A Well-Known Secret

by Fusilli, Jim;

  She went away and slid the steaming pot back on the heater.

  I dug two singles out of my pocket.

  Where does Majorelle fit in?

  Tommy knew I’d go to see him. He had Jimmy tail me to midtown. Or he had Jimmy on 45th, waiting for me to show up.

  He didn’t have a whole lot of confidence in McDowell.

  But if he used Jimmy instead of a cop he could trust, what did it mean?

  As I left the diner, stepping back onto windy Third, I asked myself if Tommy would send in muscle before he asked for a sit.

  To cover up grand larceny and murder? Yes. Sure.

  I turned toward Villa’s office.

  And up the block, leaving Villa’s, was the guy who came at me on 45th. He wore the same outfit he’d had on the other night outside the Avellaneda: short, soiled jacket, a gray sweatshirt under it; blue slacks; heavy, grease-stained work boots. One difference: His eyes were ringed in purple and yellow and his nose was swollen across the bridge. As he pulled the handle on Villa’s door, the blue bag holding the Times fell and landed on the slate threshold. The big guy looked at it, then he walked away, his back to me as I stood, exposed, on Third.

  As I backpedaled toward the diner, he scuttled awkwardly as he waited for cars to pass, and then he lumbered across the avenue, dug for his keys and jumped in a tow truck that once had been fire-engine red. He kicked over the heavy motor and pulled away from the curb. I caught a good glimpse: That nose looked like it had given him some trouble. Good.

  He hung his left arm out of the truck as if to signal he was going to cut across Third. But the light was about to change and he stopped, staying on the east side. His big hand came to rest on the side of the truck, where painted lettering said AB TOWING AND REPAIR.

  When he looked to his rearview, I left the diner and went south, away from the truck, and kept moving until I saw a cab come to a stop on the other side of 89th. I trotted to it and nodded at the driver who, without looking at me, acknowledged I was going to jump in. Holding open the driver’s-side back door, I waited as a pert brunette, bundled in a chunky turtleneck under a long wool coat, gathered her change and stepped into the whipping crosstown wind.

  “Oooh,” she moaned as she shivered and looked at me for sympathy.

  I nodded politely and squeezed by to ease into the cab as the light went to green.

  The driver, a black man with almond-shaped eyes who might’ve been all of 25 years old, punched the meter and peered without expression into the rearview.

  “A tow truck just hung a left at 91st,” I told him. “We want to follow it.”

  We caught up at Lex and 89th, then fell in right behind it as the big guy had to stop to let midmorning jaywalkers, fresh from the 86th Street subway station, amble by.

  “Don’t let him know,” I said.

  The driver sighed as if bored, then gunned it, passing the tow truck. He pulled to a stop by a hydrant in the middle of the southbound avenue between 83rd and 84th.

  He waited until the big guy made it to 82nd, then left the fire pump and fell in behind a frog-green VW Beetle. I could see the tow truck’s hook over the little car’s roof.

  He’d done this before.

  “I apologize,” I said.

  The clever driver tried to conceal his smile as torrents of yellow cabs went by us.

  The big guy with the bruised nose made a right at 49th. He wasn’t pushing it hard.

  “He’s going to 45th and way west,” I said.

  We both caught the red at Park. Limos were stacked side by side in front of the Waldorf; huge U.S. and Japanese flags flapped aggressively above the avenue. We were deep in the glass-and-steel jungle now, small amid the prominent towers.

  At this rate, he was going to run into Rockefeller Center. That meant a left on Fifth, waiting for the school kids wading from NBC toward St. Patrick’s.

  We pulled away and got onto Fifth Avenue, moving from shadows to bright sunlight. At 45th, he headed to the west side. I knew we’d run into crowds of eager tourists, delivery vans and messengers on bikes as they darted recklessly through traffic.

  “This man does not know midtown,” the driver said in a soft voice.

  Twenty-five minutes later, we arrived at Eighth Avenue, rolling under pulsing red neon arrows for parking garages and Broadway marquees, dark now but on call for tonight’s curtain. I could’ve walked from 45th and Fifth to the Avellaneda in less time, but time wasn’t what was important. The big guy didn’t seem to know we’d been on his ass for more than three miles.

  When the light changed, the tow truck went past the Aladdin Hotel and, to my surprise, Majorelle’s theater. It continued to Ninth, went left, then pulled in front of a deli.

  “Stay on 45th,” I told the cab driver, “then pull over.”

  We pushed past the white, triangular marquee of a Seventh-Day Adventist church and eased next to a row of old, unkempt brownstones. Lids of plastic garbage cans littered the sidewalk, tossed aside by the wind. A page from a tabloid was caught in a puddle.

  “He got out,” the driver said. “He’s going east.”

  “Do me a favor,” I told him as I turned around. “Stay here for a minute or so.”

  I sat in the heated cab and watched through the rear window as the big guy, hands buried in the pockets of his dark slacks, crossed Ninth and trudged toward the center of the block, pounding his work shoes through standing water, past bits of swirling debris.

  “See? He’s going into the theater,” I said.

  The driver was using the sideview mirror. “Yes he is.”

  We both watched as he waited for the buzzer to open the front door of the Avellaneda.

  “Let’s stay with this for a while,” I suggested.

  He didn’t reply.

  “Go to Tenth, then let’s come around and hang on 45th,” I said. “On the west side of Eighth, but up the block.”

  The cabbie threw it back into drive. We left the curb.

  The theater door of the Avellaneda swung open 28 minutes later and the big guy emerged.

  As the tow-truck driver went toward Ninth, the cabbie asked me if I wanted to move on to follow him.

  “No, I got enough,” I replied.

  He gave me a quizzical expression, raising his shoulders, bringing his eyebrows over his dark eyes.

  I said, “What do think that man just did?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “He’s troubled, right? Looking over his shoulder …”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “But he doesn’t look like he just smacked someone around,” I said. “He looks like he had a conversation. Nothing more.”

  The cabbie agreed.

  I gave him two twenties and told him to keep the change.

  This time Majorelle didn’t wait for me at the bottom of the long, steep stairwell.

  When I entered the theater, he was again in one of the seats, a few rows closer to the lip of the stage. Now the curtain was drawn, closing the subway station behind crushed velvet.

  “Your name is Terry Orr,” he said as I began walking toward him, wondering if I’d find myself where the big guy had sat.

  Majorelle wasn’t wearing a djellaba now, but he still had on his curious hat. A long, black sleeveless sweater covered a thin black turtleneck.

  He had the heat on high, and yet, as I drew closer, I saw he shivered.

  “And yours is Ahmed Hassan,” I said. “And you just had a visit from your old pal, Alfie Bascomb.”

  As I eased into the aisle behind him, I saw he had a thick wool blanket on his lap.

  “Do I have to pull that?”

  He moved his head from side to side. “I prefer that you do not.”

  His skin still bore a dull yellow pallor and the skin on his flat lips was drawn and dry.

  As I sat, he asked, “How do you know Alfie?”

  I kept still. I’d taken a guess on the AB in AB TOWING AND REPAIR. It wasn’t a long stretch: His jacket down at the D.A.’s said he
liked to play rough. Someone brought him in to beat me into scurrying home.

  “You ought to cast yourself in one of these,” I said, gesturing toward the curtain that hid the stage. “You had me fooled, playing innocent: ‘That was you?’ You knew Bascomb tried to take me apart.”

  “I did not.”

  “The murder of Asher Glatzer,” I began as I settled into the seat, “you, Sixto, Bascomb, you ripped off Glatzer and you killed him to do it.”

  “I remind you that the police think differently, Terry Orr,” he said softly.

  “Let’s forget about what the police think.”

  “What the police think has made all the difference.”

  I said, nodding, “All right, I’ll take that for what it is: You were involved.”

  “I was involved in nothing.”

  “And now she’s gone,” I said. “You needed to be sure her secrets went with her.”

  “Sonia wanted to be an actress,” he said tiredly.

  “Yes, I know. You only knew her from her correspondence,” I said. “You forget you went to DeWitt Clinton with her. That she dated your friend Luis Sixto.”

  “By the time Luis was dating Sonia I was working at the Broadhurst Theater, removing chewing gum from the bottoms of seats, running for coffee …” He wheezed as he sighed. “I am not a criminal. I resent … I resent your implication.”

  “Loitering. Sniffing a little airplane glue. Shoplifting,” I recounted. “You were a good boy, all right.”

  “I made something of myself,” he said, evincing as much pride as he could muster.

  “So did Bascomb. He’s got his own business too.”

  Exasperated but unable to protest, he merely shook his head. “This is much more than a business.”

  He was right, of course, but now was not the time for consolation.

  “And what about Sixto?”

  “Gone.”

  “With the diamonds?”

  “Perhaps, but I do not know where he is,” Hassan said.

  “So we’ll agree there were diamonds and Sixto made off with them. Is that right?”

  He said, wistfully, “If there were diamonds …”

  “Sixto cashed in and took off. But not before setting you and Bascomb up well enough so you’d keep your mouths shut.”

  Slowly, he closed his eyes and, with a quiet groan, he turned his back to me.

  I waited, then stood and walked onto the carpet to face him.

  “Mr. Hassan, can it be that all this, the Avellaneda, is because Asher Glatzer was killed and Sonia Salgado took the fall?”

  He kept his eyes closed, but he ran his spotted, skeleton-like hand along the side of his black collar.

  “Sonia gets to spend thirty years in prison so you can have this,” I repeated. “But it’s not enough. She has to die, too?”

  He looked at me, holding me the best he could with his rheumy eyes. “Don’t be a hypocrite, Terry Orr,” he said sharply. “Don’t you now play the innocent.”

  He lifted his hand from atop the coarse blanket and pointed at me.

  “It is you who should be on the stage,” he said.

  “I’m here for the truth, Mr. Hassan.”

  He stared at me and, slowly, deliberately, he smiled. “You are here because you were sent by your friends in the police to pressure Sonia,” he said. “When she could not tell you what you wish to know, you killed her.”

  I started to reply, to wave off his outlandish accusation.

  But I saw that he was serious. He nodded knowingly, as if the secret he revealed not only halted all discussion of Sonia’s death, but explained all that had happened 30 years ago and earlier this week.

  “Who in the name of Christ told you that?” I snorted. My voice rose in disbelief.

  “This I know,” he said, nodding still. “You were sent to Sonia by the police, the Mangionellas, to do their work. You failed, it seems. Because here you are. Here you stand, with your lies, your manipulation.”

  “The Mangos sent me to kill Sonia?”

  “You know that is correct.”

  “Old man,” I said, “you are cracked.”

  He turned.

  I walked into the aisle in front of him, my back to the curtain that shielded the stage.

  “One, I am no killer,” I said. “Two, I work for nobody but myself.”

  “Oh, dear man, you have forgotten Sonia’s mother, which was your story. …”

  “What I do I do for me,” I repeated. “When I help someone it is for me. For mine. Is that clear?”

  “As you say,” he replied, as if bored now.

  I nodded. “As I say.”

  Hassan eased himself to the back of the chair. “You were counting, Terry Orr.”

  “The autopsy report will show I arrived at Sonia’s after she was dead.”

  “Returned, perhaps. Not arrived.”

  The debate had given him a boost, and Hassan was showing the wit and bite that the impresario Majorelle must have had before the cancer had taken hold. With what he thought was truth on his side, he clearly enjoyed the interplay.

  “Ask the cops,” I told him.

  “The cops who know the Mangionellas.”

  “And how do you know the Mangos, Mr. Hassan?”

  “If you had only arrived before Alfie,” he said, “I would have known none of this.”

  “If he told you I killed Sonia, your friend Alfie Bascomb is full of shit.”

  “Now you are here to do precisely what, Terry Orr? To kill me?” he asked bitterly, defiantly. “You will be killing a dead man.”

  “No. What I want you to do is tell me the truth about Sonia, Glatzer, the diamonds.”

  “You know the truth. Sonia robbed Glatzer. Did she kill him? For the police, for the world, the answer is yes. Did she take diamonds? She said she did not.” He smiled. “No one with six hundred thousand dollars goes to prison in America, Mr. Terry Orr, friend of the police, seeker of truth.”

  “She wanted to be an actress and you were going to help her,” I led.

  “That is not unbelievable.”

  “If she kept quiet for thirty years …”

  “That is,” he said.

  “Did you see her since her release?”

  “No. I tell you what I told Alfie and the police: I did not see her.”

  “You didn’t see her,” I repeated, “but you sent her books in prison, encouraged her—”

  “Why not?”

  “Why?”

  “You ask me to explain why I chose to be kind?” he replied.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “A few books, some encouragement. The least you could do in exchange for thirty years and a cut of the six hundred thousand, the cash to get this place up and running.”

  “That is the second time you said this,” Hassan replied sharply. “The Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda Theater owes it existence to no one. No one but Safi Majorelle.”

  “Yes, Safi Majorelle. Very clever. But you play your audience cheap. I mean, did you think no one who came here would know Jacques Majorelle? The Majorelle Gardens? It’s not very far to Marrakesh from Argana, is it?”

  “Once you cross Tizi Maachou,” he said cryptically.

  “When this—”

  “Thorough research, Terry Orr. Congratulations.”

  “When this is done with,” I continued, “when we know what happened with Sonia, with the diamonds, with Glatzer, all anyone will remember about you is that you helped kill a good man, a family man, so you could have a place to put on your plays.”

  He waved at me. “If that is what—”

  “You’re dying, Mr. Hassan,” I interrupted, “and your legacy is on your mind. You want it to be this great theater you’ve built, this home for Cuban writers, Latin writers. And maybe it ought to be. But it’s going to be this: You helped kill Asher Glatzer and ruined the life of a girl who trusted you. And you profited from that. This good place, Mr. Hassan, you built it on blood.”

  Hassan reacted as if I had
slapped him, opening his eyes wide, then stiffening. The sick man, suddenly weak again, tried to draw himself up tall, to call on his self-regard to give him strength. But he could not.

  “Who killed Sonia?” I asked rhetorically. “Me? No. You? No, but we’re a lot closer to it now, aren’t we?”

  He looked at the velvet curtain. “I don’t know … I don’t know who killed Sonia, if it is not you,” he said quietly.

  “Bascomb lies.”

  “Alfie cannot.” He slowly lifted the blanket from his lap and lay it over the back of the seat in front of him. “On his own, Alfie cannot think of a lie. He was never creative.”

  “Past tense,” I commented. “You said ‘was never’ …”

  “Perhaps he has changed,” Hassan replied. “It has been a very long time.”

  “So where does it come from, this wild tale?”

  He shrugged, then he hoisted himself from the seat. To steady himself, he paused for a moment, his bony hands on the arch of the seat. He closed his eyes and he trembled, as if suddenly stung with pain.

  “You haven’t seen Bascomb for years,” I led.

  He didn’t reply.

  “Sonia is dead and now Bascomb visits you.”

  He nodded.

  I waited. Then I asked, “Is Sixto here? Has he returned?”

  He looked at me. “Luis Sixto is no more.”

  Moving sideways, Hassan inched his way into the carpeted aisle.

  “And the Mangos. Have any of them visited you?”

  The steep pitch of the aisle as it sloped toward the stage caused him to lose his balance and he grabbed at me. I caught his frail arm, then held him by the wrist, the shoulder, until he was stable.

  “I do not know the Mangionellas,” he replied. “I never did.”

  I stepped back and watched him teeter slowly down the aisle, his hand on the black wall.

  I could feel the heat from the steam pipes.

  “I tried to be kind,” he said as he reached a door to the right of the stage. He turned to me. “What happened … I was not involved. Not thirty years ago, not now.”

  I looked at him. He was groping for an exit line.

  “I have been a good man,” he said finally.

  ELEVEN

  I half-expected the young cabbie with the dark, memorable eyes to be perched up by the Marriott, his off-duty sign stubbornly aglow to turn away the eager or the exasperated caught in the discouraging task of flagging a taxi in the booming heart of Tunes Square.