Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  50

  They breezed back into the city at about 9:00 P.M., their minds whirling from the numerous contracts and checks they had signed that day. Fritzi insisted on stopping by the pub to pick up some papers before going back to the apartment.

  When they walked through the big swinging doors that opened onto the dark teak shilling bar, something struck Mooney as odd. Possibly it was the silence and, unaccountably, the sense of all motion suddenly frozen. Then a bright light flashed. There was a burst of applause and the old 49er saloon piano in the corner burst forth into a tinny version of “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

  At first he thought it was for some other person; they had inadvertently stumbled in on someone else’s party. He glanced over his shoulder to see if someone had come in behind them. Then he turned back and saw them all behind the bar in funny hats and the big banner dangling above them with bright green letters: FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, THANK GOD ALMIGHTY, FREE AT LAST.

  There was a rush of heat to his face and the taut beginnings of a frown. When he turned to Fritzi, about to growl his displeasure, she was absolutely radiant. Amid the loud rattles and cracks of party noisemakers, she tugged at his sleeve.

  There must have been at least a hundred people pumping his hand and slapping his back. Most of them were Fritzi’s friends, staunch habitués of the Balloon. But, amazingly, she’d managed to round up two or three of his old buddies from the force. Carpenter, Hewitt, Delgado—good, longtime friends of Mooney’s who’d stood by him during the dark days of the past. Big, red-faced, good old boys, retired pensioners, they encircled him, grinning awkwardly in shiny blue suits. How she’d learned about them, or where she’d dug them up on such short notice, he never knew. But what he’d come to understand that day was that as a woman, Fritzi Baumholz was formidable. When she set out to get something, she seldom if ever failed.

  They ate and drank late into the night. Fritzi sat beside him, and at the end of dinner, she helped him to slice a large chocolate cake log, baked expressly for the occasion in the shape of a policeman’s night stick. Across the top of it, in a thin wobbly line of vanilla frosting, was a horse surmounted by a jockey just crossing the finish line. Just beneath that in large, wavering birthday-cake script were the words, GUMSHOE—THE WINNER. Somehow the name for the new yearling stuck. They never would have called him Capricorn anyway, and while the name Gumshoe was hardly flattering, it was affectionate.

  Fritzi sliced the cake, serving everyone graciously. When it came time for Mooney to get his piece, the chef sent out a thin, sugarless wafer with a solitary, badly mashed strawberry cresting it.

  Roars and applause went up. Mooney laughed, but at a certain point in the lull of festivities, he turned to Fritzi as if seeing her for the very first time. He had scarcely been aware of the deep bond forged between them, so gradual and subtle a process it was. He hadn’t known her quite a year yet, but that day, in some inexplicable fashion, the joint acquisition of a slightly undersized roan yearling called Gumshoe, had suddenly given their ambiguous relationship an astonishing solidity.

  Somewhere along about midnight, while they were having coffee and brandies, and while good Havana cigars were passed round, Mitch, the bartender, came over to the table and whispered uneasily that there were a couple of “fellows” out front looking for him.

  Mooney looked up inquiringly, then excused himself, and followed the bartender back out. Defasio and another detective, Wilkinson, were waiting there, looking sheepish and uneasy in the festive gaiety and litter of that place.

  “Sorry to bother you, Frank.” Defasio’s fingers threaded nervously along the pockets of his jacket. “Mulvaney would like you to come right down.”

  “I’m out of it now,” he snapped. “Haven’t you heard?”

  “The Bombardier was out tonight. He creamed someone real good over on Forty-seventh Street.”

  51

  “When did they bring him in?”

  ” ‘Bout twelve-thirty.”

  “They say when it happened?”

  “An hour before.”

  “Eleven-thirty.”

  “Somewhere’s around there.”

  Mooney hovered over the morgue attendant. They stood at the foot of a large refrigerator drawer. The object of their discussion was a corpse, now stripped of its clothing, and lying partially covered beneath a canvas tarpaulin.

  Two hours ago the body beneath the tarpaulin had been that of a hale and hearty man of thirty years. The attendant had pulled the tarpaulin down around the ankles of the man in order to display the remains more effectively for Mooney.

  There was nothing remarkable about the body save for the unusual sense of power conveyed by its perfect proportion and muscularity. The head, or rather what remained of it, had the look of something crumpled. Shattered crockery, perhaps. The eyes beneath that awful devastation remained open and wore a strangely calm expression, as if the final image imprinted on the retinas had not been at all unpleasant.

  “Splat,” the attendant muttered. He was a small, chatty fellow with frightened eyes and large yellow incisors that drooped above his lower lip. At the conclusion of each sentence he would produce a disconcerting little giggle while his face remained a perfect blank.

  “Splat,” Mooney nodded slowly. A fan droned overhead, pushing waves of Formalin and the sweetish rotten smell of mortification all about them. Deep within his pockets his fists clenched tight and he forced himself to look.

  It was now slightly past 1:30 A.M. Not more than an hour ago, Mooney recalled ruefully, he was the guest of honor at his own retirement party. People toasted him and sang songs in praise of his good fortune. Twenty minutes after Defasio’s arrival at the Balloon, however, he was right back in the stale, unventilated air of the precinct house on Forty-third Street, being briefed by Mulvaney. There was the same old knot in his stomach and it was as though nothing at all had changed.

  “So I’m asking you to reconsider.” Mulvaney scanned the resignation Mooney had tendered the night before. Watching Mulvaney squirm, he experienced a twinge of pleasure.

  Still full of his first full day of freedom, Mooney was not prepared to be charitable. “Why,” he asked. “Why should I reconsider?”

  Red blotches erupted on Mulvaney’s pitted cheeks. “Because the commissioner was on the phone to me ten minutes after we scraped this mess off of Forty-seventh Street. Because the mayor’s office has been on the phone to him. Because restaurant owners, theater producers, even the goddamned massage parlor operators have all been tearing my ear off on the phone since eleven-thirty. Some civic-minded organization calling themselves Concerned Citizens for a Safer New York just cabled, inviting me to resign. That’s why, my friend. And since I don’t know where to start with this rooftop freak, since I have no idea whether this is a man or a gorilla running around up there, and since you’re the only one in the precinct with any background on this, I must decline to accept your resignation.” Eyes flashing, wattles trembling, Mulvaney wadded the sheet of paper in his fist and flung it into his desk drawer, slamming it, shut with a thunderous clap. “I trust now I’ve answered all your questions, Mooney?”

  Mooney appeared blissfully unfazed. “It’s not as if I didn’t warn you.”

  “Okay—I grant you that.”

  “Also, I did tell you when this was going to happen.”

  “Approximately.”

  “Don’t weasel, Larry. I missed by one night.” Mulvaney nodded stiffly. “I grant you that, too. This is a one-night-a-year man.”

  “Thank your lucky stars for that.”

  “And he does appear to be active around the start of warm weather.”

  “The solstice, Captain. You can say it.”

  “Sure,” Mulvaney spluttered. His face had turned a dangerous purple. “Sure, sure—the solstice.” Up until that moment he’d been merely livid. Now he boiled over. “This is not my idea, goddammit.”

  “Oh, so it was Dowd who put you up to this. Well, kindly give my regard
s to the commissioner and tell him I’m no longer a member of the force. I’m no longer at his beck and call. My resignation took effect as of yesterday and as a burr in the ass of this department and a blight on its public relations image, my decision stands.”

  “You want me to beg? You want me to get down on my knees?”

  “No, just get someone else.”

  “There is no one else around here knows beans about this case.”

  “There’s Defasio. He knows all about it.”

  “Defasio’s a basket case. Anyway, that’s all academic. Dowd wants you.”

  “And just because the commissioner speaks, you think all you’ve got to do is snap your fingers?”

  By the time Mooney had left the precinct house that evening he had recovered his captaincy, unconditionally, with a full rank of detective, first grade. When he’d left for the morgue, Mulvaney was still sitting there behind the desk, looking rumpled and very contrite.

  “You got the block upstairs?” Mooney asked the morgue attendant.

  “They got it up in Forensic right now. Trying to lift prints.”

  “They won’t find any. Was it cinder?”

  “Forty pounds. Taken right off some construction site. Must’ve hit like a pile driver.”

  “Who was he?” Mooney took out his pad and prepared to write.

  The attendant leaned over and read something from a tag clipped to the tarpaulin. “Name of Krauss, Willie. German citizen. Tourist. Thirty years old. Here on a honeymoon with his bride.”

  “She with him when it happened?”

  “Yeah. They were coming out of the theater. Just seen a show.”

  Mooney shook his head, and took one final glance at the shattered wreckage in the drawer. “Quite a wedding present.”

  52

  The papers were full of it the next day. And not only the papers. The TV and radio shrieked with accounts down to the most grisly detail. Editorials throughout the media excoriated the police.

  The precinct house was swamped with calls from outraged citizenry. Groups of merchants in the Broadway area posted a $10,000 reward for hard information. Another group of concerned citizens adorned themselves with U.S. Army surplus steel helmets and picketed with placards up and down West Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth streets. The Bombardier made the editorial pages and in one instance became the subject of a famous political cartoonist.

  Then, of course, came the nut calls—hundreds of them from individuals claiming to know the identity of the Bombardier; some even proudly proclaimed themselves to be him. The clairvoyants and soothsayers, and ultimately a dowser with a divining rod were the final touches in that parade of the angry, the self-righteous and the bizarre.

  The mayor’s office, under heavy fire, gazed desperately about for someone to blame. Their gaze fell at once on Commissioner Dowd, who was summoned to City Hall late one night to explain himself.

  The next morning The New York Times, chronically temperate and evenhanded, amazed everyone by calling for Dowd’s resignation in fourteen-point banner headlines on their editorial pages. The article, signed by the editors, was entitled “Enough Is Enough.”

  The New York Post featured ghastly cover photo-graphs of the victim sprawled on the pavement.

  After that came the evening news shows with cam-era crews and smartly coutured young women reporters scurrying breathlessly about.

  Mooney, now the official “chief” of the investigation, declined to speak with anyone. “Show business,” he muttered to himself and drove off fuming in a patrol car. By 7:00 A.M. the next morning, he was out pacing up and down, taking measurements at the crime site. He no longer suffered a shortage of manpower and now found himself directing the movements of dozens of men. Those who were so unfortunate as to still address him as Lieutenant were quickly and sharply corrected. In a short time scores of police and plainclothesmen were pouring over Forty-seventh Street—clattering through alleyways, collars, rooftops, up and down vacant stairwells, interrogating superintendents, elevator operators, stagehands, actors, shopkeepers, local denizens and the dregs of the earth.

  “The guy flies, I’m tellin’ you.”

  “He flies?”

  “That’s right. The guy flies. I seen it myself.”

  “You seen it?”

  “That’s right.”

  Michael Defasio peered into the bleared, unfocused eyes of a diminutive Eighth Avenue local type. He had one of those badly inflamed noses and large saucerlike ears inflected forward like a bat. The overall impression was that of a circus clown. An Emmett Kelly of the netherworld.

  They were sitting in a small Cuban bar on Forty-sixth Street, just west of Eighth Avenue. Smoke and machine-gun Spanish filled the air. The throb of cow-bells, timbales and salsa rhythms blared out of a jukebox at a decibel level that could more easily be experienced by the viscera than the ear. Hovering above them in a thick, almost palpable haze, was a concert of odors for the most part completely alien to Sergeant Defasio. From simple peppers and onions they deepened and grew more bewilderingly complex with goat stew, black cigars and ganja.

  “How does he do it?” Defasio inquired, his curiosity now piqued.

  “Fly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Climbs up on the ledge and whirls around three times.”

  “Whirls three times?”

  “Yeah. Then he starts moving his arms up and down. Real slow, see? Flailin’ himself about like. Then gradually faster and faster until the son of a bitch’s arms are vibratin’ so fast he just rises. Whatsa matter? You got a funny look on your face.”

  “Who, me?”

  “The son of a bitch flies, I tell you. The guy’s a Filipino. He learned it over there from the witch doctors.”

  “The witch doctors?”

  “Yeah, they taught him how to do it. It’s religiouslike. Can I have another rum?”

  Defasio looked at the man skeptically. He’d already been around to seven bars in the theater district—dropping drinks and buying gossip. So far that evening he had listened to stories even more garish and bizarre than the Flying Filipino, and he knew that the present line of inquiry was all but fruitless.

  Attired as a construction worker in overalls, sweat shirt, and yellow gum-soled boots, with a red hard hat rather too prominently displayed on the bar beside him, Defasio had a distinct premonition of impending failure. He was not particularly good at impersonation, and he was honest enough at selfappraisal to know he wasn’t fooling anyone, except possibly the demented little fellow he was chatting with at the moment.

  The prospect of a long night of such work ahead did not make him particularly happy. The only consolation was knowledge that a half-dozen of his buddies from Manhattan South were out right then going through the same mind-numbing motions— dragging, probing, scrounging for whatever crumbs of information might be dredged up out of the sprawling demimonde of little bars and saloons proliferating about the theater district west of Eighth Avenue.

  “Another rum for my friend.” Defasio rattled his empty beer bottle on the bar. “And another Budweiser for me.” He rose gingerly. “I’ll be right back Just gotta drain the tanks.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.” The little fellow sniggered cheerlessly. “I’ll keep your beer cold.”

  When Defasio returned a short time later, the man was still there, huddled avidly above his rum, rapacious eyes shifting round like a hungry dog guarding its bone.

  “So like I was saying,” the little fellow resumed precisely where he’d left off. “This guy’s up on the roof all the time. Practicin’. Wants to try out for the circus. Be an acrobat, you know?”

  “Sure. There’s good money in being an acrobat,” Defasio remarked without much enthusiasm. He was wondering where he’d go next. It was only ten-thirty and he was on duty another four hours.

  The little man’s rum glass was once again depleted and he could see that his benefactor’s interest was flagging. “I know another guy who hangs out up on the roofs a lot,” he offered
hopefully.

  Defasio turned back to him, a spark of interest flaring in his eye. “Oh?”

  “He bowls up there.”

  “Oh, come on now.”

  “No. I’m tellin’ you. He’s in the West Side Bowlin’ Association and his wife won’t let him practice in the apartment. So he takes his ball and …”

  53

  “Nice of you to come.”

  “I was in the neighborhood.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Easy. I just went back to the hospital. Your records showed that you’d been sent from there up to a rehabilitation center in White Plains.”

  “That’s right. Burke.”

  “They told me you’d been transferred here to Thornwood.” Mooney gazed round the spacious white room with its lofty ceilings. “Nice.”

  “It’s okay. The Sisters are kind.” Jeffrey Archer smiled stiffly as though it hurt him to do so. If it is possible for a twenty-year-old to age drastically in one year, Jeffrey Archer had accomplished that feat.

  “Carmelites,” Mooney reflected quietly. “They make the best nurses.”

  “So they tell me.” Archer conceded the point listlessly, as though it really didn’t matter. It didn’t to Mooney, either. It was merely conversation.

  “What can I do for you?” Archer asked abruptly. “I just wanted to say hello. It’s been over a year.”

  “Didn’t we speak before, when I was in the hospital?”

  “Very little. You were barely conscious when I came. The second time you were in a lot of pain. You look a hundred percent better today.”

  Archer gave him a sharp, rather cynical grin. “Do I?”

  “You couldn’t possibly know.”

  The young man looked down at himself strapped into the wheelchair. A neck brace supported his head to prevent it from falling to one side and he was wired to several electrical contraptions that enabled him to lift forks and spoons and turn book pages. His self-examination followed by a long silence conveyed a state of unimaginable loss. “They ever get the guy?”