God Told Me To (7 page)

“He said, I shouldn’t have stopped at the gas station. And then—then he was gone.”

The psychiatrist continued to stare out the window and toy with the pull cord.

After a moment Nicholas spoke. “He said something else, Doctor.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“God told me to.”

Jordan waited until they were back in the car. He began with a chuckle. It developed into laughter. Roaring laughter. He slapped his thighs and laughed. Between spurts of laughter he talked.

“Christ! I bought it. I really thought you were on to something. And all the while, the whole fuckin’ time you were off on a religious trip. That’s it, isn’t it, Nicholas? Fletcher and Gorman told you they were ordered by God.”

Nicholas was driving. He silently watched the road.

“Every fuckin’ nut in history has said God told me. If it isn’t God it’s the Devil. The Devil made me do it.”

Nicholas drove.

“Hey! Where you going? This case is over. Turn around!”

“I’m going to find out where Jennings stopped for gas.”

“There isn’t any case. Forget it. I’ll think of something to cover you with Hendriks. He’d have your head if he knew the truth. Mine, too, for not spotting you sooner.”

Nicholas braked to a halt.

“Why you stopping? No church here,” Jordan laughed. “This is a fuckin’ bus stop.”

“You want to turn back, you go. I’ve got a lead to check out.”

There was a wild, tense look about Nicholas. Jordan sobered and said, “Don’t think I should leave you alone.”

“Then shut up.”

Only one gas station was on the route between the bank where Michael Jennings had worked and the school. Jennings’ picture had appeared in the morning
Daily News.
Nicholas showed the picture to the station attendant.

“Recognize this guy?”

“They oughta string him up by the balls for what he did!”

“He ever a customer?”

“Yep. Stopped yesterday only a few minutes before he did it. Reason I remember is he pulled in and says, ‘Fill it up.’ So I filled it up. One dollar and eight cents’ worth. Faggot creep.”

“How do you know he was gay?”

“Because he didn’t stop here for gas is how I know. Stopped to meet some other faggot.”

“Who?”

“How should I know. He steps out of his car while I’m filling his big order. When I turn around he’s standing over there by the Pepsi machine. Talking to the other one.”

“Can you describe the other?”

“Weird. Looked like one of those—whatcha call ’em? Real pale and white.”

“Albino?”

“That’s it. Blond hair. Long blond faggot hair. Skinny. Wouldn’t say he was wearing a dress, exactly, but it was like a robe of some kind.”

“He leave with Jennings?”

“No. I went to get Jennings’ change and when I come back he’d disappeared.”

Nicholas and Jordan headed back to Manhattan on the Staten Island ferry. While on the boat, Nicholas left the car. He leaned against a railing and stared at the white water the boat left in its wake. He stood stiff and quiet and his hands beat an erratic rhythm against the railing. Jordan stood near and watched him.

A gull swooped low. It squawked. Nicholas reacted as if an explosion had gone off in his ear.

Jordan spoke quietly and without bravado.

“You know, Nicholas, we can’t very well comb New York checking out every blond faggot. Let’s forget it, huh? We can fix the report so Hendriks will be satisfied. What do you say, buddy? Why don’t you quit staring at that water, huh. People drown in it. Fish swim in it. You took a flyer on this one. Let’s let it go at that.”

Nicholas took out his notebook and began flipping the pages. As if to himself, he said, “The mechanic out at Fletcher’s garage.”

“Told us what everybody told us. That Fletcher was a sweet good-hearted guy.”

“Told something else. To prove his point he told us something Fletcher did only a few hours before the slashings.”

“He gave a couple bucks to a panhandler.”

“It was a kid.”

“Hell, panhandling is a way of life for kids these days.”

Nicholas was insistent. “It was a skinny blond-haired kid. I didn’t note it because it seemed too minor. But I remember the mechanic’s description. Shoulder-length hair. They thought the kid was a thief. He’d been hanging around the garage all morning. Then Fletcher went out and talked to him. The mechanic saw Fletcher hand the kid money. Fletcher came back and said the kid was just hungry.”

“Nicholas, you’re grasping at straws.”

They went to the Haskell Publications Building and found the elevator operator who had run the car ridden by Harold Gorman. The operator had a smart, know-it-all attitude and Jordan didn’t get involved in the questioning.

“You cops. Do I got to say it again? I didn’t know there was rifle in the package. I took him up to the top floor. From there he used the stairs to get to the roof. Or maybe he flew.”

“Anyone else in the elevator.”

“Probably.”

“Probably?”

“This ain’t exactly a leper colony. People do come and go.”

“How about a very pale blond boy? Hair shoulder-length.”

“Sandals?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe’s right. One was around that day looked that way. Wore one of them loose Indian shirts. Spotted him as a junkie. Why I kept my eye on him. We don’t want that shit around here. Can’t say for sure he was on the same car as Gorman.”

“What happened to him?”

“Do I know? I can’t watch everything.”

Jordan wasn’t convinced but he made no comment when Nicholas turned into the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel and they headed for New Jersey.

Harold Gorman’s mother held a picture of her son while she talked.

“I only saw him from a distance. From the window. Harold didn’t usually hang out with those types. The long hair and sandals. I thought it peculiar enough to ask Harold. He said the boy was just somebody he knew. Somebody from New York. Washington Heights. I remember specifically Washington Heights because you would think a person looking like that would live in Greenwich Village. Is he responsible for what Harold did? I believe the boy’s name was Bernard Phillips.”

SIX

They had found their link. The coincidence of the boy being seen with the three slayers and having gotten his name was enough to satisfy Hendriks. He gave them more time.

Now began the detailed and frustrating work of a search.

They started with the detective’s classic but unromantic tool. The telephone directory. In the Manhattan book alone there were seventeen B. or Bernard Phillipses. A court order got them the names of an additional four who weren’t listed. They then had the other four boroughs to cover. They found Bernard Phillipses of various ages, sizes, colors but not one matched the age, shape, coloring of
their
Bernard Phillips.

They checked the Motor Vehicles Department. Bernard Phillips,
their
Bernard Phillips, either didn’t drive a car, or if he did, he didn’t have a license.

They checked every public record and source available. They used money and every other method necessary to get hold of documents normally unavailable to the police. They put the word out through informants on the street.

They collected stacks of unrelated information which was read, re-read and read again, always hoping to find the one clue that would lead them further.

Because of the possible homosexual tie with Jennings, they spent some evenings covering the city’s gay bars.

Detective Jordan took to working his eight hours and quitting. He had privately reported to Hendriks that it looked like Nicholas had stumbled onto something. He never mentioned to Hendriks the little phrase that had originally gotten Nicholas’s interest. He neither knew nor questioned why he held back the information, and his personal attitude about the case wavered from day to day. As the tedium of the search wore on, he began to think it all one odd coincidence, he began to think Bernard Phillips,
their
Bernard Phillips, didn’t exist.

Nicholas worked long bleary hours into the night. He told Casey to expect him when she saw him and he would go home only for a change of clothing. His rest came from short naps on a cot in back of the squad room or when he leaned over his desk and dozed. His meals were black coffee and delicatessen sandwiches and cartons of Chinese food that usually cooled and gelled before he ate it.

His desk became a growing clutter of odd notes and scribbled speculations and photocopies of various public records, a house of cards which he constantly tore apart, shuffled, and rebuilt into a new pattern. But nothing resulted.

No leads.

No nothing.

Bernard Phillips
—his
Bernard Phillips—was on no school records. His name appeared on no welfare rosters nor had he ever received a Social Security number. Nicholas personally checked the New York Selective Service board, then called the main office of the Selective Service in St. Louis. Bernard Phillips had never registered for the draft. Nor was he a registered voter. He had never been a member of the Boy Scouts, nor any organization Nicholas could find. He had never owned property. The FBI and the State Police claimed the name was on none of their lists.

Not for a moment did Nicholas consider the possibility that
his
Bernard Phillips didn’t exist.

Jordan thought that possibly Mrs. Gorman had gotten the name wrong. He called on her two more times. The calls had the effect of making the woman more sure of her statement.

The theory that had gnawed at Peter Nicholas before Jennings entered the case now nagged him again. He did not attempt to discuss his theory with another priest. Two priests had sorely disappointed him within a matter of days. The thought of another rejection by his church worried him nearly as much as a new fear that began to creep up on him. One evening Jordan gave voice to his fear.

“We been on this goddamn paper chase almost a month. Assuming our blond boy is out there somewhere. Unless he strikes again, we’ll never find him.”

“We still have a few sources to check.”

“Hendriks won’t sit still for us much longer. When he takes a look at the money you’re laying out he’s liable to bust you for larceny.” Jordan chuckled and added, “You been working so hard on this you forgot to go to church.”

Late that same night Nicholas cleared his desk. He took a fresh pad of paper and a pencil. He wrote the name
Bernard Phillips
and beneath it wrote the few facts he knew.

Male Caucasian, very pale, possibly albino.

Shoulder-length blond hair.

Thin.

Approximate age: 17-24.

Wears sandals & loose-fitting white shirts (smocks?) (robes?).

Possible resident Washington Heights.

He dropped his pencil and pushed away the pad. He felt sick and defeated.

Another detective in the squad room approached and asked him how things were going.

“I’ll tell you exactly how things are going, Daley. I haven’t slept in weeks and I don’t remember my last meal. I got a kangaroo jumping in my stomach and a flamenco dancer doing
Bolero
in my head. I’ve worked a month to come full circle to where I started. I’m thinking of giving up this lousy job and joining a monastery where I can take a vow of silence and not have to answer people who ask how’s it going?”

“Sorry I asked, Nicholas.”

Detective Daley transferred his weight from his feet to Nicholas’s desk. He was a big man who sagged all over. His suits never fit. When he spoke the flesh that hung below his jaw shook like Jello. He picked up Nicholas’s pad and took too long to read the few lines written on it.

He said, “Even in New York there aren’t a hell of a lot of robe-wearing blond albinos.”

“I’ve recently met four. The wrong four.”

Daley had something on his mind. Nicholas was too tired to ask what.

“In Brooklyn. Ten years back. Had a case I never been able to forget. I was still in uniform. Walking patrol and the first one on the scene. Suicide pact. A guy slashed his wrists and his wife turned on the gas. First time I’d ever seen anything like it.”

“Nobody ever forgets their first blood scene, Daley,” Nicholas said with disinterest. “Mine was a traffic accident.”

“The woman’s name was Phillips. Judith Phillips. She had an eleven-year-old kid. Eleven or twelve. Blond hair. It was the kid who found the bodies and pulled me in off the street.”

A stir of excitement went through Nicholas. “Remember the kid’s name?”

Daley nodded. He tapped Nicholas’s pad, and said, “That’s it.”

“Remember the exact address? What happened to the kid?”

He remembered the approximate address.

“The kid was a weird little fucker. Calm. No tears. It got pretty hectic there, an’ all of a sudden I noticed the kid had disappeared. I figured one of the neighbors took him in. But nobody ever saw him again. Maybe Juvenile has some old reports.”

“Juvenile never heard of Bernard Phillips. What did the note say?”

A troubled expression crossed Daley’s wide face.

“Who said anything about a note?”

“Suicide pact, you said. Was there a note?”

There was a pause before Daley nodded.

“What did it say?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You’re lying, Daley. It said something you’ve never forgotten. Maybe scared you a little. Jordan and I haven’t made a secret about who we want. Why did you wait this long before talking?”

“Maybe if I knew what your case was all about I’d have come sooner. You guys are being pretty secretive about it. And you’re a hard one, Nicholas. A fucking hard one. When was the last time you did me a favor? You want to be a fucking loner, I figure, fuck you, be a loner.”

“What did it say, Daley?”

“Made no sense. I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe ’cause I was still green to the job. I think the woman wrote it. It said,
‘God told me to.’
Do me a favor and keep it to yourself that I tore it up.”

In a Brooklyn hospital Nicholas and Jordan discovered a twenty-one-year-old record documenting the birth of a male child to a Judith C. Phillips. They hadn’t found the record earlier because no Christian name had been given the child before it left the hospital. The child was simply listed as Baby Boy Phillips. He was born in a charity ward. The intern who attended the delivery was now a successful Park Avenue obstetrician.