on my chest.”
“How was she sitting on your chest? Was she facing you or facing away from you?”
“She had her ass on my chest with her back toward me. She started to open my pants. She got my pants open and she started to play with my groin.”
“What do you mean, play with your groin?”
“She had hold of my dick and she was stroking me.”
“What do you mean, she was stroking you?”
“She was stroking me very hard. It was hurting, and then she was grabbing me by my balls and scratching my balls.”
“Did you tell her to stop?”
“Yes. I was yelling for her to stop. It really hurt. It got to the point where it hurt so bad that I got one of my hands loose, and I just grabbed her and pulled her off me. And she went back over my shoulder. I got up, I slipped my pants up, I turned around to her and said, ‘Jennifer, come on, let’s go.’ She didn’t answer me.”
Gill didn’t ask any more questions after that. He went outside and informed Doyle that he’d been successful. He’d gotten a confession. Of sorts.
Jennifer’s friends didn’t know Robert had confessed. All they knew was that Jennifer was dead.
Leilia Van Baker, who was up in Vermont, heard the news from her father when she called home to say hello. As soon as she heard it, she began trembling and the phone shook. It virtually rattled in her hand. Jennifer couldn’t be dead. Death didn’t claim people her own age. Death was what happened to old people. But then the news sank in. And when it did, she had a vision of Jennifer’s last moments, of her struggling helplessly against some unknown feral assailant. Begging for her life.
New York was shit, Leilia decided. New York was filled with psychopaths, strangers who lived by codes totally unlike those she and everyone else she knew had been raised to uphold. New York birthed them by the thousands, nursed them, turned them loose. Jennifer had never quite understood that you had to guard yourself against strangers. No one in their age group really did. Jennifer had trusted strangers, had tried out her halting Spanish on Hispanic workmen and flattered cab drivers by asking them for driving lessons. Probably that’s why she’d gotten killed. She’d been accosted by some stranger, some creep. God, how she hoped the police caught the bastard. If they did, she’d like to see him strung up. Not that it would bring Jennifer back. If only she hadn’t been so trusting. If only she’d stuck to their own kind.
Carl Morgera, the boy who had given Jennifer piggy-back rides in the park in the days she’d been a newcomer to Manhattan, heard the news from his mother. She called him while he was over at a friend’s house. After he heard it, tears flowed from his eyes and he went into what seemed to him like a coma. But then, to get out of the state he was in, he went to the movies with his friend and a bunch of other guys. Being in the movie theater made him feel worse. It didn’t seem right to be there. And besides, the guys he was with hadn’t known Jennifer. He didn’t want to be with them, Carl realized suddenly. He wanted to be with people who’d known and liked Jennifer as much as he had. Rising, he pushed out to the aisle, went to the lobby, and called his friend Joe. Joe had gone to Baldwin. He’d been Jennifer’s friend, too.
In a few minutes Joe picked up Carl. They bought a bottle of liquor and drove to Joe’s house. But everything was weird, and Carl kept saying to Joe, “How are we supposed to feel? I don’t know how to feel.”
“I don’t know either,” Joe said.
“Should we feel sad? I mean, should we cry?” Carl asked him. “Or shouldn’t we?”
“I don’t know.”
Then Joe’s girlfriend Fuzzi came over, and they drank the liquor and talked about Jen and the funny things she used to say, and Carl wanted to laugh; but he wasn’t sure he should, and after a while he said to Joe, “You know what? Someday I’m gonna write a play and it’s gonna be just three characters, just you, me, and Fuzzi, and I’m gonna call it When Do We Laugh?”
“What do you mean, When Do We Laugh?”
“You know,” Carl said. “It’s, like, what do we do? Can we laugh? Are we allowed to?”
Outside the Central Park precinct house, television cameras were illuminating the darkness with their floodlights. Someone from Manhattan North had broken protocol and tipped off the press that a suspect was being questioned inside. Annoyed, Steve Saracco pushed his way past the journalists and hurried into Doyle’s office.
“It’s all over,” Doyle greeted him. “The kid just gave it all up. McEntee’s taking down his statement.”
“No shit!” Saracco’s bad mood evaporated. “The guy’s saying he did it?”
“Yeah. The scratches are from her. He did it.”
Saracco reached for a phone and called his office’s videotape unit. “We need a camera up here,” he shouted.
Closeted with Robert and trying to write down his statement, McEntee thought, This guy is confessing, but he isn’t giving much. He’s saying he killed the girl, but that in a way her death was her own damn fault because she hurt him during sex, hurt him so hard that he strangled her accidentally out of an instinctive reaction to pain. McEntee knew about strangling. It was hard to strangle someone accidentally, because to cut off their air supply you had to hold on to their throat for a long time. Robert Chambers, McEntee told himself, is giving us what he feels we’re gonna accept, but he isn’t telling everything. He’s still lying.
McEntee knew about lying, too. When he’d been in Bronx Narcotics, he’d been in numerous situations where he’d had to hide the truth. He’d told falsehoods about the phony needle tracks on his arms, he’d pretended to overly curious pushers that he was a foreigner who spoke no English, he’d set up a shooting gallery bust and then fled into the street along with the terrified addicts, shaking and panting with feigned fear. But if I’d ever gotten caught, if my life and my future were on the line, McEntee said to himself, I’d have broken. And if I did, I’d have gone all the way. Told the whole story. Got it out. Not this guy. He’s putting on an act.
“She forced my pants down,” Robert was saying. “She sat on my face and began to play with me. Then she began to hit my dick with a stick. And she slapped me and squeezed my balls.”
McEntee, listening, put on an act of his own. “G’head,” he nodded, as wide-eyed as if he believed every word. But to himself he was saying, This guy either made this up while he was sitting here all day, or he made it up last night, got so coked up that he got paranoid and hallucinated being beaten.
“I was in incredible pain,” Robert went on. “I reached down with my left arm, put it around her neck, and pulled back as hard as I could. Jennifer landed behind me.”
There was more, but McEntee didn’t get it all down. He made notes, then rose to go outside and tell Doyle what he’d gotten. As he stood, Robert’s eyes once again filled with tears, and he murmured, as he had to Gill, “What’s my mother going to think?”
His mother! McEntee said to himself. What a character. He’s not upset over the fact that he killed a girl. He’s upset his momma’s gonna find out. Myself, I wouldn’t be worried about what my momma was gonna think, I’d be worried about what the girl’s father was gonna think. And do. To me. Shrugging, he ignored Robert’s question and hurried outside.
Standing in Mrs. Hammerstein’s laundry room, Marilei sorted through Robert’s dirty clothes, separating the light from the dark. Phyllis had asked her to wash Robert’s clothes tonight and had helped her carry his laundry to their employer’s apartment so that she could use the capacious washing machine there. So much laundry! Marilei had lugged a big bag of underwear and T-shirts, and Phyllis had hefted a shopping bag with a heavy pair of jeans crammed into it. Where was the shopping bag? Not here with the rest of the laundry. Well, never mind. She could get it from Phyllis later. She wasn’t going to wash the dark clothes now anyway. Just the underwear and light-colored T-shirts.
She was tossing a handful of them into the machine when a short-sleeved white mesh baseball shirt caught her eye. It was filthy. Covered with earth stains. And with bloodstains, too.
She extricated it from the pyramid of other shirts and held it up to the light. How did Hrobert manage to get it so messed up? she wondered. But it doesn’t matter, she decided. It’ll come clean in the wash. And, measuring out soap powder, she dropped the shirt back into the machine, poured in the white crystals, and started the cycle.
“I want to see my son,” Bob Chambers, tired of sitting in the auxiliary building, demanded at the high mahogany front desk of the precinct house. Several detectives were standing nearby, but as soon as he spoke, they scattered.
“Just stay a few minutes more,” a man behind the desk said.
Bob wanted to pound his fist down on the wood and say, Damn it, I want to see my son! But it wasn’t his nature. His upbringing had taught him to respect police, be polite in their presence. Meekly he returned to the auxiliary building and continued his solitary wait.
He was sitting there, feeling useless and impotent, when Phyllis called him again. “Listen, I’m at work,” she said. “I can’t come over. I can’t leave my patient. But Marilei wants to come.”
“Okay.”
“She’ll be over shortly.”
He hung up, and just then the door opened and a silver-haired man came in. “I’m Lieutenant Doyle,” the man said. “May I speak to you outside?”
Bob went outside with him, and out there on a roadway the lieutenant started saying that his son had a problem and would have to stay with the police that night. Bob heard him, but he didn’t understand what he was hearing. “I’m a father myself,” the lieutenant was saying.
Bob was listening hard, but he still didn’t get it. Didn’t react. And then Doyle said, “Robert has made some statements. And we’re going to have to arrest him. Book him on murder charges.”
Suddenly, the breath drained out of Bob. “Would you mind if we walked over to a lamppost?” he said, struggling for air. “I want to read a prayer.”
When Doyle escorted him to the lamppost, he fumbled for a copy of the serenity prayer that he kept in his wallet. For some reason he didn’t want just to recite it from memory as he’d done earlier. His fingers shaking, he at last found the copy and, standing in the cold glare of the lamppost, read the prayer.
He felt better after that and asked to see Robert.
He’d have to wait, Doyle told him.
A moment later Marilei arrived. “Who’s she?” Doyle asked.
“My wife’s maid,” he said, though in fact she was Mrs. Hammerstein’s. When she did chores for Phyllis, she always insisted she was doing them just out of friendship. He didn’t explain all this, just went on asking to see Robert.
“Maybe in forty-five minutes,” Doyle said. “Or an hour. He’s busy with Detective Sheehan right now.”
Sheehan? He knew Detective Sheehan. Used to see him at his parents’ bar. Hearing his name made him feel hopeful, gave him something to go on. “I’ll go tell Robert’s mother,” he said to Doyle. “Then I’ll come back and see Sheehan.”
“A girl wantsa sit on my face, you bet I’m not gonna stop her.”
“A girl wantsa fuck me in the park, yeah, all right.”
Inside the precinct house, detectives joked about their newly confessed suspect. They were passing the time as Sheehan finished getting a written statement from Robert. “Altar boy,” one of them said.
“Faggot.”
“Yeah, well, he don’t like women. That’s for damn sure.”
“Oh, are we in trouble,” Bob Chambers said to Marilei in the cab they took to Mrs. Hammerstein’s. “We need a lawyer. You tell Phyllis.”
Marilei knew what had happened. As she’d arrived at the precinct, a photographer had tried to take her picture, and she’d put her hands over her face and run away and then asked a policeman what was going on and he told her that a boy named Robert Chambers had been accused of killing a girl. She hadn’t believed it, but when she’d found Mr. Chambers, he’d said it was true.
“I can’t tell Phyllis,” she insisted to Mr. Chambers in the cab. “You have to be the one.” Then they reached Mrs. Hammerstein’s, and she led him into the kitchen, and Phyllis was there in her bathrobe. Marilei went away and left them alone, and when she came back Mr. Chambers was gone and Phyllis started to cry, cry, cry, cry. Marilei made her a cup of tea, but it didn’t do any good. Phyllis just went on crying.
Videotaping the confessions of criminals was a relatively new phenomenon. Until the early 1980s, stenographers took confessions down in dictation. The videotapes were better because they were unchallengingly accurate. But they took a lot longer to set up. Saracco, waiting restlessly for his technicians to unpack their equipment, chain-smoked and thought about what to say during the videotaping. He didn’t have much leeway. Mostly the thing was just boilerplate. You introduced yourself casually, like it was no big deal that you were from the DA’s office, so the suspect didn’t turn skittish when the tape started rolling. You read him his rights on camera, so no defense attorney could claim you’d tricked him into confessing. You got him to tell his story, speaking to him guy-to-guy, not lawyer-to-client or priest-to-penitent, so he felt relaxed. You got him to put some fine-tuning on the details so you could check out the story. And then, if you didn’t believe it, you took your run. Got confrontational. It was in the last two areas that strategy came in. Some ADA’s spent three to five hours on the details. Not him. That wasn’t his style. And some went light on confrontation. Not him. He hadn’t been a Marine for nothing.
He was probably going to have to take a hard run at this Chambers, he figured. Because one, he’s a liar. He told Jennifer’s girlfriends he wasn’t even with her. Because two, he’s a calculated liar. He didn’t just say to the cops that he went home, but he gave them the name of TV shows he’d supposedly watched, shows he’d have had to have researched to know what was on. And because three, he’s telling lies. This story he’s been giving out lately makes no sense. I’ve seen the pictures of the girl. She wasn’t killed in any accident.
Four cigarettes into the ashtray, he was done with his planning, and he went into Chambers’s room to eyeball him for the first time.
What he saw surprised him. Sheehan had told him the kid was a preppie and not the kind of Frankie So-and-So from uptown they were used to dealing with. Given that, Saracco expected to see some fear or at least nervousness. But there wasn’t any. Chambers was just sitting there, not crying, not wringing his hands. And when they were introduced, he didn’t act worried, didn’t recoil or even seem scared. He just looked blank.
When the cameraman was ready, Robert rotated his shoulders as if he were preparing for a strenuous exercise, groomed himself by pushing back his hair, and began talking clearly to Saracco, Sheehan, and McEntee, who sat opposite him across a big desk. Jennifer had gotten insane with rage because he told her he didn’t want to see her anymore, he said sincerely. “She freaked out. And she just—she like got up and—knelt in front of me and scratched my face. I have these marks here.” Touching his cheek, he showed the scratches on his face to the assistant district attorney. “I got all upset and I stood up and I was saying, ‘I’m going to go. I’m going to go. This is crazy.’”
The ADA maintained an interested, sympathetic look on his face. Robert saw it and mentioned that, while he’d been pissed off at Jennifer for laughing at him when Jo Perry chewed him out at Dorrian’s, he’d gotten really pissed off at her after she scratched him in the park. But he forgave her, he went on, because once she’d scratched him, she calmed down and got really nice. “She came up behind me and started to give me a massage, and she said, You look cute, but you’d look cuter tied up.”
“Your face is scratched at this point, right?” Saracco asked.
“Right,” Robert said patiently. The camera was whirring softly. He launched into what he’d already told Gill and McEntee and Sheehan, explained how she’d tied his hands behind his back with her panties, pushed him flat onto the earth, and seated herself on his chest. “She started to take off my pants,” he said. “She started to play with me. She started jerking me off.” As he spoke, he rubbed his right hand up and down along an imaginary penis, indicating to the ADA what she’d done. But he wanted him to know this was no ordinary jerk-off. “She was doing it really hard,” he said, the camera catching him in a masturbatory gesture. “It really hurt me. And I—you know—I started to say, ‘Stop it! Stop it! It hurts.’”
His entreaties hadn’t softened her, he went on a moment later. “She kind of laughed in a weird way, like more like a cackle or something. And then she sat up and she like sat on my face and then she dug her nails into my chest and I have scratches right here.”
The assistant district attorney made him show his ravaged flesh to the camera and kept interrupting his account, but after a while he was able to get back to the story. He concentrated on his pain and anguish. “It was nonstop,” he said. “She was just having her way. And then she squeezed my balls and I just could not take it. So I was wiggling around, wiggling around, and she was leaning forward, jerking me off and squeezing my balls and laughing, and I managed to get my left hand free. So I kind of sat up a little and just grabbed at her.”
It was as a result of that single grab that she had died, he continued, and pointed out that when she landed he, too, got hurt, injured a bone in his right hand. The hand was paining him badly. “It—it was just really quick,” he said, “she just flipped over and then landed, and she was kind of twisted on the tree. On her side.”
He had done nothing to help her, he admitted. But that was because he thought she was just trying to frighten him. “I just, I stood there for like ten minutes waiting. Maybe five minutes. I don’t know how long. Trying to see if she’d move. If she’s just trying to, you know, scare me.” Then after a pause he described his inertia further. “I was in shock,” he explained. “I didn’t know what was going on.”
“What were you in shock about?” the assistant district attorney asked, as if he hadn’t understood anything.
“That this girl that I knew and I left the bar with and just wanted to talk to was—did what she did to me.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “And that now she’s not moving.”
A few minutes later he described how he’d gone home, gotten undressed, and fallen asleep, and how when he’d awakened this morning the whole thing had seemed like a dream. Then he was done, completely drained. He’d said everything there was to say.
As Robert talked, frustration kept gnawing at Steve Saracco. The tape had been rolling for God knows how many minutes and still, so far, he hadn’t gotten the young man to deviate one iota from the story he’d told earlier. I’m going to have to give him a couple of Jack Webbs, Saracco thought. Hit him hard with the fact that the girl is dead and he’s alive. And I’m also going to have to hedge my bets. There’s a good chance this guy won’t crack no matter what I ask him, that he’s gonna stick like glue to this accident bullshit. And if he does and we indict him for murder, which from the look of the girl’s neck is what he ought to be indicted for, this videotape is gonna be played in court someday. I want the jury that sees the tape to know I don’t give his bullshit any credence. That you could do that on a tape was the beauty of the thing. When you cross-examined a guy on the stand, you weren’t allowed to communicate your personal beliefs and disbeliefs. But you could on a videotape. “I wasn’t there,” he said to Robert. “The detectives weren’t there. But there are certain things that don’t lie. The condition of the body. The condition of your face and chest.” That stated, he paused and then, as if he were asking a very casual question, said, “How tall are you?’ Six-four?”
Chambers saw where he was going. “Three. Six-three,” he said.
“How much do you weigh?”
“What is she? About five-eight? Five-seven?”
“Five-nine,” Chambers said. “Probably weighs like one twenty or something.” But then, as if to prove that despite her height and weight the girl had been a match for him, he added, “But she was strong. I mean, she would just burst into these fits and freak out.”
Saracco back-pedaled. Chambers was growing defensive, and he didn’t want him to clam up. Not before he established how well he’d known the girl. He began asking about their relationship and the nature of their sexual encounters. “When you had sex with her,” he inquired, “did she use any protection or did you use any prophylactics?”
“It never even entered our minds at all,” Chambers told him.
Never entered their minds? Middle-class kids? Saracco hurried on to the next question.
“You had sex with her three times. Was there anything out of the ordinary? Any tying up? Or was it just regular sex?”
“Just regular sex. Except for the third time. On a roof. She took pictures of me while I was asleep?”
“How did you know she took pictures of you?”
“Because she woke me up and showed them to me. She said, ‘I thought you looked cute like that.’”
“You fell asleep on the roof naked?” Saracco couldn’t keep a note of surprise out of his voice.
“Yeah. I was exhausted.”
“What was your reaction?”
“I was shocked,” Chambers replied primly. “I thought it was odd. It was out of the ordinary. I’d never come across somebody that did that.”
Saracco wasn’t satisfied with what he’d gotten. What I need now is to weave in a motive for the killing, he thought, and he let the past go and moved back to what had happened in the park. He had a theory about the motive. Chambers looked to him like the kind of guy whose whole ballgame was his face, and it seemed to him that once the girl scratched him—messed up his looks, for Christ’s sake—he’d flipped out. “You were mad at her,” he began, heading toward weaving in the motive. “For laughing at you in the bar.”
“Right,” Chambers said. Then he went right where Saracco wanted him to go, adding, “And for scratching me.”
“Saracco was pleased. “And for spitting at you,” he pointed out.
“Right,” Chambers acknowledged.
Saracco was almost home. “That certainly would have upset you,” he commented agreeably. Then he waited for another “Right.”
He didn’t get it. “I was upset,” Chambers said. But he went on to explain, as he’d done before, that after the girl scratched him she was so apologetic and full of sweet talk that he’d made up with her and only then let her tie him up.
Saracco kept pressing him. “You just told me that she’d gone nuts on you,” he said.
“She did go nuts. And then she came back and started to massage my back.”
He was failing at weaving in his motive, Saracco realized. But he still believed in it, still felt that a pretty boy like Chambers wouldn’t have let a girl tie him up once she’d scratched his face. Probably no man would have. Which made him wonder if there was any truth at all to the sex story. Maybe they never even had sex. “Did you ejaculate at any time?” he asked.
“No. I never did. Never did.”
“Were you erect at any time?”
“Yes. I was.”
Erect even though she was hurting his genitals? Saracco found this idea unlikely. “You became erect?” he repeated dubiously.
To his surprise, Chambers seemed to take his words as an affront to his masculinity and responded as if the question had been designed to explore not how come he’d been erect if she was hurting him, but how come if he had been erect he hadn’t climaxed. “I was in too much pain,” he answered. “I wasn’t even thinking about it.”
He’d better get into a new area, Saracco decided. This was getting no place. He’d better go for something to shake Chambers up. If he got shook up, the truth might come out. The photographs of the dead girl might do the trick. Grasping them, he slid them across the desk.
It started to work. Chambers got uneasy at once. “Please, I really don’t want to see,” he murmured, and put a hand across his eyes.
“Let me just describe them to you,” Saracco persisted. “Her neck area depicts markings of a degree a lot more severe than could have been inflicted by the way you describe it. Do you see how discolored and even bleeding her neck is? Is there any way you can account for this?”
“Yeah.” Chambers said. He had given the pictures a hasty glance. “Because when I pulled her back, she landed against the tree and just laid there like this.” He put up an arm and demonstrated how the girl had landed, the camera capturing him mimicking her open, glazed eyes.
The pictures had gotten him nowhere, Saracco concluded. He was going to have to try another tack. Come right out and let the guy know, no holds barred, that he thought he was full of shit. “Your story just doesn’t make any sense to me,” he began. Then he added, “I’m not saying this was something premeditated on your part. I’m not saying that you were walking out of that bar and saying to yourself, I’m going to kill this girl in Central Park. I’m sure it didn’t happen that way. But something triggered you.”
Chambers didn’t like being challenged. He waved a hand in the air, as if to brush the unpleasant words away. And when he spoke, anger made his voice shake. “She molested me in the park,” he said. “She hit me with—”
Bingo! Saracco thought. Even if he couldn’t get Chambers to tell the truth, if he got him angry enough maybe he’d blow his cool and reveal on tape the violent side of himself that surely had been in evidence in the park. That too would be useful in front of a jury. “How could she molest you?” he plunged forward. “We’re talking about what?”
“What?” Chambers, a hint in his face of the fury Saracco was after, took the bait. “Girls cannot do it to a guy?”
Saracco kept going. “Wait! Are you telling me she’s trying to rape you in the park? Come on, Robert!”
But Chambers had regained control of himself and now stiffly, his vocabulary stilted and Victorian, he announced, “She was having her way with me. Without my consent. With my hands behind my back.”
“Wait a minute!” Saracco said. “What are we? From Iowa or someplace?”
“I don’t know where you’re from.” Chambers’s voice was icy. “That really doesn’t concern me. But you see, a jogger heard me scream. The jogger even asked, ‘What’s wrong?’”
“Just continue that.”
Chambers’s face turned indignant. “I’m hurt,” he said.
“You’re hurt from what?”
“From her!”
“I know you’re angry. From her scratching you.”
This time Chambers made a guttural sound in the back of his throat.
“Look, if I were here telling you this story,” Saracco said, “you’d be laughing.”
“No. I doubt I’d be laughing.”
“And I don’t mean laughing because it’s funny. But laughing because it doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes no sense?” Chambers seemed at last on the verge of a true rage. “It makes no sense that somebody could put your hands behind your back and push you down and then get on top of your chest?”
“Exactly!” Saracco said. “You’re exactly right.”
But although he’d made Chambers hopping mad, made him come to the verge of exploding, no explosion occurred. Nor did his story change. He just kept petulantly repeating it. Disappointed, and needing time to formulate a new plan, Saracco turned the questioning over to Sheehan.
“Did there come a time when after she spit at you and everything else,” Sheehan said, “you slapped her in the face or shoved her away from you or punched her in the eye or something?”
“I never slapped her or punched her or anything,” Chambers said. He sounded utterly convincing.
“You just let her scratch you?”
“What am I going to do? Hit her with a stick?” Under Sheehan’s questioning, Chambers had grown calm, even casual, once again. Time for a Jack Webb, Saracco decided, and broke in. “She’s dead. You’re not. Something happened. That’s a fact, isn’t it, Rob?”
But Chambers merely grunted, “Yeah,” and held firm.
A short while later Saracco took a parting shot for the sake of the trial that he now felt was an inevitability. “It seems to me,” he intoned in his best summation style, “that it wasn’t her that freaked out. That it was you. You that lost your temper to some degree. That you killed her. That you knew you killed her. That you intended to kill her. That you left her there dead. You went home. You went to sleep. And through good police investigation, they found you. The account you give is just an accommodation.”
When he was finished, he gave Chambers one last chance to change his story.
Chambers didn’t want it. “I’ve told you exactly what happened,” he said. “I’m sorry if you can’t see it. I’m sure that I’ve heard of other men being raped, other men being tied up.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Saracco snapped. “I haven’t.”
“Well, good. You’re lucky.”
“I’ve been in this business for a while, and you’re the first man I’ve seen raped in Central Park.”
“Good. That really makes no difference to me. But it happens. It can happen. It did happen.”
Saracco delivered a final Jack Webb. “You didn’t wind up raped,” he said. “And she wound up dead. That’s all I know.” But Chambers wanted the last word. “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he said. “I liked her very much. She was a very nice person. Easy to get along with. Easy to talk to. She was just too pushy. And she liked me more than I thought. More than anyone actually thought.”
See you in court, Saracco thought, and a moment later announced that the taping was finished. Although Chambers hadn’t budged from his story, and although he himself had failed at weaving in a motive, he’d taken a pretty good statement, he told himself. One that no defense attorney would be happy with. And that made him happy.
He was leaving the room when Detective McEntee, who had been silent throughout the taping, spoke up and said to Chambers, “You’re under arrest.”
Sheehan was exhausted. All he wanted was a shower and a beer, or a beer and a shower. He was trying to make up his mind which of them he wanted first when Lieutenant Doyle beckoned to him and said, “Hey, did you know Robert Chambers from before?”
“No,” Sheehan said.
“What about his father? You know him?”
“No.”
“Well, the old man knows you. He mentioned your name to me.
“You’re kidding.”
“No. He said something about Is this Detective Sheehan the one from Sheehan’s bar on Third Avenue?”
Unhappily Sheehan breathed, “Oh, boy,” and just then Bob Chambers entered the precinct-house door.
“There he is,” Doyle said, and Sheehan stared. He didn’t recognize Bob right away. The man he was looking at was clean-shaven and trim, and the Bob Chambers he’d known had always worn thick muttonchop whiskers and seemed a little sloppy. But a moment later, when he saw Bob shrugging his shoulders at him familiarly, he realized with a start that of course it was Bobby Chambers. Holy Christ, he thought. So the intelligentsia was Robert Chambers’s dad! I didn’t know the guy had a son. Then he thought, Jeez, the poor guy. This stuff with his son is all he needs. Even back when he used to come into the bar, he was having tough times, talking about how bad his marriage was, and now look what’s about to happen to him. Concerned, he walked up to Bob, shook his hand, and said, “Jeez, Bobby, it’s been a long time, eh?” Then he added, “I didn’t know Robert was your son. If I’d’ve known, I wouldn’t’ve continued on the case. But the kid didn’t say anything. I even gave him my card. He never said his father knew me. Never said, Hey, did your family own Sheehan’s bar?”
Bob just shrugged again. Then he asked, “How’s your mom?”
“Mom’s great.”
“I hope your family’s not mad at me. I mean, because I haven’t been by in five years.”
Sheehan couldn’t believe his ears. Here the guy’s son has just been arrested for murder, and he’s shooting How’s mom? “It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’s all right.”
“Mike, I want to apologize for not coming by these past five years,” Bob persisted.
“Forget it. It’s nothing,” Sheehan assured him. But Bob wouldn’t let the matter go. “It’s not because of the bar or your family,” he said. “It’s because I have a problem. I’m an alcoholic.”
Holy Christ, he hadn’t known that either, Sheehan thought. Damn, if only the guy had opened up about it back in the old days, maybe I could’ve helped him. But there was no point in crying over spilt milk. It was now that the guy really needed help. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “I mean, What are you going to do now?”
Bob’s voice was glum. “I was going to ask you that. What the hell should I do?”
“You gotta get a good lawyer.”
“Yeah, but the whole thing is, I haven’t got the dough. I don’t know if I can afford one.”
“Yeah, well. You could wait, I guess. They’d give you a guy. A public defender.”
“Yeah.” Bob sounded resigned. But a few moments later he said, “Who’s a good lawyer?”
“There’s lots of guys,” Sheehan said. Then he rattled off a few names. One of them, Bob would later tell a friend, was Jack Litman, who had just that past June won an acquittal for a Brooklyn cop accused of shooting an unarmed black man.
Inside, in the precinct house, the videotape technicians were packing up their equipment and Saracco was preparing to leave. Robert seemed almost forgotten. He was alone except for young Detective Mullally, who had been asked by Sheehan to keep an eye on him. The two were sitting quietly on opposite sides of the room when suddenly the door opened and Bob Chambers walked in. Mullally saw Robert start, stand up, and throw his arms around his father. Then he heard him say in an excited voice, “That fucking bitch, why didn’t she leave me alone?”
Bob Chambers didn’t hear the remark. Or if he did, he managed to deny its passage from his ears to his brain. He heard not a rush of angry, accusatory words but the sound of sobbing. And he saw in front of him, not an angry young man but a distraught boy, one whose eyes were watery with tears. “I’m here,” he said at once. “I’ve been trying to see you. But I’m here now, and that’s the important point.”
Robert put his head down in his hands.
“I’m with you all the way,” Bob said. “Your mother is with you. And we’ll do everything we have to do to take care of you.” But although he put his arm around his boy’s shoulder and continued to speak in a soothing voice, Robert didn’t pull himself together. He went on crying.
About an hour later—it was 2 A.M.—Robert was taken on “The Walk.” The Walk is a courtesy the police department generally grants the press, a chance to photograph a criminal before he leaves the precinct in which he has been arrested and disappears into the bowels of Central Booking. The Walk gives photographers the opportunity to get enough mugs to last them from the day of arrest to the day of bail—or right through a criminal’s trial if he isn’t granted bail. Robert, his hands cuffed and his body surrounded by police, did The Walk from the precinct house to a nearby van along a route jammed with jostling newspeople.
He tried to ignore them. But their cameras were pointing at him like guns, their lights were so bright that the roadway seemed illuminated by a brilliant dawn, and the newspeople kept calling out to him as familiarly as if he and they were intimates.
“Hey, Robert! I’m over here,” a voice rang out.
“Yo, Rob!” another one sounded. “Why’dja do her?”
He turned several times, lights exploding in his eyes. Sheehan was with him. Sheehan who had a few minutes earlier taken him into a men’s room and made him drop his pants, examining his genitals for what proved to be nonexistent traces of squeezing and scratching. He’d suffered passively through that indignity. But this one, the surge and onslaught of the press, made him angry. The press was like a pack of wild dogs hot for his blood.
While Robert was departing the precinct in police custody, Brock Pernice, still out in the Hamptons, was startled by the sound of a telephone piercing the nighttime silence. He picked the phone up and heard his mother’s voice. She was crying.
It’s my grandfather, Brock thought. He’s died. It has to be that, because the last time my mom sounded this tearful was when someone else in the family died. “What is it?” he asked at once. “Is it Grandpa?”
His mother said, “No,” and the next thing Brock knew, he was saying, “Is it Jen?” He didn’t know why he said that. But somehow he just knew that something had happened to Jen.
When his mother told him yes, and said that Jennifer was dead, he threw the phone down, flung it from him as if it were a messenger of evil tidings whose destruction he could effect. He broke into a sweat, began perspiring all over, and he couldn’t stop.
The holding cells at Central Booking in lower Manhattan were jammed when McEntee and Robert arrived at about three-thirty in the morning. The place had the look of a zoo, with herds of men, most of them dark-skinned, standing upright in a crowded pen. It smelled like a zoo, too, because there were no toilets in the pens. If a prisoner wanted to go to the toilet, he had to ask a cop or a corrections officer to take him to it, and some didn’t bother to ask. They relieved themselves right on the cement floor. Robert, his eyes dazed, took in the sights and smells that greeted him and stayed close to McEntee.
His fingers were bandaged, and he had with him antibiotic pills for his scratches and a small ice pack for his aching hand. On the way to Central Booking, he’d been taken to a hospital, where his bites, scratches, and hand injury had been examined and prescribed for. McEntee told him he’d probably be able to keep his ice pack once he was booked, but not the pills. Jail was funny about pills.
They went first to photography, so he could get his mug shot taken. He stood in front of a Polaroid camera on a tripod, and a female police officer pressed the shutter. But nothing happened. The camera was broken. The officer sent for another, but it, too, was broken. She sent for a third, but when it arrived it turned out to be unable to expose color film, which was the only kind of film she had. Each time a new camera appeared, Robert wiped perspiration from his forehead and combed his bandaged fingers through his hair. Finally a working camera that could expose color film arrived, and four views of his face were recorded. The pictures that resulted were unlike any for which he had posed in the days when he had hoped to be a model. Despite his efforts to tidy himself, he appeared as disheveled as any common criminal—his hair unruly, his face dirty, his chin stubbled. But what was most striking about his appearance were the brownish-red scratches that streaked across his pallid cheeks like the warpaint on a movie Indian.
Once his pictures had been taken, McEntee led him to a counter where he was asked to relinquish any money he had with him. He had none. Then he was asked for his sneaker laces. “They don’t want you hanging yourself inside,” McEntee said. Stooping, Robert undid the laces and handed them over. Then he started to move forward, his sneakers suddenly gaping on his feet and the metal grommets into which the laces had tongued looking like tiny empty mouths. “That string, too,” McEntee said and pointed at the waistband of his sweatpants. Robert untied the pants, removed the string, and laid it on the counter. As soon as he did, the pants began to crawl down his hips. He clutched at them with a gauze-wrapped hand and held them up as best he could. Then McEntee took him to get his prisoner number and have his fingerprints taken.
That process should have gone smoothly but didn’t. The computer that assigned numbers and fed the prints to a central clearinghouse in Albany was down. There was no telling when it would be working again, a corrections officer informed McEntee. In the meanwhile his prisoner would have to wait in one of the pens.
McEntee was distressed at the news. He had been feeling great for the past few hours. His first homicide had not only been solved but the culprit apprehended, a confession obtained, and the booking nearly completed. Everything, give or take a couple of broken cameras, had gone smoothly. But now the whole thing threatened to come to a bad end. The fact of the matter was, he didn’t want Robert in a pen and had planned to get a private cell for him once he was booked. There were three or four such cells, and although they were generally reserved for transvestites, who fared poorly in the big pen, prisoners who were considered suicidal and therefore in need of close watch could be assigned to them. In McEntee’s estimation, Robert wasn’t suicidal. But he wouldn’t know how to look after himself with the animals he’d be meeting in the pen. Not with those bandaged hands. All he knew how to do was defend himself with girls. But there was nothing McEntee could do about a private cell now. He’d just have to hope for the best. He turned to Robert and said, “You gotta go in there with the rest of them.”
Robert looked frightened, but McEntee told him not to worry. “Just don’t get into any fights in there,” he cautioned. But he couldn’t put out of his mind the time not long ago when he’d seen a guy locked up for having thrown his baby daughter off a roof. The guy had been in one of the pens only ten minutes before he’d had to be pulled out and rushed to a hospital. Prisoners had a code. They didn’t like guys who killed kids. Maybe they wouldn’t like what Robert had done either. “Listen, whatever you do,” he warned Robert, “don’t tell anybody why you’re here. If anyone in there asks you, just say we booked you on assault or robbery.”
When Robert was led away and placed in a pen, McEntee got himself coffee and talked to some fellow officers. The radio was on—someone had tuned it loudly to News 88—and the officers were listening to it and guffawing at Robert’s story, which they found hilarious. “Tell me, you think this guy is attractive?” one of the listeners, a male officer, demanded of a female one. “Well, yeah,” the woman replied. “Yeah, he’s cute.”
“Very cute?”
“Yeah, very cute.”
“Well, just don’t squeeze his balls.”
The female officer giggled, and all the men cracked up. But McEntee couldn’t relax. Even if Robert doesn’t say why he’s here, he kept thinking, those guys in there will figure it out pronto. Because the damn radio’s on. Worried, he quit the group he was standing with and hurried to the pen to check up on his prisoner.
What he saw amazed him. Robert had managed to clear a few feet of space for himself amid the roiling, shoving mass, and he was curled up on the dirty cement floor. His eyes were closed and he appeared to have shut out his surroundings and fallen soundly asleep.
He still seemed to be sleeping when, an hour or two later, the computer at last came on line. McEntee did a first set of prints, squeezing the thick ink that looked like black toothpaste onto a Lucite pad and pressing Robert’s fingers down on the pad as firmly as he could, given the bandages. But he wasn’t an experienced fingerprinter, and the prints came out smudged. A fingerprint specialist tried the process over again. But he was reluctant to do the printing the way he usually did, which involved grabbing the prisoner’s fingers and plunging them into the swirl of ink as if they were anchors being heaved into the sea. Robert’s gauze-wrapped fingers made the specialist nervous, and he pressed them down so lightly that he got only a partial set of prints. McEntee tried again, and managed to print nine fingers. It was enough. The booking was over.
By now it was 8 A.M. McEntee got ready to go. But he was still feeling uneasy, still worrying that some harm might befall his first homicide collar. He knew that Robert had managed to make out all right when surrounded by other prisoners for an hour or two, but wasn’t certain he’d go on managing if he had to hang around with them for another eight hours, or however long it took till he was arraigned. Leaving, McEntee arranged a private cell for him. Then he said goodbye to Robert. “I hadda lie for you a little,” he said. “I hadda tell ’em you were suicidal.”
Robert looked grateful, but McEntee shrugged the look away. He’d done what he’d done for himself, not for the preppie. “The last thing I need is for you to get killed in there,” he said grudgingly.
A few moments later Robert, holding up his sweatpants with his bandaged hands and pushing his feet slowly in front of him in their gaping sneakers, shuffled off with a corrections officer.