Night Life

by David C. Taylor

  Cassidy, filled with dread, went upstairs calling his mother’s name.

  No answer.

  As in the dream, he moved slowly, as if he were underwater.

  He went down the hall to the master bedroom. The door was open. He knocked on the frame and called again. “Mum?”

  No answer.

  He did not want to go in. He thumped his head against the wall hoping that would wake him, but he was awake, caught in what he knew was to come, as surely as if he had lived it before. He stepped into the room. She was in bed, leaning back propped against a bank of pillows, and though she looked like she was asleep, he knew she was not.

  Later he understood that she had arranged herself for her husband, hair and makeup perfect, peach-colored peignoir that he had always loved. See what you’re losing? See what you could still have? The clock had been turned on the bedside table so she could see it easily, and the empty bottle of pills was next to an empty glass of water.

  She was cool to his touch.

  He later understood what she had planned. She would take the pills. Tom, arriving at three, would find her and save her, and they would live happily ever after.

  For reasons he still did not understand, Cassidy moved the clock to the bureau where it could not be seen from the bed, and in doing so changed what his mother had done from an act of optimism to one of despair, and in some ways he let his father off the hook, because Tom Cassidy never suspected Joan’s calibrations, never knew that by being on time he could have changed death into life. The coroner’s estimate of her time of death was imprecise, which allowed Tom Cassidy to believe that she had killed herself early in the afternoon so that he would find her dead when he came at three. He did not understand that she meant to seduce him. He assumed that she had killed herself to punish him and had arranged for him to find her body.

  Her death pulled the family together for a time. Brian, always responsible beyond his years, grew up overnight. He took compassionate leave and organized the funeral with the help of Tom’s lawyer, Harry Gould. He oversaw the distribution of their mother’s belongings to friends and family. Then he went back to the navy.

  Tom Cassidy’s reaction was stunned incomprehension. Why? What had caused it? A man so full of life could not understand how someone would voluntarily end hers. He thought she wanted the divorce. He was going to give it to her because she wanted it. She was getting what she asked for. He asked questions of his children over and over again, but they had no answers for him. For days he refused to leave the house. He wandered the rooms in his bathrobe as if he might stumble on the answer in some dark corner. He did not eat. He did not shave. He sat for hours in the easy chair in their bedroom. Then one day, someone called from the theater with a problem only he could solve. He went down to see about it and went back again the next day, and then the next. For a while he came home every night for dinner. After a month he missed one or two a week, and soon after that Leah and Cassidy ate alone five nights out of seven.

  What do you do when the props are knocked out from under your life? What do you do when you lose someone you thought would always be there? Grief blindsided him. He found himself standing on a corner of Madison Avenue waiting for a bus and weeping while people shied away from him. He would hear something that made him laugh and think, I have to call her and tell her, and then the thought would drift away with the realization that there would never be another call.

  One night he tried to tell Leah about the dream.

  “What do you mean, you dreamed it? You dreamed she killed herself?” She looked at him with horror.

  “I didn’t know what I was dreaming. It was one of those nightmares that I couldn’t get out of. I was awake and still in the nightmare, and I could see her in her bed. When I walked into the house that day and saw her coat on the floor, I was back in the dream. I knew what she would look like in the bed. I knew.”

  “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Stop it. I don’t want to know. You didn’t dream it.”

  “I didn’t know what it meant. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I dreamt it, but I didn’t know what it meant. If I had known, I could have done something.”

  “No. No. Stop it.” She put her hands over her ears.

  Leah went away to boarding school, and for a few months Cassidy and his father drifted around each other in the house on 66th Street. Then he joined the army.

  6

  “Do you recognize him?”

  The man behind the counter took the photograph of Alex Ingram that Cassidy had found in the backstage locker and tipped it toward the light. “No, I don’t think so.” He looked again. “No.” He turned the photo over and looked at the back, then put it down on the counter and took off his glasses and shook his head. “This is not my work. I don’t use this paper. It’s cheap. You see how it curls at the edges. And look. This is a portrait, a head shot as it is called, for an actor, yes?” His accent was faint, his constructions formal, those of a second language. “See, here, see the glare on the cheekbone, how the eye is too darkly shadowed? This is badly lighted. No subtlety. Not my work.” He seemed offended by the sloppiness.

  “Can you tell who took it?”

  “No. I don’t know. There are many photographic shops in New York. Often a shop stamps the name and address on the back of such a photograph, as advertisement, but this one has not.”

  The camera store was on the ground floor of an office building on Lexington Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets. Before going in, Cassidy had paused in front of the window. The display box inside was draped in thick blue cloth to set off the framed photographs of smiling brides in white dresses, and businessmen, dignified and upright in dark wood chairs, challenging the camera. Cassidy could see that care had been taken with the lighting so that the portraits drew the eye of anyone who paused to look.

  The man behind the counter said his name was Rudi Apfel. He was in his late forties, Cassidy thought. His long fingers were stained with developing fluid. His dark tweed jacket was buttoned over a starched white shirt, and he wore a navy tie patterned with small dark red sea horses. He was about middle height, wore horn-rimmed glasses, had an open, pleasant face, and if you passed him on the street you would never remark or remember him.

  “What about this envelope?” Cassidy handed him the envelope from Ingram’s locker. The fifty-cent piece was in his pocket.

  Apfel examined it. “Yes, this mine. You see the address.”

  “Do you have any idea what was in it?”

  “Negatives, I assume. This is what I use these envelopes for. If someone wants negatives, I give them in an envelope like this.”

  “You don’t remember giving this guy an envelope of negatives?”

  “No. I’m sorry. It may not seem so today, but I have a busy shop. I cannot remember everyone. I could have given this a year ago. Who would remember?” He shrugged. “If you have the negatives, I could look. Perhaps this will make me remember. I am better about pictures than I am about people, I’m sorry to say. So, let us look at the negatives. Shall we?”

  Cassidy put the envelope back in his pocket. “Thank you for your trouble.”

  “Not at all. If there is anything I can do, I would be happy to help. I am sorry the man was killed. We live in a savage time, Detective Cassidy.”

  “Yes, we do.” Cassidy pocketed the photo of Ingram.

  “If I do remember something, is there a way I can reach you?”

  Cassidy found a business card that held the precinct’s and his home phone numbers.

  Apfel looked it over, smiled, and nodded, and tucked it away in his shirt pocket. “And now, Detective, perhaps you would sit for a moment and let me take your picture. You have a very interesting face. There is something, and I do not mean in any way to be rude, wonderfully melancholy there.”

  “Melancholy?” Cassidy laughed.

  “Ah. I’m sorry. I do not mean that you are sad in any way. That would be presumptuous of me. No, no. I sense a melancholy absorb
ed over generations.” He laughed and opened his hands in a gesture of apology. “I’m sorry. I’m Russian. This is how we think. No. How we feel. What we know. Some of us carry the sadness of generations, some the joy. Do you have Russian blood, Detective?”

  “Who knows?”

  “No matter. In America it is enough to be American. So, the photograph.” He reached under the counter and retrieved a large Speed Graphic camera like the ones police department photographers used at crime scenes.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Five minutes. No more. Then you will have something wonderful. For your wife? Girlfriend? Someone at home who will be pleased to have it.” He smiled as if to apologize for his insistence.

  “No one this week.”

  “No? A good-looking young man like you?”

  Cassidy hailed a cab on Lexington. What was it about Apfel that pricked him? The accent, maybe, so like his father’s. Or just the frustration of a dead end on the envelope found in Ingram’s locker? As he closed the door to the cab, he glanced back at the store. Apfel watched him from the counter and raised a hand in good-bye.

  * * *

  Fraker cut a piece of toast, a piece of fried egg, and a piece of sausage, stabbed them with his fork, and poked them into his mouth.

  “You didn’t find anything?” Crofoot asked. He was a compact man with a narrow face and nervous, muscular hands that drummed fingers on the table. He had ginger-colored hair and eyebrows above pale blue eyes. He wore a hairy three-piece tweed suit that would not have been out of place on an English country weekend, and he watched Fraker eat as if he had not seen the act before.

  “I don’t think so. You’ll have to decide. It’s all there. Every piece of paper, every photo in the place I could grab before the guy showed up, but nothing like you described, and nothing you might call hidden.” He pointed his fork at the paper shopping bag that bulged on the windowsill. “Of course, I was interrupted before I really had time to toss the place. I could go back, tear it apart.”

  “Maybe,” Crofoot said as he pawed through the shopping bag’s contents.

  They were in a booth in the rear of a diner on Gansevoort Street in the meatpacking district of Greenwich Village west near the river. Three long-distance truckers were at a table near the door banging on the Yankees. Could that fucking Whitey Ford win more than the seventeen games he won last year? Allie Reynolds and Johnny Sain were over the hill at thirty-seven and thirty-six. Management should trade them before their arms fell off. That kid Mantle looks okay, but he ain’t gonna make us forget Joe DiMaggio unless he hits more than the twenty-one home runs he had in fifty-three. Two meat cutters in wool caps and long white coats stained with drying blood sat elbow to elbow at the counter and ate an early lunch without talking.

  Crofoot pushed the shopping bag away. He had not found what he was looking for, and the disappointment showed. “What about the two men? Are you sure they can’t identify you?” he asked. He had an accent that was neither English nor American but somewhere in between.

  “Not a chance. The one who came in first, the one with a gun, it was dark, and then when the lights came on, I was facing away from him, headed out. The other one, I had my hand in front of my face, sapped him down before he knew what the hell was going on.” Fraker forked in another mouthful of food.

  “What is that? The dark thing? Do you mind my asking?”

  “Blood sausage,” Fraker said around the food. “Best place in the city.” He waved his fork at the diner. “The slaughterhouses are just across the street. You want the blood fresh.”

  “Ah,” Crofoot said, meaning How disgusting. “The one with the gun was a cop named Cassidy. He works out of Midtown South. We’re trying to get a handle on him.”

  “How do you know?” He saw Crofoot’s look of amusement. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You guys know everything.”

  “Not everything. What was he doing back there in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say anything. He just came in hard.” Fraker signaled the waitress for refills on their coffees.

  “We don’t like it. We don’t like him going back. Why would he go back unless he was looking for something? We’re thinking maybe he’s connected to the other guys.”

  “Could be. They’ve got long arms.”

  “Ingram was tortured. Who would have done that?”

  “Maybe the other guys.”

  “Yes. Possibly. Not their style, though they’re capable of it, I guess. Still, very impatient. Easier to offer money. Ingram liked money. That was clear,” Crofoot said.

  “You want me to do something about him, the cop?”

  “No. Keep looking. I’ll deal with the cop. You have another name, don’t you? Speak to him. Maybe he’ll give you more.”

  “How far can I go when I speak to him?”

  “You’ll have to use your own discretion, but this cannot come back to us.”

  * * *

  On Sunday Cassidy woke to rain rattling the windows. Gray clouds scudded low over the steel-colored river. His side felt better, and the blackjack bruise was going yellow and was less tender to the touch. He spent the morning trying to paper over the hole Gwen had left. He threw out the dead flowers, moved the chair where she used to read to another angle, threw out her toothpaste, rearranged his clothes in the bedroom closet to fill the gap where her clothes had hung, and redistributed things in the bureau. He stacked the old scripts she had left and the old issues of Variety and tied them in bundles to put out with the trash. He found a hat with a long green feather, part of her costume from an industrial show she had done in January, and put it on a high shelf in the coat closet in case she called for it, though he knew she never would.

  By midafternoon he felt raw and trapped. The rain had eased to drizzle. He put on a slicker and a Giants baseball cap and went out. An apartment on the floor below him had been vacant for months, but now there were boxes piled outside the open door and he had to step over a guitar case to get by.

  He walked to the White Horse on Hudson. Two couples in blue jeans and plaid wool shirts played poker at one of the tables in the back room while at another, three bearded men argued about Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking.” Was it a true villanelle? Whatever the hell that was.

  Cassidy took a table near the window in the quiet front room and had a hamburger and a beer while he read a copy of the Journal-American someone had left on the sill. John Foster Dulles warned against the growing Communist influence in South America. There were three cease-fire violations between North and South Korean troops along the 38th parallel. Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced both NBC and CBS for refusing to give him air time to answer an attack by former Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. He called the networks’ actions “completely immoral, arrogant, and dishonest.” Cassidy laughed and the bartender asked, “What’ve you got there, Mike, the comics?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “That Maggie and Jiggs cracks me up.”

  Cassidy paid his bill and walked home slowly through the rain. The weather suited his mood.

  There were fewer boxes outside the open door on the fourth floor, and the guitar case was gone. “Hey, you.” He was already past the door, but he turned back. A young woman was standing inside the apartment with her hands on her hips. “Give me a hand.” Not really a question, not quite a command. She was tall and rangy, nearly as tall as he was, and her dark red hair was cropped to short curls. High cheekbones, a wide, sensual mouth. She wore canvas sneakers that had once been white, blue jeans, and a faded green flannel shirt.

  “Sure.” He hung his wet slicker and hat on the stair rail in the hall and went in. She had moved to the end of a big green sofa that had seen better days.

  “The bastards I hired dumped the stuff and took off when I was in the can. I want to move this over under the window.” Her voice was smoke and whiskey.

  “Okay.” He went to the other end of the sofa and bent for a grip.
r />   “Bad back, weak heart, hernia?”

  “No. But I tend to weep uncontrollably in moments of stress.”

  “Not going to be a problem here. You ready?”

  “On three. One, two, three.” The sofa was heavy, but he refused to show the strain. Pride, a beautiful woman. They dropped it with a thump under the window that looked out on West Street.

  She stepped away and pushed her hair from her forehead with the back of her wrist. “A little farther this way.” He pushed. A judicious look. “Too far.” He pulled. Another look. “Okay.”

  He tapped a Lucky from his pack and lit it, and she took it out of his mouth before he got the first drag and put it between her lips. “You live upstairs?” She blew smoke at the ceiling.

  “Yes. Michael Cassidy.” He lit another cigarette for himself.

  “You tap-dance, Michael? Learning to play the bongos, any early-morning roller skating?”

  “No. I occasionally howl at the moon.”

  “Won’t bother me. I work nights.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dylan.”

  “Dylan what?”

  She looked him over carefully. “Thanks for the help, Michael,” and turned away to rip tape sealing one of the boxes. A dismissal. He waited for a moment, but there was no more, so he left and went upstairs.

  God, she was good-looking. Were her eyes green or blue? Green.

  7

  The Blue Parrot was on 53rd and Third under the rattle and shadow of the el. The front windows were curtained to block sight from the sidewalk. The interior was dim, and Cassidy waited inside the door until his eyes adjusted. The music stopped a moment after he came in, so he knew someone had hit the button to warn the men dancing together in the back room to break it up. There was a city ordinance against people of the same sex dancing, a law for the most part ignored but kept on the books in case a raid on a queer bar was needed at election time to reassure the good citizens that deviance would not be tolerated. He moved to the bar, ignoring the men past the arch at the far side of the room who now stood talking together in the awkward poses of people surprised in the act. It was six o’clock, and the place was filling up with men from the midtown office buildings. They wore suits and ties and buttoned-down shirts, polished wingtips, the gray flannel uniform of the day. Camouflage. It was tough being queer in America. Maybe in the arts you could get away with it, but otherwise you had to live a clandestine life and present a false front to the world. If you were found out, it would destroy you. You would lose everything, job, friends, family. It was worse than being a Communist.