The living room had a sofa, coffee table, and two matching chairs. He’d bought the stuff at a sale that Macy’s had had at the time his second wife had thrown him out. The furniture wasn’t very good, but Rackman had learned that women usually wind up with a man’s furniture, so it didn’t pay to invest very much in it.
On the wall above the color television set, which he seldom had time to watch, was an eleven by fourteen framed photograph of his twelve-year-old daughter, Rebecca, who lived with her mother, the first Mrs. Rackman and her latest husband, in the Forest Hills section of Queens. Rackman felt guilty whenever he looked at the photograph, because he seldom had time to see the child. Somehow he had to get out there this weekend. Almost six weeks had elapsed since the last visit.
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.