Good Day to Die (7 page)

“Then there were the known sex offenders. We interviewed five thousand creeps. Rapists, chickenhawks, pimps, madams, flashers, peepers. It didn’t matter if they were straight or if they were gay. Hell, it didn’t matter if they were fags or dykes. The brass got caught with their pants down and they were out to cover their asses before they contracted a windburn.

“Wanna hear the truth, Means? If it wasn’t for the profile, we wouldn’t have had any investigation at all. We’d still be organizing the paperwork.”

I stopped him with a wave of my hand. “What’s the profile, Pooch?”

“You don’t know about the profile?” A quick grin sent his jowls into spasm. “Tell me somethin’, Means. What do you call a Somali with a swollen toe?”

“C’mon, Pooch. Stop fuckin’ around. This isn’t a joke to me.”

The smile disappeared. “It’s a piece of shit, Means. Don’t take it serious. Don’t play Humpty-Dumpty and set yourself up for a fall. See, the psychs told us our boy would never stop killing. They said he might take it in his sick head to move on. They said he might get run over by a bus or commit suicide or get murdered by a run-of-the-mill New York psychopath. They said he might even do something really stupid and get caught. But he’d never decide to stop killing. He couldn’t decide to stop killing. Face it, Means, there haven’t been any murders in five months. Your ticket to glory is either gone or dead.”

“Or recovering in a hospital somewhere. Getting ready to kill again.”

Pooch leaned to the side, managed to lift a buttock off the chair, then farted loudly. “Ya know, Means, it’s possible we got the key to our killer right in them filing cabinets. Or maybe it’s in the boxes. Or on one of the computer disks. You might even find him if ya got, say, thirty or forty years to wade through all the crap.”

It was my turn to fidget. I knew I had to surrender, to once and for all give up the possibility of actually closing the case. And not because I couldn’t deal with the frustration. I needed every bit of the energy at my command for the game I had to play with Vanessa Bouton. For the show I was obliged to stage. The question I needed to answer had nothing to do with who killed seven male prostitutes. The only question was what Vanessa Bouton wanted from me.

“Tell me about the profile, Pooch. I need some kind of an angle here.”

“Ah, yes, the profile.” Still grinning, he picked a single piece of paper off his desk and began to read. “‘Perpetrator is a white male, thirty to forty years of age, five-foot-ten to six-foot-one, one hundred eighty to two hundred pounds. He has no criminal record. He was not acquainted with his victims prior to the murders. He is a married or divorced bisexual with children. He may be employed in one of the professions associated with homosexuality: interior decoration, the fashion industry, the theater, etc. He is obsessively neat, quite formal in dress and usually wears a suit and a tie when in public. He is a heavy smoker. He owns, rents, or leases an American-made van. He is extremely cunning and will back away from potential victims before putting himself at risk. Because his economic background is both successful and stable, he cannot readily move to another jurisdiction in order to continue killing. Neither can he radically alter his tightly organized
modus operandi.
Therefore, he is at high risk to be apprehended or commit suicide.’”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all she wrote.”

“Who did it? Who dreamed up this profile?”

“The Behavioral Science Unit of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” His short pudgy fingers caressed the side of his face as he peered at me through narrowed eyes. “Impressive, right? Especially when you consider that all they had was the victims’ backgrounds, the crime scene material, and the autopsy reports.”

I shook my head. “First, I don’t see how it helps. It’s too vague. Second, if it’s wrong, you could walk right past the real killer. Third, there was no crime scene. The vics weren’t killed where they were found.”

He put down the paper and grabbed my wrist. “It’s a piece of shit,” he insisted. “A piece of shit.”

I pulled my hand away and sat back to await the lecture. It wasn’t long in coming.

“We’re talking about a couple of hundred thousand phone tips. We’re talking about thousands of interviews. You know Deputy Chief Bowman? Black guy works directly under the chief of patrol?” He waited for me to nod, then continued. “Bowman ran the task force up. I can still hear his voice. ‘The operant concepts are organize and prioritize. Don’t let the paperwork overwhelm you.’”

“That’s easy to say.” I interrupted. “But it’s like asking a turtle to fly. Did he tell you
how?
”

“No, he didn’t. But part of it was obvious. Like the known sex offenders. We did that in
spite
of the profile. We also interviewed the victims’ friends, their pimps, if they had pimps, and every male whore we could get our hands on. But that only added to the basic problem. Everything we did generated more leads. Thousands and thousands of leads.
Tens
of thousands of leads. You think we could check ’em all out? Not in a fucking lifetime, Means. We
had
to put ’em in some kind of order and that meant we had to have some kind of a basic premise. A peg to hang the hats on. The profile became the peg.”

He fished a smoke out of a crumpled pack of Chesterfields and lit it up. “We divided leads into five categories, A to E. A few of them were easy to place, like ‘I was in a bar with so and so and he told me that he was the killer,’ but most of them were vague. So and so takes young boys into his apartment. So and so works with leather and goes out late at night. So and so is a faggot priest who gets off on male prostitutes.”

He was all excited now, jabbing at the air with his cigarette as he made his points. “After a couple of weeks, we finally got it through our heads that we had to do something. Half the task force was out on the streets harassing creeps. The other half was buried in paperwork. The whole fucking thing was getting away from us and if we didn’t make a move in a hurry, we were never gonna catch up.” He allowed himself to lean back, to relax a bit. “So we trained the phone men to ask hotline callers for age, weight, and height. What did he do for a living? Did he drive a van? Did he smoke? Was he married or divorced? Anyone who fit the profile automatically went on the A list. The idea was to check them out first, then move on to the Bs. Only we never got past the As.” He looked at his hands and shrugged. “And now it’s over.”

“How many, Pooch?” I asked casually.

“How many what?”

“How many prime suspects you develop from the profile?”

“Twenty-three.”

I shook my head in disgust. “You question their wives?”

“Naturally.”

“Their coworkers? Their bosses?”

“Yeah.”

“Their neighbors?”

His head jerked up. “Don’t cross-examine me,” he snarled. “What we did is called policing. It’s not something a psycho, like you, could appreciate.”

“Did you set up surveillance, Pooch? Twenty-four-hour surveillance?” I couldn’t resist the opportunity to give the knife another twist. “Did you follow them from their homes to their jobs to their churches to their relatives? Did you totally destroy twenty-three lives on the basis of some bullshit, fucking
profile?
”

We sat there in silence for a couple of minutes. I don’t know if Pooch was contemplating his sins or getting ready to shoot me, but I was thinking about my years in Vice. About busting HIV-positive, drug-addicted prostitutes. About finding those same, sad, vicious whores back on the street before I finished the paperwork. One sergeant told me to look at it like I was a sanitation worker.

“The streets get dirty,” he’d explained, “so we sweep ’em clean. If they didn’t get dirty again, why would anybody need us?”

He had a point, but I hadn’t spent all those hours studying for the cops only to become a garbageman. Nor did I have a wife and kids and a house on Staten Island to support. I could’ve walked away from the paycheck, and I’d thought about it more than once.

The truth was that I’d come to New York to hunt. That was the long and the short of it. And not very surprising, because I’d spent most of my life hunting. I grew up in a house (call it a shack if you’re the type who insists on a spade being a spade) on the very edge of the Adirondack Park, six million acres of deep dark forest that held more light for me than home, family, church, and school put together.

I got my first .22 when I was eight years old. One of the many “uncles” who came to occupy Mom’s bed (only to leave in disgust after a few months or weeks or days or hours) gave me a battered, single-shot, breech-loading Stevens and taught me to plink wine bottles mounted on rocks behind the house. I proved to be an attentive student—good enough, after a few weeks, to be handed a couple of rounds and instructed to return with “meat for the table.”

Bottles don’t move; animals do. It was that simple, and after a few hours I returned with no bullets and no meat. Uncle John, by way of demonstrating the fact that ammo costs money, beat me for an hour. Slapping me; chasing me; slapping me; chasing me. Until I couldn’t run anymore; until the only thing I could do was take it. Thinking about it now, the part I remember best has nothing to do with pain or fear. No, my clearest memory of that day is the sound of dear old Mom snoring on the couch.

The “whippin”’ was not without its positive aspects. I don’t recall ever coming back empty-handed again. But that may be due more to the fear of Uncle John’s taking back his .22 than fear of a beating. I’d been beaten many times before, whereas the rifle was entirely new. As was the feeling of power that went with it.

“You still here?”

I looked up to find Pooch staring at me through hangdog eyes. He looked like a scolded puppy.

“Hey, Pooch, I’m sorry about what I said before. It was stupid and I was out of line. There wasn’t anything else you could do, considering that you caught a piece of shit. If one of those men you put under surveillance had turned out to be King Thong, you’d be a hero instead of a goat.”

He nodded his head eagerly. It was the failure that bothered him. The end only justifies the means when the end is realized. “You take the man’s money,” he muttered, “you do the man’s job.”

I nodded back at him. There was no sense in making an enemy of a man I was going to need. “Tell me about the politics here. What’s Bouton’s story?”

“The bitch wants to be commissioner,” he answered, laughing. “And why not? The commissioner’s black. The chief of patrol is black. Even the fucking mayor’s black. It’s the Decade of the Ape in New York.”

I kept my expression neutral, though I couldn’t help wondering if Pucinski referred to me as the “half-breed” or the “injun” when I wasn’t around to hear it.

“I understand the ambition, Pooch. I can read it on her face. What I want to know about is the politics inside the task force. Why’d they let her loose with her cover-up theories? Why’d they let her come to me? Why didn’t they give her twenty detectives so she could do a decent job?”

“It was a trap. They set a trap and she stepped right into it.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper. “One thing I gotta say for
El Capitan,
she’s consistent. The task force was organized right after the fourth killing. That’s when the fags hit the streets with the picket signs. Bouton was on it from day one and from day one all she could talk was bullshit about the murders being part of a cover-up. Means, when I tell you there wasn’t a sympathetic ear in the house, you could believe I know what I’m talkin’ about. We must’ve had twenty shrinks in here, every one of ’em a specialist, and they all said ‘serial killer.’ Plus, the first three murders were investigated as routine homicides. The dicks who caught the squeals were out lookin’ for that ordinary motive Bouton kept screaming about and they couldn’t come up with squat.”

“Maybe it wasn’t one of the first three,” I suggested. “If you were gonna cover up a homicide by making it look like the work of a maniac, you couldn’t make the hit on the one you really wanted to kill until the media …” I stopped abruptly.

“Spit it out, Means.”

“Never mind, Pooch. I just got an idea about something else. You go on with what you were saying.”

His voice dropped even further as he launched himself into it. “It got to the point where Chief Bowman ordered her to shut up unless she had something constructive to say.”

“Did it do any good?”

“No. She managed to keep quiet when Bowman was around, but she kept talking her shit to anyone else who’d listen, including ranking officers who weren’t part of the task force.”

“What was she, Pooch, stupid?”

“Stupid? She ranked first on the captain’s exam.
First.
She’s also got a master’s in psychology from Columbia and a bunch of credits toward a fuckin’ Ph.D.
El Capitan’s
problem was that she was too smart. She was too smart and she let everyone know it. Chief Bowman’s a nice guy, but he ain’t exactly Albert Einstein. If it wasn’t for the fact that his boss and his boss’s boss are as black as he is, Bowman would never have gone past deputy inspector. Think he liked being showed up by another black cop? A black
female
cop? A black female cop that went to his
boss
complaining about how she was abused because she was a woman? About how she might even have to file a complaint against the New York City Police Department?”

I smiled by way of encouragement. “I’m surprised he didn’t have her shot.”

“He played it smart, Means. He let her mouth off until there was no way she could back out of it. Then he offered to let her conduct her own investigation on the side. Completely independent, Means. No time limit. She can work it forever and she doesn’t have to report to anyone until the day she arrests King Thong. Or decides to give up. On the day she decides to give up, she has to hand all her paperwork over to Chief Bowman.”

“Real tidy. But I still don’t get it. Why’d didn’t she demand a serious squad to work with? Why’d she settle for me?”

Pucinski sat back, relaxing a bit. A grin split his face, like a watermelon being sliced with a hunting knife. “First, let me say that I was present when the offer was made. That’s because I’m supposed to act as liaison between Bouton and the task force. My job is to guarantee she has access to all the files. Anyway,
El Capitan
didn’t seem very surprised by the deal. In fact, I’d say she’d been thinking about it for a long, long time. Bowman asked her how many men she needed and she says, ‘One. I only need one.’