Nightbird

by Edward Dee

  “Gillian came to me today,” she said.

  “Faye, don’t.”

  “Please, don’t think I’m crazy. Please, please, please. Just listen to me.”

  She went into her suitcase and took out a plain white envelope. She took out a feather and held it between her fingers. A small white feather.

  “Outside on the street,” she said. “I was going to the store, and a dove came above my head. I heard it and looked up. It just stayed there, above my head. Fluttering its wings. Making sounds. Coo, coo. Right above my head. Just staying there. Then this feather fell.”

  Ryan could hear street sounds from the street, high heels clicking on concrete. A gust of wind sent the venetian blinds swaying, clacking against the window frame.

  “I thought you would understand,” she said. “If anybody, I thought you would.”

  Faye searched the kitchen for something else to do. She hadn’t made eye contact again. She was beginning to cry.

  “I do understand,” he said, wrapping his arms around her.

  Ryan told her about a phone call just days after his son died. It was a very young boy. He couldn’t understand what the child was saying. He kept asking the boy to repeat the words. The boy made the same sounds over and over. Maybe infant gibberish, maybe a foreign language. Over and over. Ryan became frantic, begging the boy to try again. Make me understand, he’d said. He’d begged. It went on and on, until he couldn’t handle it any longer. He believed the voice was Rip telling him that he was fine.

  “I believe it was Gillian above you,” he said. “Telling you not to worry about her.”

  Faye tried to push him away, but he held her tightly. Then she relaxed in his arms, breathing deeply and exhaling, as if letting all the air out of her.

  “I did a bad thing,” Faye said.

  “Probably not as bad as you think.”

  “I knew Gillian was going to die.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “No. But I knew. I know what she had around her neck. White rosary beads.”

  Ryan had never said anything about rosary beads. Gillian had to have told her.

  “I gave them to her as a gift,” she said. “She told me she planned to wear my rosary beads when she played Maria. Then she jumped off the terrace.”

  “She didn’t jump,” Ryan said. “She was thrown off the terrace. Whoever gave her that drug threw her off.”

  Faye looked up at him, startled. At first Ryan thought another gust of wind had caught the venetian blind behind him. He heard the clatter, then it slammed back against the window frame as Victor bounded across the bed, two quick steps, and grabbed Ryan from behind.

  “No, Victor!” Faye screamed.

  Victor’s arm wrapped around Ryan’s neck. They banged against the wall, against the refrigerator, glass falling inside. The man was powerful; Ryan couldn’t budge his arm. He reached back for his gun, but it was trapped against the big man’s body. Victor squeezed tighter. Ryan stretched his head forward, his chin digging into the huge forearm, then he snapped his head back as hard as he could. He heard the crunch of nose cartilage. At the same time he raised his leg and slammed his heel into the top of Victor’s foot. He pivoted hard against the open hand.

  The big man staggered back against the wall, holding Ryan’s gun. He licked at the blood that ran down from his shattered nose. The cop’s eyes recorded the pedigree: Hispanic, about thirty years, six feet, one eighty, thick black hair. He had an athlete’s build, and his black eyes were fixed on Ryan.

  “Don’t do this,” Ryan said. “I’m a police officer.”

  “Please, Victor,” Faye said.

  “Put the gun down, Victor,” Ryan said, hearing the name. He inched forward, watching his eyes. Beads of sweat like drops of fine oil ran down from Victor’s hairline. “We can work this out.”

  “Do as he says,” Faye said. “We’ll run, Victor. Don’t hurt him. We’ll go together. Fuck the money.”

  Victor waved the gun at him, pointing him back. Trying to lick the blood off his mouth.

  “Trust me, Victor,” Ryan said. “Let’s stop this. Before something bad happens.”

  “Something bad has already happened,” Victor said, then he blinked, the sweat in his eyes, and Ryan reacted.

  He slapped the gun hand away and drove his elbow into Victor’s throat. The gun fell to the floor as Victor let out a gurgling cry and surged forward, digging in with his powerful legs. Ryan fell backward. His head cracked off the corner of the metal bed frame.

  Ryan could hear Faye yelling in Spanish as he groped for the gun. He was dazed and nauseated, and he could feel the swelling above his temple where he’d hit the bed frame. The swelling came quickly, like inflating a balloon. Swelling, until the skin could stretch no more and began to split. He saw the gun against the wall and struggled to his knees, reaching; but the big man got there first. Ryan got to his feet and lunged; he wasn’t going to die on the floor. He clutched a fistful of black hair and twisted, trying to lock Victor’s gun arm against the wall.

  Ryan saw Faye pick up the bat. The first blow hit both of them. She came down hard, with a big high swing. The full weight of the Bobby Bonilla model struck Ryan’s hand and crushed it against Victor’s head. The second blow caught only Victor. The gun fell to the floor. Ryan dropped and cradled it into his stomach. He heard the door slam.

  39

  Danny Eumont arrived in Tampa on Wednesday morning on the tail end of a tropical storm. He made two phone calls before he left the airport. The first to Joe Gregory, who reported that his uncle was still in the wind. Even Gregory sounded worried, not a good sign. The second call was to Manhattan magazine to commence begging the music editor to cover Lainie Mossberg’s rock band.

  Danny’s head still buzzed from an excess of bon voyage drinks in Kennedy’s on West Fifty-seventh. Gregory had bought the first drink, then called Ryan’s beeper. Three calls and three drinks later, Ryan still hadn’t answered the beep. One last time, Gregory promised. One and done. Anthony Ryan never called. One and done was bullshit.

  With a dry mouth and the sun overhead, Danny drove the rented Toyota across Old Tampa Bay, the tempting blue water flat as glass. The rain stopped, and a hazy steam hovered over the roadway. Evan Stone had told him where he’d find Valentine Carlson, the private detective he’d hired to locate Faye Boudreau. Danny called ahead, and the PI agreed to meet him.

  Valentine Carlson, once a promising infielder in the Milwaukee Braves organization, retired from the Tampa PD into his own investigative firm. His “offices” were located in a rusting travel trailer on a forgotten corner off Route 175 outside Gulfport. The blue sign above the trailer read, “Honest Val’s: Used Cars and Discreet Investigations.” A dozen old cars sat in the sandy lot in front of the trailer. Not one of the grimy vehicles had rolled off its respective assembly line subsequent to the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

  When Danny drove up, Carlson was stretched out in a hammock on his porch, reading the sports page. He wore a green Hawaiian shirt covered with toucans. The porch was a flatbed truck backed up to the trailer door.

  “Welcome to Honest Val’s,” he said, extending his hand, as Danny came up the makeshift stairs to the wooden truck bed. “Finest auto showroom in the subtropics.”

  As if he’d sensed Danny’s need, Honest Val Carlson moved to his ice chest with the grace of a shortstop going into the hole. He had a deepwater tan and a big smile and looked too young to be retired. Only the gray on top hinted that the engine might have a few more miles than it appeared from the body.

  Danny accepted a seven-ounce Coronita and brushed ice chips onto the truck-bed floor. He sat across from his host on the backseat of a late fifties Chevy. Like his yard adornments, Honest Val’s porch furniture had its origins in Detroit.

  “How’s the car business?” Danny said.

  “See something you like? I can put you in the car of your dreams. Low credit, no credit, don’t matter to me. Get you out of that rice burner, into a r
eal machine.”

  “These cars drivable?”

  “Probably not even pushable,” Honest Val said. “About six months ago a guy stopped, looking to buy. He wanted to cannibalize that Fairlane for parts. I chased him.”

  “Business is so good you’re chasing customers away.”

  “The last car sold here was in 1988, the year my dad died.”

  Carlson said his father was the original Honest Val. He’d inherited the nickname, the auto business, a huge Hawaiian shirt collection, and a love for life. The original Honest Val had taught him everything about life except how to hit a curve-ball.

  “I worked here as a spinner when I was a kid, turning back odometers,” Val said. “By the time I was fifteen I had standing arrangements with every major car dealer in the country. Made more money rolling back miles than I did in triple-A ball.”

  The beer tasted good, as a cold Mexican brew always did on a hot, hungover morning. The seven ounces went quickly, and Danny was tempted to reach for another. But he thought better of it.

  “I came down here after the funeral,” Val said, gesturing at the trailer behind him. “You could still smell his cigar. This place was a clubhouse more than anything else. Him and his buddies. They’d play cards, have a few beers, work on tout sheets. Laugh… Jesus, those guys would laugh. They’d all pile in that big red Caddy and head for the dog track. I couldn’t let it go. So I retired and opened this dynamic PI business.”

  Danny made a call to Joe Gregory to see if Ryan had surfaced. He hadn’t. They left in Honest Val’s old pickup; he refused to ride in the rice burner. They drove south toward Sarasota on the Sunshine Skyway, the Gulf of Mexico vast on the right. Below Bradenton they picked up Route 70 and headed inland toward Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. Honest Val began the story.

  “Lynette gave birth to Faye in a Chevy Impala in the parking lot of the Pier House Hotel in Key West,” Honest Val said. “The Impala had the keys in it, so she turned on the AC and gave birth. Security called the cops. Lynette and the baby went to the hospital for a couple of hours. Then she split with the baby. She walked back to the hotel parking lot. See, they never took the car keys from her. While the town was toasting the sunset, fifteen-year-old Lynette stole the same Impala and drove straight here with the baby.”

  “Why here?”

  “Lynnette grew up in St. Pete. She knew the convent was back here.”

  “What convent?” Danny said. “ ‘Sisters of the Swamp’?”

  Danny didn’t see any signs of a convent as Honest Val made the left down a gravel road cut in the cattails and marsh grass. They drove about a mile past an “Alligator Crossing” sign. The Convent of the Blessed Sacrament was hidden in a grove of dormant orange trees, marked only by a rusting mailbox atop a wooden post.

  “The only thing Lynnette Stone told me when she first called,” Honest Val said, “was that she placed the baby on this doorstep. She rang the doorbell and ran. She waited in the stolen Impala until a nun came to the door. Then she floored it and never looked back.”

  The doorstep was a red brick patio under the shade of a ramada, the slats heavily braided with shiny green vines. Danny got out and took half a dozen pictures. Except for a wooden cross on the wall, the building was not overtly parochial. Just a simple Sun Belt stucco with a red tile roof.

  Inside, it was cool and dark as a cathedral. They followed Sister Mary Celeste down a long hallway as she proudly filled them in on the order. Once strictly a cloister, Blessed Sacrament now served as a retirement home for the exploding population of aging nuns. Mostly they sewed altar cloths and vestments and baked for the archdiocese. Honest Val’s sneakers squeaked on the hardwood floor.

  They entered a round room with a high arching ceiling and three metal filing cabinets. It smelled of candle wax and abstinence. A long oak table sat in the center. On the ceiling was a mural depicting thirteen nuns of the order beheaded during the French Revolution. Sister Mary Celeste opened a folder and spread it out on the table.

  “This was the information we showed Mr. Carlson when he was last here,” she said softly. “It’s all we have. Faith only stayed with us for a few hours. We had to call the police. We had no facilities to care for such a small child. The county took her. Social Services.”

  “I thought her name was Faye,” Danny said.

  The nun put her finger to her lips, the universal Catholic school warning to lower your voice. The first warning.

  “I’ve heard she calls herself Faye now,” the nun said, almost whispering. “But Faith is her birth name. The county asked Sister Mary Elizabeth to name her, and she picked Faith. It’s the name on her birth and baptismal certificates. Sister Mary Elizabeth has gone on to her reward, but she kept in contact with Faith for many, many years. She thought a lot of the child.”

  “What about the name Boudreau?” Danny said.

  “As you see in this entry,” the nun said, “Faith was adopted by the Boudreaus at the age of three months. The Boudreaus were a circus family from Canada. Dancing bears. Sister Mary Elizabeth was worried about the baby, with the bears and all. We prayed for her, and hoped all would be well.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Not because of the bears. Mrs. Boudreau died of breast cancer when Faith was five, just starting school. Her husband disappeared soon after. He left Faith with the neighbors and just vanished. They found zoos for the bears.”

  Danny was startled when he heard noise directly behind him. What he thought was a wall was really a black screen. He could make out the dark habits of the sisters as they rose from their knees, rosary beads clattering. They came around the screen and walked through the room, smiling and nodding politely. Nine ancient Marys with ebony crosses on their chests. Give me nine Hail Marys, Groucho whispered.

  “Where did Faith wind up?” he said.

  “In foster care, with the Nuñez family. A trapeze act. Lovely people.”

  Danny’s head was foggy, but he remembered the list he’d copied off the mailbox at 210 Echo Place in the Bronx. He took out the Neary’s cocktail napkin. Nuñez was not on the list. He used the convent phone to make one more call to Gregory’s office. Gregory was out in the field, and he couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone else. On the way out, past the kitchen, he could smell communion wafers baking.

  40

  Wednesday morning a tropical storm moving up the coast brought wind and rain to New York City. Anthony Ryan in his Ma Bell windbreaker and bloody chinos stood at the corner of Broadway and Forty-seventh under the overhang of the Morgan Stanley Building. Times Square was a sea of black umbrellas. Taxis pulled their foul-weather fade. Street people wore paper-bag hats, neatly cuffed. Some chose plastic as their headgear and tied the bag handles around their ears. Ryan’s head was covered by his Yankee hat, which also hid a gash that should have been stitched. His hair, gelled and sticky with dried blood, curled around the bottom edge of the sweatband. His right hand was broken.

  Across the street, Trey Winters remained in his office in the dingy Theater Guild Building. Ryan waited. He figured they’d meet in Scorza’s office above the Orpheus Lounge or a neutral location like a restaurant. The odds were that he’d be walking west toward Eighth Avenue. He had set himself up so he’d be behind Winters. A tailman anticipated, bet with the odds. Fifty stories above Ryan’s head the electronic ticker of stock market prices raced in three huge, Vegas-like bands of yellow lights.

  Ryan leaned against the skyscraper’s green metal squares and realized he was hungry. That had to be a good sign. He’d called Leigh, told her he was fine but tied up on a case. She hadn’t even pretended to believe him. They’d lived together more than half their lives, and Leigh saw through his most artful stories. He wasn’t sure how much she’d intuited, but he didn’t tell her he’d been hurt. And he certainly didn’t mention he’d spent the night in Faye Boudreau’s bed.

  He remembered Faye pulling him onto the bed. He remembered being sick, and Faye cleaning his face and bloody scalp with a
damp cloth. In the morning she and her suitcase were gone, and he had more questions than ever.

  Who was Victor? What money were they talking about? Was it possible they were working with Winters or Scorza? His head itched and ached. He reached his hand up to touch it as Trey Winters came out of the office door.

  Quickly Ryan came off the green metal and began backing up. Winters fooled him, turning east, walking directly toward him. Ryan ducked around the corner into the driving rain. He looked for an alley or nook, but before he could find one Winters entered the huge office building Ryan had been leaning against.

  Ryan needed to take only a few steps to the glass doors to watch Winters traverse the block-long lobby. The center of the lobby’s marble floor was empty, roped off to limit damage from wet feet and dripping umbrellas. A path of carpet steered all traffic around to the left. Ryan lost sight of Winters. He wondered if he was heading for the elevators, but then he came around, back into view. He’d made a half circle. He was cutting through the building in the rain. When Winters got to the revolving doors on the other side, he stopped and looked behind him. Then he exited onto Forty-eighth Street.

  Ryan ran directly across the center of the lobby as a security guard yelled, “Hey, yo! Hey, yo!” He reached the north door in time to see Winters cross the street and pull the same stunt again. This time he used the covered driveway entrance of the Crowne Plaza Hotel as his personal umbrella. The hotel underpass led all the way through the block. Ryan waited, listening to the whoomf, whoomf of the revolving door. Winters was using all the shortcuts to avoid rain on his expensive haircut, and he was looking back continuously.

  Winters turned left on Forty-ninth. In the rain and against moving traffic, Ryan dashed across to the hotel underpass. He could smell the chlorine from the waterfall on the west wall, the water echoing as if in a cave. Slamming taxi doors reverberated like bombs going off in his head. He got to Forty-ninth in time to see Winters duck into St. Malachy’s Church. The Actor’s Chapel.