Without Mercy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Part One – Rackman

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Two – The Slasher

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Three – Trackdown

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  My So-Called Literary Career

  Cynthia Doyle worked in the flesh trade in New York’s Times Square, the sex capital of the world. Bodies were her business, massages were her medium … and death was her destiny.

  Cynthia met all types in her trade. There were married men, dying for the novelty of another woman’s body. Lonely men, dying for a woman’s company. And there were just a few weirdoes dying to get their hands around a woman’s throat.

  Usually Cynthia could weed out the weirdoes from her serious customers. But one night when she left the Crown Club, she didn’t realize she had made one deadly mistake, one that left her in a dead end alley, without defense, facing a dangerous man … without mercy.

  THE COLLECTED PULP FICTION OF LEN LEVINSON

  WITHOUT MERCY

  By Len Levinson writing as Leonard Jordan

  First published by Zebra Books in 1981

  Copyright © 1981, 2013 by Len Levinson

  First Kindle Edition: September 2013

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover image © 2013 by Tony Masero

  This is a Pulp Heaven Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  To Peter McCurtien

  Part One – Rackman

  Chapter One

  It was night, and the street was cluttered with patrol cars and vehicles from the medical examiner’s office, the photo and fingerprint units, and the press. Detective First Grade Danny Rackman drove up as close as he could, parking his unmarked, green Plymouth beneath a street lamp. He was the duty homicide detective and had received the call while doing paperwork in his office at Midtown North. A girl had been found with her throat slashed in an alley on Forty-Fifth Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, not far from Times Square.

  Rackman got out of his car and strode toward the alley. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and wore a black turtleneck sweater under a brown leather safari jacket. His straight, black hair was parted on the side, and he had a nose like a hawk. At the entrance to the alley a cordon of cops kept back neighborhood people, their coats thrown hastily over their pajamas. Rackman walked past them, some reporters, and swarms of other cops. A searchlight shone into the alley, and halfway down was a crumpled figure soaking in a puddle of blood. A few feet behind her were four overflowing garbage cans that stank of rotten meat.

  Rackman stopped beside the girl. She wore jeans and a navy pea coat, and appeared to be in her early twenties. The blood from the gash in her neck was turning into jelly. She had blonde hair and was reaching toward the brick wall of the tenement building. Shock and the horror of her ordeal were still on her face and in her eyes. He studied the position of her body and the dirt around it, looking for something that might be significant; it could be anything, but he detected nothing.

  Sergeant Bob O’Grady of Midtown North came to his side. Rackman turned to him. “Who found her?”

  O’ Grady pointed to windows of the tenement across the alley, where faces looked down at them. “Some people up there heard the screams and dialed nine-one-one.”

  “Who got here first?”

  “Patrolmen Wheatly and Farelli.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Around here someplace.”

  “Get them for me.”

  O’Grady walked away. Rackman studied the dead girl again. He wondered if she’d known her killer or whether some nut had cut her down for the hell of it. Her shoulder bag was lying beside her legs. He wanted to go through it to see if she’d been robbed, but didn’t know if the photo unit was finished yet.

  Sergeant O’Grady returned with Patrolmen Wheatly and Farelli.

  “When’d you two get here?” Rackman asked.

  ‘Three forty-three,” replied Wheatly.

  Rackman checked his watch. It was almost five-fifteen. “See anybody running away?”

  “No.”

  “The people upstairs see anything?”

  “Two of them said they saw somebody running out of the alley.”

  Rackman took out his notepad and pen. “What’re their names?”

  “Sylvia Suarez in apartment 5-L of 429 West Forty-fifth Street, which is this building right here. Also Reynaldo Pifla of the same apartment.”

  “Nobody else saw anything?”

  “Nobody we know of.”

  Rackman turned to Sergeant O’Grady. “Send your men into these buildings. Find out if anybody saw or heard anything. And check the stores on Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Maybe the killer stopped somewhere for a pack of cigarettes or a bottle. Get me the medical examiner.”

  Sergeant O’Grady walked off, and Rackman squatted beside the body. Dried blood could be seen around the girl’s nose and the corner of her mouth. He looked at her cold, stiffening hand; she had long fingernails. There were bruises on her cheeks. The medical examiner, a lanky man wearing a topcoat, came over. Rackman stood.

  “What do you know so far?” Rackman asked.

  “Her throat’s cut and she’s been punched around.”

  “What came first?’

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Medical attendants arrived with the stretcher and rolled the girl onto it. They covered her with a sheet and carried her out to the wagon. Now Rackman could look in the girl’s shoulder bag. He knelt down and upended it. Cosmetics, Kleenex, and a wallet tumbled to the ground. He opened the wallet and found three hundred dollars and a blue plastic ID card from Roosevelt Hospital in the name of Cynthia Doyle, 429 West Forty-Ninth Street.

  As the various police and press cars left the scene of the crime, the neighborhood people dispersed. Uniformed policemen spread throughout the area, waking people up and asking questions. The alley became deserted except for Rackman, who shuffled around the spot where the body had been. Slinging the bag over his shoulder, he went next door to see Sylvia Suarez and Reynaldo Pifla.

  It was a decrepit old tenement building whose hallways smelled like fifty years of cooking odors. He climbed to the fifth floor and knocked on the door marked 5-L. It was opened by a Puerto Rican woman around fifty years old, wearing a threadbare yellow bathrobe.

  “Mrs. Suarez?”
he asked.

  “Yes?”

  He showed his shield. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Come in, please.”

  She opened the door and he entered her kitchen. The shiny Formica, linoleum, and tile were spotless but uneven because the walls behind them were caving in. A man in jeans and white tee shirt sat at the table. He had corrugated black hair and a thin mustache.

  “This is Reynaldo Pifla,” Mrs. Suarez said to Rackman.

  “I’m Detective Rackman.”

  The men said hello and shook hands.

  “Have a seat,” Mrs. Suarez said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like to have some coffee?”

  “That would be very nice.”

  She poured some thick black coffee from a silvery pot into a white china cup and placed the cup before Rackman. He poured in some milk and sugar, tasted it, gave it another shot of milk, and lit a Lucky. For a few seconds the only sound was the faucet dripping into the sink.

  “I know you’ve already talked to the police,” Rackman began, “but I’m a homicide detective and I’d like to get the information from you directly, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure,” said Mrs. Suarez, sitting beside Reynaldo on the other side of the table. Pifla nodded his head in agreement.

  Rackman took out his notepad and pen. “You heard screaming sometime tonight, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Suarez replied.

  “What were you doing when you heard the screaming?”

  “I was asleep in my bed. It woke me up.”

  “Was Mr. Pifla with you at the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember what time it was?”

  “Around three-thirty.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Reynaldo told me afterwards.”

  Rackman looked at Reynaldo. “How did you know?”

  “I looked at my watch.” He held up a stainless steel wristwatch with a matching expansion band.

  “You were looking at your watch while the girl was screaming?”

  “Yes.”

  Rackman looked at Sylvia Suarez again. “And then what happened?”

  “We ran to the window and looked down. A person was running out of the alley, and then we noticed that somebody was lying in the alley near the garbage cans. I ran to the bedroom and called nine-one-one.”

  “Let’s go back to the person you saw running out of the alley. Was it a man or a woman?”

  “I couldn’t say for sure, but I think it was a man.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “He moved like a man, and not like a woman.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What do I mean by that?’”

  “How did the person move that made you think it was a man?”

  “He moved like a man—I already told you.”

  “How does a man move?”

  “Strong—you know what I mean?”

  Rackman looked at Reynaldo. “Did you see the person?”

  “Yes, and it looked like a man to me too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because women run on their toes, and men run on their whole feet. This person ran on his whole feet. I’m sure he was a man.”

  Rackman decided to stay with Reynaldo. “Can you describe him in any way?”

  “We only saw him for about a second or two.”

  “Was he tall or short?”

  “It was too far away to tell. But he was wide.”

  “Wide?”

  “Yeah, he looked big.”

  “Heavy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What else?”

  “We didn’t have a chance to see much else.”

  “Was he wearing a hat?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Was he wearing a topcoat?”

  “No.”

  “Then he must have been wearing a jacket.”

  “I don’t know, but he wasn’t wearing a topcoat.”

  “You could tell the color of his hair?”

  “No.”

  “Could he have been bald?”

  “I don’t think so. It looked like he had hair.”

  Rackman turned to Sylvia Suarez again. “Did you see anything that Reynaldo didn’t see?”

  She shrugged. “Reynaldo seen more than me, I think.”

  “Could I see the window you looked out of?”

  “Sure.”

  They led him into the living room and then the small bedroom. There was barely space for the bed and dresser. A plaster statue of Christ on the cross was nailed to the pale blue wall above the bed. They stood at the window and looked down the alley.

  It was a long way down, and Rackman realized it’d be difficult to see anything at night. It was hard to believe that dirty, deserted alley had been filled with cops and reporters looking at a murder victim named Cynthia Doyle a half-hour ago.

  Rackman moved back from the window and turned to Sylvia Suarez and Reynaldo Pifla. “Thanks for the information. If you can think of anything important after I’m gone, call me at my office.” He reached to the inner breast pocket of his leather jacket and took out his card, which he handed to Reynaldo. “And thanks for the cup of coffee.”

  Downstairs, Rackman threw his cigarette butt into the gutter and got into his unmarked Plymouth. He lay the girl’s shoulder bag on the seat beside him and started up the engine. The street was deserted, and a lone truck rumbled past the intersection at Tenth Avenue. The first glimmering of dawn was coming up over the East Side.

  Rackman stopped at an all-night pizza joint on 9th Avenue near Twenty-Third Street and got a meatball hero, which he ate while driving downtown to Police Headquarters in the new red stone building behind City Hall.

  He took the elevator down to the basement, where the medical examiner’s office was. Giving his name to the officer on duty, he was escorted back to a white room where a doctor was bending over the naked body of Cynthia Doyle. Her belly was as white as the belly of a dead fish, and her neck was cut from her right ear nearly to her left. The open flesh looked like corned beef. A puncture mark was under her left breast.

  “Death was from massive hemorrhaging caused by a severed jugular vein and windpipe,” the medical examiner said. “Other injuries consist of bruises on the face that were caused about the same time as the injuries that caused death. If I had to guess, I’d say they were caused slightly before death.”

  “Were the bruises heavy or light?”

  “Heavy. Whoever hit her evidently was pretty strong. He cut her throat several times and went pretty deep each time.”

  “Did he fuck her?”

  “Somebody did about an hour before she was killed. She’d washed her vagina but there were still traces of semen. The tissues looked like she’d been having a lot of sexual activity. If she wasn’t a pro, she was a very bad girl.”

  Rackman pointed to the mark under her left breast. “What’s that?”

  “I can’t say for certain, but it occurred at around the time of death. I’d guess that the killer jabbed her with his knife.”

  “Anything under her nails?”

  “Just the usual dirt.”

  “Where are her clothes?”

  “At the front desk.”

  Rackman handed him his card. “If anything comes up, give me a call.”

  Rackman went to the front desk, signed for the girl’s belongings, sat in a wooden chair against the wall of the waiting room, and went through them. The jeans were Levis, her blouse came from Alexander’s, her underpants were made by Bonnie Dee, the expensive leather boots were from Bloomingdales, and her pea coat was marked Schott Bros. Co. In the pea coat were a pack of Virginia Slims and a throwaway cigarette lighter. The pockets of the jeans carried some marijuana in a plastic bag and a pack of Job Cutcorners rolling paper.

  Rackman returned to his car and drove uptown to Roosevelt Hospital, where he parked in the l
ot next to the Emergency Room and went inside to the Records Room. He showed his shield and Cynthia Doyle’s blue ID card to the attendant on duty, and was led to a file cabinet, where the attendant took out a thick folder.

  Rackman sat at an empty desk and went through the folder. He found a description of Cynthia Doyle that matched the way the victim looked, confirming her identity. The address given was 449 West Forty-Ninth Street, just like the blue card. Cynthia Doyle had been in various clinics at Roosevelt Hospital for influenza, an ear infection, eye infection, bladder infection, and pregnancy. It was noted that she’d taken care of the pregnancy at an abortion clinic. She’d told her doctor that she smoked marijuana and used to shoot speed.

  Rackman returned the folder to the attendant, and drove to 449 West Forty-Ninth Street, between Eleventh Avenue and the defunct West Side Highway. It was a neighborhood of slum tenements and warehouses, next to railroad tracks that weren’t used anymore. The little valley where the railroad tracks ran was filled with garbage, old mattresses, beer cans, and wine bottles. Rackman double-parked in front of the building and pulled down the Official Police Investigation sign on the visor, then got out of the car and slung Cynthia Doyle’s bag over his shoulder.

  There was no buzzer system in the building; you just walked in and went to whatever door you wanted. If you were a thief, you broke down the door, took whatever wasn’t nailed down, and split. Rackman climbed the stairs to apartment 4-C, located in the rear. The stale hallways smelled of urine. He knocked on the door.

  There was no answer. He knocked again. Still no answer. Opening the shoulder bag, he was fishing around for Cynthia Doyle’s keys when he heard light footsteps on the other side of the door. He knocked again.

  “Who is it?” asked the voice of a black man.

  Rackman held his shield before the peephole in the door. “Police—open up.”

  There was a pause. “What you want?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “You got a warrant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just a second.”

  The footsteps retreated from the door, and Rackman figured the man was either hiding something or putting on clothes. The footsteps returned and the door opened. A long-faced black man stood there, his head appearing lopsided because his afro was matted down on one side. He must have been in bed.