Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  And what had happened next? I imagined that she had waited as long as she could in the dark vault beneath the sidewalk doors, waited until the hour was late and few people were outside. Then, when she heard no sound, she had clicked the lock with the key, opened one of the doors, and silently sprung up the stairs carrying her little milk carton with the gun and knife in it, locked the doors from the outside, and then darted around the corner. You could do it in under a minute. This had transpired either in the last hours of August 6 or the early hours of August 7. If the time had been late enough, it was possible that no one had noticed her or remembered that they had noticed her. After all, Simon’s body was not discovered until August 15, and that interval was certainly long enough for someone to forget what they had seen. But Caroline’s immediate actions were not the only indication of her guilt. She had gone to elaborate lengths to cover up what had happened. She had lied to the police about the nature of Simon’s disappearance. She had told them that she didn’t recognize the little piece of the jade figurine. She had the cleverness to hire a private investigator to try and determine what had happened to Simon. That was smart, for the investigator might unknowingly report to her information that might implicate her, allowing her to anticipate problems. Even more ingenious was that such an arrangement, should it come to the attention of the police, would seem to indicate that she was not the culprit. The investigator found no useful information, of course, because if he had checked the ownership of 537 East Eleventh Street, he would have found out that a Korean owned it, not the Segals. If, like the police, he had talked to the Korean owner, the owner would have been able to tell him nothing, because, being unfamiliar with the building that was about to be demolished, the owner did not know about the quirky sidewalk doors. Nor did the foreman from Jack-E Demolition, who was obsessed with a piece of rope he’d found. The detectives had no reason to seek out the Segals, and Mrs. Segal, because of her questionable deal with the Koreans, had what she believed to be a good reason not to seek out them. The police did talk with the superintendent of 535, but their conversation had centered on access to the roof door of 535, not on the sidewalk door to 537. It was true that if the police had looked through the paperwork to Simon’s estate, they might have been led to Mrs. Segal, as I had been. But I had been looking for a singular item, namely the Hobbs tape, when I found her and not, as the police would have been, for information about how Simon had entered a building. It was a logical contraption of chance and intent. No one had acted with full knowledge; no one had planned on the events as they occurred, including Caroline. So was it murder? In my mind, yes.

  A beautiful woman in a mink and jeans walked in through the sunlight. One black lizard cowboy boot crossing in front of another, she smiled confidently at the world, at the waiter, at me. “Hey, baby,” she said, presenting her cool cheek, and this I kissed with great interest, having never knowingly kissed a murderess before, and the softness of her skin seemed even softer for the hardness of the woman. I cannot report that I was filled with revulsion. No, I cannot say that at all.

  “You’ve been rolling in the mud?”

  “I’m a dirty guy, you know that.”

  “What happened?”

  I fingered the head of the broken figurine in my pocket. “It’s a long story.”

  “Can I hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  The restaurant was starting to fill up. “We’ll order breakfast first.”

  We sat, and I watched her gladness. I had liberated her from Hobbs yesterday, and she was leaving for China today; it was the first time since we’d met that she believed she had nothing to worry about. Her eyes were bright and her lips ready to smile. She didn’t need me anymore; she needed only to close it off with no trouble. The music from the back of the restaurant was Vivaldi, bright and clear, and I knew we both were going to be different only minutes hence, and so I simply watched her. It was no small pleasure as she talked about this, about that, leaving a bit of lipstick smudged on the rim of her water glass, and while she talked, my mind imagined itself to be a silver pool of lust at her feet, a pool that morphed into a moving film of desire that flowed up her shoes and ankles and over her knees and thighs and between her legs and right up deep into her, plunging deep and deep and deep again, and then, withdrawing, brushing the tiny secret scar, then continuing upward past her hipbones and belly button and along the contours of her back and stomach, lingering helplessly at the heavy crease of her breasts against her rib cage, and then flowing out and up and over them, rubbing the palms of my imagination over her nipples, and then, upward to the delicate bones of the neck, out to and around the shoulders and down the arms to the fingers that had held the knife. To the tips. To the lovely, clean, manicured fingernails. And then, sweeping back up the arms, cupping her chin and jaw and pressing deep into her mouth past her pink tongue, which itself had touched me, and then, withdrawn from her mouth, sliding the bright film of my desire slowly up over her cheekbones and eyes—her eyelids blinking, lashes brushing softly—and then up past the forehead and like fingers through the sweet thick length of blonde hair, and then up, my desire for her flowing up and away forever, letting go of her forever. This I did as I looked at her there. I would miss her. When I was an old man, I would miss this woman.

  “I’ve got something to show you,” she said.

  It was one of those glossy brochures that the real-estate firms in the better neighborhoods have printed. “I was just looking at it in the taxi.” She flopped it open. “Look at that.” It was a color photo of a big white house with a long lawn, a lot of windows, porches, eaves, gables. It looked like a yacht, or maybe a wedding cake. “Charlie will like it,” she noted. “The real-estate agent says it’s a seven-minute walk to the train station.”

  She continued to study the photo, and as I looked upward to her face, I saw that time was starting to accrue around her eyes. I didn’t really believe that she wanted to end up in a big white house or that she wanted a life with Charlie. I think that the idea of these things represented a kind of oblivion into which she could become lost for a while. But appetites always return, and if there was anything I understood about Caroline Crowley, it was that her appetites would continue to carry her away from, not toward, what safe white houses still exist in this society. On the other hand, I understood now how desperately she might desire a new life; here it was, in front of her, and I could see that it seemed almost close enough for her to touch, and that perhaps she truly believed her long, strange journey to be over. It is not fashionable for a young woman to depend completely upon the support of a man, and for a woman such as my wife, who has been the beneficiary of a premier education, the idea of such dependence understandably smacks of a kind of existential death. But if Caroline harbored a desire for a career or work, it was subordinate to a more basic drive to be delivered into a life discontinuous from the one she had long inhabited, a life in which, for the first time, she might be safe—from others and from herself.

  “I’ve got some things to show you, too,” I said.

  “You do? Are they as interesting as what I showed you?”

  “Tough call.”

  “Let me see the first one.”

  I slipped my hand in my pocket, pinched the fragment of jade. I could stop it right here, I could say I was kidding and it would all just drift away. I put the jade fragment on the table. The ears were broken, but the eyes and mouth were still perfect.

  She frowned, then picked it up. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “What is it? I mean, where’s it from?”

  I looked at this lovely face, these blue eyes, this mask, and I felt that I had never known her and never would.

  I whispered, “Don’t lie to me now, Caroline.”

  She looked down and then away.

  “It was the gift,” I said. “To you, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “From Hobbs.”

  “Yes.”

  “Very valuable.”

  “I guess. He’d o
wned it for a long time.”

  “Simon found out and got pissed off.”

  “Yes. I told you that.”

  “You wouldn’t tell Simon the story you told Hobbs because it was something you could keep from him, something that was yours.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “We talked about this last night, Porter.”

  “He threw it in your direction in the building on Eleventh Street, and it smashed against the wall of the elevator, and you didn’t bother to pick this piece up.”

  She was looking right at me now, and there was everything in her eyes: fear, hatred, amazement, and even, I think, something like love, because I knew her, finally. “Yes,” she said.

  I held her gaze then, saying nothing. Then I paid great attention to my omelette, pushing little pieces of green onion onto my fork. Around us came the scrape of silverware on china, the talk and society, the great stage set of Manhattan life.

  “Porter?”

  I looked up. Then I slid the key across the table.

  She stared at it. “A key?”

  “The key.”

  She stared straight into my face. Blue eyes. Then she touched it with one fingernail, then pinched it between forefinger and thumb, picking it up.

  “Hobbs returned this key to me,” I said. “His men had—”

  “I know, I know.”

  The waitress brought me a glass of tomato juice.

  “Did you know there was a videotape?” I finally said.

  She ate a bite of eggs. “Of what?”

  “He wired a little camera into the panel mechanism of the elevator. The actual lens was hidden behind the floor indicator.”

  She was just on the edge of figuring it all out.

  “On the seventh floor of the building, the elevator stopped, and with the door open, the lens aimed directly into the adjoining space. This was the room where—”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The whole tape is there, Caroline, the whole thing.” I leaned forward so that the people around us would not hear. “Second by second. The argument, the knife, the key.”

  She nodded, this time more heavily.

  “I believe he asked his father how to wire it, it being an old elevator.”

  “I see.”

  “I think it was all an act on Simon’s part. To see what he’d get on tape.”

  “Fooled me.”

  I looked at her. “You sure?”

  She didn’t answer. There was no answer.

  “There is the original tape,” I said, “and now, one copy. The original is in a place you do not know about and the copy is here.” I slipped my hand under the table. Her eyes watched carefully. I put the tape on the table and slid it across to her. “Here, this one is yours. You can watch in the privacy of your own home.”

  Caroline’s fingers touched the videotape.

  “All this is a surprise,” I said.

  “It was a surprise for me, too.”

  “So what’s the story?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The story Simon wanted so badly to hear.”

  “Oh, it’s just story I told Hobbs. About when I was a kid.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted to know.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Her face went screwy. “He just understood me—it was the strangest thing. In some kind of way no one ever did. That was what Simon hated so much. You saw the tape, you saw how it drove him crazy.” She looked out the window at the people passing by, and I could feel our whole affair falling away now; it was a matter of half an hour, perhaps even less. “I don’t know—it’s not really much of a story really. He just wanted to know what made me strong, and I told him about when I was a little girl.” She had longed for a horse as a girl, she said, but Ron was not interested in giving her one, and her mother was useless at arguing on her daughter’s behalf. They had one of those blighted marriages that is a tissue of hatreds. Ron, moreover, was far along in his fixation on Jackie Onassis and had amassed a not insignificant collection of books and magazine articles about her. There was even a small collectors’ market in Jackie memorabilia, and he was an avid buyer, promising his wife that the stuff would be worth a lot of money someday. When she protested, he sometimes hit her. There was more to all of it: drinking, a failing trucking business, a bleeding ulcer. It was conceivable the man had quietly gone over the tapered edge of sanity. And yet the ten-year-old Caroline badgered Ron for a horse, asking that she get it for her birthday in February. He hit her a few times, but he didn’t really mean it, she decided, not compared with what he had done to her younger brother the summer before—thrown him straight off the motorboat, so that he pinwheeled before hitting the water at thirty miles an hour, breaking his arm. A horse, she wanted a horse. Every day she asked. And so one cold February morning Ron told her to get in the station wagon, we’re going for a ride. They drove across the frozen Dakota prairie, saying nothing, a defeated man in his forties in an old black coat that came past his knees and a blonde little girl who was already troubling to look at, and fifty miles and forty minutes later they pulled up to a paddock and a stoved-in barn in the middle of nowhere and Ron got out, slamming the door and crunching across the snow. She followed, and ducked her head under the rail of a fence and kept after the black bulk in the snow in front of her. There were hoofprints and frozen horse shit on the ground, and she saw an old nag off to one side, lifting her feet and trying to stay warm. This was a good sign, she decided, but where was her horse? The nag was too old and broken down for anyone to ride and suffered a disease that was eating away the hooves, yet Ron was walking toward the horse, and so she followed, catching up with him as he reached the horse, who looked too cold even to move. They stood there a moment. She didn’t understand. “Happy birthday, Caroline,” Ron said. “This is your horse.” Then he withdrew a large old pistol from his coat, cocked it, and shot the horse in the head. And then again, before she fell. Caroline jumped back as the weight hit the ground, red spreading across the frozen grass.

  “That’s it,” Caroline told me now. “That was the story.” Her eyes were clear, she was beyond the moment.

  “That was what Simon wanted to know?”

  “He had taken everything from me already, Porter. I had told him all my stories.”

  “You killed him over a story?”

  “I don’t see it that way, exactly.”

  “It’s all there on the tape.”

  The waitress brought me the bill, and I paid it with cash. There would be no record of our breakfast, ever.

  She played with her spoon. “Why did you look for it?” “I think you wanted me to, Caroline.”

  She said nothing.

  “You wanted to tell somebody.” Her head was down; the part in her hair was perfect. “Sometimes things happen and people have to tell somebody. You never really needed me to find the Hobbs tape. You knew where it was. Basically. All it took was seeing that the estate was paying for something odd. You certainly didn’t need me for sex. You needed me for something else, Caroline, and fuck me for not understanding it from the beginning. Jesus, Caroline, you just needed to tell somebody before you married Charlie.”

  When she looked up there were tears in her eyes. I didn’t believe them.

  “I don’t want any more of this, you understand?” I told her.

  She nodded.

  “I have a certain—I felt a certain … but now I can’t do that anymore. You never cared for me, but you saw that I might be useful. You could involve me and then let out the story a little at a time. Hobbs was just part of the whole thing.”

  She took a regular cigarette out of her purse.

  “Miss,” a passing waiter said. “There’s no smoking. They made that new law.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said in agitation, waving her hand. “I couldn’t tell Charlie, you see, and if I married him without straightening it out …” She didn’t have to finish. I understood that Charlie would leave her, like that, if he we
re to know of such a thing; not only would he rightly despise her for not telling him, but he would also fear that her past would somehow taint his career, and if there was anything he would protect, it was this. And once she married Charlie and took his name, her problems became his. The fact that Hobbs’s company received some of its financing through Charlie’s bank meant, Caroline figured, that Hobbs could have Charlie removed from the account, perhaps even fired. I understood now why she had chosen Charlie. Here was the perfect man, perfect in his handsome emptiness, his dependable blandness.

  “So how could you go to the party that Hobbs threw?”

  “I went because I wanted the chance to tell him one more time. I was going to swear to him that I didn’t have the tape. That Simon must have done something with it … but I couldn’t get to him. All his people were around him. They had people for him to meet and everything. I stood with Charlie but I kept watching … actually, I saw you introduced to Hobbs; I saw them get you and bring you over to him … I recognized you from your picture.”