“And you’re sure that all of them had left the zoo by two-thirty?”
“Yeah, as far as I know, they was all gone. I didn’t see nobody except Bryant after that.”
The interrogation lasted for another hour. Reardon went over each detail again. He went over the sounds Noble had heard. He asked him to describe the couple. He took him back through his statements about the old man he claimed to have seen and asked him if he knew whether or not either the couple or the old man had gone into any of the buildings on Fifth Avenue. Noble said that they had simply disappeared up the stairs and he had not seen them again. Had he seen any of them before in the zoo? No. Had he noticed anyone spending a lot of time at or near the cage of the fallow deer? No. Reardon asked him what he knew about his fellow workers. Harry Bryant, Noble said, was a “funny guy” who constantly made jokes about the animals, particularly when they were in the process of copulation. Did Bryant show any resentment toward his work? No. Toward the animals? No. Did he ever drink on duty? No. Andros Petrakis was “a nervous type” who did not say much. But as far as Noble knew, Petrakis liked his work, enjoyed the animals as much as could be expected and bore no grudges related to the zoo.
After Noble left, Reardon reviewed the notes he had taken during the questioning. The interrogation of Gilbert Noble had established at least one possibility. If the scuffing sounds that Noble heard were not made by the killer but by someone else, then it was possible that the unknown person might have seen the killing. But what could have made the sounds Noble described? Reardon thought they could have been made by a man with a limp dragging one foot behind him after each step. But there were two sounds, one metallic and harsh and the other muffled, and they had occurred simultaneously. In that case, Reardon thought, Noble may have actually heard the killer dragging two weapons behind him as he walked, one of them wrapped in something, the other uncovered. But the sounds Noble described were not continuous, like objects being dragged. Instead, they were interrupted by pauses.
Reardon went into Piccolini’s office and told him what Noble had described. Piccolini leaned back in his chair and chewed a cigar. Anything less than an arrest seemed uninteresting to him.
“So what do you make of it?” he asked after Reardon had finished.
“I really don’t know,” Reardon said.
Piccolini crushed the stub of his cigar into the ashtray on his desk. “Mr. Van Allen has asked to speak with the head of the investigation. He wants a firsthand report. I made an appointment for you to see him at three-thirty this afternoon.”
“Schedule him for tomorrow morning,” Reardon said. “I’m seeing Bryant this afternoon.”
“No,” Piccolini said. “Schedule Bryant for tomorrow morning.”
“Look, Mario, if Noble heard something it’s just possible that Bryant saw something.”
“It can wait.”
“You’ve been a detective a long time,” Reardon said. “You know better than that.”
Piccolini opened a desk drawer, pulled out some papers and threw them on his desk. He started shuffling through them. “Bryant will have to wait,” he said.
Reardon shrugged. “All right. When is Van Allen coming over?”
“He’s not coming over here. You’re going over there.”
“Where?”
“His place on Fifth Avenue. Right across from the zoo.” Piccolini took a small piece of paper and started to write down Van Allen’s address.
“I know where it is,” Reardon said brusquely, and turned to leave the office. For the first time in all the years he’d worked for Piccolini, he did not close the door behind him.
5
On his way over to the Van Allen penthouse later in the afternoon Reardon was waiting on the curb at the corner of 68th Street and Park Avenue when the orange “Don’t Walk” sign across the wide avenue changed to “Walk.” He stepped off the curb, and at that instant – and for only a brief moment – he did not know where he was. He looked around in dismay, as if he had been suddenly placed in an unfamiliar universe. The city had taken on an immense and terrifying aspect, its sounds rushing at him like famished beasts. The moment passed so quickly that he did not even have time to tremble or call out, but the terror – as it passed – was overwhelmingly real.
As he walked across Park Avenue, shaken by the experience, the feeling of having blacked out, if only momentarily, made him think of the Arturo case. He remembered Arturo as a slim, awkward young man who wore an enormous pair of black-framed glasses and seemed extremely interested in police work. For months he had haunted the station house. Week after week Arturo would go directly to the desk sergeant and be waved through the outer vestibule and up the stairs to where the precinct records were kept. He was thought to be a graduate student researching some phase of urban police work. But Benedict Arturo, all those weeks he sat poring over the precinct files, was instead investigating himself – quietly, methodically assembling the evidence that would alter his life forever, evidence from which Reardon had later learned Arturo’s story.
As a child Arturo had sometimes experienced blackouts. At first these periods were short, no more than a few minutes. But by the time he entered college he was experiencing amnesiac lapses which sometimes lasted as long as seven hours. He could not recall anything that happened to him during these lapses, although friends subsequently assured him that they had seen him eating quietly in the cafeteria or strolling the halls of the library.
Although confused and frightened by these lapses, Arturo chose to ignore them. Then late one evening he awoke from one of them to find his face badly scratched. He discovered unexplained rips in his clothing, mud on his shoes. After that strange articles began appearing in his room, each time following a period of amnesia. Once it was a red handbag slung over his bedpost. On another occasion he found a single brown high-heel shoe standing upright just inside his door.
Reardon had always thought that it would not be unusual for an individual faced with things so bizarre to force them from his mind and ignore them. After all, his own wife, Millie, had ignored the cancer she knew was killing her. But Benedict Arturo did not do that. He made charts listing every quarter hour of every day. He carried them with him everywhere, marking the passage of each fifteen minutes. In this way he was able to closely approximate the times during which he was not conscious of his acts. He then compared these times with newspaper reports of crimes, particularly assaults on women. Those details that he could not get from the newspapers he obtained from precinct records. Slowly, meticulously, he convicted himself of at least six assaults, one of which had ended in a brutal murder. The document that emerged from this investigation of himself was a peculiar, brilliant masterpiece of self-incrimination. He turned it over to the police as he might have submitted a master’s thesis. Then he took himself to Bellevue and committed himself to a mental institution for the criminally insane.
Until now Reardon had never believed that Arturo was quite as mad as he had seemed. He could accept irresistible compulsions; but to kill while totally unaware, that was further than Reardon had allowed himself to go. Then he had stood on a corner he had passed a thousand times and had not known where he was. It was no comfort to know that anything was possible.
Before going up to the Van Allen penthouse he walked to the zoo and sat down again on a bench across from the cage of the fallow deer. He reviewed what he had: two dead deer, a sound heard by an employee of the zoo, a couple kissing, and an old man walking quickly through the zoo before the killings; no weapon and no witnesses.
And then, of course, there was Wallace Van Allen and his children. Van Allen’s wife had died in an air crash in Paris three years before. The Van Allens, Reardon thought: prominent, wealthy, liberal, political. He looked up through the trees to their penthouse above.