Come Out Tonight (14 page)

“Then what about the Pollack case?”

She opened a file folder in front of her, flipped a few pages, then closed it.
 
“We don’t have much,” she said.
 
“There was no salvageable DNA under Miss Pollack’s fingernails.
 
No finger prints on the bloody weapon.
 
The blood was Miss Pollack’s.”
 
She looked up, smiled as much as she was able.
 
“No leads,” she said.

“But couldn’t there be a connection?
 
Some kind of serial killer?”

“Do you know how many crimes are reported on any one night in this precinct alone?” the detective asked.

“No.”

“Four,” she said.
 
“Do you think that all the crimes committed in this jurisdiction over a three month period are committed by the same individual?”

“Well, no, of course not.
 
I just thought the
modus vivendi
was the same, so...”

She smiled, this time real.
 
“
Modus operandi
.
 
Anyway, your girl friend wasn’t strangled.”

“No, she was hit in the head.”

“And she wasn’t killed.”

“No, but she was left for dead.”

“So, how can you even begin to say that this is the same
modus operandi
?
  
Please, Mr. Jackman.
 
We are working on both crimes.
 
If there is a connection, you can be sure we will find it.”

“But it’s been almost four months!”

She stood up, put out her hand.
 
“Don’t call us.
 
We’ll call you.”

I shook the hand.
 
Not that I wanted to shake it.
 
I felt like I could kill her, I was so angry.
 
But that’s just a figure of speech.
 
I’m not the sort to kill people.
 
I’m just a regular guy; one of a million guys in
New York City
, part of the silent majority.
  
I’m not a hot macho dude like Kimberly thought I was.
 
I’m not macho. I’m not even brave.
 
If I were, I wouldn’t have shaken her hand, but I’m not, so I did.

Then I just left.
 
I opened the door, ran downstairs and out of the building.
 
The heat smacked me in the face again, but I didn’t care.
 
The police weren’t doing anything.
 
They weren’t going to do anything.
 
And there was poor Sherry, just vegetating.
 
I started to walk, not caring where I went, block after block.
 
Suddenly, I looked up and saw where I was:
96
^th
Street
.
 
Then I remembered the address from the paper.
 
I made a left and walked some more: past
Amsterdam
, almost to
Columbus
.
 
And there it was: 119.
 
It wasn’t much of a building, just an ordinary brownstone that had been broken up into apartments long ago.
 
I walked up the steps and opened the front door.
 
In the vestibule was an intercom with three names: Arlene Fisher:1A; Jessica Finklemeyer: 2A, and Ryan O’Donnell: 3A.
 
I stood there for a couple of minutes, my mind spinning.
 
Then I pressed the bell for 3A.

It took a few minutes, but a familiar voice came on.
 
“Officer, I already told you everything I know. I don’t know anything else.”

“Ryan,” I said.

“What?” the voice asked.
 
“Who
is
this?”

“It’s Henry Jackman.”

“Who?”

“Henry Jackman.
 
Sherry’s friend.”

There was a long pause.
 
“Oh, Henry Jackman!
 
Yeah, okay.
 
What do you want?”

“I’d like to come up if you don’t mind.”

“Is it about Sherry?
 
Did she finally wake up?
 
Oh, thank God!”

The buzzer sounded suddenly before I could say no.
 
I pushed the door open, walked into a dingy hallway and up one flight.
 
The door to 2A was draped in yellow tape and warning signs: do not cross.
 
I climbed another flight.
 
Ryan was leaning out of his door, waiting for me.

“Tell me,” he said.
 
“What happened?
 
Is she all right?”

What was with all this concern?
  
The guy was the only link to both Sherry and Jessica Finklemeyer.
 
The moment I saw his name on that intercom, I knew Ryan O’ Donnell had to be the one.
 
He couldn’t care less whether Sherry was all right.
 
He was just trying to throw me off his scent with all this “Is she all right?
 
Oh, thank God!”
 
What a performance!
 
Now, what to say.
 
If I told him she was still PVS, he was going to ask why I’m here.
 
But, if I told him she was awake, he’d have to sneak over to the hospital to get rid of her in the night.
 
I’d notify the police, and Whammo! Caught in the act!

“Yeah, I came over to tell you she’s awake.”

“But is she all right?
 
I mean,
compos mentis
?

I never heard of
compos mentis
, but I guess it meant all right.
 
“
Compos mentis
, yeah!” I said.

“Oh, that’s really terrific.
 
I’ll go visit her tomorrow, then.”

“Not tonight?” I asked craftily.

Ryan looked at his watch.
 
“It’s too late.
 
She may be sleeping. And I have work tomorrow.
 
No, I’ll go tomorrow.
 
Wow, thanks, Henry, for coming to tell me.
 
What great news.”

I didn’t believe a word of this.
 
The nurse had said Sherry probably wouldn’t remember anything, but Ryan didn’t know that.
 
As far as he knew, she’d blab Ryan’s name to the doctors the moment she got up.
 
He’d be there.
 
Oh, yes, he was going tonight.

So, all I had to do was to notify the police, and...I made a big show of yawning.
 
“You’re welcome.
 
I guess I’ll go home.
 
Good night now.” I started down the stairs.

“By the way, how did you find me?”
 
Ryan asked.

“Sherry,” I said.
 
“Sherry asked me to go tell you personally that she was okay.”

DONNA

I think
Anderson
had it just right when he labeled Henry Jackman just plain dumb.
 
That guy is something else.
 
A couple of days ago, he came into the precinct asking for me, insisting that he had new information about a link between the Pollack case and the Finklemeyer case.
 
I brought him back to my office, if you can call it that, and asked him what the connection was.
 
What a schmuck!
 

“I mean there
must
be,” Jackman said.
 
“The window off the fire escape was open in both cases.
 
I mean, the perpetrator must have come in that way.
 
It was night.
Upper West Side
.
 
Both cases they were young women.”

I sat back in my chair, waiting, still waiting for the big connection. “That’s it?” I said.
 
“Where’s your evidence?”
 
I waited till he saw the light, but he went on the offensive, instead.

“What have you done to solve the case with my girlfriend?” Jackman yelled at me.

I asked him how she was doing.

“Lousy,” he said.
 
“She’s in a persistent vegetative state.
 
She’s not improving.
 
The hospital kicked her out.
 
She’s in a crummy nursing home in the
Bronx
.”

I told him I was sorry to hear that, but of course that didn’t satisfy him.
 
He wanted to know about my leads.
 
I said I couldn’t give any info out on cases that didn’t have anything to do with him but told him whatever we had on his girlfriend’s case.
 
Meanwhile, he was still going on about a connection between the two – maybe a serial killer.
 
The guy’s watched too much TV.

 
“Do you know how many crimes are reported on any one night in this precinct alone?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Four,” I told him.
 
“Do you think that all the crimes committed in this jurisdiction over a three month period are committed by the same individual?”

“I just thought the
modus vivendi
was the same,” he answered.

Can you believe it?
 
By this time I just wanted to get rid of him, by murder if necessary.
  
“
Modus operandi,”
I corrected.
 
“Anyway, your girl friend wasn’t strangled.
 
She wasn’t killed.
 
How can you even begin to say that this is the same
modus operandi
?”

Just at that moment, O’Malley cracked the door open to tell me that they were bringing in a suspect I’d be interested in.
 
A man answering to the description of the “Bouquet Bandit” was found in a relative’s home on
West End
and 105
^th
.
 
Officers Anderson and Koslowski were currently on their way back to the station house with the suspect.
 
They were sure I’d want to interrogate him.

 
I shook Jackman’s hand and pushed him out the door before he could waste any more of my time.
 
I knew this wasn’t going to be the end of him, but I had to get downstairs.

The Bouquet Bandit!
 
We’d been searching for this guy for two weeks.
 
The story was in all the tabloids, along with some surveillance photos we released of a man walking into the bank last Thursday with a bouquet of flowers.
 
We got a flurry of tips after that, and, well, obviously someone spotted him.

Here, by the way, was a guy with a unique
modus operandi.
 
Twice before, both on upper Broadway, this bandit had robbed banks, each time holding flowers to which a bank-heist note had been attached.
 
The last one was a bouquet, with a spray of flowers and baby’s breath in a pink cellophane wrapper.
 
He got about $400 in that job, even though the surveillance photo showed no evidence of his being armed.
 
A week before, in a Capitol One branch at 92th, he was holding an unidentified potted plant.
  
Anyway, he got away with a couple of thou in that one.
 
Again, not armed other than with a plant.

O’Malley filled me in on his background as we walked downstairs. The suspect had once worked in
Manhattan
’s flower district, something that certainly seemed to fit the pattern.
 
He’d been arrested fourteen times in the past, mostly on drug possession.
 
The guy had even been arrested on Friday on a fare-beating charge, held over the weekend and released on Monday.

“Why wasn’t I apprised of this?” I asked.

O’Malley shrugged.
 
“Who knew then that he was connected to the bouquet heists?”

I figured I wouldn’t make a big deal about the inadequacies of our own department.
 
After all, it was an open and shut case.
 
The moment I cracked open the door to the interrogation room, I could see he was the man in the surveillance photo.
 
I confronted him with the evidence, and he didn’t even bother to deny it.
 
Said he needed the money, and, well, putting the note on a bouquet of flowers was the first thing that came to mind.

*
   
*
   
*

I got back around nine that night. I could have managed it earlier, but I was still ambivalent about spending time with Julian.
 
Sure, the sex was rapturous.
 
But the sooner he learned that things were not going to be the way they used to be – that I was not going to give in to his every impulse – the better off we would both be.

There was a taste in the air: some potpourri of garlic and onion, cumin, cilantro and hot peppers that brought me back Proust-like to Julian and me slurping chicken chili out of crockery bowls at my kitchen table.
 
In the tiny L off the living room, a table for two had been decked out with a red-checked tablecloth, a baguette and a green salad.
 
Julian appeared at the kitchen threshold like a maitre d’, a dish towel over his arm and a bottle of red wine in his hand.
 
“I waited for you,” he said.