Cover Story

by Gerry Boyle

  She covered the phone, and I heard muffled words.

  “Listen, I do have to go. Now, no names, right? Nothing that would identify me?”

  “Nothing. I promise.”

  “Now, what was your name again? Morrow?”

  “Jack McMorrow,” I said.

  “Wait,” Kim Albert Bromberg said. “Jack McMorrow. That’s the reporter who—”

  “I’m sorry for everything that happened to you,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

  I hung up and walked to the car, the notebook clenched in front of me.

  Another screwed-up case. Another disgruntled victim. But was the hundred thousand a payoff? Had they really planned to make this donation? Where had the money come from? It didn’t matter. It was Fiore money. It was Conroy money. It kept a crime victim from squawking, this time a victim whose father had clout. But a hundred thousand? All to prevent a little bad PR?

  “Uh-uh,” I said aloud. And I closed the notebook and allowed myself a smile.

  And the phone rang. I picked it up. Hit the button.

  “Yeah.”

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” the youngish voice said.

  36

  The voice was fuzzy, the static drifting in and out.

  “Get what?” I said gingerly.

  “Get that this ain’t no fucking game.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I don’t think so. You’re playing with fire, McMorrow.”

  “How’s that? I thought we had a deal.”

  “You don’t make deals with me, McMorrow. I give the orders and you follow ’em.”

  “What? You talked to the Boxer and he didn’t go for it?”

  “The Boxer?”

  “The DA’s guy.”

  “You only got me, McMorrow. And here’s the only deal you’re gonna get. I want you to go back to that fucking dump and pack your shit and go back to Maine and stay there.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You think I’m joking?”

  Still I didn’t answer.

  “You fucking chump. You think I’m joking, you go look for your little girlfriend. She’s in that fucking Range Rover, two blocks over, by the river. Look for a big white truck with a fish on the door. If you get there quick, maybe she won’t suffocate. But then again, you know how dogs die when people leave them in a hot car? Last warning. Go see what you did to her, McMorrow. ’Cause you did it.”

  The phone hissed. I threw it down. Started the car and screeched into traffic. Down the hill, through lights, swerving left and right. The car bounced and skidded, and near the river I tried to call the cops, looked away for a moment, and scraped the side of a truck. Horns blared and I stomped the gas and the phone fell somewhere under my feet and I kicked it aside. Slowed on the last block. Turned. Looked left. Looked right.

  A fish, I thought. A fish truck. A refrigerator truck. A single truck in New York.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said.

  There were alleys between the factories, lots ringed with barbed wire and filled with rusting trucks and cars and junk. I saw a white cab on a silver trailer. No fish. No Rover. A cream-colored van with broken windows.

  What did he mean by white? Pure white? All white?

  “Hang on, Christina,” I said. “Hang on.”

  The road ended under the bridge at a riverfront park, a place where people took walks and drugs. I backed up and smoked the tires and turned around. I had the riverside on my left, the factories on my right. Both had jogs and nooks and crannies, trash-filled alcoves where a car could be hidden.

  “If she’s in the sun,” I said, the words trailing off.

  I made another pass, then swung right, away from the river, and looped back. Now it was all factory blocks, barred windows and graffiti. I passed a deep alley, glimpsed something white. I backed up. Looked and leaped out.

  The truck’s nose poked out from behind the corner of a building. The front tires were flat. The rear end was backed up against a loading dock. There was a fish painted on the door and it was smiling.

  The Rover was around the corner, against a chain-link fence.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, God, no.”

  I could see her arms, white and pale, held high like Jesus’ arms on the cross. The top of her head was against the window. Her breasts were bare. Her fingers had been closed in the top of the door.

  I yanked hard on the door and Christina stirred. Her eyes opened and then closed. Her mouth was covered with duct tape and her face was a terrible blend of flush and pallor.

  I tried the back door. The tailgate. The other side of the car was against the building. I found a broken block of concrete in the rubble and smashed the back window. The alarm blared but the shattered glass hung. I kicked it out, catching my shoe and hopping on one foot.

  “Son of a bitch,” I hissed and yanked my foot loose and reached through and found the handle and opened the door. The alarm blared. I climbed in and reached through and said, “It’s okay, Christina,” and pulled that handle, too.

  The door popped open. Christina was kneeling and she started to fall forward and I caught her, turned her gently and sat her on the seat. She swayed and closed her eyes, then opened them, then started to make a gagging sound like she might vomit. I picked at the edge of the tape and she whimpered and I tore the tape aside, and it sounded like Christina’s face was being torn. She shrieked, then sobbed, her hands cradled in her lap like injured birds.

  I held her. All of her fingers were blood-red and crimped, the ends swollen like sausages. Christina looked at them like they belonged to someone else but then suddenly reached up to pull her shirt and bra back up. She couldn’t grip them and I did it for her, slipping the straps over her scratched shoulders, the fabric over her breasts.

  Her Fendi top was torn.

  “It’s okay,” I said, and she closed her eyes and opened them and sobbed again and nodded, and then started to talk.

  “They were in a van,” she said weakly. “It was blue. I was just going to go up to get a movie, a movie for us, so we wouldn’t just have to watch the news all the time. So we could just watch a movie.”

  She cried and rocked.

  “And oh, God, they stopped behind me and I saw the masks and there was another car in front of me, and I couldn’t move and I thought the doors were unlocked and I reached for the button. And I hit it and it unlocked them, ’cause they were locked already, I got it wrong. And they opened the door and they—”

  She gave a dry sob.

  “They said—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to talk.”

  “They said this was for you. For Jack McMorrow. And next time they’d—”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  Christina looked down at her hands, which were laid on her lap. Her thighs were scratched and she was wearing one sandal.

  “They said they’d do awful things,” she said. “They said the things right out loud, Jack. They did. They said they’d do these things to me and Roxanne. They’d go to Maine and do these things.”

  Her eyes closed.

  “Oh. I feel like I’m going to be sick. Oh, Jack, I don’t want to be sick in front of you.”

  She bent her head and I held her, my arm around her shoulders. I rubbed her arm and said it was okay, the words rasping because my jaw was clenched. Still rubbing Christina’s arm, I looked up at the building above us, turned and scanned the walls and roofs behind.

  Gulls slipped past overhead. There was no one in sight.

  “I think we’d better get you to a hospital, Christina,” I said, and then hesitated. “Is it just the fingers?”

  She knew what I was thinking.

  “Yeah,” Christina said, looking at the ground, her one bare foot. “They said they were doing my fingers because I was a painter. They said I was lucky I wasn’t a hooker. But they . . . they looked at me. And Jack—”

  She paused. Swallowed and tried to wet her lips.

  “They cut
me, Jack,” she said.

  I swallowed.

  “Where?”

  “On my stomach. I couldn’t see, but it was like . . . it was like they were writing.”

  She looked down. Tried to pull the top up but couldn’t with her swollen fingers. I took the fabric and lifted it and there was blood on the waistband of her skirt, but not a lot. I pulled the blouse higher.

  Below her navel they had scratched her. The skin was red and swollen. The blood was smeared. The letters were scrawled, like initials carved in a tree.

  MCMORROW.

  Broken fingers and surface cuts weren’t a priority that day at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, so we sat in a waiting room that, with its crying babies and feverish mothers, was like the hold of some disease-ridden ship.

  The uniform cops, two hard young men with boot-camp haircuts, came and went, reports in hand for what they called an assault / attempted sexual assault. They said a detective would be calling Christina, but I’d already called our detectives. It was a little after nine when they came in, spotted me, and sidestepped their way through the babbling, coughing throng.

  They nodded and Ramirez crouched in front of Christina and patted her arm.

  “Can you tell us about it?” Ramirez said, a new gentleness in her voice.

  “Yes,” Christina said. “I can.”

  She told them what had happened, what had been said to her, about me, about Roxanne. She said she wasn’t raped but one of the men had fondled her breasts and lifted her skirt. A loud truck had gone by and one of the others said they had to go.

  “And the cuts?” Donatelli said.

  “They said they’re not deep,” Christina said.

  “More like scratches,” I said. “My name. My warning.”

  And then Christina’s name was called and a nurse came out and touched Christina’s arm as she led the way to an examination room.

  “Still think it’s a smokescreen?” I said to Ramirez.

  She ran a hand through her lacquered hair and looked away, then back.

  “And where were you when all this happened?” she said.

  I told her about the pay phone, the cell phone in the car.

  “Like I told the other cops. A young voice. New York, New Jersey accent. Knows who comes and goes at Christina’s building.”

  Donatelli looked at Ramirez, then back at me.

  “Believe me now?” I said.

  “They told Christina they’d go to Maine to carry out these threats on this Roxanne person?” Donatelli said.

  “Yeah.”

  “If you didn’t leave?”

  “Right.”

  “You staying or going?”

  “That’s partly up to you.”

  “We’d rather you stayed a few more days,” Ramirez said.

  “But we can get you protection,” Donatelli said.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “But I’d appreciate it if you could do something for Christina. If she stays in the city.”

  “What about your friend in Maine? Roxanne?”

  “She doesn’t know about this. I haven’t been able to reach her.”

  “I’ll call Portland PD.”

  “Like I asked you to do already.”

  Donatelli shrugged.

  “We were getting to it.”

  “They know her there. Some of the detectives.”

  “She’ll probably be all set, them being down here.”

  “For now,” I said.

  “So?” Ramirez said.

  “So what?”

  “So what’s it all about?”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  I looked to Donatelli.

  “She show you the stuff from Butch?”

  “Yeah, I saw it. But it looks like kind of a long-term project, you know what I’m saying? We’re talking ancient history.”

  “And somebody doesn’t want any of it dug up,” I said.

  “I was telling you that. Now you’ve got this.”

  “We’re doing our best,” Donatelli said.

  “And look where it got us. She could have been killed. Tossed in the river. I thought you were watching the loft.”

  They looked at each other.

  “It was the afternoon. And from what I’m told, the officers on duty attempted to follow a white Camaro but lost it.”

  “They didn’t come right back? What’d they do? Stop for a sandwich?”

  “No doughnut jokes, McMorrow,” Donatelli said.

  “So you staying or going?” Ramirez said. “What’s the deal?”

  I thought of Conroy and the Boxer and these cops, too, all of them sitting at that table together at police headquarters. All of them, together.

  And I sat there in the midst of the sick and suffering and didn’t say another word.

  By a roundabout route I took Christina to Ellen Jones’s apartment in SoHo. Ellen arrived by cab as we pulled up in the Camaro. She ran to Christina as she got out of the car, put her arms around her shoulders, and said, “Oh, you poor dear.”

  The doorman came running, too, and took Christina’s bag, which I had packed while she was being treated, having her hands X-rayed, getting a tetanus shot.

  “For God’s sake, I’m not an invalid,” Christina said. But her walk was tentative and the snap was gone from her hips. They helped her up the stairs. I followed her and at the door she turned to me, her mummy-wrapped hands in front of her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Hey,” Christina said gamely, “Monet did some of his best work when he had cataracts. Maybe this will be a new Mansell period. Take care, McMorrow.”

  I hugged her with one arm and kissed her cheek.

  “Now you get all hot to trot,” she whispered, mustering a weak smile. And she went through the door, the doorman following her. I stood there for a moment and then walked back to the car. Ellen came back to the sidewalk as I slung myself into the seat. The motor roared and smoked, an embarrassment in this neighborhood.

  Ellen peered into the car.

  “We have to talk.”

  “Yes, we do,” I said. “In a day or so.”

  “A day or so? Why not now? If this is even remotely connected to you and Casey and Fiore—”

  “Ellen,” I said. “Off the record, there’s nothing remote about it. And when I have a little more information, I’ll talk to you. Tell Sanders he’s finally going to get his precious Pulitzer.”

  And I put the car in gear and pulled away, driving south to Brooklyn, where the bridge was lighted, the sunset was fading, and Christina’s neighborhood was still. Her building was dark and silent, like the home of someone who has died. I rolled past at the end of the block but there were no cars in sight. Were they staying away? Were they still in the window?

  Looking up at the brick cliff walls, I circled. Parked the car around the block in an empty lot, behind a van that was filled with trash. I walked around the block slowly, slipped through the gate, and climbed the fire escape. The window still was open and I crawled inside, like a cave dweller coming home.

  The loft was still, the rooms silent. I checked them one by one, then went to the door. I listened, my ear against the cold wood, then eased the door open and listened again. The hallway was quiet, the elevator was down. I heard sirens but they were in the distance.

  Back inside, I closed the door and bolted it. Then I went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Light spilled out and I reached in and unscrewed the bulb. I wolfed the leftover crab cakes and lobster salad, drank a Corona in three gulps.

  And then I sorted through the knives in the drawers, on the rack on the counter. There were butcher knives, filet knives, long thin knives like something made in prison. I took one or two of each and went first to Christina’s room, and then to Philippe’s room. On the beds, I arranged the knives like surgeon’s instruments, then covered them with the sheets.

  One knife I kept with me, a small, wood-handled one, on the chance that in this sprawling, black-roomed buildi
ng, I wasn’t alone.

  37

  Like eyes in the dark, my ears slowly adjusted.

  First silence. Then my own breathing. Then the distant noises of the city: the rattle of trucks on the bridge. The sound of horns, faint as migrating geese flying high overhead.

  I was in Philippe’s room, sitting in a straight chair against the wall, next to the window. The knife was on my lap. Butch’s papers, too. In the dark, I strained to listen. Heard the refrigerator humming. A tire screech, not so distant.

  The phone, jarring me upright like the jab of a blade.

  It jabbed again. Again. The machine clicked and whirred and Christina answered, in absentia. Then another beep.

  “Jack, just checking in. I’m on the road. I’ll call later. I love you. I’m thinking about you, Jack McMorrow.”

  I came off the chair, lunged for the phone, grabbed it as Roxanne hung up.

  The machine clicked and rewound. With the light flashing in the dark like a winking red eye, I called Roxanne’s home. Another machine answered and I told her to be careful. Told her she’d been threatened. I said she probably should stay with a friend. Call Clair and tell him what had happened. I called her office and said it all again. I called her car phone, but another machine said it wasn’t in service.

  I cursed it. And then the loft was silent again. But just for a moment.

  I heard voices outside. I edged to the window. Three figures were lurching down the middle of the street. One tripped and staggered. Another threw something and it smashed. A bottle. One of them cackled. A woman. They reeled on their way. I watched until they were out of sight and then I went to my chair. With the knife in my hand, I tried to think.

  I had victims, but no perpetrators. Ortiz was gone. Mihailov. Lester John, too. But Drague, the rapist, where was he? Prison? The Bronx? Maybe he was out there. Somebody or something had to be, or I wouldn’t be pinned in here. I’d find Drague. I’d ask him why he got off. I thought of all the jailhouse interviews I’d done, guys in jumpsuits and slippers who had looked me in the eye and said they were the real victims.