Victims (21 page)

He stared at Miranda. Their eyes locked. His face contorted and a shudder ran through his tense muscular body. His mouth moved and his lips pulled back and his teeth were revealed: large and white, slightly parted.

“Bitch.
What are you trying to pull here? You see, you ask, you all ask, ‘Why you kill this nice young woman?’ Nice young woman. You a nice young woman, huh, you sit here and you talk to me like I am some kind of fool, you so very smart as to make a fool of a man, huh, is that it?”

The connection had been broken. With nothing to lose, she went straight to it.

“What are we talking about now, Mr. Mera? All that money. So much money. From what, Mr. Mera? Who does Mr. Firenze work for that he gets so much money? Why did someone send him to represent you? Did he have a message of some kind to deliver to you?”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore, bitch.”

He stood up and banged on the door.

“Get her out of here,” he yelled to Dunphy. “Get her out of here before I cannot help myself. You want to know why I killed that woman on Barclay Street? And the others?” He leaned into the squad office and yelled directly at the homicide detectives. “You want to know about the others? The three others? Okay. But you keep this bitch—or any other woman, you understand?—away from me. Fucking bitches, all of them should get it. You let me alone with her—I show her!”

Miranda sat in Captain O’Connor’s office and translated the tape for him. Dunphy, a homicide detective named Teitel, and A.D.A. Waters. The tape came to a halt at the point where the detectives had taken over and Mera reverted to English.

“Well,” Captain O’Connor said. He lit a cigarette and took off his old glasses, rubbed his eyes. “Well, what the hell do we have here?”

Waters started to speak, but O’Connor held up his hand. “Let’s think about it for a moment, okay, Mr. Waters?” Then, to Dunphy, “Get someone on Firenze. Who the hell
is
he? Who sent him?”

“I placed a coupla calls, Captain. It’s in the works.”

Which was no less than O’Connor had expected.

Waters looked around the room, puzzled. “He probably comes from some Hispanic organization. Established attorneys give a certain amount of their time to cases that—”

O’Connor cut right through and spoke to Miranda. “Detective Torres, what do you think?”

Miranda studied her hands, locked together in her lap. Slowly, she looked up, directly at O’Connor. The slight shrug, the less-than-certain tone that really didn’t convey doubt. “Drugs?”

“What do you mean?” Waters asked. “What drugs? The man is a murderer. You heard him. You’ve seen him. That man, in that room, is confessing to four separate murders of females. Here, you, Detective—” he indicated the homicide detective with his chin—“you’ve heard him. You’re working on these homicides, aren’t you? That man is the Beast of Queens. And he looks it. Doesn’t he?”

The detective shrugged and remained silent.

“What are you talking about, Torres?
Drugs? What drugs?
We got us a murderer in there. You’ve
seen
him in action. You’ve
seen
the videotape, haven’t you?”

“Mr. Waters, Detective Torres
gave
us the tape. And I wish you wouldn’t refer to it quite so freely when—”

“Oh?
You
wish? I see. Listen, I represent the Queens District Attorney’s Office and as of right now—well, with maybe a little more cooperation from the homicide squad—I think I’m nearly ready to hit up the grand jury for four separate indictments.” Waters spread his arms wide, then smacked his hands together. “Clean sweep. Doesn’t that please you? Why are you all so goddamn gloomy? Maybe you all need a little time off, that the problem? Heat got you down? Well, I’m putting my case—my four cases—together. You people seem to doubt his confession to the other killings. What did you expect, a videotape of every one of them? Well, life ain’t that easy, is it? Listen, if you people come up with anything that might be important, call my office and leave a message. I have work to do.”

The departure of the assistant district attorney left an abrupt silence in the room. The captain rubbed at his scratched lenses and set them in place.

“What the hell is this guy Mera saying about the other murders?” he asked the homicide cop.

Slowly, carefully, Teitel said, “I haven’t been in on the others, Captain. We’ll be questioning him in teams. I’m assigned to the Anna Grace killing. This case is the strongest.”

“What do you
think
—off the top of your head—about the possibility that he’s telling the truth? That he did in fact kill the other women?”

The homicide cop, a thick, heavyset, sweaty man with small eyes set close together on either side of a small, piggy nose, pursed his lips and sucked in air before he answered. His voice was surprisingly light for such a rough, grungy-looking man.

“I don’t think about nothin’, Captain, but what I’m assigned to think about. I can only talk about my own particular assignment, and like I said, I think we got him real good. For Anna Grace.”

“All right, pal, no one is trying to—Listen, don’t you people have anything better to do than hang around here all night? Dunphy, Torres, how much overtime you putting in? Pick up in the morning, if you haven’t anything special to do. You both look tired.” Dunphy looked like hell; Torres looked cool—and smart. That was the word. She had a smart, sharp, cool, unruffled look. O’Connor realized he had been staring, taking stock, though she did not seem to have noticed.

“Hey, you two put in your expense sheets yet for Florida? You got that done yet?”

“We got the papers in, Cap,” Dunphy said. Then, low key, taking advantage of friendship, always knowing when it was safe, “So whadda ya think? Don’t you think Torres and I deserve a coupla days away from all this? A chance to breathe and reflect?”

O’Connor stood alongside Dunphy, and they watched Miranda Torres leave. He looped his arm around Dunphy’s shoulder and said softly, “So tell me, kid, what the hell are we dealing with here? This guy the creeping raper-murderer Beast of Queens, or what the hell have we got here?”

“We got something not right, is what we got.”

“Homicide and the D.A.’s Office are very hot to stuff whatever open crime we got in Queens into this guy’s bag. And he seems not only available but eager to admit to everything and anything. This gent playing tricks or what?”

“Someone’s playing something, Bill. Tell ya, these are the days when I’m glad I never passed the promotion exams. Too much responsibility for me. You tell me what to do, I’m the kinda soldier does it.”

“What kinda soldier is Torres?”

Dunphy pulled back, reached up and removed O’Connor’s glasses. He held them to the light and shook his head.

“No wonder you have headaches, for Christ’s sake. Why don’t you wear your new ones? These would make anyone blind.”

“Oh? Am I blind? Am I missing something?”

The two men, old friends, years and secrets and plans and schemes between them, held a deep long unspoken communication, questions asked and answered.

Finally, Dunphy said, “Bill, the day hasn’t come when you’d miss anything like that. Not a damn thing.”

“Ya not interested or what?”

“Hey, this is a very interesting girl. But I’ll tell ya, you forget all that when you work together. Jeez, Billy, this kid is one helluva cop. And... well, she’s a... she’s
nice,
ya know? She knows how to be a partner.”

“Anything doing with her and Stein?”

“I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”

O’Connor looked over the top of his glasses.

“But on the other hand,” Dunphy said quickly, “who the hell ever really knows?”

T
HEY’D MADE A TENTATIVE
date for dinner. Mike wanted to show off a little: a good French restaurant, the best food and wine and then his apartment. But a phone call from Forest Hills changed his plans. He had to visit someone on Barclay Street.

It was one of the things—among many things—that he liked about Miranda Torres. He knew there’d be no hurt feelings, no long pauses, no injured tone, no prying questions. He was surprised, however, at her response.

“That is good,” she said. “I was getting ready to call you. I’ve been called back to work on a homicide.”

“In Forest Hills? Not another—”

“No, no. Something quite different.”

He knew it was all she would say. “Well, all right, then. We’ll be in touch. Soon.”

Stein’s telephone call led him to the Stone apartment, fourth-floor front. There was fairly good view of where the attack had taken place: just to the left of center and straight down.

There were just the two of them, father and son. Jason Stone, the father, was a professional studio musician. He played a number of instruments, and on the night of Anna Grace’s death he had been playing keyboard for an up-and-coming new group. They had played well into the morning hours, and by the time he had returned home most of the commotion on Barclay Street had come down to a few uniformed policemen standing around looking bored.

“Angelo waited up for me, Mr. Stein, and he told me, as much as he knew, what was going on.”

Angelo Stone was a small boy in a wheelchair. It would be difficult to guess his age—thirteen—by his appearance. His body was distorted and misshapen and odd, but the cerebral palsy, with complications, had not affected his intelligence. If anything, Angelo’s brain functioned in rarefied isolation not dissipated by any physical activity. Added to the fact that his IQ had been measured higher than the 170s, the intensity of his enormous light-brown eyes was disturbing.

It was Angelo, not his father, who explained his situation.

“You might say I’ve developed my innate intellectual abilities to the sharpness, say, of a blind person’s sense of touch or hearing. It is a known fact that most humans function at about ten percent of their intellectual capacity. I think that probably that’s what marks what is so-called genius from the average: the use of at least part of the ninety percent dormant ability. I really haven’t had much choice in my life.”

His voice had a peculiar, tinny sound. Mike searched his memory quickly. The boy sounded like a cartoon character, like a little animal. It was a parody of human speech, thin, piping, but understandable.

Angelo managed very well despite his physical handicaps. His room was filled with electronic equipment that he could operate with the fingertips of his right hand. Every item in his room that had to be activated—lights, telephone, TV, tape deck, computers—was designed to function especially at the level of his capability. Angelo had worked with the engineers in developing most of the equipment.

“Angelo is a born engineer. He’s studying at college level. He’s planning to design equipment for handicapped people.”

Angelo smiled at his father and shook his head. In his weird little voice he said, “Whatta guy, that Angelo! There stands a father, Mr. Stein.” Followed by a thin, staccato sound: Angelo laughing.

Then the conversation came to an abrupt halt and the silence turned tense.

“Mr. Stone, this is all very impressive and I’m sure we’ll all hear a great deal from Angelo one day. But you didn’t ask me to come here for that reason.”

For the first time, Angelo deferred to his father.

“Mr. Stein, Angelo was here, at this window, working on some problem. This is what he calls his ‘thinking place,’ right here. And he saw the attack on this woman, who was killed. He saw the man come from behind the parked cars, he saw him grab at the woman and attack her. He couldn’t actually see him clearly enough to identify him, but he
could see exactly what he was doing.
He said the blade flashed in the light. He knew it was a knife.”

Stein looked from father to son. An odd transformation had occurred. The boy, incredibly, had seemed to shrink even smaller. His body seemed more compacted. His head looked larger, more bloated, balloonlike, lolling to the right. His right hand, his only controllable instrument, began to shake. The boy stared at the jumping fingers.

“My reaction to tension,” he said. His voice was even more peculiar: tinier, an imitation of a small child’s. Angelo’s breathing increased; his gasps were deep and loud, interrupted by a strange laughing, giggling sound.

“Are you all right, Angelo?”

Jason Stone put a large hand on his son’s forehead. The boy rolled his head back, and his eyes focused on his father’s face. There was a gentleness between the two. The father’s hands moved slowly, patiently, with years of experience, along his son’s neck, shoulders, forehead. He patted his son’s cheeks.

“This is what happens when I get tensed up,” Angelo explained in his tinny voice, gasping, laughing, coughing. “All this—all these—sound effects—are completely—absolutely—un-con-trol-lable.”

“Let me explain, Angelo,” Jason Stone said softy. “You just hang in there, all right? All right, Angelo? Good. Mr. Stein, we’ve heard, from neighbors, from people on the block, that you’ve been interviewing witnesses to this terrible, terrible thing. One of our neighbors, a Mr. Lamont, the man who owns the clothing shop on Austin Street, he’s been canvassing the neighbors. Asking who you’ve interviewed, what their impression of you has been. What it is you’re after. He’s planning a meeting with the people you’ve talked to. He’s told everyone he thinks you’re planning to do a number on them, the witnesses, instead of focusing on the real culprit, the murderer. And on the police. Well, you can guess what his attitude is, you’ve met him.”

“Yes. I’ve met him.”

“Well, he was here and he spoke to Angelo. Angelo listened carefully and what he’s come up with is what you’ve come up with. The fact that all the people on this block watched a murder. Watched an attack that left the victim alive but bleeding. Watched the young woman die, rather than do anything, at all, to help her.”

“
I called 911,”
Angelo said in a high, shrieky voice. His hands began to jump spasmodically as he indicated his telephone, hooked up to his bank of electronic equipment.

“And I recorded it.”

D
URING THE LAST FOUR
days, there had been a record number of impulse killings all over the city. Psychologists were blaming the unbearable stress of an unlivable atmosphere: the heavy thick polluted air pressed and weighted down human beings, the simple act of breathing became an ordeal, simple everyday emotional events became catastrophic. Simple family arguments and disagreements, over which TV program to watch, who drank the last can of beer or who wouldn’t pass the salt, turned into homicides: by knife or family gun, kept illegally by the bedside for protection against interlopers.