Closing Time

by Fusilli, Jim;

  “Dad, you’re losing your touch. I think I’ll take you tomorrow.”

  “The wind took it,” I said, pointing to the threatening, steel-gray-and-blue sky.

  “‘The wind took it.’” She repeated as she picked up the bottle and dunked it in the can. “Somehow, I can’t imagine Automatic Slim saying that.”

  We started toward Grand Army Plaza, where jittery pigeons pecked at birdseed and bread crumbs laid out by a hunched woman in a floral scarf who carried empty aluminum cans in a baby carriage. Two men in African garb made their way around the flock of bobbing birds as they walked toward the east side.

  “Bella, I’ve been meaning to ask you something: How’s Mordecai Foxx doing?”

  She hesitated. “Pretty good.”

  “You didn’t think I knew.”

  “Who told you?” she asked.

  “And you’ve got him there with Tilden and Tweed and Riis and Slippery Dick?”

  “Right with them,” she said, looking ahead, toward the yellow taxis and hansom cabs and the many national flags that fluttered aggressively over the hotel’s entrance. The new one by Merchant-Ivory was at the Paris Theater.

  “Bella, you know there was no private investigator working for Tilden called Mordecai Foxx.”

  She stopped, but did not face me.

  “You made him up.”

  “There could have been a guy like him,” she offered.

  “I think I would’ve known. I mean, some people say I wrote a pretty good book about those guys.”

  “Maybe you should write a book about Mordecai Foxx,” she said. She reached up and adjusted her hat, pressing it down to keep it from flying away in the wind that ripped across town.

  I turned her toward me and I looked down at her red cheeks, her dark eyes. “Maybe you ought to. Let’s see if you can write a book.”

  “I did it for you, the research.”

  We held hands as we crossed 58th Street.

  “You have been writing, Dad. Admit it.”

  I decided to tell her. “I write letters, Bella. To your mother.”

  She looked at me, her expression somewhere between shock and surprise. “You do? Can I see them?”

  “If you let me see your journal…”

  She paused, then said, “I don’t think I’ll do that. But will you tell me?”

  “About what I write? Sure. Why not?” Then I said, “By the way, nice name. Mordecai Foxx. It’s got a ring of authenticity.”

  “You think so?” she asked. “I thought so too.”

  “Do something with it,” I challenged.

  She said, “I could write a book.”

  “Sure.”

  “I could. I’m disciplined. I’m smart.”

  “In two weeks, you won’t even remember that you said you could.”

  “Hah,” she barked.

  “I’ll give you three-to-one for all the money in the trunk of your Barbie car that you can’t write one chapter of a mystery featuring Mordecai Foxx.”

  “Make it $100 at four-to-one and you’ve got a deal,” she said.

  I stuck out my hand and we shook. “One chapter by January first,” I said.

  “I’ll give you one by Monday,” she replied.

  We turned to walk on, and she draped her arm around my waist and I felt her head against my ribs. She looked up at me and she smiled.

  We went on toward the cabstand. We would slip inside a warm taxi and a driver with an unpronounceable name would head south down Fifth, passing St. Patrick’s and the crowds at Saks and the Library. And I would offer Bella my shoulder and she might take it, or she might not. She might pull a book from her bag, the Salinger or the Auster I’d gotten her, maybe; or she might talk to me about something Diddio had said, or she might point to some strange man on the street with a green Mohawk, or a woman in Versace with a Vietnamese pig on a ruby-studded leash, or a pop star. Mrs. Maoli, she might say, said something funny today, imitating her Italian accent to demonstrate how she abused the English language. As she told her tales, Bella would bubble, Bella would exude life, would radiate life.

  I held open the taxicab door for her and she squeezed by to jump inside.

  I slid in beside her. For now, thoughts of revenge, of atonement, of justice, of vindication were set aside.

  In the moments before twilight, we were on our way home.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Terry Orr Mysteries

  ONE

  Her name was Dorotea Salgado. Our housekeeper called her a friend.

  She was sitting in a two-seat booth with her long, crinkled hands folded on the tabletop, and as I approached her she looked blankly at me, then returned to staring into the distance, toward the dappled sunlight and budding trees in Union Square Park. Her hollow, angular face was scored with wrinkles and dark lines, and her skin sagged slightly from the jaw. She wore a modest dress, burgundy with a paisley print, over her thin frame. Strands of gray, standing in contrast to her black hair, rested above her ears. At her side near the window sat a square pocketbook that wasn’t new. It matched her brown belt and sensible shoes.

  The old, ’40s-style clock above the entrance to the kitchen read DIAMONDS, but if that was the name of the place, no one used it: The red-neon sign out front said COFFEE SHOP and nothing more.

  At 11 on a Monday morning, black stools waited for customers at the Formica counter, and the small dining room to my right was empty except for a man working a laptop, nursing a mug of coffee.

  I was in here once on a Sunday morning at about eight and was the only one who hadn’t been out all night.

  “Mrs. Salgado?”

  She looked at me and blinked her sad eyes and said, “Yes.”

  I told her I was Terry Orr. She slid out of the booth and stood. She was of average height and that made her much shorter than me.

  She had a faint accent. Mrs. Maoli had said she was Cuban.

  “Please,” she said as she gestured to the booth.

  I waited for her to sit. When she did, I squeezed in across from her, leaving my legs in the aisle.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  I nodded.

  When the waitress appeared, I ordered coffee black.

  “An espresso, Mrs. Salgado?” I asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  In here, espresso was as close as we’d get to café Cubano, which had the viscosity of Brent crude and enough caffeine to jump-start a slug.

  I waited for her to doctor her drink with sugar. Her teaspoon clinked the sides of the tiny cup.

  She wore her gold wedding band on her right hand.

  “You’re looking for your daughter,” I began.

  “Yes,” she said, “Sonia.”

  “Where did you last see her?”

  “In Bedford Hills.”

  “You haven’t seen her since her release?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you know where she went?”

  Again, no.

  “I see.” I went gently. “You’re not close…”

  She looked down into the cup. “It is difficult. Mistakes were made, and, no, she didn’t want me to come see her.”

  “‘Mistakes?’”

  “I—I was very angry,” she said, “and then maybe it was too late.” She hesitated. “In time, I visited, but she preferred not. Maybe so I would not see my daughter grow old in prison.”

  Our housekeeper Mrs. Maoli told me Sonia Salgado had been in Bedford Hills, a maximum-security facility up in Westchester, but between her wobbly English and my poor Italian she hadn’t been able to give me much more. Her friend Mrs. Salgado was “a good woman, not young now—she must not work at this age. She has many problems. Her grandson is not well.” Urging her to tell me more, I learned that the Italian word for a woman who murdered is assassina.

  Mrs. Maoli mimicked downward strokes with a knife.

  “Even after thirty years, she is my daughter,” the old Cuban woman said.

  “Did she have
any plans? A job?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I have no information.”

  I sipped the bland coffee. “Is it possible she wanted to disappear?”

  “Possible, yes.”

  “Is there a reason you need to find her?”

  She frowned quizzically. “Did Natalia tell—Do you know about Enrique?”

  “Is he the grandson?”

  “He’s very sick. She should see him.”

  “Mrs. Maoli said the boy has never seen his grandmother. Is that—”

  “No. We would not take him to prison.”

  “How old is the boy?”

  “He is three.”

  I found myself sketching invisible flow charts with my finger on the tabletop, avoiding the coffee-cup rings. “I’m trying to understand: You haven’t seen her since—”

  “Not in five years. This Christmas, five years. For a few minutes only.”

  “Does she know she has a grandson?”

  “I wrote to her, yes.”

  I leaned forward. “There’s no easy way to say this—”

  “I understand, Mr. Orr, that Sonia does not want to see me and she does not want to see Enrique. I understand. But the situation has changed.”

  “Perhaps not for Sonia, Mrs. Salgado.”

  She stopped, then she shook her head. “I cannot explain. She is my daughter. I am seventy years old. And Enrique is sick.”

  “Sure,” I nodded, “and you want to make things right.”

  “I think it is too late to make things right. But she was my little girl,” she said without a trace of sentiment, without anger. “Then she was lost to me. I cannot explain. The newspapers said she was a monster. No.”

  Thirty years in Bedford Hills made it Murder One for Sonia Salgado. There was no sense asking her mother why she’d done it. A premeditated killing meant money or revenge.

  “Perhaps she’s hiding, Mrs. Salgado. That may be why she can’t be found.”

  “I have thought of this and this is why I ask you and I do not ask the police. You can find her and you can give me the information. No one will know.”

  “You expose her and you may put her—and yourself—in danger.”

  “Mr. Orr, I just want to see my little girl. I want her to see Enrique. I want to see what is possible now.”

  “I understand, but—”

  “And you help children, Mr. Orr. We know this.”

  On the north side of Union Square Park, they were cleaning away the debris from the Farmers’ Market: Rotted fruit that had escaped the homeless lay in a pile near the curb. A city dump-truck moaned and wheezed as it backed toward 17th Street.

  “Sure, Mrs. Salgado. Why not?”

  She smiled, not in triumph but as if to signal that a burden had been lifted, a milepost passed.

  “Give me a call in a day or two,” I added.

  “Thank you.”

  “No thanks yet,” I said. “Let’s wait until something gets done.”

  She reached for her handbag, but I dug out a five before she could get her money to the table.

  “No, Mr. Orr, I insist.” She pulled out a small brown wallet and dropped two folded singles between our cups.

  That wasn’t enough to cover my coffee, but I said nothing. I shouldn’t have asked the proud old woman to meet me at this place, whose high prices paid for a hip cachet rather than customer satisfaction.

  But since Mrs. Maoli said she knew Dorotea Salgado from the Farmers’ Market, I thought it might be convenient for her.

  What kind of people charge $3 for coffee?

  I told her I was going to have another cup. She thanked me again, and I waited until she was halfway to Lex before I asked for the check. I left her two singles as a tip.

  The New York County District Attorney’s office is about a two-mile walk from Union Square. The best way to get there on a mild April morning is to cut through the park and stay on Fourth until the Bowery meets up with Park Row; or just take Lafayette through Little Italy toward the construction near Paine Park. Either way was faster than a cab, especially today: Somebody’d been given a big enough bag of cash to let Tim Robbins take over Spring near Balthazar for his latest flick, and traffic on Broadway had slowed to a dribble. Or so said WNYC before I left the house.

  I went toward Fourth, stopping briefly by the melted candles, weathered fliers and inexhaustible well of sadness at the makeshift tribute to the victims of the World Trade Center attacks that stood sentry to Brown’s statue of Washington on horseback. As I walked along the wide avenue, passing a Salvation Army thrift store, a year-round costume shop dubbed the Masters of Masquerade and the elaborate and decidedly English architecture of the Grace Church School, I called Sharon Knight, the best known and perhaps the best of Morgenthau’s army of assistant district attorneys. A secretary with a Jamaican accent told me she was in court, so I asked for Julie Giada and got her voice mail. The clock in the musical quarter note on Carl Fischer’s building told me a lunch recess wasn’t too far off, so I kept going and arrived at Hogan Place just short of 45 minutes later: If Julie got my message, she’d help.

  If Sharon was the star in the D.A.’s office, Julie was its angel. Julie, Sharon once said, had “a big, big heart,” and added that “it’s too bad she’s doesn’t check with her head now and then.” Julie was plenty smart, but I knew what her boss meant: She liked to dig through the system to find lost causes—a bag lady who didn’t want to move off a grate in Sutton Place, a wizened old man set up to take a fall by his pinstriped nephew and trophy wife, a wide-eyed yet insolent kid caught playing lookout for the neighborhood drug dealer. Julie had interned in the Brooklyn D.A.’s, then joined full-time after graduation from Penn Law. She spent a year in private practice, but jumped at the chance to come into Sharon’s small group. “She really should’ve joined the Legal Aid, ACLU, something,” Sharon laughed. “If I didn’t trust her with my soul, I’d think she was working us from the inside.” Maybe Julie’s compassion would extend to the mother and grandson of a murderer.

  I breezed through the first metal detector, then another, and I took the elevator upstairs. The receptionist was a cop who long ago had been taken off the streets and given a job that kept him warm and relatively safe: He still carried a service revolver. His family name was Casey, and whenever I came up here, perhaps 50 times in the past four years, he reacted as if he’d never seen me before.

  “Officer Casey,” I said with a nod.

  He pushed aside his copy of the Post. “What’ll it be?” he asked blankly. The thin black man had pale blue eyes and a long chin.

  “Julie Giada, please,” I said.

  “Are you somebody by the name of Terry Orr?”

  “Terry Orr,” I replied, surprised.

  “You have some ID?”

  I dug out my wallet and showed him my P.I. license.

  He handed me a white envelope that bore the New York County crest. “Julie’s still out.”

  I nodded.

  “You can call later if you want.”

  “OK.”

  I tore open the envelope and slid out a single sheet of paper.

  Sonia Salgado’s address. St. Mark’s Garden in the East Village.

  I stopped at Bazzini’s, grabbed a salade niçoise and a half-pound of raw pumpkin seeds for lunch and brought it in a sack across Greenwich Avenue to my house. As I punched in the security code, I looked west to the river and watched it roll by for a while, its narrow ripples undisturbed by ocean-bound boat traffic or heavy winds, its scent barely discernible in the warm spring air. But at that moment the light scent was as fragrant as the saltiest sea, because its presence meant that the oppressive odor of toxins and death had finally been vanquished.

  With the door open a crack behind me, I sat on the front steps, a mere eight blocks from where the World Trade Center had stood, and looked up at the wooden water tanks and ornate acanthus leaves in the fading green copper edging high on the buildings on Greenwich and Hudson. Bathed in sun
light, they seemed fine now, crowns on vital, broad-shouldered homes brimming with activity—creativity, housework, children playing, music, laughter—or quiet, as people slept off long nights of work and pleasure. But I knew that tomorrow these buildings might once again seem fragile repositories of gloom and sorrow, sagging remnants of a once-thriving neighborhood hit by an inglorious attack, by a stunning loss of life and the overwhelming aftermath: police sirens, a din of whirling helicopter blades, panic, crippling fear, brilliant klieg lights, expressionless soldiers in high boots and khaki carrying M16s, firemen in uniform staggering away from their 12-hour shifts (opposite raccoons, Bella called them, their faces black with soot and their eye sockets unmarked thanks to protective goggles), horrified tourists slowly approaching the burning chasm in the city, the nation. Neighbors lost in grief. The smell of death, the eerie silence.

  Everywhere, every day, I see signs of hope, and of distress and defeat. A new restaurant opens on Harrison to rave reviews, Windows on the World is gone forever. A bustling crowd at a five-and-dime on Chambers, a shuttered storefront on Reade. A red carnation in a flower bed high on a ledge on Warren, and sidewalks still covered in a gray sheet of ash. American flags that have fallen from cars are now soiled rags in black water pooled in the gutter. (“Bella, I’m not sure you’re supposed to put a flag in the washing machine.”) On Duane, a Champagne party celebrating the anniversary of a shop that sells tchotchkes from England. On Duane, a man sitting on the steel steps of an old egg depot, his head buried in his hands as he sobs uncontrollably.

  I believe we will be all right. We are resilient. We are strong.

  We will never be the same. Something in us has been altered forever.

  I’ve heard both sentiments expressed by the same people, unaware they had said the opposite moments earlier.

  What can I say? I know what it’s like to be caught between echoes of death and the possibility of recovery.

  It takes a boundless courage to hope.

  I mean, why should we bother?

  Because we are inexorably driven toward life, even in the darkest hours. We must accept this. Failing to do so, we are fighting our best angels. We are defeating ourselves.

  And when we smile, we are asking the dead to forgive us. When we laugh, we know they have.