Thomas Cook - Blood Innocents

“No.”

“Do you ever go to Greenwich Village?”

“No.”

Reardon could never remember having felt such exasperation. There was life all around them, even in the intolerable hurt and confinement of the Tombs. But Petrakis’ heart seemed to beat beneath a breast of stone.

“Have you done anything that is punishable by death in this state?” Reardon asked.

Petrakis stared straight ahead. “I do not obey my mother.”

“Besides that.”

“That is enough.”

“But besides that,” Reardon insisted.

“No.”

Reardon stood up. “I think you should call your family and let them know where you are. If you want, I will call them for you.”

“They know where I am,” Petrakis said.

“They know where you are?”

“Dead,” Petrakis said.

Reardon took one of his cards and placed it carefully on the table in front of Petrakis. “Call me if you need anything, or if anything comes to you that can shed some light on this case.”

Petrakis said nothing.

“Will you call me?” Reardon asked.

“I am dead,” Petrakis said.

“Not yet, Mr. Petrakis,” Reardon said, “not yet.”

When he reached the door Reardon turned to watch Petrakis disappear behind the door that led to the cells. He glanced at the table where he and Petrakis had talked. His card rested face up on the table like a corpse on a mortuary slab.

Driving back to the precinct house, Reardon felt the case of the fallow deer plummeting toward him like a bird of prey. He believed Petrakis could be convicted for the killing of the deer on the evidence already assembled. He knew how it would go in the courtroom. Witnesses could place Petrakis at the deer cage with an ax in his hand only moments before they were killed. Bryant would testify that Petrakis was highly agitated, even furious, when he had met him in the coffee shop the morning the fallow deer were killed. On the witness stand Daniels would paint a sinister portrait of Petrakis, one which would doubtless chill the nerves of the jury; the district attorney’s office might even give Daniels a break on the cocaine bust if his testimony was convincing enough. The ax itself would be displayed before the jury, complete with bloodstains. It would be pointed out that Petrakis’ fingerprints were all over it. Worst of all, Reardon knew, Petrakis would probably confess. He had seen far stronger suspects crumble under grueling interrogation. And Petrakis already seemed beyond caring whether he was guilty or not.

But there were still the murders of Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky. So far the only thing that could connect Petrakis with their deaths was Mathesson’s revenge theory. Reardon knew that still left a lot to be explained. Why were the deer and the women killed in exactly the same way with fifty-seven blows on one body and only one on the other? And what did the roman numeral “two” and “dos” mean?

Reardon was certain that the deer and the women had been killed by the same person. The deer investigation seemed at a dead end. But the case of McDonald and Ortovsky still had one line of investigation open: Jamie O’Rourke.

Reardon stopped for a traffic light and glanced through his notebook for O’Rourke’s address. When he had found it he turned his car around and headed toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

Time was what he did not have much of, and he felt its movement like an enormous wave thundering toward shore.

Jamie O’Rourke lived in a Brooklyn row house on a street of Brooklyn row houses, drab, featureless, decaying like a dead body in a warm room. Reardon had seen these neighborhoods before, always feeling that somehow an immense and secret crime had been committed against the residents. They lived like citizens of a besieged city, in constant dread of invasion by any people different from themselves – non-Catholics, nonwhites, both, anything.

He climbed the steps to the door of O’Rourke’s house and rang the bell. He heard slight movements within the house but no one came to the door. He rang again.

This time the door opened. “If you’re a Jehovah’s Witness selling God, I ain’t buying none,” said a man dressed in dark-blue pants and a T-shirt, a bathroom towel wrapped loosely around his neck.

Reardon showed his gold shield. “My name is Reardon,” he said.

“What do you want?” the man asked harshly. He swabbed the back of his neck with the towel and looked suspiciously at Reardon.

“Are you Jamie O’Rourke?” Reardon asked.

“That’s right.”

“I understand you were married to Patty McDonald.”

The man pulled the towel from around his neck and wiped his hands. “You think I killed her?”

“I’m trying to find out who did,” Reardon said.

“I don’t know nothing about her,” O’Rourke said sharply. “She run out on me a long time ago. I ain’t seen her.”

“You were at her funeral.”

O’Rourke looked at Reardon warily. “Well, I got a right to go to her funeral, don’t I? She was my wife.”

“I’m not here to cause you trouble,” Reardon said.

“I’m not afraid of trouble.”

“Well, maybe you wouldn’t mind talking to me about her then.”

O’Rourke wiped his face with the towel. “I was just shaving,” he said. “I got to go to work tonight.”

“It won’t take long.”

O’Rourke studied Reardon’s face, came to some conclusion about him, and opened the door wider. “Come on in then.”

Inside Reardon quietly viewed the disarray around him. The room was furnished with an overstuffed sofa and two chairs, a heavy coffee table and matching end table. The stuffing of the couch was easily visible through gaping rents in the fabric. The coffee table was spotted with water stains and scarred as if raked with a fork. Sheets of floral wallpaper barely hung from the walls, and leaks had caused yellowed paint to peel halfway across the ceiling. There were no curtains; the Venetian blinds which afforded some privacy hung askew from dirty windows. The only signs of habitation were old copies of the Daily News piled on chairs and the floor and four or five crushed Schlitz cans.

“Sit down anywhere,” O’Rourke said. He looked around the room as if disgusted with it himself. “My old man told me I didn’t give a shit for nothing. That was the only truth that old man ever told me.”

Reardon grabbed a handful of newspapers from a chair and deposited them on a nearby table. “I’ll just sit here,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” O’Rourke said. He plopped down on the tattered sofa across from Reardon and stared at him silently, waiting.

Reardon pulled out his notebook and removed a ballpoint from his shirt pocket.

“You Irish?” O’Rourke asked suddenly.

Reardon nodded.

“From Brooklyn?”

Reardon shook his head. “Bronx. University Avenue around Fordham Road.”

O’Rourke grinned. “Jesus Christ, you might as well have been born in the Vatican.”

Reardon smiled. “Father Zeiser Place, actually.”

O’Rourke smiled widely. “Good God, how come you ain’t a priest?”

“Everybody else was,” Reardon said.

“I’d offer you something to eat,” O’Rourke said, “but I don’t keep no food in the house. Brings rats.” He glanced about the room again. “I know what you must think of this place, but just remember, if you think I like it, you’re wrong.”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“You’ve probably seen blood all over the walls,” O’Rourke said darkly.

“Sometimes.”

O’Rourke took a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose. “I have a cold all winter,” he explained as he returned the handkerchief to his pocket. “I work as a night watchman in this old warehouse on Flatbush Avenue. They got this one little heater for the whole place. So I’m sick all the time.”