1975 - Night of the Juggler Read Online Free PDF Page B

correspondence.
    Luther Boyd made himself a mild scotch with soda and packed a pipe from a soft leather tobacco pouch. Then he set the tape in its spool, snapped the switch, and watched it begin to spin, his expression hard and thoughtful.
     

Chapter 2
    The New York police department was not unaware of Gus Soltik. Nor was it unaware of the “lessons” which he had administered to four young girls on four successive years, precisely in the middle of the month of October.
    Four in a row, Lieutenant Vincent “Gypsy” Tonnelli was thinking, and this is October, and tomorrow is the fifteenth, and would they nail the psycho bastard then, or would the Juggler make it five in a row? . . .
    They didn’t know Gus Soltik’s name, and they had only a vague description of him, but they knew certain areas of his MO very well indeed.
    The murderer who in the past four years had abducted, mutilated, raped, and then slashed the throats of four young girls in the borough of Manhattan was known to the police as the Juggler because that was the final dreadful gesture in his pattern, a knife ripped across tender jugular veins.
    These thoughts were in Lieutenant Tonnelli’s mind as he strode along the corridor of a precinct in the upper Sixties of Manhattan.
    This was headquarters of the task force which had been assigned to Lieutenant Tonnelli two months earlier by Assistant Chief of Detectives Walter Greene, a graying veteran with a rasping voice and a head shaped like an artillery projectile. Tonnelli’s second unit was stationed at the 13th Precinct on the East Side and was under the command of Detective Sergeant Michael “Rusty” Boyle.
    In each unit of Lieutenant Tonnelli’s task force were two switchboard operators and four detectives, second grade. At headquarters, which was located in the 19th Precinct on East Sixty-seventh Street, were Detectives Clem Scott, Jim Taylor, August Brohan, and Carmine Garbalotto. On the switchboards were Patrolmen Jules Mackay and August Sokolsky. Collating and indexing the steadily mounting piles of paperwork were two uniformed policewomen, Doris Polk and Rachel Skinner.
    In Detective Sergeant Rusty Boyle’s command in the 13th Precinct on East Twenty-first Street were Detectives Miles Tebbet, Jason Corbell, Roger Fee, and Ray Karp. On the switchboard were Patrolmen Joe Knapp and Ed Maurer, and the flow of files and reports was in the competent hands of Patrolwomen Alice Halzer and Melissa Foreberg.
    Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli was short and stocky, with a huge chest and heavily muscled arms so thick that he couldn’t wear jackets or sports coats from a rack, but had to have them fashioned by a tailor.
    Since he was forced to spend considerable money on his clothes, he had over the years cultivated a certain sartorial elegance; in fact, the lieutenant looked like a prosperous broker with a subdued but excellent sense of fashion rather than a very tough and, in this particular city, a nearly legendary cop.
    A bachelor, Lieutenant Tonnelli lived in a modest apartment in the East Thirties and indulged himself in very few extravagances beyond his taste for well-made clothing. His father and mother were dead, and his only living relative was his sister, Adela, who was married to a Greek used-car dealer in Baltimore. She had some kids, he knew, but they didn’t see each other anymore, didn’t even exchange Christmas cards.
    Gypsy Tonnelli’s features were usually composed in a deceptively pleasant smile. His eyes were dark brown, and his lips were full and red. A scar coursed from his left temple to the point of his jaw, a vivid cicatrice which he had acquired while subduing a carload of unruly blacks during one of the riots in the late sixties. Lieutenant Tonnelli had once been so ashamed of the scar that he had grown a beard to conceal it. But to his consternation the beard, unlike his coal-black hair, had emerged in an embarrassing pepper-and-salt mixture.
    Preferring the scar to a prematurely