“Jesus. You know, I heard the names myself, but I was watching TV with half my mind on the sports pages in Newsday. I should have caught it.”
“You would’ve, next time you heard the news.”
“Yeah, maybe. Shit, Arthur, we got to go in, don’t we? I mean, we can’t phone it in, and it won’t wait till morning.”
“Afraid not.”
“Wouldn’t you know I just lit the fucking charcoal. Well, she can grill. She never gets it right, but if I’m not here I won’t know the difference, will I?”
“We’ll go to that Malaysian place you like.”
“That’s if we even get time to eat. You want me to come by for you?”
“No, I want to have my car with me,” Arthur Pender said. “I’ll meet you there.”
The focus of the investigation shifted when Pender and Hurley raised the possibility of a direct link between the firebombings and the activities of the Curry Hill Carpenter. The immediate result was an expansion of the task force investigating the bombings, with the inclusion of personnel from the Thirteenth Precinct previously assigned to the Curry Hill investigation.
Evidence began to accumulate, and the argument that the killings were linked was bolstered significantly with the discovery of a stainless steel claw hammer with a black rubber grip among the burned-out wreckage of Cheek. Witnesses had reported the window was smashed before the first Molotov cocktail was thrown, and investigators theorized that the hammer might have been used to break the glass. While there was no way to tie the hammer to the Curry Hill murders, forensics determined that it could well have been the implement used to beat the women to death. “If it wasn’t this hammer,” a technician said, “it was one a lot like it. It might not have had a claw on the back of it, because he didn’t use the claw, but this is what the business end of it would have looked like.”
Eyewitness testimony was difficult to sort out, but there were plenty of police personnel assigned to the task, and some common elements began to emerge. Reports accumulated of an older white male, of medium height and slightly built, ordinary in appearance and unremarkable in dress, who had been observed both in and around the targeted premises. At both Cheek and Harrigan’s, persons who’d been on the scene hours earlier recalled an older man who had ordered a drink and left it untouched.
A waitress in a coffee shop across from Harrigan’s thought she might have had a customer fitting that description; on that Friday night, he’d lingered over a cup of coffee for a long time, and she seemed to recall he’d looked out the window a good deal of the time. He’d had some of his coffee, but he never finished it, and if he ever said a word she couldn’t remember it. He hadn’t even asked for coffee, had ordered by pointing to another patron’s cup, then nodded when she asked if that was what he wanted.
Other cops canvassed the immediate environs of the whorehouse, coming up in short order with a manager in another coffee shop who reported similar behavior, although he couldn’t furnish even a general description of the customer in question. He remembered him because a waiter had asked him to check the coffee and see if anything was the matter with it. He’d checked, and it was no better or worse than usual. The customer, whoever he was, had already paid without complaint, and left the premises. The manager might have seen the man, he was behind the register and had presumably taken his money, but had no sense of which customer he’d been or what he looked like. The waiter might remember, but he was away for several days visiting family in Philadelphia.
FDNY inspectors established that the propellant was ordinary gasoline. Anyone with an automobile had ready access to gasoline, but one detective noted that the perpetrator had never been linked to a motor vehicle, and could quite easily have covered the distance from Harrigan’s to Cheek to Death Row on foot. This prompted him to check with attendants at nearby gas stations, and on Eleventh Avenue he turned up an excitable fellow who remembered a man who’d wanted to buy gas for a stalled car. “But I didn’t sell him nothing,” he insisted. “I told him you gotta have an approved container. He went away, I never saw him again.”
The man was only able to furnish a vague general description, but it was encouragingly close to the one then in circulation — white, middle-aged or older, medium height, slight build, no visible distinguishing marks. It led him to widen his search, and a few blocks below Fourteenth Street he stopped at a Getty station — the last one left in the world, as far as he could tell — where the proprietor, one Khadman Singh, remembered selling two gallons of gas — regular, unleaded — to a white man perhaps fifty-five or sixty years old. Sometime in the middle of the week this was, he recalled. This was not unusual, people paid no attention to gauges, they ran out of gas all the time. This man had a container and paid cash for his gas, which was not unusual either, because who would bother with a credit card for a three-dollar sale? But what was unusual, in Singh’s experience, was that the man had approached from the right, which is to say from the south, or downtown, and had walked off in the opposite direction, heading uptown on Eighth Avenue.
While most of the task force worked from the crime-scene evidence, a small group focused on the common denominator of all four venues, the three bars and the whorehouse. Which is to say Jerry Pankow.
He was interrogated at length, over and over. No one suspected him of any conscious involvement in the perpetrator’s scenario, but it seemed entirely possible he knew something, even if he didn’t know that he knew it. The series of layered interrogations aimed at unearthing unconscious knowledge, and while they didn’t lead anywhere, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Another possibility lay in anticipating the next outrage. No one thought the man who’d just scored what a Post columnist called a hat trick for terrorists would call it a day and rest on his laurels. He looked to be that classic urban nightmare, the serial terrorist. Reporters were writing sidebar columns on George Metesky, the Mad Bomber of a half century ago, who’d planted explosive devices in public places in an unfathomable private vendetta against Con Edison. Others, by no means convinced that the whorehouse murders were his first venture, were looking at every unsolved crime since the calendar ticked over to start the new millennium.
And policemen, trying to get ahead of him, staked out the apartments of Jerry Pankow’s remaining clients.
“I don’t have any clients,” he told them. “I called them all, I told them I’m through. I’m out of business anyway, it was the commercial clients that paid the rent. The rest, there were five of them, twenty-five dollars a day, you do the math. I want a real job, I want to work in an office or something. With other people around, living ones.”
They staked out the residences of his customers — his former customers — just in case. And sat back and waited.
The razor was another source of leads.
It lay beneath the dead body of Eric “Buddha” Kesselring, twenty-eight, of Ludlow Street, whose throat it had been used to slash and whose blood had pooled around it. Thus it presented a challenge to the lab technicians who examined it; they had to remove the blood without destroying any trace evidence it might conceal. When they were done, they had two good fingerprints and one partial, which they turned over to an investigator who sat down with them at her computer.
The computer search came up empty. The perpetrator (if that’s whose prints were on the razor, which seemed a fair working assumption) had never been fingerprinted. This meant he’d never been arrested, had never applied for a government job, and had probably never served in the military. It meant, too, that the prints on the razor couldn’t point him out now, but might help confirm his guilt if and when he wound up in custody.