Blood Innocents Read Free

out. He seems to be clean.”
    Darrow nodded. “Nothing funny in his background?”
    â€œNot that we’ve been able to uncover yet. Everything that we know about him is in the file. A few people in the neighborhood of 122nd Street saw a man and a boy around the car, but nobody saw the child’s body put into it. There’s also this: two days before the boy was killed the desk sergeant received an anonymous complaint about noisy kids playing in that same car in the afternoon. For now, that’s it.”
    â€œNot much then,” Darrow said disappointedly.
    â€œNot much,” Reardon agreed, “but there’s never very much in the beginning.”
    â€œSure,” Darrow said, and walked away from Reardon’s desk.
    Reardon turned to Wallace Chesterton. “The next one’s for you.”
    â€œAll right,” Chesterton said.
    Wallace Chesterton was a large, ponderously built man with a fiery temper, a bully who had been formally disciplined several times. He believed that the best way to approach either a witness or a suspect was to assault him, sometimes verbally, sometimes physically. So Reardon gave Chesterton the closest thing he had to a routine gangland killing, because he knew it would probably never be solved. Chesterton would know that too and be less inclined to rough up somebody for nothing.
    â€œThis one is strictly by the book, ” Reardon told him. “A routine gangland rubout. Clean. The victim is a guy named Martin Scali. He was found in a parked car near the East River with one bullet through the back of his head. He had two hundred and thirty-eight dollars in his wallet. He has all kinds of gangland connections. As usual, no witnesses. Nobody heard or saw anything. You’ve got a guy with a bullet in his head and that’s it.”
    Chesterton frowned. “Shit.”
    â€œDo the best you can.” Reardon handed Chesterton the folder. “There’s not much in it.”
    Chesterton shrugged. “Yeah,” he said and stalked out toward the file room.
    Reardon gave his last case of the morning to Ben Whitlock, who was neither young nor exceptionally competent but in whom Reardon continued to sense the old, special calling of the law. Whitlock was incorruptible. He had lived through one Police Department scandal after another and had always emerged untouched.
    â€œI guess the last one’s for you, Ben,” Reardon said with a slight smile.
    â€œWhy are they pulling you off all these cases, John?” Whitlock asked.
    â€œThey’re pulling me off more than these cases,” Reardon said. “They’re pulling me off all my cases.”
    â€œWhy are they doing that?”
    â€œBecause they want me to handle that deer killing in the zoo. Over in Central Park.”
    â€œThat’s not a homicide.” Whitlock looked at Reardon suspiciously. “What the fuck is all this about?”
    â€œYou mean why are those deer so important?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWell, it’s not the deer. It’s who they belonged to.”
    â€œThey were just in the zoo, right?”
    â€œThey were given to the zoo by Wallace Van Allen.”
    Whitlock nodded. “I get it,” he said. “Yeah, that explains it. Some fat cat gets his deer killed, so everyone downtown goes into a panic.”
    â€œThat’s about it.” Reardon admitted. He felt a stir of respect for Whitlock, his old colleague, who had triumphed for so long against internal politics and external corruption, like an old mastiff, guardian of the gate, who eats from no man’s hand. “I’m sorry we didn’t work together more all these years.”
    â€œYeah, me too,” Whitlock said, “but that’s the way it is.”
    â€œMaybe we’ll get a case together someday yet.”
    â€œMaybe. But not likely. They keep assigning me new partners every year or so. It’s always been like that. Ever since I