Gladyss of the Hunt (29 page)

He closed his eyes peacefully. The room was full of seated women who seemed as calm as purring cats. His Oms were a signal for me to back out of the sacred space.

Since I couldn't do a workout, and felt too tense to stay at home, I decided I might as well go see if O'Flaherty had confessed.

By the time I got to the precinct, the capture of the Blonde Hooker Killer had gone viral. News vans lined the sidewalk, waiting for the latest briefing. Apparently O'Flaherty had refused to say a word last night until he had been taken to the hospital, where a doctor insisted that he be sedated and allowed to sleep. So it wasn't until a couple hours ago that they finally were able to start interrogating him.

The bruises on my face must've bloomed into a colorful bouquet, as everyone did a double take. Because I'd been dumb enough to get sacked from behind and almost killed, the sergeant and others treated me like a hero.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Bernie asked when I got to Homicide. “You were injured in the line of duty. Go home!”

I said I wouldn't have any peace of mind until I knew my pain had earned us a confession, and asked, “Did he lawyer up?”

“He declined a lawyer because he
is
one,” Annie said. “We're pretty pissed he got a good night's sleep, though. We should've had his statement by now.”

She and Bernie led me into the surveillance room, where we could watch the interrogation from behind a one-way mirror.

Because Bernie had nearly drowned O'Flaherty in his own crapper, he had to leave the interrogation to others. Alex, Barry, and the ADA who'd been appointed to the case were taking turns questioning him.

On the wall behind them, Annie had taped up large photos of the carnage he had wrought—the butchered bodies of Mary Lynn MacArthur, Denise Giantonni, Nelly Linquist, and the others.

“It's a simple question.” We listened as Alex spoke softly. “Why did you kill them?”

“You're worried about a couple of two-bit hookers while an entire
city
is being murdered. How about going after the real criminals!” O'Flaherty hissed.

“And who would that be?” the ADA asked.

“These entitled fucking rich kids who have invaded New York because their own homes are sterile shells. And what's the first thing they do? They destroy
our
city and replace it with the kind of boring, suburban shit that made the rest of this country so meaningless.”

Annie silently offered me an ice cube wrapped in a napkin, which I pressed in turn to my cheek, nose, and lips. Like me, O'Flaherty was flamboyantly cut up and bruised. He was babbling on about how his community had been systematically decimated by the invading army of Yuppie ants, whose money was manipulating the police, politicians, and developers, and how all he was doing was trying to defend it.

After a half hour of this, it was clear that the interrogation was stalled. He simply wouldn't own up to the killings. Fortunately, we probably didn't need a confession—the fact that we had the weapon pretty much sealed the case—so Bernie received permission from the captain to see if he could get a result.

Before going inside though, Bernie rummaged through the communal refrigerator and grabbed a dried-out American cheese sandwich that had been unclaimed for a week now. He tipped out the pens and pencils from the mug on his desk and filled it with the burnt dregs from our coffee pot and added some skim milk long past its expiration date.

O'Flaherty flinched as his tormentor from last night entered the room and placed the offerings on the table before him.

“From one lapsed Catholic to another, here's my little act of
contrition,” Bernie said, taking a seat across from him. “When you shot at my partner, some poor young girl, I'da been well within my rights to splatter your brains on the elevator wall. But I didn't, did I?”

O'Flaherty began wolfing down the moldy sandwich. In between swallows, he told Bernie he was sorry for what he had done to me. He glanced at the one-way glass, and I knew he was looking for me.

“Look, Nessun,” Bernie began. We've got you on this. It's an open-and-shut case. You're staring six murder one charges in the face. In other words, lethal injection. If you confess, maybe you can plead diminished responsibility and escape the death penalty.”

“That's not the way I see it,” O'Flaherty said. “The way I see it, you got me for assaulting that Amazonian kneecapper, but that's it.” He took an authoritative sip of the burnt coffee.

“We got the murder weapon from your room, with various blood samples and your prints all over it.”

“That'll be thrown out of court! It was an illegal search. You had no warrant!”

“You're not stupid,” the ADA said, “so let's not play games.”

“Maybe so,” O'Flaherty replied calmly. “But as you well know, I have alibis for some of those killings.”

“So what are you saying?” Bernie asked.

“Voluntary manslaughter. Murder two, tops. Twenty years with a parole option.”

The ADA responded that if O'Flaherty worked with them, providing iron-clad alibis for the times of the murders he said he didn't commit and confessing to the murders he did, then he'd take it to the DA and see if he could get him a deal.

“I only killed two girls,” O'Flaherty said bluntly. “and I only did them in self-defense.”

“Sure,” Bernie replied. “They attacked you while they were unconscious, so you chopped their heads off.”

“All the butchery was
after
they'd died. They didn't feel any of it.”

“Okay, so what did you do to them while they were still alive?” the ADA asked.

“I had a little routine, really nothing more than a harmless chat. Verbal foreplay. In fact, I never even had sex with any of them—it was all just talk. Been doing it that way for years.”

“Years?”

“Suffice to say, I've been with a lot of girls. If you ask some of the regulars they'll tell you I was always a gentleman.”

“So why did you ‘butcher' two of them, as you put it?” Bernie asked,

“What you need to know is: Number one, I had no premeditation. It was a crime of passion, so to speak.”

“If it wasn't premeditated,” began the ADA. “then how do you explain using sleeping pills—”

Bernie raised his hand to silence him.

“Number two, they went calmly to sleep, without any fear or suffering. And number three, all the messy stuff took place
after
their spirits had left their bodies.”

“Just walk us through it,” Bernie said. “Who was first?”

“Mary Lynn was the first.”

“Why'd you kill her?”

“She tried to run off with my disability check so I . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Where'd you meet her?” Bernie asked.

“Some sordid agency I found in the back of one of those disreputable newspapers. I asked for a tall blonde and they sent her.”

“Where'd you get the credit card?”

“From some yuphole at Starbucks.”

“I don't understand,” Alex spoke up. “So you had the girl come up and give you a blow job, then you killed her?”

“Please!” O'Flaherty groaned in disgust. “They're all infected with HIV. I don't want to get AIDS. I don't even shake their diseased hands. I just talk to them.”

“So what did you do, pray together?” Bernie asked.

“Freud said that the female libido is essentially masochistic while the male libido is sadistic, and this dynamic has always intrigued me. I start by asking them about their past, what drives them to degrade themselves with strange men.”

“Does this little routine ever involve Marilyn Monroe?” Barry spoke up for the first time.

“Is that some kind of joke?” O'Flaherty shot back. “Are you mocking me?”

“Not at all,” Barry said earnestly. Although O'Flaherty had evidently read about the additional murders, we had managed to keep
the Marilyn Monroe details out of the press.

“So Mary Lynn tried to rip you off and you fought back?” Bernie said, returning to the narrative.

“That's right.”

“You killed her.”

“Yes.”

“And which one was Nelly?” Bernie said looking at the gruesome pictures behind him.

“She was the one with the tear drop marks near her eyes,” O'Flaherty pointed to the photo of her. “Crappy prison tats. That tipped me off immediately that she was no good.”

“And Denise . . .”

“Yeah.”

“And Tabetha,” Bern said as almost an afterthought.

“Who?” O'Flaherty said.

“You cocksucker, you twisted that girl's head right off her fucking shoulders and you're gonna sit there and say who?”

“I just didn't hear her name, goddamn it!”

“The one at the Fabio.” Bernie leaned forward so he was right in the man's face. “You twisted that poor kid's head off and you're gonna tell me why.”

“Why?”

“Yeah, why? What the fuck did she do to you?”

“Nothing, she was dead. I just got tired of cutting their heads off. Takes a lot of work to butcher a body.”

“That would explain these two, Jane and Caty,” Bernie tapped at the other photos. “Their heads were still attached.”

“See, this is the kind of shit that pisses me off!” O'Flaherty hissed. “I'm being straightforward with you and then you start throwing in every whore in the city who winds up dead.”

“Fine, let's just talk about your gang of four,” Bernie pointed to their photos. “Because it's four killings you've now confessed to, not two. You expect us to believe they all mugged you, or what?”

“I'd perform a little test. I'd leave my wallet out, go to the bathroom.”

“Sounds like entrapment,” Bernie said.

“Yeah, that's what I thought when the NYPD did it to me. But then when it held up in court, I figured, what's good for the goose . . .”

“Okay, so if your cash was missing when you came back, what then?” Bernie asked.

“Did any of the prostitutes
not
take your wallet?” Barry asked delicately.

“Yeah, some didn't.”

“If we could get their names,” Barry continued, “it might help your case.”

“I didn't exactly stay in touch.”

“Getting back to those four, the ones you say ripped you off,” continued Bernie.

“With them, I'd . . . get justice.”

“By cutting their heads off?” Alex asked.

“No! I told you I never hurt anyone. I'd simply offer them a bottle of beer laced with sleeping pills—if they didn't drink the beer, that would be the end of it, because I don't believe in violence. But guess what? They always drank it.” he said with a snicker. “Then I'd just talk until they passed out.”

“And then you'd strangle them?” the ADA asked.

“They had ripped me off. I was merely defending myself and my property.”

“Fair enough, but what was the purpose of this gruesome display?” Barry pointed to the post-mortem tableaus on the wall.

“After someone's dead, what does it matter?”

“Well, years from now criminologists are going to be debating the significance of the numbers you carved into their limbs, as well as the fact that you always arranged the body in the same exact position,” Barry said, elevating O'Flaherty's crimes to legendary status.

“Call it late Abstract Expressionism,” O'Flaherty said, refusing to be drawn.

“From your window I could see the new Times Square complex,” Bernie said tiredly. “You must've hated watching those damn buildings going up.”

“So you figured it out,” O'Flaherty replied. “Bully for you.”

“And you're a lying piece of shit,” Bernie said, leaning into him again. “You didn't kill those girls because of your empty wallet. You did it because you're a fucking faggot who hates women.”

“Our SRO was purchased by a developer three years ago,” he replied. “We stopped them demolishing it for a while, but now we've
only got a couple months left, then we're all out on our asses. Do you know, some of the residents have been living in that neighborhood as far back as the 1920s? Anna Hurley in room 306 was in Times Square when they announced the end of World War Two. Just 'cause rents are going up shouldn't mean you can just roll up the past and chuck us all into homeless shelters in Queens!”

“What the hell does all this have to do with you butchering hookers?” Alex asked.

“High crime rates kept the property values down for years,” O'Flaherty replied.

“Boy, Jane Jacobs woulda given you a handjob out of sheer gratitude,” Bernie said straight-faced. “You're a political fucking prisoner, fighting to preserve the integrity of old New York.”