Blood Innocents

  “Well, find anything?” Mathesson asked, glancing up from his notebook.

  “No,” Reardon replied quietly. “What time were they killed?”

  “Between three and three-thirty this morning,” Mathesson said. “Two patrolmen named Burns and Fitzgerald answered the call, and they said that according to one of the workmen …” He quickly turned through his notebook. “Here it is. According to one of the workmen — a guy named Gilbert Noble — they had to have been killed between three and three-thirty this morning. He works on the night crew. He saw the deer alive at three, and he saw them dead at three-thirty. But he didn’t see nothing in between.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing important. He said there were a few people in the park earlier in the evening, but that’s all.”

  “I want to talk to him anyway.”

  “Okay,” Mathesson said. “I’ll have him come in and you can talk to him.”

  Reardon nodded toward the open shed. “Anybody check that place out?”

  “Yeah. It’s empty except for some dried leaves and deer shit. We rustled around in the leaves looking for the weapon, but there’s nothing there. No bits of clothing or anything like that. It looks like the killing was done out here. Out in the open. The whole thing. There’s not a drop of blood in that whole goddamn shed.”

  “I’ll take a quick look,” Reardon said. He turned and walked toward the shed.

  It was constructed of cinder blocks and was roofed with a sheet of tin. The front was entirely open and faced out toward the bars. The entire structure was covered with graffiti.

  “How did all that writing get in there?” Reardon asked, stopping at the entrance of the shed.

  “I think it must have happened last summer,” Mathesson said. “I think Burns said the deer were taken someplace else and the bars were down for a while. They were doing some sort of maintenance work or something like that. Anyway, the bars were taken down, so the local artist community did its thing.” Mathesson grinned. “Let me know if you see any hot numbers. That’s how I used to get most of my dates.”

  A breeze suddenly skirted through the park, driving small, noisy waves of dried leaves across the cement floor of the cage. Reardon turned up the collar of his overcoat and stepped inside the shed.

  Almost every square inch of the shed was covered with some kind of writing. Most prominent were the obscenities, references to various sexual acts or bodily functions. Interspersed with these were individual names, hundreds of them: Stanislas and Pedro, Betsie and Wilhelmina. There were also attempts at poetry, bits of personal philosophy and expressions of occult religions. But what grasped Reardon’s attention was something else, something that stood out from the rest; most of the writing had been done with chalk or spray paint, but this one was written in a color Reardon had seen too often not to recognize.

  “Mathesson!” he called. “Come in here a minute.”

  Mathesson came in and glanced about the shed. “What is it?”

  Reardon pointed to a rusty red scrawl on the ceiling of the shed. “Doesn’t that look like it’s written in dried blood?”

  Mathesson squinted up at the ceiling. “Yeah, it does. It looks like it could be.”

  “I think it is,” Reardon said. “It’s a roman numeral two.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want you to have that piece of tin cut out and sent down to the lab for an analysis. I think it’s blood of some kind. It may have come from the deer.”

  “A roman numeral two,” Mathesson said thoughtfully. “Jesus Christ. What the hell could that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s just a tally.”

  “A tally? What do you mean?”

  “Just that it may be a tally and nothing else.” Reardon looked up at the roman numeral two. “You know, the number ‘two’ for two dead deer.”

  “Oh,” Mathesson said. “Yeah, maybe.” He looked at the number, then outside at the two tarpaulins lying heavily over the bodies of the fallow deer. He shook his head. “A tally.”

  A tally, Reardon thought. Perhaps. But he was also thinking of another possibility. He had seen it more times than he liked to recall, and it had always begun with a terrible crime, one almost incomprehensible in its brutality: sex organs hanging from a doorknob or a severed finger floating placidly in a decanter of scotch or some other inhuman mutilation. And then that sudden, quiet, stunning touch of the human. The undeniable suggestion that even in the raving, animal cruelty of the crime, some touch of conscience remained. Sometimes it might be nothing more than a handkerchief too obviously left behind. Once, Reardon recalled, it was a telephone number tucked loosely under a doormat. But each time it had led to the killer, who had retained, even through the viciousness of the act, the certain knowledge that it was wrong and who was, therefore, determined to be caught.

  Or perhaps it was a tally, and nothing more.

  When Reardon got back to his desk in the precinct house, he found a note requesting him to telephone his son. He felt no desire to call but found himself dialing his son’s law office, anyway.

  “Mr. Reardon’s office,” the secretary said.

  “This is his father,” Reardon said.

  “He’s in conference at this time.”

  “This is his father,” Reardon repeated. He had sat through too many conferences in his life to be awed by the word.

  There was a pause. “Uh, just a moment, sir. I’ll see if he can be interrupted.”

  Reardon waited for a moment, thinking of the fallow deer with more than a trace of pity, then of a small dog he had once owned. It had been run over by a car. The driver had stopped, gotten out and very sadly offered his apologies and some money. Reardon had declined, and they had shaken hands. Whenever Reardon felt some need for a quiet moment of shared decency and generosity, his mind turned to that.

  “Mr. Reardon?” the secretary said, returning to the line.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Reardon wishes to know if you will have dinner with him tonight. He would like you to come to his apartment at around seven-thirty.”

  “All right,” Reardon said.

  “May I tell him you’ll be there?”

  Reardon found the formality of the secretary irritating. “Yes, you may.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Yeah, right,” Reardon hastily said, glad to get off the phone.

  As soon as he hung up he went into Piccolini’s office. Piccolini sat hunched over his desk, staring glumly at an inch-thick stack of requisition forms. Through the window at Piccolini’s back Reardon could see a few flakes of falling snow. “I saw the deer,” Reardon said.

  “Get any leads?” Piccolini was smoking an enormous black cigar, and the entire room was filled with heavy blue smoke.

  “Maybe one.”

  Piccolini’s eyes brightened. “Yeah, what?”

  “There was some writing on the shed.”

  “What kind of writing?”

  “A roman numeral two.”

  Piccolini squinted through a puff of smoke. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Reardon said. “I’m having the lab check to see if it was written in deer’s blood.”

  “Is that all?”

  “One of the deer died instantly,” Reardon added dryly.

  Piccolini leaned forward in his chair. “Reardon, I told you this is an important case. This may be the biggest thing in the city right now. Are you taking this thing seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “You retire in four years, Reardon.”

  “So?”

  “So you have a great record with the department. The Lamprey case alone would get you into the detectives’ hall of fame.”

  Reardon shrugged. “The Lamprey case was luck.”

  “The Lamprey case was memory,” Piccolini said, “remembering details from way back. That’s what a detective is all about.”

  Reardon did not know where this was supposed to be leading. Reh
ashing old cases had never appealed to him. It was like listening to middle-aged former quarterbacks blathering about past athletic glories. He looked out beyond Piccolini’s face and through the window behind him to the snow.

  “You know you retire in a few years,” Piccolini said, “so go out on a big one. Don’t mess this up. It’s a big case. It’s not a homicide, but it’s a big case, like I keep telling you. So break it. Go out a champ.”

  “Save the locker room pep talk, Mario. I’m too old to get steam out of that stuff.”

  “Maybe so, but I’d hate for you to louse this up.”

  “It won’t be loused up.”

  “Good.”

  Reardon went back to his desk and began typing up a brief account of his investigation so far. He described the condition of the deer, recorded the probable time of death, noted the probable characteristics of the death weapon or weapons. He noted that entry into the cage of the fallow deer would have been possible for anyone within the indent range of height and weight, that no human bloodstains had been located at or near the scene of the crime, and that, thus far, there were no witnesses.

  He had recorded such details hundred of times. He had described warehouses of weaponry: pistols of all calibers, shotguns of all gauges, blades of all lengths and widths and adornment, spikes, tire irons, bottles of all shapes and colors, acids, poisons, ropes, chains, wires, torches, bricks, baseball bats — every conceivable object that an agile, enraged and premeditating ape could use to kill another.

  He sat, thinking over the details of the case before him, but they did not seem to lead anywhere. Wallace Van Allen had donated two fallow deer and someone had killed them both, one with a ferocious brutality and the other with one devastating blow. Perhaps the killer had been repelled by his slaughter of the first deer and then had impulsively killed the other one out of some deranged fear of leaving any witness, even an animal. Or perhaps the approach of a human witness had frightened him, causing him to cut short the slaughter he had intended for the second deer. If he had bolted from the park someone might have noticed him. And Reardon knew he must have been drenched with blood after the first killing. A slashing killing sent geysers of blood in all directions; spurting vessels, the arcs of the weapon in its rise and fall, the thrashing about of the victim — every act in a slashing killing left a trail of blood. But no amount of blood caked on a killer or oozing from between his fingers would matter if there were no one around to see it. And as yet there were no witnesses. Reardon had already recorded that intolerable fact succinctly in his notebook: “Wit.: 0.”

  The crime had taken place at about three-thirty in the morning. Still, Reardon’s experience had taught him that eyes watched the streets constantly, that in a large city in a public place there were almost no unrecorded acts. He remembered the Ruiz case. If anyone had ever expected to kill invisibly in a city it was Paco Ruiz. Dressed in a business suit although he was a blue-collar worker, Ruiz had escorted a teenage boy to the depths of the city’s largest park and in one of its many narrow ravines of granite and underbrush he had soundlessly strangled him to death. It had happened about two hours before dawn on a moonless night in the heart of a supposedly deserted and isolated park, and two separate people had seen it. One was another teenage boy who had run away from his home that afternoon, fleeing the alcoholic rage of his father. The other was a thirty-five-year-old painter who all his life, he told Reardon, had been looking for the darkest place in the world in order to get some understanding of the nature of light. Each witness had been unaware of the other, but both of them had watched Ruiz and the boy approach from the distance, and both had sat in horrified astonishment and watched, from two widely separate angles, a large muscular man strangle a small-framed boy to death.

  In any event, Reardon thought, it was too early to tell if there were any witnesses to what had happened in the cage of the fallow deer between three and three-thirty in the morning. Sometimes it took a very long time for witnesses to come forward. Sometimes they never did. Reardon did not intend to become impatient.

  3

  Reardon arrived at his son’s apartment at exactly seven-thirty. He did not want to spend any more time there than he had to. He had admitted to himself some years ago that he did not like his son very much anymore, or his son’s wife or children or friends. They lived in one of the more fashionable areas of the city, where every door had a doorman, and Reardon always felt an intense discomfort at having a man his own age, gray and rather used-up and dressed clownishly in an absurdly ornate uniform, open the door for him, smile artificially and blurt, “Good evening, sir.” But this was evidently what his son wanted; it had propelled him to win his Ivy League scholarship, perform masterfully in college, and then seek out and secure a position in what Reardon was told was one of the city’s most prestigious law firms. But in the process of all that, Reardon thought, Timothy had lost the ability to distinguish between the things that really mattered in life and those that only seemed to.

  Abbey answered the door. “Well, hello, papa,” she said.

  She was young; that was the most significant thing about her. She had borne two children but still managed to retain a kind of teenage ebullience. Everything she said, she said with enthusiasm; every gesture had a synaptic energy of its own. Her lithe body made Reardon feel dense and heavy. Just being around her made him feel tired.

  Reardon removed his hat. “Hi,” he said. He did not feel like the bouncy, lovable, garrulous old grandpa he knew she expected him to be.

  Abbey took Reardon by the arm and escorted him into the living room of the apartment. It was a place of pastels. Pastel blue walls. Pastel upholstery on the chairs and sofa. Even the paintings were pastel, little girls in soft-colored dresses, their cheeks lightly flushed with pink.

  “You look tired,” she said after they had both sat down. “Have you been eating regularly?”

  Reardon tried to make a joke to please and relieve her. “I eat regularly, six times a day,” he said, smiling ludicrously as he patted himself on the stomach.

  “Weight becomes you,” Abbey said.

  Suddenly Reardon remembered her at Millie’s funeral, remembered the pained expression that had passed over her face when Timothy had performed his counterfeit of grief. Impulsively, he leaned over and kissed her cheek.

  “Well, thank you,” she said lightly, but Reardon could tell that something in his gesture had alarmed her.

  “I have moments …” Reardon heard himself say, knowing that his sudden gesture of affection had surged up from that other part of him that frightened him with its power. “I have moments …” he began again, but the rest of the sentence died in his mouth.

  “What?” she asked, clearly concerned now.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you all right?”

  Reardon tried to smile. “Yes, I’m all right.” He felt sorry that he had lost control, had imposed himself upon her light-heartedness and goodwill.

  “Really?” Abbey said. “You sure?”

  Reardon forced a laugh. “Of course, of course. Can’t an old man kiss a lovely young lady?”

  “Sure,” Abbey said brightly. She leaned forward and kissed him. “Can a young lady kiss a great-looking father-in-law?”

  “Sure,” Reardon said.

  “Timothy will be in in a moment,” she said. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Irish whiskey.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  She left the room, and Reardon could hear her talking to his son in the next room. There seemed to be some urgency in their voices, but he could not tell what it was all about. He looked down at his hat. Gray and weathered, it looked incongruous on the expensive chair with its lavender silk upholstery. He felt like an intruder, a poor relation swept up to their apartment by some sudden calamity — fire or flood or worse. He did not belong there with the luxurious furniture, the marble and the lace and the delicate vases with flower designs. In his life he had been invited to such rooms only when a dea
d body lay on the floor, its blood silently staining the Oriental rug.

  “How are you, Father?” Timothy asked as he entered the room. He wore a dark-gray pinstripe suit. Below the coat a vest was drawn primly over his stomach. His tie was pulled tightly against his throat as if he were going to a corporate board meeting. He had recently taken to calling Reardon “father,” rather than the more familiar “papa.”

  “Hello, Tim,” Reardon said.

  “How are you?” Timothy sat down in a chair opposite Reardon and sipped casually from a martini glass.

  “Fine. Where are the children?”

  “At the symphony.”

  Reardon nodded, wondering who had taken them, since both parents were at home. But then, he recalled, times were different now; people could be hired to do such things.

  “Well, do you like being back at work?” Timothy asked.

  Reardon nodded.

  Timothy took a long, dark cigar from his coat pocket and handed it to Reardon.

  “No, thanks,” Reardon said.

  “What? My father turning down a good cigar?”

  “I’ve quit smoking.”

  “Really? Well, give it to one of your associates.”

  Associates? thought Reardon. “No,” he said, “keep it.”

  “Very well,” Timothy said. “I don’t smoke them, as you know, but I thought you might like it. Very expensive, you know.”

  “It would probably be too strong for me, anyway,” Reardon said dryly.

  Timothy slapped his knees lightly and smiled. “Well, now, how are things on the force?”

  “Same as always.”

  “Murder and mayhem, I suppose.”

  “The usual.”

  “Ever thought of an early retirement?”

  Here it comes again, Reardon thought. “I like to work, Tim,” he said. “I don’t want to retire. I’ve told you that before. What would I do? What is it you think I would do if I retired?”

  “Anything,” Timothy said. He raised his arm and gently massaged the back of his neck while he stared absently into Reardon’s face.

  “No,” Reardon said. “I’m not looking forward to retirement. I’ll leave when they make me leave.”