Good Day to Die (3 page)

“Bouton. Vanessa Bouton. You
are
Roland Means.”

“That’s me.”

“Let’s find some chairs.”

She led me out of the lab and into Sergeant Flynn’s office. Flynn was nowhere to be found, the usual case in the late afternoon when he invariably found some excuse to get out of the lab and into a bar.

“Sit down, Detective.”

I sat, noting that Vanessa Bouton’s back was as straight and unyielding in a chair as it had been when she stood.

“How long have you been a police officer, Detective?” Her gaze had lost its former puzzlement. Now, her eyes were hard and piercing. As befits a ranking officer addressing a piece of shit.

“A little over eighteen years.” I kept my voice casual. Hoping that whatever she wanted would lead me out of the ballistic wilderness in which I’d been wandering.

“And how long have you been a detective?”

“Nine years.” The gold shield had been my goal even before I took the entrance exam.

“It didn’t take you long to get into trouble.”

“Trouble, Captain?”

“Don’t jerk me off, Means. I have neither the time nor the temperament for bullshit.”

Was the profanity her way of announcing that she wasn’t a tight-assed, by-the-books bureaucrat? I’d have bet my left testicle that she’d gotten off the streets at the first opportunity. That she wouldn’t know how to track a dead junkie through the morgue. That she hadn’t made an arrest in ten years unless she’d stolen it from another cop.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I insisted. “I’ve got three commendations and no reprimands. In 1989, I was up for Detective of the Year.” I have to admit, I smiled when I said it.

Bouton continued to stare at me for a moment. Her features, taken apart from her attitude, were soft. Broad nose, full lips, round cheeks, large liquid eyes. In another lifetime, she might have been motherly. In this lifetime, she was determined to be less sympathetic than a drill sergeant with athlete’s foot.

“You
killed
a man.”

“A man? Don’t you mean a
mutt?
As far as I know, the job doesn’t punish cops for killing dogs. Especially dogs with guns in their hands.”

“You killed him with a knife.”

The problem was that I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. The facts had been established by an automatic review board that kicks in whenever there’s a civilian death. I’d confronted a pimp and he’d put a gun against my chest. Being as my arms were up in the air at the time, the only weapon available to me was a plastic knife, a dagger, that I kept in my sleeve. It was the best defensive knife I ever owned, and I was more than a little pissed when the review board kept it. I’d never seen a plastic knife before I took that one off a street junkie. It was virtually weightless, yet sharp enough to cut circles in a sheet of newspaper. A perfect little double-edged dagger that I miss to this very day.

The pimp should have killed me on the spot. (God knows he had plenty of reason; I’d been in his face for months.) But he didn’t pull the trigger right away. What he did was indulge his ego, telling me that I was a piece of shit he had to scrape off his shoe. What I did was grab the knife with the fingers of my right hand, then sweep the gun aside with my left hand while I dragged the blade across his throat. He stood there for a moment, pumping blood all over my Evan Picone jacket, then dropped like a rock. Leaving, I’m happy to say, his Glock 9mm in my hand.

(I’m not trying to make myself out to be a hero. There was no risk at all. The asshole had made two mistakes. Not only had he gotten too close, he’d let me make the first move. He could
not
have pulled the trigger before I hit his hand. I had no doubt about it then. I have no doubt about it now. Taking him out amounted to no more than having the confidence to do it without hesitation.)

“What’s the point, Captain? The killing was investigated and I was cleared.”

“The point is that I have to know whether you’re a run-of-the-mill hotdog or a genuine psychotic. The department took you off the streets because it couldn’t make up its mind.”

“You want proof? I can’t give it to you. You want
evidence
on the other hand, take a look at the last ten months. I came into work, on time, every day. I peered through a microscope until my eyes refused to focus. And I never complained.
Never.
I know I’m on probation, Captain. I’m not a fool. But the question I have to ask is if there’s
anything
I can do to redeem myself.”

I let my eyes go hard for a moment, trying to show her a little righteous indignation. Hoping she’d fall for it. The truth, as far as I could see it, was that the NYPD would be much better served by keeping me right where I was. The truth was that I’d never been a team player and never would be. The truth was that what I wanted from the job had very little to do with a paycheck and a pension. I felt like a game warden trying to explain how an out-of-season deer got into his trunk.

“It wasn’t the first time, was it?” Her expression didn’t change. It
refused
to change. She wasn’t going to let me wriggle off the hook until her question was answered. I’ve known any number of ranking officers who pretended to be hard asses because that’s what they thought they were supposed to be. Vanessa Bouton, Captain, New York City Police Department, wasn’t pretending.

“The first time?”

“The first time you
killed
someone. I believe you were still on patrol the first time it happened.”

That one got a genuine smile. “The first time happened long before I joined the department, Captain. In a country called Vietnam. You wanna hear about it?”

“Not especially.”

“Not especially? Listen, you say I’m a hotdog? You say I worked on my own time when I could have been drinking in some cozy cop bar? When I could have been rubbing against some aging cop groupie? I say it was that extra hustle that got me out of uniform. That got me knocked up to grade one. That got me those commendations you don’t wanna talk about. And I’ll tell you something else, Captain. I’ll never be the kind of cop who does his tour and goes home. Never. I’d leave the job first.”

Suddenly I was disgusted. Why was I sucking up to this fatass desk jockey? For Captain Vanessa Bouton, creeping down a dark hallway in some abandoned South Bronx tenement was the cop equivalent of jumping out of a helicopter without a parachute. For me, it was the ultimate superfly dope.

“What do you know about King Thong?”

That got me. I actually burst out laughing, then continued to laugh at Vanessa Bouton’s unchanging expression. I don’t know which one of the tabloids gave that name to New York’s latest serial killer. (At the time, I’d thought it incredibly insensitive, even by New York standards. Then I’d discovered that reporters in the Seattle area had routinely identified Ted Bundy’s victims as Miss March, Miss April, Miss May, and so on.) In any event, King Thong had spent most of last year killing and mutilating male prostitutes. He’d earned his nickname by wrapping his victims’ penises with a narrow strip of leather, a thong, then tying the ends around the victims’ waists in what amounted to a permanent erection. The tabloids and the counterculture weeklies (especially the
Soho Spirit)
had injected a certain bizarre humor into their coverage from the beginning. I suppose the fact that each victim was a homosexual
and
a prostitute entitled them (at least in
their
opinion) to a little license, but the humor had ended abruptly when the
Spirit
published a cartoon depicting the Empire State Building wrapped in a long, leather strip. The caption, “Thong Lives,” had said it all. So had the two thousand protesters who spent the next month picketing the headquarters of the
Spirit.

“Sorry.” I dutifully wiped the smirk off my face. “You caught me by surprise.”

“You always find murder funny, Means?”

“Not always, Captain. But, then, not every murderer gets a name like ‘King Thong.’”

Vanessa Bouton finally managed a smile. A smile and a deep chuckle. “The best part,” she said, “is that we’d decided to hold the leather back. Somebody in the task force leaked it.”

I nodded sympathetically. Detectives regularly hold back details as a way to separate a true confession from the ravings of a maniac. They just as regularly hand information over to their favorite reporters, despite a professed hatred of the media.

“Tell you the truth, Captain, the only thing I know about your serial killer is what I read in the papers.”

And the only thing I wanted to know. Homicides where killer and victim have no prior connection are a cop’s worst nightmare. Where do you begin? Every detective catches his share of professional hits, and I was no exception. After a while, I dreaded them, because I knew I’d never solve one. Not
one.

But I still had to make the rounds. Had to send out whatever evidence I recovered to the labs. Question the locals in search of a witness. File my DD 5’s after every tour. NR, NR, NR. Negative Results. Every inch of the way.

When it comes to serial killers, you can take all that frustration and multiply it ten thousand times. The media pounds the public every day with the simple truth: no suspects, no clues, no nothing. Despite the creation of unimaginable six-hundred-cop task forces that, in turn, create tons of useless paperwork.

“You don’t know
anyone
on the task force? Nobody?”

“I don’t spend my off-duty time with other cops.”

“Off-duty time? My information is that you’re a cop twenty-four hours a day. Is it true that back when you were in uniform, you used to ride the subways looking for muggers to arrest?”

“I used to ride the subways looking for muggers before I became a cop.” I leaned forward, smiling. “Tell ya the truth, Captain, looking for muggers is
why
I became a cop.”

It was her turn to hunch forward on her chair. She kept on coming until her face was a couple of inches from mine. “Listen, you sorry-assed motherfucker, if you think you can intimidate me, you’re sadly mistaken. Now, sit back in that chair and try to use your brain instead of your hormones.”

“I thought that was my line.”

Stalemate. But not altogether unpleasant.

“You like punch lines, Detective?” she asked, ignoring my witty remark.

“Only if I’m not the one getting punched.”

“The King Thong victims were
not
selected at random. They were not serial killings as we understand them. The motivation was not sexual, not the product of a demented psychopathic personality. One of the murders had an everyday, understandable motivation. The rest were committed to cover it up.”

That got my attention. The Thong murders had begun more than a year ago. One killing a month for seven long months, then nothing. The department, in its infinite wisdom, had tried to bury the first three, assigning them to Homicide as if they were routine incidents. Then some cop had leaked the facts to a CBS reporter with close ties to New York’s considerable homosexual community. That considerable community had responded with an organized fury not seen since the heyday of the Vietnam protest era.

And why shouldn’t they? Devastated by a disease called AIDS, subject to attack by roving packs of demented teenagers, how could they view the NYPD’s response as anything but another demonstration of the city’s indifference to their plight? Indifference that was a logical extension of the conventional wisdom that whatever happens to a faggot is part of God’s punishment for a demonstrably evil lifestyle.

For the first few weeks, the crowds at City Hall and Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence, were massive, with large numbers of ordinary citizens as well as a dozen gay advocacy groups in attendance. A serial killer was walking the streets, a predator seeking victims. How could the cops (and, as far as the demonstrators were concerned, the mayor and every other politician) try to cover it up? A year later, months after the killings had suddenly stopped, small groups of demonstrators holding lit candles continued to follow the mayor from one public event to the next.

The NYPD (following a series of carefully orchestrated
mea culpas)
had been forced to go public. The sixteen cops assigned to investigate the first three killings quickly grew to a hundred, then two hundred, then six hundred at the peak of the investigation. A hotline had been set up, the FBI called in, and psychologists galore invited to speculate on the killer’s motivation.

All to no avail. The killings had stopped five months before Vanessa Bouton appeared in my life and the task force, with nothing new to investigate, had begun to wind down.

“What’s the matter, Detective, cat got your tongue? Is the wise guy out of wisdom?” Her grin had broadened considerably.

“I admit you’ve got my complete attention.” I shifted in my seat, trying to get my brain to pursue exactly what this piece of information meant to
me.
“Is that the official position of the NYPD?” I knew it couldn’t be even as I asked the question. If the task force was buying Vanessa Bouton’s theory, it’d be doing its own investigating.

“No, it’s not.” The grin faded as she returned to her formidable former self.

“Does the department know you’re here?”

“Do you think that’s a proper question for a piss-ant detective to put to a captain? You might want to do yourself a favor, Means, and not presume
anything.
Not unless you plan to stay in this lab for the rest of your career.”

She obviously expected a response, but I refused to give her one. The only thing she could do (as she so kindly pointed out) was leave me where I was. I was already being punished.

“What do you know about serial killers?” she asked after a moment.

“They don’t get caught unless they make a mistake.”

“That’s not very much.”

“Look, Captain, the last serial killer we had in New York was the copycat Zodiac killer. He managed to kill one man and wound several others before he disappeared. How many homicides have we had since then? Two thousand? Three thousand?
Five
thousand? Serial killers are big problems for politicians, not cops.”