77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

“I saw the bitch.”

  “She said she was in the process of moving out. I thought she was gone months ago.”

  Sarah/Sandra stopped flexing her arms. “She was gone. She was back. Like a yo-yo. Drove Hector crazy.”

  “He let her come back?”

  “She always showed up in the middle of the night. The way I see it, either the new guy was beating on her, or he wasn’t giving it to her the way Hector did and she had to have it.”

  “Hector never said anything about her coming back.”

  “He was embarrassed. It looked like she was using him. He was still paying the rent, you know, and she had that other guy.”

  “Hector told you about the project we were working on. Some of my files are in his apartment. Any way I can get them?”

  She shrugged, thought for a moment. “I shouldn’t let you in, but why not? You’re a friend, and it’s not as if I don’t know where to find you. Hector’s mom came by last night to look around. She said she’s coming by tomorrow to pack his stuff. If anything belongs to you, maybe you should get it before she comes, save a lot of hassle. I’ll have to come up with you, though.”

  “I’ll feel better if you do.”

  She pulled her door closed and led the way toward the elevator, bringing her hand weights with her, pumped her arms all the way up to the fifth floor. “I told Mrs. Melendez there’s no hurry. The rent is paid until the end of the month.”

  She unlocked the door of Hector’s apartment, stopped pumping, and muttered, “Holy shit.”

  I stepped past her into a nearly bare apartment. I asked, “The furniture was here last night?”

  “Oh, yeah. How’d Gloria get all the stuff moved out? And when? I saw her at the funeral.”

  “You think it was Gloria?” I asked.

  “Who else? She had a key.”

  “She also had a helper.” I picked up a stray throw pillow that had been left behind. “Or she had a couple of helpers. And a truck.”

  “Should I call the cops?”

  “You’re the manager, that’s up to you. You might call Hector’s mom and see what she wants you to do.”

  When Gloria moved out a few months ago, Hector bought new living room furniture, because she took their new furniture with her, and left him with two sets of payments. He had told me he could barely afford the rent on his own, and the extra payments were killing him.

  Hector’s personal gallery of family pictures and framed department commendations was intact. A borrowed small-screen TV sat on the floor. His new computer was gone. Next to its former place on a kitchen counter, his boxes of disks and about a dozen unlabeled videotapes were still lined up on their shelf as they had been the last time I was in Hector’s apartment, maybe three days before he died.

  The bedroom furniture came from a secondhand store, and apparently wasn’t worth taking. The bed was unmade and both of the pillows still had head dents. His secondhand dresser was full of clothes, mostly underwear and running things. I opened the dresser drawers because the room had the particular perfume common to cop bedrooms: eau de gun oil. Fresh gun oil.

  Sandra/Sarah stood by, still muttering about the sleaziness of looting a man’s apartment during his funeral. I opened the top dresser drawer and moved the balled athletic socks around. I found two boxes of 9-mm ammunition, set them on top, and kept looking.

  “Hector had friends over the day he died?” I said.

  “Couple of people I didn’t know. She was here part of the time. I saw her in the morning. The shooting happened around three in the afternoon. I don’t know if any of them were still around that late.”

  The gun oil smell was strongest in the small walk-in closet.

  Hector always dressed well for work. His expensive suits and dress shoes were gone. His casual clothes, some old things like a few frayed shirts, a worn bathrobe, and some sneakers, had been left. The shelf over the racks was crammed with extra blankets and a sleeping bag. I felt around under the blankets. First I found a soft, zippered gun case, then felt around some more and found a hard case large enough and heavy enough for two more handguns. There was also a shoe box with gun-cleaning supplies. But there was no empty gun case, and no .38 shells; Hector hadn’t carried a gun upstairs.

  “Those things give me the creeps,” Sarah/Sandra said as I stacked the guns on the dresser. “How did you know they were there?”

  “I live with a cop. All their socks smell like gunpowder, their extra blankets smell like gun oil. Haven’t you noticed?”

  She turned up her nose. “What are you going to do with all that?”

  “I don’t think guns should be left here. Anyone could come in and pick them up. Unless you have a better idea, I’ll turn them over to Mike. He’ll know what to do.”

  “I should have you sign a receipt. But, hell, if anyone says anything, I’ll tell them to call the cops.”

  She didn’t offer to help me carry either ammo or guns into the other room. I said, “Tell me what Hector did on his last day.”

  “It was like a normal Sunday. You guys used to come over, you know how he’d do. He’d put in his laundry, watch the games, then he’d go run on the beach. If anyone was over, they’d run with him or they’d have a swim. I didn’t see him go out, and I didn’t see him come back in. Does it matter?”

  “I think it does. Can you ask people in the building?”

  “Sure, but didn’t the police ask all their questions already?”

  “No,” I said. “Because there was no reason to. It seemed clear what happened. What questions were there to ask?”

  She walked around, looking at the places furniture had been. “What are you? Nancy Drew?”

  “I’m a friend.” I looked through the labeled disks. “Were you in the building when the shooting happened?”

  “I was down in my place—I told the police all this. I didn’t know anything until Mrs. Altunas—that’s the mother of the guy who killed Hector—until she came down.”

  I found a disk labeled Frady.

  “Is that your stuff?” She looked over my shoulder.

  “Probably.” I put the disk in my pocket, stacked the videotapes. “These are, too.”

  She found a grocery sack in the broom closet and held it open for me. “Got it all?”

  “I hope so. Just one thing, could you show me the apartment where it happened?”

  She balked.

  “Please?”

  “Okay. I’ll show you which one, but I won’t go in. I don’t want to talk to Mrs. Altunas today.”

  I agreed. Mike had told me Mrs. Altunas had had her son cremated and there would be no services. With Hector’s funeral all over the news, the mother would be having one hell of a bad day. I just needed to see for myself the route that Hector had taken, to see how it would look on film.

  We got back into the elevator and went up four floors.

  “Who all went upstairs when Mrs. Altunas said her son was going to jump?” I asked.

  “Just Hector, I guess. Mrs. Altunas asked him to go stop her son, and then she came down to my apartment to call the police.”

  “She went all the way down to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t she call from Hector’s place? Or from the neighbor’s?”

  The manager seemed very uncomfortable. “Okay, here’s what happened. Mrs. Altunas didn’t want to call the cops. See, she was scared her son would be committed again if she called the cops. All she wanted when she came down was some company. She told me Hector was going to talk to her boy, calm him down, get him to take his pills. No one called the cops until there were gunshots.”

  “Hector went up alone?”

  “I don’t know.” Something bothered her that she didn’t want to talk about. “The whole building could have gone in with him. I just don’t know. I was all the way downstairs. It wasn’t me who heard the gun.”

  Mrs. Altunas lived in apartment 915, so her apartment faced the back alley, and not the beach, as Hector’s did. I went
down with Sarah/Sandra, thanked her, declined her invitation to come in for coffee, and promised that I’d let her know anything I found out. She, in turn, promised to put a new lock on Hector’s door.

  I felt like a ghoul. I had spent so much time trying to attach motives to everyone who crossed paths with Roy Frady that I began to think my judgment was warped where Hector was concerned. Out of my paranoia I could construct at least three scenarios for his death that had nothing to do with a guy who forgot to take his meds and wanted to jump.

  I wanted to talk to Mike, but I didn’t want to call him at the academy because he would take heat from his pals. The guys might think I was checking on him. So, I drove back to the studio to work.

  Jack Newquist had pulled a chair up to Fergie’s desk and was sitting there reading the new edition of Filmmaker while she worked. He jumped to his feet when he looked up and saw me.

  “Here you are,” he said. “You’re hard to keep up with. I lost you at the cemetery.”

  “You should have stuck with Guido,” I said. “How’s your article coming?”

  “Good,” he said. “Great. It’s been an education. Can I hang with you for a while?”

  “You’d have more fun up in the studio because I’ll be taking care of junk work for a while. But if you want to sit inside and make like a mouse, go ahead.”

  Jack found a stool in the back corner of my office and perched there.

  Fergie said her ankle wasn’t hurting much and handed me a sheaf of telephone messages. The first message began, “You fucking ball breaker,” and ended, “Love, Brady.” The second was from Darl Incledon, who was trying to track down Frady’s gun. “Still at it,” Fergie had written. Lyle, my former housemate, now caretaker of my house in San Francisco, had also called. “Tenants not only bailed on rent, but left a mess. Now what?”

  Fergie said, “Now what?”

  “Mike wants me to sell the house.”

  “Shall I call some area realtors and get appraisals going?” Fergie leaned on her aluminum crutches, her injured ankle dangling behind, waiting for instructions.

  “I want you to keep off your feet.” I picked up a stack of three-ring binders and set them on her desk. “Police files on Roy Frady. Two hundred forty-five interviews, six hundred suspects from tips. Find a comfortable place and go through them again. See what you come up with.”

  I went into my cubicle and made calls. It didn’t take long to forget that Jack was in the corner watching me.

  Brady was first on my list. I asked him to come in and talk to me. Then I warned security that he was coming and asked them to escort him up and to wait in the hall until he was ready to leave.

  I talked to Lyle. When I moved south to be with Mike, the third floor of my painted lady had been converted into an apartment for Lyle so that he would be comfortable and be able to watch over the property; he was an old friend displaced by the Loma Prieta quake and had become family to me and Casey. I didn’t want Lyle to be displaced a second time, and it worked out for both of us to have him there to watch over things.

  Lyle is such a fuss, I couldn’t imagine tenants getting away with anything that would cause significant damage. On the phone, I asked him, “How bad is it?”

  “Lot of holes in the walls where they bolted furniture—quake protection. Leaky water bed upstairs was the problem, though. Floor’s a mess, leaked through to the living room ceiling. Jesus, Maggie, I feel terrible.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “You couldn’t very well go on patrol.”

  “I told them, no water bed.”

  “Did they leave a forwarding address?”

  “No such luck.”

  “I’m coming up Friday. We’ll see what we need to do. Mike wants to me sell.”

  “I just bet.” Lyle was still a little touchy about Mike taking me away. Lyle, Casey, and I had been very comfortable together.

  Lyle offered to call in a contractor to assess the damage by Friday.

  My daughter was on her way to dinner when I called her.

  “Every part of my body is sore,” she said. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “A massage. And dinner. I gotta go, Mom. I’ll call you later. I love you. Bye.”

  “Bye.” I imagined her long-legged sprint carrying her across the room, even if I could not see the room.

  My mother was happy I was coming up Friday.

  I took Hector’s tapes out of the grocery sack and piled them on my small office sofa, put the one on top into the VCR, and started it.

  The tape was a copy Guido had made for Hector, some of about ten hours of interviews they had done; Hector talking to people from the old days, camera work by Guido. I had only seen clips.

  Jack edged closer. “What’s that?”

  “JoAnn Chin, RN,” I said as the woman appeared on the screen. “One of our interviews.”

  “Hmm,” he said, and watched from his stool.

  JoAnn was in her middle years, somewhere between forty and fifty, but fighting the inevitable. She was still very pretty. Her short-cropped hair was dyed too dark to look natural, and she wore the gauzy-drapy sort of clothes that fooled no one into believing a svelte figure was hidden underneath. Guido’s voice asked her to take off the New Age crystals dangling from her ears because they made noise in the mike clipped to her bodice.

  Guido pulled back, bringing Hector into the frame. He was laughing with JoAnn when the assistant director held up the board: JoAnn Chin, October 20, Morningside Hospital.

  I found it difficult to take my eyes off Hector: two days before he died he had not an apparent care in the world. I missed the question he asked, tuned in on her answer.

  “The night I met Roy Frady, I was working the reception desk in the emergency room. He came in all cut and bloody from a street brawl. What I remember was, he was laughing. He was so full of himself. His partner—I don’t remember his name right now, tall guy with glasses, had a cut on the bridge of his nose from the fight—his partner kept trying to calm him down.

  “They had arrested three or four kids, brought half of them to the ER with them for treatment. A lot of cuts and bruises all around.

  “Roy was so pumped with adrenaline he didn’t want novocaine when we sutured him. I thought, what kind of maniac is this? He almost passed out before we finished, and that’s when I decided I liked him.”

  HECTOR: When did the two of you get together?

  JOANN: The first time? He was waiting for me after my shift that night. I think he was still pumped. He had these beautiful brown eyes, and, well, who could resist him?

  HECTOR: How long did you know him before you moved in together?

  JOANN: Around two years. I wouldn’t even call it an affair most of that time: I had a boyfriend, he had a wife and kids. It was just [she thinks about it, then smiles] sex.

  HECTOR: The relationship wasn’t serious?

  JOANN: Nothing was serious for Roy, except his job. He’d come into the ER on his lunch break—usually around midnight. We’d go find a quiet place and get it on; in a hospital in the middle of the night, there are plenty of places to go. A couple of times we went out to my car. One time, we did it in Alphy’s Coffee Shop. I just sat on his lap in a corner booth and he did me. I loved it. I think he ordered pancakes.

  HECTOR: Right there in the restaurant?

  JOANN: It was such a quickie, no one noticed. Usually, though, we really got into it. His partner had an old pickup with a camper shell. A couple of times, the partner would show up with a date and the four of us would go roll around in that camper. Probably wore out its shocks.

  HECTOR: YOU don’t mind talking about some awfully personal moments.

  JOANN: Moments? More like hours. Roy had a gift. But, no, I not only don’t mind talking about it, I’m proud of it. Look at me. All my life I was a good girl. I did everything I was supposed to do. Until I met Roy. Every time we fucked, I secretly wished we’d get caught just so everyo
ne would know JoAnn Chin was no Goody Two-shoes. That she could turn on a hot dog like Roy Frady.

  HECTOR (with a skeptical frown): You said you had a boyfriend. Wasn’t he also a cop?

  JOANN (nodding): I dated a lot of cops—who else do you meet working in an emergency room?

  HECTOR: Did your boyfriend know about you and Frady?

  JOANN: It took him a couple of years, but he finally figured it out. We were already splitting up by then. He was a loser with too many problems—drinking, gambling, wife and kids. He was in trouble at work. It was tough to live with. I think Roy and I helped each other. I know he helped me over a rough time.

  There was a knock on my door. I stopped the tape and turned to see Fergie supporting herself on the door frame.

  “Policeman here to see you, Maggie.” She hopped aside to let a brown suit pass her.

  I went through an inventory of reasons a policeman would come by: Sarah/Sandra called to report the looting of Hec’s apartment; someone had learned I was using classified police files and Mike would be fired, without pension; Mr. Edwards at the five-and-dime on Telegraph Avenue had finally gotten around to reporting that I boosted a Snickers bar from his store in 1968.

  The policeman glanced at Jack as he handed me his card with its big, embossed detective shield: Larry Rascon, Hollenbeck Division, LAPD.

  Fergie, nosy, reluctant to leave, asked, “Can I get anyone coffee?”

  I looked at the detective, who did not say no. “Sure, if you can manage it,” I said. “And maybe a doughnut. This is a workingman.”

  Rascon smiled as he patted his hard midsection. “You can skip the doughnut.”

  “Come in, have a seat, Detective.” I stacked the tapes on the floor to make room for him; the inner office was very small, only about twice what the county would call a two-man cell. “What can I do for you?”

  He looked at Jack.

  “Jack Newquist,” I said. “He’s researching an article.”

  “Reporter?” Rascon smiled, offered his hand to Jack, but the handshake became a gentle tug and Jack was on his feet. “You’ll excuse us?”

  “Uh, sure.” With a glance at me, Jack was out the door.

  Rascon sat down. “Are you acquainted with a Michelle Tarbett?”