Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  “Not on foot, if he was that badly injured.”

  “Marvelous. But he wasn’t waiting round for no bus either. With all the blood spurting out of him, he probably grabbed the first cab he could get. Not an easy thing to come by in that area, that time of night, with theaters letting out, and what not. But given the emergency, the quantity of blood all over him, he was probably able to commandeer something.”

  “So you want me to check the cab companies.”

  “Right again, Dick Tracy. Drivers and dispatchers.”

  “They keep records of injured fares like that?”

  “Right, and moreover, drivers talk. They’d remember picking up a fare covered with blood and rushing him over to a hospital. Even if it was over a year ago.”

  Defasio shook his head despairingly. His shoulders bore the slump of defeat.

  “One other thing before you go,” Mooney said, pulling from his vest pocket a small ragged swatch of material. “Remember this?”

  The young man stared at it blankly. “Sure. It’s the stuff that was found stuck on the fire-escape ladder.”

  “Wonderful. And what did the police lab tell us about this ‘stuff,’ as you call it?”

  “They said it tore off the guy’s clothes when he jumped from the ladder to the ground. I think they said it was part linen, part …”

  “The composition doesn’t interest me,” Mooney snapped. “Where did they say the piece probably came from?”

  Momentarily bewildered, Defasio’s jaw dropped open.

  “I’ll give you one hint. There were threads still clinging to it and part of a buttonhole.”

  “Okay,” Defasio’s face brightened. “I gotcha. They said it looked like it most probably ripped off from the back trouser pocket.”

  Mooney’s eyes danced wickedly. “And what does that suggest to you about where our man most probably injured himself?”

  “The leg. The thigh.”

  “What about the butt, my friend? This guy could have very well torn his ass open on that ladder. So when you tell the emergency wards to look in their files for the night of April 30,1979, what will you tell them to be particularly on the lookout for?”

  “Anyone who came in that night with injury to the extremities, especially the legs or butt. Like a deep cut that had to be sewn.”

  “I’m astonished by your keenness of mind, Defasio. You’re a regular Nero Wolfe.”

  The young man stared back at him bitterly. “Am I glad they turned this investigation over to you, Mooney. What an opportunity to learn under a master. It gives a man something to look forward to every day.”

  “I, too, Defasio, am gratified,” Mooney’s eyes glinted wickedly. “It gives me a chance to kick your ass around a little more.”

  SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER/‘81

  28

  “Who was Sevrenson?”

  “The brother-in-law.”

  “Not the same one driving the car?”

  “No. That was the brother. The one who was fencing the stuff out of the warehouse in Queens.”

  “Bauer?”

  “No. For Chrissake. Don’t you listen? Or am I talkin’ to myself. Bauer is not related to these guys. Bauer’s a small-time three-story man who’s never done anything bigger than Class C felonies. Residences. Muggings. Auto theft. Peanut operations. He just happened to fall in with this Sevrenson crowd.”

  “And they needed a fall guy?”

  “Right. Your classic klutz, if you know what I mean.”

  They were driving over the Queensboro Bridge from Queens where Mooney had just successfully closed a two-year investigation on a three-million-dollar-a-year fencing operation in Astoria.

  It was slightly past 7:00 P.M., and the saw-toothed skyline of the city rose a luminous chalk-white against the indigo dusk of early fall. It was a Friday evening, the beginning of the weekend and just that hour when workers were spilling out onto the street from glass towers, homeward bound. Bars and restaurants had begun to fill. People were unwinding. So was Mooney, expansive, even kindly, in the flush of victory. “I knew I had that son of a bitch nailed the minute I got my hands on that pawn ticket. If he just hadn’t tried to pawn that coat—”

  “All the guy hadda do was hold it for a while.”

  “That’s just it. They never do. They always need cash, and the minute they’re tapped out, they panic. You got a twelve-grand mink sittin’ round a warehouse collectin’ dust. It’s hot; you wanna unload it, right? So you try the first place you can, right? The fuckin’ pawnshop down the block. Dumb. Just so fuckin’ dumb.”

  “Lucky break for you, Mooney.” Defasio drove the unmarked city car with characteristic Italian panache. It was as though he were conducting the Philharmonic. For every one required motion, he would execute four—cocky, swaggering, completely unnecessary. When they stopped at lights, he would eye the ladies in the cars alongside.

  “Lucky?” Mooney’s grin faded. “What d’ya mean lucky?”

  “I mean the pawn ticket, and all. You just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

  “What d’ya mean the right place at the right time? No one told me where that pawn ticket was. I hadda go find it. I hadda drag my can around to fifty different pawnshops in the Astoria, Corona section. I figured it hadda be somewhere in the vicinity, and I was right. No miracles. No luck, Defasio. Simple gumshoe, my friend. Hard work and experience. Right out of the Old School. Not like you, wise ass.”

  “Come on, Mooney. Don’t start on me now. I done everything I could, didn’t I?”

  “Everything, and still you come up with nothing. Zero. Goose eggs. That can’t be. That don’t wash, my friend. You mean to tell me there’s not a cab dispatcher in this city don’t have a record the night of April 30, 1979, of one of his hacks pickin’ up an injured fare, some guy bleedin’ like a stuck pig all over his back seat?”

  “Right.” The younger man’s voice grew shrill. “That’s exactly what I mean. You know as well as I do most hacks won’t file reports on injured passengers ‘cause they know if they do they gotta go to court, or appear before insurance companies. Why the hell should they? It’s a big hassle. Hangs ‘em up a long time. Costs ‘em money. And then their own companies get pissed off with them—‘Oh, you still hung up in court, Smith. That’s tough shit. I’m gonna have to go get someone else to turn your trick!’ So that’s why I got nothin’ to show for talkin’ three weeks to cab companies all over Queens and fuckin’ Manhattan.”

  “And hospital emergency wards,” Mooney fumed right back. “Nothin’ to show for that, either?” Defasio shook his head belligerently. “I didn’t say that, now did I, Mooney? I didn’t say I got nothin’ to show.”

  “No. Instead you tell me for hospitals you got too much to show and you don’t know where the fuck to start. Right?”

  “Jesus, Mooney, can’t I make you understand?” The car suddenly lurched and bounded through a series of potholes, jouncing the two of them in their seats.

  The moment they were on smoother ground, Defasio resumed his explanations. “Emergency wards are busy places. In case you haven’t heard. April 30, 1979, was relatively quiet. The New York City hospitals only admitted 84 people that night. You’re lucky. They generally average more like 135 to 150. Now I gotta figure out some way of tracking down all these 84. Some fun, ay? Half of them are not even local. They’re from out of town. One guy was visiting from Algeria. Should I go check him out?”

  Mooney slumped deeper into his seat. “You’ve always got some kind of goddamned excuse.”

  Defasio drove on grimly through the glittering dusk. “Don’t bust my hump, Mooney. I’m too tired.” Suddenly Defasio braked hard in order to avoid a cub swinging out in front of him. “Motherfucker.” Mooney was hurled forward. “All right. That does it. Lemme out right here.”

  “I’m takin’ you up to Eighty-first Street, I said.”

  “No way. It’s worth my life. I’m gettin’ out here.”

  “Hold your water, will you. I
promised I’d get you up to the widow, Baumholz.”

  Mooney swelled dangerously. “I’m warnin’ you, Defasio. You give me any more of that Widow Baumholz bullshit, and I’m gonna turn you inside out.” They were stopped in the middle of Third Avenue, glaring at each other. The light changed and horns shrieked. Mooney hoisted his great girth from the front seat, flung the door open and heaved out into the midst of the blaring, traffic-clogged night. Behind the car window Defasio muttered soundless and unrepeatable Sicilian epithets.

  “Don’t eat the potato salad, Mooney.”

  “Why’d you put it on my plate if you didn’t want me to eat it?”

  “In the first place, I didn’t put it on your plate. Harold put it on your plate.”

  “Who told Harold to put it on my plate?” Mooney raised a forkful of the potato salad to his mouth. “He knows as well as you if you’re gonna put potato salad on my plate, I’m gonna damned well eat it.” Frances Baumholz dipped into Mooney’s plate with a large spoon and, in a single sweep, removed the offending potato salad. With an air of childish hurt Mooney watched it depart. He had the look of a famished dog having just been given his bowl, then seeing it whisked cruelly away.

  They were seated in one of the spacious leather booths of Fritzi’s Balloon. As pubs go, it was not much different from the other East Side watering holes with a vaguely British theme—the same bare oak tables, the same booths, described grandly as ecclesiastical pews attributed to some quaint seventeenth-century abbey and allegedly shipped across from England at enormous expense.

  The ceilings were stucco and timber. Coach lanterns hung on the bricked walls of three narrow sprawling rooms. In the larger main dining room was a stone hearth where a cozy fire licked and crackled behind a black cinder screen. A number of English riding prints hung from the walls, while directly above the hearth hung an antique pub sign depicting a huge red balloon soaring above the countryside. Its guy lines were attached to a small wicker basket in which a dapper Victorian gentleman in a plaid jacket and derby hat sipped champagne and gazed phlegmatically out over the tiny, toylike countryside below.

  At dinner, trolleys of beef were wheeled round the floor from table to table while a stooping, bearlike creature in a toque blanche carved joints for famished diners. Another trolley, this one for desserts, featured trifle, berries, Stilton cheese and pastries.

  In the adjoining room was an authentic London shilling bar. Dozens of pewter tankards hung above it, and on the bar itself at cocktail time great wheels of cheddar, wicker hampers crammed with fresh erudite and bowls of salty chips were constantly replenished to keep patrons waiting for tables happily drinking.

  The final touch was a rude green parrot with clipped wings, who sat on a brass perch beside the hatcheck stand and insulted clients to their infinite delight. His name was Sanchez and he cursed in Castilian.

  “Harold doesn’t give a damn if you gain back thirty pounds,” Fritzi went on earnestly.

  “I already lost forty.”

  “And you feel much better. Right?”

  “If you must know, I feel lousy. And what’s more, I’m losing interest.”

  “But saving your life.”

  “Saving my life is a pain in the ass, if you must know. And for what? To live another two years? Screw it. I’m dying for a beer. That’s a fate worse than death.”

  “No beer. That’s the worst. You have a beer and you start to swell.”

  “Who cares if I swell? I like to swell. If I wanna swell that’s my business—ain’t it?”

  Ignoring him, she rose majestically to greet more guests. Mooney was left alone to pick disconsolately at his peas and beef.

  It was slightly past 8:00 P.M., Friday night, and the place was jammed to the gunnels, with sleek, stylish, upwardly mobile young people just beginning to feel the release of week’s end in New York. It was a payday, too, and the cash register at the bar jingled prosperously.

  In the last half year Mooney had seen a great deal of Fritzi Baumholz. After the debacle of their first meeting at the track, she had lured him back, not with the two hundred dollars he’d lost following her tout, but with the good red beef and fine ale of Fritzi’s Balloon.

  Shortly, they were going out to the track weekends, and he was eating at the Balloon regularly. After a few evenings out, they spent several nights together and that’s when she put him on a diet and told him to shape up. No bread, no butter, no starch, no sugar, no salt, no greasy, fried junk food, no sweet carbonated stuff, one drink a night and absolutely no beer. He told her he was not entirely sure it was worth giving all that up for a love life. Not at his age. And anyway he told her that he thought copulation was greatly overrated—mostly hype from the fashion mags, Seventh Avenue, cosmetics manufacturers, book publishers and film pornographers, in order to hawk their goods. He’d rather have ten hamburgers and a couple of quarts of beer at the track any day, than a roll in the sack with the most lusty wench imaginable.

  “Suits me fine.” Fritzi eyed him coldly. “I don’t know who could stand the sight of you in the buff, anyway.”

  He lost some forty pounds not long after that and was working on another twenty. He started to feel better and thought vaguely of getting some new suits, or at the very least, having some of his old ones taken in. But the nature of his growing relationship with Mrs. Baumholz, their unfailing weekends at the track, the pajamas and the shaving kit he kept in her apartment near the pub, her proprietarial concern for his diet, the whole sense of a shared growing intimacy—all of that had begun to trouble him. He couldn’t say precisely why, but he suspected that it frightened him. It alarmed him that he liked it so much and that it appeared to be taking him over like some insidiously seductive drug. More and more, after a day’s work, he found himself looking forward to dashing up to the Balloon and seeing her. He liked the way he was treated there; more like family than clientele. When he walked in at night, Mitch, the bartender, had his Jack Daniel’s standing right up there waiting for him, all beaded with chill, perfect, the way he loved it. It troubled him that he liked the whole cozy arrangement just a bit too much—like .< neutered old cat coming home each night for its saucer and bowl.

  Fritzi came back and slipped into the booth beside him. “What puts you in such a larky mood? Just the loss of some overmayonnaised potato salad? Harold,” she waved for the waiter. “Bring Mr. Mooney potato salad. Heaps of potato salad. All he wants.”

  “I don’t want no potato salad now.” He waved the waiter off. “I’m in a dandy mood. Listen—what about an ale? A small one? Even a shot glass?”

  “No ale. Harold”—she snapped at the baffled waiter—“bring Mr. Mooney a Tab. With a lot of ice and lemon, the way he likes it.”

  “No Tab, Harold. I wouldn’t put it in my system. It’s like something that’s leaked out of a radiator.”

  “You are in a dreadful mood, Mooney. You ought to feel great. You broke this fencing operation. You bagged the big guy, plus a lot of the small fry. Everyone’s proud of you. You’re a terrific guy. They’ll probably give you a medal and buck you back up to captain. And on top of that, you lost forty pounds.”

  “Forty-two pounds.”

  “I’m sure you put the two right back on with all that potato salad tonight. So what do we have going for us in the first tomorrow? Belvedere looks fine to me. A two-year-old, he’s run second his last …”

  “I’m not going to the track tomorrow.”

  He’d caught her off-guard and for a moment it was only sheer momentum kept her rattling cheerily on. Then the weight of his message sank in.

  “I’m not going tomorrow,” he said again. The waiter poured his Tab, and they didn’t speak, waiting for the man to go.

  “I knew something was wrong,” she said. “What’s up?”

  A jukebox was playing out in the bar and the din and smoke bothered him. She stared into his face as if he’d spoken, but he hadn’t, only muttered several words beneath his breath.

  “What’s that, Fra
nk? I’m sorry, I don’t …”

  “You can’t depend on no one, I said.” He spoke louder. “People just don’t care anymore.”

  She watched him uneasily, expecting more to come. But it didn’t; and what finally did, sounded a bit hollow and self-serving. She thought she was now in for one of those interminable tirades about the ills of civilization. Youth. Laziness. Lack of commitment. Undesirable ethnic types. Disrespect for authority. The decline of the Church. The full catalog of contemporary crimes. All of that delivered with a ringing self-righteousness, as if he were a deacon of the Church himself.

  She’d heard it all before, but this time it was just a few sputters and feeble, halfhearted denunciations, then a kind of joyless resolve about doing his duty, whatever the hell that was.

  “So I can’t go out to the track with you tomorrow. I gotta stay right here in town and work.”

  “But why? It’s Saturday. What’s so important? They’re running yearlings. Can’t it wait?”

  Head crooked to one side, he rested his cheek in the palm of a hand and swirled sugarless sweetener through his decaffeinated coffee. A fresh crowd surged in from the bar. The amplification of the jukebox had reduced whatever music there’d been to mere visceral thudding.

  “What did you say, Frank? I’m sorry, I can’t …” She strained toward him.

  “Nothing.” He gazed abstractly off at some point in the middle distance. “I didn’t say anything.” Actually he had, but she’d caught only the tail end of it, and to her it made no sense. Something like “Equinox,” is what she’d heard, or thought she’d heard. She shrugged and smiled. “Well, suit yourself.”

  He nodded, but he was still staring into emptiness. “Are you going to be over on Sunday?” She waited for a reply, but he was a million miles away. The second time she called louder. “Frank.”

  “I hear you. I hear you.”

  “You think you’ll go out to the track Sunday?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”