William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

Crazies, a town full of crazies. Paul Wayne at the Times told him the crank calls were starting, and Gypsy Tonnelli thought of these as he looked at the photographs on the walls of his apartment, pictures he took as a hobby on his days off, scenes of the various boroughs that he’d grown up in and worked in and loved, scenes the out-of-towners never saw because all they wanted to do, it seemed to the Gypsy, was get drunk and wander around high-crime-rate areas where they could get mugged so they could tell the folks at home about it.

The crazies were coming out of the wood.

“Look, I ain’t talking to no shit secretary or reporter. I want to talk to the editor of the Times, and I’ll stick it in his ear, because if the cops don’t catch that guy who’s murdering all those little girls I ain’t payin’ dime one in state or city taxes anymore.”

“I’ll connect you to the metropolitan desk, sir.”

The visitors’ concept of New York never embraced that of neighborhood; their picture was inevitably a stereotype of hostile and highly neurotic people living in apartment buildings one on top of the other and sharing the elevators without ever a “hello” or a “good morning” or “it’s going to be a scorcher, isn’t it?”

Paul Wayne had told him of one hysterical lady who had told him in shouting Biblical accents that she and she alone was responsible for the deaths of the four girls. They had been punished by a just but Almighty God because she had sinned, had whored around the bars of Third Avenue like a bitch in season, and since she had been the angel of her family before her fall, the vengeance of God had been that much more savage and merciless. “It’s all kind of a preemptive vaginal strike by the Big Cock in the Sky,” Wayne had said wearily.

But in fact, Tonnelli thought, arms crossed, studying his nearly professional portraits of the boroughs of New York, Manhattan didn’t match the tourist boobs’ concept of it. It was as rich and diverse, as ethnically and racially sustaining as areas of the country where you had Texans and Indians and Mexicans mixed together. Or the fascinating pockets of ethnicity, the colorful and variegated customs that he had observed when he was in the Army, along the frontiers of Holland and Belgium and Italy and France. If you didn’t like the weather, wait a minute and it’d change. True of his city. If you didn’t like the food, the look of the streets, the people, the way they dressed, take a walk and find something else.

Paul Wayne had told him of other calls.

“I marvel at your stupidity, all of you phony liberals, though I am not going to assume your ‘bigotry’ and assert that you are not sincere. But it is so simple it makes me laugh. If ‘they’ would just let James Earl Ray out of solitary, you wouldn’t have a country where four little girls can get their throats slashed by the ‘animals’ that are the darlings of all your Northern cities.”

Lieutenant Tonnelli inhaled deeply on his cigarette and looked at photographs he had taken of Queens around Jackson Heights and the Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn and the playgrounds and wading pools at Hillside Home in the Bronx. Much of the views were imperfect. There was always the evidence of common humanity in graffiti and litter, but there was strength everywhere, too, in an evident will not only to endure but to survive, exemplified nowhere more powerfully than in vistas and scenes that Lieutenant Tonnelli had found in Grymes Hill, Staten Island, a neighborhood still splendored by gulls and water and views of seaports and shipping lanes.

But the tourists saw none of that. Probably because they didn’t want to. New York was a safari for them, with cabdrivers their white hunters, scaring the shit out of them with stories about certain areas of the West Side and Central Park. And it wasn’t just the tourists; it could be pros. Sokolsky had called in earlier tonight to tell him about a retired Camden, New Jersey, detective named Babe Fritzel. Fritzel had come into the 19th Precinct, a well-set-up man despite his seventy-odd years, Sokolsky had reported, with shrewd, tough eyes and a full shock of white hair. Babe Fritzel still had a gun, a gold badge, and a two-way radio, and he’d come over to Manhattan from Teaneck, New Jersey, to offer his service to the NYPD to “get the bastard” who was cutting up little girls in the city.

“You know somebody named Unruh, Lieutenant?”

“Unruh?”

“Yeah, Unruh, that’s what this guy Fritzel said.”

“Well, there was a Howard or John Unruh who walked out of his house in Camden on a nice, sunny day, hell, this was before our time, Sokolsky, way back in the fifties, maybe even before that, and he shot and killed thirteen people, a lot of them kids, I remember.”

Sokolsky seemed pleased to corroborate his lieutenant’s last comment. “This guy, Babe Fritzel, told me one little kid was sitting on a rocking horse in a barbershop waiting to get his hair cut when Unruh blasted him. Fritzel was one of the cops who collared Unruh.”

“You told him to get lost?”

“Told Mr. Babe Fritzel to go back to Teaneck and watch the show on TV in living color.”

“What the hell is wrong with everybody?”

Sokolsky had hesitated a moment and then, clearing his throat, had said, “Well, Lieutenant, my idea is that-”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Tonnelli said, and put the phone back in its cradle.

Tonnelli’s doorbell rang. He checked the.38 in the holster on his belt, turned two locks, and opened his front door the six inches allowed by the burglar chain and found himself staring into the luminous, white-circled eyes of Samantha Spade, which were shadowed only slightly by the floppy brim of her red velvet hat.

“Real big of you to drop by,” he said.

“Might have something, Lieutenant,” Samantha said. “Buy a lady a drink?”

“You’re on.” Tonnelli said, and unhooked the burglar chain.

“It was on Eighth Avenue, up around a Hundred and Eleventh or a Hundred and Twelfth, six-maybe eight-months ago,” Samantha said.

Samantha still wore her flared black leather coat and the black denim pants suit with sequins glittering in patriotic designs, but she had added a half dozen thick gold bracelets to her wrists.

“Bourbon all right?”

“With a splash of water.”

Tonnelli went into his small kitchen and made two drinks and brought one back to Samantha, who reclined languidly in a deep leather chair, her legs crossed, the overhead lights glistening on her white boots.

“Go on,” Tonnelli said.

“Where was I?”

“Eighth Avenue between a Hundred and Eleventh and a Hundred and Twelfth.”

“One of my sharks was making loans in that area, laying the bread on the guys from a car. Couple of my studs, Coke and Biggie, were keeping the line nice and orderly, taking down names, addresses, the amount of loot and collecting signatures. Most of the guys were old customers, brothers and a few Puerto Ricans, so this big honkie, well-he stood out. I mean he was like a rebel yell at some spade corn boil. He was big, Gypsy. Six-four, my guys told me. And from what they said, a chest and shoulders like yours. He was wearing a leather jacket and some kind of a funky cap. My studs told me later he looked out to lunch permanent upstairs.”

Tonnelli was taking notes on a legal pad. “How about his age?”

“Thirty, thirty-five. Anyway, the big honkie seemed to think it was like Santa Claus handing out the money. When he gets up to the paymaster, he reaches for some loot. They tried to get his name, find out where he worked, but they couldn’t get through to him. Finally, they gave him a piece of paper and a pencil and told him to write all that shit down, and that’s when he went ape.”