Lights Out Summer

by Rich Zahradnik

  “That’s a threat,” she said. “I’m telling Harry. That was a threat.”

  “Throwing me out makes your son look guiltier. Tell me what went on, and we can leave it there.”

  “Get. Out.”

  “Harry better be a good lawyer.” He addressed the old woman. “If you’re connected to any of this, that’s conspiracy.” Taylor tossed his card on the desk. “Tell the lawyer to call me. Remind him I’m looking for facts. I get enough threats from the two-bits and mob boys.”

  As he rode the elevator down, Taylor exhaled at getting that over with. He’d never planned on the light touch with MacDonald’s interview. More like a hammer blow. Even if Ricky MacDonald hadn’t done Martha’s murder, he’d made her life miserable. Karma said someone should return the favor. A side benefit of Taylor’s job.

  Thousands stood on the Park Avenue automobile ramp that ran around the south side of Grand Central Terminal. That was the problem. Jacqueline Onassis, Mayor Beame, former Mayor Robert Wagner, and several actors and singers were up on a dais for this April 21 lunchtime rally to save Grand Central. The only real interview here was Onassis, and lacking that, at least one of the other names up in there in their seats. Who sits at a demonstration? That, among other questions, he wasn’t getting answered because he wasn’t getting any closer to those people.

  Grand Central was seriously old New York and had somehow survived in a city that tore things down without a second thought. Its survivor status was highlighted by the 59-story Pan Am Building, a symbol of the modern metropolis that towered behind the 64-year-old train station.

  This fight was about air rights, all those floors that could exist above GCT if it were shoved into the basement of an office tower.

  Penn Central Transportation Corp knew that and wanted to rip down the station to replace it with a—surprise—59-story skyscraper. Pretty much the same thing had happened to old Penn Station, an exquisite glass-and-steel classic that had resembled one of the great railway terminals of Europe. The new Penn Station looked like a dirty bus terminal and had been, in fact, shoved in the basement under an office tower and Madison Square Garden. The destruction of Penn Station was what had mobilized Onassis and all the other somebodies to save GCT.

  In this battle, the city’s countermove was to declare Grand Central a landmark. Penn Central was fighting that through the courts and today’s rally was to bring attention to the case.

  Taylor reconciled himself to man-on-the-street interviews.

  “It’s a symbol of New York, true New York,” said Carl Miller, who worked on Lexington. “We’ve got enough skyscrapers.”

  A passerby stopped to listen. “You know what I think?” Which in New York meant Taylor didn’t have a choice. “It’s a dump. Full of the homeless. A homeless hotel. Look at the windows.” He pointed to the huge windows, nearly blackened by dirt and cigarette smoke. “They haven’t cleaned those in decades. Let them put the ball through it.”

  The rally-goer started to argue. Taylor left them to it.

  Chapter 15

  Taylor fell onto his back and slapped the mat hard. The crack was loud and his hand hurt with that belly-flop sting.

  The second thing Taylor hated about judo was falling practice. The first twenty minutes of every session were dedicated to different ways of landing on the mat. Backwards, forward roll, sideways. When Taylor and Samantha started, their instructor had said they couldn’t learn how to throw until they knew how to fall because there was no guarantee they’d be doing the throwing. It wasn’t just learning, he said, but ridding oneself of the fear of falling. Taylor wasn’t sure if fear was the right word. Sure, he didn’t enjoy it. At the same time, he was a kid from Queens. Falling was a bad plan in any street encounter. What he wanted was no encounters—just good stories. To that, Samantha said he should switch to sports or the City Hall beat.

  The first thing Taylor hated about judo was being the worst of all the students. Matched up against a guy who had joined about when he did but was already one belt higher, he got lots of practice in falling when he was supposed to be throwing.

  Smack, his hand hit the mat. Again. No matter how hard Taylor tried, he could only drop the guy or leverage him into a flip a third of the time at best. So far judo had only worked for him when he’d surprised someone—Jerome McGill. Had that been beginner’s luck?

  The floor came up again fast, and he landed poorly.

  “You’ve got to roll,” said the instructor. “Roll. That’s why we practice at the beginning.”

  Across the way, Samantha toppled a man bigger than her. Bigger than Taylor.

  Before reengaging, he rehearsed in his mind the ways to hit the ground correctly, but that pissed him off. That was retreating. He put his opponent on the mat three times in a row.

  Taylor met Samantha outside the locker room.

  “You sure you want to do this?” she said.

  “Yes.” No.

  “We could try something else. Boxing?” An excited smile.

  “Not paying to get hit in the head.”

  He’d stick with judo because it was something they did together. Then there was how much she’d worry if he ran around after crime stories without any means of defense.

  “Let’s have dinner at the Oddity. Grandpop will be happy to see you.”

  “I think it’s his grandson who’ll make his night.”

  “Wouldn’t bet on that. We can continue our discussion of self-defense there. Ask Grandpop about ancient Greek wrestling.”

  “They did that naked.”

  “You never know when I’m going to have a good idea.”

  She hit him in the arm.

  “There were severed arms and legs lying on the landing pad.” The fireman looked at the top of the skyscraper.

  Just over three weeks after the rally, Taylor was back on the same city block, but on the other side of Grand Central at the foot of the Pam Am Building. In the midst of chaos. When he’d arrived, he’d seen two firemen come out of the building and throw up. That alone he couldn’t remember seeing before. He’d finally found a firefighter who’d done his work and could talk.

  “We got a call—trouble with New York Airways Flight 572 from JFK.”

  “On approach?”

  “No, after it landed on the pad.” He pointed up to the flattop of the Pan Am Building.

  Flights from area airports to the skyscraper had resumed in February after a nine-year suspension.

  “What happened?”

  “The big Sikorsky S-61 landed and let everyone off. Passengers were waiting to board. Suddenly, one of those huge blades snaps off and goes flying. Killed four people standing there. Chopped them into pieces. The blade went over the side and must have smashed into at least one window.” He pointed at the glass all over Vanderbilt Avenue. “People on Madison hit by it too.”

  “Four dead, then?”

  “Five. Part of the blade killed a woman at Madison and Forty-Third. Awful.”

  Firemen didn’t call many things awful.

  “That’s probably the end of flights for good.”

  “No doubt.”

  Taylor ran for a phone.

  Taylor snatched the pink message slip taped to his phone. It said DeVries and the home number. He hoped against hope this might be the first break in weeks on the Martha Gibson story—okay, not break, but at least live contact. The DeVrieses had extended their trip to Europe by an additional two weeks. What’s it like to go on a five-week anything? Two personal trips by Taylor to 827 Park to get messages through hadn’t done any good. The butler, if anything, followed orders.

  He’d been cut off from reporting on any connection Jerome McGill might have had with the murder because the hitman had the misfortune of dying from gunshots wounds in front of the pawnshop. Were his activities tied to Martha Gibson’s death? Taylor had no way of knowing. The detectives had closed the pawnshop shooting case about as soon as they’d opened it; he was getting nothing there. Abigail Gibson remained on his lis
t, but she’d disappeared from the apartment.

  DeVries sounded like Taylor’s oldest friend. “Would you like to go for a ride?”

  Taylor had to suppress a laugh at hearing the movie mobster cliché uttered with DeVries’ Upper Eastside accent, which didn’t so much sound like New York as formal and a little old-fashioned and from nowhere in particular.

  Taylor, expecting a limo of some sorts, didn’t notice the blue Thunderbird until the horn honked. DeVries waved at him out the rear window. It might not be a limo, but there was still a chauffeur in uniform and hat at the wheel. Taylor noted someone in the backseat, so he got in up front.

  “Taylor, this is Joe.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Joe said with a nod.

  “You met my wife at the dinner.”

  Mrs. DeVries was the other passenger in the back.

  “Of course.”

  “Why is it your goal to embarrass me?” she said to her husband. “We could have taken the big car, you could have dropped me off, and our guest wouldn’t need to sit up front.”

  “I don’t mind, Mrs. DeVries—”

  “Thank you for being kind. There are ways to do things and ways not.”

  “I’m going for a drive in the country, honey,” DeVries said. “I didn’t want the Town Car.”

  “Use the brains God gave you. If he did. In that case, you should have dropped me off and gone back for this little sports thing.”

  Joe gave Taylor a sideways look that was hard to translate. Could mean, Don’t say anything more … Good luck … Run away or all those things at once.

  They dropped Mrs. DeVries at a well-kept brownstone in Greenwich Village right off Fifth Avenue. Taylor switched to the backseat.

  “One of my wife’s favorite designers. I think she keeps her in that nice house. Or I do, I guess.”

  Taylor nodded. He couldn’t think of some friendly, we’re-all-in-this-together thing to say to that. Samantha looked good in nice clothes. The kind she could afford. She also appeared mighty fine in jeans and a t-shirt—often one of his—on weekends. Weekdays, a skirt or slacks and blouse and jacket hid her curves some so she could blend in on stakeouts for shoplifters and wayward husbands. Still, she looked beautiful then too. Mrs. DeVries and her friends at that dinner party had been going for something more like an exotic plant—or out of a picture in a museum. All of them except the daughter, Audrey, who’d kept it simple and so looked better than the rest.

  “Let’s go up the Henry Hudson to the Taconic,” DeVries said.

  “Yessir.” Joe clicked on the right blinker and turned to head for the West Side Highway.

  “We are going for a ride.”

  “I wanted to talk—and to show you something. You know where, Joe?”

  “Yessir.”

  DeVries picked up a silver bottle from a miniature bar sitting on the transmission hump. “I tried to convince Joe to call me Teddy. Won’t even use Mr. DeVries. His father drove my father. Right, Joe?”

  “Yessir.”

  “So I’m yessir.” He shook the bottle and poured whatever was in it into two metal mugs in the bar on the hump. “I’d love to make that change at the house. First names for everyone. Enter the modern world. It would make my wife too unhappy.” Taylor imagined unhappy could be quite a show. “Traditions must be upheld.”

  DeVries handed Taylor the mug.

  “Thank you. It’s a—”

  “Moscow Mule. A nice little nip. Had to plan ahead, though. The Thunderbird doesn’t have a full bar like the Town Car.”

  I hang around DeVries, I’m going to have every nice little nip available. Break every rule I’ve got too.

  The cocktail went down easy. The West Side Highway became the Henry Hudson Parkway.

  “Imagine Henry Hudson and his crew sailing up this mighty river,” DeVries said. “Palisades. Shoreline heavy with trees on both sides. The first Europeans to see all this, all that would become Manhattan and the rest of New York and New Jersey. They could have no idea what they were looking at.”

  “Sometimes I don’t think people know what they’re looking at today.”

  “Very good point.” DeVries clinked their cups. He took a good swallow. Taylor’s head was already fuzzy and buzzy. This was not a seven-ounce beer. This was barely not drinking his breakfast. “I’ve always enjoyed talking with reporters.”

  “When I was at the Messenger-Telegram, Park Avenue only spoke to the Society Page editor and only on certain topics.”

  “Garfield would invite me down to your paper. I’d get a private briefing from a City Hall reporter or the business editor or one of the Washington correspondents. There are things reporters notice that others miss because they look deep and fast. They have to see an event or study an issue quickly and still get the story right.”

  No one else talked about the Messenger-Telegram anymore, not outside Taylor’s head. The paper was another ghost haunting him. He never would have imagined how fast a newspaper could disappear—be forgotten. Not until he’d seen it happen. When he’d first started in the business, he’d thought papers were forever. He’d learned that was wrong pretty quickly, but still …. They weren’t special to people, normal people, not like they were to Taylor—and, he presumed, other journalists, though he’d never asked. He was afraid the answer would make him the only weird, haunted one. Ghosts. There had been a time when he worked for the paper and had a mother and a brother not yet rigged up for war. They were all gone. His father was gone too, but he refused to let the man haunt him. The Professor had had his shot at that when he was alive. He imagined Mom and Billy around the kitchen table with the MT spread across it on some average day he should have enjoyed far more than he did.

  “You can only go with what you’ve got by deadline. If you don’t have it, you can’t go with it.”

  “That’s it! Great speed and great care. Using only what you’re sure of. Sitting in the newsroom, reporters will tell you what they haven’t confirmed yet, but the job trains them to separate the facts from the guesses. Most people mix all of it together so you’re not sure what happened and what’s guess and what’s opinion.”

  “We never met when you visited. Did you ever speak to the cop shop?”

  “Cop shop?”

  “Nickname for the police reporters.”

  “I should have taken as much interest in crime as the political and foreign scene. Foolish snobbery. Like crime could never enter my world.” A long swallow. “I miss Martha. To die that way. It so saddens me. That’s not the only crime in my life.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “We’ll talk when we get there. I want you to see the good first. I want to watch the forests along the Taconic in their full spring splendor. So much green, it’s like everything wants to live as much and as fast as it can.”

  I can wait. We’ll also talk about what Martha heard before we’re done.

  DeVries finished his drink while looking out the window. His head bobbed a couple of times and he was asleep, leaning into the corner of the seat.

  Several miles later, Joe pulled off to get gas. Taylor got out, stretched, and moved into the front seat.

  Chapter 16

  The big car swung back onto the parkway. Joe didn’t say anything. Taylor replied with silence. Sometimes the best approach was not to ask questions, to wait it out. They slipped by trees either side of the narrow roadway, rising through the Hudson Highlands—Henry Hudson sure got enough things named after him for his efforts—and the parkway had the look of an alpine highway. Long drops on one side. Stone walls on the other. A big curve and the drop and the walls switched sides. A car flew by them on the left, passing within the thickness of a layer of paint.

  “Asshole,” said Joe, “in that piece of junk. I could take him. Don’t want to wake up sir.”

  Taylor nodded, releasing his tight grip on the hand rest.

  The miles passed. Taylor took out the paper that was ever present in his jacket pocket. Slow day, as far as he was conce
rned. Before a crowd, Governor Byrne waved the signed bill allowing gambling in Atlantic City. The U.S. and Cuba were ready for a limited exchange of diplomats. That was the best of it. Governor Carey on rent control. Skip. The House considering creating a Department of Energy. Skip. The international energy conference in Paris ending in failure. Double skip. He turned the page.

  Inside the paper, the U.S. and Vietnam resumed “gloomy” talks on normalizing relations. The U.S. expressed concern the Soviets planned to try Jewish dissident Anatoly Shcharansky for treason. And a thousand migrating sharks drove swimmers from the waters off Corpus Christi. After the movie Jaws two years ago, any shark story made it into the paper, though Taylor had to admit a thousand of them had the makings of a pretty good monster movie.

  Deeper in the paper, he read through a juicy report on how doctors running Medicaid mills in the Bronx had agreed to cut in racketeers as secret partners after being threatened with death. Every time he thought he’d heard of all the ways to commit crime in New York ….

  The best police story: a 55-year-old Queens woman had contracted to kill her dentist son-in-law. However, that one was done and dusted. Nothing to track down, nothing the DA wasn’t already announcing.

  “You know, he likes you,” Joe said.

  “He’s a nice guy. I like him.”

  “Yeah, but he’s too trusting.”

  “Of me?”

  “Of everyone. Used to be, you could do business with a handshake. You took care of people, they took care of you. Sir still works that way. No one else does. It’s hurting him. I’m trusting you now because maybe you can help him out.” He glanced into the rearview mirror. Light snoring from the back. “I don’t know what exactly he’s going to tell you. He’s been embarrassed. Badly. The wife, she likes to spend. Running the DeVries household has never been cheap. The money’s not there the way it used to be.” He pulled out a pack of Winstons and offered. Taylor waved him off. Joe lit up. “You really think Miss Gibson’s death is connected to the family? Because that’s the last thing he needs.”