“How much?”
“Two thousand a month.”
“What else? The law firm’s fee, what’s that?”
Here his voice stiffened. “It’s calculated in respect to a percentage of the estate’s gross value, a percentage of the gross annual income, and itemized legal costs to administer same.”
“Come on, a number.”
“Maybe sixty thousand.”
“What else?”
“Well, the nursing home for Mr. Crowley, the father. That’s like six thousand a month. They’ve got a lot of Medicaid patients, for which they don’t receive the same rate of compensation from the federal government. So they bill private-pay patients like crazy. I mean, they bill us for everything—extra socks, special doctor’s visits, stuff like that. A new cane. All the paperwork and medical reports come here. At first I worried about this, but Jane asked Mrs. Crowley if she wanted it sent to her and she said no. There are other bills for the father, too. Stuff like special therapy nurses, hearing aids, caretaker visits, special boxes of fruit at Christmas, gum surgery—”
“Who is the caretaker?” I asked. “Some neighborhood woman picking up a little extra money?”
“It’s a law firm, actually.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, let me show you it.” He dumped out one of the boxes and spread its contents across the table. In a few seconds he had fished out a document that had SEGAL & SEGAL at the top, with a location in Queens. This stopped me cold. Segal & Segal had filed for bankruptcy on the same day that Segal Property Management, former owner of 537 East Eleventh Street, had filed for bankruptcy. “See, here, it lists the visits to Mr. Crowley.”
I checked the paper. It detailed visits twice a week by a Mrs. Norma Segal for the monthly billing period. Each visit cost the estate fifty-five dollars. This had to be the same elderly Norma Segal whom Mrs. Wood had found on her databases.
“Fifty-five dollars a visit—I don’t feel bad about paying that,” Raoul was saying. “Some kind of neighborhood law office. If you look at the nursing home bill, you can tell it’s nearby. Same zip code.”
“Seems like money well spent,” I noted.
“Probably,” said Raoul. “Sometimes they bill for other things. Usually five thousand dollars, but that’s irregular.”
“What’s it for?”
“I don’t know. I just pay it.”
“How about any safe-deposit-box fees, storage facilities, private mailboxes, that kind of thing?”
“None.”
“Getting back to other personal expenses, are there any payments in here to other parties—you know, people who aren’t billing for a service or a good, just a payment?”
“Yeah, a lot of them. They come through Mrs. Crowley. We just get a note from her that says, Please pay so-and-so this much.”
“I suppose she could just pay them out of her own checking account.”
“Yeah, but her income from the estate is taxable. Expenses incurred by the estate are tax-deductible. It’s like, if she fixes a broken sink and pays for it out of her checking account, then that expenditure is, at the end of the year, an out-of-pocket expense she pays for with aftertax dollars. If she forwards the bill to the estate and the estate pays it, the expense is deducted from the total income of the estate, thereby reducing the estate’s total annual federal and state tax liability, if only by a little bit.”
“You should be a lawyer,” I said.
He smiled. “I’m working on that.”
We went on from there, and by the end I had looked through all of the boxes, hunting for something, anything, that might tell me why somebody was sending a tape to Hobbs. But after a while, I felt myself deflate; the boxes of paper, in sum, seemed only that: boxes of paper, the dead skins of small financial transactions, notable for the cost of maintaining the luxury of Caroline’s lifestyle but little else.
I found Caroline in the coffee shop downstairs. She was reading Vogue.
“I don’t see how you can find it,” she said, putting down the magazine. “This whole thing is crazy. Why don’t you call Hobbs and tell him it’s impossible?”
“Why don’t you?”
“I have. I’ve tried to call him.”
I found this comment interesting. “When you did, how did you do it?”
“I just called him.”
“Where?”
“At his office, wherever.”
“Where is wherever?”
“I don’t know, his office, basically.”
Her mind ran to precision. She was lying.
“Do you want me to find the tape?”
“Of course.”
“Then stop fucking around, Caroline.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes you are. If you didn’t call Hobbs at his office, then where did you call him? At his home? Oh, Porter Wren’s mind begins to ask, why is that, why would she call Hobbs somewhere other than his office? Well, the answer might be because she has his home number. How could that be, I wonder. How could she have his home number? Presumably these people are adversaries. Or maybe they are adversaries now but weren’t always. Perhaps they knew each other a bit. Perhaps they saw each other more than one night in a hotel.”
She had a beautiful face, but she could make it ugly, and now she did. “Screw you.”
“No, Caroline, no. You brought me into this. You thought you could just be the sweet fuck bunny and lead me around. But you didn’t study me very carefully, Caroline, you didn’t figure out how a small-town boy like me with not one connection in New York City elbowed and hustled and hassled his way to be a newspaper columnist. You didn’t think about this, Caroline. You need to understand something else, too. The police are going to tear me apart looking for the Fellows tape, and they will tear you apart, too. So we have to get the Hobbs tape back, and you have to tell me what happened with him.”
We had quite a long conversation after that. After the first meeting with Hobbs, she had seen him a few more times. Only to talk, she said; when Simon was out of town she would go to Hobbs’s hotel and spend a couple of hours. Did Simon know? I asked. Yes, she admitted. Simon knew about it. Hobbs had sent her a little gift and, finding it, Simon had confronted her. Caroline admitted to him that she was seeing Hobbs. So Simon had a reason to hate Hobbs. Yes, she said. But the tape didn’t get sent to Hobbs until after Simon died. Did she know any of the businesspeople Simon worked with? I asked. Some. There were dozens, of course. Maybe Simon gave them the tape. No—it would have gotten back to her, she said, Hollywood being what it is. Someone would have sold a copy to one of the television shows. And besides, what was the motive? Hobbs was apparently not being blackmailed; moreover, he could pay just about any sum if he was. What about Billy? I asked. Who is he? Caroline shook her head. They ran around, but Billy has gone straight, he’s a big-deal businessman now. A banker or something. Did Simon have any other confidant? She shook her head. You mentioned the studio, I said, how does that work? She sighed. Well, the studio makes its payment to the production company. The production company makes payments on the first two big films to Simon’s agency, and they take their cut, then forward a check to the law firm. Now, for the third movie, Simon owned the production company, but it’s basically defunct now, so the check from the studio goes directly to the agency, and then the check comes here, to the law firm.
“Any reason to think that he could have set someone up out there to do this, send the tapes to Hobbs?” I asked.
Caroline shrugged. “I don’t think so. Why would they do it? It’s stupid. It could cause them a lot of trouble. Everybody in Hollywood tries to be nice to one another because someday they might work together. Plus you have to understand, Simon’s time out there was pretty short. Everybody keeps shifting around. His little nucleus, you know, all over the place. Some of them are working for Quentin Tarantino now, John Singleton, all kinds of people.”
“Tell me about the physical spaces Simon controlled or owned or rented when he d
ied.”
“We had the apartment. I know everything in the apartment—the tape wasn’t there. He had an office downtown and I cleaned that out. There wasn’t much there, anyway. Old scripts, a lot of trash. He also had an office at the studio, but that was cleaned out after he died. They sent me all the stuff in it. He had a room he used at the Beverly Palms a lot, but that probably doesn’t count. He had an apartment out in Brentwood that he bought right before we were married, but he sold it later, because he started worrying about earthquakes. That’s all I can think of.”
“How about his father’s house?”
“His father has lived in the nursing home for maybe six or seven years. The house was sold a long time ago.”
“Tell me about Mr. Crowley,” I said. “How sick is he?”
Caroline put some sugar into her coffee. “I don’t know.”
“You haven’t talked to his doctors?”
“No.”
“Do you know him?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“You’ve met him, though.”
“Actually I haven’t.”
“Why not?”
“Simon never took me out there to see him.”
This struck me as strange.
“Simon never took me back to his old neighborhood,” she protested. “He said he was going to take me back to the house where he grew up to see the neighbors and everything, but he never had any time. So I don’t really have a connection to those people.”
“But didn’t the father come to the funeral?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, it was small, Porter, and, you know, very private, and he just didn’t come.”
“Was he invited?”
“I assume so.”
“You didn’t send word to the nursing home and tell him that his son was dead and that he should come to the service?”
She looked down at the table, pressed her fingers to her forehead. “The studio handled the funeral, Porter. I was in no shape to do it.”
“You’re telling me that Simon Crowley’s father was never told that his son was dead and that there was a funeral?”
She looked at me. “I think that’s what happened. Maybe they told him later.”
I watched the people passing outside the coffee shop.
Caroline spun my briefcase around and fiddled with the contents. “You should have a picture of me in here. Every time you open it up, you would see my smiling face.”
I turned back. “My wife would make this a topic of discussion.”
“She wouldn’t know,” said Caroline.
“She’d know,” I said.
“Why?”
“She knows everything, my wife.” She would certainly know to invite my father to my funeral.
“You say it with pride.”
“I am proud of her.”
“But you’re here with me.”
“I’m there with her, too.”
She snapped my briefcase shut. “I’m going. You’re fucking bugging me.”
The Greenpark Nursing Home in Queens was a hulking institutional structure whose very architecture suggested that all hope was an illusion. I signed in at the desk. The reception area was populated by ancients in wheelchairs, ancients shuffling across the waxed floor, ancients staring fixedly at the bright slogans of happiness stapled to the bulletin boards. The uniformed staff was, uniformly, black. I asked where I might find Mr. Crowley and was directed to the sixth floor. Usually the floors in such places are organized by the functioning level of the patients, and I wondered about the condition of patients on the sixth floor. I rode up with a whiskery ancient who performed a sequence of knee bends while standing in a puddle of urine, not necessarily his own. I signed in on the floor and was asked which patient I was visiting, and the nurse pulled down a binder notebook marked CROWLEY, and I signed in there, too, marking the date as well. The last visitor had been Mrs. Norma Segal. In fact, no one else had visited Mr. Crowley recently. Mrs. Segal, it appeared, arrived every Monday and Thursday without fail. Her signature was tight, careful script, the style of which I associate with third-grade teachers. I flipped the page left to right, which took the visits back a few months. Mrs. Norma Segal, without fail.
The nurse directed me to the dayroom, and I passed several Chinese ancients, all women, sunken into their wheelchairs. Another woman in a red robe shuffled by, spied me, and shrieked, “Hey! I’m so tired!”
In the dayroom I encountered a dozen ancients in wheelchairs. A television was on and being watched, but without irony—or perhaps with the greatest of irony. Each ancient had a small paper container of some nutritional drink, and a straw. No one was drinking it. A woman gobbled wetly at me.
An attendant, a young black woman slumped in a chair, looked up. “Yas?”
“I’m looking for Mr. Crowley.”
She pointed casually.
He was sitting with a large urine bag fixed beneath him in his wheelchair, and although his eyes were open, awake, his mouth hung slack and wet. His teeth, I saw, were exactly like his son’s, crooked and large. His face had not been shaved in days; his neck, much longer than that.
“Mr. Crowley?”
He only stared at me. The lip of skin beneath each of his eyes had fallen inward, as if the eyeballs had receded.
“Hello, Mr. Crowley.”
“Ain’t going be much use there, mister,” called the aide.
Mr. Crowley smelled, I’m afraid to say, like an old animal. But I tried again and he lifted a papery hand in the air. I shook it gently, noticing that the hand of a retired elevator repairman still had quite a bit of strength in it.
“If you want to take him to his room, you can do that,” the attendant said.
As I wheeled Mr. Crowley out of the dayroom, I noticed he still had a good head of hair, though it was flat with grease and flecked with innumerable stars of dandruff. The floor of the hallway was spotless, but beneath the pervasive smell of disinfectant, the air seemed stale, recycled, forced through someone’s kidneys. An atmosphere of compressed exhalations. We passed room after room, each a variation on the same theme: ancient asleep in bed, chin up, mouth drawn back, as if rehearsing for death; ancient in wheelchair, his aide making a bed; ancient standing naked from the waist down, her aide dressing her; ancient in wheelchair looking at cereal on wheelchair tray; ancient asleep in bed. Mr. Crowley’s room—a private one, I noticed—was small and sparsely furnished. There was a sink on one wall, a built-in closet of drawers, a shower. A heating vent whistled in the corner. On a night table next to the hospital bed stood a small framed Kodachrome photograph, and I bent down to inspect it: a small dark-haired man, Mr. Crowley, and his wife and their son, Simon, about age three, standing between them. The background: Queens, New York, circa 1967.
“That’s a nice picture,” I said, somewhat idiotically.
He gave me no answer, though his eyes watched me. I walked to the window and looked down on the nursing home’s parking lot. Three aides in blue uniforms were throwing tied-off garbage bags into a Dumpster. Another aide was washing a car from a hose that ran from the building.
Outside the door, the old woman in the red robe shuffled by. “Hey! I’m so tired,” she exclaimed. She looked into the doorway, and, appearing to hope that another patient’s visitor might pay attention to her, she addressed me: “I’m so tired.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“My name is Pat,” she said thickly. “He can’t talk.”
I noticed food stains on her robe.
“I know everybody here. I’m so tired.”
“Perhaps you should sit down.”
“I can’t.” She looked at me, munched her mouth. “I had three children.”
“I’m very sorry, Pat.”
“I had three children and now I can’t find them.”
“I’m sorry, Pat.”
“Thank you,” came her thick voice. “Thank you.” She looked back down the hallway, as if co
ntemplating her endless, appointed rounds. “Here comes James.” She shuffled on.
A footstep outside the door, and then a portly middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt and green pants strode in. He was holding a clipboard and seemed surprised to see me. “Well, well, Mr. Crowley, you have a visitor!” He turned to me. “Hello, I’m James, the barber. I have to find out when this fine gentleman would like to have his hair cut! We must have a look at the fingernails, too, Mr. Crowley. We must do that! Are you a relative of Mr. Crowley’s, sir, if I may be so bold as to inquire?”
I told him I was just a friend of the family’s.
“Well, that is fine! Mr. Crowley does not get many visitors! Except for Mrs. Segal, bless her heart, this fine gentleman is left alone!” He leaned forward and pressed a hand affectionately on Mr. Crowley’s emaciated shoulder. “And except for me, of course, isn’t that right, Mr. Crowley? We have a fine time. He comes down to my barbershop and I give him a good wash and a cut and have a look at the nails and just try to tidy him up! He has rather thick nails. Tidy up the ears and nose. Maybe a good shave if he is feeling up to it. Some of the girls want me to do their old hairstyles from forty years ago, and I try to be accommodating. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?” He turned to me conspiratorially. “I know he understands. He can’t talk back, but I know he understands. It’s in his eyes, it’s in all their eyes. You have to look in the eyes to see anything. But let me tell you, when Mr. Crowley came in here he was sharp as a tack, just a little problem with his—maybe it was diabetes, I can’t remember what it was. And up to maybe two or three years ago, he could still talk. They do go downhill, I’m afraid, just like children on sleds. But we try to be brave about it, we try to think good things—don’t we, Mr. Crowley? The staff”—he gave a sad little wave of his hand—“well, they’re overburdened, so it does no good to be a critic, but I do think he still can—” He glanced at his clipboard. “We’ll just put him down for ten A.M. tomorrow, I think.”
Mr. Crowley lifted his arm feebly. A sound came from him.
“What is it, sweetheart?” James said, his face alert. “Hmm? Yes? The drawer? You—why, yes! He wants to show you, do you know about this? It’s the most fantastic thing I have ever seen, and I’ve been working in this very lovely land of hope for twenty-seven years!” James went to the drawer. “He made this, you see, didn’t you, Mr. Crowley? Yes!” And then in a quiet aside to me: “It was some time ago, when the old sweetheart was more—still himself, if you know what I mean.” Then from the drawer he pulled a strange arrangement of string and old cereal boxes. “Let me just—it’s a bit tangled, yes, Mr. Crowley, yes, we’ll hang it up. You see, he made this thing, he made this thing by himself. What an achievement! We have some of the sweethearts painting a little bit downstairs in the crafts center, marvelous colors, but no one has ever—there!”
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