by Alaric Hunt
“But you found him,” Guthrie said.
John nodded. “He don’t want to be found,” he said again. “Ghost Eddy ain’t friendly.” He waved toward Cindy, shoulder-high above them on the porch. “She wants to hurt him now.”
“Then maybe you all better stay away from him,” Guthrie said.
The drifter relaxed but didn’t stop moving. “I know,” he said. “He woulda killed Danny. That’s what he aimed to do. He aimed to teach us a lesson about following.”
“What happened?”
“Like this,” the drifter said, his orbit slowing a bit as he recounted. “Closer to the park, there’s a drunk called Stoop-O, and he would cling like a crumb to Ghost Eddy’s whiskers. I thought that out and Cindy agreed that been a good place to start. There’s an old sandwich shop on One Thirty-eighth called Villa’s. Stoop-O usually starts out there, digging for not good enough—leftovers, huh? Not good enough to eat. That’s what’s in the trash there. The river flows by the cans and drops off not good enough.
“So we went down early. The kids did a look-see, like they were searching for cops, and sure enough found Stoop-O. We laid on him and didn’t say because—well, we could have given him an ice cream, even though they were all melted and he woulda had to drink it, but he’s a craphead and he don’t never share with nobody except himself—and so we laid and didn’t say. One of the boys thought we should clean the cans in front of him, but I said he would just move along and we wanted to watch him. Cindy said so, too. We watched Stoop-O.
“After he filled his fat belly, he moved on. He was belching and rubbing his mouth like it was set for wine. That meant he was going to steal or bully, on account that Stoop-O is too lazy to bag cans. That be part of why he wants to sit beside Ghost Eddy, because he always has whatever he wants, even good enough if he wants, or so the story goes.” The drifter frowned. “I didn’t see until now, but Ghost Eddy must’ve liked him until earlier, because he never could’ve bullied Ghost Eddy for no wine.”
Vasquez crossed her arms and started to say something, but Guthrie gestured for her to be quiet. The light was failing fast, and there was no streetlight in the alley. At full night, the alley would be almost pitch-dark. Black-haired John didn’t notice. His orbit, and his story, rambled on.
“And we trailed Stoop-O. He didn’t see nothing. He gets grabbed all the time because he can’t see cops coming. I say he’s too lazy to look. He moved along like he had something in mind, not like he was just going round somewhere to check, but knows it’s there and where, and we follow him right into the trap because we’re looking at him. How stupid is Black-haired John? So stupid he has to watch what anybody could see—Stoop-O—instead of watching for Ghost Eddy.” The drifter’s voice edged up and crested at an angry shout. Spittle flew from his mouth. His orbit reversed, then quickened.
“Down by the station on One Fifty-first, that’s where he went. Ghost Eddy done gone mole, spooked before he knew we was looking. That’s how smart Ghost Eddy is—too smart for Black-haired John. He seen Stoop-O coming. He seen us trailing Stoop-O. Ghost Eddy seen it all. Can’t give him no ice cream to make it better!
“But anyway, we ain’t knowed.” The drifter’s voice settled, and his feet slowed again. “Cindy knowed something was queer when Stoop-O stopped by that old lot with the manhole on One Fifty-first, looking round like his momma should be by, and puzzled. Then we heard Danny screaming like the devil had him. He was gone so quick … by me one moment, then down the street screaming the next, as if the wind gusted him there.”
In the darkness, Cindy stood and peered down at them from the railing surrounding the old porch. On quiet feet, she slipped down the stairs. Her pale shirt was speckled with dark droplets. Dark puddles on the cloth trailed small, dark handprints on her body like a mockery of walking by someone with dirty hands.
“Then we forgot all about Stoop-O,” Black-haired John continued. “You can recognize a scream, you know, if it’s someone’s voice familiar, near to you. So we all knowed it was Danny and we ran down the street—and damn Stoop-O anyway. Many’s a night you can’t avoid seeing him, as well he might be following you, as constant as the moon. We ran, and there’s another lot down that way, where they’s fixing something, or building on it. Danny’s hanging high on the wall. He’s screaming still, but softer. I climb up the scaffold there and catch him, ’cause he couldn’t pull up on the bricks, nor jump back to reach the scaffold.
“He clung so desperate, he wouldn’t let go even after I had him. I had to wrench him loose, and he left his nails on the bricks. Ghost Eddy had jumped out and got him. He kept Danny quiet and carried him off. When he held him out to the bricks, he told him catch on or get dropped, no matter which. Then he told him to hang on till we was close enough to see the drop, and laughed.” Black-haired John’s orbit stopped for a moment, and he looked directly at Vasquez for the first time. The alley was dark, and all of them were only dim shapes. Then he started moving again.
“Once we had Danny safe, some of the boys remembered Stoop-O. They went back and found him. He was stretched out like an old bottle, top missing. Back when I drank, that was the sorriest sight I could come upon. His face was touched up, and a good number of his teeth was gone. Once we was standing over him, Ghost Eddy started laughing out in the dark. He called out to me, called me a loser. Told me don’t try looking for him in his city.”
Cindy took something from her pocket and handed it to him. The drifter held it out to Guthrie: a cell phone and some money. “We can’t look for him no more,” he said gently, “and we don’t feel right about it.”
Guthrie grunted and took some more bills from his own pocket. He pressed them atop the phone and other money. “Stay away from Ghost Eddy, Black-haired John,” he said. “But you still need to call me when you need something.”
“I guess,” the drifter said, taking back the handful.
“Can I take Danny to a doctor?” Guthrie asked.
Cindy shook her head. “Done asked him,” she whispered. “He ain’t want to. Wants to be tough.” John nodded in agreement.
The city was tough. It made the kids want to be tough. After Guthrie and Vasquez left the alley, noise and light rushed in to surround them. Black-haired John had a refuge in the alley, like an island away from the city, an island on the city’s island. The kids watched them suspiciously as they walked back across the lot to 153rd Street. They were watching for Ghost Eddy now. The gray-bearded drifter wouldn’t catch another.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“This morning I woke up and realized I was chasing the wrong rabbit,” Guthrie said after Vasquez closed the passenger door of the Ford.
The young Puerto Rican answered with a sleepy grunt and slid her rolled-up gun belt and windbreaker onto the floorboard. She added cream and sugar to a cup of coffee waiting in the console.
“The Bowman file is thin because Olsen had a registered gun,” he continued. “Once NYPD put him with her as the boyfriend and looked into his alibi, the gun jumped out. That was the end of the Bowman investigation—about as quick as it began.” Guthrie turned onto Clinton Street. His window was cracked for a hiss of air that included a faint whiff of car exhaust from the workingmen pouring from the Lower East Side.
“Wrong rabbit,” Guthrie repeated. “That ain’t the one NYPD started with, and it ain’t the one they’re hunting now. Bowman started out as a Jane Doe—a Barbie doll—and that’s who NYPD’s hunting now. Monica got what they threw in a file and labeled Bowman, but that wasn’t all they were working.”
Vasquez grunted again, drinking coffee.
“Burn yourself?” The little detective smiled as she gave him a sharp look. “Anyway, we gotta look at where NYPD found the gun. Someone used it. We gotta pick it up.”
“We’re not going to look at the students?” she asked.
The little man turned onto Canal Street. The sidewalks were crowded with people hustling in the soft morning light. Coming from the East Side, they were mostly Spanish,
splashed with colors brighter than the gray and brown stones of the city. A bit of green or yellow, maybe some red, they were as necessary as an outthrust chin and a swagger.
“Sure,” he said. “Just not yet. They ain’t going nowhere.”
Vasquez nodded. The night before, that part had seemed simple. Somebody had killed Camille Bowman. The college students had a reason to do it—motive. A bunch of half-grown men could push one another to do anything. She had seen it with her own eyes too many times. They would jump from fire escapes into trash cans, or whatever. One of them would brag about the killing, or one of them would feel bad and give the others up. That was barrio kids; rich kids wouldn’t hold air any better. Someone would crack as soon as fingers began pointing. It was that simple, until she thought about the gun.
“Whichever muchacho thought to get his gun was a genius,” she muttered.
“Unless it was Olsen,” Guthrie rejoined.
She shook her head, then reached to the floorboard for her gun belt. She strapped up, tucking her Smith & Wesson into the kidney holster, and then shrugged into the windbreaker she used to hide it. While she rummaged in the backseat for the doughnuts, he drove into Greenwich Village. The town houses were tidy, the streets quiet. Pedestrians moved quickly, faces frozen and teeth clenched, disappearing into cars and taxis.
Guthrie shot into a parking place south of Washington Square, a beat ahead of a balding man in spectacles driving a Mercedes. The other driver honked in frustration, then roared away. “I hate this car,” Guthrie said. “No, I hate driving in this city.” He grinned when Vasquez shot him a look.
“You got powdered sugar on your chin,” he said before handing her the keys to the Ford. “Wasserman said I was fixed on the notion of having a car. He said it showed how Middle America I was. He didn’t mean middle class. He meant Midwest or anyplace outside the city. Wasserman always walked or rode the trains, but every once in a while he took a taxi.”
“Wasserman?”
“The old man I started with. I think he originally came from another universe, because he sure didn’t belong here. He said you gotta ride the trains if you want to be a real New Yorker.”
They climbed out of the Ford into the morning sunshine. The old stonework in the Village glimmered. They walked across Washington Square and up to Grove Street. The traffic was thinner and people on the streets hurried by with only glances. Parking spaces were open like missing teeth; Guthrie sighed and touched the brim of his brown fedora each time he walked past one.
Number 33 was part of an old nineteenth-century brownstone. It had an underground alley entrance, surrounded by a wrought-iron railing with a swing gate. The door was built into an old window well, matching the others on the bottom story of the brownstone. A short, steep flight of brick steps showed signs of decades of passing feet. Guthrie was disappointed. The entrance was only partly visible from the street. He studied it for a while, checking it from different angles. He told Vasquez to watch, and settled down to wait for a while.
The sun climbed, glowering down, until the morning could no longer pretend coolness. Passersby ignored Guthrie and Vasquez, except for an occasional momentary puzzled stare. About nine o’clock, a white-haired old man marched from the front door of a narrow town house on the other side of the street, pulling a slender water hose and nozzle. He studied them placidly for a moment, then turned and began rinsing his stoop. He sprayed the front of his building, then chased the sidewalk debris into the gutter. Guthrie walked across the street to watch.
“Just giving her a bit of a sprinkle before the day gets too hot,” the old man said to him.
The detective nodded. “You pretty much stay in?”
“Been pensioned off for a while.” The old man smiled, taking a closer look. “You ain’t too far off, with that dust you’re showing. I’m Phil Overton.”
“Clayton Guthrie.” He nodded at the other side of the street. “I was having a look at that underground. I guess you really can’t see it from here.”
“A few steps down the alley?” Overton asked.
“Sure. You know who lives there?”
The old man nodded and wiped a palm on his khaki trousers. “That pretty little girl did. She got killed. Probably they aren’t ready to let it yet.” He paused to take a long look at Vasquez, who was standing on the other side of the street, her red windbreaker spread like a sail to catch the faint breeze while she looked toward Seventh Avenue. “Your daughter?”
“I wish. She works for me. Right now, I’m doing background work for a lawyer, relating to that young woman who got killed.”
Phil Overton frowned. “They arrested someone, I thought.”
“They did,” Guthrie said, “and mostly that’s why I’m taking a look. Maybe you know what kind of hours she kept? Did she have visitors, and like that?”
“I saw her,” Overton said, “but it sort of runs together. Late in the day, mostly I rest.”
“Sure. Okay,” the detective said. “I’m going to take a longer look around, though, if something comes to mind.”
Guthrie walked back across the street, beckoned Vasquez, and then went to the underground door. The seclusion of the alleyway suggested that anyone could have gone inside, and they wouldn’t have been spotted except by going back and forth. Guthrie unlocked the door with a key James Rondell had sent by messenger. A simple alarm pad waited inside the door, and he disarmed it as Vasquez came inside and shut the door. The apartment smelled a few days stale, from unwashed dishes, unmade beds, and cast-off clothes.
The apartment was surprisingly large. The underground door opened on a living room combined with a kitchen. A bathroom and bedroom opened onto the living room. A third door opened into a short hallway. A den, another bedroom, and a second bathroom lay beyond. The bathrooms and kitchen were away from the street, but each bedroom, the den, and the living room had windows looking out into bricked street wells, with wrought-iron railings above them. Careful remodelling hid the evidence of being an understory but left the apartment with a warm, lived-in feeling, with wooden floors and doors, well-used couches, and ranks of framed posters and photographs marching along pastel walls.
“This’s the poor branch of the family,” Guthrie muttered.
The front bedroom had an unused four-poster bed and a small desk with a stack of books, notebooks, and neatly arranged pens and pencils. The notebooks had the same handwriting as those in Olsen’s Livingston Hall dorm room at Columbia. A laptop computer and cell phone sat on the desktop. In the closet hung clothes that might’ve come from a costume shop, and there were stacked boxes of hats, shoes, and smallclothes in different sizes. The boxes were labeled “Small,” “Medium,” and “Large”—seemingly for the sizes of clothing or shoes—with some jumbled inside and others neatly folded. The room was impersonal, perhaps even little used except for the desk.
The back bedroom was disarranged, the bed unmade. A number 42 red Wisconsin Badgers jersey was smoothed across one pillow. A single dresser held a mixture of clothing, for a small woman and a large man. A mirror looked over the crowded dresser top at an array of books, cologne, cosmetics, and loose change. In the closet, a bundle of records in a plastic case huddled among the shoes, and one class-A uniform still wrapped in a dry cleaner’s bag fought with the dresses.
The den was an electronic paradise. Two wall-mounted plasmas overlooked the desk, with another wide monitor for the desktop computer. A second laptop was tucked into a cradle with a rack of cameras, recorders, and players. The room smelled like electricity. The wastebasket was filled with scraps of paper, each bearing an elaborately written piece of gibberish made from numbers and letters. Guthrie grunted as he shuffled through a handful before letting them slide back into the wastebasket.
Numerous photos decorated the apartment. Movie posters filled the broad spaces, ranging from 1920s silents with Valentino up to 1950s promos for Elvis and Monroe. The smaller pictures were snapshots of the city and anonymous pedestrians, except where they were
pinned to the refrigerator or clustered in the den. Those were an album of Olsen and Bowman, at Columbia and elsewhere. Many pictures included Tompkins, or featured Tompkins. Some were of sedate studying, and others of drunken happiness, but none were suggestive.
NYPD’s warrant for Olsen’s .44 placed it in the bedroom, in a locked case in the bedside table. The case was gone, taken for evidence, but the police had seized nothing else. Guthrie gathered the electronics—laptops, phone, and hard drive—and the paper records in the back bedroom closet. They fit into a gym bag. He didn’t seem encouraged.
“What’s next?” Vasquez asked.
“We’ll come back and canvass the neighborhood,” he replied glumly. “I’ll look around to see if somebody’s security cameras caught anything. We could get lucky.”
Vasquez nodded her way through his list. “What’d the old man tell you? Was he any help?”
“He sundowns,” Guthrie replied with a grim look.
“What do you mean?”
“Sundowns—it’s what people with Alzheimer’s do. He’s lucid in the morning, but he gets fuzzy in the afternoon. He don’t remember nothing, so he thinks he rests in the afternoons.” He let out a slow breath. “I had an uncle go down that way.”
Guthrie reset the alarm on the door and locked up when they left. The swing gate at the top of the brick stairs had a faint creak each time it moved, but not enough to call attention from the street. The apartment windows facing the outside had all been undisturbed, and the little detective thought a break-in unlikely. An intruder would’ve needed the expertise of a professional burglar. Walking away with the gym bag in his hand, he paused a few times to turn and examine the brownstone. Each time, he shook his head and started walking again.
Vasquez stopped him when he finally seemed settled on leaving, and pointed back down the street. Phil Overton was hurrying up the far side of the street, in their direction, waving a light blue hat. He shouted when they paused again, and kept coming. Guthrie and Vasquez crossed the street and went back. The old man wanted them to talk to his wife, but she was an invalid and couldn’t leave their house. They walked back with him. The sunshine had baked Overton’s stoop almost dry, but a faint dampness lingered, and it was cooler.