by Edward Dee
“The First Amendment is my protection,” Scorza answered, and waved the big man away. “Come up here, Lonny.”
But Lonny’s progress slowed drastically. He had to fight his way back to his perch behind the desk because the crowd came sudden and intense. The halls were filled with men heading for the sunlight, buckling belts, zipping, snapping. It was a pervert’s fire drill.
“Nobody seems to want to talk,” Ryan said. “We may have to come back later, maybe tomorrow, too.”
“Come back every hour if you want,” Scorza said. “In the meantime I’ll call my lawyer.”
Scorza went back inside his office as Lonny shook his head at the mass exodus of men in Armani suits or army fatigues. All manner of clothing in disarray.
At the end of the hallway they split up. Gregory went downstairs, Ryan took the one-on-one booths on the second floor. No one volunteered to speak to them; all were too busy seeking an exit. A sanitation man tripped on his green pants and tumbled down a full flight of stairs. His arm, unfortunately, looked broken. Ryan wondered how that accident report would be written up.
They left through the gift shop, thoughtfully situated on the side street. Convenient enough for the harried and horny commuter to duck in and pick up a movie, a magazine, or a battery-powered love muscle for the little woman waiting in Westchester.
“Got any love potion number nine?” Gregory asked.
Both detectives squinted in the bright sun.
“That went well,” Gregory said.
“We didn’t hurt him,” Ryan said. “He lost a couple of bucks, that’s all.”
“He knows we can’t hurt him, pally. His customers will be back no matter what we do. We need a different angle. All we’re doing is trying to get even with him because he’s stonewalling us. Sometimes getting even ain’t the way to go.”
They turned the corner onto Eighth Avenue, and Ryan noticed it first. A parking ticket on the window of the Buick. Under the windshield wiper and directly over their official plate with the seal of the NYPD.
“Remember what I just said about getting even being a bad thing?” Gregory said. “That was all bullshit.”
24
On Sunday morning Anthony Ryan sat in the grass of Oakland Cemetery with a penknife, digging deep narrow holes over the grave of his son, pushing little pieces of his life down into the soft turf. First a button off his uniform, then a shamrock tie tack, a tiny NYPD detective’s badge, a subway token.
Oakland Cemetery is situated on a hillside in Yonkers, New York, facing the defunct Alexander Smith Carpet Shops, which once wove carpet for the coronation of a Russian czar. Anthony’s father, Kieran Ryan, had told him that czar story when he took him through the factory over fifty years ago. He’d wanted him to see it before it was gone. The whir and clatter of the massive looms had frightened the young boy, but he’d never admitted it.
Kieran Ryan, a retired bus driver now eighty-four and residing in Florida, had told his son a million old Yonkers stories. Anthony Ryan couldn’t even remember if he’d passed the czar story down to his son, Rip.
Alexander Smith’s was built in the mid-1800s and grew into the largest rug mill in the world. Now “the shop” sat sliced into myriad furniture and appliance warehouses and small woodworking firms. In the beginning Alexander Smith himself drove the daily product into New York City by horse and wagon. Each day’s sales gave Smith the money to buy material for the next day. Alexander Smith died on November 5, 1875, on the night he was elected to Congress. He was buried on this same hill, a bit lower than the Ryan clan.
The fact that the Ryan family was above the Smiths pleased Kieran Ryan, who’d purchased twenty plots in the hillside graveyard after he’d hit the number for $600, a small fortune in 1947. Thanks to the reckless lifestyles of Kieran’s Irish kin, only five of the twenty plots remained. The deed to the plots was locked in a strongbox in the closet of Kieran Ryan’s Florida condo. He’d given Anthony clear instructions that if he should die, neither Uncle Rocco, the brother of Kieran’s late wife and Anthony’s mother, nor any of the Gagliardi family was to be allowed access to the remaining plots.
Last January, when Rocco’s wife, Ryan’s aunt Violetta, died, Kieran Ryan disappeared into the Florida Keys with the deed, while his phone rang off the hook. Kieran had vowed that only one Gagliardi would ever be laid to rest in ground that he paid for; and she was already there: his beloved Angela Gagliardi Ryan, Anthony’s mother. He’d rather see an Irish setter interred next to him than the likes of Rocco Gagliardi.
Kieran Ryan was the family storyteller, and one of his favorite stories was the day he collected his $600 in the Hollow Athletic Club on Walnut Street, a few blocks away. He took six-year-old Anthony, and they walked down the hill to the neighborhood called the Hollow, because Kieran Ryan never owned a car until he moved to Florida at eighty years of age. Before they entered the Hollow A.C., Kieran bent and told his boy, “Pay attention, son. These men are Polacks.” Inside the club, Anthony sat at the bar and drank the best root beer of his life while a man called Singapore Charlie found a quarter behind his ear.
On the way home they stopped in another club. Before entering, Kieran Ryan again told his son to pay attention, “These are your mother’s people. These are eye-talians.” Inside, he ate his first cannoli and women hugged him and talked about his blue eyes as if he were a movie star. The lesson continued through other neighborhoods as Kieran sipped from a gallon of red wine in an unlabeled jug. On the climb back up the hill Anthony saw a group of people on the steps of a church. Eager to please his father and show his aptitude, he pointed at the group and in a loud voice said, “And they’re niggers, right, Dad?”
Anthony Ryan remembered how his father loved to tell that story, always embarrassing his serious, liberal son. But he taught Anthony about a world he came to love: the rich ethnic and racial heritage of the city. Anthony became a regular in the Hollow, a tight community inhabited by proud carpet millworkers, immigrants from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Good people, Kieran assured his wife, who’d look out for a small child no matter what neighborhood he’d come from.
The Sunday bells of Holy Trinity echoed throughout the cemetery. He was sure the bells came from Holy Trinity because three churches in the neighborhood, all within blocks of each other, carried that name. The Catholic church, the Episcopalian, and the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic with its endless name and impressive minarets. As kids they’d called it the “onion” church. Three churches with the same name in the tight neighborhood he once roamed, where nobody had money but everyone had food to share and muscle to loan.
Anthony was always struck by the cleanliness of the Hollow, every front stoop scrubbed daily by the woman of the house, on her hands and knees. He remembered the unintelligible calls of produce vendors pulling their own carts, and the iceman, the rag man, the scissors grinder. Yonkers was a city of neighborhoods, each a world unto itself. He could have passed this on to his own son. It would have been so easy. The stories were in his heart and on the tombstones around him.
In 1954 the sprawling carpet shop abandoned Yonkers for cheap labor in Mississippi, as if they owed nothing to this city of hills. It signaled a death knell. With the loss of the city’s largest employer, the Hollow and other neighborhoods began to self-destruct. Now only a few stubborn old women scrubbed the stoops every day. The Hollow A.C. and all the other clubs were gone. The old women stayed indoors at night.
Ryan wondered whether the neighborhoods would have held on if the carpet shop had stayed. Would the children of the millworkers not have fled? He wondered, if he had passed down the old Yonkers stories to his own son, would he have learned to love this funky town between Manhattan and the real suburbs? If Rip Ryan had known that the mile-long factory across the street once wove carpet for the coronation of a Russian czar, maybe he wouldn’t have gone west to find his own life and death on the floor of a bleak Utah canyon. But, as the Great Joe Gregory said, reasoning like that was thinking through yo
ur ass.
After all these years, Anthony Ryan was again a regular in the Hollow. Around him were other regulars, mostly women carrying watering cans from the spigot, clipping tall grass around a tombstone, lining the stone with flags and small plastic statues of saints and angels. He returned a wave from a woman tending the grave of her husband, Stan, dug twenty years earlier. Ryan considered his wave to be progress.
The grief experts said it took eighteen months to two years. Six months ago he couldn’t have lifted his head without tears. Six months ago he was still angry with God. Now he was closer to God than ever and prayed to him to take care of his son. This was progress. He knew that in twenty years he wouldn’t be here every day clipping and watering.
The world has become too mobile, Ryan thought. It’s too easy to move away to a place where the sun is warm but the history belongs to others. Away from home it becomes too easy to sit by the pool and forget we’re responsible for each other. Responsible not only to connect the dots of each other’s lives by passing down stories, but to protect the old, the sick, our children, and the children of others who move away to find their own history. Despite our parochial stupidity, we have a contract here.
Ryan’s mind was filled with questions about his son’s death. The events of that day were still not clear to him, but maybe that was best. He knew if he allowed his natural suspicion to overwhelm him, he’d be on a plane to Utah. He had to trust in his brother officers in Utah, all cops and fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers. They were good and decent people, and he trusted them to act as his surrogate.
Leigh Ryan worried that the circumstances of the Gillian Stone case were too similar to their own nightmare. But this was not about similarities to Anthony; all deaths were different. To him it was about responsibility. It was about looking out for your neighbor’s child, no matter how far he or she has come. Trey Winters should have looked out for Gillian Stone. He hadn’t. When that happened, cops had to step in and become surrogate fathers.
Although he hadn’t held Gillian Stone in his arms at birth, he’d held her at her death. God had delivered this young woman into his arms for a purpose, and that made her his child. Gillian Stone’s departing spirit had understood that when she’d made him hear the words “I love you.”
He took a small set of NYPD collar numerals from his pocket. The brass forty-eight identified his rookie precinct. During the time he wore those numbers on his collar, his life was full of stories. Stories he should have told before now. He pushed the numbers into the dirt.
25
The ferry rocked gently as Joe Gregory blew a smoke ring that floated in the twilight over the Hudson River. The sounds of a dance band drifted out from the main room. Through grimy windows Danny could see Anthony and Leigh Ryan clinging to each other, moving across the floor in slow motion.
“What were you and Aunt Leigh cooking up before?” Danny said. “Looked like a pretty heavy-duty conversation.”
“We’re running away to the islands,” Gregory said. “She’s dying to see me in a Speedo. Now quit changing the subject and finish telling me about Evan Stone.”
Danny took a big swig of his gin, though Gregory had warned him that the juniper berry made you crazy. Gregory held a cigar in one hand, a glass in the other. He sipped Irish whiskey and gazed at the city. Sunday quiet, and glittering.
“He was all apologetic,” Danny said. “The guy really felt bad about hitting me.”
“Okay, let’s go over it again: All you said was, ‘I’m Danny Eumont from New York,’ and he hits you. Did he say why?”
“He said he thought I was someone else.”
“Like who, for instance? Who would he punch at a funeral?”
“How should I know? A business associate, some asshole golfing buddy who pissed him off.”
“That don’t sound kosher,” Gregory said. “Not for nothing, but people at funerals are on their best behavior. If everyone always acted like they were at a funeral, this would be a better world, guaranteed.”
It’s no wonder cops are as paranoid as they are, Danny thought. After a lifetime spent suspecting everyone and everything. Side by side, elbows on the boat’s rail, they exchanged opinions on the resurrection of the New York waterfront. The big-shouldered Gregory dwarfed Danny as they passed the new sports piers off Thirty-eighth Street.
“So after all the bullshit,” Gregory said, “Stone didn’t even give you anything useful.”
“All he said was Gillian was doing fine until Faye Boudreau came to New York.”
“Well, he certainly wasn’t going to say anything negative about his little angel. Parents are always shocked when they find out their kids got bad habits. I hope you didn’t tell him you were banging her. He’ll wanna blame you. He probably thinks she never had sex in her life.”
Manhattan’s narrow working waterfront disappeared when containerized shipping chased the industry to New Jersey. Manhattan lacked the space needed to unload the containers and set them onto the backs of eighteen-wheelers. The loss sent the waterfront into a forty-year funk. Now it was coming back, but in a far different form. Gregory said he liked it better when it fed families, not entertained yuppies.
“Let me say one final thing in regards to your Arizona fiasco,” Gregory said, getting back to the case. Cops never let the conversation drift away from “the job” for very long. “I’m sure Evan Stone was upset, but guys in our job spend their entire careers in the worst minutes of other people’s lives. Day in and day out, we’re knocking around in somebody’s nightmare. None of those people feel like talking to us. If you don’t push them, you’re wasting your time.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Danny said. “The trip wasn’t a total waste. I put together some good notes on the landscape, things like that.”
“What landscape, coupla cactus? You can copy that stuff out of National Geographic. You want the story, you should have been all over Stone.”
“Compassion is not the worst character trait,” Danny said. “Evan Stone was burying his daughter.”
“So you’re a nice guy. Do I have to tell you the rest of that one?”
“Next time I go on an interview remind me to borrow one of your rubber hoses.”
The boat’s rail was packed, and almost everybody faced east, watching the skyscraper light show. The bejeweled skyline of Manhattan flashed gold and silver in the setting sun. To New Yorkers, nothing in nature was as interesting as its effect on the city. Gregory said that the few who remained on the opposite side of the boat were conspirators and sleazy opportunists, whispering deals that only New Jersey should witness.
“You think we’re all corrupt, brutal bastards, don’t you,” Gregory said.
“Not all.”
“Not your sainted uncle, of course, but the rest of us thieving bullies.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I’m actually a sensitive guy at home,” Gregory said. “An accomplished gardener. Bet you didn’t know that. In fact, the only place I use my official NYPD rubber hose these days is in my backyard. Watering grass and flowers for the beautification of our planet.”
“Is that so.”
“I’ve even managed to grow grass in my backyard, a lovely shade of blue. Bluer than Kentucky. Want to know how I managed that?”
“Not really,” Danny said.
“By accident, my young friend. Like all great discoveries. The blue rises up from all the Maxwell House coffee cans underneath my lawn. That’s where I keep my bribe and shakedown money. Buried in my backyard in hundreds of Maxwell House coffee cans. Over the years the blue paint has peeled off the cans and dyed the grass follicles. Royal blue. Quite a sight.”
“I’m sure it is,” Danny said. “I’ve got to see it sometime.”
Gregory shook his head and flicked his cigar out into the water. “As far as the angel Gillian goes,” he said, “a slightly less than perfect picture is starting to emerge. We spent part of yesterday and most of today interviewing chorus girls.”
>
“I don’t think they call themselves chorus girls.”
“Whatever,” Gregory said. “Apparently Winters wasn’t the only person who noticed her dark side.”
“Who else?”
“I don’t do names.”
“How about doing a little bit about the Scorza interview?” Danny said.
“I’m not doing anything about that at all. But I will tell you something about human behavior. See John Miller over there?”
Gregory gestured over at his date, Cookie Martucci Counihan. Cookie was sitting on the life preserver box, discussing her previous lives with John Miller, the ABC-TV News reporter.
“One time a bunch of us are bullshitting at the bar in Elaine’s, and John Miller asks everybody what’s the first thing we look for in a woman. Your uncle says, ‘Gray hair.’ Everybody goes, ‘C’mon, stop the bullshit.’ They all thought it was a nonanswer, like he was being politically correct. But I knew it was his answer.”
“The woman would be more his age. I’ve heard him say that before. He means it.”
“Exactly,” Gregory said. “I said big tits, and I meant that, too. Although every now and then I go through a great ass phase. But what’s important is, John Miller asked a simple question and he wound up getting an answer that spoke volumes about your uncle. It’s his character, people act in character. Now apply that to your situation. Evan Stone didn’t let all those reporters at JFK rattle him last Wednesday, did he? But yesterday, you walked up to him all alone, and suddenly he gets rattled and knocks you on your ass. It’s inconsistent.”
“You’re telling me there’s something suspicious in Evan Stone’s reaction.”
“You were there. You tell me.”
The boat was filled with New York writers, athletes, politicians, and show biz celebrities the cops had pulled out of places like Elaine’s, Neary’s, and Rao’s. Nobody understood the value of contacts and connections better than cops. Someone always knew someone, but even if they didn’t, they’d find a way to reach into the most sheltered levels of metropolitan society. Danny was only beginning to understand the immense behind-the-scenes power the NYPD wielded. But they kept it all sotto voce, and that was the main reason the power existed.