Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  TO CATCH A KILLER

  “I have studied the files on all five cases and I am pretty much convinced they are the work of some kind of nut case. Maybe a religious freak of some sort who performs something like a ritual sacrifice once a year or so.

  “I have noted, and called the attention of my colleagues to this, the royal dunderheads of Manhattan South and the 6th Homicide, all to no avail. The fact that all these fatal drops occur without exception in the spring of the year, three having occurred in April and two in May, appear to make no impression on them.

  “It is now, as of this writing, May 13th. So far April has been quiet, but I now have the strongest gut feeling that sometime this month our rooftop friend will strike again …”

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  Copyright © 1984 by Herbert Lieberman

  Cover art by Sonya Lamut and Nenad Jakesavic

  Designed by Richard Oriolo

  Published by arrangement with G.P. Putnam’s Sons

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-13742

  ISBN: 0-380-69819-6

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

  The G.P. Putnam’s Sons edition contains the following Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

  Lieberman, Herbert H., date.

  Nightbloom.

  I. Title.

  PS3562.I4N55 1984 813’.54 83-13742

  First Avon Printing, February, 1985

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  Many thanks to Dr. Len Rubin of Chappaqua, New York, whence, one summer night, the idea sprang.

  For Judy

  APRIL/79

  1

  The man stood at the edge of the rooftop, hands clasped, elbows pressed into the concrete ledge. The balmy spring breeze rustled the cuffs of his trousers and stirred his lapels. There was an imminence of rain, something one smelled in the exhalations from the sparse foliage and the full trash cans—something dank and sweetish wafting upward through the shafts below.

  Periodically a gash of lightning rent the western sky. At that elevation, seven stories up, the city had the look of a dirty carpet onto which a billion gaudy sequins had been strewn. Neon and prismatic, the lights from the teeming theater district cast a glow of lurid red on the sky above, as if at that one point some vengeful, purging Old Testament fire were raging below.

  In the palm of his hand the man rattled pebbles and a few chips of schist he’d gathered up off the tarred rooftop. He shook them in his hand as if he were telling beads or reading auguries from them. Then, with an air of dreamy abstraction, he would pitch one or two down into the warm pools of shimmering light where crowds of people streamed from the emptying theaters into the warm orange glow of café windows.

  Of his actions the man appeared to be oblivious. On his face he wore a sweet, placid expression as if at that moment he was deep in the midst of recalling something infinitely pleasing, some point at which he existed in a dim, scarcely remembered past. Gently, and with an air of exquisite restraint, his arm rose and another pebble arched outward from his hand over the ledge top down into the void below.

  Francis Mooney grunted and stooped his 240-pound frame above the mound of dirty tarpaulin that lay heaped on the corner of Forty-ninth Street, just west of Eighth Avenue. It was now well past midnight, but still crowds of people gathered silent and watchful in a circle round him.

  At the curbside, the radio from a police patrol car sputtered and crackled sporadic reports of the evening’s crimes in progress.

  Hunkered on his knees, Mooney lifted a corner of the tarpaulin and held it between thumb and forefinger, rather fastidiously, the way one might lift a lace doily. It was an incongruous gesture in someone of Mooney’s girth. Beneath the tarpaulin was a man, slight, fortyish, with wide staring eyes. At the side of his head a pink, bulblike excrescence like a newly bloomed hydrangea sprung whole from his skull. Mooney was careful to keep the soles of his scuffed black oxfords well back out of the way of the red puddle trickling over the pavement from beneath the tarpaulin.

  Not far from the tarpaulin itself, a slab of concrete cinderblock lay, twelve inches across, four inches thick, weighing approximately forty pounds. At the elevation from which it had fallen, he judged, it had on impact reached a velocity of nearly two hundred miles an hour and had broken into four clean, nearly equal quarters.

  “Hit him like a brick shithouse,” Mooney muttered, more to himself than to the reporting patrolman hovering above him. A vision of the shattered, pulpy skull beneath the tarpaulin flashed in his head.

  “Looks like it just fell from the roof,” the patrolman responded. Mooney gaped upward. His slightly protuberant eyes ascended the brick facade of the building. “Probably broke off the coping up there.”

  “Any identification?”

  “Name’s Ransom,” the patrolman answered, flipping pages in a little note pad. “John R., age forty-three. Musician. Address given here on his union card is 443 West Forty-seventh. A few blocks down. Probably just on his way home.”

  “Anyone see it?” Mooney asked without looking up.

  “The kid over here,” someone in the crowd said. Mooney couldn’t tell if the black child suddenly materializing before him had come forward voluntarily or was pushed. He was simply just there. “What’s your name, friend?”

  “Cleveland.”

  “Cleveland what?”

  The boy uttered a surname that got lost somewhere between the noise of the street and the fright constricting his throat.

  “I can’t hear you, Cleveland. Don’t talk with your hands in your mouth. What’s your last name?”

  The boy swallowed hard. “Gaynes.”

  Mooney gazed up at him. What he saw was a scrawny, bug-eyed kid who was clearly frightened. “How old are you, Cleveland?”

  “Sixteen.”

  Mooney estimated his real age to be somewhere close to eleven or twelve, a part of one of the dog packs of homeless waifs who foraged regularly through the Times Square area. Bug life, Mooney thought. Lice. “You from round here, Cleveland?” The boy’s eyes widened. He appeared blank. “Where do you live? Where do you crash?”

  There was a pause while the crowd pushed forward and the boy stalled for time. “A hundred and thirty-eighth.”

  “And where?”

  “St. Nicholas.”

  “You got a pad up there?”

  “My cousin got a pad up there.”

  Mooney regarded the child skeptically.

  “You see what happened here tonight, Cleveland?”

  The boy gazed down at the sticky red puddle and the impersonal humped thing lying beneath the tarpaulin with the shoes sticking out from beneath. The crowds inched forward while Mooney, still stooping on cramped legs, waited.

  “You see what happened, Cleveland?” he asked again.

  The boy pointed to th
e slab of concrete. “That come down off the roof.”

  “From where? Point to it. The exact spot.”

  The boy’s head turned and his eye wandered back up the gray brick facade of the building where inquisitive occupants in nightclothes leaned out over sills through lighted windows open to the street. “From there.”

  Mooney’s eyes followed the boy’s finger to the top of the building to a point just above and to the left of the uppermost fire escape. “You see someone throw it?”

  The boy looked around uneasily.

  “You see someone up there, Cleveland?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mooney’s interest perked. “Anyone you know?” Dead-panned, the boy slowly shook his head right and left. “Nope.”

  “But you say you saw someone drop it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How come you saw that?”

  The boy shrugged and made a face. “Just look up and seen him there. Then seen it comin’ down.”

  “From that spot you showed me?” Mooney thrust a pudgy finger skyward.

  “Uh-huh. From there.”

  By that time a sizable crowd had gathered. Two more patrol cars had joined the first. Their red dome lights spun while a gray forensic van from the medical examiner’s office nosed its way through the crowds, coming to collect the remains.

  “No one threw it, Mooney.” The cop scribbled in his pad. “Take it from me. It just broke off from the building. All of these old fleabags round here are falling apart.”

  “Probably,” Mooney sighed. His leg had started to cramp from where he’d been kneeling above the tarpaulin. His nose made a high whistling sound as he wobbled to his feet. “I guess we oughta go up mid have a look anyway.”

  Frank Mooney was an overweight, failed detective. Overweight because he was a compulsive eater with a predilection for beer and fried foods; failed because he was a malcontent, antisocial creature in an organization that bonded men on the principles of teamwork and compulsory fraternal loyalties. Like all misanthropes, he was not much on fraternal loyalties. In fact, Mooney had very little good to say about mankind in general and about cops, nothing whatever. He counted no man his brother. Moreover, he was given to a whole medley of habits that policemen have no business cultivating. He loved the ponies to the point of impecuniosity. Also, he had never married nor sought the company of any woman with serious regularity. On off-hours he was not averse to alleviating loneliness in sleazy West Side dives where professional women were known to ply their trade.

  Twice he had made detective first grade—a captaincy—and twice he had been broken back down to detective second grade; this for (a) “acting unprofessionally,” (b) “exceeding his authority,” and (c) “comporting himself in a manner unbecoming a police officer.”

  Now his misanthropy was such that he took a kind of perverse delight in his demotions, and seized any opportunity to flaunt them jubilantly in the faces of junior colleagues, as if daring them to follow his example.

  He was fifty-nine, a veteran of nearly forty years with the force, and thrice decorated for bravery. With four years away from retirement, no one, not even the commissioner, would have had the stomach to fire him. On several occasions, pressure had been brought to bear to make Mooney take early retirement. But he would not truckle before the chief. He would not be intimidated. Though there was no love lost between them and Mooney, the Policemen’s Benevolent Association and the Detectives Endowment League both made it emphatically clear they would not brook any forced retirement in his case. But even more compelling, Mooney left little doubt that in forty years of service he had learned where all the department skeletons had been buried, and that if the situation warranted, he wouldn’t hesitate to disinter them.

  Mooney was therefore, in all respects, a survivor, a master at the art of staying afloat in the treacherous swamps of municipal bureaucracy. His ordeal, however, had not particularly ennobled him. As a youth he’d been striking and tall, in the blue-eyed, darkhaired Gaelic mold. But now age and chronic dissatisfaction had transformed the once alert, agreeably regular features into something flaccid and unshaped through which one might still glimpse the ruins of a more comely past.

  The overall effect was heightened by a strangely cultivated voice that clashed with the stream of vileness steadily leaching from his mouth. He was emphatically a thorn in the department’s side, a wart on the spanking-clean image they were always at such pains to promote.

  Catalonia, Alonzo. Went out in April ‘75. Thirty-pound chunk of tile pried or fallen from a rooftop, 308 West 51. Busted his head. No witnesses. No suspects. Cause subsequently determined to be accidental. Case closed August ‘75. O’Meggins, Harold. May ‘76. Age 48. Locksmith. Skull crushed by 80 pounds of limestone chimney capping dropped or fallen from construction site, 423 West 47. No witnesses. No suspects. Cause subsequently determined to be accidental. No further investigation. Case closed July 4, 1976. Quigley, Wayne. Decapitated—Jesus, decapitated—May 12,1977, by flying slate believed to have dropped or fallen from rooftop, 315 West 48. No witnesses. No suspects. Cause subsequently determined to be accidental. Case closed, June 14, 1977. Kim, Chai Soong—Christ—what the fuck kinda name is that? Oh, here it is. Korean. Waiter. Age 19. Death from falling concrete slab, April 13,1978.

  That’s a year ago today. Causes subsequently determined to be … Case dropped. Case dropped.

  Case dropped. Bullshit.

  Mooney flung the precinct files aside with an air of disgust. Tilting his sizable girth backwards in the chair, he rummaged deep within his jacket pockets for a cigarette.

  “Five people die over a space of five years, from bricks or slabs, or flying objects falling from rooftops, all of ‘em around the West Forties or low Fifties, or generally the theater district. All of ‘em round ten or eleven at night. Two in May, three in April. But that roof was clean tonight. At least when I seen it. And nobody in the building, on the top floor, heard anybody movin’ at that hour around up there. Can all the rest be coincidence? No witnesses. No suspects. Bullshit.”

  It was getting well on to 3:00 A.M. and he was still at the station house. He had filed his initial reports and he pondered now the wisdom of going home. He lived in a large, nearly unfurnished apartment up in the West Bronx around the Yankee Stadium. All he had in the way of household possessions was a large-screen color television, a couple of canvas director chairs, a Formica kitchen table, a couple of pots and pans, a few dishes, and a permanently unmade bed. His neighbors were all Puerto Ricans and Blacks, with a sprinkling of terrified geriatric Jews. Everyone in the building, except Mooney, was collecting one form of welfare assistance or another. Mooney never spoke to any of them.

  Though he was bone-tired, he had no wish to go home. Home terrified him. He knew that if he went there now he would not sleep. Instead, he would merely lie in bed half-undressed in the sour rumplement of his sheets, toss and turn and stare at the nightmarish shadowshow that never ceased to play across his ceiling.

  His mind was far too active for sleep. Disquieting images flashed across his fretful eye. Images of violence and carnage, tawdry and bizarre. Generally, they depicted the apocalypse of the urban night.

  Murder and mayhem. He could neither avert his eyes nor turn them off. Then came the images of lust. Vibrantly, pulsatingly pornographic. Dreams of murder and lust in the nighttime doodles of a lapsed Roman Catholic. He had not been to Confession for fifteen years. He was too haughty to go down on his knees before a priest and beg forgiveness. He was not a penitent. He had other ways, more circuitous but less demeaning, for assuaging guilt.

  As always, after mental work he was famished. If he could not sleep then at least he would eat. The thought of hamburgers came to him, greasy fries and sweet, black coffee. A groan issued from the great vacant cavern of his stomach and shortly he was in his battered ‘70 Buick Skylark, heading crosstown toward the FDR Drive.

  At Forty-fifth, in the shadow of the UN, he would get on the FDR Drive heading north. De
spite the temperature or the time of year, he would drive with all the windows open, gulping frigid air for dear life, cooling his overheated body, freshening his clogged, drowsy brain.

  Though it was the longer route, he would take the Willis Avenue Bridge which had no toll as opposed to the Triborough which tithed him a dollar. From Willis Avenue he would swing left onto the Major Deegan, tearing up the thruway to 161 Street, where he knew he could depend on an all-night White Tower to be open.

  There were other all-night eateries in the area, establishments where he knew the food to be superior. There was the Bun & Burger on 168, Arthur Treacher’s, the Taco Gaucho and the Chicken Shack. All stayed open the night. All served a credible hamburger, most of them better than the thin, leathery thing about the size of a half dollar the White Tower still foisted off on its unwitting clientele.

  But to Mooney all of these places were parvenus, upstarts, spoilers. He didn’t like the class of people that frequented them. Undesirable ethnic types, he reasoned, whereas the White Tower catered to the older, more established folks in the neighborhood.

  But, more importantly, it had been the White Tower he knew as a moody youth growing up around the West Bronx. It was the place he haunted as a chronic truant, a friendless, sullen child whose premature obesity had doomed him to mostly solitary pleasures. He had been the neighborhood “fat kid,” ridiculed by his peers into a sharp antipathy for all adolescent tribal codes of bonding. Gangs, teams or clubs he had no use for. Instead, he had made a fetish of aloofness, grew up distrusting the world in general and any number of things specifically. He sought the solace of isolation, finding it, oddly enough, in the high places—the rooftops of those onetime benign West Bronx polyglot neighborhoods where of a summer night he contemplated the evening sky and taught himself the stars, while the baking pavements of July and August suffocated all the sweltering life below.

  His love of stargazing persisted well into adulthood. As a passion he kept it very much to himself, certain that among his colleagues at the station house it would become the butt of much amusement to be used against him. Astronomy was no doubt an improbable passion for such a man but, then again, Mooney was an improbable man. The son of strict Roman Catholic parents whose notions of faith fastened on the punitive, whatever intimations of divinity might have been lurking about in his boyish heart were quickly throttled. Why bother with a god if this is what it got you?