“I got it,” Albert shouted. The story was on one of those old sheets of newsprint. He handed it to me.
***
“A Stamford man was taken into custody last night on a warrant issued on the complaint of the parents of a 12-year-old Glenbrook girl.
“Nigel Barthelme, 18, of Palmer Hill Road, has been charged with six counts of corrupting the morals of a minor and three counts of statutory rape. He is scheduled to appear in town court this morning for arraignment.”
***
“There never was a court appearance.” Albert laughed, humor mixed with bitterness, “and there never was a news story.”
This was what I went looking for, yet it stunned me. The girl who’d accused Nigel that night in my bar told the truth. The charge was statutory rape, which meant he didn’t use force; it was sex with a young girl too young to know what she was doing. The date on Albert’s story was August 11, 1971, two years before the same kind of non-forcible rape happened to Angelina. My hunch on Nigel was borne out, just as my hunch on Reuben had held up. Reuben was a murderer. Nigel was a child molester of at least one young girl. Now what?
Before I left the next morning, I remembered Patricia the adorable hooker mentioning Nigel’s college jacket and asked Albert if he knew anything about Nigel’s college days—where he went to college, for instance.
He said he didn’t but he’d see what he could find out.
Chapter Eleven
I called Janet when I got back to the city, figuring she’d gotten over being mad by then.
“I’ve found out a number of things,” she said excitedly. “Your good friend Carl may be in the clear, after all. I think it was someone else.”
“Who?”
“I’m not going to tell you because I’m not sure. But if I’m right, you’ll be amazed.”
“Let’s not keep secrets from one another,” I said, calmly I hoped. “It’s too dangerous now to go nosing around by yourself.”
“Talking about secrets, your father said you went to Stamford. Why?”
“Checking on something.”
“I thought we weren’t keeping secrets.”
“Who’s your suspect?”
“Never mind.”
“Why is Carl in the clear?”
“I talked to him. All of what he told me makes sense, and it brings up the possibility of this other person. I’ll have all the information I need by tomorrow night. Then we can compare notes. I will tell you one thing,” she said. “Nigel Barthelme called the police to tell them Angelina had been with Danny.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, at least, I’m pretty sure it’s him. Peter found out they had a tape of the call, and they let him listen to it. He said he recognized the voice.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“You’ll see.”
“You’re doing this wrong.” My voice was rising. “It’s too dangerous now to go off doing stuff alone.”
“Now you want to work together. You don’t want any help from me when you’re talking to prostitutes. Why didn’t you tell me about going to Stamford again?”
“You walked out before I had a chance.”
She hung up.
I felt like a four-year-old who couldn’t make anyone, particularly this pain in the ass Massachusetts banker, understand what I meant. I wondered what she was on to. I needed to see Carl to find out which way he’d pointed her. But, first, I wanted another crack at Barthelme.
***
Once more, I resorted to my borrowed suit and followed a group of pin stripes into Barthelme’s building and onto the elevator. I didn’t want to be announced by the concierge this time around.
I knew I’d have to move fast once the elevator door opened, so I tried to picture the layout of Barthelme’s suite. The elevator opened into the reception area where Janet and I had met him. His office was beyond the reception area, and, if I remembered correctly, there was a reception desk that no one was at the last time, but someone might be at this time. The trick would be to get past and through his office door.
When the elevator door opened, I caught a glimpse of Barthelme’s back as he went into his inner office. Taking my chances, I rushed across the reception area, waving my copy of Lew Archer. “Oh, Mr. Barthelme, you forgot—”
Before anyone could react, I was in. As soon as I got through the door, Barthelme turned on me, his face hard, his expression contemptuous. He was a lot taller than Nigel, taller than me, and I’m a shade over six feet and wear a hefty size forty-four.
“What do you want?” His tone suggested my answer had better be good. Dressed in gray this time, too, he bent forward at the shoulders toward me, although clearly this time he had no desire to get closer.
“Maybe to save your son.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” His eyelids came down over his eyes like hoods.
“I’m speaking of your son Nigel, the child molester.”
His eyes opened, registering the news without losing their imperiousness.
He stood behind his desk. I stood in front. “Who are you?”
“A friend of Angelina Carter’s.”
He leaned farther forward, peering at me more carefully. “You’re that bartender.”
“You should remember Angelina. You paid off her mother to keep her from pressing charges against Nigel a few years back.”
His clear gray eyes never left mine, nor did his expression show anything except contempt.
“Was Nigel with you on that Wednesday night and Thursday morning two weeks ago?”
No answer.
“Do you know another girl named Sharon Collins? Did you know Ozzie Jackson? Did you go to visit Angelina when she was working at Hanrahan’s? Did she put the bite on you again?”
His eyes bored into mine.
I was really glad I’d gotten a chance to talk to Edwin Barthelme. For some stupid reason, I thought he might answer something. What do you do when the guy doesn’t answer?
What the hell? I tried one more. “It’s hard to believe that a son you hadn’t seen in ten years was with you on the very night he most needs an alibi. Was he with you the night Ozzie was killed, too?”
No answer, just the icy stare.
“Look, it’s been really nice chatting, Mr. Barthelme. But I have things to do, as I’m sure you do.” I smiled toothily. “We’ll talk again sometime soon.”
Riding down in the elevator, I considered what I’d done. Tipped Nigel’s father that I was onto Nigel’s past. Found out nothing at all that might help me. Like the man said, if I’d’ve had a third leg, I’d’ve kicked myself in the ass.
***
That night, after I’d eaten a steak, and, in pursuit of normalcy, had a couple of drinks with Nick at the Terrace, I stopped off to see Carl at his guard post on West End Avenue. He was busy for a good fifteen minutes with the elevator. Every time he came down with it, someone else was waiting to go up, so I sat in his cubicle looking over a book he was reading, Diet for a Small Planet. I was always amazed by Carl’s wide-ranging interests, his primitiveness in learning what he himself thought he needed to know in life, and how little this kind of knowledge had to do with being successful in the world as most people knew it.
“Who are the crazy people running the world?” I asked him when he finally returned to his booth.
“You were looking at that book, eh? I know. We let people starve so we can eat overstuffed deli sandwiches. Our entire food chain is wrong. No one has to go hungry.”
I watched my friend drinking his Coke and eating his hard roll with butter. He looked at me, then at his hard roll. “One must learn to practice what one preaches,” he said.
I approached this conversation awkwardly, once more wishing I could avoid confronting someone with his failings and misdeeds. But now I was afraid someone else would be killed, that Janet might be, or me, so I probed when things might much better be left alone.
“What did you talk to Janet about?�
� I asked.
When he started involuntarily, I realized he hadn’t expected her to tell me. “I told her some personal things I’m not sure I want to tell you.”
“Oh,” I said. Certainly in any civilized world he should have that right, but not now. “I’m afraid someone is going to die,” I said.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Janet. Maybe me.”
“That’s a lot to be afraid of,” Carl said. I knew nothing I could say would make him talk unless he decided himself, so I waited.
After a long time he said, “I told her about meeting Angelina in Montauk. I went there that summer to try to get my head together. Instead, it blew apart. I wound up coming back to the psych ward in Bellevue.” Carl paused to look at me accusingly, his baleful expression suggesting how difficult it was for him to tell me this. “I didn’t want everyone in town to know that I was in a nuthouse.”
“I understand.”
He didn’t say anything, but his stance and his manner softened ever so slightly. He began playing with the Coke bottle cap, breaking off the thin metal fringe at the bottom of the cap.
“I didn’t know Angelina very well in Montauk. But when they hauled me away, she came down to visit me every couple of weeks at Bellevue. That says something about her, doesn’t it? She was the only person to come and see me. Actually, she was the only one I wanted to see.
“I knew you knowing about all of this wouldn’t help find who killed her, and I didn’t want to tell a hundred cops and district attorneys and lawyers and bartenders about it. It was my business.” He went back to breaking up the thin band he’d peeled off the bottle cap.
I watched his fingers that were thick and stubby work on the cap. His movements were deliberate and precise as always. I was embarrassed. I would have liked to forget the whole thing and have gone back to the Terrace, but I went on. “Did Angelina come to visit you after you got out of the hospital?”
“When she still lived in Massachusetts, she would stay in my apartment for a weekend every now and again while she tooled around the city looking for a millionaire.”
“Why did she move here?”
“I told you, to find a millionaire.”
“A particular millionaire, or would anyone do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why here on the West Side? Why not the East Side where the high rollers live? Because you were here?”
“No. I suggested the East Side or downtown. I even found a place for her on Tenth. But she wanted to live in this neighborhood.”
“Did you find her an apartment?”
“The first one. The second one she got herself.”
“Where’d she get the money?”
“I wondered that, too.” Carl had broken up the strip from the bottle cap into tiny pieces that he now pushed together into two piles like he had done with the coffee lid the last time I’d visited him.
“Can you find out how she got the second apartment?”
“That’s what I told Janet. I told her that I was pretty sure Angelina was set up with the apartment and with the job at Hanrahan’s. Somebody made her Queen for a Day.”
“Why?”
“You tell me.”
“Blackmail.”
Carl registered the word. His face took on that owl-like expression. “That might explain it,” he said when he’d thought for a few minutes.
“What else did you tell Janet?”
“I gave her a name, Mario, he’s the super for the building on 110th Street. He’d know how Angelina got the apartment.”
It was around three by now. I went home to bed and slept for a long time. Checking my mail on my way out of my apartment late the next morning, I found a letter from the union telling me I’d won my grievance and should report to work at the hotel a week from Monday. The letter jolted me back to a life that had once been normal. Who the hell had I become?
When I opened the outer door, I saw Nigel in the doorway of the building across the street. He ducked back in. I would have left him there, but he came out himself.
“Hello, Brian,” Nigel said. “Any new suspects?” He came on like a bully. Stood up close to me, his chest out. His eyes through those coke bottles of his were about the size of bar coasters. “Danny killed Angelina,” Nigel said. “Ask the cops. It’s all over.”
“We’ll see.”
He laughed a tight rattling laugh. “Turn up anything on me?”
“No.” I watched his eyes. “But I haven’t found Sharon Collins yet.”
His eyes moved, showing a glint of interest; he forgot about me for a split second. Then his eyes turned sad. I felt embarrassed for him. It’s awful to have your secrets laid out for you, right there, a block off Broadway.
“Keep it up, McNulty,” Nigel said. “You think you’re going to prove I’m the murderer, but you won’t because I’m not.” He stared at me, and I caught a glimpse of his father’s penchant for contempt. Like father, like son, after all. “You’re a good person, McNulty, despite your attempts to bury it under your degeneracy. But you’re not particularly bright.”
What he said hurt my feelings, but I suspected he might have something there.
“By the time you discover I’m not the murderer, you’ll have dug a couple of more graves. Your Massachusetts friend is worse. Why don’t you take her to the Bahamas for a couple of weeks?” It sounded like a joke, but he wasn’t smiling. “Let it go, Brian.” His eyes began to mist over and his goggles to fog up. He walked off without another word.
I went back inside to call Albert Hawkins. When he answered the phone, he laughed his hearty laugh, so different from Nigel’s.
“How ’bout Amherst College,” he said. “Amherst is about twenty miles from Springfield, less than that from Chicopee. Nigel was there, a debater and a fencer, until 1973 when he left for health reasons. I found him by working my way through the ruling class schools. Somebody forgot to erase something.” He paused. “By the way, how did you get along with his dad? He cut his day short yesterday and came home.”
I needed to get to Springfield, then to Stamford, then back to New York in the same day. What I needed was a car, except I didn’t know how to drive. I tried to call Janet, but I couldn’t reach her. I left a message with her hotel for her to make sure I could find her tonight, then went looking for Ntango and found him having breakfast in La Rosita at 107th Street. He had the horse hire for the next twenty-four hours.
“I need to take a trip without the meter running,” I told him while I sucked down a double espresso.
Ntango, his brown eyes soft and kind, said apologetically, “Mr. Brian, I haven’t made my nut for the past two days.”
“How much?”
He rested his elbows on the counter and leaned forward; his manner was patient. “Fifty for yesterday. A hundred for today.”
No wonder Lew Archer had clients pay expenses. I’d settle for twenty-five a day and expenses myself. I needed a couple of hundred dollars fast. Only one person in our circle, so to speak, ever had that kind of money in pocket. I went looking for the Boss. He was always in Sully’s from noon to five to collect from the numbers runners.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Ntango. “Don’t take a fare even if it’s to the airport.” I ran across the street, hoping the mug I’d dumped into the elevator shaft had returned to Jersey for good.
The Boss looked up, but was not his usual gracious self. “Beat it, McNulty,” he said.
“Sorry, man, I need a word.” We walked outside.
“I want a deuce and a half.”
The Boss, dapper in his fedora and sharkskin, stood on his little portion of Broadway sidewalk like it was his front porch. “A loan?”
“No, a grant.”
He looked at me and then on either side of me. “What’s that?”
“I want you to pay me to clear your good name.”
With the decisiveness of a first-class businessman, the Boss took two C notes and a fifty from his wad. “You
caught on,” he said.
I also took a gram of blow on the cuff, figuring Ntango and I would be too wilted without it.
I handed Ntango the money, figuring the extra yard could keep him in rice and beans for a while, but held onto the blow.
We drove to the building Angelina had lived in on 110th Street. Ntango waited while I nosed around the cellar in search of Mario. I couldn’t find him, so I decided to go downtown to Hanrahan’s to see how Angelina got her job there. But on the way down Broadway, I changed my mind. The information about Nigel being twenty miles away from ten-year-old Angelina burned in my brain like the feeling I got at the track when I knew I had the sure thing. I told Ntango to head for Springfield.
“Which way, Mr. Brian?” he asked in his soft voice, looking at me in the rearview mirror, chuckling to himself. He didn’t know Springfield from Ankara.
“North,” I said. He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Uptown,” I said.
He made a U-turn around the island at 106th Street and we headed north on Broadway, then across 125th Street to the Triboro and the New England Thruway. I told myself it was okay to skip Hanrahan’s and not find Mario. Carl told Janet the same thing he told me, so she might cover that anyway. Why duplicate effort? Yet this icy fear began building around me. We were getting too close. I’d rather she wasn’t off on her own.
Two hours and forty-five minutes later, Ntango and I cruised into Springfield and spent another forty-five minutes looking for Mrs. Carter’s house. Ntango was patient and unflappable, circling the streets of Chicopee in ever-increasing circles like a lost dog until I recognized the 1940s window display and the bartenders’ union hall.
When we found Mrs. Carter’s house, I brought Ntango to the door with me for a witness in case I did get something out of her. Mrs. Carter, her eyes electric with cunning and fear, held the door in front of her like a shield, warding us off as if we were the Mongolian hordes, but I kept at her. Already cranked, I wasn’t to be trifled with.
“Nigel Barthelme, do you remember that name?”
“I can’t say,” Mrs. Carter twittered, looking beyond me and Ntango for help.
Beware the Solitary Drinker Page 21