Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries)

by Al Sarrantonio

  There were things she was going to say. She ran through her gamut of expressions, from anger to denunciation, ending on the verge of tears.

  "It's done, Ginny," he said to her quietly.

  She stood with the coffee mug in her hand, and Paine wanted, as badly as he had wanted to put the gun to his head or the bottle to his lips the night before, to go to her and put his arms around her and say, "Yes." He wanted to say, "I still love you, and I'll try to change, I'll try not to be fucked up anymore and we'll try to make it work." But he knew what would happen if he did that. Someday he would see that frozen look on her face again, the one that said, "Go ahead, pull the trigger, get it over with," and he would pull the trigger for her. Finally, he would have changed for her, and he would no longer be her failure and she would be rid of him because she would possess him in the way she had always desired, which was to possess him so that he no longer possessed himself. She would own, not a piece of him as Barker did, but, in the end, all of him.

  "Please go, Ginny," he said, and she stood a moment more and then she put the mug of coffee down and walked to the bags of clothes and gathered them up in her arms and opened the door and was gone. Paine heard the elevator work, but this time it was not leaving to take her away from him. It was simply leaving.

  He walked to where she had put her coffee mug, and as he picked it up some of the coffee spilled out onto the carpet. He thought of Gloria Fulman and her Persian rug.

  He went to the kitchen, and he poured the coffee into the drain, watching it spiral down to the depths of the earth, and said, "Good-bye, Ginny."

  He showered California off his body, then dressed in a suit and tie and went to his car.

  He drove to the Bronx in the dark. No stars to look at through the windshield tonight; a little of that low, angry, hot weather had followed him across the country. The back of his neck was pooled with sweat again. Muggy was muggy.

  There was a white car far back that might be pacing him. He slowed, trying to lure it past, but it stayed stubbornly back. On the Major Deegan Expressway it disappeared from his rearview mirror, but when he got off he spotted it again, mounting the off-ramp as he turned onto Fordham Road at the top. The car was a BMW or Mercedes.

  He waited ten minutes in the shadow of a White Castle hamburger joint, but it didn't pass. Then he pulled out conspicuously, hoping to flush it out. It was gone.

  Thompson's Funeral Home was only two blocks from the Bronx Zoo. Paine pulled into the driveway, past the sign. The signs on funeral homes are all the same, bright white bordered in black. You don't have to read the name to know where you are.

  The parking lot in back was big for the Bronx. He pulled into a spot bounded by bushes that had no cars to either side of it. He got out, straightened his suit and went in.

  A young man with a sad face and hands folded permanently in front of him dispatched him solemnly in the right direction. He walked into a crowded room. There were a lot of high school students, some weeping onto each other; the rest were adults clustered to one side in shocked groups of three or four. The casket was closed. Paine looked at the name on the white-lettered sign at the entrance and discovered that he had walked into the wrong chapel. Closed casket. Teenager, probably; car collision, through the windshield.

  He found Jimmy's chapel next door, and it was what he had expected. Small room, low lighting, taped organ music. The air smelled like refrigerant. The casket was open, and even from the doorway he could see Jimmy propped unnaturally high, compensation for his shortness. The chapel was empty.

  Paine walked on the red plush carpeting and listened to the organ music. Just audible, like Rachmaninoff in Barker's office. Muted weeping filtered in from the auto death next door.

  There was a kneeler before the casket. Paine stood. Jimmy's eyes were paraffined closed. His head was tilted to the left; one of the slugs had caught him just above the ear on that side and the boys in the cellar had done what they could. It wasn't all that great. Jimmy looked like waxed fruit.

  "So long, Jimmy," Paine said, and with the common trick of anticipation, Jimmy's resin smile seemed to widen.

  Paine left the empty room. A couple in dress and suit passed him, holding each other up; they entered Jimmy's chapel, realized their mistake and backtracked to the automobile accident next door. Organ music soothed. The ventriloquist dummy with the folded hands bowed his head at Paine as he passed.

  "Good evening, sir."

  "Sure," Paine said, and went into the night.

  There were two of them, and they had waited for him in the stand of bushes in front of his car. It was easy for them. They stepped out as he put his key in the lock; he heard them but when he looked up there was an arm in front of his face and that was the last thing he saw. One of them hit him in the face to get him to cover up, and then the other one pumped blows to his belly and groin. Paine heard a grating laugh. They worked on him methodically, and when he was finally down they kicked him toward unconsciousness. Just before he went there, he felt a burning explosion in his groin and heard one of them say, "Hit me in the hangers?"

  Lights passed overhead. He thought someone was shining a light in his eyes, flashing it back and forth. He reached up his arm to push away the flashlight. His arm hurt, and he couldn't raise it up. "Stop," he tried to say, but his mouth didn't work well, either. It tasted like it was filled with bloody sponges.

  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the lights were still flashing. But his eyes worked better now. They focused for him. The flashing lights were streetlamps, passing overhead. He was staring through the back windshield of a car. It was clean, and had defogger wires embedded in it. He tried to look closer at the defogger wires but his eyes unfocused again, and his body told him to return to unconsciousness.

  When he opened his eyes this time, they stayed focused. The streetlights were gone. Up through the windshield was crisp dark sky. He recognized a turn of diamond stars shaped vaguely like a W. The constellation Cassiopeia.

  Someone opened the car door.

  The night that came into the car was as cool and dark as it looked through the windshield.

  He expected rough hands to pull him out of the car onto the pavement, but instead, a head stared upside down into his face, and kissed him.

  "You're alive." Rebecca Meyer smiled.

  "Yes," his mouth tried to say, without success.

  "Can you sit up?" she asked. She put her hands under his arms and pulled, but he must have cried out because she took her hands back. He tried to sit up. The world wheeled and his eyes threatened to unfocus but he made it to a sitting position and rested his head on the back of the seat. She sat next to him.

  "How did you find me?" he asked thickly.

  "Bob Petty said you'd be at your friend's wake. I found you in a pool of your own blood. I thought you were dead."

  "I am."

  He looked into her brown turbid eyes that he already knew so well. He was very tired. She was speaking slowly, but he couldn't hear her. He looked at her mouth, and it looked like she said, "Oh, shit," and, as the blurry world of unconsciousness claimed him yet again, he was sure he fell into her arms.

  TWENTY

  His body was not young anymore. He had taken worse beatings, but this time his body did not let him heal easily. Perhaps his mind was healing, too, letting the world spin while accountings were made, checks and balances restored. He felt like a drained bottle, not only empty, but not even knowing what he had been filled with to start.

  He awoke the first morning in a bed facing the largest picture window he had ever seen. The night cold he had felt had not been an illusion; there was a sprinkling of early white snow on the leveled lawns down to the tennis court and, beyond that, the Hudson River was bathed in autumn fog.

  The house itself was not cold. The fireplace in the second-floor bedroom he occupied filled half of one stone wall. Above the fireplace was the proud antlered head of an elk. The opposite wall was dominated by a Turner oil flanked by
the heads of a cheetah and black leopard.

  Paine tried to move and nothing happened. His body felt as real as that of the elk over the fireplace. Bandages shifted under the covers.

  The morning passed. He watched the fog evaporate over the Hudson, and the tenuous dusting of white snow turn back to green lawn. He watched the gardener inspect the trellises along the path to the tennis courts for frost damage.

  She came to him when the sun was high over the river. She sat on the end of the bed and looked at him for a long while. Her hair looked longer, brushed back over her eyes.

  "I'm in love with you," he said.

  "I know," she said.

  She laid her head on him, on a place where it didn't hurt. Outside, the world turned from summer to autumn.

  The next day he felt better. Four of his ribs had been taped. He still felt like a punching bag after a workout, but he sat up and looked through the window as rain fell on Westchester. In the afternoon the clouds cleared out and the sun burned through. It was in the 70s by late afternoon. He watched Rebecca and Gerald play tennis. As the sun went down he brought the telephone from the nightstand onto the bed and dialed it.

  "Bobby?"

  "Where the hell are you, Jack?"

  "Somewhere. What's going on?"

  "I have a warrant for your arrest. Were you in California two days ago?"

  "I was in California. I put my fingerprints all over that house and left my card. Then someone came in and hung the two of them."

  "Great. Should we extradite you to California or would you rather go on trial in New York first?"

  "Isn't murdering two California creeps more serious than beating up one former employer?"

  "Not if your former employer is owed by the police commissioner. Barker wants your balls in a paper cup."

  "Can you handle him?"

  "I can try."

  "Great. Anything from your friend on Steppen and the FBI? I found out that Steppen, Druckman and Paterna were all the same creep."

  Bobby whistled. "It makes sense. Ray found that Steppen was a paperboy for the FBI—he could get any kind of document you wanted. He was involved in witness relocation but he was pretty much a rotten apple from the beginning. Got into a couple of jams early in his career, mixed up with loan-sharking, but he was good and they needed him, so they kept him around as a free-lance. Finally they just kicked him out in 1968."

  "That explains how he turned from Steppen into Druckman into Paterna, but it doesn't explain why. Or what he had to do with Morris Grumbach."

  Petty sighed. "Where are you, Jack?"

  "Can't tell you."

  "Dannon's really heating things up here over you. And the way things are now, nobody would mind if you came in DOA."

  "Fine."

  "Come in and talk, Jack. It might be the only way I can protect you."

  "Talk to you soon, Bobby."

  "Jack—"

  Paine hung up the phone.

  "Can't tell you where I am, Bobby."

  They had dinner in Paine's room, by light from the table lamp next to the bed. Outside, there was blackness interrupted periodically by the red and green blinking lights of an airplane passing up the river. There weren't even drapes to hide the picture window at night.

  "This was my father's bedroom," Rebecca said. "My sisters and I used to play in here when we were little, when my father was away. We made believe the animals on the wall were real and might leap out at us any minute."

  "Where did your father get the animals?" Paine asked.

  "Oh, he was a hunter when he was younger. He knew Hemingway, went on safari with him once or twice. My father knew a lot of people. You never saw his name in the paper, but he was always near power."

  "Did your mother and father always have separate bedrooms?"

  His question drew her back from memory. "Oh, yes. Always. My mother's bedroom is down the hall. It's all in blue and silver. No picture windows there. Everything is closed tight against the world."

  There was wine on the tray which lay on the bed, and she filled their glasses.

  "What about you, Jack?" she asked. "Do you have painful memories?"

  "Are we talking about painful memories?"

  "All memories are painful." She smiled distractedly. She seemed to take more solace in the darkness outside the window than in his face. "Now I think they all are."

  Yet again, Paine almost knew why she affected him so strongly; why he was so drawn to her. And yet again, the reasons danced away and fell beyond him.

  "Tell me your most painful memory," she said abruptly, turning from the dark window to look at him and pin him with her eyes.

  And then, suddenly, he wanted to tell her what he had never told anyone.

  "I've never dreamed about it," he said. "I've dreamed about other things but never this."

  She looked into him, over the rim of her wineglass, red liquid sliding back and forth in the glass like blood, like waves against the dark banks of the Hudson.

  And then he told her.

  It was a Saturday afternoon. His father had to work an extra shift, so his Uncle Martin volunteered to pick him up after his Little League game. His father hesitated, but finally said yes.

  His uncle came about the fourth inning and sat in the stands and watched. Jack got two hits that day, a double and a triple that was almost a home run. He was thrown out at the plate. It was a good game, and he felt good because it was summer and he didn't have to work mowing lawns for another two weeks and there were still two ball games between now and then. The sun was out every day. It was warm, but he never felt the heat; it rolled off him and into the green grass.

  His uncle watched the game, and Jack looked over every once in a while to make sure he was enjoying it. He was sitting quietly in the stands, with a fisherman's hat pushed back on his head, his elbows splayed out on the bench to either side of him. He sat in the upper tier, in a corner where no one else was.

  Jack didn't know much about his uncle; he'd been around, off and on, and once he'd bought him a windup boat—a huge thing with a good slow-working spring in the mother that he and his brother, Tom, used on the artificial lake in the park. Another time he brought both Jack and Tom books about space. But Jack hadn't really seen him that much, and he and his father didn't seem to be all that close. His uncle had been in the Army for a long time, in the war and then overseas in Germany. He was an M.P. His father used to talk about him every once in a while as his big brother, but there was about six years' difference between them and it seemed like they never got to know each other very well.

  So his uncle watched the game, smiling or squinting against the sun. Jack couldn't tell which.

  After the game was over, after Jack's team won and gathered in a circle and threw their hats into the air, his uncle stood at the bottom of the grandstand with his hands in the pockets of his bright blue jacket and he smiled. He put his arm around Jack and said, "How you been, kiddo?"

  They got in his car, and Uncle Martin talked about getting something to eat. Jack said he thought they should go back to the house; he was supposed to meet Tom there to play some more ball in the backyard.

  His uncle looked over at him and smiled. "I'll get you back before you know it, kiddo."

  He kept driving. They drove for a long time. His uncle kept making excuses for why they weren't going to Jack's house. "We'll get there soon," he said.

  They drove about an hour outside the city, then they stopped at a hamburger place. They sat outside and ate on one of the round white enameled-metal tables. Uncle Martin spread a map out and began to study it. He pushed his fisherman's hat farther back and scratched his head. "No," he said, once or twice. Then he said, "That's it."

  "What's it?" Jack asked.

  Uncle Martin folded the map and smiled. "A surprise," he said. "Your father didn't want me to tell you till we got there."

  Jack stared at him, and Uncle Martin gave a hearty laugh and reached across the table and slapped Jack's shoulder. "I'm ta
king you on a trip!"

  Jack regarded him blankly. "What do you mean?"

  "We're going to go someplace, you and I."

  "But what about my father and Tom?" Jack protested. "I don't have any clothes."

  "Your dad said it was fine. Said you needed a treat after the school year you put in. Where we're going there are clothes and everything. Do you like to fish?"

  Through his perplexity, Jack's eyes brightened.

  "That's right, kiddo—we're going to fish, and camp out, we're going to do all kinds of things. You know," he said, "I've been waiting a long time for this. Did your father ever tell you what a good fisherman I was?"

  He searched his memory and found nothing, but his uncle had such an earnest, expectant look on his face that he nodded. "Yes."

  "He did?" Uncle Martin said. His face lit up. "Well, I'll be damned."

  Uncle Martin became thoughtful again, and suddenly he got up and cleared the table and said they should be going. "Got a long ride ahead of us," he said.

  They got into the car and Uncle Martin reached under the driver's seat and took out an open pair of handcuffs. "Darn seat belt doesn't work very well, kiddo," he explained, snapping one of the cuffs around Jack's right wrist and the other to the door handle. He did it so quickly and solemnly that Jack didn't question it. "I believe in safety," Uncle Martin said, and then he started the car.

  They ate up a lot of highway. They crossed New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Jack slept for a while. When he awoke they were in the Poconos. His uncle was humming to the radio, which was tuned to a station playing 101 Strings. Jack's wrist hurt where the cuff had tightened into it. His uncle saw him try to loosen it and reached over and pulled his left hand away.