Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  “That’s all right,” he spoke between clenched teeth. “We’re going now.”

  But Watford was not yet finished. He started back. “You know me, Mr. Quintius. Tell the truth. Tell the inspector. Don’t be frightened. You do know me.” As Mooney went out the door, the last glimpse he had of Peter Quintius, his face was ashen.

  63

  In the end, Mooney had to physically remove Watford from the gallery, hauling him out and cramming him into the front seat of the car. All the way out to Queens he sat scrunched into a corner as if he were trying to shrink inside himself. Not once did he speak.

  “That is the man. I’m not lying,” Watford said when they’d drawn up to his front door.

  “Who said you were lying?”

  “You don’t have to. I can see what you think.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Well, then, what do you think?”

  Mooney was momentarily stumped. “I’m not sure I know.”

  “There. See? I told you. You do think I’m lying.” Watford smiled suddenly with a kind of wistful triumph.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake.” Mooney slammed the wheel with his hand. “How could anyone be expected to make a foolproof identification of a perfect stranger he happened to share a hospital room with two years before?” Mooney blustered. He couldn’t meet Watford’s eyes. “And, let’s be perfectly frank with each other,” Mooney hurtled onward, “when it comes to telling the truth you’ve got something less than a sparkling record.”

  News of his deficiency appeared to leave Watford crestfallen. “Okay,” he muttered. “I won’t argue that. But this time it happens to be different. I’m telling the truth. I swear it. Oh, God,” his fingers cluttered at his temples. “That did it. I’m working up to an awful bummer.”

  When Mooney reached across his lap to open the door, he noted that Watford’s eyes were watery. “Go on in, why don’t you, and lie down.”

  Watford sat there huddled and unmoving.

  O dear God, Mooney thought. Please don’t let him start to blubber now.

  “I must be pretty worthless,” Watford mumbled, “if no one can believe a word I say.”

  Mooney switched on the ignition. Looking more defeated than ever, Watford fumbled, opened the door, and started out.

  “One question,” Mooney called after him. “Do you know what this man is suspected of?”

  Watford, standing outside the car, tilted his head as if he were contemplating a point. “He once told me something. One morning, half-drugged, just coming out of the anesthesia.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mooney snapped his head toward him. “What was that?”

  “I don’t remember—I was in kind of a rush then. Hut it was pretty strange.”

  As soon as he got back to the station, Mooney wrote it all down in his notes. He wouldn’t tell Dowd, or even Defasio. Most of it, he thought in retrospect, was improbable. But a part of it, a very small part to be sure, still felt real enough to have left him twitching from the experience. And once again Watford had repeated that business which he still could not recall about Quintius telling him something “strange.”

  It was shortly after six. He called Fritzi at home but got no answer and finally caught up with her at the Balloon. He asked her to meet him at a Chinese restaurant in the East Fifties. He was tired of steak and salad and wanted to saturate himself in fried batter and monosodium glutamate.

  Forty minutes later they were seated together in a booth, spooning egg drop soup and fried wonton out of deep bowls. After that came a course of hot hors d’oeuvres—more pork fat sizzling round the blue flames of a Sterno can.

  He drank several beers and gorged on duck and lobster, then more pork. Having not indulged himself like that for nearly a year (at least not when Fritzi was looking), she could see that it was his way of making a point. She knew him well enough not to interfere. She spent most of the meal watching him devour lethal quantities of fat and salt. She spoke little and hoped that her face betrayed no disapproval.

  “Enough?” she asked when he’d spoon-scraped a thick coating of lobster and mandarin sauce from his plate.

  He looked up, suddenly recalling she was there. “Aren’t you eating?”

  “I’ve had enough, thank you. What’s the problem?”

  “What problem? There’s no problem. I just couldn’t face another steak. Waiter.” He snapped a finger at a passing waiter. “Another beer, please. Something for you, Fritz? Brandy? Dessert?”

  Fritzi gazed up at the ceiling, permitting her eyes to linger there. She could see that he was unusually agitated. “I’ll bet you had a grand day.”

  Hot towels were brought and Mooney wiped his mouth vigorously. “Nothing wrong with today. Chrissake, goddamn wonderful day. How’s the pony?”

  “I didn’t think you cared.”

  “I’ve got almost seven grand in him, don’t I? Course I care.”

  It was like a blood transfusion. Suddenly she was animated, talking rapidly. “He did six furlongs at 1:11this morning.”

  “What about the fractions?”

  “He did 22 3/5 at the quarter; 46 3/5 at the half. José still says he should go for the Roses.”

  “And I say what’s the rush?”

  “José says he’s ready.”

  “José has hot pants. All Latins have hot pants.” The waiter cleared the table and poured tea. He asked if they would have dessert. Fritzi declined. Mooney ordered ice cream with almond cookies.

  “You’re killing yourself with kindness, my friend.” Even as she said it she knew she’d made a mistake. It was the opening salvo of the campaign he had so carefully staged. As he spoke now, there was a spiteful glee upon his face.

  “It’s the first satisfying meal I’ve had in months.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it.” She looked, away, pretending disinterest. “Why did you call me down here, anyway? So I could watch you kill yourself?”

  “I wanted to make you hate me.”

  “You’ve succeeded.”

  “So I could say good-bye. This is wrong. All wrong.”

  “It wasn’t great. But I didn’t think it was all that wrong.”

  “You’re not wrong.” He appeared to relent for a moment. “I’m wrong. It’s me. I’m the one.”

  She continued to look away, this time at an elderly couple drinking tea. “For this you had to drag me out to a lousy meal?”

  “I can’t go on with this,” he spoke, shaking his head. “It’s me. All me. And I won’t change. Not now at sixty-two.”

  She didn’t speak for a long while, afraid she would cry. Yet outwardly she appeared composed. Not teary, not weak, even a little scornful. “What would you like me to do about the horse?”

  “What about him?”

  “Your share. You get fifteen percent of him.”

  “Keep it. It’s yours.”

  She rose. “I’ll send you a check in the morning.” He reached for her hand, but she snatched it back. “I’m sorry. I should’ve known better by this time.” She stared down at him a long moment, then turned and walked out.

  That evening he reverted to his old haunts on the Stroll. Unsatiated, like a sailor on a shore binge, Mooney went from the restaurant to a small private club called Cipango. He entered a dark mirrored room with a lot of small tables around which young women sat in various stages of undress.

  When he entered, one or two eyed him suggestively, assumed a variety of poses and invited him to sit. Several men sat about at the table with hostesses who were young and not unattractive. They drank tall, sticky Polynesian drinks, surmounted by chunks of pineapple and tiny paper umbrellas.

  Several of the girls gestured and hissed at him. He felt foolish in his business suit, his paunch swollen with lobster and pork.

  The girl he chose was a tall black girl with marvelous breasts and legs, and hair cropped close to the skull. Even tarted up as she was she had the noble bearing of an Ethiopian princess.

  He chose her because she
didn’t whistle and hiss and roll her eyes. She sat with her legs crossed and an air of quiet self-possession. “You want to drink first?” she asked with a light West Indian lilt. “Take your time. There’s plenty time.”

  They had a drink together and he slipped a hand between her thighs under the table.

  “You want to go to the room now?” she asked. Her eyes showed no pleasure, but at least there was no contempt.

  She watched him steadily, something profound and imperturbable within her gaze. “No rush. Take your time. You look tired.”

  “I’m fine.” He rose. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Sure. Sure I’m okay.”

  She led him into the rear of the building through a labyrinth of damp, rank corridors into a warren of little rooms, past closed doors from behind which a variety of gasps and moans issued. The place reeked of sex and sour bedding.

  A number of elderly black lady attendants in white nurses’ uniforms moved in and out of the rooms with fresh supplies of sheets and towels, not unlike a hospital.

  The girl’s name was Georgette, she told him. She came from Barbados to study ballet. There were not many places in New York to study ballet, and fewer jobs once you completed your studies. She fell in with the wrong crowd and soon she was here.

  She led him to a small mirrored room with a narrow double bed upon which the sheets had the rum pled, faintly grayish cast of recent use. In an effort to suggest sybaritic opulence, a small sunken tub with tile coping had been installed in a corner of the room. A tarnished brass faucet in the shape of a griffin spat tired jets of pine-scented water onto the tepid bubbly surface.

  She asked him if he wanted to bathe first. Actually, he would have enjoyed that. He was hot and uncomfortable from a surfeit of food and alcohol. A bath, he felt, would be renewing, but the water, like the bed, had a used oily look, and so he declined.

  She appeared to read the reticence in his eyes and nodded understandingly. “Where you want to start?” she asked.

  He mumbled something and permitted her to push him backward on the bed. Flat on his back and staring at the ceiling, he lay docile and slightly damp as she drew his shorts down. Then, with the firm, unembarrassed hands of a thorough professional, she began to massage him.

  Eyes closed, he lay back and succumbed to the deep tidal pull of blood and nerves. His heart slugged in his chest. “Fritzi,” he muttered, half-aloud.

  “What, dahling?” the girl asked. “You say something?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You comfortable now? You easy? I make it better for you.”

  Her tongue ranged over his pelvis, went up his body, and darted into his ear. “You ready to come into me now?” she whispered.

  The sense of dampness he’d felt earlier had turned into a sweat. Not a sweat of passion but rather one that left him spent and cold.

  “You all right, dahling?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You want to come into me now?” Whispering into his ear again, there was now a slight edge of impatience to her tone.

  “Sure.”

  “You like me on the bottom or the top?” She patted his great belly and grinned as if to remind him of that huge impediment.

  He took the gesture as a slight. “Don’t worry about me, Sheba.” He started up as if to grab her and took instantly what was the first of several hard jolts. Coming so close, one on the heels of the other, they might have been mistaken for a single smashing blow. It had the effect of knocking him backward, as if he’d been struck in the chest. Pain followed, viselike, crushing, steadily intensifying. Watching the naked light bulb overhead grow dim, he could feel the breath slowly being squeezed out of him.

  “What the hell …” The girl scurried off the bed. “What’s the matter with you? Dotrice. Dotrice,” she cried out.

  There was a sharp rap on the door. Someone jiggled the knob outside and the door burst open. Several people streamed into the room.

  His shorts drawn down about his ankles, Mooney flailed and gasped on the bed. He had the look of a hooked fish whomping out the final moments of its life on the deck of a boat. Though barely conscious, he was still aware of voices and movement all about him. He perceived it all as shadows rushing past. There was an annoying buzz in his ears and a sharp pain shooting up the length of his right arm.

  The girl cowered in the corner, gaping at him, her eyes wide and rolling with fright.

  “Get an ambulance,” someone hissed. “The son of a bitch is croaking.”

  “Get him the fuck out of here.”

  “Quintius,” he cried, as a candle wick guttered and died in his head.

  64

  He awoke and she was there, sitting by the bed, light streaming in from the window behind her. Through slitted eyes he watched her, all the while pretending to be asleep. At that moment he had not yet realized that he was in a hospital, hooked to tubes in his nostrils and veins. At the foot of the bed an oscilloscope projected an image of his pulse at regular time intervals.

  He stirred and she glanced up from her newspaper, peering at him over the frames of her glasses. He shut his eyes tighter, unwilling to meet hers.

  What had happened he couldn’t say, unaware as he was of specific details. Nevertheless, he knew it entailed something unpleasant. He was conscious of discomfort. His buttocks, beneath the gown which had ridden up beneath him, were raw from the steady abrasion of overly starched sheets. He tried to move. She was up at once and moving toward the bed.

  “Mooney?”

  She leaned over, enveloping him in the kind, familiar scent of soap and cologne.

  “Mooney? Are you awake?”

  He rolled his head sidewards on the pillow. “What happened?”

  “No one knows for sure. You blacked out. Rest now.”

  When he opened his eyes he found her hand resting lightly on his. Cool, and slightly coarse, he found it comforting. “What happened to me?”

  She made an effort to be flip and gay. “Nothing much. You might have had a heart attack. They won’t say for sure until they’ve done some tests.”

  He mumbled something, then opened his eyes wide for the first time.

  “What do you want?” She tried to push him back, then saw his need at once. “Hold on. I’ll get it for you.”

  He started to protest. He wanted a nurse, but he was too feeble to make much of a case for that. She was back in a moment with a glittering steel pot, helping to raise his thighs above it, then afterward, carrying the thing away when he’d done with it.

  In his shame and awful desolation he heard her flush the waste off in the toilet and rinse the pot out in the sink.

  By then it had all come back to him. He knew the whole squalid thing and, no doubt, she did, too.

  It had taken two whole weeks for Mooney to get his legs back before he could be discharged from the hospital. But not until he’d had a few sobering words from a resident cardiologist plus a trunkful of pills from a lady internist who made it clear she disapproved of him.

  It had not been a heart attack. It had been a spasm, a dysrhythmia. Fortunately, there had been no damage, but the warning had been loud and clear. The cardiologist had characterized his body as a museum of self-inflicted abuses.

  “Lose weight. Fifteen pounds, at least,” the man fulminated and thumped his desk top. “Give up fats and salt. Absolutely no alcohol. Your blood pressure and cholesterol levels are screaming stroke.”

  In the light of all the bitterness that had transpired between them, Mooney was mystified by Fritzi’s insistence that he come home with her. Three times he refused. He wanted to go back to 161 Street, he said, where he belonged. The fourth time, and out of pure exhaustion, he capitulated and went back with her, instead, in a cab to Seventy-third Street.

  For three weeks she fed him thin unsalted consommé and dry salad. All he drank was water and, occasionally, tea. He’d lost five pounds in the hospital. He lost another ten pounds over the three
-week period he spent with her.

  In the morning she gave him his medication and breakfast—a half grapefruit, a slice of unbuttered toast, a cup of unsugared tea, along with an eighty-milligram indiral, followed by a diuril. Then she’d go off to work, leaving him with the Daily News, TV Guide and the Racing Form. To the refrigerator she would tack a luncheon menu, generally consisting of a half-cup of cottage cheese with either vegetables or sliced fruit.

  At the end of three weeks he was down an additional eighteen pounds. None of his clothing fit. When Fritzi took him back to the cardiologist after four weeks for a checkup, the man beamed with pleasure and declared that some kind of miracle had taken place.

  In all of that time Mooney spoke to Manhattan South only four times, three times to Mulvaney and once to Defasio. He was on sick leave with full pay, Mulvaney assured him, and urged him not to worry about the investigation. Everything was proceeding apace. The captain sounded pleased over the phone. “Take your time, Mooney. Don’t rush back till you’re one hundred percent better.”

  Those calls rankled. Each time Mooney hung up, he did so convinced that Mulvaney was delighted to have him out of the way. More than anything, that spurred him on to full recovery.

  While Fritzi was off at the Balloon, Mooney watched TV, sat in the park and read endless 87th Precinct mysteries. Strangely enough, he did not think of Watford or even Peter Quintius. He had put them both aside as if he perceived in them the root of all his misfortune.

  On weekends Fritzi would bundle him into the car and off they’d go to the track to see the yearling and watch the trainer put him through his paces. Invariably, Fritzi came away exhilarated. The Roses was three weeks off and, studying Gumshoe’s daily workout chart and fractions, she computed his chances.

  Going back in the car Mooney would sit glum and unspeaking. He was brooding over the unsatisfactory past and the uncertain future. While Fritzi chatted happily about handicapping odds and sprint fractions, Mooney toted up his scorecard and computed his own odds for winning. None of the figures, however, had anything to do with racing.