Habit of Fear Read Online Free PDF Page B

honor and cherish for as long as love remained. Okay. No broken promises. Their witnesses had been Frances and Tony Alexander.
    She unfolded the Certificate of Live Birth. She had been born Julie Anne Richards in Doctors’ Hospital in New York City. Her mother’s name was Katherine Anne Richards, her age twenty-eight. She had been born in Illinois, and at the time of Julie’s birth was living at the 499 East 91st Street address. The father’s name was Thomas Francis Mooney, age twenty, born in Ireland, and there was a notation: “whereabouts unknown.” The name of the informant was Allan Burlingame; relation to the infant: family friend. The certifier was George Stephen Macready, M.D.
    Whereabouts unknown. There had to have been a time when his whereabouts were known. To have had a marriage annulled—if that was what really happened; and if so, why didn’t a notation to that effect show on the birth certificate instead of “whereabouts unknown”? For the marriage to have been annulled it had to have occurred in the first place. In other words, there must be a record of it somewhere. She thought back to the preliminaries of her and Jeff’s marriage … the blood tests, the application for the marriage license three days later … the forms, the names of parents, Richards and Mooney. A comedy team. But not very funny.

SIX
    T HE SEX CRIME UNIT DETECTIVES , Al Beamis and Mabel Hadley, came to see her every few days. This time they were accompanied by Detective Dominic Russo, a precinct man Julie had known since her first days in the shop. She thought his inclusion was intended to put more pressure on her; the police were not satisfied that she had wrung everything out of her memory that she could. They were probably right. She had recalled that neither man wore rings, that they smelled of stale beer and sweat, and one of them of medicine and some kind of machine oil or grease. She’d smelled vomit. Her memory was strong on smells, weak on what she saw. She didn’t think the taller man was more than five foot ten; they had ordinary New York accents, no racial intonation that she could detect. More, more, the detectives always wanted more. She resented the repeated questioning. If they were making progress, they were not sharing the information with her.
    Detective Russo lived on the West Side only a few blocks from where he had grown up—five minutes’ walk from the shop and not much farther, coming from the other direction, from the building site where the attack had occurred. He was a rarity among modern urban police, a neighborhood cop. Solid and stocky, he seated himself gingerly in one of the director’s chairs at the round table in Julie’s living room. The others followed suit. Russo looked with solemn eyes at the table’s one ornament, the large crystal ball, no doubt remembering his early encounter with Julie at this address. His wife was a believer in the occult. “Mrs. Russo sends regards,” he said.
    Mrs. Russo was also a friend of Mary Ryan, another neighborhood character, so that Julie had to anticipate that old lady’s imminent arrival. She’d expected her before then. Loaded with soda bread and sympathy.
    It was all so goddamned neighborly.
    “I don’t like to wait until the bastards strike again,” Detective Beamis said, getting the interrogation under way.
    “Am I supposed to have been their first victim?” She tried to keep the hostility out of her voice.
    “We can’t be sure they’ve always played as a team,” Beamis said.
    “That’s some game they’re playing, sir.” The hostility was out in the open.
    “Detective Beamis’s way of speaking,” Hadley explained softly. She was a good-looking, forthright young woman. “It’s not unique that two men team up that way, but most rapists are loners. What was their attitude toward one another?”
    “Cooperative.”
    “Be a little more specific, can’t you, Mrs. Hayes?” she pleaded.
    But Julie’s control broke. “What do