Nightbird

by Edward Dee

  “Remember how she fixes the house with flowers, Faye? Bouquets in every room. Her eyesight is going bad, now. She has to feel her way along the street to get to mass. Along the walls and the parked cars. But every morning she goes.”

  “I miss her, too, Victor,” she said.

  “Come with me. We’ll stay in the Bronx. One night. Tomorrow we’ll drive to see Mama.”

  “I’m not going to Mexico with you.”

  “Stop being stubborn. You have no life here. You belong with us, your family.”

  “Gillian was my family.”

  She opened a beer and put on the television. An old movie with Bogart and Bacall. She pushed the suitcase aside and sat on the open sofa bed. Victor picked up the clicker and changed it to the all-Spanish station.

  “We better get used to the language,” he said.

  “How many times do I have to say it, Victor?”

  “Faye, I’m sorry for what happened to Gillian. Sorry with all my heart. But it didn’t have to happen. All she had to do was tell him she didn’t know how it was missing. Someone could have stolen it. A burglar. Thieves steal every day in this city.”

  “But you stole it, and I have to live with that.”

  The phone rang, and Faye ignored it. It kept ringing, and Victor looked at the phone, then back at her.

  “Answer your telephone,” he said.

  “I don’t answer the telephone anymore.”

  “Answer it!” he yelled. “Or they will come over here to find out why.”

  Faye picked up the phone with a soft “Hello.” She listened, then said no several times before hanging up. She told Victor it was a detective wanting to know if Detective Ryan had stopped by.

  Victor knew where Ryan was.

  After delivering the message to Winters, Victor had stayed around and watched the Theater Guild Building for signs of police activity. But all he saw was Detective Ryan following Trey Winters to lunch. He suspected only Trey Winters, saw nothing else. Ryan would be Victor’s Popeye Doyle.

  “You should go now,” she said.

  “We haven’t eaten.”

  “I’m not hungry, I told you.”

  He snatched the beer out of her hands and poured it down the sink. She went to the refrigerator for another, and he grabbed her and held her by the wrists.

  “It was fine when I fixed your police friend in Miami,” he said.

  “I never asked you to kill him.”

  “He was beating you, Faye.”

  “So you beat me now, instead.”

  “You make me do that, querida. With your disrespectful mouth. These people did nothing for you. Your own birth mother did nothing. That’s not family. Your own sister didn’t help you.”

  “Gillian loved me.”

  “You were a novelty to her; she would have forgotten.”

  Faye slapped him in the face.

  Victor hit her back, quick and hard with his open hand. Faye fell backward and slammed into the stove. She slid to the kitchen floor, and red sauce spilled down the white porcelain stove and onto her French blue blouse. Victor knelt down. He touched her cheek with his fingers.

  37

  Gregory came off the Cross Bronx and made the left on Webster Avenue. Skeletons of Chevys and Fords sat helter-skelter along the sides of the sad streets, as if abandoned in haste by the conscripts of a retreating army.

  “We should have stopped at Faye’s apartment,” Danny said.

  “I called her from Neary’s.”

  “She was home?”

  “Yeah, and she said Ryan wasn’t there.”

  “And you believed her.”

  “If your uncle was there, he wouldn’t let her tell me he wasn’t. Besides, he’d never miss a trip to the Bronx. My guess is he’s going to put Trey Winters to bed, then we’ll hear from him.”

  Anthony Ryan loved the Bronx. He loved talking about how much the South Bronx had improved in the past few years. A new dawn was rising over Fort Apache, he said. Every other block showed evidence of new construction. But to Danny the predominant look was still the bombed-out landscape of a battle lost. Rubble-strewn lots seeded with shards of shattered brick; abandoned five-story walk-ups shuttered blind with tin; the twin war orphans of poverty and apathy playing on cracked sidewalks.

  “Tremont Taxi, right?” Gregory said.

  “That’s what it said on the side of the cab.”

  “There used to be an eye and ear clinic over here on Tremont Avenue, right off Webster. I used to drive a cop there once a week for treatment. This was in the late sixties, maybe early seventies. Treatments lasted three hours sometimes. Some psycho woman tossed lye in his face, partially blinded him. Lye used to be a big thing. Big danger to cops. This woman nailed five or six cops at once. Coming up the stairs, some Harlem tenement. He was one of them. You don’t hear so much about lye anymore.”

  When the Bronx was all one big farm, they named this section Tremont for its three hills: Mount Hope, Mount Eden, and Fairmont. The gypsy cabs congregated atop Mount Hope, outside a storefront on Tremont Avenue near the Grand Concourse.

  “He’ll call you, right?” Danny said. “If he needs you.”

  “He knows my beeper number by heart.”

  Joe Gregory said the reason the city allowed the gypsy cabs to operate was that they’d go into areas like this. Gregory parked in front of Tremont Taxi, behind a primered Plymouth Aries with a plastic taxi sign on the side door.

  The front window of the taxi office had once been the showcase of a bakery or butcher shop, some place with wares to display. Inside, a bitter smell, coming from the dark green leaves steaming on the hot plate. A two-way radio crackled.

  The dispatcher was a heavyset black man in a wheelchair with “Property of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital” stenciled on the back. He sat beside a rickety card table, the shiny pages of a skin magazine open before him, all flesh and hair.

  Gregory identified himself and told him that he needed to speak to someone who worked late last Sunday night. Someone with knowledge of a fare dropped off at Third Avenue and Sixty-fourth in Manhattan. The dispatcher gave him the obligatory sneer, then spoke into the radio.

  “That’s two one one five Bathgate,” the dispatcher said, his mouth against the mike. “Two one one five.”

  A smattering of porn mags spilled over a greasy vinyl sofa against the wall. Coke cans jammed with cigarette butts. A poster of Pam Grier as Foxy Brown was taped to the wall above the sofa. The radio crackled again, the voice unintelligible.

  “Return to base,” the dispatcher said.

  Then he said to Gregory, “Sorry, I can’t help you.”

  Gregory walked behind the desk and put both hands on the back of the man’s wheelchair. He yanked it quickly and powerfully, as if he were going to dump the dispatcher onto the floor. He leaned down and whispered something to him.

  “Miguel is the dude you want,” the dispatcher said. “He probably took that run. Probably coming in at midnight.”

  “Two probablys,” Gregory said.

  “Sometimes he shows, sometimes he don’t.”

  “What’s his phone number?” Gregory said.

  “You gotta be joking.”

  “Maybe it’s in these files,” Gregory said. He opened the single file cabinet against the wall and took out a bottle of Gilbey’s gin. He opened the second drawer and threw movie cassette tapes onto the vinyl couch.

  “You don’t need to screw up my files,” the dispatcher said. “I can’t speak for last Sunday, but Sixty-fourth and Third is a regular…. We pick her up around the corner, Two Ten Echo Place. Three, four in the morning, maybe once a week. Maybe less, I don’t keep no statistics.”

  “What apartment at Two Ten Echo?” Gregory said.

  “She calls, we pick her up out front of the building.”

  “Our little talk won’t get back to her,” Gregory said, picking up a stack of mail on the counter.

  “I’m not exactly planning to sweet-talk the bitch, myself.”
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br />   Gregory gave him the zipped-lip sign. “How did that happen?” he asked, pointing in the general direction of the dispatcher’s lower body.

  “’Nam,” he said.

  “Sorry, man,” Gregory said quietly. “Sorry I hassled you.”

  He took a business card from his pocket and told the dispatcher to call him if he needed anything. He apologized twice more before they got out the door.

  They had no trouble finding 210 Echo Place, a large private house carved into several apartments. Three metal garbage cans sat out front, with the number 210 painted vertically in black. A thick chain looped through the lids. Seven steps led up to a stone stoop. Gregory kept driving past the building.

  “We passed it,” Danny said. “Two Ten is back there.”

  “I know. That was just a look.”

  He went around the block and came through more slowly the next time.

  “What are we doing now?” Danny said.

  “Looking for your uncle.”

  “Why would he be here?”

  “Because he’s capable of getting Faye to admit she had a boyfriend up here. And he’s crazy enough to look for the guy himself. That’s why I went through the block. To check for his car.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t at Faye’s?”

  “Never assume, Daniel.”

  Gregory parked at a hydrant three houses away. He turned off the lights, let the car idle.

  “What we got here is tricky,” Gregory said. “The trick is to find out exactly who lives here without raising anybody up.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Several ways. Con Ed billing tells us who’s paying the electric, but maybe this place isn’t broken down to individual meters. The phone company is a source, but maybe our subject doesn’t have a phone. My personal favorite is the mailman. The mailman knows it all.”

  “It’s almost midnight,” Danny said. “Good chance the mail-man’s been here already.”

  “That’s the conundrum.”

  A radio car from the precinct cruised by slowly. The heavily muscled cop driving had his bicep propped up on the door ledge. He threw a glare to let them know they were trespassing on his turf. And he knew who they were. Danny wondered why it was so important for some cops to establish fear. The weight lifter’s glare suggested he was one small provocation away from steroid rage.

  “They think we’re Internal Affairs,” Gregory said.

  Danny knew that two white guys from different generations wearing suits would be perceived as being from Internal Affairs. Cop reasoning went as follows: This neighborhood, this hour, who else could they be?

  “Years ago,” Gregory said. “Everybody in the Detective Bureau used to wear fedoras. The same fedora. Cops would know we were from the bureau because of the hat.”

  “I left mine home,” Danny said.

  “When you first got made detective they sent you down to Izzy’s on Delancey Street. You walked in, told Izzy you just got made, he sold you the right hat. We all had the exact same hat. Ribbon band. Izzy always threw in the pearl pin. I still got mine home.”

  “Leave it to me in your will,” Danny said.

  Gregory made a note on a Neary’s cocktail napkin with an old golf pencil he found on the dash.

  “I wish your uncle was here,” Gregory said. “He knows the Bronx a lot better than I do.”

  “What’s going on with him, Joe?”

  Gregory looked up at the windows of 210 Echo Place. For a guy who’d been a cop over thirty years, he seemed unsure of what to say next. He was not comfortable as the final word.

  “Your uncle is a guy who dwells on his regrets, Danny. He thinks he’s responsible for everything and everybody, including Gillian Stone. When something goes wrong he blames himself. Always did. Since Rip died he’s been eating himself alive with regrets. I told him, as my old man always said, it’s a late day for regrets.”

  “I think Eugene O’Neill said that.”

  “He probably heard it from my old man.”

  The same radio car passed them again. This time the recorder, a young black woman, checked out their license plate number. Danny thought about how his own regrets had been eating at him this past week. He knew he hadn’t listened closely to Gillian. He thought about his uncle, and how his granddaughter, Katie, would sit on his lap, look up at him. He remembered watching his uncle’s face, the absolute concentration on every word she said; bombs could go off and he wouldn’t know anything but her. He decided he’d give Abigail Klass another call. He’d learn to listen. Really pay attention.

  “How about you?” Danny said. “You have any regrets?”

  “Regrets?” Gregory said. “I’ve got a few. But then again too few to mention.”

  “That’s the first Sinatra you’ve done tonight.”

  “I must be slipping,” he said.

  A male voice came over the Buick’s police radio. Gregory had switched bands to pick up local precinct calls. “Rat Squad on Echo Place,” the voice said. “Rats on Echo.”

  “Where?” said another voice.

  “Two Ten,” the first voice answered.

  Gregory ignored the veiled threats on the radio, as if accepting the paranoia of late-shift ghetto cops. Danny preferred not to be the target of mistaken identity.

  “Take a walk up and check the names on the mailbox,” Gregory said. “At least we’ll get something out of the trip.”

  “Maybe there are no names on the mailbox.”

  “Maybe if the queen had balls, she’d be the king,” Gregory said. “Go up and check the names. It’s worth a shot. Take two minutes.”

  “What do I do with them when I get them?”

  “You write them down, take them to Florida, and ask the people down there if any of them ring a bell.”

  He handed him the golf pencil and another Neary’s napkin.

  “What do I say if I get caught?” Danny said.

  “Say you’re looking for Nilda Rosario. About five two, dark hair. A little mole on her neck, just below her left ear. Big ass.”

  “You just make that up?”

  “Naw, she’s a broad I used to know. She lived in that apartment building on the corner. I used to visit her for those three hours while the lye cop was getting treatment.”

  “Thirty years ago and you think she still might be around?”

  “It’s worth a shot,” he said.

  Danny walked up the stairs and opened the vestibule door. The smell of disinfectant was strong enough to bring tears to his eyes. In the ground-floor window a TV flashed blue behind the curtains. The light was dim, but he could see names written on the mailbox. Above each mailbox, on a strip of fresh adhesive tape, appeared a name. Five names: four Spanish, one Russian.

  38

  After he stopped following Trey Winters, Ryan caught the number six train downtown. He switched to the westbound E at Fifty-first. At the Mid-Town North Precinct, he picked up his Olds, stuffed his bright windbreaker into his gym bag, and put it all back in the trunk. He donned a black sweatshirt from his emergency clothes bag, then drove back to Faye Boudreau’s and knocked on the door.

  He could hear Faye’s TV from outside her apartment door. The sound of rapid-fire Spanish and a loud laugh track like Telemundo. He knocked again, harder this time, and the sound of the TV stopped.

  “Just a minute,” Faye said.

  Ryan was ready to knock again when he heard footsteps coming toward the door. Locks unsnapped.

  “I didn’t expect you,” Faye said.

  “I just have a few questions.”

  “You can’t stay long; I’m leaving in a few minutes.”

  Faye’s face was badly bruised, her body language too tight, her voice too shrill. Something was very wrong with Faye Boudreau. He felt the prickly hairs on the back of his neck. Ryan decided he’d ask her what happened but wouldn’t push it. He knew she’d lie, and he didn’t want her to go off on a tangent.

  “What happened to your face?” he said.

/>   “Fell down the stairs. Going to the laundry room.”

  She wore black jeans that looked new, and sandals with leather thongs braiding up her leg. The fact that Faye had been barefoot every other time he’d seen her made Ryan think she truly was leaving. But over the black jeans was an old, ripped Florida Marlins T-shirt.

  “I heard the TV from out in the hall,” he said. “I didn’t know you could speak Spanish.”

  “You grow up where I grew up, you learn to speak Spanish damn quick.”

  “Pronto.”

  “Sí,” she said.

  The bed was made. On it, a half-packed suitcase. It struck Ryan that he never considered she had a life outside this apartment. A life outside her grief. The curtain blew away from the partly open window. First time he’d seen that.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “Florida. Taking the bus.”

  “When?”

  “Right now.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” she said.

  He followed her into the kitchen. He felt the stove burners and found one still warm.

  “Did you ever know Gillian to take a drug called Lorazepam?”

  “I told you she didn’t take drugs.”

  “Blood tests proved she had Lorazepam in her system, Faye. A lot of it.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  In the sink, a single pot soaked in red water. Except for slicing limes for beer, that was the first domestic act he knew her to perform.

  “Let’s talk about your last conversation with Gillian,” he said. “I want you to think about each word.”

  “You always this thickheaded?”

  “Gillian told you she was wearing the white costume, didn’t she?”

  “She said she tried it on.”

  “Do you know what she had around her neck that night?”

  Faye fiddled with silverware and dishes, drying things that already appeared to be dry. Taking them from the dish rack and putting them into various cabinets. The stove and counters were clean, wet swipe marks on both.