The Night Falconer

by Andy Straka

  “So what do you want to do about Raines?” I said, pulling the photo from my pocket and twirling it in my fingers as we made our way down the Henry Hudson toward Midtown.

  “I think it’s worth checking out,” Barnes said.

  “We’ll start asking around.”

  “In addition to talking to people about the shooting.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What about other people in the building at Grayland Tower?”

  “Whoever is home, we’ll try to talk to them. And we’ll make some copies of this picture and pass them around the park this afternoon with our business cards.”

  “Have at it. It’s a big park and a big town. I spent weeks once looking for a New Jersey runaway before I finally tracked the girl down.”

  “Everybody’s running from something, I guess.”

  “I suppose. I promised Carl I’d spend the afternoon with him. Maybe tonight after the fireworks I can help you guys case the park.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We passed a black church on Frederick Douglas Boulevard, worshipers spilling out its doors.

  “You religious at all, Frank?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Sometimes? What kind of an answer is that?”

  “An honest one, I hope.”

  As we waited for the light to turn green, a group of well-dressed parishioners—men, women, and children—moved across the street in front of us.

  “I used to be religious,” she said. “My father was a preacher. I ever tell you that?”

  “No. He still alive?”

  “No, no.” She shook her head. “He died from a stroke four years ago. But Dad was a preacher all right. At one time his church had over three-hundred members.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Sometimes I think the problem with religion isn’t God, it’s the people.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Dad used to always say that Jesus was alive and that his holy spirit could come and live inside us if we believed. You think that could be true?”

  “Your dad sounds like a very wise man.”

  “I don’t know. After a day like yesterday, it’s hard to tell where anything sorts out.”

  The light turned green and we continued on down the avenue.

  Ten minutes later, she dropped me off in front of Grayland Tower, where she’d picked me up just after sunrise.

  “See you back here at eight,” she said. “I’ll keep my mobile turned on in case anybody needs me.”

  “You bet.”

  I nodded to the lone guard at the reception desk—Jayani Miller must have had the day off—and rode the elevator upstairs to find Nicole in the dining room of the apartment. A Sunday Times was spread out on the table in front of her, and she was eating a bagel and cream cheese. She didn’t look up as I came into the room.

  “You get my note?” I asked.

  “I got it.” She took another nibble of her bagel, her eyes glued to the newspaper.

  “You aren’t mad, are you?”

  “What do you think? Of course I’m pissed off.”

  “Why?”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “I thought we agreed you wanted to sleep in.”

  “I never agreed to that.”

  “Plus I thought you could use the sleep more than chasing after some curmudgeonly old falconer who might not even be home.”

  “Was he home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he curmudgeonly?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “There you go, then. You should have woken me up.”

  I stepped around and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  “I’m not a teenager anymore. I can do without sleep.”

  “You’re right. How are the bagels?”

  “There are some more in the bag in the kitchen if you want one.”

  “You pick them up down the street?”

  “Yeah, and I did a little more than that.”

  “What?”

  “I took the keys to the Porsche and drove uptown.”

  “You what?”

  She flipped to the next page in the newspaper. “Talked to the mother of one of last night’s shooting victims and to the sister of the other one. There’s a story here in the paper about the killings, but it doesn’t really tell us much.”

  “Now wait just one minute.”

  “You didn’t expect me to sit around here in the apartment while you were out working, did you?”

  I glared at her for a moment. Brilliant, at times, she had as much of a nose for this thing as I did. Who was I to try to rein her in? Just her father, trying to keep her from getting her beautiful face shot off.

  “Next time you don’t go without backup,” I said.

  “Hey, it was just background work on a Sunday morning. No one there was going to hurt me.”

  “What did you find out?” I could envision Nicole, in her tactful, feminine way, holding the hand of the aggrieved.

  “That these two kids were into some serious goings-on.”

  “Not just hangers-on with Los Miembros then?”

  “Nope. These two were players.”

  “In what way?”

  “Mansuela’s mother said her son was flashing around a lot of money lately, and that he always seemed to have a different girl with him. Fraser had just bought a new bullet bike, according to his sister.”

  “Maybe they hit a major score and someone wanted it back. Were the two of them friends?”

  “Not really. The mother said she’d never heard of Damon Hicks before but Louis never really talked much about his friends anymore.”

  “I don’t suppose either the mother or the sister knows anything about our mysterious falconer either.”

  “No. I hinted around a little and asked some open-ended open questions, but they genuinely didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”

  “Okay. So can where can we go from here with what you’ve learned?”

  “The brother.”

  “What brother?”

  “Hicks has an older brother too. Never involved in the gangs, the sister said, but he knows stuff.”

  “Where do we find him?”

  “At the sister’s place on Lenox Terrace near Harlem Hospital. He was supposed to be coming over there for a big dinner party cookout later, but the plans have been changed with Damon’s shooting. Now it’s just going to be family.”

  “A private wake.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And the sister’s okay with us crashing this intimate get-together?”

  Nicole nodded. “I’ve got an appointment for seven. She says she’ll talk to him first, make sure he knows we’re okay.”

  “Nice work.”

  “One more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She hasn’t told the cops much of this stuff. Doesn’t trust them.”

  “But she trusts you, after one conversation.”

  “I’m good, aren’t I?” She smiled and gave a bow.

  I shook my head. “All right,” I said. “We’ll keep pursuing what you’ve got so far on Los Miembros. In the meantime…” I casually pulled the photo from the back pocket of my jeans and tossed it so it landed face up on the table next to her.

  “What’s this?”

  “That,” I said. “Is how we’re going to spend some of our afternoon.”

  * * * * *

  Even with the holiday, we found a copy center on Fifth Avenue that opened at noon. Nicole charmed the young man behind the counter into letting her tweak the image quality controls on the computerized color copier and we managed to crop the image to eliminate the bird and print out several halfway decent copies of the head shot on plain paper.

  At Nicole’s insistence, we divided the stack in half and headed off in opposite directions around Grayland Tower and the park, planning to meet up a couple of hours later to compare notes.

&
nbsp; The day had become a scorcher. The sun seemed lost in the bright brown haze above. My first stop was the taxi stand on the corner of 110th Street. It being a Sunday and the Fourth of July, business was slower than usual. Several dozen cabs were lined up behind one another in the sun. A group of drivers of varying ethnicities stood beneath the shade of a canopy, talking. A few glanced in my direction as I approached.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for a man who might be living in this area on the street.” I held up a copy of Raines’s photo. “His name is Cato Raines. Any of you gentlemen happen to recognize him?”

  Shaking heads all around.

  “Why don’t you check out the Piscataway Hotel on 116th Street?” one man said. “They house some of the homeless over there.”

  He gave me the exact address and I thanked him.

  It wasn’t that far away. Since I was on foot, I would have to pass through the projects between 112th and 115th Streets, but it was a good lead.

  The brick rectangular high rises loomed over the sidewalk, where people were milling about. Some kind of festival, probably related to the Fourth, was taking place on the promenade. The only evidence of birds of prey I witnessed were a couple of barrio brothers clearly interested in sizing me up for the taking as I moved around a corner and past their darkened doorway where the crowd had thinned. I would be too much work, they must have decided.

  The Piscataway hotel was an ancient establishment with crumbling stucco outside and crumbling plaster in the lobby. In its heyday ninety years before it might have been a decent place to stay. Now, the city’s department of homeless services paid the entrepreneur owners thirty dollars per room per night to temporarily shelter homeless families. Or so I learned from the old copy of a New York Post framed on the wall in the lobby.

  I really didn’t think Raines would be living in such a place. First of all, if my information was correct, he didn’t sound like the type to register with the department of homeless services. Second, Raines struck me as a loner. It was the height of summer and the weather was a lot more conducive to sleeping outdoors, where he probably preferred to be anyway.

  Still, someone in the Piscataway Hotel might have come across Raines and recognize his picture.

  I spent the next half hour canvassing the building, from the sharp-eyed but inarticulate desk clerk in the overcooled lobby to the elderly woman wearing footed pajamas in her sweltering corner room on the top floor. No one remembered seeing Raines. No one seemed to have heard of him.

  Okay, by last count there were anywhere from thirty to forty thousand homeless people in and around New York City. Even if I was in Raines’s neighborhood, it still made finding him cold like this a gargantuan task.

  Outside on the street, the heat was building to a mid-afternoon crescendo. Cars and buses and cabs plied the streets. Diesel smoke perfumed the air. What would I do if I were Cato Raines on a day like today? I wouldn’t be sitting in some fleabag hotel, that was for sure.

  I’d be out enjoying the park.

  A few minutes later I was walking along 110th Street again across from the Harlem Meer. Nicole was planning to go down as far as the Reservoir and work her way back north along the west edge of the park. I would enter the park from this end and work my way down the Eastern side, looking for anyone who might recognize Raines.

  The old black man was the fourth homeless person I talked to. He didn’t seem inclined to say anything at first, or even look at the photocopy I showed him, but a much higher quality image of Andrew Jackson began to loosen his tongue.

  Reed thin, he had a modest crop of curly hair that had turned yellow gray, thick eyebrows, and an unruly tangle of beard the same color and consistency as his hair. A pair of wiry gold hoops pierced through the corner of one his brows. His old coveralls were torn and dirty, but he looked otherwise presentable.

  “Raines, you say?”

  He repeated the name and stared at the grainy photo I was flashing.

  “Yeah. Cato Raines. You know him?”

  “I know him,” he said. “But he don’t call himself no Cato Raines.”

  “What does he call himself then?”

  “Pock.”

  “Come again?”

  “Pock. Dude calls himself Pock, short for Pocket. Cause he’s short, I guess, and he’s good at relieving people of some of their change, you know what I mean.”

  “Have you seen him lately?”

  “I saw him just last night.”

  “Where?”

  “Down by the boathouse.”

  “Between 74th and 75th?”

  “That’d be the one.”

  “How many times have you seen him before?”

  He shrugged. “A few, maybe.”

  “You know where else he likes to hang out?”

  The man smiled. “Wherever he can find a crowd. You see? He’ll clean himself up and blend in so he can do his bidness.”

  “What’s he doing on the streets?”

  The man made a circular motion with his index finger around his ear.

  “Crazy?”

  He coughed. In a hoarse whisper he said, “Ain’t we all? But Pock, he’s … he seems like he may have a few more screws loose than the usual.”

  “If you wanted to find him right now, where would you look?”

  “Right now, this minute?” He thought about it for a few moments. “Today’s Sunday, the Fourth of July, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Almost three-thirty.”

  “You got Cynthia Scott singing over by the Meer at four. That’s where Pock’ll probably be working. That woman sure got a voice on her. She’ll draw herself a crowd.”

  “What does Pock wear when he gets himself cleaned up?”

  “Blue shirt. Red tie. Red suspenders. You keep an eye out. Betcha he’ll be there.”

  * * * * *

  A little while later, Nicole and I were working the crowd on the edge of the park at the Harlem Meer Performance Festival. The place was indeed packed. The crowd consisted of a varied selection of New Yorkers, white, black, and brown; male and female, young and old; uptown, urbane, and sophisticate.

  My cell hummed. Nicole said she’d spotted him. She directed me to meet her at the corner of the Dana Discovery Center where she was leaning on the side of a booth chatting up a snow cone vendor, using the concession as cover while she kept an eye on our wary pickpocket.

  We didn’t catch Raines in the act of practicing his trade, however. At least, not at the moment. Like almost everyone else in the crowd, he was focused on the music, his eyes fixed on the stage a few hundred feet away, his smallish body swaying with the beat. Even from the back, though, there was no mistaking who he was.

  We edged over to a spot directly flanking him, Nicole on one side and I on the other, just in case he decided to bolt.

  I stepped up beside him and said quietly, “Cato Raines?”

  He winced and offered me a sidelong glance.

  “Been a while since someone called me that.”

  “You prefer I call you Pock?”

  “Yeah. That’s my name now.”

  “All right, Pock. I was wondering if we might have a word.”

  I pushed a business card in front of his face and watched his expression while he read it. He seemed more annoyed than anything else.

  “What for? I ain’t doing anything here but listening to the music like everybody else.”

  Just in front of him, one of a group of three middle-aged women carrying shopping bags looked back at us as he spoke. This was not what he had in mind.

  He swore under his breath, turning away from the stage and toward the street behind us. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We began to weave our way through the throng. Nicole stayed close behind us.

  “Who’s the girl?” Raines asked, without looking at her.

  “My partner,” I said.

  “She looks too much li
ke you to be just that.”

  “She’s also my daughter.”

  “Cute. You two family types got any ID?”

  Whatever else you might say about Cato Raines, he didn’t appear to be delusional. I showed him my license and that seemed to satisfy him.

  “So what do you want?”

  “We’ve been looking for you. Nixon Deebee gave me your name and said I might find you somewhere here in the city. He says you used to be a licensed falconer.”

  “Deebeee? That old bear. Yeah, man, that’s right. I used to fly lots of birds.”

  “Why’d you give it up?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He rubbed at his nose, tilted his head almost imperceptibly, and fixed his gaze somewhere in the middle distance. When he spoke, his voice became more measured.

  “First,” he said. “I lost my job. Then I couldn’t find another one. Then my lover died.”

  “I’m sorry. Had she been ill a long time? Deebee said you were divorced.”

  “You’re talking about my ex-wife. I’m talking about him.” He stared at me for a moment. “And yes, we found out later when he tested positive for AIDS.”

  “I’m doubly sorry then. A crappy way to go.”

  “Yeah, well, then I had to go into the hospital myself for a while.”

  “You sick too?”

  He smiled. “I’m clean as far as AIDS. But my mind got a little sick,” he said, pointing to his head. “You know what I mean?”

  “Sounds like you’ve been through a lot,” Nicole said from behind us.

  “You might say that,” he said, turning to look at her.

  “Ever think about working with a bird again?” I asked.

  “You mean a hawk or a falcon?” He looked back at me. “Shoot. I see them all the time out here in the park. But no, I don’t want to have to mess around with another one.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “No place to keep the thing. Can’t feed it if it doesn’t catch game. Can’t even feed myself half the time.”

  A kernel of an idea formed in my brain. But it was so outrageous I just about dismissed it as my own bit of mental imbalance.

  What if Raines, or possibly someone else, was so desperate for food that he’d resorted to illegally hunting small game within the confines of the park? It seemed an absurd notion in today’s prepackaged, preprocessed world of convenient food sources. Absurd unless you were starving.