1975 - Night of the Juggler (5 page)

But Lieutenant Tonnelli had stubbornly continued to press for manpower and resources to prevent the Juggler from making it four in a row. The raping and mutilation of those tender young bodies had become a consuming obsession with the Gypsy.

At first he hadn’t understood this compulsion. Couldn’t understand why he was knocking on official doors, aggravating his superiors, indulging an almost always fatal professional flaw which was, in effect, a distrust of the department and the corollary conviction that he was the only man who could get the job done. Gypsy Tonnelli in a
mano a
mano
against the Juggler, not the city’s thirty thousand cops acting in impersonal concert to trap a killer.

Later he understood his compulsion, but that served only to make it more bitter and relentless.

On one occasion Tonnelli had recklessly driven to Camden, New Jersey, to seek out the New York commissioner of police, who was in that city to speak to a group of the nation’s top law enforcement officers. (The commissioner’s topic was kinky and typical of him: He advocated that bachelors, not having the responsibility of wives and families, should be drafted as reserve police officers certain given hours per month.)

Tonnelli had found the commissioner in his hotel room and had pleaded with him for a special force to stop the Juggler. The commissioner had been impressed by the Gypsy’s zeal but mildly exasperated by the interruption, since at the time he had been putting the finishing touches on his speech. The commissioner’s “mild exasperation” had picked up velocity and strength as it raced back down the channels of the department, and this had ultimately struck Tonnelli like a gale force tornado.

He hadn’t been suspended but had been threatened with that action.

Then Jenny Goldman had been murdered on October 15. And Tonnelli picked up an ally strong enough to break the power of any police department in the free world, said ally being the aroused, challenging, accusing national and international press. And since Tonnelli now had a physical make of sorts on the Juggler, Deputy Chief of Detectives Greene had called the Gypsy into his office one sweltering afternoon in August. “Bunch of goddamn vultures,” the chief had said. “Headlines calling us incompetent because we can’t find a needle in a haystack.”

“You could turn that around, Chief,” the Gypsy had said. “Problem is, we’ve got a million needles in our particular haystack. The job is finding the right one.”

“So what do you want?”

“Two units. One under Rusty Boyle’s command. The other under mine.”

“What kind of troops you talking about?”

“Sixteen second-or third-grade detectives.”

“I’ll give you eight. What else?”

“Reserves of uniformed troops I won’t commit unless we go to a Red Alert. Dispatchers, a few bird cops to handle the paper.”

The chief made notes. “And?”

“On October 8, I want helicopters standing by, attack-trained dogs, light trucks, and a team of marksmen.”

“For Christ’s sake, Gypsy, you sound like you’re going to start a goddamn war.”

“I hope I’m gonna end one.”

Lieutenant Tonnelli and Detective Sergeant Rusty Boyle had selected their staff with extreme care, dipping into precincts in all five boroughs of the city to find the men they needed. What they had to do in the lead time represented by August and September was to redevelop complete biographies of the four dead girls, with a renewed attempt to determine whether or not the victims had traits or flaws in common which appealed to the Juggler’s sadistic needs.

This all had been done before, of course, but by detectives normally and routinely assigned to the task by the department’s table of organization. Now all that mass of official reports would be reworked by a special unit honed and chiseled in advance to stop the Juggler.

Thus, the men Tonnelli and Boyle had selected were chosen for their tact and understanding, in addition to their rigorous efficiency as investigative officers. They must interview once again the parents and relatives of the four dead girls. And this must be done without unduly lacerating the emotions of grieving fathers and mothers. This was not only basic, decent humanity, but it would also help create an almost confessional climate that would allow the parents to re-create the activities and patterns of their children’s lives as accurately as possible.

Detective Second Grade Miles Tebbet in Sergeant Rusty Boyle’s unit had studied for the priesthood until he realized his vocation was not a true one, and at this time he had joined the New York police department. He was twenty-eight, a slender blond who usually wore jeans and a poncho, and was about the best man on the force to talk down a jumper.

Second Grade Detective Clem Scott in Tonnelli’s unit had a bachelor’s degree in urban affairs from Fordham University. Scott was married, with two children, and spent one day a month at a VA hospital typing personal letters for disabled veterans.

The remainder of the units were men of similar bents and endowments. While some were more educated than the others, they shared one thing in common. They were, in Tonnelli’s view, a group that represented the toughest and most dedicated traditions and skills of the department. They were expert marksmen, and Tonnelli knew from their records that they had guts; damned fine men to be at your side if you were going into an alley after a killer.

Carmine Garbalotto, in Tonnelli’s unit, was a veteran of eighteen years on the force, who lived in Brooklyn with a wife and nine children. He was an expert in the areas of perversion and child molestation; he could check a crowded playground at a glance and determine whether it was “clean” or not. Garbalotto’s specialty was movie theaters; his big hand had fallen heavily on the shoulders of hundreds of men he had observed attempting to molest young boys or girls, whose attention was so riveted by what John Wayne or Doris Day might be doing up on the big screen that they were hardly aware of the fingertips probing toward their loins.

Tonnelli and Boyle’s units had processed every sex crime committed in all five boroughs of the city during the past five years, using these profiles as the base of their investigative mosaic. But none matched the Juggler’s MO.

In September, Tonnelli had dispatched Detectives Tebbet and Scott to the morgue of the New York
Times
to check news stories on October 15 on the years before the murders had commenced their crimson flow through the borough of Manhattan. They were looking for stories which might have triggered a need for revenge: massive lawsuits, bitter, expensive divorces, medical malpractice suits, tragic accidents, suicides, something bizarre or catastrophic that could send someone around the bend, misfortune driving a victim toward a series of paranoid slaughters. Tebbet and Scott had indeed found catalogues of disaster in every edition of the
Times
published on October 15 in the five years before the Libra murders: rapes, drownings, explosions, hit-run victims, murders by ice pick and fine nylon stockings. But the sheer number and variety of tragedies had been so massively complex and unrelated that the precious hours given to the project had ultimately been unproductive, a sheer waste of time.

Libra—September 24 to October 23. All the murders had occurred on Libra 15. Something dark and hidden and mystical in the mysterious signs of the zodiac, like the movement of a leviathan in fathomless waters, appealed powerfully to the Gypsy’s Sicilian intuitions. But none of the victims had been Libras. Encarna Garcia, Gemini. Trixie Atkins, Aquarius. Bonnie Jean Howell, Capricorn, and Jenny Goldman, Scorpio.

Gypsy Tonnelli wondered at the possible significance of the symbol of Libra, the classic golden scales. Did that suggest a perverted sense of justice or retribution? Or the sinister balance between himself and the man they called the Juggler. . . . But so far, with all their research, with all the potentials they had explored, with so much talent and dedication going for them, Tonnelli’s task force had come up dry, had drawn blanks.

Yet Gypsy Tonnelli knew in the depths of his Sicilian heart that the Juggler was ready to make his move; he could feel that presentiment in the marrow of his bones, in a cold, painful clench in his guts. The Juggler was out there in the city, living maybe like a stinking animal in somebody’s basement, making his plans, preparing to snatch some young girl and enjoy his sadistic fun with her before slashing her throat. Well, Tonnelli thought, this time he wouldn’t make it. They’d catch him and trash him. The Gypsy felt that, too, in his bones. And there wouldn’t be any bleeding-heart psychiatric apologies for the Juggler. No pleas of temporary insanity, no judicial wrist slap followed by six or seven years in some cozy funny farm. No, when they caught the Juggler, they’d waste him as they would a mad dog. . . .

Lieutenant Tonnelli walked into the large offices he had been assigned in the upper floors of the 19th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street.

Carmine Garbalotto, huge and balding, with a face like a kind bloodhound, was on the phone reassuring a young mother that she hadn’t caused them any unnecessary trouble.

“Look,” he was saying in his slow, patient voice. “Your daughter comes home from school and uses the back door and falls asleep in her room and you don’t see her. So you’re worried. So you call us. That’s what we’re here for. We sent a couple of cars over to the school, checked the neighborhood. Don’t you worry about us. Any time your kid is missing, irregardless of the hows or whys of it, you give us a holler.”

Gypsy Tonnelli nodded to Sokolsky and Jules Mackay at the switchboards. Detective Clem Scott got up from his desk and joined Tonnelli, who had stopped to stare with bitter eyes at the four large glossy photographs of the girls the Juggler had tortured and murdered. Scott, whose lined and weathered face made him look older than his twenty-nine years, gave Tonnelli a sheaf of reports. The two policewomen clerks were typing in the adjoining office. August Brohan and Jim Taylor were not at their desks.

“Taylor and Augie went up to a school in Harlem.” Scott checked his watch. “Around eight P.M. somebody reported a character bothering black kids playing basketball. Augie just phoned in. It was a fruitcake with a beard down to his balls and a wooden leg. He was passing out Tootsie Rolls to the colored kids because it was his birthday. His daughter made the scene at the same time as our guys and threw a net over him.”

Tonnelli continued to glance through the reports. Drunks for the most part, vagrants, seventeen in all, three or four with records.

B&E. GT Auto.

“Sergeant Boyle called in from the Thirteenth,” Scott said. “Rape squeal around Thirty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue. He and Tebbet went out on it.” In response to Tonnelli’s sharp, questioning look, Scott shook his head. “It’s not our stud, Lieutenant. The lady’s in her forties. She’s alive and well and probably won’t be drinking martinis with a stranger until the next time.”

Lieutenant Tonnelli glanced through Max Prima’s report of the hulking figure the patrolman had noted in Central Park earlier that day.

“Max Prima,” Tonnelli said to Scott. “You know him?”

“I think his uncle used to work out of the Fourth Division over on Eighty-second Street,” Scott said. “He made first-grade before he put in his papers. But no, I don’t know Max Prima.”

Tonnelli continued to study Max Prima’s report. “He’s got a good pair of eyes.” Tonnelli said. “And his instincts are right.”

Gypsy Tonnelli frowned and rubbed a hand in a tentative gesture along his scarred cheek. The gesture suggested that he remembered the agony of a cold knife slicing through his flesh; his fingertips were gentle on the old wound, as if loath to stir memories of pain.

He read Prima’s report again, aware of the deliberate beat of his heart. Subject, Caucasian, early thirties, six-three, two-twenty, fast and strong . . . thick blond hair . . . bulging forehead . . . brown sweater, denims, Wellingtons . . . yellow leather cap. Staring at the young girls in the children’s zoo. Weirdo. . . .

Again Gypsy Tonnelli felt the slow stroke of his heart. Some instinct, a premonition, a dark complex of Sicilian superstitions, or simple gut cop instinct, warned Tonnelli that he was close to the Juggler now, so close that he could almost see him and hear him and smell him; he could never explain these almost mystical convictions or calibrate them in any fashion remotely approaching scientific accuracy. But he believed (or wanted to believe) they had been given a sudden glimpse of their quarry, and as that belief grew firm and solid, he could almost feel the Juggler’s thick, corded neck within the grasp of his own big hands.

Gypsy Tonnelli glanced from Max Prima’s neatly written report to the large photographs of the Juggler’s young victims, whose fresh and innocent faces were graced with hope and excitement and bore no shadow of the fates in store for them.

Encarna Garcia. Fourteen, black hair, sparkling eyes, smiling confidently, innocently at the camera. Obviously proud of her frilly new dress, which had been a birthday gift from her father. Reported missing five P.M., October 15, five years ago. Found nine P.M. the same day in a condemned two-story dwelling near Eighty-seventh Street and Broadway. Rope burns on wrists and ankles. Four fingers of the left hand broken. Sexually assaulted, throat slashed.

Bonnie Jean Howell. Thirteen, black. Pigtails, wide grin, white, healthy teeth. Father a Pullman porter. Mother a dentist’s receptionist in Harlem. Bonnie Jean was found in a tool shed on a school playground near 129th Street and Lenox Avenue. Bonnie Jean had been reported missing at six thirty P.M., October 15, four years ago. The coroner’s report was pure Grand Guignol. Both arms broken, left kneecap shattered, burns on abdomen and small of back. Two of those fine healthy teeth broken. Sexually assaulted.

Throat slashed.

Trixie Atkins. Fourteen. White. Lived with her mother, a hooker, in an apartment on West Forty-seventh Street. Trixie was blond, with lively eyes and a big grin for the world. Her mother had gone off with a customer to Detroit, and Trixie wasn’t reported missing until a week after she had failed to show up for school. Then the police got a call on October 22 complaining of an odor stemming from an empty loft in a Greenwich Village apartment building. That’s where they found Trixie Atkins. Rope burns on her thighs, three fingers on her right hand broken, the blood dried and hardened on the gaping wound on her throat.