Small Town

Small Town Page 45

“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.”

T H E F O C U S O F T H E 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.

W H I L E M O S T O F T H E 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.

T H E R A Z O R W A S A N O T H E R 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.

Prints aside, the razor presented some interesting possibilities.

The first was that it was the killer’s own razor, that he’d owned it for decades, that he kept it either for sentimental value or because it was what he preferred to use on his whiskers. If that was the case you could probably forget about tracing it, but suppose he’d acquired it recently, for the express purpose of cutting a throat?

There were still men who bought straight razors, detectives discovered, and still manufacturers that produced them. The majority of customers were barbers. Not many men still went to the barbershop to be shaved, but those who did were looking for an old-fashioned shave, with a shaving brush and a straight razor, not a noisy buzz with an electric shaver or foam from a can and a disposable plastic device. A straight razor, the kind the barber honed on a leather strop, that was what they expected to be shaved with.

It turned out there was a wholesaler on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn who sold barber supplies, including straight razors. He identified the razor as one made in Solingen, Germany, by a firm that had gone out of business (or at least stopped producing razors) some twenty years ago. That didn’t make the razor an antique, just an old razor, and, since straight razors didn’t change much from one decade to the next, it was possible that there were still retailers who had similar razors in stock. It was also very possible that some local barbers, who kept their razors for a lifetime, had razors like this one.

The wholesaler’s own retail accounts included two not far from the perpetrator’s field of operations. Both were drugstores, and both carried a wide line of homeopathic remedies and old-fashioned devices. One was on Third Avenue at Nineteenth Street, the other on Sixth Avenue in the Village, between Eighth and Ninth Streets.

Neither had sold a straight razor to anyone within the past month.

Someone thought of thrift shops. There were quite a few in the immediate area, and two police officers worked their way down the list, finding quite a few that had a straight razor or two for sale, but none that had actually sold one. Then, in the Salvation Army store on Eighth Avenue, a woman with mean little eyes in an otherwise grandmotherly face said that no one had bought a straight razor from her, but one man had stolen one.

“If I’d seen him,” she said, “I might have stopped him on his way out and suggested he pay for it. Or perhaps not. After all, he was armed, wasn’t he? Though I can’t say he looked terribly dangerous.”

If she’d seen him? If she hadn’t seen him, how did she know he’d taken the razor? How did she know whether or not he looked dangerous?

“The security camera. We have two of them and they’re running all the time while we’re open. At the end of the day I review the tapes. Most of the time there’s nothing to look at, you can fast-forward through vast stretches of nothingness, but I’ll slow it down when I see anybody behaving furtively. Or quite boldly—

they’re bold as brass, some of them.”

It was useful to review the tape in order to keep shoplifters from returning. When an offender turned up after he’d been caught on tape, he was simply turned away at the door, which was safer all around than trying to stop a suspected thief on his way out. No one could sue you for false arrest that way. And the value of the goods stolen was pretty much beside the point; they were all donated, after all, and the few items of real value got snatched up early on by dealers.

And did she by any chance still have the tape of the man pocketing the straight razor?

She did. They had thirty tapes for the two cameras, and rotated them, so that each day’s taping erased what had been recorded two weeks previously. She had to scan several tapes to find the right one, but she was able to go through them at great speed because she knew precisely what she was looking for. When she got there she slowed the tape to normal speed, and the two cops watched over her shoulder as an aging white man wearing a plaid shirt and dark pants picked a razor off a shelf, flicked it open, closed it, flicked it open a second time, rubbed it with his thumb to test it for sharpness, closed it again, looked around casually, and just as casually slipped it in his pocket.