"Are you serious, Jack?"
"Sounds crazy, don't it?"
"Yeah, that's how it sounds, all right."
"If there's just the three it don't prove a thing, right? I mean, it's a common name and you got lots of people dying violently in New York City. When you have eight million people in a city it's no big surprise that you average three or four murders a day. The rate's not even so high compared to other cities. With three or four homicides a day, well, when you got three Ackermans over a couple of weeks, that's not too crazy all by itself to be pure coincidence, right?"
"Right."
"Suppose it turns out there's more than the three."
"You've got a hunch, Jack. Haven't you?"
Freitag nodded. "That's what I got, all right. A hunch. Let's just see if I'm nuts or not. Let's find out."
"A fifth of Courvoisier, V.S.O.P." Mel Ackerman used a stepladder to reach the bottle. "Here we are, sir. Now will there be anything else?"
"All the money in the register," the man said.
Ackerman's heart turned over. He saw the gun in the man's hand and his own hands trembled so violently that he almost dropped the bottle of cognac. "Jesus," he said. "Could you point that somewhere else? I get very nervous."
"The money," the man said.
"Yeah, right. I wish you guys would pick on somebody else once in a while. This makes the fourth time I been held up in the past two years. You'd think I'd be used to it by now, wouldn't you? Listen, I'm insured, I don't care about the money, just be careful with the gun, huh? There's not much money in the register but you're welcome to every penny I got." He punched the No Sale key and scooped up bills, emptying all of the compartments. Beneath the removable tray he had several hundred dollars in large bills, but he didn't intend to call them to the robber's attention. Sometimes a gunman made you take out the tray and hand over everything. Other times the man would take what you gave him and be anxious to get the hell out. Mel Ackerman didn't much care either way. Just so he got out of this alive, just so the maniac would take the money and leave without firing his gun.
"Four times in two years," Ackerman said, talking as he emptied the register, taking note of the holdup man's physical appearance as he did so. Tall but not too tall, young, probably still in his twenties. White. Good build. No beard, no moustache. Big mirrored sunglasses that hid a lot of his face.
"Here we go," Ackerman said, handing over the bills. "No muss, no fuss. You want me to lie down behind the counter while you go on your way?"
"What for?"
"Beats me. The last guy that held me up, he told me so I did it. Maybe he got the idea from a television program or something. Don't forget the brandy."
"I don't drink."
"You just come to liquor stores to rob 'em, huh?" Mel was beginning to relax now. "This is the only way we get your business, is that right?"
"I've never held up a liquor store before."
"So you had to start with me? To what do I owe the honor?"
"Your name."
"My name?"
"You're Melvin Ackerman, aren't you?"
"So?"
"So this is what you get," the man said, and shot Mel Ackerman three times in the chest.
"It's crazy," Freitag said. "What it is is crazy. Twenty-two people named Ackerman died in the past month. Listen to this. Arnold Ackerman, fifty-six years of age, lived in Flushing. Jumped or fell in front of the E train."
"Or was pushed."
"Or was pushed," Freitag agreed. "Wilma Ackerman, sixty-two years old, lived in Flatbush. Heart attack. Mildred Ackerman, thirty-six, East Eighty-seventh Street, fell from an eighteenth-story window. Rudolph Ackerman, that's the Transit Authority cop, killed his wife and kids and shot himself. Florence Ackerman was stabbed, Samuel Ackerman fell down a flight of stairs, Lucy Ackerman took an overdose of sleeping pills, Walter P. Ackerman was electrocuted when a radio fell in the bathtub with him, Melvin Ackerman's the one who just got shot in a holdup-" Freitag spread his hands. "It's unbelievable. And it's completely crazy."
"Some of the deaths must be natural," Poolings said. "Here's one. Sarah Ackerman, seventy-eight years old, spent two months as a terminal cancer patient at St. Vincent's and finally died last week. Now that has to be coincidental."
"Uh-huh. Unless somebody slipped onto the ward and held a pillow over her face because he didn't happen to like her last name."
"That seems pretty farfetched, Jack."
"Farfetched? Is it any more farfetched than the rest of it? Is it any crazier than the way all these other Ackermans got it? Some nut case is running around killing people who have nothing in common but their last names. There's no way they're related, you know. Some of these Ackermans are Jewish and some are gentiles. It's one of those names that can be either. Hell, this guy Wilson Ackerman was black. So it's not somebody with a grudge against a particular family. It's somebody who has a thing about the name, but why?"
"Maybe somebody's collecting Ambroses," Poolings suggested.
"Huh? Where'd you get Ambrose?"
"Oh, it's something I read once," Poolings said. "This writer Charles Fort used to write about freaky things that happen, and one thing he wrote was that a guy named Ambrose had walked around the corner and disappeared, and the writer Ambrose Bierce had disappeared in Mexico, and he said maybe somebody was collecting Ambroses."
"That's ridiculous."
"Yeah. But what I meant-"
"Maybe somebody's collecting Ackermans."
"Right."
"Killing them. Killing everybody with that last name and doing it differently each time. Every mass murderer I ever heard of had a murder method he was nuts about and used it over and over, but this guy never does it the same way twice. We got-what is it, twenty-two deaths here? Even if some of them just happened, there's no question that at least fifteen out of twenty-two have to be the work of this nut, whoever he is. He's going to a lot of trouble to keep this operation of his from looking like what it is. Most of these killings look like suicide or accidental death, and the others were set up to look like isolated homicides in the course of a robbery or whatever. That's how he managed to knock off this many Ackermans before anybody suspected anything. Ken, what gets me is the question of why. Why is he doing this?"
"He must be crazy."
"Of course he's crazy, but being crazy don't mean you don't have reasons for what you do. It's just that they're crazy reasons. What kind of reasons could he have?"
"Revenge."
"Against all the Ackermans in the world?"
Poolings shrugged. "What else? Maybe somebody named Ackerman did him dirty once upon a time and he wants to get even with all the Ackermans in the world. I don't see what difference it makes as far as catching him is concerned, and once we catch him the easiest way to find out the reason is to ask him."
"If we catch him."
"Sooner or later we'll catch him, Jack."
"Either that or the city'll run out of Ackermans. Maybe his name is Ackerman."
"How do you figure that?"
"Getting even with his father, hating himself, I don't know. You want to start looking somewhere, it's gotta be easier to start with people named Ackerman than with people not named Ackerman."
"Even so there's a hell of a lot of Ackermans. It's going to be some job checking them all out. There's got to be a few hundred in the five boroughs, plus God knows how many who don't have telephones. And if the guy we're looking for is a drifter living in a dump of a hotel somewhere, there's no way to find him, and that's if he's even using his name in the first place, which he probably isn't, considering the way he feels about the name."
Freitag lit a cigarette. "Maybe he likes the name," he said. "Maybe he wants to be the only one left with it."
"You really think we should check all the Ackermans?"
"Well, the job gets easier every day, Ken. 'Cause every day there's fewer Ackermans to check on."
"God."
"Yeah."
"Do we just do this ourselves, Jack?"
"I don't see how we can. We better take it upstairs and let the brass figure out what to do with it. You know what's gonna happen."
"What?"
"It's gonna get in the papers."
"Oh, God."
"Yeah." Freitag drew on his cigarette, coughed, cursed and took another drag anyway. "The newspapers. At which point all the Ackermans left in the city start panicking, and so does everybody else, and don't ask me what our crazy does because I don't have any idea. Well, it'll be somebody else's worry." He got to his feet. "And that's what we need-for it to be somebody else's worry. Let's take this to the lieutenant right now and let him figure out what to do with it."
The pink rubber ball came bouncing crazily down the driveway toward the street. The street was a quiet suburban cul-de-sac in a recently developed neighborhood on Staten Island. The house was a three-bedroom expandable colonial ranchette. The driveway was concrete, with the footprints of a largish dog evident in two of its squares. The small boy who came bouncing crazily after the rubber ball was towheaded and azure-eyed and, when a rangy young man emerged from behind the barberry hedge and speared the ball one-handed, seemed suitably amazed.
"Gotcha," the man said, and flipped the ball underhand to the small boy, who missed it, but picked it up on the second bounce.
"Hi," the boy said.
"Hi yourself."
"Thanks," the boy said, and looked at the pink rubber ball in his hand. "It was gonna go in the street."
"Sure looked that way."
"I'm not supposed to go in the street. On account of the cars."
"Makes sense."
"But sometimes the dumb ball goes in the street anyhow, and then what am I supposed to do?"
"It's a problem," the man agreed, reaching over to rumple the boy's straw-colored hair. "How old are you, my good young man?"
"Five and a half."
"That's a good age."
"Goin' on six."
"A logical assumption."
"Those are funny glasses you got on."
"These?" The man took them off, looked at them for a moment, then put them on. "Mirrors," he said.
"Yeah, I know. They're funny."
"They are indeed. What's your name?"
"Mark."
"I bet I know your last name."
"Oh, yeah?"
"I bet it's Ackerman."
"How'd you know?" The boy wrinkled up his face in a frown. "Aw, I bet you know my daddy."
"We're old friends. Is he home?"
"You silly. He's workin'."
"I should have guessed as much. What else would Hale Ackerman be doing on such a beautiful sunshiny day, hmmmm? How about your mommy? She home?"
"Yeah. She's watchin' the teevee."
"And you're playing in the driveway."
"Yeah."
The man rumpled the boy's hair again. Pitching his voice theatrically low, he said, "It's a tough business, son, but that doesn't mean it's a heartless business. Keep that in mind."
"Huh?"
"Nothing. A pleasure meeting you, Mark, me lad. Tell your parents they're lucky to have you. Luckier than they'll ever have to know."
"Whatcha mean?"
"Nothing," the man said agreeably. "Now I have to walk all the way back to the ferry slip and take the dumb old boat all the way back to Manhattan and then I have to go to..." he consulted a slip of paper from his pocket "... to Seaman Avenue way the hell up in Washington Heights. Pardon me. Way the heck up in Washington Heights. Let's just hope they don't turn out to have a charming kid."
"You're funny."
"You bet," the man said.
"Police protection," the lieutenant was saying. He was a beefy man with an abundance of jaw. He had not been born looking particularly happy, and years of police work had drawn deep lines of disappointment around his eyes and mouth. "That's the first step, but how do you even go about offering it? There's a couple of hundred people named Ackerman in the five boroughs and one's as likely to be a target as the next one. And we don't know who the hell we're protecting 'em from. We don't know if this is one maniac or a platoon of them. Meaning we have to take every dead Ackerman on this list and backtrack, looking for some common element, which since we haven't been looking for it all along we're about as likely to find it as a virgin on Eighth Avenue. Twenty-two years ago I coulda gone with the police or the fire department and I couldn't make up my mind. You know what I did? I tossed a goddamn coin. It hadda come up heads."
"As far as protecting these people-"
"As far as protecting 'em, how do you do that without you let out the story? And when the story gets out it's all over the papers, and suppose you're a guy named Ackerman and you find out some moron just declared war on your last name?"
"I suppose you get out of town."
"Maybe you get out of town, and maybe you have a heart attack, and maybe you call the mayor's office and yell a lot, and maybe you sit in your apartment with a loaded gun and shoot the mailman when he does something you figure is suspicious. And maybe if you're some other lunatic you read the story and it's like tellin' a kid don't put beans up your nose, so you go out and join in the Ackerman hunt yourself. Or if you're another kind of lunatic which we're all of us familiar with you call up the police and confess. Just to give the nice cops something to do."
A cop groaned.
"Yeah," the lieutenant said. "That about sums it up. So the one thing you don't want is for this to get in the papers, but-"
"But it's too late for that," said a voice from the doorway. And a uniformed patrolman entered the office holding a fresh copy of the New York Post. "Either somebody told them or they went and put two and two together."
"I coulda been a fireman," the lieutenant said. "I woulda got to slide down the pole and wear one of those hats and everything, but instead the goddamn coin had to come up heads."
The young man paid the cashier and carried his tray of food across the lunchroom to a long table at the rear. A half dozen people were already sitting there. The young man joined them, ate his macaroni and cheese, sipped his coffee and listened as they discussed the Ackerman murders.
"I think it's a cult thing," one girl was saying. "They have this sort of thing all the time out in California, like surfing and est and all those West Coast trips. In order to be a member you have to kill somebody named Ackerman."
"That's a theory," a bearded young man said. "Personally, I'd guess the whole business is more logically motivated than that. It looks to me like a chain murder."
Someone wanted to know what that was.
"A chain murder," the bearded man said. "Our murderer has a strong motive to kill a certain individual whose name happens to be Ackerman.
Only problem is his motive is so strong that he'd be suspected immedi-ately. So instead he kills a whole slew of Ackermans and the one particular victim he has a reason to kill is no more than one face in a crowd. So his motive gets lost in the shuffle." The speaker smiled. "Happens all the time in mystery stories. Now it's happening in real life. Not the first time life imitates art."
"Too logical," a young woman objected. "Besides, all these murders had different methods and a lot of them were disguised so as not to look like murders at all. A chain murderer wouldn't want to operate that way, would he?"
"He might. If he was very, very clever-"
"But he'd be too clever for his own good, don't you think? No, I think he had a grudge against one Ackerman and decided to exterminate the whole tribe. Like Hitler and the Jews."
The conversation went on in this fashion, with the young man who was eating macaroni and cheese contributing nothing at all to it. Gradually the talk trailed off and so indeed did the people at the table, until only the young man and the girl next to whom he'd seated himself remained. She took a sip of coffee, drew on her cigarette and smiled at him. "You didn't say anything," she said. "About the Ackerman murders."
"No," he agreed. "People certainly had some
interesting ideas."
"And what did you think?"
"I think I'm happy my name isn't Ackerman."
"What is it?"
"Bill. Bill Trenholme."
"I'm Emily Kuystendahl."
"Emily," he said. "Pretty name."
"Thank you. What do you think? Really?"