“Let’s compare calendars tomorrow and pick a day,” he said. “I’ll spring for the tickets, but you’re on your own for beer.”
The twins smiled at their father’s lame attempt at a joke; the promise of a family outing to the ballpark lightened the mood in the room. “Oh, and I’d suggest that you bring your digital recorder for Moishe’s talk,” Karp said. “This is oral history, and there’s fewer and fewer people every year who can tell us the truth about what happened.”
Zak sighed heavily. “Okay, okay,” he muttered.
Karp smiled. He knew that this was not going to be his outdoors-loving sons’ idea of how best to spend a Sunday afternoon. “You chose the topic and asked Moishe to help,” he reminded them. “And this was the time that worked best for him. By the way, make sure you thank him or forget the ball game.”
“We will,” Giancarlo promised.
“Okay then, see you dudes in the morning.”
“Nobody says ‘dudes’ anymore, Dad.”
“Good to know, dudes,” he replied, and closed the door.
6
The sky was starting to lighten in the east when the young woman climbed the stairs out of the subway station at 167th and River Avenue. She’d just completed an eight-hour shift at the Old Night Diner in Manhattan and all she wanted was a hot shower and to crawl into bed. But with a groan she thought about the hours she’d first have to spend studying the schoolbooks she was lugging in the satchel over her shoulder.
It was Sunday morning and traffic was light on 167th as she started to walk west past Mullayly Park. She kept an eye on the shadowy environs of the park. The police had still not caught whoever murdered the woman she’d read about in the newspapers. The sidewalks were nearly deserted, too, and she was glad that it was getting light enough to see and be seen by the few pedestrians who were out and about. It made her feel safer.
Then out of her peripheral vision, she saw a man in a hooded sweatshirt. He had been walking in the same direction as she was on the other side of the street but was now crossing at an angle and speeding up to intercept her.
The woman, Marianne Tate, increased her pace. But so did the man. His face was shadowed by the hood, but he appeared to be a young Hispanic in need of a shave. She fought not to panic when he jogged the last few yards to catch up. “Your bag looks heavy,” he said with a slight accent. “We are walking in same direction, let me help you.”
“No, thank you,” Marianne said firmly, as she’d been taught in the women’s self-defense class she’d taken at the YMCA. He was to the side and slightly behind her, and she avoided looking directly at him and kept her eyes straight ahead.
When he started to hurry to get in front of her, she walked even faster. “Leave me alone!” she shouted, hoping someone would hear or that her voice would deter him.
Instead, he grabbed her from behind; she felt the blade of a knife against her throat. “Don’t scream, sooka, or I’ll cut your fucking head off,” the man snarled. “Now you and I are going to get busy.”
The man started to drag her into the park. But at that moment, a man walking a small dog came around the corner from River Avenue. He saw what was happening and shouted, which caused his dog to start yapping excitedly.
Tate’s attacker hesitated and she felt the knife move away from her neck. Summoning her courage and recalling her martial arts instructor’s admonition to fight back “with anything you have,” she stomped on the man’s instep and heard him cry out in pain. She then twisted slightly and threw an elbow behind her as she’d been trained, and was surprised when it made solid contact with the side of the man’s face.
His grip loosened and she dropped to the ground, where she scrambled away on her hands and knees. She heard her attacker run off and started to cry as she looked up into the worried face of her rescuer, whose dog danced around barking.
“Are you all right, lady?” the man asked, helping her to her feet. “Shut up, Roscoe. Sorry about him, he gets a bit wound up.”
“I think so,” she said. “And that’s okay, Roscoe was a big help. Thank you, thank you so much.” She wobbled and pointed to a bench. “Maybe I should sit down for a minute.”
“Yeah, yeah, you do that,” the man said. He pulled out his cell phone. “Dialing nine-one-one. Maybe if the cops aren’t snoozing in their patrol cars somewhere, they can still catch this creep. I couldn’t see him very well myself. Did you get a good look at him?”
“Not really,” Tate replied to the same question from the detective a half hour later, sitting at his desk in the detective squad room at the Forty-eighth Precinct house. “I mostly saw him out of the corner of my eye and he had the hood pulled up on his sweatshirt. I know he had black hair and might have been Hispanic, maybe Puerto Rican or Mexican, but not too dark skinned.”
“About how tall?” Detective Phil Brock asked, his pen hovering above his notepad. He didn’t hold out much hope that they’d catch the guy. Muggers were a dime a dozen, and for all he knew, this one was probably holed up in whatever rat’s nest he called home or accosting tourists in Battery Park.
However, the brass was all over violent attacks on women because of the Atkins murder. There’d been insinuations from some media outlets that the NYPD, in particular the detectives working out of the Forty-eighth’s detective squad, had messed up because the murder happened during the day and the killer had gotten away clean. The case had received a lot of press-particularly from one Ariadne Stupenagel, who’d been nosing around through unsolved murders in the five boroughs and was apparently using Atkins as her story’s centerpiece.
Brock thought the attacks were unfair. Actually, violent crime had dropped significantly over the past two decades in the Forty-eighth, an area of the Bronx described as “economically disadvantaged” and filled with a lot of low-income residents.
Rapes tended to fluctuate year by year, averaging three to four dozen. But robberies, which had numbered a thousand or more per year in the early nineties, were now a third of that. There’d been 137 murders in 1990, which dropped to a couple dozen ten years later and had been holding steady at less than a dozen for the past couple of years, and detectives like Brock were beating the national average at making arrests.
Still, the press barked and the brass sat up and listened. They wanted the Atkins killer and they wanted him bad. “Before he kills somebody else,” the captain in charge of the detective squad said. “Or life around here is really going to get miserable.”
So Brock and the other detectives were putting a little more into anything that sounded like a possibility. And this guy had attacked Tate during the day, even if it was a little early; he also used a knife and wasn’t just trying to rob her. The problem was Brock had no idea what he was looking for; no one had seen a suspect in the Atkins case.
Tate shrugged. “He was behind me, but I’d say a little taller than me, and I’m five-seven.”
“What color was his sweatshirt?”
“Gray. A light gray.”
“What about pants?”
“Jeans. I didn’t really look at him. I was trying to keep my eyes to myself.”
“I understand,” Brock said. “But sometimes you never know what question will stimulate a memory. Was there anything unusual about him? A scar you might have noticed? Maybe a tattoo on one of his hands?”
Tate shook her head. “I didn’t see anything like that… He had bad breath.”
Brock laughed. “Don’t they all? Dental hygiene is not a priority with most of the bad guys I meet. What was his voice like? Gruff? High-pitched?”
“He had an accent.”
“Any particular kind of accent? Hispanic?”
“Yeah.” Tate thought about it for a moment then added, “I think so. Or maybe something else. I’m not sure.”
“No problem, you’re doing real good,” Brock said. “So he grabs you and says something. What was it again?”