Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  Finally he lost the connection, or he was cut off. In any event, he had to run round the corner to a small cigar store for change. There was a pay phone there. He ducked in at once and redialed Hartford.

  “Where’d you go?” the records chief asked when he got him back on the line.

  “We were cut off,” Defasio explained breathlessly. “Did you find anything?”

  “Well, if it’s the address you’re looking for, I’ve got it.”

  “Terrific.”

  “It’s A. Boyd, Incorporated, Import-Export, 3143 Crown Drive …”

  “Wilmette, Illinois.”

  “That’s right. How come you knew that?”

  “I’ll tell you some other time.” Defasio sounded tired. “Listen, that’s a commercial address. Don’t you have a residence?”

  He could hear papers shuffle through the line. “Afraid not. This is a commercial health insurance policy. All the premiums were paid by the company. A. Boyd, Incorporated.”

  “Who’s the guarantor of the policy?”

  “The proprietor—Mr. Anthony Boyd, I told you. If you wanna locate Mr. Boyd, what you’ve gotta do is call A. Boyd, Incorporated, in Wilmette.”

  “Okay,” Defasio nodded. By then he was willing to try anything. “Do you happen to have the telephone number out there?”

  “Sure. It’s right here on the policy application. Area code 555-734-2664. But I should tell you one thing. This policy lapsed over two years ago.”

  In a sense, Defasio did not have to make the call to Wilmette. His good basic cop instincts told him that, just like the lapsed policy, the telephone at 3143 Crown Drive would be disconnected and Mr. A. Boyd, long gone. He knew, too, just as certainly, that when he’d finally located the landlord of the building in which A. Boyd, Inc. had operated, there would he no record of a forwarding address—just a trail that dropped off into nowhere—a trail that had started in a taxi garage in the Bronx and appeared to end at an office building in a suburb of Chicago.

  He was no closer now to the badly injured mystery man in Rudy Uliano’s cab than before when he’d started with the formidable Ms. Solomon. Who was Anthony Boyd and where could he be found? For starters, he might try the phone book. It was the most obvious approach and yet no one had done it.

  A bank of local directories stood outside the booth. He started with Manhattan, in which five Anthony Boyds were listed; the Bronx yielded two; Brooklyn and Queens, three apiece. Staten Island had one Andrew Boyd, but no Anthony. Then, of course, there was Connecticut and New Jersey. And why did he so blithely assume that his Anthony Boyd had to reside in the tri-state area? Why not Montana or Utah or Texarkana? Or, why not Illinois, particularly when A. Boyd’s import-export business was in Wilmette? Why then, not a check run of all Anthony Boyds or A. Boyds to be found through the central billing division of the Illinois Bell Company? Why then, not run the name through the FBI’s central records office in Washington, D.C., as well as a fast check for military records at the Pentagon?

  A great bone-weariness came over him as he contemplated the magnitude of the job. It would take weeks, months, perhaps, to cover all those check runs. Meanwhile, there was the problem of one Francis Mooney, the blowtorch scorching his backside. Over the past week Mooney had grown testier and more impatient than ever. He, too, had his own ax to grind with the captain and the commissioner. He was in no mood for the frustration of further delay. Also, Defasio had guessed that Mooney, in some curious, unspoken way, had taken the matter of the rooftop Bombardier to heart. Unlike his characteristically cynical approach to most investigative work, this case, Defasio noted, had taken on for Mooney the appearances of a personal cause. It had something to do with the man’s fall from grace, and his quest for ultimate salvation.

  Then, too, there was this incomprehensible cant he’d babble all day about the time of year, the stars, the solstice and the urgency of NOW, NOW, NOW. Based on the vaguest information, gathered from a slightly forgetful cabdriver named Rothblatt, Mooney now genuinely believed that he had drawn close to the mystery man who’d commandeered Rudy Uliano’s cab on the night of April 30, 1979. The same man who, bleeding and close to shock, had been driven from somewhere on Forty-first Street and Eighth Avenue to the emergency ward of Beth Israel Hospital. Now he would have to tell Mooney that he was unfortunately mistaken. He was no closer at all.

  With sinking heart, Defasio dialed Headquarters to report to Mooney the results of his investigations.

  37

  “You checked the insurance company?”

  “I already told you I did.”

  “I know what you told me. Tell me again. I’m stupid.”

  Defasio sighed and rolled his eyes heavenward. “The insurer was the Hartford Trust and Traveler. The policy number was 683 …”

  “Never mind the number. Tell me about the premium payments.”

  “Paid by A. Boyd, Incorporated, Import-Export, 3143 Crown Drive, Wilmette.”

  “And that’s a commercial address, not a residence, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You checked that with the landlord?”

  “I told you I did, for Chrissake. And Boyd, Incorporated, vacated the premises two years ago.”

  “Okay. I’m just getting it all straight in my head.” Mooney spoke with a strange calm. Intermittently, he sipped from a mug of steaming consommé, wincing with revulsion each time he swallowed. “What about the landlord?”

  “Quality Office Brokers, 14 Lake Drive, Chicago. I told you that too.”

  “Right. Now tell me, Sherlock,” Mooney’s eyes narrowed to small gashes, “was rent on the office space paid directly to them?”

  Defasio wore a look of immense personal delight.

  “I bet you think I didn’t check that.”

  “Not for a moment,” Mooney replied acidly. “But now that you mention it, did you?”

  There was a weighty pause, followed by an abject sigh.

  “Stupid fuck.”

  “I was gonna, Frank. So help me.”

  “But of course you forgot. I should’ve known. Stupid asshole. Get on that phone. Get hold of that landlord. Find out what bank those rent checks were drawn on. And out of whose account.”

  “It’s gonna be A. Boyd, Inc. Don’t you see, Frank? It’s a dummy. Don’t you know that by now?”

  “Sure I do. Boyd’s not the guy’s name at all. It’s an alias. And the dummy corporation is set up so he can write checks and not be traced. But why?” His voice trailed off in bafflement. “Still, I wanna hear it from the fucking landlord. Not from you. Then I’ll start looking someplace else.”

  “Where, for Chrissake?” shouted Defasio. “The trail ends out there in Wilmette. Boyd’s walked off into thin air.”

  “Not thin enough.” Mooney gulped his consommé. “Not thin enough, my friend. Now you go find out about that goddamned dummy bank account.”

  In twenty minutes he was back. “Chicago First National City. Account number 437 109-680.”

  “And?”

  “The account’s in the name of A. Boyd, Incorporated.”

  “And who signs the checks?”

  “A. Boyd.”

  “Is the account still active?”

  “Closed out.”

  “When?”

  “May 10, 1979.”

  “Just about the same time Mr. A. Boyd was released from Beth Israel, and let his health insurance lapse and vacated the premises at Crown Drive. This doesn’t say anything to you, Defasio?”

  The young detective pondered that a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Mooney’s face purpled. “If I were you, Defasio, I’d think seriously about taking a TV repairman’s course in night school. The odds are improving. Five’ll get you eight that Mr. A. Boyd and our good friend, the Broadway Bombardier, are one and the same.”

  Mooney rose suddenly, the breeze of his huge motion scattering papers across the desk. “Come on.”

  “Where? I just got back. Where the hell ar
e we going now?”

  “Back down to Beth Israel.” Mooney swayed massively through the door. “I wanna talk to your friend, Sophie Whatsherface again.”

  Charles Watford was just leaving the Premier Employment Agency where he’d been subjected to a particularly brutal interrogation at the hands of a brusque young personnel interviewer.

  “None of these dates on your employment history tally, Mr. Watford. You can’t possibly have been working for Pan Am and Braniff and TWA all at the same time.”

  “It’s been so long. I guess I just got the dates confused. I’m sorry.”

  “Go back and fill out the application again, with the correct information, will you, please?”

  The young man turned away, a curt, dismissive gesture, and pressed a buzzer on his desk.

  Watford hovered there momentarily, red-faced and speechless, even as a tall black man in a gray suit was ushered in.

  In the next moment Watford turned and left. He did not fill out another application. On the street in the midst of the noontime rush, he had the first inkling of an approaching migraine. Tentative and fleeting, it came as a sharp jab at his right temple and a momentary dimming of vision attended by some blurring. Long experience with such premonitory signals was enough to tell him that within an hour or two he’d be in agony.

  Several capsules of Demerol remained in his pocket. Fairly weak prescriptions, they were certainly not enough to weather the full storm. He needed not only Demerol, but his ergotamine as well.

  He had about thirty-eight dollars to his name and very grim prospects of getting any more within the foreseeable future. With full realization of that, he started to panic.

  He started to walk very fast and with no particular destination in mind. The object was simply to move, and quickly, as if motion itself were the way to slough off the ominous symptoms.

  But even as he walked he felt the throbbing commence at the back of his neck, then a distinct tightening like a band narrowing across his temples. Shortly his walk had changed to a half-stumbling trot, and he was craning his neck this way and that as though he were seeking something. He was somewhere on Fifth Avenue, just south of Thirty-fourth Street, when he recalled the Gramercy Park Medical Center, not far from where he was.

  He veered sharply south and started down Fifth Avenue at a fairly brisk clip. In his gray plaid suit with shirt and tie, an expression of glazed desperation in his eye, he was a curious sight.

  Ten minutes later he stood, as he had two years before, below the large black directory posted out front. There the physicians, along with their specialties, were listed like movie stars on a marquee, DR. GERALD NACHTIGAL—PROCTOLOGY. DR. SEYMOUR SCHNEIDERMAN—CARDIOLOGY, and so forth. There, too, was Dr. Rashower, the urologist whose name he’d borrowed in order to obtain a prescription of Demerol. He was not about to make the mistake of availing himself of that name again.

  Watford’s leaping eye caught the name of DR. JOSHUA SILBERFEIN—GASTROENTEROLOGY—and fixed there with a tenacity that suggested to him something of the providential. The name appeared to give off powerful vibrations of his own deliverance. Instantly, his mind summoned up a host of excruciatingly painful symptoms to accompany the attack of gastric colic he was about to invent.

  Several minutes later, he was down the street at the Gramercy Pharmacy, inside the very booth he had used with such great success two years before. He dialed the number of the pharmacy and asked to be connected with the druggist. Though his head was already afflicted with a dull pounding, he experienced the same kind of erotic tickle when he heard the phone ringing behind the counter and watched the druggist reach for it. This time it was a different man from the one of two years before.

  “Hello, this is Dr. Silberfein,” his voice commenced, with a barely perceptible quaver, then evening out, assumed an impressive authority as he slipped easily into the role. A patient of his, he explained, a Mr. Bertram Mortimer, was in extreme pain from chronic intestinal colic. He was about to admit the man to New York University Hospital, but he would need some Demerol, about seven hundred milligrams, to tide him over until they could find him a bed. Mr. Mortimer was on his way over right now. He, Dr. Silberfein, was uptown on another emergency, but he would instruct his office to send a prescription over as soon as possible.

  Watford watched the pharmacist, phone tucked between cheek and shoulder, nodding and scribbling onto a pad. Having set it all in motion, Watford could not help feeling a kind of wild excitement, like an artist under the spell of some great Promethean force. After he’d hung up, he waited in the booth approximately six minutes, then when the pharmacist was preoccupied with another customer, he made his way slowly across to the counter.

  The pharmacist looked at him uneasily when he presented himself. Watford at once realized he might well look a fright after the sprint down from Thirty-fourth Street to Gramercy Park.

  “Would you wait just a moment, Mr. Mortimer?” the man said. “I’m just making up your prescription now.”

  “Dr. Silberfein did phone it in?”

  “Oh, yes. He did. Just one moment, please. I’ll be right back.”

  Something in the way the man had said it, the stiffness of his voice, the visible tightening of his jaw and mostly the look of distrust in his eyes told Watford that something was up. Whatever might be said of the foolishness and wastefulness of Watford’s life, one thing he had unmistakably in his favor was an uncanny acuity for self-protection. His powers of premonition were extraordinary.

  He walked round the counter and peered into the back. Instantly Watford surmised the whole situation—the pharmacist on the phone, leaning forward, whispering hastily into the speaker. Watford needed no additional information to verify that the man was at that moment checking the prescription with the doctor’s office.

  Suddenly, the pharmacist looked up and saw him. They gazed at each other like a pair of relatives who had not seen one another for years. Watford’s face wore a pitiful expression, that of a man hurt and betrayed. He turned and bolted.

  “Stop!” the pharmacist shouted and started out from behind. But Watford wasn’t stopping for anyone. He barreled down an aisle lined with cosmetics and toiletries, careening off a wire basket full of soaps and sending it scattering. Several women screamed even as the pharmacist, in hot pursuit, kept shouting, “Stop him. Stop him.”

  A drab, smallish man grappled Watford by the lapel and made a heroic effort to detain him at the door. In vain, however; Watford thrust the man aside and bolted out onto the street. The pharmacist tore out after him, shouting at Watford over the heads of relentless waves of people bearing down upon him. Halfway down the block the pharmacist stopped short, watching the tail of Watford’s gray plaid jacket disappear wraithlike round a corner. Puzzled, he paused a moment rethinking his situation, then turned, ran back to the pharmacy and immediately called the police.

  38

  It was nearly 6:00 P.M. and Sophie Solomon’s dander was way up. You could tell that from the way her head shook and from the quick vertical up-down motion of the wen on her chin as she spoke.

  Defasio’s eye was fixed hypnotically on the small purple blemish with its solitary pole of hair thrusting up out of the center. Mortified that he was unable to avert his gaze, he watched transfixed as she read the riot act to Mooney.

  “There’s no way in the world I’m gonna go back and pull out record books now. Do you realize what time it is?”

  Mooney hovered there, a look of martyrdom on his face, trying to slip a word in edgewise.

  “I have a life too. I’m a human being with rights.” She wagged a gnarled, arthritic finger under his nose. “Listen—I already went through this with your friend here this afternoon. Ask him.” She shrieked at Defasio. “Didn’t I already speak to you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Didn’t I already tell you everything you wanted to know?”

  “Unfortunately, Mrs. Solomon …”

  “Ms.”

  “Ms.,” Mooney pro
nounced the word with an odd buzz, “but unfortunately my colleague here neglected to …”

  “Now, at six o’clock, you got the gall to come barging back in here with a whole new list of questions. I’m due at the airport in an hour to pick up my niece.” She started to rise.

  “I appreciate everything you’ve done for us already, Miss, Ms. Solomon.” Mooney sounded his most reasonable.

  “If you appreciated it you wouldn’t be standing there asking me to go pull out records at closing time.” Flustered and fuming, Ms. Solomon fumbled into a gray pillbox hat.

  “One question is all I’m asking,” Mooney persisted.

  “One question comes to two questions. Two questions to four.”

  “Believe me, I don’t want to take up any more of your time than I have to. This is critically important. Lives depend on our finding this man.”

  Ms. Solomon appeared unconvinced. “You say he’s been missing over a year. He can wait another day.” A second time she rose and started for the coat rack where her tan raincoat hung. Defasio reached for it in order to help, but she glowered at him through her pince-nez and snatched it herself. “I’ll take that, thank you very much,” she hissed coldly.

  “Honest,” Mooney implored, “this won’t take more than five minutes.”

  “How would you know how long it’ll take?” she demanded. “I know how long, Sergeant. You don’t.”

  “Lieutenant,” he corrected her and noticed that one of her legs was shorter than the other and that she walked with a pronounced limp, but briskly all the same. In a trice, he grasped her entire history. Spinsterhood. Small cramped apartment with kitchenette. Rolling beds that folded into walls. Cats for companionship. Suppers of canned soup. Evenings beside a small flickering TV or listening to radio concerts. Alone on holidays. By herself on packaged vacation tours. Not entirely unlike his own dismal regimen, although he never went on tours.