Reversible Error Read online

  The rapist studied the woman with growing interest and excitement. She was wearing a sleeveless jersey dress in some silvery shade, which showed off the slendemess of her back and her lean arms. He could see the delicate bones of her cervical vertebrae through the cloth and above it, under her short dark hair.

  Her hair was glossy and reflected the strobe lights from the dance floor. There was an empty space at the bar next to her, and he went over and stood in it. He ordered a drink. She pulled a cigarette out of her purse and he snapped a lighter under it. Their eyes met as she puffed, and he smiled his most harmless smile and said, “That was quite a performance. You really scorched that guy.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, the asshole! My girlfriend talked me into coming here. What a pit!”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “I never come here either. I was supposed to meet somebody here, but she never showed. You’re right, it’s a slime joint. Amazing, in a way—all these supposedly civilized young adults. Get them in a place like this and they turn into cavemen. And women.”

  “And women, right. I should know. I haven’t screamed at anyone like that in years.” She looked at him with more interest. She saw an ordinary but not unpleasant face: dark eyes, a good tan, a long bumpy nose, dark hair growing low on the forehead and swept back in an old-fashioned ducktail. He wore a nice silk cable-knit over an open white oxford shirt, tan slacks, and tasseled loafers without socks.

  “It looked OK to me,” he said. “The slob was probably asking for it.”

  On the basis of sympathy thus established, the two of them exchanged names and talked congenially for twenty minutes, about how unlike the unhappy people in this bar they both were, about their jobs, their likes (her: Jamaica; him: underwater photography) and dislikes (her: the arrogant; him: the phony), their apartments, how they were both Italian, how rotten the city was to live in.

  Much of what she told him was true. She was a naturally frank person and was attracted in a cautious way to this well-built, good-looking young man, who seemed mannerly, open, and pleasant. Nice eyes, she thought. Well-dressed. No gold chains, seems smart.

  Everything he had told her about himself was a lie.

  She waited for him to make his move, but here she was surprised, and, she had to admit, disappointed. He looked at his watch and gulped the remains of his gin and tonic. “Damn, I’ve got to go to work.”

  “This late?”

  He stood up and smiled ruefully. “Yeah, like I said, I’m a film editor at ABC. If you want to see film on Good Morning America tomorrow, I’ve got to run.”

  “Well, it was nice talking to you,” she said.

  “Yeah …” He paused, shuffled his feet shyly. “I was wondering—maybe we could get together sometime. I’ll buy you some spaghetti.”

  She laughed. “Anything but,” she said, and gave him her number.

  The girl lay curled up on the front seat of the car, a white ’68 Pontiac, leaning against the door, her left hand drawn protectively up to her face. Except for the blood and the smell, she might have been sleeping next to Daddy on a long car trip.

  “When did you find her?” Art Dugman asked the patrol officer.

  “About seven-thirty this morning,” the young cop replied. “A trucker spotted the car when he came in to make a delivery and called it in. When we got here, we saw it was the girl in your citywide, and we called you.”

  The killer had stashed his car on one of the short streets that lead to the Hudson River just south of the Thirtieth Street Terminal. There were truckers all around, standing impatiently beside their rigs, barred from the loading docks by the police vehicles and the portable barriers that had been set up around the crime scene. The crime-scene-unit people were poking through the car, taking photographs, and collecting anything that looked like evidence. Dugman doubted they would find much.

  After speaking briefly to the medical examiner at the scene, he walked back to his own car. Maus was in the front seat, talking to someone on the police radio. He hung up the receiver and said, “The car’s stolen. Belongs to a Hector Baldwin, lives up on St. Nick. He parked it at six-thirty last night and missed it when he wanted to go to work this morning. What’s it look like?”

  Dugman leaned against the car and chewed his lip. What did it look like? From one angle, another dead whore down by the docks. Not that unusual. Whores went into cars all the time, worked in cars. There was an extensive trade in quick hose jobs for businessmen on the way home. Sometimes they got unlucky, got picked up by a John whose particular fancy was not on any girl’s menu.

  “You think it was Slo Mo?” Maus asked.

  Dugman looked up. “No. Slo Mo didn’t have no cause to kill this girl, and if he did, he wouldn’t have stole no car in Harlem to shoot her in.”

  “So what, then? A perv? Robbery?”

  “Possible, but I don’t think so. There’s something too clean about it. Girl was shot in the head point-blank with a small-caliber weapon. She’s fully dressed, or as dressed as she ever got, with no real obvious marks on her besides the shot to the head. It don’t sing perv, do it?”

  Maus shrugged. “The fuck should I know? I’m not a perv. The robbery angle any better?”

  Dugman shook his head. “It sucks too. Her bag’s missing, yeah, but I been trying to think of another case where a guy robbed a whore, killed her, and left her in the car. It doesn’t figure. Why not dump her and drive away? It also means he needs another car. What’s he gonna do, walk back from the river at night? Call a cab?”

  Maus considered these questions for a moment. He knew Dugman had already figured it out, was waiting for Maus to catch up. Dugman always did this, would always diddle with him like that. Maus didn’t mind playing the straight man. Maus thought Dugman was the best detective in the city, and understood that this was part of his own education. Playing the honky fool was the tuition.

  Maus said slowly, “You’re saying like maybe it was a … a hit—not just any whore, but this one, because … because we wanted to talk to her on the other thing?”

  Dugman’s pouchy face broke into a broad smile. “Yeah! That’s thinking, Maus!” He poked his head into the back of the car, where Jeffers sat calmly reading the News. “You hear that, Mack? I told you we get a white boy on the squad, we start solvin’ some crime!”

  Jeffers looked up from his paper. “He can’t dance, though.”

  “I can too!” said Maus indignantly.

  “Shit, you can,” responded Jeffers. “It took me six months to teach you to clap on the off beat.”

  Dugman raised his hands, palms out. “Brothers,” he said, his voice assuming orotund tones, “this is not a time to be confusin’ ourselves with racial disharmony, discord, and dissensions. Rather, it is a time to rededicate and remotivate our own selves to the cause.”

  Jeffers said, “Hear him tell it!”

  Maus said, “Yes, Lord!”

  Dugman climbed into the car and slammed the door. “And what is our cause, brothers?”

  “Say it out!” said Jeffers.

  “Let us hear it!” said Maus.

  “It is to investigate and invigilate. It is to detect and suspect. It is to bring to the bar of justice lowlife motherfuckers of every description, but especially the lowlife motherfucker responsible for the heinous crime which we got before us now.”

  “That the truth!” said Jeffers.

  “Hear his word!” said Maus.

  “Because he has not only done fuck’ with the citizens; because he has not only done fuck’ with the po-lice; but he done have the temerity to fuck with the Trio, and therefo’ he has fuck with the wrong dudes! Mr. Driver, take us to the Deuce!”

  “A-men!” said Maus, and cranked the engine to a roar.

  “I wasn’t going to come in,” said the dark young woman to Marlene Ciampi. “I figured, what the hell, I was stupid, I learned my lesson. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and all that, I figured I was lucky not to be dead. But, like, I couldn’t just leave it. I started jumping at shad
ows, being nervous on the street. My sleep is shot. I can’t work.

  “So I went to the cops. It turns out, if you don’t go right away, you might as well not go at all, because you washed the evidence away and also they figure if you waited days, how bad could it be? But they gave me your name down at the precinct, so I figured it was worth a shot and, so …”

  Her voiced trailed off. Marlene looked at the card she was filling out. Name: Jo Anne Caputo, West Village address, worked at NYU, age twenty-six, date of incident, description of assailant. Jo Anne had been explaining, without being asked, why she had delayed a week before reporting the rape. It was a familiar reaction, and one that added an additional burden to the prosecution of such cases.

  Marlene said, “OK, Ms. Caputo, what I want you to do now is tell me about the incident in as much detail as you can remember.”

  Caputo took a deep breath. “The incident … OK. I met this guy two weeks ago this coming Saturday, June 10, in a bar called Adam’s. It’s in SoHo, I don’t know the exact address …”

  “That’s OK, I know it.”

  “He seemed OK—calm, decent; said his name was Bob Graziano. Didn’t put any heavy moves on me. I gave him my number.

  “He called me a couple of days later, nice conversation, asked me for a date for the next Saturday, the seventeenth, for dinner and a show. I said OK.

  “He showed up around eight. I ask him in, offer him a drink. Right away I notice something different about him—he’s more nervous, more agitated. I sat down on my couch, he’s still pacing back and forth, rattling ice cubes. So I get up and say something about shouldn’t we be going, and he grabs me.

  “I thought it was a joke for a second there, like he was parodying a horny guy. But then he started really mauling me, squeezing my breasts, and trying to grab my crotch. I managed to push him away. But when I saw his face was when I really got scared.

  “I said to myself, ‘JoAnne, you have really done it this time.’ I began shouting at him, that he was an asshole, that I wanted him out of there right now, and like that. That’s when he pulled out the knife.”

  “Describe it, please.”

  “A regular knife, like a kitchen carving knife.”

  “Not a hunting knife or a switchblade?”

  “No, I don’t think so. A regular carving knife, about eight or ten inches long, and shiny.”

  “All right, go ahead. What happened then? And please try to remember his exact words, if you can.”

  Caputo’s voice became lower and more strained. “He told me to take my clothes off. ‘Strip, cunt! Now!’ is what he said. ‘I want to see that precious cunt!’ I said, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’ And he said, I forget what, something about don’t make me angry, and I’ll do anything I want to you—he got real crazy then, so I started taking my clothes off.

  “When I was naked, he told me to sit on the couch and keep my mouth shut. He couldn’t stand women running off at the mouth, he said. Cunt bullshit, he called it. Then he picked my panty hose up and sort of played with it for a minute, rubbing it on his face. I’m thinking, this is a real fruitcake, all the time I was sitting there frozen, part of my mind was clear as a bell, observing it, looking for a way to make a break.

  “Then he came over and wrapped the panty hose around my head, the seat part, and knotted the legs around my neck, tight, but not enough to cut off the air. Just to hold them on. I thought, this is it, he’s going to strangle me.

  “But he backed away and said, ‘Spread your legs and show me your cunt! Wider, wider! So I did. He made me pull my knees way up. Then he must have bent over, because the next thing I felt was the knife poking around down there, between my legs.”

  “Did he cut you?” Marlene asked as calmly as she could.

  “No, he just poked around the … area, just hard enough not to break the skin. Look, could I have a drink of water? Talking about this, my throat is clamping up.”

  Marlene poured a paper cup of water from the carafe on her desk. After the woman had drunk it down, she continued.

  “While he was doing this he was insulting and threatening me, like saying stuff like, ‘I should cut it out, bitch,’ and ‘I ought to fuck you with this, you whore.’ He was really working himself up. I was concentrating on not wetting myself, that’s how scared I was.

  “Then he raped me. It hurt like crazy but at least it was over fast. He lasted about eight seconds. Then he stood up and grabbed my head and rubbed his genitals on the panty hose. That was it. He left.”

  “He didn’t say anything as he left?”

  “He might have. I can’t remember.”

  “I don’t guess you kept the panty hose.”

  “No, that was a dumb move, I realize it now. But I wasn’t thinking of that at the moment. I buried them in the trash and took a shower for about an hour and a half. And then took a bunch of Valium. Which was another dumb move. I should have just gone down to the emergency room and had them take a sample. Now I know, but I, um … but I’d never been raped before.”

  Caputo sat silently for a moment, taking deep breaths. Tears oozed slowly from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Marlene passed her a box of tissues, without comment. She completed her card and resisted the temptation to glance at her watch; she was due in court in a few minutes, but something was nagging at her mind and she didn’t want to let it go.

  She slid one of her shoeboxes across the desk. What was that woman’s name? Feldman? Rosenberg? She started shuffling through the files, muttering and cursing quietly.

  “What are you doing?” asked JoAnne Caputo.

  “Oh, sorry. It just occurred to me that your rapist may have done it before—that trick with the panty hose. I had a woman in here a couple of weeks ago with a similar story, but I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten her name. I have them filed by name, and there are over two thousand.”

  Caputo leaned forward. “You don’t have them cross-indexed?”

  Marlene shook her head. “No, see, this is strictly amateur hour. It’s a shoebox with cards. I’ve been trying to get some better analysis, but there’s all kinds of problems …” Now Marlene did look at her watch. Almost out of time.

  “Let me see the card,” said Caputo.

  Marlene passed it across the desk and Caputo read both sides. “I see the problem. A lot of the key information is in text fields—what he said, what he did. You’d have to input the whole field as text and then do a string search subroutine to pull matches out. SPSS could handle it, or you could write a little Fortran program.”

  “You know about this stuff?” Marlene asked hopefully.

  “It’s what I do. I told you I worked at NYU. I’m in social stat.”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” said Marlene. “Would it be possible … ?”

  “Would it help to find that bastard?”

  “Girl, it’s about the only way there is.”

  “OK, give me the boxes. I’ll start right away.”

  “You can do it? Just like that?”

  “No,” said Caputo, her face tightening. “I’ll have to steal and lie and forge my boss’s signature and do nothing else for the next week or so, but there’s nothing much else I feel like doing anyway. I’ll get back to you in a couple of days.”

  Pepper Soames’s club, on the old part of 125th where it curves down to the river, was one of the last of the old-time Harlem jazz clubs. It was a relic of the days, thirty years past, when the audience for real jazz was small, hip, and almost entirely black, before stereo, heroin, integration, or rock and roll.

  Art Dugman walked into Pepper’s around midnight, took a table in the nearly empty room, ordered a J&B on the rocks, and watched his boss, Detective Lieutenant Clay Fulton, finish his set. Fulton was playing keyboard in a trio: a hotshot kid alto player and an elderly man on bass. Dugman thought they were pretty good, but he didn’t know anything about jazz.

  After they finished playing, Fulton came over to Dugman’s table and sat down. He was holding a glass of what Du
gman knew was club soda. Fulton didn’t drink anymore.

  Fulton said, “Why ain’t you home, Dugman? Streets are dangerous this time of night.”

  “You said report to you. I’m reporting.”

  “So cop a squat, Jack. What’s happening on the dealer murders?”

  “Let me spin it out for you, just like we got it. See if you come up with the same bad thoughts I did.”

  “Bad thoughts?” said Fulton.

  “Just listen up, Loo,” said Dugman, and quickly recited what he and his team had learned since the night of Larue Clarry’s murder: the details of the killing itself, the evidence from Clarry’s apartment, their interrogation of Slo Mo, and the murder of what ought to have been their best witness, the prostitute Haze.

  “Whores get killed all the time,” said Fulton after a thoughtful pause.

  “Yeah, but look here, we know who did it,” said Dugman. Some of the girls on Haze’s stroll saw Haze getting into a car with a black man about one-thirty this morning. The M.E. says she was killed between two and three the same morning. Nobody ever saw her alive again.”

  “You got a good make on the guy from that?”

  “No, we had to shake the place up a little.”

  Fulton grunted. “Am I gonna have trouble on this?” Fulton understood what happened when the King Cole Trio shook the place up a little. People came flying headfirst out of shooting galleries. People found themselves hanging by their ankles from rooftop parapets. TV sets fell from windows. Normal trade shut down at the public drug markets and the places where stolen goods changed hands. The underworld got sick, heaved its belly, and spewed forth a sacrifice.

  “No trouble,” said Dugman, “we just hustled the mutts. Anyhow, a junkie name of Laxton shook out. Says he saw the whole thing.”