Without Mercy (3 page)

He almost never thought about the second Mrs. Rackman, an airline stewardess to whom he’d been married for less than six months when they’d split up. He couldn’t understand what had happened, so preferred not to think about it. Maybe it had something to do with his emotional immaturity, which is what her laywer had said in court.

He went to his cubbyhole of a kitchen and drank a glass of milk, because he was an insomniac and had read someplace that the calcium in milk helps one to sleep. He’d never had trouble sleeping before he became a cop; the weird hours had screwed him up. After downing the milk he washed his face and hands and brushed his teeth in the bathroom that he told himself he had to clean one of these days because it was starting to smell like an army field latrine. He should find himself a cleaning woman but didn’t know where to look.

He went to the bedroom and took off his clothes. In a silver frame on the wall next to his dresser was the silver pin they awarded him when he qualified as a paratrooper in the US Army. He’d gotten it in 1963, long before the Vietnam War got serious, and he still felt he’d missed something by not being in the fighting. It wasn’t because he thought front line combat was glamorous, or because he’d believed in the war, but because war showed whether you were strong or weak, brave or cowardly, a leader or a follower, quick or dead. Rackman wanted to know these things about himself, and thought battle was the ultimate test of them. Now he’d never know for sure.

The women in his life had often told him how silly his attitudes were about those things, but he thought most women and a lot of men just didn’t appreciate the qualities and shadings of courage.

Naked except for his jockey shorts, he moved toward the bed. On the night table beside it was a sound machine he’d bought from Hammacher-Schlemmer. It imitated the noise of rain falling on a roof or surf on a beach or just made “white sound,” which was similar to the sound of an air conditioner. Rackman needed the machine because there were several stereo enthusiasts in his vicinity, plus one trumpet player who blew his horn as though he was on top of a mountain or in the middle of a forest. The machine blocked out all those sounds and helped him to sleep. He turned it on, crawled into bed, and closed his eyes.

It took a long time for his knots to loosen. He thought about his daughter and his buddies at Midtown North, his girl friend and the four unsolved homicide cases he was working on. The last image in his mind was of the pudgy blonde lying crumpled and bloody in the alley.

Chapter Two

Rackman returned to Midtown North at five thirty in the afternoon. He wore his leather jacket with a blue chambray shirt underneath. Detective Third Grade Johnny Olivero was the only one there, and looked up from his
New York Post
when he saw Rackman.

“Jenkins wants to see you,” Olivero said.

“What about?”

“How should I know?”

Inspector Jenkins occupied a small private office next to the one used by the detectives he supervised. Rackman knocked on the door.

“Come in,” croaked Jenkins from within.

Rackman entered the office. Jenkins had a piece of correspondence in his hand, and pointed with it to a chair. Rackman sat and crossed his legs. Jenkins was a husky man of fifty-five with a florid Irish face and red hair. His suits were always too big for him and looked as though they also served as his pajamas.

“You see the papers?” Jenkins asked in his gravelly voice.

“I haven’t even seen breakfast yet.”

Jenkins threw him the
Post
and the
News.
On the front page of each was a photo of Cynthia Doyle in the alley where she met her death and a big news story. The mayor, Manhattan borough president, police commissioner, and chief of detectives had issued appropriate statements about finding the killer and cleaning up the Times Square area.

Rackman handed back the papers. “I guess the pressure’s on.”

“You’d better believe it.” He picked up a piece of paper. ‘‘The lab report’s in, but I don’t suppose there’s much in it that you don’t know already. I read your report, and I guess Luke the Duke is the best suspect so far.”

“Maybe, but a dead girl can’t make any money for him.”

“She might have put him down in a way that embarrassed him in front of his friends. You know how sensitive those pimps are. They worry more about their image than General Motors.”

“Anybody talk to him so far?”

“Nobody’s been able to find him. He’s like the stars, he only comes out at night. He should be in the Times Square area in a few hours.”

“I know where he hangs out. Anything happen at the massage parlor?”

“There’s a different shift on during the day, so you’ll have to check that one out too. If the management gives you any shit, just call for a backup and bring them all up here.”

“I don’t think I’ll have any trouble. Those people are all afraid of getting closed down. Has any useful information come in while I’ve been off?”

“We’ve been talking to people in the neighborhood all night and all day and nobody saw anything, although several of them heard the screams and called nine-one-one. We also checked out the victim’s boyfriend—we think he’s clean.”

“I’d hoped a lead or two might have come up.

“The only way they’re going to come up is if you dig them up. Anything else?”

“No sir.”

“Then get going.”

Rackman went out to his car and drove cross-town to Broadway, where he parked in front of a hydrant and went into a little restaurant for a breakfast of ham and eggs, coffee, and newspapers. It didn’t escape his notice that the people around him were having dinner, and it made him feel good to be out of sync with the rest of the world, as though he weren’t a member of the great herd.

He returned to his car and drove down Broadway slowly, close to the curb. It was dusk and the area was a pulsating sea of rainbow lights. He looked at pedestrians and the fronts of movie houses, pokerino parlors, penny arcades, and peep shows. Part of him hated the area’s filthy tawdriness, and another part of him was fascinated by it. The weirdest people came here in search of paradise, and some acted as if they’d found it. You could smell crooked money in the air along with the hot dogs, souvlaki, pizza, and exhaust fumes.

At Forty-ninth Street he turned the corner and parked beside a ticket agency closed for the night. It was a no parking zone so he pulled down the Official Police Investigation sign on his visor. It was too early to look for Luke the Duke, so he walked to Broadway and meandered downtown, trying to soak up Cynthia Doyle’s milieu, hoping an inspiration would come from somewhere. People rustled against him, and a guy coming from the opposite direction carried a big portable radio that blasted salsa music.

On the next block was a peep show, and Rackman walked in, following his instincts. It was modern and clean with chrome and Formica covering the walls and ceiling. Behind the counter was a big black guy and a metal tube filled with quarters. Rackman got two dollars worth, then passed the tables covered with porno books and magazines and entered the area of private booths, where for a quarter you could watch ninety seconds of a hard-core porno film. In front of each booth were large photographs of scenes from the films on display, and Rackman chuckled at the picture of a blonde girl in pigtails sucking two cocks at the same time. The next booth showed a brunette being screwed by a dog. Then he came to a photo of seven lesbians in a big sexual pretzel.

Other men were looking at the photographs and entering or leaving the booths. They didn’t appear filthy or depraved, and probably were ordinary office workers, tourists, students, union members, the guy who lived next door. They came to places like this, got horny, and sometimes visited one of the whorehouses in the neighborhood. Rackman wondered if Cynthia Doyle’s killer had been in a place like this last night, or if he was just a crazy bastard hanging out on West Forty-fifth Street, deciding to commit a murder just as Cynthia Doyle happened along.

At the rear of the peep show area was a series of booths with a sound system playing funky rock and roll. Rackman entered one of the booths, closed the door behind him, and dropped a quarter in the slot. There was a motorized humming sound and a little screen lifted, revealing two naked girls dancing in the small area that the booths enclosed. One of them, a white girl with short dark hair, was hopping around and wiggling her ass, moving from window to window and giving everyone a close-up show of her ass and genitals. The other girl was black and lay on a circular revolving platform in the middle of the floor, spreading her legs and fingering her labia while screaming obscenities.

The dancing girl stopped before Rackman, winked, and whipped her ass around. She spread the cheeks of her ass and pressed it against the window in front of Rackman’s nose.

“How does it look?”

“Okay.”

The girl turned around and dangled her low-hanging breasts in front of the window. “Like ’em?”

“I guess so.”

The motor hummed and the curtain came down. He dropped in another quarter, and up it went again. The girl had moved to the next window, and Rackman could see across the dance area to the windows on the other side, where guys were drooling and ogling the girls. He felt sorry for them because he figured they were lonely and didn’t have women. He’d gone through a long period of loneliness himself, and it’d been awful. All you could think about was women and fucking. Sometimes it got so intense that you’d pay for it, and there was nothing so degrading as paying for it, because it was an admission that you couldn’t get a woman on your own.

The screen dropped again. Rackman left the booth and roamed farther back to another room where some guys were slouching around in front of booths that had photographs of naked girls on them. The deal here was that for four quarters you could talk privately to a naked girl, separated from her only by a plastic window. With only a haphazard glance at the photograph in front, Rackman walked into a booth and dropped his coins into the slot.

A curtain that ran the full length of the opposite wall raised slowly, revealing a young blonde girl sitting on a chair. She wore a flimsy nightgown that was unbuttoned, her legs were wide open, and you could see her snatch and breasts. Rackman stared at her and didn’t know what to do.

She had a telephone in her hand, and pointed to the one hanging beside her. He picked it up and held it to his ear.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

They looked at each other for a few moments, and the silence hung heavy.

“Are you married?” she asked in a sprightly way.

“Not now.”

She looked disconcerted because she thought he meant he didn’t want to talk about his marriage just then and that she’d said the wrong thing.

“I meant that I’m not married now,” he explained.

“Oh.” She smiled again.

“Are
you
married?” he asked.

“No, but I’m getting married.”

“Congratulations.’’

“Thank you.”

He looked at her and wondered what to say. Most guys told the girls to stick their fingers between their legs, press their coozies against the glass, or get into obscene poses. “Where are you from?” he asked at last.

“Florida.”

“I’ve been to Florida a few times. What part?”

She thought for a few moments because she didn’t want to tell him where she was from. “Jacksonville,” she said finally, and it was a lie.

“I’ve never been to Jacksonville. My parents live in Miami Beach.”

“It’s nice down there.”

“Yeah.”

The curtain came down. Rackman walked out of the booth, out of the room, and through the peep show area to the street. He thought about the girl in the plastic booth and wondered why she had such a shitty job. Maybe she was lazy and it was easier than working as a secretary. It almost certainly paid more. She mustn’t be very bright. Nobody with smarts would do something like that.

Out on the sidewalk, he walked past a hat store, a pizza stand, and one of those stores that sell cameras, transistor radios, watches, and knives at alleged discounts. In doorways and alleys were the ubiquitous slobbering drunks. He passed a noisy gathering of black dudes, and wondered if one of them was the boyfriend of the girl in the plastic booth. They were a weird subculture of dumb little girls and violent guys, who saw the rest of the human race as suckers to be intimidated or ripped off. Their attitude was understandable because the rest of the human race had permitted them to sink about as low as human beings could go.

He turned right on Forty-eighth Street and walked past a few hotels and bars patronized by the down and out. On the corner of Eighth Avenue was a hamburger parlor bearing the name of one of the lesser-known national franchise chains, this one a hangout for pimps and whores and those trying to become pimps and whores.

Two uniformed black guards stood near the entrance, and around the orange Formica tables inside sat an assortment of local types, many of whom Rackman knew personally because they’d been in Midtown North at various times for involvement in crimes of prostitution, narcotics, theft, assault, burglary, and so forth. Occasionally one of them would push things a little too far and kill somebody. Perhaps Cynthia Doyle’s killer was sitting there right now.

Luke the Duke sat at a booth facing the front door. He wore a pearl gray sombrero, black suit, and red silk shirt open at the collar. Next to him was one of his whores, and opposite were two black guys also dressed like pimps. Luke looked at Rackman icily as he approached down the aisle.

“Hiya Luke,” Rackman said, his hands in his pockets.

Luke nodded without smile or sound. He knew Rackman and didn’t like him for no other reason than that Rackman was a cop.

“Let’s have a talk,” Rackman said to Luke.

“I ain’t in the mood,” Luke replied in his lazy Tennessee drawl.

“We can talk quietly here or you can come down to the precinct with me. It don’t make a fuck to me either way.”

“What you want to talk to me about?”