William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

“Forget it, John. It’s not important now. But this is: Where was Kate when you saw her last, and what time was it?”

“She was a half block north of here, on this side of Fifth.” The old man frowned, then nodded with obvious relief. “That would have been just a minute or two before six o’clock. Because Mrs. Cadwalader told me she was giving herself an hour and a half for her seven thirty flight at Kennedy.”

Boyd checked his watch, noted that it was a few seconds past six thirty-five. Which meant Kate had been off on her own about thirty-seven or thirty-eight minutes.

He hit the revolving door with the heel of his hand, and it was still spinning when he walked to the curb and looked up and down the avenue. Traffic was normal, a half dozen pedestrians on the sidewalks, a man in uniform removing a box of flowers from the rear of a florist’s van. Boyd noted the chestnut vendor standing beside his cart at the intersection south of their building. He walked to him and said, “Did you see a young girl”-he indicated Kate’s height with his hand-”wearing a red ski jacket and walking a black Scottie?”

Halfway through the sentence, the old man shook his head helplessly and pointed to his mouth.

“You can’t speak?” Boyd asked.

The old man nodded quickly. He repeated Boyd’s gesture by which he had indicated Kate’s height and pointed across the avenue to Central Park.

“She went into the park?”

Instead of responding with a nod or headshake, the old man knelt and made a scrambling motion with his fingers on the sidewalk.

“The dog?”

The old man nodded rapidly.

“The dog went into the park?”

The chestnut vendor put his right forefinger into the palm of his left hand and made a fist over it. Then he abruptly jerked the forefinger free from his own grasp.

“The dog pulled the leash from the girl’s hand?”

The old man nodded again.

“The dog got away from her, ran into the park.”

Again a quick nod.

“And she followed him?”

The old man’s expression reflected impotence and frustration. He pointed across the avenue to the approximate place that Harry Lauder had scrambled across the wall and disappeared into thickets of shining sumac. As Boyd looked at him questioningly, the old man gave him an emphatic shake of his head and pointed north to a footpath which entered the park two blocks from where they were standing.

Luther Boyd saw exactly what had happened, as clearly as if he were watching the sequence of action on a motion-picture screen.

He thanked the old man and stared at the sprawl of the park, while he examined the first three scenarios that occurred to him. One, Kate was in the park searching for the Scottie. Two, she was lost and was trying to find her way back to Fifth Avenue. Three, she was in trouble, hurt or restrained, physically unable to leave the park.

He rapidly sorted out his options: to go after her immediately or risk a few precious moments to prepare himself for potentially dangerous contingencies.

Luther Boyd had been trained to face facts, and because of that discipline, he had already accepted his third scenario as the most logical explanation for Kate’s absence.

Barbara turned to him nervously when he let himself into their apartment. “Where is she?”

“Somewhere in the park.”

“Oh, God. Why would she do that?”

Boyd went along the hallway to his bedroom and kicked off his loafers, while Barbara hurried after him, her high heels sounding with a clatter of panic on the parquet flooring.

“Luther, what’s happening?”

He sat on the edge of the bed, putting on a pair of tennis shoes. “For some reason, she crossed Fifth Avenue. Harry Lauder got away from her and ran into the park.”

Luther Boyd stripped off his jacket and pulled on a black windbreaker.

“The wall is too high for Kate to manage, so she went up a block or so to an entrance.”

“But when? How long has she been in there?”

Boyd opened the top drawer of a highboy and removed a Browning 9mm automatic pistol, and after checking the thirteen-shot magazine and the safety, he slipped the piece under the waistband of his slacks.

From the same drawer he picked up a flashlight and tucked it into his rear pocket.

Barbara’s eyes were dark and haunted against the natural pallor of her face. “Goddamn it, are you trying to torture me? How long has she been in the park?”

“Forty minutes,” Boyd said, and went into the bathroom and from the medicine cabinet collected a compact but sophisticated first-aid kit.

Barbara’s voice was trembling, and her eyes were bright with tears.

“Did you call the police?”

“No,” he said.

“Why in God’s name didn’t you?”

“Hysterics won’t help Kate,” Boyd said, and put his big hands on her shoulders and shook her until the glaze of terror faded from her eyes.

“Now listen to me and understand me,” he said. “We aren’t calling the police. If she’s in trouble, the faster I get to her, the better her chances are. We don’t want a task force blundering around out there. This is a one-man job. And it requires speed. Whatever’s happened, I’ll find Kate. That’s a promise. This is the kind of shit detail I’m good at.”

And he was gone.

In less than three minutes, Luther Boyd had picked up Kate’s trail in Central Park.

His knowledge and awareness of his daughter’s character and habits were precise. And his tracking abilities and instincts had been honed to near perfection by decades of application and experience.

He knew Kate would head south on a straight line to where her Scottie had leaped a wall and scrambled into the park.

As he ran silently and effortlessly through the shadows of huge English oaks, his flashlight picked up the imprint of Kate’s small boot beside a drinking fountain where the earth was especially moist and soggy. When he reached the area where Harry Lauder had entered the park, he heard nothing but the wind high in the crowns of a quartet of gum trees and, above that, the muted traffic on the avenue.

Knowing Kate’s resilience and guts, Boyd realized she wouldn’t give up at this point; she had a dangerous conviction that the world was full of nice people, and she was just reckless enough to continue searching for Harry Lauder through this dark and dangerous jungle.

Luther Boyd, eyes tracking the ground, ran in slow but ever-widening circles until he picked up another imprint of Kate’s boot, this one pointing at right angles from her original course. She was traveling west now and running, which he determined by the length of her strides.

He thanked Providence for the drenching afternoon rain which had cleared the park of most pedestrian traffic. Normally, in fair weather, there would be a variety of footprints evident in this safe and attractive area of the park. But much of those signs had been erased by the rain, and the ground was fresh and pristine and so spongy and porous that he could follow the track of his daughter’s small boots as easily as if she were running across wet sand.

Directly ahead of Boyd, perhaps a hundred yards away, was a tall stand of dark trees. And it was toward these that Kate had been hurrying, obviously following Harry Lauder’s noisy trail. But when he entered the grove of trees (mulberries, he knew from the sandpaper-like touch of the leaves), there were signs of Kate but none of the Scottie, and this puzzled him. If the dog had been underneath these trees, there would be evidence of it, leaves and soil scratched and scattered in a half dozen places. But while he spotted the imprints of Kate’s small boots, he saw nothing to indicate why she had rushed so confidently toward this particular grove of trees.