“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 far-fetched, Jack.”
“Far-fetched? Is it any more far-fetched 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.”