Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  “What part of his leg?” Defasio asked.

  “I don’t know. He was under covers all the time.”

  “Did he say how he’d injured his leg?” Mooney asked.

  Watford squinted, trying to recall. “Something about falling or tripping through an open manhole.” He watched the two men exchange glances. “That’s what he told me. I’m pretty sure.”

  “You had some conversation with him, then, I take it?” Mooney went on.

  “Not very much. He was unconscious most of the time. Anesthesia, you know. He’d had surgery. They sewed up his leg, I think. They had to load him up with sedatives and pain-killers.”

  Seated on the sofa, Defasio scribbled quietly into his pad.

  “You recall what he looked like?” Mooney pressed harder.

  “Hard to say. He was lying down in bed all the time, under covers. White hair. Fifty. Sixtyish. Distinguished. Banker, broker sort of type. Possibly a diplomat. When he spoke …”

  Watford had settled eagerly into the role of innocent bystander. For him, the heat was off. He’d caught their intent now, and the game rather pleased him.

  It was quiet for a moment and the clocks ticked loudly. The big detective rose and began to tread heavily up and down the room. He was much too large for the cluttered little area and Watford held his breath, waiting for the man to collide with furniture or topple antique glass from tabletops.

  “You don’t happen to recall the guy’s name, do you?”

  “His name?” Watford gazed upward at the ceiling and chewed his lip. “Oh, golly, his name. Let me see now.”

  “Does the name Boyd mean anything to you? Anthony Boyd?”

  “Boyd.” Watford closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Boyd. Boyd. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe.”

  “That’s the name he was registered under at the hospital.” Defasio’s voice rose from the corner. “Boyd. Boyd. No, I don’t …”

  “Did you ever hear him addressed by any other name?” Mooney went on. “The nurses? The doctors? What did they call him?”

  “I don’t remember at all. It may very well have been Boyd. I just don’t …”

  “That’s okay.” Mooney caught his agitation and relented.

  “There may have been some other name.” Watford strained to recall. “As a matter of fact, he may have once told me. I’m sorry—I just don’t remember. It wasn’t Boyd though, I can tell you that.”

  “What was it? Try. Think back.”

  “Think.”

  Watford laughed helplessly. “Sorry, I can’t. Listen, hey, that was over two years ago.”

  Mooney was suddenly very tired. He took his hat from where he’d left it on the chair. Defasio lumbered to his feet.

  “Thanks very much. We may get back to you.” Mooney held a hand out to Watford. Together they walked back out to the front hall.

  Watford opened the door. “I wish I could’ve been more helpful.”

  “You were helpful.”

  They stood there shaking hands while a gang of small boys squealed and played stoopball in the street.

  “What did this fellow do, anyway?” Watford asked.

  “I’ll tell you about it some other time. We’re in a bit of a hurry right now.” Mooney scribbled something onto a pad. “Here’s my number. If something should come to you—a brainstorm in the middle of the night—just gimme a ring. We’ll be in touch.”

  The two men started down the front steps, Mooney in front, ponderous, huge, like some shuffling prehistoric biped, the dark, wiry man scurrying closely behind.

  Suddenly, Watford cried out to them: “He said something to me once.”

  The two of them turned at the same moment.

  Watford cried out once more, a furtive little smile upon his face. “He told me something once. Something strange.”

  Mooney and Defasio appeared to lean toward him. “Do you happen to recall what it was?” Mooney asked.

  Watford closed his eyes, straining for recollection. When he opened them again he shrugged and smiled sheepishly. “I’m afraid not. I was feeling pretty strange those days myself.”

  APRIL-DECEMBER/‘82

  41

  Mooney woke out of a fitful sleep. It was April 30 and as May approached he knew they were entering a critical period. At one o’clock the following day he had an appointment to see the commissioner. How would he begin to explain the embarrassment of the elusive Mr. A. Boyd, all of whose tracks led into an airy vapor? How to make comprehensible to a man of the commissioner’s stolid, literal turn of mind a notion as whimsical as that of a homicidal maniac killing one night a year while dormant for all the rest? Even worse, how to make plausible the notion that the night of murder appeared to be keyed to a period between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice—as the sun’s ecliptic moved toward a point farthest north of the equator? How to explain something as fanciful as that to an exceedingly pragmatic commissioner of police, and then persuade him to authorize the use of a helicopter, plus extremely costly night surveillance equipment to a man whose name had long been associated with trouble throughout the force.

  Fritzi moaned lightly in her sleep. Lying beside her beneath a light comforter, Mooney watched her breathe. She rolled slightly sidewards and resumed her gentle breathing. Like him, she lay naked. Her body radiated a perfumed warmth along the flank of his own and he watched the calm, unhurried rise and fall of the quilt between her breasts.

  Outside an ambulance wailed up Lexington Avenue. He moved closer to her, tucking the comforter up around her shoulders against the chill of the night wind rattling the blinds.

  “The way I see it, we’ve got three days.”

  “Give me one good reason why I should believe you.”

  “Today’s Thursday. I figure this guy for Saturday night.”

  “And on the basis of all this fancy stargazing I’m supposed to allocate twenty thousand dollars for three nights of skylarking about in a police helicopter, and also detach an additional fifteen plain-clothesmen?”

  “It’s not fancy stargazing. It’s the goods. I got the records to show. This Bombardier nut only gets busy the end of April to early May.”

  “Buy yourself a glass ball, Mooney, and a storefront on Eighth Avenue. You’ve had two years exclusive—all to yourself—on this thing. Extra men. Extra time. That’s cost me, and what do I have to show for my money?”

  “You owe it to me, Commissioner.”

  The tall gray man in the pale blue pinstripe stood with hands clasped behind his back, gazing thirty floors down onto Police Plaza below. “I told you, Mooney,” the commissioner went on grimly, “the department owes you nothing.”

  “Just forty-two years of service. I call that something.”

  “Forty-two years of aggravation and intransigence …”

  “With a couple of winners tossed in for good measure. Remember the Hardwell case, the Basilica gang, the Brooklyn warehouse murders …”

  “Not enough of the winners, Mooney, and much too many of the other kind. On top of a record of chronic insubordination, you’ll recall, as well, one or two episodes that cost the force heavily in terms of public embarrassment.”

  A smile, bitter yet tinged with melancholy, flickered in Mooney’s eyes. “You don’t let a guy forget, do you, Tom?”

  The commissioner gazed through the big windows westward to the financial district dominated by the World Trade Center. Off to the east he had a splendid view of the docks and slips lining the East River, with the tugs and barges plying their way up and down the slick, choppy waters. He turned and wandered slowly back to his swivel chair behind the big walnut desk. “I don’t dare. The moment I did you’d be off in a shot doing something stupid, then screaming how the department was victimizing you. We had a whole city out there screaming for your head once, Mooney. But this department stood behind you.”

  “Sure. They busted me from captain to lieutenant. That’s how this department stood behind me.”

  The commissio
ner’s large freckled fingers drummed nervous tattoos on his desk top. “You’re lucky you didn’t wind up in jail, you ungrateful bastard. You ought to get down and kiss the floor of the lobby out there, and all you’ve ever given in return is grousing, poormouthing and peaching on your colleagues whenever it suited you …”

  Mooney scowled. “Fair is fair. There were plenty of them poormouthing me when I was in the soup. Mulvaney knew I was next in line for chief, Manhattan South.”

  The commissioner laughed ruefully. “Mooney, I don’t know whether to laugh or pity you. Maybe you’re just plain dumb. What makes you think you were ever seriously considered for that spot?”

  “I was next in line. Ahead of Mulvaney.”

  “Mulvaney didn’t have a questionable murder rap decorating his record.”

  “There were no questions about that.”

  “There are always questions. Particularly when the victim is black and a minor.”

  “No questions, Tom.” Mooney’s lip trembled. The great mass of him hunched forward in his chair. “The court exonerated me. The department gave me a clean bill.”

  “And knocked you down to lieutenant. That’s how clean a bill. And furthermore, my friend, even if there hadn’t been the other business, you would never have been appointed chief of a precinct like Manhattan South. Not once have you ever demonstrated an iota of administrative tact. You have always been a thorn and a burr in the ass of the force, and you know as well as I do, Frank, that the only reason you’re still here is that you happen to still have a few good friends in high places at City Hall. Okay?” The commissioner rapped the desk top with a glass paperweight in which a blizzard slowly descended through water onto a tiny Alpine village.

  “No—I’m sorry, Mooney. The department owes you nothing, and why, in Christ’s good name, you should think I’d be idiot enough to authorize an expenditure of another twenty thousand dollars on more men and fancy equipment on the basis of some astrological argle-bargle is beyond me.”

  “You did two years ago,” Mooney spoke softly with a stiff reserve.

  “That’s right. I did. I thought then that despite your many liabilities you had the makings of a first-class investigator. This case, I figured, had all of the right ingredients for you. A big challenge. A real toughie. No leads. No motives. No hard evidence. Had you scored, the rewards would have been considerable. And, personally, I would’ve loved to see it happen. It would have vindicated my trust in you when everyone else advised me to fire your ass. But after two years and the addition of thousands of dollars’ worth of expenses to a badly strained budget, all I’ve got to show are a couple of dead ends in Wilmette, Illinois, and a hospital in New York, plus the wrath and scorn of the mayor’s office, not to mention the public’s outrage.”

  “There’s always that, isn’t there? You can always count on the public’s outrage.”

  The commissioner sighed, leaned back in his chair and gently patted his stomach as if to pacify some gnawing ulcerous pain there. “A lot of people have been after me about this, Frank. Not just your good friend, Mulvaney, either. Civic groups. Theater owners. Restaurateurs. I simply can’t justify these additional expenditures without something a helluva lot more concrete.”

  “So that’s that,” Mooney replied abruptly. He clapped his knees and made a funny wry smile.

  The commissioner sat silently with his arms folded, his brow lowering. He watched the big, rumpled man seated opposite him and noted with surprise the rather handsome features that had recently resurfaced as a result of dramatic weight loss.

  “I really feel I’m close to this guy now,” Mooney continued with disconcerting calm.

  “Boyd?”

  “If that’s really his name. I can’t actually say why, but over the past few months I’ve sensed a lot of things all starting to fall into some kind of logical pattern. I can’t express it in words, but I’ve got it all down in my notes.” Mooney tapped the place above his chest where the two small pads resided in his vest pocket.

  “You were a great detective, Tom. You know yourself the feeling that comes over you after you’ve been on something a long time. First, it’s all confusion. Odds and ends. Little bits of things. Disconnected. Nothing adding up. You live with it daily. You wake up in the middle of the night and you’re thinking about it. You’re thinking about it even when you’re not thinking about it.”

  The commissioner struck a match and put it to his pipe. He puffed deeply and nodded with his eyes closed.

  “Then suddenly”—Mooney’s face flared momentarily—“shape and direction. I’m at that point now ho I want to make a deal.”

  Dowd’s eyes opened, instantly alert. Even as Mooney had lulled him into the cozy affability of old friendship, the commissioner had been waiting, slightly tense. Now here it was. At last the kicker. “What kind of a deal?”

  “Don’t get antsy, Tom. I think you’ll like what I have to propose. I know my buddies at Manhattan South will like it.”

  Elbows on desk, Dowd leaned slightly forward, inching his way like a man approaching a live bomb. Mooney’s boyish smile seemed more lethal than ever. Dowd waited, his voice barely above a whisper. “Well?”

  “Since I’m such a burr in the ass of the department,” Mooney said, repeating bitterly those rankling words, “for the use of one helicopter, plus night surveillance, infrared equipment and a detachment of fifteen additional men, for limited duty over the next three nights, I, Francis Mooney, will take early retirement.”

  The commissioner’s eyes blinked behind a veil of pipe smoke.

  “If I fail to make my man,” Mooney’s voice rose, “if the operation’s a bust, I will serve my walking papers Monday morning next.”

  A mixture of both hope and disbelief leapt into the commissioner’s eyes. “You will?”

  Mooney thumped the desk top. “I wish to cause no further embarrassment to my esteemed colleagues.” The few moments of vulnerability were over, Dowd observed. More likely, they’d never begun. Mooney was his own sweet self again—all craftiness and self-promotion. Playing the angles.

  “For a man who has wanted all of his professional life to walk out of here age sixty-five, covered with honors and a full pension, you sound pretty cocksure.”

  “Pretty cocksure,” Mooney beamed.

  42

  It was going on 4:00 P.M. Charles Watford was in his pajamas and robe. It was not that he’d gotten into pajamas early for the night but rather, that he’d not yet gotten out of them from the day before.

  He’d gone to bed the evening before fully intending to rise early and get back out on the street, canvassing agencies in his search for work. But he’d had an extremely restless night, fraught with anxiety and sleeplessness which finally yielded to a double dose of Demerol. So thoroughly had the good little “Mother” done her work that Watford failed to rise the next morning, sleeping through till noon and missing, as a result, whatever appointments he’d so carefully managed to arrange for the day.

  He laid the blame for it on Mooney, whose visit, it seemed, had scared the wits out of him. It hadn’t been bad, he recalled, while Mooney and the other man were there. As a matter of fact, he’d started to enjoy being the focal point of their attention. It was only when they’d left that the doubts and misgivings began.

  “Who do they think they’re kidding?” he fumed, “They must take me for some kind of sap. All of that hokum about a man in the bed next to me in the hospital two years ago. Just a pretense to come in here, nose and poke around looking for bottles and pills. I’m a suspect. They’re on to me.”

  It started like that, gradually. But then he began to work it up into a mild frenzy. Winding the clocks for the evening, his agitation escalated into a huge, inflicted panic. “It’s me that big cop was looking for. Not anybody in the hospital. They’ve got something on me. Either I left fingerprints at the pharmacy, or I dropped something.”

  Struggling to reconstruct his every move at the Cardinal Pharmacy, he started to make
his way through the clock collection, winding and resetting them distractedly. Forcing windup keys into clocks, at one point he nearly upended a rare French Napoleonic clock of doré and marble. All the time he kept muttering, working himself into a frenzy about the big cop and who the devil was he to come into someone’s home like that, snooping around on a cheap pretense about some man in a hospital bed next to him? So obvious a lie it was, unless … unless it wasn’t the Cardinal Pharmacy at all. It was Myrtle. That was it. She’d notified the New York police, who’d finally tracked him down. My God. Oh, my God, it’s Myrtle.

  It was just about then that he’d had the first intimations of a rapidly onrushing migraine. He’d not wanted to take the Demerol. Some deep vestige of self-preservation had cautioned him over the past several months to curtail his intake. He had actually made some conscientious effort to cut back. But if Myrtle had the New York police track him here … this was clearly not the time to start denying himself.

  “But maybe it’s not that at all,” he reasoned. “Maybe it’s the prescription yesterday. All those fake prescriptions. My God, and that doctor, the gastroenterologist I impersonated. Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”

  A thousand chimeras whirled through his head. Phantoms of past crimes, actual and imagined. Forgeries. Impersonations. Thefts, petty and grand. Breaking and entering. In his mind he recalled dozens more. The Cardinal Pharmacy was but one of a string of many. Vividly, with almost preternatural acuity, he relived the crime over and over again. The shattered glass. The high, persistent shriek of the alarm. Lurching up and down the aisles of canisters and phials.

  It was then that he’d bolted down the second Demerol, forgetting completely that he’d taken one only minutes before. A cold sweat erupted on his forehead, and though it was close to eighty degrees outside, he started to shiver. He climbed into bed that night fully expecting never to awaken. A dull throb had commenced at the back of his neck. Lying there anticipating the arrival of pain was more ghastly than the pain itself. That slow, insidious creep upward from the back of the skull into the right ear, radiating spokes of agony outward into the right hemisphere of the head as far as the right eye.