Sunny's Nights

by Tim Sultan

  Sunny lowered his voice though we were alone.

  “I trust your honor, your friendship,” he said, haltingly. “I have never spoken to anyone about this other than my brother Ralph. Not Tone, not to my family, not to my friends. But I’m telling you so you might understand why my mother was the way she was. She must have been living with her aunt and uncle when this occurred. Anyway, she and her brother—my uncle Tony—went to visit their father one day. Perhaps they intended to surprise him because when they entered his apartment, there was a body there of a woman cut in two. What an experience that must have been for her. For any child. I don’t know the details, but my grandfather was arrested for murder and apparently there was a trial and in the end, he was found innocent. Nonetheless, the stigma was so great that he changed his name, from Travia to Travis. Francisco Travia became Frank Travis. My mother never spoke of that incident again and I never knew all of what took place. I loved my grandfather very much, Timmy. He was always so kind to me and I’ve not been able to reconcile this bloody image with the man I knew.

  “The truth of the matter is there is so much that I don’t know and that I would like to know. And I know that you have some knowledge of these things, of how to look up old newspapers, police files, whatnot. I wonder whether in your spare time you might be able…”

  “I can try to do that, Sunny.”

  “I would so very much appreciate that. Me, I wouldn’t know where to start at a library, in that sea of words. I don’t think I’ve read ten entire books in my life. I wish I had that capability.”

  He refilled our mugs with coffee. “My mom was a sweet lady, Timmy. I mean, really, really nice. Too bad she had to spend a good part of her life regurgitating those experiences that got to her very early on.”

  What to Sunny might have seemed an overwhelming endeavor had taken no more than several hours of sitting cross-legged on a library floor, combing the small print of heavy-bound volumes of annual newspaper indexes for the name Travia. Even so, the moment of discovery of a lone entry for Travia, Francisco had been unexpectedly affecting. While I had never sought validation of Sunny’s memories, it had seemingly come to me nonetheless.

  “Travia.” The caption beneath the photograph of Sunny’s grandfather misspelled his name as Francisco Trapia. I returned to the top of the page and began reading.

  A middle-aged woman, a wife, and mother of three children, was beaten to death with a huge chisel and then hacked in two with a butcher’s knife early today in a flat on the top floor of 56 Sackett St.

  Her slayer, Francisco Trapia, aged 33, of the Sackett St. address, was captured by the police and under severe questioning he has told varying stories. He was caught trying to dispose of the legs he had severed from the body.

  At first the police believed his tale that the woman was a waterfront character, known only as “Marie,” but at noon the torso—all of her body that has been recovered—was identified at the morgue in Kings County Hospital as that of Mrs. Anna T. Frederick, 42, of 566 Henry St.

  HUSBAND IDENTIFIES HER

  The identification was made by her husband, Frederick Frederick, who became prostrated at the Morgue and was unable to help the police much in determining how his wife had come to be in Trapia’s clutches. He insisted that his wife was a good woman and that she was devoted to her children.

  Ms. Frederick failed to come home at 6 o’clock last night, he said, but he did nothing about it until this noon when he sent their daughter, Anna, 13, to the Hamilton Ave. station to report her as missing. The police questioned the child and then sent for the father.

  SEES MAN CARRYING BUNDLE

  At 7 o’clock this morning Patrolman James Anderson of the Hamilton Ave. station was standing on post at India Wharf and Hamilton Avenue. He was soaked through from the heavy rain and fog and it was so murky that he could not see the tugs that were fog-horning their way through the adjacent waters.

  Looking toward Hamilton Ave., he observed a phantomlike figure scurrying along, blurred in the mist. He looked closely, for the man appeared to be misshapen. Then Anderson observed that the fellow was carrying a bundle on his head. It was a queer bundle, of burlap and an old army overcoat. The man kept looking behind as he hurried toward the wharf.

  DROPS BUNDLE IN WATER

  Patrolman Anderson started to intercept the man before he could reach the pier, but the man heard him and moved faster, darting ahead in quick spurts.

  “Where you going there?”

  The man heard the patrolman’s shout and ran headlong, reaching the pier first and dropping, then kicking, his bundle over the edge into the thick, oily water. Then the man ran and Anderson went after him.

  Over Conover St., up Hamilton Ave., over Van Brunt St., Anderson emptied his pistol in the air. He knew workmen were on their way to the piers at that hour and in the uncertain fog he didn’t dare shoot directly at the fleeing figure. It was all he could do, in his heavy raincoat, to keep the man in sight.

  COP ON POST HALTS HIM

  A block from the Hamilton Ave. station Patrolman Louis Vitalo was standing on post. He heard the shots and looked and was almost bowled over by the figure catapulting out of the fog. He grabbed him and the two went down. Anderson came up quickly and it was all both policemen could do to subdue their prisoner.

  At the Hamilton Ave. station Capt. Daniel O’Connor was just going on duty. Anderson turned in his prisoner.

  “I don’t know what it’s all about, but there’s something mighty funny,” he said.

  The prisoner gave a name and address. Detectives were dispatched to the place. No such person was known. He gave addresses at Coney Island and South Brooklyn. All proved false.

  TAXI DRIVER GIVES CLUE

  Then Captain O’Connor sent Anderson and Vitalo with Sgt. John Weisenrider down to India Wharf to see about the bundle. They ran into Rocco Zaquerella, a taxi driver, of 45 Sackett Street.

  “I know that guy you was chasing this morning,” said Zaquerella to Anderson. “He lives up at 56 Sackett—Apartment 19. I was on my way to the garage and I saw you leggin’ it. His name is Trapia.”

  The police went to No. 56. They broke into the three-room flat on the top. In the first room, they found nothing. In the second, they saw where someone had been sleeping. It was dark and they threw their searchlights on the floor.

  In a bundle they found the nude torso of a woman, crudely severed just above the hips. The carpet was soaked in blood. On the floor was the chisel—of steel with a large wooden handle.

  BREAKS DOWN, ADMITS CRIME

  The police hurried back to their station. Trapia at first was sullenly indignant. Then he broke down.

  Captain O’Connor got an idea.

  “Take off your shoes,” he ordered.

  Trapia did and disclosed blood-soaked woolen socks.

  “I killed her,” he said.

  Then he told of having known the woman for ten months.

  “REVENGE” HIS MOTIVE

  Trapia said he killed her in revenge.

  “Last night she come to my house. She was drunk. She fell asleep. I couldn’t sleep. So I get up. I get the chisel. I hit her on the head,” he confessed.

  Acting Capt. George Bishop, in charge of detectives of the 11th district, notified Deputy Inspector John J. Sullivan, head of Brooklyn police, and both took a detailed statement from Trapia. By the time they finished with him, Trapia realized that he had said too much and he changed his story.

  Calling Lieut. John Rand he gave another version. He said the woman came to his place and he told her to go away. But she sat down in a chair and he was going to pick her up and toss her out when he saw that she was dead.

  That, according to his last story, was at 9 o’clock last night. A dead woman in his flat worried him. The idea of cutting her in two and throwing the pieces in the harbor struck him. No one would ever know, because no one ever inquired about “Marie.”

  He was charged with homicide and an autopsy will be performed tomorrow at
King’s County Hospital after the Marine police recover the legs from the water.

  What I knew of Sunny’s family had always been limited by the frailty of his memory. It was like standing in a kitchen and through a swinging pantry door, observing the Balzanos and the Travias seated around a dinner table in a room that was only lit by occasional flashes of lightning coming through a window. Now a lamp had abruptly been turned on above the head of one of the guests.

  When I called to let Sunny know that I had succeeded in finding accounts of his grandfather’s case, he invited me to come over straightaway.

  “I’ll fix us breakfast!” he said, though it was the afternoon. It was his favorite meal and he would prepare it any time of day and sometimes very late at night when a bartender’s stomach is at its hollowest.

  I pulled the articles out of my bag and placed them on his dining table. “I have to confess, I’m feeling anxious about learning what it is that you have uncovered,” he said. Sunny put on his reading glasses and leaned over to look at the photograph of his grandfather.

  “Wow. Amazing. I don’t see him that way in my memory. Although I see my mother’s features—I see the cheekbones—but he looks really bad. He’s just a kid here. That’s amazing. How old does it say he was here?”

  “Thirty-three years.”

  “Thirty-three years old. My grandfather. I love you. My grandfather. I don’t have any photographs of him, Timmy. I haven’t seen his face except in my mind for fifty, sixty years.” Sunny bit back tears.

  “You don’t see him as you remember him?” I asked quietly.

  “I am beginning to now. He’s got black hair and when I knew him, his hair was white. But the hairline is the same. I can cut through all of this and see the beautiful man that I knew. What’s this say? ‘Mother of three children. Slain by a friend, body cut in two’?”

  “Fiend. ‘Slain by a fiend.’ You want me to read it to you?”

  “Yeah. They probably cuss him out. They make him seem like a real piece of shit, I’m sure.”

  I read each of the stories aloud, including a Brooklyn Eagle story with the memorable headline “Woman Not Dead When Travia Cut Off Legs.” Sunny listened raptly.

  When I had finished, he let out a long sigh and held his grandfather’s picture in front of him in silence. I began clearing the table.

  “That’s what my mother must have seen,” he said after a while. “My mother must have been brought up into that apartment by her brother, my uncle Tony, and there was blood all over.

  “I’d like to go to that address and the wharf, Timmy. The fact that they acquitted him after an hour of deliberation had to be the result of a very smart lawyer, because it seems to me that from what I just heard, I would have said, ‘Hang the son of a bitch.’ And they could have. That picture of him is really diabolical looking. In those days, if you were Italian you were guilty before you were proven innocent.”

  I told him his grandfather’s lawyer was in fact Alfred E. Smith, the son and namesake of New York’s most famous governor and head of the 1928 Democratic Presidential ticket. This was Smith’s first case and he relied on the testimony of the chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, who convinced the jury that Ms. Frederick had died of carbon monoxide leaking from the stove after a coffeepot had boiled over and extinguished the pilot light. It was the first use of forensic pathology in a trial defense in American history and Norris would later say that the Travia case was the most notable of his career.

  “Al Smith! This is all such a surprise to me, Timmy. I never imagined my family connected to his name, Timmy. And in such a way.”

  He stared at his grandfather’s miserable face again.

  “I was much closer with this grandfather than with my grandfather Balzano—who I lived with. Sometimes I think it’s true that familiarity can breed a kind of contempt. The thing you miss most is the thing you’re not with most of the time and I was hardly ever with Grandfather Travia. He was a mystery to me. He didn’t speak any English really, he lived in Coney Island, he wore a cowboy suit, and he worked at the Steeplechase Park. They had a stage, like a little theater, and his job was to slap the men on the ass with a slapstick—it was like a paddle that clicked—and to blow up women’s dresses with an air blower.

  “Unlike my other grandfather, I truly loved my grandfather Travia. I didn’t know him really outside the experiences I had with him in Coney Island and in my experiences, he was a loving man. I would have liked to get to know him better but a kid is never going to get to know a man. Every now and then, we would go see my grandfather at the Steeplechase, blowing up the women’s dresses and sometimes smacking them on the ass. He would take us backstage and introduce us to the clowns and midgets and whatnot, so we had a real feeling of belonging, of being insiders, and a kid feels good about something like that. Knowing what I know now, that circus must have had a real dark side. It was a freak show of a kind, and you think of the stories these people had to tell. They all had to have stories. They had to have backgrounds some of which might have been so dark. You know the expression, birds of a feather flock together? To me, the Steeplechase was a good example of that. People who came together in that environment, they had something in common outside the parade of acrobats and animals and tricks and gymnastics and tightrope walking. But I wasn’t aware of that side. A kid has to rely on the obvious things and from what I knew of him, what I saw of him, my grandfather had a great heart.

  “He was always giving me little presents from his treasure hunting and at Easter, he would bring me chicks or a bunny rabbit, which I kept in coops in the backyard. I’ll never forget this one particular animal. And I tell you this story so you understand how I came to feel so differently about my grandfathers. I had a lot of heartbreaks when it came to animals, even as a grown-up. The truth of the matter is I’ve suffered as great a pain from the loss of some of my animals as I have from my own family. Well, I had a bunny rabbit that Grandfather Francisco had given me and every morning before school, I would run downstairs and feed that bunny rabbit. I looked forward to seeing him. One day, the rabbit wasn’t there. I remember it was on a Sunday because on Sundays, we would usually go to my grandmother’s next door for dinner. So, I ran next door and up the stairs into the room where the whole family was sitting and I said, ‘Grandpa, where’s my bunny rabbit? I can’t find my bunny rabbit!’ And my grandfather Balzano and a good many of the folks at the table began to snicker. They couldn’t answer the question but I could perceive what the situation was. The food on their table was my fuckin’ bunny rabbit. How could anyone not feel some compassion for the pain of a child whose pet was on the dinner table? But that was my grandfather Balzano. And that was the beginning of my loss of any real sort of affection for him.

  “Once that had taken place, I began to not treat him with the same kind of respect as I did before that happened. I became a grown-up of some kind after that, even though I was young.

  “I am glad I got to know my grandfather Travia as I did. But I reflect sometimes, I watch the images in my memory and I imagine him bringing all these wonderful things to us and treating us as kindly as he did, and I imagine him up on that stage, in his cowboy suit. And then every once in a while I get this flash of him cutting up a body. It’s a strange juxtaposition of images. The image where he’s doing this thing, chopping up a body, that’s my imagination. That’s not a memory that comes from living and experience. But nonetheless, it’s as powerful to me as though I had witnessed it.

  “But, Timmy, thank you for doing what you did. You have to understand I truly loved my grandfather. He was a great guy. He ended up in a nursing home. He died by fire as well. Smoking in bed. Not only did his wife die by fire, he also died by fire.

  “I still love him. I love him.”

  * * *

  25

  Christina’s World

  The years had been generous to Sunny. His face was unmarked by wrinkles and although his hair had turned a streaked gray, it was as abundant as a chi
ld’s—my own had been in recession since my twenties. He was also one of those people who seemed not to be aging so much as always coming of age. Ever idealistic, rarely cynical, he had the carefree, and occasionally imprudent, attitude of someone who believed that their whole life was ahead of them. Another man his age might begin planning for his golden years by, say, belatedly opening a retirement account; Sunny’s 401K was a painting given to him one night by an elderly gangster, unsuspecting of its worth. Though unsigned, Sunny had a hunch—he was, after all, very familiar with Cubism—but he maintained a poker face until after he saw the man to the door, whereupon he quickly turned the lock and dimmed the lights should the man have a change of heart. He would go to some trouble to have it authenticated but wasn’t bothered by the minor detail of provenance. Cervantes would have made a case study of Sunny.

  In drinking, he could still outlast any customer at the bar and it seemed likely he would outlive many of them as well. Though I never knew him to behave particularly drunkenly, Sunny drank more than anyone I had ever known. He drank when he worked with me on Friday nights but also in the mornings afterward. He drank in the way people snack between meals and preferred drinking to eating—although over six feet tall, he weighed little more than one hundred and thirty pounds. A shot of whiskey was his idea of the perfect interlude, and a cigarette the perfect conclusion not only to the carnal but to every occasion.