Death's Witness Read Free Page B

Kim, washed her, and tried to settle her into bed by nine-fifteen. Tom never carried any kind of identification when he ran—his face was still readily recognizable in this city of well-known people—but he did put quarters in a wristband he wore, enough for a telephone call and a bus ride. He refused to carry his cell phone when he ran. “Nothing,” he told her, “is more annoying than the sight of some New Yorker pretending to run and talking into a cell phone at the same time. Me, I can barely chew gum and run.”
    Kim at last settled into sleep shortly before ten. Because her father so frequently worked late at night, she didn’t ask where he was or mention his name. By ten-thirty, Julie was walking from room to room in the apartment. Where’s Tom? He must have twisted an ankle, seen an old friend, helped another runner who had tripped. She looked repeatedly from their high windows at the northern expanses of Central Park. Rows of lights in the park traced the mile-long outline of the reservoir and, in the rest of the P A U L B A T I S T A
    park, the intricate patterns of footpaths and roadways. Glistening jewels on a black cloth.
    The spacious, elegant views of the park at night didn’t calm or reassure her. The feverish words I know what happened kept coming into her mind, almost audibly. She called his office: no answer. She called his cell phone: maybe this once he’d taken it.
    She heard it ringing in the pocket of his suit. Since she wanted to believe he’d come back and didn’t want him to think she had pan-icked, she decided she’d wait until midnight to call the police.
    And what would she say? My husband went out and he’s not home yet.

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    A cop would sardonically answer: Right, lady, it’s Friday night, lots of husbands aren’t home yet.
    At eleven she switched on the radio. One of the all-news stations broadcast the foreign and national news for five minutes (another suicide bombing in Iraq, at least ten people dead). Then the familiar, almost bored voices of the station’s man-and-woman pair of late-night announcers began a routine run through the local news.
    “This just in,” the male voice intoned. “A shooting in Central Park has left one man, apparently a jogger, dead. Police have no information about the identity of the victim. And they have made no arrests.”
    And then the well-rehearsed woman’s voice: “We’ll have more for you on this story as soon as we get it.”
    The words burst in her mind: I know.
    Somehow she managed to find one of the porters to sit in the apartment while Kim slept. Julie also found the telephone number of the Central Park police precinct. To an indifferent policewoman she said what she knew about the radio broadcast and about her husband’s absence in the park. After keeping Julie on hold, the woman finally said, “Maybe you better get over here.”
    Just after midnight Julie took a taxi to the police station in the middle of the 86th Street crossing in Central Park. She had seen this assembly of old-fashioned stone-and-wooden buildings a thousand times on quick bus transits through the park from east D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
    to west, west to east. The buildings always had the look, the texture, of run-down riding stables, cobbled English-style roofs, gray walls—a comforting image. Inside, what she found was fluorescent lighting, harsh and unreal, scraped metal desks, and linoleum floors. She kept thinking I know. The three policemen who led her to a rear room also seemed to know.
    There was a body under a sheet on a steel table. The sheet was blood-stained. A tag was tied to the right foot with a twisted wire.
    The older policeman lifted the sheet from the blood-soaked sneakers to the middle of Tom’s overwhelmingly recognizable 15
    body. She saw the faded, years-old shorts he wore. They bore the word “Columbia” stitched below the left-hand pocket. There was an odor of blood and open wounds in the room. Blood had an odor like freshly