Bleeding in Black and White

by Colin Cotterill

  “Did you hear a car pull away?”

  “Did I? You know I may have now you ask. It was a couple of minutes later.”

  “Great. Thanks a lot.”

  “No problem. You’re that friend of Vistarini. I’ve seen you around before. They found him yet?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. Night.”

  He shut the door on Bodge and left him standing there. It now appeared very likely the taxi driver had told the truth about bringing Lou home. So somehow he had to trace his friend’s movements from the doorstep on which he now stood. He’d rung the bell and not been allowed in. What would he have done then? He decided to give his surveillance one more shot.

  An hour later he was drowsing against the wall of the school. His toes and fingers were numb from the cold. If it hadn’t been for the squeaking of the perambulator wheels, he would probably have missed the old lady completely. She was a coffee-brown woman dressed in layers of clothes like an Eskimo. She dragged the baby carriage behind her piled high with every type of junk he could imagine. This hill of garbage was topped with an old cane chair whose legs held everything in place. It was a miracle of trash engineering.

  This was exactly what Bodge had been waiting for: people like Coffee-Brown who owned the early morning streets. These were the spies who saw and heard secrets in the sleeping city. He wouldn’t confront her there on the poorly lit sidewalk. He’d follow her from a distance and see where she stayed, perhaps meet her gutter comrades, see who’d been about the previous Friday.

  She walked slowly stopping at trash cans and piles of garbage that stood on street corners like neighborhood pyres. Residents could never tell when the refuse collectors were likely to come by, so some weeks the trash piled up and gave the streets a certain smell. A blind man could tell if he was in Chinatown, Little Italy or Jewish Williamsburg just by the stench. But there was gold in them there hills of junk for people like Coffee Brown. She browsed. She tasted. She tried on crushed hats and holey sweaters and heel-less shoes. And all the while, Bodge stood uncomfortably back in the doorways and alleyways she’d passed.

  It was another hour before she reached her final destination. Her route hadn’t been a straight line. She’d worked her way up and down blocks like a mailman, and Bodge had labored after her, believing she’d never let up. He marveled at how happy she seemed, adding the spoils to her towering chariot. But finally she ended up at a boarded-over building only two blocks from Lou’s place. The basement had been converted to an all night center whose lights were blazing even at 4AM.

  Coffee Brown walked past the entrance and wheeled her booty down an alleyway beside the building. At its dark end she creaked open a tall gate and pushed the carriage inside. It appeared to Bodge to be the rear entrance to this same center. He walked back to the front and read the plaque screwed to the wall at the foot of the steps.

  “Salvation Army - Bowery Shelter”, what Lou would call a “bum depot”.

  Bodge walked down the steps, through an open door and into a well-lighted room. It was fitted out like a cafeteria with clothed tables, and chairs that mostly matched. Against one wall was a long trestle with cups and plates of cookies. A large black coffee pot with cloth wrapped round its handle sat on a stove over a low flame. Although it was likely well stewed, the coffee smelt good to Bodge.

  But he wasn’t about to steal vital nutrients from the city’s vagrants wherever they might be. There had to be someone on duty. The Salvation Army wasn’t about to let bums save themselves. There was only one door at the rear of the room. It opened into a large dark space set out with rows of bunks. Half of them were occupied and the place stank of body odor and stale liquor.

  “Shut that fucking door, you asshole,” came a voice.

  Bodge pulled the door shut behind him and immediately felt uneasy there in a dark place with the vermin of New York’s night world. Someone on the far side of the room had noticed him. A huge figure picked its way toward him through the sleeping bodies. In the light that sawed through the cracks in the ill-fitting doorway Bodge could make out the features of a well-built Negro even taller than himself. He stopped in front of Bodge and spoke in a deep educated southern accent,

  “I’d personally say you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “No, I think I’m right,” Bodge answered.

  “Are you with the police?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Yous two gonna spoon there all fuckin’ night?” shouted the same, unsettled houseguest.

  “Shut up, Slim,” the big man said calmly into the darkness. “You want quality, you go and book yourself a room at the Carlton.” But the Negro put a powerful hand on Bodge’s shoulder and steered him back into the reception room.

  “Do you look after this place alone?” Bodge asked. His host walked to the trestle and started fixing coffee for both of them.

  “At night, after supper, there’s just me. You want to tell me who you are?”

  “Sorry, yes. My name’s Robert Leon.” He reached into his hip pocket for his badge then remembered he’d made a decision earlier not to bring it. “In the daylight hours I work with the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “I reckon I’ve heard of them. Cream? Sugar?”

  “Just as it comes from the pot, thanks.”

  “And what are you after dark?”

  “I guess you could say I’m here doing some research.”

  “About?”

  “I’m looking for a lost friend.”

  “And you think your friend might be in a place like this?” They sat at one of the tables. The man was solid like a pro linebacker. If he hadn’t been so exhausted, Bodge might have bothered to ask him if he’d ever played.

  “No. But I was hoping some of your…guests might have seen something. Last we knew, my friend was drunk and passed out on his front stoop two blocks from here.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last Saturday morning around 2AM.”

  “No offence, but I imagine your friend isn’t the type of drunk we cater for here.”

  “I understand that. But I’m sure your people would notice a guy passed out beside the street. I just saw a woman with a baby carriage walking in front of his apartment.”

  “Vivien Leigh.”

  “Viv—?”

  “Don’t ask. Yeah. She sees a lot. She even sees a lot that isn’t there. I just have doubts that Vivien and our usual clientele would be comfortable talking to someone like yourself.”

  “What am I like?”

  “Establishment, crew cut, manners, white, money, badge. Take your pick.”

  “It had never occurred to me I belonged to so many unpopular sub-divisions.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been here since they opened this place and a lot of them don’t trust me, either. And I’m from an inferior race.”

  “Look, all I want to do is get some information about a friend. I’m not here to start a war.”

  “You’d be too late anyhow. The war’s been going on for quite a while. You just happened to arrive at the front line.” Bodge was too tired for a lecture. He knew the place now and could come back when he had some energy. He stood.

  “Thanks for the coffee. I needed it.”

  The night man looked up at him, “I’ll ask around. You got a number?”

  Bodge pulled a card from his jacket pocket, then remembered a small black and white photo he’d brought from his apartment. He handed it to the night man.

  “This your friend?”

  “Yeah.”

  He went to a shelf beside the unplugged TV where he kept his bifocals in an ornate case. He put them on and read one of the cards. There was just Bodge’s name and two numbers, one in New York and the other in DC.

  “I’ll be at the New York number, I guess, until Sunday,” Bodge told him. The night man had turned over the photograph and was studying Lou’s face. Bodge knew. He knew straight away that something had happened in the man’s head. The slight inflectio
n of an eyebrow, a dilation of the pupils, nothing spectacular but enough to tell Bodge the figure in the photograph had triggered a memory in the night man’s mind.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “You know, don’t you?” Bodge said. “You know what happened to him.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Is he dead?” He wanted to get that out of the way.

  “Yes.” It was the answer Bodge expected but he still couldn’t prevent the chill from squirming up inside him. “I’m sorry. But you got the times wrong. That screwed me up.”

  Palmer sat on the sofa with his legs crossed. Denholm occupied the easy chair beside a stack of magazines. Bodge had covered four miles walking up and down his living room rug as he told the story. The two men had listened in silence.

  When Palmer was sure Bodge had finished, he stood and walked to the dining table. He perched his backside on its edge and folded his arms. Bodge, exhausted, took his place on the sofa. Palmer looked at Bodge and shook his head minutely.

  “I can’t pretend to be happy that you took all this on by yourself, Bodge. You knew all along you’d be going out to Lou’s after we left you last night.”

  “There was nothing three of us could have done better than one.”

  “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that someone’s trying to kill you as well.”

  “We can’t be sure of that.”

  “Right. There’s really only one way to find out for sure. Make it easy for them. Hang around on street corners and vagrant centers. Is that what you’d planned? Bodge, I’m disappointed in you. Really.”

  Bodge was tempted to blurt out all his own disappointments and doubts, but he held on to them. They were still his only weapon.

  18.

  It was Saturday morning and Bodge was once more on the train to DC. The previous 24 hours had sped by like the insignificant stations beyond his carriage window. Bodge had found himself relegated from first baseman to the dugout almost as soon as he’d finished telling Palmer and Denholm his findings. With agency pressure, the police force had acted amazingly quickly. The efficiency of the dealings had left Bodge breathless, and also a little afraid. Denholm coordinated things from Bodge’s apartment phone, and passed on news as it came in.

  A numbered grave on Hart Island had been located and Lou’s body exhumed. It was swiftly returned to the city morgue where a formal autopsy began. Meanwhile, a very serious shakedown of residents at the Bowery shelter turned up Lou’s clothing. Some of it was being worn by one, Mr. Smith, a career low-life and drunk who claimed to have “found the stuff beside the road.” By whatever means, the interrogators subsequently learned that at the time of his finding them, the clothes had been on a dead body. His explanation of events had sounded logical to him and he couldn’t understand what the agents were so het up about.

  “The guy was dead, right? What the hell use did he have for clothes?”

  So, Mr. Smith had dragged the body into a step-down, stripped Lou of his outer clothes, and, very charitably he thought, given the guy his own rags. Mr. Smith was taken into custody as a suspect in the murder of Louis Vistarini. There were however one or two major inconsistencies about his story. He swore that he saw the man arrive in a blue car at about four and that the guy collapsed straight away. The driver didn’t stop to help. But then again, Smith was wearing his pants back to front.

  The night man at the shelter hadn’t seen the body until after six. The police arrived at his apartment with it on the back of a truck. It was picked up on what the cops called the morning sweep up. An average of five homeless people died on the streets every night in Manhattan. Some succumbed to diseases or the ravages of booze. Others died from exposure or just couldn’t think of a good reason to stay alive any more. The police would get a call and send the wagon to pick them up. There would be a cursory attempt at identifying them at centers like the Bowery but they wouldn’t be kept on ice too long. They’d soon find themselves on the barge to Hart Island, the pauper’s graveyard.

  While they were at it, the police brought in the doctor who’d signed the death certificate. The agency was interested to know what kind of MD would fail to notice clean fingernails and unblemished skin on a dead street bum. The answer turned out to be an MD who didn’t actually go to look at the body. The medical student on duty that night filled out the certificate on his way to the mortuary. Based on the sight and smell of the body, and unvarying experiences, he’d covered all bases by writing ‘cardiac arrest’ and ‘liver failure’. The next day he’d dropped by the doctor’s place to get it signed. It was a formality.

  It had been the following day when word got back from the coroner’s office. Lou’s body showed no evidence of violence apart from some minor bleeding and bruising around the mouth. There were no traces of the usual effects of common poisons. According to the forensics man, the medical student might have been right. All the indications were that Lou had indeed died of a coronary brought on by an overdose of alcohol.

  Denholm had given the news to Bodge in such a way as to suggest that was the end of it. Mystery solved. Life goes on. Palmer sat with Bodge and commiserated for a while, but before he left he suggested Bodge make his way back to DC sometime over the weekend. They could resume the orientation on Monday. Bodge had nodded, walked Palmer to the door, and smiled politely when the man told him again how sorry he was about Lou.

  “Still,” he’d said, “I imagine it’s better to know for sure what happened than to be forever wondering. You did a fine job of detection, Bodge. I haven’t forgiven you for going it alone but it was a fine job. Relax this weekend. Get it out of your system. Things will seem fairer in a couple of days.”

  Bodge didn’t know what that meant. He closed the door and went to sit in his favorite TV reclining chair where he waited for the sun to go down. He couldn’t imagine what he’d do in New York over the weekend. The Giants were over in Brooklyn playing the Dodgers, but baseball, so often the only really important thing in his life, had suddenly started to feel like…well, a game. He had no more interest in trivialities. He packed a few more things, took a cab to Penn Station, and caught a late train.

  The hell it was all over. Bodge hadn’t the slightest doubt in his mind that Lou had been killed. Men in their thirties in passable shape didn’t just keel over. Of course, there were ways to murder a man that made death look natural. Hadn’t they taught him about that? Why had the agency settled so complacently on the most obvious of causes? He wondered in the rush how many tests they’d done, how many other possibilities they’d investigated.

  Everything had gone too fast. It was as if they wanted it out of the way. Permission to exhume a body in two hours? Coroners dropping everything else on their schedule? It was the crime investigation version of bus station burgers. No preparation, no slow grill, no thought at all. Ten seconds and its hot and in your hand. He was leaving New York behind him, but not Lou. The magazines had to be connected, and young Eddie. What the hell did all that have to do with a heart attack? It was time, he decided, to play it clever. He’d only get his answers by listening, by being on Palmer’ side. If they wanted him to be a big dumb desk-jockey, that’s what he’d be. Something would eventually have to give.

  The train, the beat of the wheels on the tracks, two days and nights awake…Bodge put his head against the window and finally got some sleep.

  19.

  Ban Methuot.

  The guest list for the November Confucius Festival dinner at Le Residence was a who’s who of VIPs in the district. The French had every cultural holiday — their own, Vietnamese and Chinese marked on the calendar as suitable excuses for dinner parties. They’d somehow squeezed thirty six people around the impressive teak table, not one of whom would have given the others a cursory glance at any other place or time. Being an expatriate in a small town threw odd people together. They were as ill matched as the symbols of the zodiac.

  Among the guests were General LePenn, commander of Frenc
h forces in the West, one or two of the wealthier plantation owners including M. Yves DeWolff, Mayor Thrin — the token Vietnamese, Doctor Moncur, Captain Henry — the Director of Police, there was the Tax Inspector, the Inspector of Schools, and the Health and Sanitation Examiner. All but the general and School Inspector Petit had brought along their wives. General LePenn’s wife lived in Auxerre. Petit’s lived in his imagination. Naturally, hosting the event were the Duprés. Administrator Dupré sat at the head of the table like Louis XIV, barking orders at the white-clad Moi servants and enthralling those near him with stories of history’s great clerical mishaps.

  His wife sat at the far end, ruddy and silly from too much wine. The couple had another tiff that afternoon. It was sparked by a change in the seating plan. M. Dupré had been alerted by many of the expatriate spouses to the inappropriateness of his wife studying alone with a single man. As a result he’d insisted on hiring a chaperone to accompany her to her English lessons and report back on his wife’s progress. He also began to consider the possibility that his wife, being a beautiful and vibrant young woman, might have been inadvertently attracting unwanted advances from young men. In an attempt to remove such temptation he’d shuffled school inspector Petit’s name plate to a spot beside the Vietnamese. Dupré knew the boy didn’t object to contact with natives.

  His wife, in a fit of rage, moved it back. As she knew it would annoy her husband, she also moved the outgoing missionaries up to her left flank to set up a small English language colony at her end of the table. She argued that a dinner party would be an ideal place to practice her syntax. The Americans had spent the past month in their city house and were on their way home. Dupré had cleverly invited them to this large noisy gathering in part as an official farewell, but mainly to drown them out. Why on earth the church would send a couple who couldn’t speak French to a French colony was beyond him. Like most of the Anglos they had the arrogance to expect everyone else to learn their language. But this was Annam. It was only good manners to speak French here. So, with one end of the table jabbering away in English, and the other listening politely to the host, it was left to the large middle section to maintain that happy buzz French parties were so renowned for