Night Secrets

by Thomas H. Cook

  Frank did not move. “I want to see where the body was,” he said flatly.

  She glared at him with eyes that looked half-enraged and half-terrified.

  Frank stood up immediately. “And I want to see it now,” he said very firmly. “A hundred bucks buys something, even here.”

  The old woman glanced longingly at the bill in her hand. “To see, that is all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well,” the old woman said wearily. She got to her feet slowly and led him through the second curtain and into the adjoining room.

  Frank stopped at the small table and picked up the medallion. “What is this?” he asked.

  She glared at it resentfully. “There are no questions,” she said sharply.

  “It’s some sort of symbol, right?” Frank asked.

  She walked in front of him, hunching her shoulders slightly as she passed him.

  “Is it the symbol of the Puri Dai?” Frank asked coldly.

  She wheeled around to face him. “You must not speak of her again,” she said. “She is dead to us.”

  Frank picked up the medallion. “Why did she take this off?”

  The old woman snatched the medallion from his hand. “She is dead to us.”

  “She was wearing it before the murder,” Frank persisted. “Why did she take it off?”

  The old woman shook her head. “You must go,” she said.

  Frank remained in place. “Where was the body?”

  The old woman drew in a deep, resigned breath. Then she pointed to a door which opened onto another room. “There is where I found her,” she said.

  She walked over to the door immediately, but did not step through it. Instead, she stopped and pointed inside. “There,” she said.

  Frank walked over to the door and looked in.

  It was a large room, and three beds were arranged head to end along its enclosing walls.

  Frank walked to the center of the room, then turned slowly, surveying it from one angle to another.

  “All of you slept in here?” he asked.

  The woman nodded quickly, then crossed herself.

  Frank turned away from her to look at the room again. To the right, he could see the chalk outline of the old woman’s body as the police had drawn it across the unpainted wooden floor.

  “Blessed among women,” the old woman repeated, hugging herself gently now, as if against a sudden blast of cold.

  Frank walked into the room and looked at the chalk outline. The body looked as if it had fallen forward, then lain face down across the floor.

  “Go, now,” the woman said.

  Frank looked back at her. She was standing very stiffly in the doorway, her long hair flowing chaotically over her shoulders, her hands clenched in front of her, the long red nails scratching at her wrists.

  “You have seen,” she said. “Now you must go.”

  Frank didn’t move. “Where were you when you first saw the body?”

  “Here,” the woman said, pointing to the right.

  “What did you see?”

  “The Puri Dai was over her,” the woman answered, “standing over here.”

  Frank stepped toward her instantly. “You saw her? I thought you didn’t see her. That’s what you told the police.”

  The old woman shook her head brokenly. “It was a lie,” she said softly. “I saw the Puri Dai.” She shivered. “With my own eyes, I saw her.” She drew in a long, trembling breath. “The razor was in her hand, like this.” She lowered her arm to her side. “In her hand, like this.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “She stared into my eyes.”

  “So she was facing you?”

  “Face-to-face,” the woman said.

  “Standing where?”

  “In the doorway.”

  Frank stepped over to the outline. From its configuration, he could tell that she had lain on her stomach, her arms stretched out over her head, her legs drawn up near her chest. He studied the outline a moment longer, then took out his notebook and drew it on a blank page.

  “You must go now,” the woman said to him.

  Frank paid no attention to her. Instead he let his eyes move up the chalk outline, beginning at the feet, then sweeping upward, past the head then beyond it for a few feet to where there was a second closed door at the far end of the room. “What’s in there?”

  The woman didn’t answer.

  Frank pointed to the room. “What’s in mere?” he repeated.

  The woman stood in place.

  Frank walked over to the door and opened it. Inside there was a small table and on it a small painting of a woman, clothed in purple, her head covered with a dark hood. She wore a medallion identical to the one in the other room, and her feet were sunk deep in foamy green waves, as if she were wading in the sea. There was a small rectangle of uncovered foam rubber, which looked as if it had simply been shoved into the room for storage.

  Frank stepped back out of the room, closing the door behind him, his eyes absently moving up the door until they settled on the hook-and-eye latch, which had been screwed loosely into the outer doorjamb at just about the height of his shoulder.

  For a moment he stared at the latch, then turned to the woman. “What was that for?” he asked.

  “To hold the spirit in,” the woman answered, then smiled eerily as if the words themselves were part of a code which only she could comprehend.

  Frank took a quick sip from the glass, his eyes roaming over the room, settling here and there on one lone figure after another. It was the usual crowd, and over the past few months he had become familiar with them. There was the thin young man who chain-smoked Chesterfields and never spoke at all, except to order the one drink he always ordered, a Jameson’s, straight up. To his right, an older couple sat, one mask drinking with another, and just beyond them a woman who nearly always dressed like someone a good deal younger than she was.

  Farouk was looking at her too when Frank returned his attention to him.

  “I do not trust a woman who wears large ribbons,” he said.

  Frank took a long pull on his cigarette. “Why?”

  “One must understand the stages of life,” Farouk said, “that we are not now what we once were, and that we will not be later what we are now.”

  Frank smiled. Sometimes he wondered where Farouk got those sayings.

  “What do ribbons have to do with that?”

  “They lack the dignity of experience,” Farouk said.

  Frank smiled again and took another drag on the cigarette.

  “You are very quiet tonight,” Farouk said.

  “I get that way sometimes.”

  Farouk leaned toward him. “Something troubles you, Frank.”

  Frank shook his head. “No, nothing.”

  “The day case, or the night?”

  Frank crushed the cigarette into the small glass ashtray. “I spoke to Tannenbaum about it.”

  “Ah, so it is the murder.”

  “Yeah.”

  Farouk laughed quietly. “It does me good to know that you will never change.”

  Frank shook his head. “There’s something about it, this case. It bothers me.”

  “Because you do not know, that is what bothers you,” Farouk told him. “What did Tannenbaum say?”

  “He thinks she did it.”

  “You do not think so?”

  “Something doesn’t fit,” Frank said. “But I don’t know what it is.”

  Farouk took a quick sip of whiskey, then put down his glass. “I do.”

  Frank looked at him questioningly.

  “It’s the woman,” Farouk said. “You do not want her to be a murderess.”

  Frank nodded. “Maybe,” he admitted.

  “It has been a long time, yes?”

  “Long time?”

  “Since you have felt it?”

  “Felt what?”

  Farouk looked at him knowingly. “The great sorrow is that we make it a wall between u
s, when it should be a gate.”

  “What should be a gate?”

  Farouk smiled quietly. “Desire,” he said.

  He was still thinking about what Farouk had said when he took up his position outside Mrs. Phillips’s apartment the next morning. While he waited, he glanced through the notes he’d made the previous day, trying to gear himself up for another tedious round of working what he now thought of simply as his “day case.” He went through the various times of arrivals and departures, the addresses of her destinations, noted the only name that had cropped up so far: Kevin A. Powers.

  It was time to check him out.

  The first place to look was a telephone directory, and after waiting a moment longer beside the wall, he quickly darted into the nearest shop and asked for one. The woman behind the counter produced it immediately, and Frank quickly flipped through the pages, ran his finger down the long line of names until he came to “Powers, Kevin A.” There were seven men by that name, but only one of them listed his address on Twelfth Street. A second address was listed as well, this one for his office: 485 Fifth Avenue. Frank wrote it down quickly, along with what the directory said was his profession: gynecology.

  * * *

  It was noon before he saw Mrs. Phillips, and he quickly wrapped the square of wax paper back around the sandwich he’d just begun to eat and tucked it into his jacket pocket. All the while, he watched her, carefully noting her clothes so that he could keep track of her in a crowd, pick out her long red coat, feathery black hat and small matching purse from a sea of shifting colors, textures, fabrics.

  She walked west again, just as she had the morning before, turned onto Fifth Avenue and immediately hailed a cab.

  Frank waited on the curb for a few minutes then took one too, a yellow clunker that wheezed slightly as it pulled away.

  “That cab ahead,” Frank told the driver, “just to the right of the limo. Follow it.”

  The driver glanced back at him, a young woman with red hair and light-green eyes. “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” Frank said.

  The woman smiled brightly. “You a foreign agent or something?” she asked mockingly.

  “Just follow it,” Frank told her.

  “Yeah, right,” the woman said. “Just like in the movies.”

  Frank leaned toward the seat and fixed his eyes on Mrs. Phillips’s taxi. It took her first to Fifty-ninth Street, then turned right, headed to the western end of Central Park, made another right onto Central Park West and moved uptown, slowly at first, then more quickly as the traffic thinned.

  At Seventy-second Street, the cab turned left, pulled over to the curb in front of the dark wrought-iron gate of the Dakota, and stopped.

  “Pull over at the edge of the park,” Frank told the driver quickly.

  She did as she was told, then looked back at Frank. “I got it now,” she said. “Your wife’s cheating on you.”

  Frank gave her a withering look, then paid the fare and got out.

  Across the traffic of Central Park West, he could see Mrs. Phillips as she stood at the passenger window of the cab. She drew several bills from a small black purse, paid the driver, then turned toward the entrance of the building. For a moment she stared about, as if looking for someone, then she turned quickly, stepped up to the building’s small bronze guardhouse and said something to the uniformed guard who kept his place inside it. The guard nodded politely, picked up the phone in the guardhouse and made a quick call on the building’s security system, while Mrs. Phillips waited beside the guardhouse.

  Frank quickly took out his notebook and scribbled down what he’d seen during the last few minutes. By the time he’d finished, Mrs. Phillips had passed beneath the large archway and disappeared into the building.

  Frank glanced at his watch and noted the time: 12:45 P.M. Then he pocketed the notebook and walked across the street to the Dakota.

  The guard was a middle-aged man who wore a dark-blue greatcoat with shiny brass buttons. Frank nodded to him politely as he approached the guardhouse.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” the guard asked.

  Frank smiled quietly and handed him his identification.

  The guard returned it immediately. “If I don’t talk to the cops, they start ticketing the delivery wagons, giving them a lot of shit. But you’re not a cop, so I don’t have to talk to you.”

  Frank shook his head. “No, you don’t,” he said. He pulled one of Mr. Phillips’s crisp hundred-dollar bills from his pocket and slipped it into the guard’s hand. “Unless you want to.”

  The guard sank the bill into his pocket without looking at it. “What are we talking here?”

  “A C-note.”

  The guard looked pleased. “Just so it doesn’t interfere with my job.”

  “It won’t.”

  “Then shoot.”

  “It’s about that woman, the one who just went in.”

  “Miss Driscoll,” the guard said.

  “Driscoll?”

  “Yeah, Miss Driscoll,” the guard repeated a little impatiently. “What about her?”

  “She come here very much?”

  “Maybe once or twice a month, something like that.”

  “Who does she see?”

  The guard hesitated briefly.

  Frank moved quickly to urge him along. “Now look,” he said firmly. “You have a hundred-dollar bill in your pocket, you’re not going to go soft on the first question.”

  The guard thrust his chin out slightly. “No,” he said. “She comes to see Mr. Devine.”

  “What’s his whole name?”

  “Preston Devine. With an R in the middle. Preston R. Devine.”

  “And he lives here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which apartment?”

  “Four-C.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Short, a little on the stocky side, but he buys the kind of suits that cover up his belly, you know?”

  “Is he bald?”

  “Getting there.”

  “Gray hair?”

  “Yeah, mostly. Gray-black.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  The guard shrugged. “He’s got a lot of money. But everybody in the Dakota has a lot of money.”

  “Where does Devine’s money come from?”

  “His business dealings, I guess.”

  “What are they?”

  “You mean, what does he do?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t know for sure,” the guard said. “Importing stuff, I think.”

  “Importing what?”

  The guard laughed to himself. “Probably Jap TVs, something like that.”

  “You don’t know?”

  He looked at Frank mockingly. “I’m not the guy he discusses that shit with, know what I mean?”

  Frank nodded. “Do you know the name of his business?”

  “Allied something,” the guard told him. He struggled to think of it. “Global-East,” he said quickly when it came to him. “Allied Global-East. It’s somewhere down on Forty-seventh Street, I think.”

  “West Forty-seventh Street?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The diamond district,” Frank added.

  The guard shrugged. “Maybe that’s what he imports.”

  “Is he married?”

  “Yeah. Two kids, I think. But they’re both in college. We don’t see them. We don’t see the wife much, either. She lives in London.”

  “London?”

  “Yeah, London,” the guard said. He smiled. “These people, they got their own way of doing things. The whole world, it’s their playground, you might say, their … what do you call it? … their oyster, you know?”

  Frank nodded dryly. “When Miss Driscoll comes here, does she always see Devine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she always alone?”

  “I’ve never seen her with anybody.”

  “Does she always
come by taxi?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does she ever bring anything with her, like a package, anything like that?”

  “No, just whatever a woman carries, you know. A purse, something like that.”

  “Do they ever go out?”

  “You mean out here, onto the street?”

  “Yeah.”

  The guard shook his head.

  “So they meet in Mr. Devine’s apartment, and stay there?”

  “They stay inside, yeah.”

  “You’ve never seen them together?”

  The guard’s face changed slightly, as if he were thinking about something. “No,” he said. “Which means you’ve figured it out, right?”

  “Figured out what?”

  The guard laughed. “Well, come on, pal. It’s got all the signs.”

  “Of what?”

  “It’s an affair, man,” the guard said confidently. “He’s married, away from the wife for months at a stretch. You got to develop quite an itch in all that time.”

  Frank nodded.

  The guard looked at Frank quizzically. “She’s married, too, am I right?”

  Frank didn’t answer.

  “The husband’s suspicious, so, whammo, he hires his own private dick to check things out.”

  Frank said nothing.

  The guard smiled cunningly. “I hit the bull’s-eye, didn’t I?”

  Frank pulled out one of his cards. “If you hear anything, I’d like to hear it, too.”

  The guard shook his head. “Our deal ends when you walk away,” he said. “A hundred bucks don’t buy a lifetime contract.”

  Frank smiled edgily. “The well’s not dry.”

  “Then the next time we meet,” the guard told him, “we’ll send the bucket down again.”

  “Absolutely,” Frank said. Over your shiny little head, he thought.

  Two hours later, Mrs. Phillips walked out from beneath the archway, slung the small black purse over her shoulder and headed eastward, first crossing the street, then moving into Central Park. From his position across the street, Frank could see that she turned without hesitation, as if she knew exactly where she was going. He took out his notebook, recorded the time, then followed her at a distance.

  She moved slowly into the park, her shoulders drawn in somewhat, but her head erect, staring straight ahead. Her hair was very bright in the afternoon sun, and had he simply been another stroller in the park, Frank realized that he would have sensed nothing at all about her.