Blood Innocents

  “Have you been to the park since early Sunday morning?” Reardon asked. He wanted to rivet Petrakis’ attention on the fact that the police knew he had gone to the park that morning. Perhaps that would break him.

  “No,” Petrakis said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure.”

  Reardon glanced down at his notes. He felt like a talk-show host without a guest. Petrakis sat directly in front of him, but no one really seemed to be there at all. Somehow he had to get at Petrakis, draw him out. He decided to be more direct.

  “How long have you worked with the Parks Department?” he asked.

  “Two years,” Petrakis replied.

  Dos, thought Reardon, and the roman numeral two. “You don’t speak Spanish by any chance, do you, Mr. Petrakis?”

  “Greek,” Petrakis said.

  Reardon looked down at his paper again. “Yes, I thought so. And you work with Gilbert Noble and Harry Bryant, is that right?”

  Petrakis nodded.

  The only part of Petrakis’ body that had moved since the interrogation had begun, thought Reardon, was his head. “Let’s get back to the deer.” Reardon looked at Petrakis intently. There was no response. “Did you have much to do with the fallow deer? Did you tend to their cage?”

  “Sometimes,” Petrakis said, and for a moment he closed his eyes wearily, his head swaying very slightly forward and backward. But the face betrayed nothing, and Reardon was beginning to believe there was nothing for it to betray. “Sometimes you cleaned the cage and sometimes Bryant cleaned it and sometimes Noble cleaned it?” Petrakis made no response. Reardon decided to work on the details of what he already knew about Petrakis’ home. Finally draw him out.

  “On Monday, about three A.M., you met Harry Bryant in a coffee shop on Second Avenue, is that right?”

  “Right,” Petrakis replied.

  “What did you talk about?”

  “I move to a new place that Thursday.”

  “You moved from 109 East 90th Street?”

  “Yes.”

  Reardon looked down at his notes. “What is your new address?”

  “103 East 101st Street. My wife sister apartment. We move in with her. I have no money.”

  “You were evicted from your previous apartment?” Petrakis nodded.

  “And who is the landlord of the building you had to leave?” Reardon asked, staring down at his notes as if it were just one more routine question.

  “Robles,” Petrakis said.

  “He’s your landlord?”

  “He kick me out,” Petrakis said without emotion.

  “Do you know his first name?”

  “He kick out a sick woman. He kick out my wife.”

  “Do you know his first name?” Reardon repeated.

  “Julio,” Petrakis said, “Julio Robles.”

  “Excuse me a moment, Mr. Petrakis.” Reardon picked up the phone and called Mathesson. “Jack, I want you to go over to 109 East 90th Street and see if a Julio Robles is around. Mr. Petrakis says Robles is the landlord, so we could have made a mistake on the connection.” Reardon hung up and glanced at Petrakis. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. But Petrakis seemed to have been unaware of or uninterested in the break-in time since the last question.

  Reardon began again: “Did you have any kind of fight with this Julio Robles?”

  “No.”

  “None at all?”

  “No.”

  “When did you leave the coffee shop,” Reardon asked. “About what time?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “To work. The zoo.”

  “What happened when you got there?”

  “I start to work.”

  “Doing what?”

  Petrakis closed his eyes again and appeared to go far away.

  “Doing what?” Reardon asked again.

  “Cutting brush behind the shed.”

  “What shed?”

  “The deer shed. The brush look bad.”

  “How did you cut the brush?”

  “My ax.”

  A shiver went down Reardon’s back. Could it be, Reardon wondered, that Petrakis would actually confess to the killing of the fallow deer in this blunt, dead monotone?

  “And so you took the ax from the work shed and started to cut the brush?”

  Petrakis nodded.

  It was inconceivable, Reardon thought, that Petrakis had gone this far into an interrogation without discerning the reason for it. But he only said: “Then what?”

  “I cut the brush. I think of my sick wife at home. I feel bad. My wife is sick.”

  “Yes,” said Reardon, “go on.”

  “I cannot work. I think of my sick wife. Only my children are home.”

  “So what did you do?” Reardon asked.

  “I cannot work,” Petrakis said, “I go home.”

  “You went home? After coming that far?”

  “Yes.”

  It could have happened, Reardon thought. He, himself, had come to work many times during Millie’s illness and had then gotten sick with the pain of her dying and had gone home to see her and to be with her, to bring her what little comfort he could, while he could. “What did you do with the ax? Did you put it back in the shed?”

  “No, put it down,” Petrakis said.

  “Where?”

  “By the deer cage,” Petrakis said.

  “And then you went home?”

  “Yes.”

  “To East 101st Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do when you got home?”

  “I go to sleep.”

  “Did you go out again during the night?” Reardon asked.

  “No.”

  This was going nowhere, Reardon knew. He had to get to the point quickly, flush Petrakis out, hit him hard. “You said that you don’t know why the police were looking for you. Well, the reason is: the fallow deer, the ones whose cage you sometimes cleaned, were killed early Monday morning.”

  Petrakis received this information without any sign of emotion. He seemed to project only a dull acknowledgment of yet another insignificant fact.

  “Were you aware that they had been killed?” Reardon asked.

  “No.”

  “You would have noticed that they were dead when you came to the park, wouldn’t you?”

  “They alive.”

  “And you say you placed your ax outside the cage when you left the park. Why didn’t you lock it up?”

  “Too tired,” Petrakis said. “I put it down and leave.”

  Reardon nodded. Then he said sternly, almost accusingly, “Your ax was the weapon that killed the fallow deer.”

  Petrakis was unmoved. He simply nodded, staring dreamingly into Reardon’s face.

  “Your fingerprints are the only fingerprints on the ax,” Reardon said in the same commanding voice.

  Petrakis did not answer.

  “Have you ever heard of Wallace Van Allen?” Reardon asked.

  “He gives the deer to the zoo,” Petrakis said.

  “And he threw you out of your apartment too,” Reardon said, “didn’t he?”

  “No,” Petrakis said. “Robles.”

  “Wallace Van Allen owns the building,” Reardon said.

  “Oh,” Petrakis said.

  “You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “And you hated him, didn’t you? Didn’t you want to get even?”

  Petrakis did not answer.

  “Didn’t you?” Reardon repeated.

  Petrakis’ face seemed to darken. “It is the curse,” he said. “I will die!”

  Reardon leaned forward in his chair. For a moment he believed that he had broken the impenetrable surface of Petrakis’ consciousness. “Die for what?”

  “This is the last,” Petrakis said.

  “Last of what?”

  “The curse.”

  “What curse?”

  “She curses me with thre
e deaths.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I leave my village in Greece. She says three would die.”

  “She cursed you for coming to New York?” Reardon asked. He had heard of such things among the Irish.

  Petrakis continued, dazed. “She says that three will die. My daughter last year. Now my wife. Now me.”

  “Your daughter died last year?” Reardon asked.

  “Born dead,” Petrakis said without emphasis, as if filling in an inconsequential detail, as if all his nerves had been seared down to a final insensibility.

  Reardon could feel a pressure behind his eyes, his skin tightening in the old, remembered fury of his pity.

  17

  Reardon was still questioning Petrakis, searching for contradictions, breaks, discrepancies in his story when Mathesson walked into the precinct house later that afternoon. He seemed to be moved by a dynamo, gaining energy from the pursuit of the killer. Reardon could sense that Mathesson smelled blood, felt he was on the right track and had already fingered Petrakis as the killer in his mind. He looked at Petrakis, then at Reardon. “Can I see you a minute?” he asked Reardon.

  Reardon stood up, and he and Mathesson walked into an empty office not far from Reardon’s desk. Mathesson was poised, ready. He paced to the back wall of the office, leaned his back flat against it and slapped his hands together jubilantly.

  “The Van Allen connection still checks out,” he said. “Julio Robles is just the lousy superintendent of the building. He’s not the landlord.”

  “Van Allen is the landlord?”

  “That’s right,” Mathesson said, “and I did a little survey. You know, on my own. Everybody in that building that I could talk to knew that Wallace Van Allen was the landlord.”

  Reardon nodded. There was no doubt now, Reardon knew: Mathesson was after Petrakis and already believed he had him.

  “It was just like I thought,” Mathesson said, “just like my buddy with the Hollywood star for a landlord.”

  “I see,” Reardon said.

  “So the connection holds.”

  “Yes, I guess it does.”

  “You gonna arrest him?” Mathesson asked. “Got a lot on him, you know.”

  Reardon looked at Petrakis through the internal office window. He was sitting erect in the chair, his hands folded motionlessly in his lap, his face still holding to its doomed rigidity, the face of a cow waiting for the hammer.

  “He says he crossed Fifth Avenue on the way to the subway,” Reardon said.

  “Then that’s it,” said Mathesson. “Piccolini wants an arrest.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you think you can get a confession out of Petrakis?”

  “Like they got one out of Whitmore,” Reardon said harshly, “by feeding him the details of the case.” He felt his anger flash almost uncontrollably. He gazed at Petrakis, thinking of that impregnable passivity the man gave off like an odor. “They actually got him to tell them the color of a bedspread in a murder room he had never been in,” Reardon said softly, controlling himself. “That’s not the kind of confession we want, is it?”

  “Of course not,” Mathesson said. “You know better than that. You know I wouldn’t go for anything like that.”

  “If I build a case against Petrakis,” Reardon said, “I want it to stick. Besides, I’m not sure we have a case yet.”

  Mathesson seemed amazed. “Are you kidding?”

  “I have an opinion,” Reardon said firmly, turning to face Mathesson, “and that’s it. I don’t believe we have a case nailed down against him yet.”

  “The connection holds, the prints hold, the motive holds, the weapon holds. He was in the area of the crime near the time of its commission.”

  Reardon thought Mathesson sounded like a textbook on criminal procedure.

  “I’m not convinced.”

  Mathesson’s initial amazement was obviously now turning into irritation. “Are you going on hunches now?”

  “You can call it what you like.” Reardon pointed his finger toward the closed door. “Outside that door a man is sitting in a chair. That man is a part of this case. He’s a part of this case, just like the ax and the prints and the rest of the physical evidence. He just does not connect with the facts. I don’t believe the case is solid against him and I am not going to subject him and his family to an arrest before I have a case I can send to court.”

  “Is that what you’re going to say to Piccolini?”

  “That is just about it.”

  “Forget it,” Mathesson said wearily. “Petrakis will be in the slammer tonight no matter what. Piccolini won’t buy any of this.”

  “Maybe so,” Reardon said.

  “For sure,” Mathesson said. “And I’ll tell you something, John. I don’t buy it either. You’ve gone a little crazy on this case. Don’t ask me why, but you’ve been a little crazy on it from the beginning, from the first day when you saw those deer. And you’re going to fuck yourself up royally. And it’s all going to be for nothing. For that little shit out there. Who cares about him? He did it. Everything connects. I believe he did it. And I hope to hell that Piccolini locks him up, because he may have wasted more than those deer. He may have wasted two women in the Village. Remember, the one with the face like a child? I don’t want him on the streets because you have a hunch he didn’t do it.”

  For a moment Mathesson glared furiously at Reardon, then he strode out of the office, slamming the door behind him.

  Reardon, exhausted, sat down in the empty office at the empty desk, the light streaming through the window, illuminating cascading clouds of city dust, alone.

  When Reardon emerged from the office he walked directly past Petrakis and straight to Piccolini’s office. He entered it without knocking and closed the door behind him. Piccolini’s head shot up, startled. But when he saw Reardon standing stiffly in front of his desk, he relaxed, placed a hand behind his head and leaned back in his chair. He smiled. “Finished?”

  “I don’t think so,” Reardon said.

  “What’s the problem? Have you finished the interrogation?”

  “Just about.”

  “Did he confess?”

  “No.”

  Piccolini smiled. “He will,” he said confidently. “Maybe not right away, but he will.”

  “No,” Reardon said, “he won’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway, does it?”

  “Well …”

  “Just go over the basics again,” Piccolini said.

  “Well,” Reardon said, “we found the weapon. A Parks Department ax. Only one set of fingerprints; they belong to Petrakis. According to Daniels, Petrakis was near the Children’s Zoo just before the deer were killed. He was mad at his landlord, according to Bryant. His landlord was Wallace Van Allen. Petrakis knew the deer were given to the zoo by Van Allen because he worked there when they were donated.”

  “Did you confront him with those facts?” Piccolini asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And he didn’t confess?”

  “No.”

  “Arrest him,” Piccolini said matter-of-factly.

  “No,” Reardon said. “I don’t think we have a complete case.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t believe we do.”

  Piccolini leaned forward in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. “That’s it? That’s your whole explanation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Based on nothing.”

  “Based on Petrakis. I don’t believe he connects with the facts of the case.”

  “He connects with the physical evidence,” Piccolini said, “and that’s enough of a connection for me. Arrest him.” He turned casually to get a book from the shelf behind his desk.

  “No,” Reardon said, his whole body growing taut.

  Piccolini wheeled around to face Reardon. “Arrest him!” he said coldly.

  “Have him arrested i
f you want to, but not by me. I won’t do it. Get somebody else, not me.”

  “Petrakis had a motive for the crime and the occasion to commit it,” Piccolini insisted.

  “What motive?”

  “What motive?” Piccolini said. “Are you kidding? He was in a rage at his landlord and his landlord was Wallace Van Allen. That’s a motive in anybody’s book.”

  Reardon shrugged. “Petrakis thought his landlord was Julio Robles.”

  “Who is Julio Robles?”

  “The super in Petrakis’ old building.”

  Piccolini grinned. “That’s just a cover. I’ve heard stuff like that a thousand times. So have you.”

  “I believe he did not know that Wallace Van Allen owned the building he lived in,” Reardon said.

  Piccolini leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Reardon, but something is.”

  Reardon said nothing. He was not sure he disagreed with Piccolini about that. He was not sure but that something terrible was in fact wrong with him, but he could not name it.

  “Do you have any real reason to hold off on the arrest of Petrakis?” Piccolini asked.

  “No,” Reardon said immediately.

  “Then arrest him.”

  “No.”

  “You’re off the case,” Piccolini said abruptly. “Send Mathesson in here. And tell Petrakis to wait right where he is.”

  Reardon nodded. He felt like Petrakis. He felt as though there was nothing left of him.

  That night Reardon could not sleep. He sat by his window watching the life of the street coil and strike beneath him. His mind was filled with the grotesque opera of his life: the hideous dismemberments, the familiar molestations. He remembered Whitmore, a confused and lonely boy from whom the detectives had gently nudged a false confession the way a kindly grandparent might coax candy from a grandchild. That’s what Mathesson and the others will do to Petrakis, he thought. Piccolini was right: Petrakis would confess to everything. He would embrace a confession as the fulfillment of his mother’s curse.

  Reardon shook his head. He was off the case. He had been reassigned. It was his duty to take the reassignment, to forget about Petrakis, to let Mathesson and Piccolini handle it. Tomorrow morning there would be another homicide. The city offered up unexplained corpses with every dawn.

  World without end, amen.