She popped another wafer and chewed furiously. Then white foam started trickling out from her lips.
“What’s the matter with you? What is that stuff, lady?”
“Alka-Seltzer,” she said. “I chew it up when I’m on the trains and you see what happens. People see me like this, they stay away from me.”
The train stopped.
“Good night, lady.”
“So long, sucker.” Some of the foam flew out of her mouth. “Have a buttercup day.”
I walked up the stairs from the subway platform and out to the corner of Essex and Delancey Streets where I flagged a taxi cruising east on Delancey. I gave the driver Ruby’s address and we were off.
My bad luck, the cabby was the chatty type.
I asked him please, for the love of God, to give me a break.
Ruby’s theatre is called the Downtown Playhouse. It is located on the third floor of a two-hundred-year-old skinny brick federal-style building on South Street, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.
There is a decent bar and grill at the street level, Vern’s, and a barber shop on the second floor. Ruby lives in a studio at the back of the fourth floor, which is the top of the building; she has a large terrace that looks toward the graceful old iron suspension bridge spanning the East River. Most of the rest of the top floor is given over to a reception room for theatre functions, and Ruby’s office.
My clever girl friend owns the deed to the whole works.
All her savings and everything she could borrow while she was still making her brisk Madison Avenue salary got her the place. The day she closed on the deal was the same day she blew off the uptown life, causing most of her friends and colleagues to pass the word that Ruby Flagg was ungrateful and unhinged.
“Actually,” Ruby told me that first night we met, “I’m only one of those.”
I naturally wondered, “Which one?”
“That, sir, I leave to you.”
Then she asked impulsively, “So, let me find out about you. Are you the kind of man who knows the difference between a smart person and a genius?”
“I only know that nobody’s ever called me either one of those.”
Ruby laughed. It was the first time I had made her laugh and so I decided to remember that, no matter what might happen with us.
“My friends and colleagues used to say I’d started out a regulation smart person, but that I reached the genius ranks in record time,” Ruby said. “They taught me that a smart person knows what smart people want and a genius knows what stupid people want.”
“Could that be why the advertising business is so full of geniuses?”
She laughed again and put a hand on my arm and said, “Why, Mr. Hockaday, we’re two of a kind, aren’t we?”
I agreed. And Ruby and I have been together ever since.
But tonight was the night we would become an item, as Walter Winchell used to put it in the Mirror. Tonight I would learn that the big answers to my life—as a man, as a cop—would begin to come by way of Ruby Flagg.
It was a quarter-past ten when I finally made it to the Downtown Playhouse. Which turned out to be just in time to catch the start of the second of two one-acts that Ruby was auditioning for potential backers.
She was happy and relieved to see me. But also rushed and nervous and preoccupied, with only a minute or two for me before the program began.
I asked her about the crowd of eight up front, four suits and their wives. Ruby’s spare, brick-walled theatre far from the precincts of expense-account dining was not the sort of place I expected to see suits and wing tips.
“They’re friends from the old life,” Ruby explained. “Reasonably good guys, still doing the dance but looking for ways to spend money like the angels would. Which I’m hoping means me and this little old theatre.”
“I thought you never saw genuises anymore.”
“What do you think, I’m unhinged?”
“Break a leg, Ruby.”
“Thanks, sweet. I’m going to scoot away now. The wine and cheese act is upstairs, right after this; I want to clear everybody out early, though, and then you can stay at my place for a change.”
“I don’t mind if I do. The inspector’s probably been telephoning my apartment every hour on the hour. I could live without that for a night.”
“Thanks, Hock. You really know how to make a girl feel convenient.”
I kissed her cheek. “Sorry, you know I don’t mean it that way. Go on, get your show on the road.”
Ruby went up front to sit with the geniuses and I settled down by myself in the back row of the theatre, a small house of ninety-nine seats. Tonight there were maybe thirty people in the audience—the suits, their wives and a scattering of Ruby’s show-business friends.
Up on stage was a bare-bones set and scene. Actors sat in folding chairs around an open casket, mourners at a wake. The coffin was tipped upward at the head so that we saw the actor inside, in the role of the deceased.
The stage lights went up and the house lights dimmed. Then one of the actors in the folding chairs stood up and faced us. He crossed himself in the Catholic manner, and spoke:
“The man in the coffin is named Arthur Colfax. We all used to call him The Mister. He was my father. The color of that necktie he’s wearing is the same shade of blue as The Mister’s eyes. Which, since they’re closed in death, I thought you would be interested to know.”
The actor paused, then turned to the other mourners and pointed to a man. “Over there’s Mr. Lyle Grant.”
The actor playing Grant rose from his folding chair and nodded at the audience. Then he sat down again.
The opening monologue resumed:
“Now, Mr. Grant did a fine job of making The Mister look good for his wake. I’d have to admit, my father had an evil look in life. He had a dirty black and gray fringe of hair on his head that was always wild with peaks, like his head was full of horns. And his lips stuck out and they usually turned down, like he was forever perched in a stadium seat shouting boo at the teams.
“So Mr. Grant worked oil into his hair and smoothed down the horns, and now his hair’s nice and silvery. Kind of distinguished, don’t you think? And also Mr. Grant forced he lips back and pulled them straight. And besides that, Mr. Grant clipped away most of the stiff little black hairs that snaked out from my father’s nose and ears.
“Like I say, The Mister looks real good tonight. Better than I’ve ever seen him look, truth to tell. I’d say downright well groomed.
“But I can’t believe The Mister’s dead. What I mean to say is, I can’t trust the old man’s dead, and even though I can turn around right now and see for myself he’s gone, which ought to satisfy me that everything’s going to be all right now…. Well, I’m still afraid …”
And then, to everybody’s complete astonishment—the actors playing the mourners and everybody in the audience iractically jumped out of their skins—The Mister bolted upright in his coffin. His eyelids popped open, his bright blue eyes blazed. With his hands folded tightly over his chest, he said:
“Oh yeah, I’m dead, all right! But you people out there, I suppose you’re the type who believe dead men tell no tales?
“Hah! That’s nothing but an old movie line. It’s a crock, just like a thousand other lines you’ve heard all your lives about people who can’t speak up for themselves.”
The Mister wiped his mouth, the way a drunk does.
“I expect from now on that most everybody’s going to say nasty things about the kind of man I’ve been in life—things they never had the balls to say to my face.
“Hah! There’s another crock for you: Never speak ill of the dead.”
I had sneaked out of the third-floor theatre and down the stairs. Now I stood at the bar in Vern’s, with a double of Johnnie Walker red, believing that this might help me escape the overlapping waves—the undertow—of memory and coincidence that had dogged this day and every day since Picasso in the park.
If
nothing more, the Scotch helped soothe the still-prickly shock of seeing that actor upstairs bolt open his eyes and speak from the beyond; hammering back into my head the always-hovering image of my own soldier father. A father I never knew or saw, save in old photographs of made-up poses; he, too, had been a blue-eyed man, so my mother once told me in a rare and womanly reminiscence of the man she married.
But never before tonight had I realized this: my father’s image in my mind was black and white; the color of the man was only now beginning to take shape.
Often lately, this happens. I am stopped in the midst of what I am doing by my father’s image. I am more and more struck by the notion that my job is only rehearsal for a greater detective case, namely the mystery of my hollow place. As a detective and a drinker, I am also lately asking myself: Do I go about solving the mysteries of others for their sake, or do I see their mysteries as clues to my own story?
Just before taking up with Ruby Flagg, I had been thinking seriously and soberly about booking an appointment with a doctor. By which I mean a shrink. But not the department psychiatrist, for I have my vanities; I did not want to risk that sort of thing getting around, which it does. I wanted somebody on the outside; somebody like Dr. Reiser would have been ideal.
But then my thought broke. For suddenly, there was Ruby’s voice at my back.
“I see you’re missing something, Hock.” She seemed very irritated.
“What?” I spun around.
“Was the play really all that bad?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“All right, so the play didn’t stink. So you were overcome by a sudden, terrible thirst, is that it?”
“Ruby, I’m awful sorry.”
She said angrily, “There are people upstairs waiting for me, Hock. Waiting for us!”
“I said I was sorry. It’s the case, Ruby. Can you understand? And, it’s my father.”
Forgiveness softened her face. She placed a hand on my forehead, as if checking for fever.
“Can you remember what you said at breakfast?” I asked.
“What, about your father?”
“Yes.”
“Not exactly. Can you?”
“Yes, I can.”
I pulled out my notebook and found the page where I had jotted down a list of impressions and dissonant things people had said, things I would try to organize into some possible meaning. Later, maybe as I slept.
“Your exact words: ‘I’m sorry, Hock, but shame on your mother. Your father should never have been allowed to die that way, with nobody to give you his memory.’”
Ruby said, “You wrote that down?”
They say, “You’re a great artist!”
Can you beat it? Fat lot of good that does me.
They say, “What you paint, it’s the truth!”
Ho, ho, ain’t that the truth?
Damn straight, so far as it goes.
But actually, they ain’t got a clue how truly great I am. They think I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.
Ho, ho, but I do!
It’s what the holy goddamn bible says I got to do, “Be sure your sin will find you out.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I woke up in Ruby’s place at the crack of noon.
The bed I was in was one of those big regal numbers, the kind that go with country inns in New England—high off the floor and full of pillows and chintz covers, with four tall mahogany posters and curtains that drew closed by day. It was a bed straight out of a photo layout in one of those magazines for people who live in Manhattan studio apartments, people lacking space but not style.
Ruby walked by, on her way to the terrace with coffee and newspapers. She said, “Aren’t you going to open it up, Hock?”
She meant the rectangular box on the bed next to me. It was wrapped in gift paper and ribbons, with a card attached that said it was for me.
Inside was a terrycloth robe from Saks. It was blue with handsome pinstripes of purple and red.
“I told the clerk blue because my guy’s a cop,” Ruby said. She sounded almost like a high-school girl, her voice young and weightless. “Do you like it?”
“What, are you kidding? I love it!”
I got up from the bed and put my arms through the sleeves and wrapped the robe around me and knotted the belt loosely. Then I followed Ruby to the terrace. There was a table set with cups and saucers and fruit and rolls. Ruby poured us coffee from the pot she had brought from the kitchen. We sat down, looking out toward the Brooklyn Bridge with the sun straight overhead, glinting off the silvery gray towers spanning the water.
This was the first day of the new spring when the breeze did not chill the skin. The clouds were high and milky, a sign of clear weather for the next several days. Seagulls streaked lazily through webs of steel cable up on the bridge decks. Tugboats went about their slow, quiet business of shoving barges and tankers up and down the river. And there sat I, a soundly slept prince of New York in his royal blue robe that smelled of newness, steam blowing off my coffee cup in the open air and Ruby Flagg beside me, a slice of orange touched to her tongue.
“Thanks, for everything,” I said to Ruby. “Really, thanks.”
I must have sounded a little overwhelmed by my thoughts. Ruby looked at me and asked, “Are you all right?”
“Sure I am. Just, thanks for the coffee, and for last night. And for all your help on the case.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And thanks for the robe. It must have cost a fortune.”
“It did.”
“So it’s pricey gifts now. We’re getting in deep, Ruby.”
“You bet your life.”
I sipped my coffee and looked at the bridge and asked, “If we could do exactly as we pleased, how should we spend this gorgeous spring day?”
Ruby did not now sound at all like some innocent schoolgirl. “We’d stay in.”
“What’s this, a randy streak?”
“A criminal streak, that’s more like it. I think you and me together in the sack is still against the law in four or five southern states.”
“Is it now? And here I’m always saying how civil disobedience has its honored place.”
“And time, which is what you haven’t got this afternoon, Detective Hockaday.” She held out the Daily News and the Post. “I hate to remind you, but there’s still a killer out there.”
I took the papers and scanned the contrasting methods employed in the exercise of that hallowed tabloid principle of presumed guilt. And I could easily see how these tabloids would not bring cheer today to the mayor or the commissioner or Inspector Neglio, and certainly not to the poor hounded Picasso.
The Daily News now had its own artist’s sketch of Picasso, thus playing catch-up with the Post on graphics. Over Picasso’s likeness was the streamer, “Dragnet For a Loser.” The story accompanying this was an imagination of Picasso’s down-and-out life in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, almost entirely based on quotations from Luis Riestra. It read to me like Luis had goofed on the press after a night full of funny cigarettes.
But the Post once again had the journalistic leg up with its streamer, “Secret Plan To Nab Psycho Killer Revealed To Post Reporter, See Page 3.” Slattery was at it again.
I sighed and turned to page 3.
There was my photograph, and the Post drawing of Picasso from the other day. And Slattery unthrottled:
EXCLUSIVE!
Solo Detective Stalks Mad-Dog Slayer
“Terror Is a One-Man Job”
By William T. Slattery
The hope of a city seized by the bloody nightmare of serial murder rides on the shoulders of a single, highly unorthodox cop—Detective Neil Hockaday of the Street Crimes Unit, Manhattan, popularly known in police and criminal circles as the SCUM patrol.
Detective Hockaday is virtually alone in stalking a homeless artist called Picasso, wanted for questioning in connection with three stunningly brutal murders in recent days.
“
We got a suspect, but routine investigation has come up with just about zip on him, so it all comes down to one guy—Hockaday,” said Hockaday’s superior officer, Inspector Tomassino Neglio, in an exclusive interview with this reporter. “That’s some hell of a secret plan if you want to know the truth, but there you go.”
With unusual candor for a top-echelon police commander, Neglio added, “You ask how we’re going to find some mad dog who’s out terrorizing this town. I’m squaring with you. Not with some huge gang of cops. Terror is a one-man job, and Hock drew it.”
“Hock,” as the SCUM-patrol detective is widely known, has investigated many of New York’s most baffling homicides. Only recently, he was credited with solving the murder of flamboyant radio preacher “Father Love,” the long-time pastor of Harlem’s Healing Stream Deliverance Temple.
In referring to that case, Inspector Neglio said, “In the whole department, Hock’s the only cop who could have dug up the crazy bedbug who did that preacher. He’s not the easiest cop I ever knew, and he’s got his own quirky ways of working, but Hock brings them in, boy! I don’t know what it is about the guy, but when a bedbug starts scratching Hock starts itching.”
Neglio added, “Right now, we’ve got a bedbug someplace out there with a head full of hate. So we put Hock on the trail. God bless us all.”
Detective Hockaday himself was unavailable for comment.
I skimmed the rest of the story, which mostly only recapped the murders of Celia Furman, Dr. Reiser and Benito Molevo Reyes. Even the great Slattery had not made the Celia-Picasso marriage connection, nor Picasso’s connection with Coney Island.
I examined my photograph. It did not reveal much, which pleased me. A grainy head-and-shoulders shot of a guy somewhere way past his rookie days who had not shaved in a few days, wearing a Yankees cap and sunglasses. The point to publishing this escaped me.
“What do you think?” I asked Ruby, holding up the picture for her to see.
“So, that’s supposedly my Neil Hockaday?” She laughed softly. “No, I don’t think so. That guy looks like some ball-park lout, from the cheap seats.”
“Thanks, it’s how I look about half the time. You really know how to make a guy feel adored.”
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