Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  Yes? Hobbs. Who is calling?

  I let Campbell go on a minute, explain the basics. How he had fucked up. But he was apologizing too much, nearly weeping in exhaustion, and my message wasn’t getting through. I took over: “Hobbs, listen to me, you motherfucker. If you do not call off your fucking goons, I will make a thousand copies of the videotape.” This was the easiest lie of my life. “I will make a thousand copies and I will send one to every fucking newspaper and television station in the country and I will provide a transcript of the conversation for the idiots who can’t do it for themselves. I will go down in a glorious fireball, you fat cocksucker, and I will take you along. Your fucking goons beat me up, stole the wrong tape from me, and shot my boy, Hobbs, and you are smart enough to know how stupid that is. You can sue me into the next century, I don’t care. I’ll be a fucking wild man, Hobbs, if anything more happens to my wife or children. I will hunt you down and cut out your heart, you fucking fat monstrosity, do you understand that? And before I do that I will also tell the New York City Department of Police that your man here, your executive, has possession of the tape that your goons took off of me, a tape that happens to show a policeman being killed. The cops want this tape. They’re gonna throw Campbell into fucking Rikers Island. You ever hear of Rikers Island? Largest penal colony in the world, right here in New York! Seventeen thousand inmates! Campbell goes there, he’ll—wait! Your man is crying, Hobbs. Here he is.”

  I put the phone next to Campbell’s lips.

  “Beg him,” I ordered.

  His breathing was panicked but he said nothing. I poked the tip of the knife into his ear.

  “Mr. Hobbs! Mr. Hobbs!” Campbell screamed hoarsely. “It’s my fault! I’m very sorry! I went too far with the men! I need—please give me authorization to withdraw them!”

  A pause. His head dropped to the carpet.

  “Okay,” he said.

  I took the phone. “I want to hear it, Hobbs.”

  “You have my word, Mr. Wren. I will be in New York soon. We will exchange the tapes then. And now, may I go back to my dinner?”

  It was nearly three A.M. when I returned to the gate in the wall, watching carefully behind me. Inside the tunnel I saw a few drops of blood on the brick and then a long oblong streak flung on the porch and then inside it was everywhere, on the floor, smeared on the phone, soaked into two large towels, and thrown in a dark splatter on the wall. The EMTs had left their litter of torn gauze packaging and syringe wrappers. All this bleeding was my fault, and I was glad that Lisa and the kids were far away from me. I wasn’t worthy of them now. Somehow this was not a surprise to me; always I have known that I am selfish and small-hearted, an asshole among assholes. I am not good. I am selectively bad. I am capable of what should be rightfully condemned. My father, in fact, a gentle and patient man, always worried about my nature when he was raising me without my mother. Standing in my kitchen, gazing at the red spots flung about the room, I was reminded of a day many years past, a July afternoon when I was fifteen. My father had asked me to paint the kitchen of a Miss Whitten, an old woman who lived in town. My father was one of the church’s elders, and I suppose that it had come to his attention that Miss Whitten lived in reduced circumstances. I told him I didn’t want to do the job, but my protest was halfhearted, because I knew that my father would not have asked of me such an onerous task were it not somehow important to him. He explained that he had volunteered to paint the kitchen himself but that his back had been bad for a few days. Indeed, I saw the pain in his face as he lifted a gallon of house paint into his truck. We drove over to Miss Whitten’s house after breakfast, and along the way my father explained to me how one paints a room, using drop cloths, masking tape around the molding, and long, easy strokes. “The important thing is not to hurry,” he told me. Miss Whitten met us at the door of her modest clapboard house, standing with the help of a cane. “So, yes, here you are,” she said. As soon as we were inside, she sat heavily into a wheelchair, sliding the cane into a loop that hung from one of the steel armrests. My father was unusually solicitous of her. She led us back to a large, old-style kitchen with appliances from the 1950s, cracked linoleum flooring and counters, and paint falling like leaves from the ceiling. My father helped me with the cans and drop cloths and told me he would be back at six that evening.

  I worked diligently, first scraping all the loose paint off, then masking the parts not to be painted, then setting up the drop cloths. Miss Whitten inspected my progress from time to time, wheeling her chair over the ancient red carpeting of the dining room up to the doorway leading into the kitchen. She didn’t say a word. It was a hot day, and by one P.M. I had taken off my T-shirt and was drinking water from the tap. Miss Whitten appeared. “Young man, put on your shirt,” she commanded from her wheelchair. I looked at her, shrugged, and put it back on. Her peevishness could not quite reach me; I had settled into the not unpleasant rhythm of the work and, more to the point, was thinking about the cotton panties that Annie Frey wore, the soft flimsiness of the material, the puckered border of elastic at the waist, that, once breached by my fingers, gave way to a musky mound of pubic hair. Annie always sighed resignedly as I moved my hands about her—what she wanted, of course, was emotion—and in those sighs were entire markets of sexual transaction. Each good was purchased at the price of a certain number of tolerant exhalations, and once I had learned to ignore Annie’s eye-rolling displays of patience, I blundered on. Such were my preoccupations as I painted Miss Whitten’s kitchen and thus was my surprise absolute when she shrieked from the doorway to the dining room, “You’ve ruined it! You’ve ruined it.” With that she jabbed her cane at a dime-sized spot of errant paint that had violated the airspace of the kitchen proper and landed on the faded red carpeting in the dining room. I hurried anxiously over to the offending spot. “I can fix it,” I assured her, bending down close to it. “I’ll just get a cloth and—” “No! No!” she cried out above me. “It’s ruined! Oh, you stupid boy.” And with that, incongruously, she lifted her cane and brought it down sharply on my shoulder. “You stupid, stupid boy! Paint all over the rug!” She was set for another swing and I jumped backward. I was about to protest how sorry I was, but I chanced to look directly into her eyes; I saw a lantern of hatred, still lit brightly by the fires of a lifetime of bitterness. She scared me, but only for a moment, and I was cocksure enough of myself that I could not suppress a bit of my own cruelty. As Miss Whitten continued to glare at me, her cane poised, I gave her a mean smile of disgust, which, translated from the body language, went something like this: I’m not scared of you, you fucking old hag in a wheekhair. But Miss Whitten wasn’t scared and she wasn’t done. She lowered her cane and narrowed her eyes dramatically. “You are a bad, bad boy,” she proclaimed. “Don’t think I don’t see just who you are, young man. I see you. I can see it right there in your face. You think you’re so clever. But you will disappoint your father, you will disappoint everybody.” And with that she wheeled backward and remained unseen for the rest of the afternoon. I finished the job hurriedly, pissed in her kitchen sink, and then took the drop cloths and the cans outside to the front porch, there to wait for my father, to whom I did not report the incident.

  You will disappoint.

  The cold night came around again, and I didn’t want to see it. In the kitchen, I was too disheartened to eat—the cereal boxes just killed me, the little plastic bowls that Tommy and Sally used. I hunched out into the cold and looked again at the bloody snow. Then I heard someone at the end of the brick tunnel.

  “Yeah, what the fuck do you want?” I yelled.

  “Mr. Wren?”

  “Yeah,” I said, walking toward the gate.

  It was a young policeman. “Got a message here from Deputy Commissioner Fitzgerald.”

  I took the envelope.

  “Thanks.”

  I waited until he returned to his car and drove away. One sheet of paper. Hurry, it said.

  So I did, skipping breakfast to dri
ve out to Queens again, noting the different traffic pattern, it being early still. The Segal residence was overgrown with unpruned azalea bushes. The sidewalk was cracked; the porch looked like it would fall off anytime. A small sign in the window read SEGAL & SEGAL., ATTORNEYS’ OFFICE, but no one could possibly believe that much legal work went on inside. I rang the buzzer. There was no answer. I pushed the buzzer again, this time pressing harder. The intercom made a scratchy noise.

  “—a minute.”

  A wizened man of about eighty answered the door. He peeked out, his thick glasses fuzzed with dust and what looked like jam from breakfast.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m here to see Norma Segal.”

  “She’s shopping.”

  “Are you Mr. Irving Segal?”

  He extended his lower denture far out from his mouth, like the drawer of a cash register shooting open. Then he sucked it back in. “Yes.”

  “Yes. My name is Porter Wren—” I mentioned the law firm where Caroline had her account.

  “I am well acquainted with the firm,” the old man croaked. “Well acquainted, young man.”

  I told him that I was here on Caroline Crowley’s behalf. Mr. Segal gave me a limply tentative shake, as if wary of having the bones of his hand broken, and then led me to a paneled hallway where the carpeting was at least forty years old. A worn path led to a closed door; inside was a large paneled office with stacks of paper everywhere. The shutters were closed, and except for one desk lamp, the room was dark.

  “What’d you say your name was again?”

  “Porter Wren.”

  “You got some kind of identification?”

  I spread out a few cards from my wallet on the table and the old man took each, one at a time, and examined them under the lamp. “Nobody is who they say anymore,” he grumbled. “You just never know. Everybody’s identity—nothing is private anymore. Nowadays it’s all sex this and sex that. I see some of those novels you get in the drugstore, I can tell by the covers, let me tell you, but the point is sexual intercourse between a man and a woman used to be a private act. Nowadays these kids are doing all kinds of things that are unnatural, if you ask me.” He shook his head, grimly agreeing with his own assessment. “Now, of course, it’s the schools, too. Teach them how to do it, teach them the whole gadbla-med alphabet. What we have in this country is a—you could call it, why, a disgrace would be generous, yes. I think the word generous would be rather—I mean the word disgrace would be generous, when in fact the situation with these filthy, filthy sex books are—I looked at a few of them once, and some of those filthy magazines, in the store right there where little girls can see them, those little, little girls—ah—and I said to the clerk at the drugstore that in my day such things were unacceptable.”

  He was looking straight at me and not seeing a thing.

  “Patently unacceptable. I remember when that drugstore was run by the Ezzingers, a fine family. Bert Ezzinger was a good father, had three daughters as I remember. One of-them was a few years younger than me, and she had—she was a real … well, back then we had words that were respectful when a girl was … not this filthy, filthy sex sex sex like these kids are always talking about on the television.”

  The old man stopped for a breath and I took the opportunity to get my identification back. “Mr. Segal, I’m here to inquire about the special arrangement you have with the estate of Simon Crowley—”

  “What did you say the name was again?”

  “Crowley.”

  The old man slid me a paper and pencil.

  “Please just write it there.”

  This I did and he picked up the paper, then laboriously stood and shuffled over to an immense green filing cabinet. He pulled out a drawer and some papers fell out, which he ignored. “Hmm, no, C. First we will find the B, here …” Another drawer and more papers. “It will be here—she’s filed it … I asked that she do the paperwork, how can I remember? I run a busy office, how can I spend all my time filing when I—” He turned around. “The name again?”

  “Crowley. You had the paper in your hand.”

  “Yes, of course.” He looked in his hands, but a moment earlier he had put the paper down and already it was lost in the puddle of files on the floor. My beeper trilled. I glanced at it. PORTER CALL ME. HAL. Now Mr. Segal was cleaning his glasses.

  “Did you know Simon Crowley?” I asked, thinking that I had to drive the conversation.

  “Why yes, he came to see us quite some time ago.”

  “What did he want?”

  “I can’t tell you. It’s a privileged client relationship. Of course you understand that.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “He is?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man frowned suspiciously. “Do you have a copy of the death certificate?”

  “No.”

  I was ready to give up. But Irving Segal was starting to remember something. “There were … certain instructions …” he mused. “I remember we had it all written down—we were to—and then the arrangement was to bill, to send a—you see, we had things nicely filed down in the basement, but then that pipe, we had an awful mess and some bats, too, terrible problems at the time, I didn’t put on the brake in time and we were sued by a Korean man, so—” The old lawyer pulled out a drawer, looking for a pad. “We’re going to have to clean up this office sooner rather than later,” he announced. “Generally our system is very …” He pulled a stack of pornographic magazines from the drawer and they fell to the floor in a lurid heap. “I was looking for—” He stopped, then cocked his head. “Normie? Normie, is that you?”

  There was the sound of a door closing and groceries landing on a table, and then a woman in her late sixties walked in. She was surprised to see me.

  “Normie, this man is here to ask about the, uh—”

  “Crowley, Simon Crowley.”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation. Then she turned to me. “I’m familiar with my husband’s business affairs, and I’m afraid that we once did some work for a client named Crowley, but that was years ago, perhaps two or three years ago, and I don’t think we’ve done any more since then.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mr. Segal said. “That’s it. A bit of work some years back, but nothing lately, sir, nothing at all that I can help you with now, so I’m afraid I must direct my attention to other … very busy, sir, nice to speak with you.” And with that he began to pick through his papers and junk mail with interest, turning them over as a child might examine colored cards with animals on them. He selected a Reader’s Digest printed during the first Reagan administration and settled into a chair.

  “Let me show you out,” Mrs. Segal said. When we were beyond her husband’s earshot, she turned to me. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, you see. Now then, what about Simon?”

  I explained who I was and why I was there.

  “You write for the newspaper?”

  “Yes. But I’m not going to put this in the newspaper.”

  She eyed me warily. “I can’t be sure of that.”

  “I should also tell you that yesterday I visited Mr. Crowley in the rest home—”

  “You saw Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  “How was he?”

  “Well, of course, I don’t know how he usually is, but he didn’t seem too well to me, Mrs. Segal.” I looked at her, decided to gamble. “Was he a good father to Simon?”

  “No.”

  I waited.

  “You see, we’re all from the old neighborhood, Mr. Wren. We used to live six houses down. Mrs. Crowley died when Simon was very young, two years old, I think. Breast cancer. Died just like that. After that Simon started to spend some time with us. I wanted a child, you see, and it took me seven years to get pregnant. I thought something was the matter with me, but finally, when I was thirty-six if you can believe it, I did. I had a little boy, Michael—”

  My beeper went off again. “Excuse me.”

  CALL ME ASA
P—HAL (YOUR PAL).

  I put the beeper away.

  “Anyway, I had a son named Michael, and the two of them, Simon and Michael, used to play together. All the time. I picked them up from school. They were like brothers. Mr. Crowley—Frank—worked long hours. He was a .good man, but I think—well, he was never very imaginative. That all came from the mother, and I felt it was my duty to do what she might have done if she had lived, you see. The boys played together, and sometimes Frank would give me money to pick out Simon’s clothes. He didn’t remarry. I don’t think he knew how. I don’t know if it occurred to him. It was just elevators. All over the city. But Simon and Michael had a great time—”

  She stopped and pulled off her glasses. Then she put them on and looked up at me. “Michael was killed when he was five. He drowned in a motel swimming pool. It was my fault. I ran into the room for another towel and he hit his head, and to this day, Mr. Wren, I curse myself for my stupidity. That was twenty-five years ago last July.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “It was … we were making money, thinking maybe we’d just move to Florida for the good life. Irving was making good money, we drove a Cadillac in those days. I was past forty, Irving was older, in his fifties. He was on his second marriage, see, and with Michael we used to just drive up and down Route 1, there on the eastern coast of Florida. This was back when Florida was safe, before everybody—well, that’s the story all over. We had a house down in St. Petersburg and were thinking about moving. Irving incorporated his business down there. He owned some properties. This was all before Michael died. When Michael died, that was—that was the end of it, Mr. Wren, we just couldn’t hold on to anything anymore. My drinking started to get very bad. I—part of the reason Michael drowned was because I wanted to go get another drink, and I spent too long mixing it, that’s the god-awful truth, Mr. Wren—”

  She looked at me, her eyes wet. ’

  “Go on.”

  “I suppose that then I really started to drink after that, and Irving, he just couldn’t remember anything. We had some properties, some good ones, but—”