Thomas Cook - Blood Innocents

“Did you see where he went when he left the coffee shop?”

“Yeah, he walked out in the direction of the zoo.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. He crossed the street going toward the zoo, up Sixty-fourth Street,” Bryant said. “The coffee shop is right on the corner of Sixty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. I could see him for a good ways. He was walking toward the park.”

“Why did he decide to come to work?”

“Needed the money,” Bryant said. “Why do you decide to come to work?” He looked mockingly at Reardon. “He ran out of vacation time and sick time and all that, but they been letting him kind of work by the hour, you know?”

“What time did he leave the coffee shop?” Reardon asked.

“I don’t know for sure. About three A.M. or so, I guess.”

“How long were you in the coffee shop?”

“Too long. I should have been doing the aviary at about three.”

“Why weren’t you?”

“Have you ever owned a bird?”

“No,” Reardon said.

“Well, if you had you’d know they shit all the time, and when you got ten or fifteen birds in a cage, that cage is going to be covered with bird shit no matter how much you clean it. So I decided I’d stay a few extra minutes in the coffee shop and then just hose it down when I got back. That don’t take long.”

“How long were you in the coffee shop?”

“Hell, I must have been there for about an hour and a half, from a little before three till about four-thirty.”

“What were you doing before you left the zoo?”

“Well, for a while me and Gil was working on some of them monkey cages. Then Gil went to do the elephant cages.” Bryant winked. “He already had his break, you know?”

Reardon nodded.

“From about one to two-thirty,” Bryant added impishly.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe not to you, but to the Parks Department it matters, by God. They’d raise holy shit if they knew.”

“Uh huh,” Reardon sighed, no longer able to conceal his total indifference.

“Poor old Petrakis,” Bryant said. “He should have stayed out one more night.”

“Why?” Reardon asked.

“Because I understand his wife died that night.”

Reardon spent the rest of the day trying to get in touch with Andros Petrakis. He found the entire Petrakis story suspicious.

During the early afternoon Reardon called the Petrakis home twenty-three times. There was no answer. The Parks Department informed Reardon that they had not heard from Petrakis since the Monday morning following the killings. At nine A.M. on Monday he had called to tell Mr. Raymond Cohen, his superior in the Parks Department, that his wife had died during the night and that he would not be back to work until the following Monday. The deteriorating condition of Mrs. Petrakis had been well known to Mr. Cohen, and consequently he had not associated the phone call and week’s absence with the slaughter that had taken place in the cage of the fallow deer during the early morning hours of that same day. It was noticed, however, that Petrakis had made his call from a pay phone booth. Petrakis had rambled somewhat in the conversation, using up the time allotted for a pay phone call, and had been interrupted by a recording warning him to terminate the conversation or deposit additional money. At that point, according to Mr. Cohen, Petrakis had quickly finished his conversation and hung up.

Next Reardon called Harry Bryant to see if he had heard from Petrakis. He had not. Petrakis had not spoken to Bryant since the meeting in the coffee shop.

“But I got the feeling you two were friendly,” Reardon said.

“Well, we were in a way,” Bryant said, “but Andros was a kind of close-knit ethnic type. I got the feeling all his friends were Greek.” Bryant did not know any of Petrakis’ Greek friends.

After speaking to Bryant, Reardon told Mathesson to find out who owned the building from which Petrakis had been evicted. Then he decided to visit the building himself.

Until the eviction Petrakis and his family had lived at the top of a five-floor walk-up on 90th Street and First Avenue. It was a dirty, steaming tenement, not much different from thousands of others in the city. As he gazed up toward the fifth-floor windows Reardon could not imagine being evicted from such a place, being forcefully excluded from a rat hole like this. Where could a man and his family go, he thought, if they were already at the bottom?

He opened the door into the hallway that led to the stairs, and the warm, almost sweet smell of urine enveloped him. The hallway was full of debris: a partially burned mattress, beer cans, a disemboweled television, the bare, rusty, wheel-less skeleton of a bicycle. The walls were covered with a dark, murky layer of mold, and the squeaking stairs were littered with the plaster that had fallen from the walls and ceiling overhead. As Reardon made his way toward the fifth floor he could hear the easy frolicking of rats.

When he reached the Petrakis apartment Reardon knocked lightly on the door, then listened for movement inside the apartment. There was only silence. He knocked again, harder this time, but still there was no response. He turned to the door facing the Petrakis apartment and knocked. Inside he could hear rustling, hurried movement, but the door did not open to him.

He knocked again.

“Yes?” a voice said, but still the door did not open.

“My name is Detective John Reardon, Police Department. I’m looking for Andros Petrakis.”

“Moved,” the voice said. Reardon could tell that it was the voice of an old man. Each word was preceded and followed by a wheeze.

“Yes, I know,” Reardon said, “but we can’t get in touch with him. We were wondering if anyone in this building might know where the Petrakis family moved after they left the building.”

“Took his family,” the voice said.

“Yes, I know.”

“Sick wife. Lots of kids.”

“Yes, I know,” Reardon said. He did not ask the old man to open the door. He knew that he would not. He did not even want to frighten him by asking. “But do you know any of Mr. Petrakis’ friends? Did he have any friends in this building, anyone who visited him?”

“Don’t know,” the voice said through a gentle cough. “Don’t know nothing about them. Just lots of kids.”

“I’m sorry to have troubled you,” Reardon said, giving in, and he touched the door, gently with his fingertips, as he might have soothed a troubled face.

That night, as Reardon slept, two women were murdered in an apartment on Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, a fashionable area in the center of Greenwich Village. When Smith informed Reardon of the crime the next morning he described it as a “bloody” and told Reardon that Piccolini wanted to talk to him.

“Have you read the report on the murder of those two girls in the Village?” Piccolini asked. To Piccolini all females were girls, no matter what their age.

“How old were they?” Reardon asked.

“Twenties. It’s all in the report. You didn’t read it yet, huh?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s all in there. In the report. It’s on your desk.”

“I haven’t been to my desk.”

Piccolini looked irritated. Reardon knew that not going to the desk first thing struck Piccolini as being symptomatic of a serious social maladjustment. “Well, anyway, Mathesson was over there this morning, and there are some strange things about it. It might be a good idea for you to take a look. Like there’s a number scrawled on the wall of their apartment, and it’s the same number.”

“Two?” Reardon asked.

“Yes.”

Reardon felt a wave of tension pass over his body. “A roman numeral?”