Nightbird

by Edward Dee

  Gregory tried to sing the theme from Gilligan’s Island, but he couldn’t get past “a three-hour tour.” Anthony Ryan came up behind them.

  “You and the skipper keeping out of trouble, Gilligan?” Ryan said, moving into a spot on the rail next to Danny.

  “The skipper has taken a vow of silence,” Danny said.

  “Nothing to say,” Gregory said. “We rattled Scorza’s cage. The guy held his ground.”

  As they sailed past Greenwich Village Danny was surprised by the number of water tanks that still remained on the roofs of the older buildings. Cylinders of all colors and sizes. They looked like the homemade rockets of a disorganized militia.

  “I’m meeting Wacky tomorrow,” Danny said. “I’ll ask him about Scorza.”

  “That string is played out,” Gregory said. “So Trey Winters knows a Mob guy. Big freakin’ deal. Everybody on this boat can pick up a phone and call a made man.”

  At the tip of Manhattan the ferry swung gently west to avoid the path of the Staten Island Ferry. Then it turned toward the East River. The wind changed and carried a brackish odor.

  “I’m also having dinner with Abigail Klass tomorrow night,” Danny said. “The food editor for our magazine set it up.”

  “She’ll be looking to protect Winters,” Ryan said. “But try to get an idea of his mental state that night.”

  “Winters’s mental state was at home, with his bodily state,” Gregory said. “At the time Gillian Stone died he was not there. You keep forgetting that, pally.”

  “You guys really don’t agree on this at all,” Danny said.

  “Was that a light bulb just went on?” Gregory said, waving his hand around in the space above Danny’s head. “By jove, I think he’s got it.”

  Near Wall Street they passed some of the newly renovated piers that housed tennis courts covered by block-long bubbled air tents. As night fell, the lights glowing yellow inside made them look like giant radioactive beehives out of a colorized Japanese horror flick.

  “You have to admit Winters had motive,” Ryan said. “We know he was having an extramarital affair with Gillian. A relationship that was blowing up in his face.”

  “Right,” Gregory said. “We know that from the neighbor Stella Grasso and the sister, Faye. Both interviews you did alone.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Ryan said. “You don’t trust me to do interviews on my own?”

  “I trust you. But I don’t agree with the way you’re handling this. This is my freakin’ case, pally, and I don’t see Winters as a suspect. You got some private hard-on for the guy, that’s your business. But I call the shots in this case. And I say we back off of Winters. And, oh yeah, we discuss interviews before we do them. No more Lone Ranger shit.”

  The smell of fish blew from the Fulton markets. Up ahead, the three bridges loomed into view: Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Manhattan; all three huge steel and spidery, like an erector set contest of the gods. Spanning a river that was not a river at all.

  “If you guys see a mermaid out here,” Gregory said, slapping his big meaty hand on the rail, “ask her what she thinks. Don’t bother calling me. I’ll be inside dancing with your wife.”

  “Keep the Holy Ghost between you,” Ryan said.

  A frowning Ryan stared out over the water, as if he were actually looking for a mermaid. Danny knew that on the way back they’d make one trip around the Statue of Liberty, then linger at Ellis Island. The booze would be flowing by then, the cops full-blown sentimental. Someone would offer a toast to the struggles of their ancestors. McDarby would play the harmonica. Joe Gregory would sing “If Old Ireland Were Over Here,” a song he knew in its entirety.

  “Should I cancel the interviews?” Danny said.

  “No,” Ryan said, resuming his thousand-mile stare. “Absolutely not.”

  Above them, the E train rumbled across the Brooklyn Bridge. Inside, on the main floor, Joe Gregory, with the agile grace of a grizzly bear, danced across the floor with Leigh Ryan.

  26

  After the boat ride they wound up in Elaine’s, their group filling three front tables. The mix of cops and reporters spewed stories faster than you could write them down. Which no one would, because the mere appearance of a notepad indicated a serious death wish. Joe Gregory sang from his one-line repertoire, the doo-wop years, until Elaine threatened to toss his ass out onto the bricks.

  In the wee hours the newsmen drifted into their own group, cops into theirs. Anthony and Leigh Ryan were the first to leave, taking Gregory’s date, Cookie Martucci Counihan, home to Queens. At last call only the hard core remained. Joe Gregory sat at table three in a hushed conversation with Elaine. Danny moved to the corner of the bar near the window and a zaftig redhead he’d chatted up earlier.

  “Where on the West Side?” the redhead said, apparently doubting he was a legitimate Manhattanite.

  “On the corner of bedlam and squalor,” Danny said, a line he’d borrowed from Tom Waits.

  “In a doorman building?” she snapped, and he knew he was outgunned.

  He wasn’t sure what other idiotic comments he’d made. Thick clouds floated through his consciousness. In his defense he could cite the devastating effects of jet lag, ferry funk, and the juniper berry.

  He put his glass down carefully. He didn’t want a spill. In the society of late night drinkers the worst thing you could do was spill your drink. Better you should fall off the stool, fracture your skull. Your cranium would heal faster than the scars a spilled drink would inflict on your reputation.

  At table three Joe Gregory recited “Dangerous Dan McGrew” while Elaine ignored him, scanning the night’s receipts. When the redhead finally went to the ladies’ room, Danny leaned over and asked Tommy the bartender if he knew her name.

  “Electric Alice they call her,” Tommy said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think it’s more a warning than a name.”

  Danny knew that Tommy was right. The prudent thing would be to grab a cab and go home, but prudence jumped ship when man’s favorite organ assumed command. Discreetly he checked his pockets to make sure he was armed with latex security.

  “Does she live around here?” Danny said, thinking maybe her nickname had something to do with her hair, or she worked for Local 3, maybe Con Ed.

  “You think it’s wise to find out?” Tommy said, looking directly at him.

  Danny paid his tab as Electric Alice came out of the ladies’ room, fresh lipstick and all. To the exhausted Danny, with his shoulder aching, she looked as refreshed and rested as Minnesota Fats did to Fast Eddie Felson in that crucial juncture of their nine-ball marathon. He folded.

  He caught a ride down Second Avenue with former squad boss Wally Millard, who dropped him off a few blocks before he turned onto the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to Queens. Danny walked toward Third Avenue, figuring he’d make the left down to Fifty-seventh, where he’d stand a better chance of getting a cab. The air felt cool and clear, benefiting from the breeze and the weekend dip in air pollution. The city was quiet enough to hear the streetlights click through the changes. It was that surreal hour when only cops and psychos were on the stroll.

  At the corner of Third Avenue he heard the squeal of brakes, a cab stopping near Caramanica’s restaurant. The poorly tuned engine chugged loudly in the hushed city. Danny jogged toward it. The cab’s back door opened. The driver wrote on a clipboard. A woman slid money into the safety slot. The cab was a gypsy, “Tremont Taxi” painted on the side. A broken side window covered with plastic taped to the frame. He started to yell to the driver. Then he stopped.

  The woman slammed the door. The cab chugged away. The woman paused, a little unsteady on her feet. Danny waited on the corner as a Nineteenth Precinct radio car cruised by. He knew she’d be walking toward him. He knew exactly where she was going.

  “Danny?” Faye Boudreau said.

  “What the hell happened to your face?”

  Her eye was swollen, almost closed
, the bruise dark purple and fresh. She put her hand up quickly, but her hand could not hide the welt.

  “I fell,” she said.

  “From where, the roof?” he said, looking closely. “You have to get that taken care of. I’ll take you to the hospital.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t be silly, Faye. Get it looked at. You could have eye damage.”

  “Just walk me home. I’ll put something on it.”

  Faye wore white sandals, a short black rayon skirt, and a black T-shirt from Cats with the green eye staring. He could smell the booze, see the shaky gait.

  “Who the hell did that?” he said.

  The bruise looked worse in the elevator’s fluorescent glare. The purple skin around it appeared parchment thin and dead. Outside the apartment door she fumbled for her keys. Danny wanted to persuade her to make the emergency room run, but he kept his mouth shut until she opened the door. He knew how sounds carried in the hall.

  Danny knew where to find everything in the apartment. It was exactly as Gillian had left it. Not as neat—Gillian had been obsessively neat. But it still smelled like her, the scented candles and potpourri.

  He took a white terry-cloth dish towel from the kitchen drawer and dumped half a dozen ice cubes into it. He held it up to Faye’s eye. She winced and stepped back when the towel touched her. Danny put his left hand against her back to hold her still. She took a breath and allowed him to press the ice against her cheek. Danny couldn’t help himself, his heart beating faster, being in this apartment again. Nothing had changed. Nothing.

  “You really should have this looked at,” he said.

  “Mañana.”

  Even Faye’s shampoo, her hair so close to his face, was Gillian’s apricot.

  “She always said you were a nice guy,” Faye said.

  “I fool a lot of people,” Danny said.

  “That was a big subject between us. Nice guys.”

  Faye wore simple gold hoop earrings. Just one hole in each ear, not four like her sister. She wore no other jewelry, no rings, no bracelets.

  “I miss her,” Faye said. “I never knew I could love somebody like that. Like it hurts. It hurts in my heart. I always heard that in songs. About heartache, you know? I thought it was just something you say.”

  “Are you going to be all right?” he said.

  Faye’s profile, in the light of the table lamp, reminded Danny of Gillian. The same bone structure and low thick hairline as their mother, Lynette. She pulled her head away. He was sure the ice was painful, but it would keep the swelling down. She reached up and took hold of the towel and put it on the counter.

  “Just hold me,” she said, wrapping her arms around his waist. She pressed her body against him, as if trying to go through him. Then she looked up at him and kissed him. Her lips were full and moist, her breath hot.

  “Faye,” he said in weak protest.

  She shoved her hand under his shirt, feeling his skin. Even her hands were hot. She yanked his shirt out of his pants, then stepped back and pulled the Cats shirt over her head. She un-snapped her black bra and tossed it. She bunched Danny’s shirt up under his chin, then she pressed her chest against him. Skin to skin.

  He said her name several times but said neither stop nor go. Just “Faye, Faye, Faye.” Her breasts were much fuller than Gillian’s, her nipples dark and large. She clawed at Danny’s shirt, then his belt, easily frustrated at each small impediment: buttons, buckles, snaps. “Faye, Faye, Faye,” he murmured.

  In red panties, Faye tossed clothes off the bed, then the red panties. She had a tattoo of something peeking above the vee of her pubic hair. Danny struggled to get his pants off, the condom out. She pulled at him, her legs wrapped around his body as if trying to climb him. He could feel her wetness on his leg.

  She fell backward onto the bed, trying to pull him down on top of her. They were too close to the wall, his feet still on the floor, knees barely on the bed. Danny tried to maneuver her longwise, farther up the mattress. But she grabbed his cock and squirmed toward him. Pulling him down.

  She came almost instantly… violently… the second he entered her. Her legs straightened, her heel smashing into the wall. He heard it break the Sheetrock. She moaned and bucked. Then the desperation left her, but she kept riding him. Riding it out. Working on him. Chanting in his ear.

  Later he lay there, looking at the wall. His shoulder ached, but he was afraid to wake her.

  27

  A good tailman gets the glare behind him. Anthony Ryan stood on the east side of Columbus and Sixty-sixth, with his back to the Monday morning sun. The weather had cooled off, the predicted high only eighty-two. Ryan leaned against the front windows of the ABC-TV studio. On the big screen in the lobby Regis and Kathie Lee held up a copy of the Daily News. The back page headline was OVERRATED, yesterday’s crowd chant at Yankee Stadium for the beleaguered pitcher Irabu.

  Ryan pretended to watch, but his attention was focused on the sun-drenched West Side, specifically the front door of the Reebok Sports Club. He was waiting for the wife of Trey Winters to show up for her ten A.M. workout.

  Darcy Jacobs Winters met her personal trainer three times a week in the Reebok Sports Club. Ryan knew she’d arrive by nine forty-five in a black Lincoln Towncar. Her driver would be Poochie Englehardt, a former member of the Four Eight Precinct detective squad, who’d rub his face with both hands when he parked. This gesture courtesy of the blue underground.

  The blue underground consisted of thousands of retired cops and feds working at all levels of big business. With its silver-haired cadre of seasoned detectives, the NYPD provided corporate Manhattan with a ready-made all-star team. A tightly knit network, it knew all the secrets, where all the bodies were buried.

  The Lincoln was right on time. Poochie Englehardt picked Ryan out easily, as if he had a badge painted on his forehead. He did the face rub, then threw Ryan one solemn nod, as if to say “This is a gift, don’t screw it up.” Darcy Winters hit the sidewalk running. She wore a raincoat over black tights and white sneakers. Ryan followed her into the lobby.

  Ryan figured Darcy’s raincoat indicated her desire not to be caught sporting spandex in public. He made a point not to look at her as they rode the elevator silently to the third floor. Three was as far as the elevator went in the huge building. There had to be another bank of elevators.

  The door opened onto a room the size of a cathedral with a thirty-foot ceiling and marble floors. Three steps up to the security desk; the sign read, “Reception Desk.” Ryan picked out all the security people in their Gap blue blazers, a pair of them within fifteen feet of the elevator. He had his ID ready.

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Trey Winters,” he said loudly.

  He got the reaction he’d hoped for. They looked right over at Darcy Jacobs Winters, who had stopped at the coat check room.

  “Oh,” Ryan said, turning slowly. “Are you Mrs. Winters?”

  Ryan introduced himself. He extended his hand quickly, knowing that once they’d shaken your hand you’d scaled the biggest barrier.

  “If I could have just two minutes,” he said, holding on to her hand. “It’s about the Gillian Stone case.”

  “I’ve already been interviewed.”

  “This is the follow-up. It’s standard.”

  Ryan transferred his hand to the woman’s shoulder and guided her back, out of the way of the people rushing off the elevators. A gentlemanly thing to do, her safety his only concern.

  “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “I have a friend who works out in this gym,” he said.

  “Tell Russ I’ll be with him in a second,” Darcy said to the woman behind the reception desk.

  Darcy Jacobs Winters was not a classic beauty. Her face was large and full. Her figure was deceptive, slim up top, pearing out from the hips down. Ryan asked her what she remembered about the night Gillian died.

  “The phone ringing in the middle of the night. My husband answering it.
He said the police asked him to come down to the precinct on Fifty-fourth Street. Gillian had been seriously injured. We were shocked to find out she was dead.”

  Ryan remembered his own middle-of-the-night call from the police officer in Utah: Your son has been seriously injured. But Ryan had been a cop a long time. He knew exactly what “seriously injured” meant.

  “I’m talking about before you went to bed,” he said. “What time did your husband get home that night?”

  “A little before twelve-thirty.”

  “In the previous interview you said twelve forty-five.”

  “Did I? I forgot what I said. What time does Letterman end? Letterman was still on.”

  “It ends at twelve-thirty.”

  “It used to be on until one.”

  “That was the old Carson show, years ago.”

  “Then I should have said about twelve-fifteen. I’d fallen asleep on the couch with the TV on. I always wait up for Trey, unless he says he’s going to be real late. Letterman was still on when he got home.”

  Ryan wrote in his notebook. Sometimes it unnerved people if they saw you recording their words in ink. It implied adding teeth to words that might return to bite them. Darcy Winters didn’t even blink.

  “I know people are going to say my husband was having an affair with Gillian,” she added. “But it’s not true.”

  “I believe you,” he said, smiling.

  “People think because of his looks he’s a womanizer. Even my father called him a playboy when we first started dating. Then he got to know him better.”

  “Your father was a great friend to the cops in this city. The Police Foundation would have gone broke years ago without him. We were all truly sad to hear of his death.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Her eyes filled with tears. “My father was a wonderful man. My whole life, before I met Trey.”