Blood Innocents (16 page)

“How did you know it was the deer cage?”

“Because I could see one of the deer peeking out of that tin house where they stay. Then this deer walked out toward the bars right up to the guy, poking its nose against his side, there where he was leaning.”

“What happened then?”

“I just kept looking. Then he turned around and looked at me. But he didn't seem to see me. He was in a fog or something. Wacked out.”

“Then what?” Reardon asked.

“He took a few steps away from the cage and just seemed to stand there, like he was in another world. Then he took a few more steps. That's when I got scared. Really scared. I started to walk away. Pretty fast too. I was afraid he was coming after me.”

“Was he?”

“I thought so. So as I was walking, I looked back over my shoulder.”

“And he wasn't following you?” Reardon asked.

“No. He had turned around again. He was walking away from me.”

“Where was he walking to?”

Daniels smiled. “He was walking back toward the deer cage. He had taken the ax off his shoulder and was dragging it behind him, you know, like a kid would pull a wagon.”

Reardon opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out photographs of Gilbert Noble, Harry Bryant and Andros Petrakis. He laid the photos face up on the table and pushed them across the desk to Daniels. “Have you ever seen any of these men before?” he asked.

Daniels' face paled. “God, it scares me just looking at him,” he muttered.

“Which one?”

He pointed to the photograph of Andros Petrakis, then stared up at Reardon. He grinned. “Bingo,” he said.

16

So Harry Bryant had told the truth, Reardon thought, after Daniels and his attorneys had left the precinct house. Petrakis had come to work the night the fallow deer were killed. And Daniels had seen him there, slumped against the deer cage, a peculiar expression on his face, the ax nestled menacingly in his hands.

But Reardon was still no closer to Petrakis than the photograph he had already placed back in the top drawer of his desk. Petrakis and his whole family had vanished, leaving Reardon with nothing more than two conflicting images of the man. The one drawn by Mathesson was easier to understand. Mathesson had portrayed an enraged man, capable of sudden explosions of strength and violence, animated solely by an overwhelming hatred of Wallace Van Allen, who had come to symbolize for Petrakis the utter devastation of his life.

And so Andros Petrakis had killed. He had come at three in the morning from the deathbed of his wife to the Children's Zoo, where he began that process of revenge which, he believed, would result in the destruction of Wallace Van Allen. He had butchered a fallow deer with fifty-seven blows of an ax and killed the other with a single thrust. But that was only the beginning. He had then acquainted himself with Wallace Van Allen's holdings in New York. He had picked out an apartment house which belonged to Van Allen, waited patiently in the early hours of the morning, somehow managed to get into the apartment of Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky, and had then butchered them in exactly the same manner as the fallow deer.

Daniels had painted a different portrait, but Reardon could not get the lines and colors straight. The Petrakis that Daniels had seen leaning silently against the deer cage seemed a different sort of man from the one of Mathesson's narration. He had been leaning, simply leaning, on the cage with the ax nestled in his hands. That was what Reardon could not get out of his mind. That Petrakis had not been striding about menacingly tapping the ax blade against the bars but had been leaning like a tired workman against a wall, staring out into the dark air. And when one of the deer hesitantly moved toward the bars Petrakis had not jerked back but had continued to lean silently in the darkness while the fallow deer gently sniffed his trousers.

Reardon had seen murderous revenge. It did not lean silently in the early morning hours.

Who was Andros Petrakis, anyway? Reardon wondered.

Reardon had expected a long manhunt for Andros Petrakis, and so when he saw him for the first time only a few hours after Daniels and his lawyers had left the station house, he could not believe it. He looked up from his notes to rest his eyes and saw a small man in a green Parks Department uniform standing in front of the desk sergeant. Even in the distance there seemed to be something insubstantial about Petrakis. He stood before the large desk, staring up at Smith, waiting for some direction. Flooded by the light that flowed through the tall glass inlays of the precinct house doors, he looked more like an apparition than a man. The soiled uniform seemed to fall around him as if it were draped over a skeleton rather than a full-fleshed body. His arms hung loosely and motionlessly at his sides like those of a marionette.

Reardon waited, staring, unable to move. He saw Smith point in his direction and watched as Petrakis walked toward him.

Petrakis stopped directly in front of Reardon's desk and pointed to himself. “Petrakis,” he said almost inaudibly.

Reardon stood up. “You are Andros Petrakis?”

“Andros Petrakis,” the man repeated.

Reardon stared at him. He was about five-eight or nine but looked much smaller. He had a slight paunch, but even this characteristic only served to miniaturize him. The tiny, childlike face of Karen Ortovsky flashed through Reardon's mind. He blinked his eyes and tried to regain his concentration.

“Please sit down,” Reardon said.

Nervously, Petrakis took a seat directly in front of Reardon's desk. He was very dark, with black curly hair and a thin mustache. A thick pungent odor surrounded him.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“No,” Petrakis said faintly. He seemed frail, lost, irredeemably abused.

“I understand that you recently lost your wife,” Reardon said. “I'm sorry.”

Petrakis nodded.

“My own wife died only a few weeks ago,” Reardon added.

Petrakis said nothing, but his face took on a softness that Reardon translated as an expression of understanding.

“We have been trying to find you,” Reardon began.

Petrakis stared at Reardon without expression.

“Did you know that?” Reardon asked. “Did you know that the police wanted to talk to you?”

“I call Mr. Cohen. Try to get back work. He tell me come here.”

“When did you talk to him?”

“Today. Just now.”

“Do you know why we want to talk to you?”

Petrakis shrugged his shoulders.

“The deer,” Reardon said. He looked for some response in Petrakis' face. He had seen people break down at the first mention of a crime which they alone knew they had committed. But Petrakis' face registered nothing.

“Have you spoken to anyone in the Parks Department besides Mr. Cohen?”

“No.”

Reardon felt stymied. He had never seen a man so drained of concern or curiosity.

“Have you been to the park since early Sunday morning?” Reardon asked. He wanted to rivet Petrakis' attention on the fact that the police knew he had gone to the park that morning. Perhaps that would break him.

“No,” Petrakis said.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure.”

Reardon glanced down at his notes. He felt like a talk-show host without a guest. Petrakis sat directly in front of him, but no one really seemed to be there at all. Somehow he had to get at Petrakis, draw him out. He decided to be more direct.

“How long have you worked with the Parks Department?” he asked.

“Two years,” Petrakis replied.

Dos, thought Reardon, and the roman numeral two. “You don't speak Spanish by any chance, do you, Mr. Petrakis?”

“Greek,” Petrakis said.

Reardon looked down at his paper again. “Yes, I thought so. And you work with Gilbert Noble and Harry Bryant, is that right?”

Petrakis nodded.

The only part of Petrakis' body that had moved since the interrogation had begun, thought Reardon, was his head. “Let's get back to the deer.” Reardon looked at Petrakis intently. There was no response. “Did you have much to do with the fallow deer? Did you tend to their cage?”

“Sometimes,” Petrakis said, and for a moment he closed his eyes wearily, his head swaying very slightly forward and backward. But the face betrayed nothing, and Reardon was beginning to believe there was nothing for it to betray. “Sometimes you cleaned the cage and sometimes Bryant cleaned it and sometimes Noble cleaned it?” Petrakis made no response. Reardon decided to work on the details of what he already knew about Petrakis' home. Finally draw him out.

“On Monday, about three A.M., you met Harry Bryant in a coffee shop on Second Avenue, is that right?”

“Right,” Petrakis replied.

“What did you talk about?”

“I move to a new place that Thursday.”

“You moved from 109 East 90th Street?”

“Yes.”

Reardon looked down at his notes. “What is your new address?”

“103 East 101st Street. My wife sister apartment. We move in with her. I have no money.”

“You were evicted from your previous apartment?” Petrakis nodded.

“And who is the landlord of the building you had to leave?” Reardon asked, staring down at his notes as if it were just one more routine question.

“Robles,” Petrakis said.

“He's your landlord?”

“He kick me out,” Petrakis said without emotion.

“Do you know his first name?”

“He kick out a sick woman. He kick out my wife.”

“Do you know his first name?” Reardon repeated.

“Julio,” Petrakis said, “Julio Robles.”

“Excuse me a moment, Mr. Petrakis.” Reardon picked up the phone and called Mathesson. “Jack, I want you to go over to 109 East 90th Street and see if a Julio Robles is around. Mr. Petrakis says Robles is the landlord, so we could have made a mistake on the connection.” Reardon hung up and glanced at Petrakis. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. But Petrakis seemed to have been unaware of or uninterested in the break-in time since the last question.

Reardon began again: “Did you have any kind of fight with this Julio Robles?”

“No.”

“None at all?”

“No.”

“When did you leave the coffee shop,” Reardon asked. “About what time?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Where did you go?”

“To work. The zoo.”

“What happened when you got there?”

“I start to work.”

“Doing what?”

Petrakis closed his eyes again and appeared to go far away.

“Doing what?” Reardon asked again.

“Cutting brush behind the shed.”

“What shed?”

“The deer shed. The brush look bad.”

“How did you cut the brush?”

“My ax.”

A shiver went down Reardon's back. Could it be, Reardon wondered, that Petrakis would actually confess to the killing of the fallow deer in this blunt, dead monotone?

“And so you took the ax from the work shed and started to cut the brush?”

Petrakis nodded.

It was inconceivable, Reardon thought, that Petrakis had gone this far into an interrogation without discerning the reason for it. But he only said: “Then what?”

“I cut the brush. I think of my sick wife at home. I feel bad. My wife is sick.”

“Yes,” said Reardon, “go on.”

“I cannot work. I think of my sick wife. Only my children are home.”

“So what did you do?” Reardon asked.

“I cannot work,” Petrakis said, “I go home.”

“You went home? After coming that far?”

“Yes.”

It could have happened, Reardon thought. He, himself, had come to work many times during Millie's illness and had then gotten sick with the pain of her dying and had gone home to see her and to be with her, to bring her what little comfort he could, while he could. “What did you do with the ax? Did you put it back in the shed?”

“No, put it down,” Petrakis said.

“Where?”

“By the deer cage,” Petrakis said.

“And then you went home?”

“Yes.”

“To East 101st Street?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do when you got home?”

“I go to sleep.”

“Did you go out again during the night?” Reardon asked.

“No.”

This was going nowhere, Reardon knew. He had to get to the point quickly, flush Petrakis out, hit him hard. “You said that you don't know why the police were looking for you. Well, the reason is: the fallow deer, the ones whose cage you sometimes cleaned, were killed early Monday morning.”

Petrakis received this information without any sign of emotion. He seemed to project only a dull acknowledgment of yet another insignificant fact.

“Were you aware that they had been killed?” Reardon asked.

“No.”

“You would have noticed that they were dead when you came to the park, wouldn't you?”

“They alive.”

“And you say you placed your ax outside the cage when you left the park. Why didn't you lock it up?”

“Too tired,” Petrakis said. “I put it down and leave.”

Reardon nodded. Then he said sternly, almost accusingly, “Your ax was the weapon that killed the fallow deer.”

Petrakis was unmoved. He simply nodded, staring dreamingly into Reardon's face.

“Your fingerprints are the only fingerprints on the ax,” Reardon said in the same commanding voice.

Petrakis did not answer.

“Have you ever heard of Wallace Van Allen?” Reardon asked.

“He gives the deer to the zoo,” Petrakis said.

“And he threw you out of your apartment too,” Reardon said, “didn't he?”

“No,” Petrakis said. “Robles.”

“Wallace Van Allen owns the building,” Reardon said.

“Oh,” Petrakis said.

“You knew that, didn't you?”