Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  He uttered the question aloud into the darkened hospital room, and waited there as though expecting an answer.

  When none came he felt more muddled and lost than ever.

  60

  “He’s been getting mile workouts every other day. They alternate that with sprints on the off days. José Thinks he’d like to enter him in the first mile’s stakes race that comes up. Maybe the Roses.”

  “Too soon. It’s too soon.”

  “José wouldn’t enter him in a race where he doesn’t belong. Obviously he feels the horse belongs in stakes company right now. Why be so cautious? We enter him at a mile. Nothing farther. He’s been testing well at that distance regularly. If José didn’t like what he saw he could’ve damned well looked elsewhere for six-furlongs stakes. But he didn’t. He thinks the animal is up to the Roses right now. He’s a trainer. That’s what you pay him for, right? He swears the Baby’ll win by a length and a half at maybe five to one. What’s wrong with that?” Fritzi had taken to referring to the horse as “the Baby.”

  “Wonderful. Fantastic.” Mooney rolled over and burrowed his nose into the pillows.

  She folded her arms and shook her head. “What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? You’ve been grousing and snapping ever since you got here.” Mooney closed his eyes and fumed in silence. Oh, Christ, he thought. Now we’re gonna have a blow.

  Still smarting, Fritzi went on sharply. “I just thought you’d be interested in the progress of your investment. You’ve got about seven thou into this, as I recall.”

  It was going on toward midnight and they lay together stiffly, embattled in the king-size bed. It was June now and they’d been together for over a year.

  “I recall only too well,” Mooney groaned. “Nobody bent your arm, my friend.”

  “Who said anyone did?”

  “I detect a note of regret in your voice.”

  “I regret nothing.”

  “I’ll be more than happy to return your money anytime you wish.”

  “Forget it. Let’s quit this talk. I’m sick of the goddamned horse anyway.”

  She tossed the covers off and started out of bed. “In that case, I’m writing you a check now.”

  “I don’t want it, I told you.”

  “Well, Christ almighty, what’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing’s bothering me.”

  “Tell me. I can’t sleep with you in this state of mind.”

  “Would you like me to leave?” Mooney snarled. “I can go now.”

  “I’m sorry this Bomber business …”

  “Bombardier,” he corrected her. “Bombardier.”

  “Whatever. I’m sorry it’s all going so lousy for you.”

  “Who said it was going lousy?”

  “You didn’t have to. I can tell. It’s this man you saw today, isn’t it? This—what’s his name?”

  “Watford.”

  “Right. Watford,” she sang out triumphantly. “He must’ve really knocked your socks off this time. You’re on a prize bummer.”

  “Look. Maybe I should leave now.”

  “What did this Watford character say to you, anyway?”

  “As a matter of fact, he told me the name and address of the guy on the roof.”

  She’d already barged ahead before the weight of what he’d said registered. “The Bombardier?”

  “His very self.”

  Head tilted back, she regarded him warily. “I don’t believe you.”

  “The man’s name is Quintius. Peter Quintius.”

  “He’s the Bombardier?”

  “That’s what Watford says. The guy in the bed next to him at the hospital.”

  The ghost of a smile flickered in her eyes, then trailed off. “Well, what’s wrong with that, for God’s sake?”

  “Nothing,” Mooney sat up in bed scratching his scalp. “Except for the fact the guy’s bananas.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You don’t have to be no shrink from Vienna to figure it out.” Mooney belched sourly. “Excuse me. Listen, how about a glass of milk?”

  “Tell me about this guy first. What’s his name?”

  “Watford.” Mooney got up and put on his robe. “I’ll tell you in the kitchen.”

  She padded out behind him into the cool darkness of the apartment. “How do you know Watford’s bananas?” she asked, after pouring him a glass of milk.

  Mooney drank deeply with an almost greedy, audible sucking. “Because,” he said, swiping the mustache of milk from his upper lip, “before he told me about the Bombardier, he confessed to robbing a bank in Kansas City and breaking into a pharmacy in Kew Gardens.”

  She pondered that a moment. “Maybe he did.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “Well, why couldn’t he be telling the truth?”

  “If you knew anything about the guy, you wouldn’t even bother asking. He’s a screwball. A nut case. Anyway, I thought I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. I checked. I called Kansas City. They never beard of him. He’s a suspect for nothing.”

  “And the pharmacy?”

  “Kew Gardens?” Mooney yawned deeply. “I checked that, too. There was a pharmacy broken into out there. Roughly the same time as he said he made his break-in. Only the cops out there already picked up a couple of kids who confessed to the job, along with busting into a dozen other pharmacies out there over the past year.”

  “Oh.” Fritzi sat back and stared up at the ceiling. “Sorry.”

  “So am I.” Mooney rose and carried his glass over to the sink.

  “What was that name he gave you again?” she asked suddenly.

  “Quintius. Let’s go to bed.” He flicked out the kitchen light and they started back through the darkened apartment to the bedroom. “He told me he saw the guy on the late TV news. Some cockamamie story about an attempted robbery of a gallery uptown. Claims he recognized the guy immediately. Same guy in the bed next to him. Only he was using the name Boyd then.”

  “Maybe it’s the truth.”

  Mooney gazed across at her hopelessly. “Come on, Fritzi. Don’t knock me out.”

  She slipped back into bed. “Did you bother to check it out?”

  He turned out the light and crawled into bed beside her. “Life’s too short.”

  “Come on, Mooney. What’d you find out?”

  He rolled over on his side and dug his head into the pillow. “There is a gallery up on Madison and Sixty-seventh with that name.”

  “But he probably got that off the TV news show.”

  “Right. And there is a Peter Quintius, too. I checked him out. Guy’s from a prominent Long Island family. Place has been in business up on Madison Avenue about a hundred years. All the swells buy fancy art off him. Philanthropist. Humanitarian. Pillar of society. And all that crap. Clean as a whistle.”

  “But why couldn’t this Watford be telling the truth?” she persisted with strange urgency.

  Mooney stared into the darkness, almost too tired to speak. “Because he’s incapable of the truth,” he growled and turned away. “He’s a pathological liar. Add to that, he’s a junkie. Up to his ears in Demerol.”

  “Demerol? That’s some kind of painkiller, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Yeah. Too bad,” he echoed the words, staring ruefully into the dark.

  “I wish you’d retire again,” she mumbled before she fell asleep. “You were more fun then.”

  Fritzi fell off quickly, but Mooney lay awake, going over, replaying obsessively every bit of dialogue exchanged between himself and Watford that afternoon. He had very little doubt regarding Watford’s state of mind. If he had any nagging reservations about the gallery story, he could march right up to Sixty-seventh Street and question Quintius himself. But God help him if Watford were wrong. People like Quintius fairly bristled with expensive lawyers. He could be charged with defamation of character. Harassment. The city could be sued for millions.


  Mooney pushed it all out of his mind. Still, one tiny item gnawed implacably at him. Nearly a month before when he’d gone to see Watford, he asked him if he’d ever heard the name A. Boyd. He hadn’t he claimed, but at the conclusion of that visit Watford appeared to know, or hint at, something unusual regarding his erstwhile roommate at Beth Israel. “He told me something strange,” he’d remarked. Yet at that time he was either unwilling or unable to share any information with the detective.

  “Get the hell out of here, all of you. And don’t come back until you get me something solid. Something I can build on. Now go on, for Chrissake. Get the hell out.”

  Twelve badly shaken plainclothesmen from Mooney’s special Bombardier Task Force skulked from the squad room of Manhattan South and out to their designated beats.

  After they’d left, Mooney sat at his desk sifting through the torrent of reports that had poured in over the wire in the wake of Willie Krauss’s death— tips from individuals claiming to know the identity of the Bombardier, others claiming to have sighted him. A spurt of activity generated by the city’s offer of a $10,000 reward for information had the phones going twenty-four hours a day. Everything had to be checked, and when it was, all tips, it was discovered, invariably led to the same dead end.

  At the bottom of the pile of reports was a handful of newspaper clippings that Mooney had pulled from the morgue of the Daily News.

  “Quintius.” Even as he read the name aloud, it rang in his head. But it was Watford’s high, faintly querulous voice that he heard speaking. “That’s him, I tell you. It’s him.”

  He read the story again. It was pretty much as Watford had first reported it—a young man shot to death by police as he tried to break into a wall safe in his father’s gallery after working hours. The Daily News printed a picture of the son, William Quintius, whom they described as a dapper young man about town; a fast liver and a high roller known at all the tracks and nearby casinos. The youth, Mooney noted, appeared attractive and intelligent, but with that soft, pampered look that suggested some underlying corruption.

  The photograph of the father, Peter Quintius, told a different story. It was an arresting portrait, the eyes haunted with a mixture of arrogance and grief. It was the kind of face Mooney instinctively disliked, conveying an air of privilege and class, of automatically assumed prerogatives. Moreover, Mooney could not associate this face with that of a man who would drop a forty-pound cinder block from a rooftop into an unsuspecting crowd below. This man would not be caught dead on a rooftop, let alone a pissy, reeking ghetto rooftop somewhere over in Hell’s Kitchen.

  It was past 9:00 A.M. Outside in the assembly room they were mustering for the day ahead. The roll call was being taken, the duty roster recited. Mooney could hear the bang of lockers opening and closing as the night men changed to go home.

  The detective pushed aside the clippings. Why he’d bothered to dig them out, he couldn’t say. He gave no credence to Watford’s story. It was wildly farfetched. “I was just watching the eleven o’clock news and I see this face come on the screen. So I …” Mooney laughed ruefully. He had seen Watford’s kind before—innocuous, inoffensive little freaks fading into the wallpaper; confessing to every crime on the police blotter. A pathetic, tortured, self-lacerating nut case who thought that by blanket confessions he could buy leniency for all of those ghastly crimes he imagined he’d committed.

  Mooney shook his head despairingly and rose.

  Throughout the rest of the day he was busy. Not with the Bombardier but with a flurry of new emergencies. The murder of a bag lady on the West Side; the mutilation murder of a prostitute in a midtown hotel; a street knifing in the Times Square area—all fell to him that day. Several times his movements had him crisscrossing the city. At one point he was as far down as the Battery and then as far north as Seventy-fifth Street to interview several witnesses to the knifing.

  Gratefully, he had not thought once about the Bombardier. He had pushed it all out of his mind. But at 5:00 P.M., as dusk slowly purpled the streets, the shadowy phantom of the rooftops muscled its way back in upon him. He called his office from a small cigar store to get an up-date. Defasio took the call and assured him in a slightly tremulous voice that there was nothing new.

  It was twenty past five when he stepped back out onto the street. It occurred to him that it was just about quitting time and that he might take a slow walk up to the Balloon and have a drink with Fritzi.

  The Balloon was at Ninety-first and Lexington. He was at Sixty-fourth and Madison and so he started to walk north. At Sixty-seventh Street he happened to glance up and found himself passing directly in front of the Quintius Gallery. His sudden presence there was not fortuitous, he knew.

  The lights were lit and there were people inside. On the street, crowds buffeted past him, people streaming from out of office buildings and department stores, dashing for subways and buses. Mooney lingered before the big plate-glass windows, gazing up at the smart marble tablet graven with a large Q outside the door.

  Through the windows he could see paintings on the walls and tall potted trees set all about. A slight, officious figure glided airily round the floor. He was followed by a tall, smartly turned out matron. The whole setting reeked of money and privilege.

  Curiosity piqued the detective. He maneuvered through the crowd to the window, seething at his own gullibility. The fact that he had even taken the time to go there suddenly infuriated him. He was vaguely conscious of trying to slip into the disguise of a potential customer.

  For a time he busied himself staring at a cluster of medieval miniatures. There were martyrs, apostles, angels, hermits and saints—triptychs framed in gilt and antique reredos. It all filled him with a rush of anger and distaste.

  When he looked up, the man and the woman had moved to a point a mere several feet from where Mooney stood on the opposite side of the glass.

  Suddenly a third figure appeared within his purview. Spied first with a flurry of motion on the periphery of his vision, the figure approached, striding fast, looming large, then coming to a halt before the two people. Mooney watched the woman turn and smile. She leaned forward to accept a kiss on the cheek from the man who’d just arrived. Their lips moved soundlessly behind the glass, while the third figure, the short, officious fellow remained silent, a disturbingly ambiguous smile flickering at the corners of his lips.

  But it was the tall man from whom Mooney could not avert his gaze. Undoubtedly, this was Quintius, the same individual who’d figured so prominently in Watford’s wildly improbable story.

  Standing at the window peering in, squinting against the reflection of lights from nearby shops, Mooney could not recall precisely the chain of events that had led him to this point, only that at that moment, he experienced a strange, incomprehensible agitation at being there. A part of him wondered at this feeling, but another part was simply confounded by it. Try as he did, he was unable to shake it off.

  The three people behind the glass turned and walked toward the back of the gallery. Mooney watched them disappear into a lighted office at the rear. For several moments he watched figures move back and forth in the plane of light cast across the partially opened door.

  Suddenly he started to laugh. Several people standing nearby, looking in the windows, stared at him. Still laughing, he stared back hard and in the next moment he turned and strode quickly off.

  61

  “You discharged him?”

  “On an outpatient basis. There was nothing much left we could do here.”

  “He told me he had some kind of fatal disease. Is that true?”

  “I’m afraid so. We’ll continue to treat him, of course, but as an outpatient only. He wanted to stay. He begged us not to release him.”

  “Why toss a guy out if he’s dying?” Mooney fumed. “Because it’s likely to take him six months to accomplish the task. Quite frankly we needed the bed.”

  Ramsay reached across the litter of his desk for a cigarette. “Why di
d you want to see him?” he asked, puffing smoke from the corner of his mouth.

  “It’d be hard to explain.”

  “Has he done anything wrong?”

  “Not that I know of, but that doesn’t stop him from confessing to crimes with which he’s never been involved.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Ramsay reflected a moment. “Any man who can inflict as much disease on himself as Watford would have no trouble confessing to crimes he hasn’t committed.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “He’s addicted to Demerol, you know.”

  “He told me— He also told me he broke into a pharmacy out in Queens.”

  “He very well might have. If he ran out of Demerol and got flaky enough.” Ramsay shrugged. In his white gown with the blue name tag, he looked small and oddly like a ventriloquist’s doll. “Who knows? Devilishly clever, our Watford.”

  “A nut case, if you ask me.”

  “Borderline psychotic, to put it more clinically.” Ramsay paused, then went on confidentially.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this, but while he was here we ran a Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale on him. He’s a 142 IQ. That’s well above average. Forget about the impression he gives, Captain. This is a bright man. A very bright man. Lied to me every day for about three months. I was fascinated.” Ramsay continued, caught up in the force of his own narrative. “We also did a Minnesota Multiphasic.”

  Mooney made an odd face.

  “Personality profile.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “The obvious things, of course. Brief psychotic episodes. Unstable interpersonal relations. Inadequate social functioning. The list goes on and on. Here’s a man who’s brimming over with guilt and rage, most of it associated with feelings he’s suppressed about his parents for years. Father was something of a bully, I gather. The mother was addicted to drugs. It was she who gave him his first blast of Demerol.” Mooney nodded, his mind flashing back to Quintius on Sixty-seventh Street, even as the doctor spoke.