Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Ed Gorman

  Sure, sure, I told her, meaning it.

  “Just help me get upstairs and I’ll be fine. Thank you, Justin. Thank you, really.”

  Was it this way with Ooten? But then she also seemed really embarrassed. Who was she? How could one woman do this to two men?

  With my help she managed to mount four of the stairs. “Just flip the lock on the way out, will you, Justin? I can make it the rest of the way.”

  She smiled and thanked me again. I started to go down but then reached the next step up before she did, hardly aware of my action. I brought her around and pulled her to me and sank into her lips. “No,” she said … and let me kiss her again.

  What I wanted to do … what I intended to do … was scoop her up like Rhett Butler did Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, but it didn’t turn out that way, oh no, it didn’t. She jerked back and then … as I try to recall this, I am not sure just what happened. All I know is I tried to grab her to keep her from falling. Instead, as she sank she twisted, and my fist connected to the left jaw. In her dive down, her head shot against the square platform of the end stair-rod, and then she flipped and her head went smack! on the tile, a gray tile with tan swirls in it until joined with the brightest of red.

  Even as early as then I wondered if I’d let her fall. If I’d caused her to fall. My reactions are supposed to be quick. How could I let her slip by?

  She was on the floor with her eyes rolled partway up. I began CPR.

  You might suppose it crossed my mind to eat the hornet. Oh, I practiced caressing my weapon the way I’d seen it done in movies. And I drew other dramatic scenarios in my mind. My illicit favorite: death by scumbag. I would insert myself into a bad street scene and, while making like a hero, arrange for my own end.

  I even imagined a sequence where my body would be found among the homeless at the Bethlehem mill. Once, on a perimeter canvass after a series of home break-ins, I went in at a downed section of fencing near the rear of Blast Furnace Row. Inside the steel skeleton crows flutter. Cat eyes gleam in the alcoves. Scruffy-looking souls, both men and women, cook their meals over fifty-five-gallon drums, glance at you with little interest, as though even in uniform you’re just another wanderer there. That is where I belonged. Now I lay me down to sleep … forever. But to involve them in my final act would be to pile wrong upon wrong.

  Again I was summoned to headquarters. It was a whole month after the first interview with Major Manning and the commander. This time it was two sergeants from the homicide unit.

  I won’t drag it out. What they laid on me I knew was coming; knew it yet pretended it wasn’t imminent, that each day I awakened would be like any other before the incident.

  At the autopsy for Erin Flannery it was discovered that her sternum and two ribs were cracked from the compressions I had rendered. When I first began, I did not want to remove her bra. To do so would seem a trespass of its own variety. Because I didn’t remove it, the first several thrusts downward scored the flesh over her sternum. In due time I also heard a crackling, like the sound of a cereal bag being pinched tight, but I thought it was interference from the bra. With clumsy fingers, I unhinged the plastic hook in front and just kept on pumping, calling her name before I put my mouth to hers to force in another breath.

  It must have gone on for thirty minutes, or so it seemed. And then, when I had no positive response, no reaction at all, curse me, I looked around trying to think of anything I’d touched, and then I fled.

  The medical examiner, upon noting those injuries to the chest, instructed her assistant to swab around the mouth and to perform another separate swab on the lips of the deceased. Even this action, through DNA testing, would not have implicated me, save for the fact I volunteered a sample in one of the extra criminal investigation classes I took after joining the force. The sample was sent to the state laboratory as though it were any other, not a student’s. It would be held as an unidentified profile. These are kept in the database in the hope that someday they will “hit” in another case that had other trace evidence with which to bust a suspect. Like Mrs. Ooten’s fingerprint on the oboe case, my identity would not be known from that saliva sample — except that eventually my superiors pressed for a new sample to be taken. And of course, I complied. There was the ring the commander asked about — the twist in the garrote, you might say. Nothing at the scene of Erin’s death would have pointed my way. I left no fingerprints. I had not touched a glass, nor the banister. I did open the door with Erin’s key, but I had on gloves, as I did when I left. Even while rendering CPR, I avoided the blood on the floor. But the ring …

  The sergeant who studied the evidence seized on a peculiar mark on Erin’s jaw, a curved flame shape with a slight space below, and beneath that a kind of pear shape, a teardrop with a touch of high waist. Two of each shape. Sergeant Geerd Scranton showed me a photo of it. “What does that look like to you, son?”

  “I don’t know, crooked carrots? With a blotch below?”

  “I took up an interest in Indians when I was a boy.”

  “Did you,” I said. Where was this going?

  “My name,” he said, “means ‘spear brave’ in Dutch. Piscataway Indians used spears. They’d hunt fish and bear with them.”

  “Are you onto something, Sergeant?” I asked, feigning only an intellectual interest in the case.

  “It’s part of a bear print. The nails, the pads. See? Perfect in the photo.” He turned the photo my way. “You could be right.”

  “I’m told you wear a ring with a bear print on it, Justin. Trooper Buttons says you always have it on.”

  “Hah. I do. Or almost always. I guess I left it on the sink this morning.” I smiled. “I spent some time in Montana with my dad and uncle. God, what beautiful country. Have you ever …? The grizzly is the state mascot. Lots of people wear it on jewelry.” I said.

  He nodded, waited a few beats, or maybe it was minutes, or maybe it was an hour, before he said, “Why don’t you just tell me about what happened, Justin? It must be very uncomfortable for you. Sergeant Kunkle, myself, Major Manning — we know there must have been some pretty powerful extenuating circumstances or you would have done the right thing. Isn’t that so, son? Look, we know that sometimes we get pushed to extremes. Maybe you tried to romance her? Maybe you had a little too much to drink?”

  I sat looking at him, stunned he would suggest such things, but not arguing because arguing would only deepen what he already believed.

  Again he went on like that, and I shook my head as if I just couldn’t believe what test they were putting me through now. I did say I was clueless as to what response they wanted.

  And then he used the tool of silence. Crows could have been squalling in the steel mill shadows. The wails of warning cats went chasing their own echoes around. The hollow laughter of the homeless kept piercing my ears.

  There is a certain terror in the veins of those who would do right always. I am the junior to the senior, our standards so high there is no true escape.

  Perhaps my father knew that, and maybe that’s part of why he left us, his daily companions a fifth of whiskey, a bottle of bennies, and tricked-up tubing duct-taped to the exhaust pipe of his cruiser, snaked into his window on the passenger side as it sat hub-deep in mud on the side of a cornfield, a stand of trees blocking the scene from the main road, no reason known, no final written note to tell us why.

  As a child, nights, I’d be in bed listening to my parents argue, my mother’s voice loud and clear, my father only sometimes shouting back. After his death I tried recalling what all they argued about. I couldn’t then, but today I remember a woman’s name. An odd name, to me even then: Clarabelle. I remember my mother calling her “whore” and my not knowing what the word meant but that it had an awful sound, the way a roar issues deep from within a throat. Perhaps I should have known, but I was a quiet child and did not hang with any special friends.

  It wasn’t until I was twenty and spent a final summer with my uncle outside of
Butte that I learned the real story of my father’s death. Until that time, and even after, I kept hearing of what a good man he was. How positive. How good, how perfect. A model of a man. My image of him was forever ruined by what my uncle revealed and, later, by other things I came to know. I longed to be better than Enoch “Eddie” Eberhardt, and determined to shape my longing into action to become, if it is possible in this world, the truly moral man.

  Commander Ooten became my model. I would learn to be like him. Anything or anyone that got in the way to diminish the image I had must only be possessed of a fierce and terrible magic. In my obsession to know what the power was that did trip him up, I laid out a woman who in no way deserved an early end, whose only fault was to be a friend to a family and to a lonely madman.

  To this day I do not know if I deliberately put my fist to her jaw. But does it even matter? I either committed or omitted, failed to do what I should have, and encouraged what I should not.

  It may be two years now that I’ve lived on the banks of the Pocono River, there until weather drives me and my fellow campers to find a collapsed barn, a forgotten shed, a building in wait for a bulldozer. Days, we hook fish and toss whatever’s left to forever-hungry cats skulking in the bushes. We keep watch on our meager holdings and quickly drive out any offenders. Draw straws to see who will go buy the wine. Days are good. Blackbirds chainsaw the nights. I tell those of you who would listen that even the strongest of girders rust. We are all just wanderers here.

  N.J. (NOREEN) AYRES is the author of three forensics-based crime novels that pre-date the CSI t.v. phenomenon. For 20 years Ayres wrote and edited complex, multi-volume technical manuals for large engineering companies and defense contractors. She now develops proposals and reports concerning lead reclamation at private and police shooting ranges. Having won a few awards for her poetry and short stories, she enjoys serving as a judge in national writing competitions and helping other writers in polishing their manuscripts. With her long-time partner, she rescues feral cats and kittens in northeastern Pennsylvania, getting them neutered and returned to their environment or adopted out (128 so far in 3 years). Another pastime is oil and acrylic painting. In summer 2009, her story “The Exquisite Burden of Bones” will appear in Murder Past, Murder Present, Twilight Times Books, editors Jan Grape and Barri Born. Website: www.noreenayres.com.

  Skin and Bones

  BY DAVID EDGERLEY GATES

  New York’s a city that’s forever reinventing itself. In lower Manhattan, excavations for a water main or a subway line will uncover graves from a forgotten potter’s field, or a shellfish midden predating the Dutch. The public library between Fifth and Sixth is built on the site of the old Croton reservoir, itself once a formidable monument to nineteenth-century ambition and ingenuity. Times change, and the landscape of the city changes with them. Where once there was a boundary between the wild and sown, for example, in Peter Stuyvesant’s day, is now Wall Street. The footprints are all about, if only you take notice.

  And of course New York’s a place that invites reinvention. Irish and Italians, Germans and Swedes, Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe, Armenians, Levantines, and Greeks, the tidal migration north of Negroes between the wars, apple-cheeked kids from Iowa, and streetwise toughs from Jersey, all of them hungry for adventure or advancement, Anglicizing their names, rewriting their histories, imagining their own creation myth.

  Dede van Rensellaer had been born Deirdre O’Donnell. The orphaned child of a whore, she grew up in the workhouses and was turned out onto the streets when she was fourteen. She fell into the natural grasp of a pimp and was jobbed out to the trade.

  If you’d asked her why she didn’t seek to enter service as a domestic, she would have guffawed. Where was the practical difference? In either case, you were property. She was, as it happened, rescued by one of her clients. Not so rare an event as you might think. She married above herself and never looked back. I was startled by her invitation to lunch.

  We met at the Waldorf. I knew it only from the salad. But she cared little for appearances, that was plain.

  “Mickey, it’s been twenty years,” she said, offering me her hand.

  I took it. “Ma’am.” She was probably the one on thin ice, not me.

  “Would you care for a cocktail?” she asked.

  “Better, perhaps, that I keep my wits about me,” I said, as I took my seat.

  Her laughter was like a chime, nothing artificial or forced about it at all. She’d certainly kept her gamine charm.

  “I’d share a bottle of wine,” I said, leaning against it.

  She ordered a Bordeaux. The wine steward and the maitre d’ apparently knew her well

  She rubbed the cork between her fingers and passed it beneath her nostrils. She approved. I let her order the meal for both of us as well. We raised our glasses.

  “The future,” she said.

  It was the shared past we were drinking to, I imagined, but we clicked rims.

  Scallops, en croute, a green salad, beef Wellington. More pastry, in fine, than I would have chosen, given the pounds I’ve put on in my age. But it was her treat, and her schedule.

  We came to it over coffee.

  A girl, she told me. Not much above fourteen, but already slightly soiled and shopworn from the life. Undernourished, just skin and bones. Wary, a little feral, perhaps, mistrustful of solicitude.

  “Why?” I asked her. I meant, what was her interest.

  “Oh, Mickey,” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? She reminds me of me, at that age.”

  “Nothing further?”

  She smiled and shook her head, sadly. “I see where you’re going. No. She’s not my illegitimate daughter, or the like. If it were blackmail, I’d face it out, or hire a private dick to break some heads.”

  Something she knew full well I had a name for.

  “Not that, either,” she said, reading my expression.

  I nodded. Rented muscle is easily found. The rich have lawyers and dogs bodies to insulate them from responsibility or consequence. “Why call in an old marker, then?” I asked her.

  She looked at me with level regard, and then her focus shifted past me, into some indeterminate middle distance. “I’d say I owed you, Mickey, not the other way around.” She spoke without addressing me directly, or as if she weren’t talking about herself. “You never took advantage of me back then. I even wondered if you were queer. For all that you’re no doubt a hard man, and a wicked one, you’ve got a sentimental streak.”

  “I’ve a weakness for the downtrodden,” I said, meaning some irony.

  “You wear it lightly,” she said, letting her eyes meet mine again. They were blue and transparent, like Arctic ice.

  I shifted my weight, uncomfortably.

  “You have boys on the street,” she said. “Girls, too, for all I know.” She meant the young numbers runners I used. “What I do know is that you don’t whore them out.”

  I could see where this was going. “You think my kids would already have noticed her, yes?” I asked.

  “Beekman Place,” she said.

  I knew she lived in the East Fifties. “Not our turf,” I said.

  But she had a whim of iron. “You could cozy up to her.”

  “I’d be a John, no more.”

  “You might win her trust, Mickey.”

  “A thankless errand,” I said.

  “You’d have my thanks.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished, Deirdre,” I said.

  “And don’t I know it,” she said, sadly.

  Which, on the face of it, was sufficient. In retrospect, I should have been less credulous.

  They say there’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway. I couldn’t tell you, but it feels anecdotally accurate. All those children who come here, wild with ambition. How many of them fall through the cracks? How many of them suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? I was a product of the West Side streets myself, Hell’s Kitchen. If the mob hadn’t found m
e and taken me under its wing, I’d have been bait for predators.

  This is not merely philosophy.

  It was 1949. Along the East River, ground had been broken for the United Nations. Sutton Place and Beekman were old and established, respectable addresses, and the foreign legations were eager to snap them up. Real estate values were going right through the roof. But at curbside, prices were stagnant.

  “Bareback blow job, two bucks,” one of my kids told me.

  “Is that how she makes the rent?” I asked.

  “She can always sleep on top of a heating grate, or under a cardboard box.”

  “You speaking specifically, or generically?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know her,” she said.

  “Can you get to know her, Judy?” I asked. She looked at me suspiciously.

  How much do you give away? They were sly, they were hungry, they were survivors, they’d shovel their competition under a subway train for the odd dime. I had to be frank. “It’s a favor for a friend,” I said. “I want her looked after.”

  “Would you do it for me, Mickey?” she asked.

  She was thirteen, just shy of puberty. I could have turned her out and gotten a return. “Yes,” I told her. It was true.

  “Okay,” she said. Wise beyond her years.

  I protected my kids, unlike some, but it wasn’t sentiment. I was investing in the future. People might tell you that there’s an infinite pool of throwaway talent, the abandoned and forlorn, and in brute fact they’re thrown away daily, like candy wrappers, but if we eat our own young, hope dies.

  Not that the children weren’t themselves carnivorous. Judy would interpret my writ however she chose, and not necessarily to my liking. All the same, I wanted her and the other canny lads to see the job through. They were my only decent chance to get at Dede’s lost girl. It was a small ambition.