Closing Time

by Fusilli, Jim;

  Nine of them said Weisz was standing at the edge of the platform, lingering wild-eyed over Davy as Marina screamed and dove down after him.

  I was looking at the slag on the green Jersey cliffs when I said, “He was here and your guys went at it easy.”

  They made the right guy. The man with an IQ of 180. Member of Mensa. Performed at Carnegie Hall at age 11. As a boy, he relaxed by feeding the wolves at the Bronx Zoo; The New Yorker found that charming. Later, after he snapped, they found him living at the zoo, subsisting on discarded food, bathing in the flamingo pond, crawling among the bushes, hiding in the trees.

  I have 13 photos of Raymond Montgomery Weisz. One for each of the 13 people who refused to help the woman who frantically tried to save her son.

  But that’s all I’ve done: read files, studied microfiche until my vision blurred, collected photos, drafted his biography. My boldest move to date: standing on Park Avenue, outside of Weisz’s mother’s apartment. Not only didn’t I see him, I never saw her.

  No more standing around, thumb up my ass. At some point, theory gives way to action.

  “I told you, Terry,” he said tersely. “All you can do is fuck it up. You want to do right by Marina and your boy, stay home. Write yourself another book.” He tugged at his belt, hitched up his black slacks. “You know, having an uncle as a cop doesn’t make you a P.I. any more than that license does.”

  “My uncle was a stone drunk. He has nothing to do with nothing,” I said. “I told you, plain and straight: It’s about what it’s about. Today, it’s about Aubrey Brown.”

  “You like to rough it up, kid—you got the body for it—but hard-ass doesn’t fit you.”

  “At least we know I won’t walk away, Luther.”

  He started to snap off a reply, but he held back. After a moment’s pause, he started back toward his big black car.

  “I make time of death around midnight,” I said, aiming at his broad back.

  He paused, but did not stop.

  I went west.

  I took the elevator to the floor that held the critical-care unit and checked with the duty nurse, who told me that Judy was out of danger and had been moved upstairs to a regular ward.

  Since it was only three flights up, I decided to take the stairs. When I turned to take the last set of steps, I found Sol Beck sitting on the landing. He seemed beyond forlorn, almost desperate.

  “Hello,” he said softly. “Terry.”

  “Are you all right?”

  He said, “I’m OK.”

  He wore a black shirt and oversized khakis, and there were small splotches of dry paint on his well-worn sneakers.

  “How’s Judy?” I asked.

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “What do they say?”

  He shrugged, then Beck hung his head and stared at the floor. He wasn’t pouting, merely shy or lost in self-pity. He seemed frightened, his skin sallow on his gaunt face.

  I asked, “Did you go back to the gallery?”

  “This morning.”

  “Much damage to your work?”

  “Broken frames. A lot of soot.” He shook his head. “Not really.”

  I watched as he fell back into his own thoughts. I waited, but he was unable to shake off what was gnawing at him. I squeezed by and went onto the floor, toward the nurses’ station.

  Lin-Lin was at the far end of the antiseptic hall. I made my way toward her, past the station, past nurses with carts filled with charts in three-ring binders, pills, other medicines and accessories. A man worked the floor with a buffer, and a woman in a wheelchair beckoned for him to stop so she could roll by. She had a paperback novel in her lap, with its cover torn away. She was missing her right leg.

  As I walked the long hall, men and women, curious yet somehow disassociated, peered from their beds, studying me, perhaps eager to see a new face, hopeful that the visitor was theirs. I peered sideways into the rooms as I went by, and I saw several canes, crutches and wheelchairs, and an artificial leg propped against a nightstand. Physical therapy was a morning thing, and the afternoon was for realizing just how much life had changed.

  Lin-Lin greeted me. “She’s sedated,” she said.

  She stepped aside and I entered the room. The shades had been pulled, and the only light was soft and low, from a fluorescent tube that hummed above Judy’s bed.

  In the dim glow, Judy seemed more an apparition than a physical being: Her skin was a ghostly white, and she looked like an old, old woman. Her head was awkwardly wrapped, and above her right eye was a deep purple-yellow bruise. Her jaw was slack and her body abnormally limp, as if she were unconscious rather than asleep. A thin, soft bedspread covered much of her, but the bottoms of her legs were exposed. One foot was covered with a pale blue sock; the other was gone, and the stump was heavily bandaged.

  A clear solution dripped into a long tube that had been inserted into her arm. Bright flowers, artlessly arranged, filled the nightstand, hovering over the standard-issue telephone. I sat at the side of her bed and gently patted her hand. I noticed that the call-button had been hooked to the top sheet, in case she woke up. When she did come around, when she fought through the narcotic haze, she would understand, and I wondered how she would react. It was impossible to know, I realized quickly. No one could know how she would react; her true reaction would occur only when she was alone, when there was no reason to hold on, when all defenses, unnecessary in solitude, were banished. This I knew well.

  I stared at her, and I began to drift and I saw Marina. Not as she had been, nor as I had ever seen her. I saw her as pale, incorporeal, without expression, bloodless, lying here in front of me, in Judy’s bed, with my hand patting her tanned, tapered fingers.

  But I hadn’t seen her after she died. Her body had been badly mangled, I was told, and it would be difficult for me when I went to the coroner’s to identify what remained.

  I didn’t go; I wasn’t going no matter what condition she was in. So, Benedicto did. He flew in from Italy, and within 90 minutes of arriving in America for only the second time, he went to the coroner’s office to identify his daughter’s body.

  And then he identified the body of his two-year-old grandson.

  I didn’t even go to the funeral.

  Fuck that, I told Diddio.

  I can’t, baby, I told Bella. You go with Pop-Pop and Rafaela.

  I stayed in the bedroom, opening the door only when Bella knocked.

  I came out to put Benedicto and Rafaela, now his only child, in a cab to Kennedy.

  And Bella and I walked for hours, along the Battery.

  When we came home, we found that someone had put flowers and a candle on our front steps. By the next morning, flowers spilled onto Harrison. A photo of the makeshift altar appeared on the cover of The Village Voice.

  “Excuse me.”

  I turned to find a young woman, stethoscope draped around her neck, clipboard in hand. So stereotypically controlled was she that I blinked, thinking I had imagined her as well.

  I stood and slid the chair away from the bed.

  She reached in to take Judy’s pulse, stared at her wrist-watch, then scribbled on a form.

  “How is she, Doctor?”

  She said as she wrote, “She’s stable. Considering what she’s gone through, I’d say she’s doing well.”

  For some reason, the young physician felt I needed comforting, and she squeezed my shoulder and smiled kindly before she turned to leave.

  I followed, and unable to find Marina again, I took a last look at Judy before joining Lin-Lin in the corridor.

  “Is Judy’s family on their way?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” Lin-Lin replied. “But Edie said she spoke with her ex-husband and son.”

  “You talked to Edie?”

  “This morning. She feels she is to blame. Perhaps she could have done more.”

  We stood for a moment in silence in the pale-green corridor, on pale-green linoleum squares. I looked down the long hall, pa
st the hunched man with the buffing machine, past the woman in the steel chair who wheeled slowly toward thin rays of sunlight that squeaked through a window facing east.

  “Terry, I must speak with you,” Lin-Lin said solemnly. We went to a small alcove near the elevators in which sat a single table covered with well-thumbed copies of an entertainment magazine. A vending machine offered fruit juices, and there was a telephone on the wall, hung low enough to be used by people in wheelchairs.

  I joined her at the table. “We were told that you are a private investigator now. Is it true?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is something extraordinary.” She hesitated. “The bomb at the gallery.”

  “Yes…”

  “Sol was hoping maybe it was something else. That maybe…” She let the thought fade away. “Whatever.”

  “Someone calls and says there’s a bomb, and then there’s an explosion, it’s a bomb.”

  She ran her finger along the table. “It’s difficult to be completely rational, Terry.”

  I leaned forward.

  “We don’t want to cooperate with the police. Sol doesn’t want to.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” I said. “It’ll bring trouble down on the both of you.”

  “We are certain that we know who placed the bomb in the gallery,” she said directly. “Sol believes it was his father.”

  “Sol’s father bombed his son’s opening?”

  She nodded. “We believe so, yes. I believe so.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled. “How many answers can there be to that question, Terry?”

  One, I thought, with a million reasons behind it. “I mean, what’s the point?” The bomb was placed where it would do the least amount of damage. It was Judy’s bad luck to go into the storage room.

  “I don’t know if he wanted to hurt Sol, destroy his paintings or ruin his opening. We can’t say we know why he did it. But we believe he did.”

  “It’s no small feat, to be that precise. It’s easier to take down a building.”

  “He could do it,” she nodded. “He was in the Army, in Korea. He was an expert.”

  “Where is he, the father?”

  She dug into her white jacket and came up with a slip of paper.

  I took the note. It said that Chaim Rosenzweig lived on Grove Street in the West Village. “Rosenzweig?”

  “That is Sol’s legal name.”

  I slipped the paper into my breast pocket. “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “But if I think he’s involved, if he had something to do with what happened to Judy, I’ll turn it over to the cops.”

  “I understand.”

  “You should’ve told them yourselves.”

  She disagreed. “It’s better this way.”

  I stood, and she followed me as I went toward the elevator. “Maybe it’d be better if you tell your husband it had nothing to do with his old man.”

  “I cannot. He knows.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  I pressed the button and the painted doors parted. “I’ll call you,” I said as I walked in.

  Lin-Lin watched me as the doors began to close. She nodded and waved, waiting until I was out of sight.

  Mallard was propped in his customary spot under the TV, which now offered NY1 without sound. He looked at me, nodded lethargically, then went back to his copy of yesterday’s Tìmes-Picayune. On the other side of the room, Diddio had the top of the jukebox open and was working under it, as if he were beneath the hood of a ’64 Mustang.

  “Dry,” I said.

  “Take,” he replied. At 350 pounds, Leo Mallard expended as little effort as possible, unless he was extremely enthusiastic about the assignment.

  I stood on the bar rail, reached over the counter and pulled out a bottle of sparkling water from the ice chest. I cracked the top off the quart bottle and drank half of it down in one long, satisfying pull.

  The lazy overhead fan moved the smell of stale beer, cigar smoke and sawdust around the room. I sat on the red Naugahyde stool at the dead center of the bar. A blue neon sign provided by an uninspired salesman flickered unevenly in the front window, while in the back of the room an antiquated pinball machine let out a bleep and groan. Outside, a delivery truck skidded to a halt in front of Zolly’s, a bagel shop on the other side of Hudson.

  “Hey, there he is,” Diddio said. “We were just talking about you.”

  I finished the cold sparkling water, put the green plastic bottle aside and reached into the ice for another.

  “When did we see Elvis Costello at St. John’s? I’m trying to remember the last time I had a driver’s license,” he said. “Remember, I interviewed him in your dorm room, ’cause mine was, you know, like disheveled?”

  Diddio filtered everything through the world of contemporary music, though how contemporary is subject to interpretation. Though he’s able to sustain a living writing about the current music scene, for his own pleasure Diddio listened almost exclusively to rock music from the late ’60s and early ’70s, in particular the Dead, the Band and the Allman Brothers. Despite working his beat in new-music clubs all over Manhattan, he was lost in rock’s glorious past.

  “Man, what kind of useless shit clogs you two up,” muttered Mallard, as he flipped to another page.

  Coincidentally, Diddio’s taste for so-called classic rock and its rhythm-and-blues predecessors brought Mallard’s Tilt-A-Whirl the kind of celebrity Leo never wanted. Diddio was constantly fiddling with the jukebox, bringing in compact disks from his own huge collection. The night a writer from New York magazine wandered in, the jukebox carried a varied, but somehow cohesive, selection and the following week, the magazine pronounced it the best jukebox in New York City. Since then, the Tilt has been swamped with what Leo, generously, calls “Wall Street scum.” Though it offered nothing but a dusty old pinball machine, a buck-a-game pool table, beer nuts, overpriced and watered-down drinks and Diddio’s picks, the Tilt is packed with suits weekdays beginning a little after five. It quieted down about nine: Neighborhood people aren’t too interested in the best jukebox in New York when the owner is trying to clear them out by turning on the lights, spraying Raid and complaining about “rats the size of raccoons.” “One of these days, I got to get me a big rat, case somebody ask to see him,” Mallard once said.

  “What’s going on, Leo?” I asked. On the screen above him, a shaky camera showed a reporter doing his standup in front of City Hall.

  “Lunch,” Mallard replied. His skin was closer to gray than olive, and he had raccoon-like rings around deep-set eyes. Wheezing, his white cotton shirt soaked with sweat, Mallard looked worse than usual today, and he labored as he stood to head out from behind the bar. “I’m making muffulettas,” he said. “I got me some fresh mozzarella.”

  When Mallard returned with the three sandwiches, he instructed Diddio to lock the door and pull the musty green shades. We sat at the corner of the bar. Ignoring Diddio’s efforts, Mallard slapped on a cassette of Professor Longhair; New Orleans-style piano darted and danced as we ate ham, salami and mozzarella stacked on French bread with lettuce and a trickle of olive oil.

  “You’re all duded up today, Terry,” Diddio observed, pointing at my outfit.

  “Funeral. Up in Harlem. Cabdriver.”

  “That body you found when I was sitting for Gabby.”

  “I bet they was wailing all over themselves,” Mallard said. “Blacks is worser than Italians at a funeral.” He threw down a handful of napkins. “Hacking ain’t a good way to make a living,” he added. “Risky.”

  I nodded. I’d read that about 30 to 35 cabbies get killed every year in New York; 42, a couple of years ago.

  Diddio seemed to be struggling with the oversized sandwich; a strand of lettuce had landed on the front of his black t-shirt. I looked behind his wire-rimmed glasses. Diddio was a world-class pothead, a connoisseur of weed. Today, now, he seemed fine.

  Leo asked, “You gonna do something for this guy?”

/>   “Why not?”

  “Let me ask you this,” Diddio said, as he touched his shoulder-length, midnight-black hair. “I mean, you know, were you like the only white guy up there?”

  “In Harlem?” Until about 96th Street. “Yeah.”

  “Woof,” Diddio said. “The only place I been to in Harlem is the Apollo. No, wait, I saw Craig Handy at the Lenox. And Andrew Hill at the Schomberg. It’s a little too scary up there for me. Man, one block the wrong way and bang.” He smacked his fist into his open palm. Then, he added with a shrug, “Maybe it’s me. Too much gangsta rap.”

  “Hey,” Mallard cheered, “who’s gonna fuck with the brooding man? Terry, you was brooding all the way up-town with that big frown and that temper you got. Six-four, 225 and stomping and brooding.”

  Diddio looked at Mallard and laughed. “Terry, don’t get all defensive. We’re only teasing you, man. I mean, like, don’t bust up Leo’s bar again, all right? If you’re going to smack us with a pool cue, maybe you could do it outside.”

  This past summer, two guys who didn’t make the shape-up at a construction site near the Holland Tunnel entered the Tilt in a belligerent mood, threw back their Beam-and-beers too quickly and started hassling Mallard, who at his weight, with his lack of mobility, can’t really defend himself unless he produces the .38 Smith & Wesson he keeps taped under the bar. I was in a back booth, thwarted momentarily in my self-imposed tutorial by a particularly incomprehensible passage in a brief, when they went too far. I cracked one with a pool cue. The other I dropped with a right under the ribs and another to the point of his jaw. The second shot sent him into the jukebox, cracking the glass. I admit I’ve got a temper, and it’s gotten me into more trouble than I can recall, but I was clear when I tore down those guys.

  The cassette tape behind Mallard went silent, and Diddio sprang from his seat. “Leo, let me,” he said and slid to the jukebox. A moment later, “Chest Fever” by the Band surrounded us.

  “Diddio says you was at that gallery last night that blowed up,” Mallard said. He reached into the ice and withdrew a Jax. Born and raised just outside of New Orleans, he was the most brand-loyal guy I knew, going so far as to have a week’s worth of the Times-Picayune FedExed to him each Monday by his sister down in Lafourche. “You lucky you didn’t get hurt.”