William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

While Tebbet listened gravely, Sergeant Rusty Boyle put his hands on his hips and stared at a group of what he judged to be whip-dick hippies bunched together on the sidewalk. They wore ponchos and dirty jeans and were grinning at Hilda Smedley, obviously savoring her flushed, swollen face, ripped blouse, and hysterical tears.

A third-grade detective from the 10th Precinct arrived, Dennis St.

John, a bulky man in his forties who was wearing a windbreaker and a beret. St. John double-parked his car alongside Boyle’s unmarked vehicle, blocking traffic and touching off a fusillade of blasting horns.

Christ, Rusty Boyle thought, with swiftly mounting exasperation and anger. Chaos was part of a police officer’s life, Detective Sergeant Rusty Boyle knew full well; death in its most violent forms, from gunshots, fires and drownings, from knives, razors, the strangling hands of maniacs, these were the items stacked up on the shelves of every policeman’s shop. But Rusty Boyle hated the merchandise he dealt with and traded in and thus tried with all his skill and strength to prevent its occurrence or at least to camouflage it with some semblance of form and discipline. And that was why the present scene so offended him, with its noisy untidiness, its disheveled and violated Hilda Smedley, the gawking street freaks, and the other pedestrians stopping to stare with insulting intensity at the ravaged woman and even, he thought furiously, goddamn dumb Denny St.

John from the 10th, puffing officiously onto the scene and contributing to the turmoil by double-parking his car and blocking traffic all the way back to Sixth Avenue.

Rusty Boyle began shouting orders, beginning with the hippies, and scaring them half out of their wits by bellowing at them in a voice that was like a clap of thunder.

“Get moving, you kinks. Go find some school to drop out of, or I’ll kick your butts up between your shoulders.”

As they backed away from him, covering their embarrassment with awkward grins, Sergeant Boyle turned and stared with cold eyes at the other pedestrians who had stopped to witness Hilda Smedley’s pathetic anguish.

“Everything snap-ass in your homes? Kids all straight-A students? Nobody banging his secretary or sneaking a few belts of whiskey before breakfast? Take care of your own lives. You heard me. Move!”

Dennis St. John tapped Sergeant Boyle on the arm and nodded with an air of gravity and importance toward Hilda Smedley.

“What we got here, Rusty?”

“What the fuck you think we’ve got?” Rusty Boyle said. “I’ll tell you what we got here. We got a fucking traffic jam here. Will you get your car off the street? Pull it into the parking lot.”

There was no reason to shout at him, Sergeant Boyle realized; St. John would probably handle this case, but the detective’s dumbness, which was annoyingly coupled to a manner of pompous self-importance, gave Boyle a pain in the ass.

“I’ll move it,” St. John said. “But I thought something was breaking. That you guys might need some muscle.”

Sergeant Boyle stared in disgust at the backed-up lines of honking automobiles. “What’s breaking are my damned eardrums,” he said.

“Come on, cool it, Sergeant,” St. John said in a petulant voice, and waddled back to his car.

Rusty Boyle noticed then that one man still stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to the parking lot. The man was forty or forty-five, Rusty Boyle judged, wearing slacks and a sweater over a sports shirt. His hair was thinning and gray, and his features were nondescript; a worthy burgher, a taxpaying Mr. Straight, Boyle thought, except there was something haunted in his eyes which were large and clear behind bifocals. He didn’t look the type, Boyle thought, to be getting his jollies at the sight of a sobbing, battered woman, but Boyle had stopped judging people by appearances ever since he collared an altar boy who had hacked a janitor into bloody pieces and then had set fire to him and, in addition to which, had seemed largely pleased by the charred wreckage he had made out of what had once been a human being.

Boyle walked over to the man and said, “Look, the lady’s been through a rough time of it. You’re not helping staring at her.”

“I want to talk to you, Officer,” the man said. “My name is Ransom, John Ransom.” He pointed at the second-story windows of an apartment which overlooked the parking lot. “I heard her scream. I looked out my window just as she was pushed out of the car.”

“You see the guy?”

“Just a glimpse. I couldn’t identify him.”

Well, that figured, Boyle thought with weary exasperation. No way would he get involved. Saw a girl being raped, took his sweet time to come down and lend a hand.

“Was he black or white?” Boyle asked him.

“I’m pretty sure he was white.”

“Any guess on his age?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Ransom said. He fished into the pocket of his slacks, removed a slip of paper with numbers on it, and handed the paper to Sergeant Boyle. “But I got the license number of his car.”

“Well, what were you planning to do? Save it for Christmas?”

“I wasn’t dressed, you see. I just had a robe on. So I had to get on some clothes. That’s why it took me so long to get down here.”

Ransom’s tone was defensive and apologetic. “I got here as soon as I could.”

“You did fine, you did just fine, sir.”

Why the hell am I chewing everybody out? Sergeant Boyle was thinking, in one of his rare but honest moments of self-criticism. First St. John and now this nice John Doe of a citizen.

“Look, sir,” he said by way of making amends. “If everybody in the city did as good as you did tonight, we could close down half our precincts.”

Sergeant Boyle gave the license number to St. John, saying in a pleasant and conciliatory tone, “I’d suggest you get Miss Smedley checked out at the hospital and bust that stud quick.”

“Thanks, Sergeant,” St. John said, staring with grave intensity at the license number. “I’ll call Motors and get a make on this plate.”

Dumb. What was the use? Where else but Motors? The dog pound?

The morgue? Macy’s basement?

“Thanks again, Sergeant,” St. John said. “I’ll get this lady checked out at the hospital and bust the stud quick. I’ll see you around.”

Let’s hope not. .

Sergeant Boyle started for his car but stopped when he noticed that Ransom was standing on the sidewalk outside the parking lot, staring at him with those haunted, pain-bright eyes.

Still feeling a bit repentant, Sergeant Boyle walked back and gave him a pat on the shoulder.

“I’ll say it again, you did beautiful tonight,” he said.

“I’ve got cancer,” Ransom then said, but so simply and unexpectedly that the words struck Sergeant Boyle like blows under his heart.

Thanks, he thought wearily, thanks a lot. I don’t get enough death and shit on this job, bodies in the river, bodies hanging from ropes, heads blown apart by crazies, but I got to have more of it handed to me by a civilian who probably thinks that’s what he pays his taxes for.

“My wife doesn’t know about it,” Ransom said, and smiled uneasily as if to indicate this was a casual oversight on his part. “I sell upholstery fabric for B. Altman, it’s part of their at-home decorator service, but a couple of months back the weight of the fabric case got too much for me. My arm and chest were hurting. I haven’t been working at all for the last three weeks, but I haven’t told my wife that either.” Ransom smiled again, and this time the nervous flicker across his lips suggested that he and the sergeant might be sharing a mild joke at Mrs. Ransom’s expense.

“Jesus,” Sergeant Boyle said, “when are you going to tell her?”