A Long Line of Dead Men

"No," I said. "I know most of it, except for the details, and I can look at the notes later. What I want to know-"

"You want to know if the file's still open, right? The answer's yes. The guys from the One-oh picked up a couple of Uhl's acquaintances but their stories checked out. Every once in a while they collar a perp who's been doing gay men this way, picking up tricks in the leather bars on West Street and giving them more excitement than they wanted, and they trot out all their open files with a similar MO and try them on for size. So far Carl Uhl's still an orphan. Why? What do you know that the One-oh doesn't?"

"Not a thing," I said. "Is that how the killer got to Uhl? He picked him up on West Street?"

"Nobody knows. Maybe he came down the chimney carrying his bag of tricks. As far as finding out who he is, that's not gonna happen. Unless he gets picked up for doing it again, and he won't, because you know what? Odds are he's dead."

"How do you figure that?"

"How do I figure it? I figure that twelve years ago he was engaging in high-risk sexual behavior at a time when AIDS was spreading through the bathhouses and backroom bars, but before anybody knew what it was, let alone gave the first thought to precautions. Guy who did Uhl, he probably killed fifty times as many people by giving them the virus as he ever did with his little knife, and when he was done spreading it around he went and died of it himself."

"Did he leave semen behind?"

"No, he took it home in a doggie bag." He picked up the report and scanned it. "Semen traces on victim's abdomen, it says here. Probably Uhl's. His blood type, anyway. Of course this was before DNA testing. Forensics has come a long way, my friend."

"It certainly has."

"And that's why nobody gets away with murder anymore. Where'd that question come from, did he leave semen behind? What have you got?"

"Nothing," I said. "I just wondered if there was any concrete evidence that they'd had sexual relations."

"Well, it doesn't sound as though they were talking about the weather. With these leather boys, though, what they call sex might not be what you and I would call sex. One case I had, these two boys had a relationship, and how they worked it, the one would come over to the other's apartment and be told to strip naked and clean the toilet. Not with his tongue or anything, just grab a can of Comet and a roll of paper towels and clean the toilet. Meanwhile the other one sat in the living room watching Oprah. who cleaned it some verbal abuse and send him packing. It'd be like you or I having the cleaning lady come, an' when she's done instead of paying her you tell her she's a stupid cunt and to get the hell out."

"I wouldn't dare," I said. "It was bad enough the time I asked her to do the windows."

"As far as Uhl's concerned," he said, "somebody had sex, because the semen on Uhl's belly didn't just grow there. Either it's his semen because he had a good time before his friend got serious with the knife, or it was the killer's and he had the same blood type. Does it make a difference?"

"Not to me," I allowed.

"Then can we move on? Six years later, 1987, and we've got Boyd and Diana Shipton murdered in their loft downtown on Hubert Street. Two theories on that one. One's they walked in on a burglary in progress."

"That was my impression from the news coverage."

"Well, there were things the press wasn't told. The brutality of the crime suggested a more personal motive."

"He was beaten to death, she was raped and strangled."

"He was beaten, but not just to death. His head was mashed to a pulp, the skull fractured beyond restoration, the face completely unrecognizable."

"But it was definitely him."

"Yeah, they had fingerprint ID, but what prompts a question like that?"

"Nothing in particular. When somebody tells me a corpse's face is completely unrecognizable, the first question that comes to mind-"

"Yeah, I see what you mean. But there's no question it was him. As to the wife, she was garroted with a strip of wire. Her head turned purple and swelled up like a volleyball. As for the rape, well, I don't know if you'd call it that, but it was certainly a violation. She had a fireplace poker thrust up her vagina and well into the abdomen."

"Jesus."

"She was already dead when it took place, if that makes a difference. The whole bit with the poker was withheld from the press for obvious reasons, but even if they had it they couldn't have printed it. Though nowadays I'm not so sure anymore."

"Nowadays they'll print anything."

"Did the news stories say that some of the paintings were vandalized? What they didn't let out was that they'd been defaced with satanic symbols. The consensus of some experts- " he rolled his eyes "- is that these were not the work of authentic satanists. I suppose an authentic satanist would have done something horrible to the Shiptons, whereas these fake satanists were just out to have some innocent fun."

"How many killers?"

"Best guess seems to be two or three."

"Could one person have done it unassisted?"

"You can't rule it out," he said. "The cops in East Hampton had somebody they liked for it, a local contractor who had been having an affair with Mrs. Shipton, or else it was the other way around, Boyd was dicking the guy's wife. It could have been done by one person acting alone, lying in wait. One blow to the skull knocks Boyd out, then he gets the wire around her neck and kills her, then he pulps Boyd's head, and finally he does his stupid pet trick with the fireplace poker."

"Do they still like the contractor?"

"No, his alibi was solid, you couldn't knock it down. There was a ton of theories. The guy was a prominent artist, the wife was a former ballet dancer, they had pots of money, the loft downtown, the beach house in East Hampton, they hung out with a moneyed and talented crowd. What does that suggest to you?"

"I don't know. Cocaine?"

"A big play in the media and a ton of cops assigned, both here and out on the island, that's what I was getting at. Cocaine? I suppose they had a toot now and then, but if there was a major drug element in the case I never heard about it, and the guy I talked to yesterday didn't mention it. Why?"

"No reason. I know there hasn't been an arrest, but do they think they know who did it?"

He shook his head. "Not a clue," he said. "Well, plenty of clues, but none of them led anywhere. Why? What does your snitch say?"

"What snitch?"

"Your snitch, whoever's got you barking up four different trees. Who does he like for the Shiptons?"

"I don't have a snitch, Joe."

He looked at me. Two desks away, Bellamy picked a burning cigarette from the ashtray and stubbed it out. "Hey," the kid with the goatee said. "I wasn't done with that, man." Bellamy told the kid he was lucky he hadn't ground it out on his forehead.

Durkin said, "All right, we'll let it pass for now. Next up is four years ago, 1989, Thomas P. Cloonan. Nice decent Irish fellow, driving a cab, trying to put food on his table. Nobody tied him up, nobody jerked him off, and nobody shoved a poker up his ass. I'll tell you, I'm surprised a guy like yourself's got any interest in him at all."

* * *

According to his log sheet, Tom Cloonan had picked up the last fare of his life at 10:35 on a Tuesday night. He'd just dropped a fare at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, and he made his pickup a few blocks downtown, across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral. The destination he entered on the sheet was Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, up in Washington Heights.

It was impossible to know if he got there. At approximately 12:15, acting on information received through an anonymous phone tip, a radio car from the Thirty-fourth Precinct found Cloonan's taxi parked next to a fire hydrant on Audubon Avenue at 174th Street. Cloonan, fifty-four, was slumped behind the wheel with bullet wounds in the head and neck. He was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics.

"Two shots fired at close range, weapon was a nine-mil, and death was instantaneous or close to it. Wallet was missing, coin changer was missing, murder weapon was not left at the scene- no surprise there- and the only question is did the shooter ride all the way up from Saint Paddy's with him or did he drop his long-haul at Columbia Presbyterian and make another pickup right on the spot that he never had a chance to log in? And the answer is who cares, because the case is closed and the shooter's doing twenty-to-life in Attica."

The surprise must have showed in my face, because he answered my next question before I could ask it.

"He didn't go away for Cloonan," he said. "What happened, there was a rash of these in '90 and '91, gypsy cab drivers shot in Harlem or the Bronx, some Third World part of the city. There was a task force formed consisting of cops from five different precincts in the Bronx and upper Manhattan, and they set out a string of decoys and came up with Eldoniah Mims. A Norwegian kid, obviously."

"Well, they've always been a race of troublemakers."

"I know, them and the fucking Estonians. They had Mims flat-footed for half a dozen killings, and they took the most rock-solid case to trial, one where they had physical and eyewitness evidence. The plea they offered him, he could cop to six counts of second-degree murder, and in return they'd let him serve the sentences concurrently."

"Very generous."

"So he had to turn it down, and the case they brought was a Manhattan killing, so you didn't get one of those Bronx juries determined to avenge three hundred years of racist oppression. The judge and jury both did the right thing, and Eldoniah's got to do twenty upstate before he's eligible for parole, and if he ever gets out they can try him for some of the other cabbies he killed, the useless little son of a bitch."

"Could they try him for Cloonan?"

"He'd be way down at the bottom of the list. You know, you get someone dead to rights like that, you want to close whatever files you can."

"But you don't know that he did it."

"I don't know zip, my friend, because all of this happened up in Washington Heights and the fucking Bronx, so what do I know? What I hear, which isn't the same thing, is nobody's all that sure Mims did Cloonan, but what's it hurt to let him take the weight until somebody better comes along?"

"You said gypsy cabs," I said. "If Cloonan was picking up on Fifth Avenue, wouldn't he have been driving a metered taxi?"

He nodded. "He was in a Yellow and the rest were gypsies. He was also shot with a nine-mil and the others with twenty-twos. Not all the same gun, different guns, but all the same caliber."

"Sounds as though they were reaching some to hang it on Mims."

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "Anyway, there were similarities. They were all driving cabs and they all wound up dead."

"Of course Mims said he didn't do it."

"Mims said he didn't do anything. If Mims had gone to confession, all he'd have been able to come up with was impure thoughts and taking the Lord's name in vain. Matt, it's like muggings and burglaries. The typical mutt, by the time you land on him he's gotten away with it fifty times running. So you clear fifty could-bes and tie them to his ass. It averages out, and if you don't do it your clearance rate looks like shit."