“But I don’t care,” she said. “You could find a higher IQ growing in a petri dish. I wish he would smarten up or ship out. But then I feel that way about most of the people I meet. What do you want to do now? Is there a ball game on?”
“Let’s watch the news.”
And we did, half watching, half listening. I paid a little more attention when the perky anchorwoman began talking about a Midtown shooting, because I still respond to local crime news like an old Dalmatian to the ringing of the fire bell. When she mentioned the site of the shooting Elaine said, “That’s your neighborhood.” The next thing I knew she was reading the victim’s name off the teleprompter. Glenn Holtzmann, thirty-eight, of West Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan.
They went to a commercial and I triggered the remote and turned off the set. Elaine said, “I don’t suppose there’s more than one Glenn Holtzmann on West Fifty-seventh Street.”
“No.”
“That poor girl. The last time I saw her she had a husband and a baby on the way, and now what has she got? Should I call her? No, of course not. I didn’t call her when she lost the baby and I shouldn’t call her now. Or should I? Is there any-thing we can do?”
“We don’t even know her.”
“No, and she’s probably surrounded by people right now. Cops, reporters, film crews. Don’t you think?”
“Either that or she hasn’t heard yet.”
“How could that be? Don’t they hold back the name of the victim pending notification of next of kin? You hear them say that all the time.”
“They’re supposed to,” I said, “but sometimes somebody screws up. It’s not supposed to happen that way, but lots of things happen that aren’t supposed to.”
“Isn’t that the truth. He wasn’t supposed to get shot.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for God’s sake,” she said. “He was a bright young guy with a good job and a great apartment and a wife who was crazy about him, and he went out for a walk and—did they say he was making a phone call?”
“Something like that.”
“Probably to find out if she needed anything from the cor-ner deli. God, do you figure she heard the shots?”
“How do I know?”
She frowned. “I just find the whole thing very disturbing,” she said. “It’s different when you know the person, isn’t it? But that’s not all. It just seems wrong.”
“Murder’s always wrong.”
“I don’t mean morally wrong. I mean in the sense of a mistake, a cosmic error. He wasn’t the kind of person who gets shot down on the street. Do you know what this means? It means we’re all in trouble.”
“How do you figure that?”
“If it could happen to him,” she said, “it could happen to anybody.” The whole city saw it that way.
The morning papers were full of the story. The tabloids led with it, and even the Times stuck it on the front page. Lo-cal television stations gave it the full treatment; several of them had studios within a few blocks of the murder scene, which gave it a little added impact for their employees, if not for their viewers.
I didn’t stay glued to the set myself, but even so I saw in-terviews with Lisa Holtzmann, with people from the neigh-borhood, and with various police officials, including a detective from Manhattan Homicide and the precinct com-mander at Midtown North. All the cops said the same thing—that this was a terrible crime, that such outrages could not be allowed to go unpunished, and that all available police personnel would be working the case in around-the-clock shifts until the killer was in custody.
It didn’t take long. The official estimate of the time of death was 9:45 Thursday night, and within twenty-four hours they were able to announce an arrest. “Suspect charged in Hell’s Kitchen homicide,” the newsbreaks chirped. “Film at eleven.”
And at eleven we watched the film. We saw the suspect with his hands cuffed behind him, his face pointed toward the camera, his eyes wide and staring.
“Jesus, will you look at him,” Elaine said. “The man’s a walking nightmare. Honey, what’s the matter? You can’t possibly know him.”
“I don’t know him,” I said, “but I recognize him from the neighborhood. I think his name is George.”
“Well, who is he?”
I couldn’t answer that, but they could and did. His name was George Sadecki, and he was forty-four years old, unem-ployed, indigent, a Vietnam veteran, a fixture in the West Fifties. He had been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Glenn Holtzmann.
Chapter 4
Saturday morning I rented a car and we got out of the city and drove a hundred miles up the Hudson. We stayed three nights at a refurbished colonial inn in Columbia County, sleeping in a canopied four-poster bed in a room that had a dry sink and a porcelain chamber pot, but no television. We didn’t look at TV or read a newspaper all the time we were there.
It was Tuesday afternoon by the time we got back to New York. I dropped Elaine and turned in the car, and when I got to my hotel there were two old guys in the lobby discussing the Holtzmann shooting. “I seen the killer around for years,” one was saying. “Wiping windshields, hustling spare change. All along I said there was something wrong with the son of a bitch.You live in this town, you develop an instinct.”
The Slaughter on Eleventh Avenue, as one of the tabloids felt compelled to call it, was still very much in the news, even in the absence of continuing developments in the case. Two elements combined to give it a hold on the public imag-ination: The victim was a young urban professional, the sort of person to whom such things were not supposed to hap-pen, and the killer was a particularly unattractive soldier in the vast army of the homeless.
The homeless had been with us a little too long, and their numbers had grown too great. What charity fund-raisers call “compassion fatigue” had long since set in. Something within us made us long to hate the homeless, and now we had been given good reason. We had always sensed that they represented some sort of low-grade danger. They smelled bad, they had diseases, they were louse-ridden. Their pres-ence gave rise to guilt, coupled with the disquieting intima-tion that the whole system was failing, that they were in our midst because our civilization was falling apart around them.
But who would have dreamed that they might be armed and dangerous, apt to come out shooting?