Small Town

The man was only able to furnish a vague general description, but it was encouragingly close to the one then in circulation — white, middle-aged or older, medium height, slight build, no visible distinguishing marks. It led him to widen his search, and a few blocks below Fourteenth Street he stopped at a Getty station — the last one left in the world, as far as he could tell — where the proprietor, one Khadman Singh, remembered selling two gallons of gas — regular, unleaded — to a white man perhaps fifty-five or sixty years old. Sometime in the middle of the week this was, he recalled. This was not unusual, people paid no attention to gauges, they ran out of gas all the time. This man had a container and paid cash for his gas, which was not unusual either, because who would bother with a credit card for a three-dollar sale? But what was unusual, in Singh’s experience, was that the man had approached from the right, which is to say from the south, or downtown, and had walked off in the opposite direction, heading uptown on Eighth Avenue.

While most of the task force worked from the crime-scene evidence, a small group focused on the common denominator of all four venues, the three bars and the whorehouse. Which is to say Jerry Pankow.

He was interrogated at length, over and over. No one suspected him of any conscious involvement in the perpetrator’s scenario, but it seemed entirely possible he knew something, even if he didn’t know that he knew it. The series of layered interrogations aimed at unearthing unconscious knowledge, and while they didn’t lead anywhere, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Another possibility lay in anticipating the next outrage. No one thought the man who’d just scored what a Post columnist called a hat trick for terrorists would call it a day and rest on his laurels. He looked to be that classic urban nightmare, the serial terrorist. Reporters were writing sidebar columns on George Metesky, the Mad Bomber of a half century ago, who’d planted explosive devices in public places in an unfathomable private vendetta against Con Edison. Others, by no means convinced that the whorehouse murders were his first venture, were looking at every unsolved crime since the calendar ticked over to start the new millennium.

And policemen, trying to get ahead of him, staked out the apartments of Jerry Pankow’s remaining clients.

“I don’t have any clients,” he told them. “I called them all, I told them I’m through. I’m out of business anyway, it was the commercial clients that paid the rent. The rest, there were five of them, twenty-five dollars a day, you do the math. I want a real job, I want to work in an office or something. With other people around, living ones.”

They staked out the residences of his customers — his former customers — just in case. And sat back and waited.

The razor was another source of leads.

It lay beneath the dead body of Eric “Buddha” Kesselring, twenty-eight, of Ludlow Street, whose throat it had been used to slash and whose blood had pooled around it. Thus it presented a challenge to the lab technicians who examined it; they had to remove the blood without destroying any trace evidence it might conceal. When they were done, they had two good fingerprints and one partial, which they turned over to an investigator who sat down with them at her computer.

The computer search came up empty. The perpetrator (if that’s whose prints were on the razor, which seemed a fair working assumption) had never been fingerprinted. This meant he’d never been arrested, had never applied for a government job, and had probably never served in the military. It meant, too, that the prints on the razor couldn’t point him out now, but might help confirm his guilt if and when he wound up in custody.

Prints aside, the razor presented some interesting possibilities. The first was that it was the killer’s own razor, that he’d owned it for decades, that he kept it either for sentimental value or because it was what he preferred to use on his whiskers. If that was the case you could probably forget about tracing it, but suppose he’d acquired it recently, for the express purpose of cutting a throat?

There were still men who bought straight razors, detectives discovered, and still manufacturers that produced them. The majority of customers were barbers. Not many men still went to the barbershop to be shaved, but those who did were looking for an old-fashioned shave, with a shaving brush and a straight razor, not a noisy buzz with an electric shaver or foam from a can and a disposable plastic device. A straight razor, the kind the barber honed on a leather strop, that was what they expected to be shaved with.