“We do not hit girls. Don’t they teach that in Queens schools anymore?”
Angry choking, which Taylor figured was hard to pull off.
He frisked the teen, found a switchblade, and dropped it in his pocket.
He pushed the cane harder. The kid coughed, grasping at this throat, didn’t sound so angry.
“We’re walking out of here. See this?” Taylor held up his police credentials. “That’s an NYPD press card. Soon as I hit the avenue, I’m going to send every sort of cop I see in here looking for you. I’m going to tell them you’re carrying a Charter Arms Bulldog Forty-Four.”
Taylor took Abigail’s arm and backed away slowly. He needn’t have worried. This pusher was in the bully-girls-coward class. The boy ran, still holding his throat, deeper into the woods.
Taylor handed the old man his cane. “I can pay for any damages.”
“Never mind about that. My privilege. There was a time I could stand up to little shits like him.”
“Language, Malcolm!” The wife grabbed her husband’s arm again.
Back in Bubbie’s, Abigail refused food. She held a napkin to her split lip. A bruise was rising on her cheek. The waitress offered ice. She refused.
She turned to Taylor. “Just give me a couple of bucks.”
Taylor ordered two coffees. He put two sugars and two half-and-halfs in his. Abigail put in even more.
“That kid your new dealer?”
“It’s more like a sharing relationship.”
“I can bet what you share.” The comment didn’t seem to bother her. “I need to clear up something with you.”
“Gimme some money.”
“Answers first. How often did Jerome come to the apartment before Martha was killed?”
“Never. I told you he didn’t. She’d call the cops if he did. Or he’d kill her. I’m messed up, but I loved my sister. I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“Never has to mean never. This is serious as death.”
“Never. Only after, when you were there.”
“You ever buy dope in the building?”
“Shit no. I had a home there. Martha took care of me. Always trying to get me to kick.” Her voice went wistful. She smiled wanly at her golden oldie days two months ago, when her sister was alive. “She got me clean for three months. I never scored anywhere near the building.”
“Junkies lie.”
“I had Jerome. He had the stuff. He liked having me around.” She tried to smile, but her hand went to her lip. “Maybe you want me around some.”
She put her hand on his leg. He lifted it off.
She started shaking.
“C’mon.” He led her out of the coffee shop, hailed a cab and they got in. “I’m going to repeat myself. This is for your sister, who you say you loved.”
“I did!”
“What you’re telling me is absolutely true. I can rule out anyone shooting her because you were buying or Jerome was dealing. No one came gunning for you and got her instead?”
“How many times do I have to swear it?”
“I don’t know. I’ll probably case the damn building anyway to confirm. Ask what people saw and heard.”
“Nothin’ and nothin’.”
Going door to door would be a royal pain in the ass. Still, it was about facts. Abigail Gibson didn’t strike him as someone who worried too much about those. More about manipulation. This story needed facts bad. Facts are stubborn things …. The beginning of his favorite quote, from John Adams. Facts were a story’s floor, roof, and walls—everything. If he could report enough facts, he could write what happened. To Martha Gibson. To Edmond DeVries.
She looked out the window. “Hey, the fuck, we’re in Brooklyn.” She said it like it was another country.
The cab pulled in front of the methadone clinic.
“Get out.”
“I’m not doing that.”
Nevertheless, she opened the door and stepped to the curb. Taylor had to pull the door closed.
“Then don’t. Then die.”
“You’re a shit.”
“That’s been said before.”
“You owe me cash.”
“I owe you nothing. You owe your sister.”
“You think you know everything!” she said. “You don’t.”
Taylor told the driver to hold up and spoke out the window. “I doubt I do. Junkies lie.”
“Didn’t lie.” Out of nowhere, she wretched and threw up in front of the clinic. She coughed and somehow started talking again. “Left it out. It wasn’t my fault.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Twenty bucks.”
“I swear, Abigail—”
“Twenty bucks or I don’t talk.”
Taylor held a ten dollar bill out the window.
She walked over to the cab and took it. “My dealer, the one before Jerome, he followed me back to the apartment building one day.”
“Name.”
“Jimmy. Don’t know last. They call him Jimmy the Cryptkeeper.”
“Why’d he follow you?”
“Says he likes intelligence on his clients. Keeps the cops away.”
“So your dealer did know where you lived.”
“It’s worse than that.” Her face wasn’t sad now, but rapt in the anticipation of getting a bag of heroin. “Ten dollars worse.”
Taylor held up another bill but kept it inside the cab.
“Before your big revelation, where’s this Jimmy deal?”
“Mt. Olivet.”
“The cemetery?”
“Says it’s safe unless there’s a funeral around. Jimmy’s real small and doesn’t want to get busted, ’cause inside he gets busted up. He didn’t work anywhere near the apartment. I didn’t lie about that.”
“You’re a real saint.”
“One day, Jerome came along with me to see Jimmy. He’d just gotten to the neighborhood. He didn’t have his supply yet. Like I said, Jimmy isn’t much. He’s got this high, squeaky voice. Jerome hit him. Only a couple of times. Took some extra hits off him. Didn’t want to really rob him, only get a treat out of the deal.”
“You’re telling me your boyfriend robbed your dealer and your dealer knew where you lived?”
She nodded slowly, her eyes on the portrait of Alexander Hamilton. “Jimmy was no threat. I swear.”
“Maybe he knew threats. Maybe he paid for threats, like people paid McGill.”
He handed her the money. She turned and looked at the front door of the clinic, turned back around, gave Taylor the finger, and walked off down the sidewalk.
So much for trying to help a stray. He failed more than he succeeded in that effort. Samantha said it made him a good man that he tried. Or a stupid one. Taylor took the cab to the nearest subway stop. A taxi from Brooklyn to Manhattan was for a splurge or emergencies.
Chapter 21
During a call Thursday with Carol, the first time he’d reached her since the murder Saturday, she told him of something he should have guessed. Studio 54 was Charlie DeVries’ favorite nightspot, though he made the rounds at most of the top clubs, restaurants, and after-hours joints that Taylor would expect of a man employed in spending his family’s money. He needed to interview Charlie outside the apartment, the domain of the detectives.
Taylor hadn’t been in Studio 54 since it exploded on the scene two months ago, whatever the scene was. He hated disco music. Add it to the cultural plague that made the seventies seem like the answer to the wrong question, a question he didn’t remember anyone asking at the end of the sixties. Whether he wanted in or not, getting in was going to be a hurdle. Taylor was as likely to be invited to dinner at the governor’s mansion as he was to find his way past the red velvet ropes of Studio 54.
“Is there anything else you need?”
Taylor had stopped asking Carol questions to puzzle on how to get past the bouncers.
“Ask around if anyone else on staff heard conversations. Threatening conversations. Or knows who t
he stranger in the room might be.”
“I don’t want to spy.”
“You liked Mr. DeVries, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. But the police.”
“Then don’t be obvious about it. Anything someone heard or saw could help. Had you heard that Mr. DeVries was planning some changes?” Taylor left out the specifics because he wanted to see who knew and how much. Even Carol.
“The family was meeting privately. A lot. They went on that long trip. We all were afraid it was bad. During one of those meetings, Charlie started yelling and stormed out.”
“What’d he say?”
“I only heard one line, as he ran from the sitting room to the elevator. ‘And you say I throw fucking money away.’ He was gone for two days.”
“How is Mrs. DeVries doing?”
“She’s taken to her bed. The doctor’s been by almost daily. Will only let in Mrs. Frist—”
“Who’s that?”
“The housekeeper. You must not have met her. Mrs. Frist says she hasn’t eaten anything but soup and not much of that.”
“Who on the staff was Mr. DeVries closest to?”
“Oh, Joe, of course. He’s so upset. He took a week off.”
“Where’s he live?”
“The Far Rockaways.” Taylor took down the street address. They weren’t called far for nothing. It would be a long-assed haul to that Queens seaside peninsula. Didn’t matter. The chauffeur was someone else he needed to talk to away from the DeVries place.
He thanked Carol, hung up, and dialed a number that might be the one way a reporter could get into Studio 54. The owners cultivated both fame and exclusivity, a tough balancing act. An old friend from his newspaper days—the theater critic at the Messenger-Telegram—had landed a gig doing PR.
“You want in to Studio 54?” the friend asked.
“I’m doing a feature.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Do you want the real reason?”
“I do not. Someone else put you on the list for Friday if you’re ever asked.”
The first day of July arrived with temperatures holding in the mid-eighties. The humidity had decided to hang around there too. Taylor worked late into the evening, mainly organizing his notes. He tried some calls but came up empty. He knew things wouldn’t get going at the club until eleven at the earliest, at which point he’d walk the 11 blocks to Studio 54, simply named because the club had been installed in an old opera house turned TV studio on 54th Street west of Broadway, making it an exception, since most of the popular clubs were downtown. That hadn’t gotten in the way of Studio 54 becoming the center of the disco universe, populated by movie and TV stars, politicians, rich folk, people famous for being famous, and the few plebs the bouncers let in based on how good the women looked. Men on their own were doomed.
Taylor approached the black marquee with its silver 54 set in a typeface of an art deco style from the twenties, the last period New York danced as the world was about to burn. Forget Studio 54, Taylor had somehow so far survived the disco era without actually entering any disco, province as they were of gossip chasers and star fuckers. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. He had been in two—one in Queens, one downtown—but they had been transformed from dance halls into crime scenes. A romantic entanglement had left one dead in Queens—the under-aged girl in the middle—and some gang beef downtown had offed two and sent two to the hospital. Three of the victims were bystanders.
Studio 54 was its own ongoing crime scene, at least when it came to drug dealing. Any sort of drug available in whatever quantity. Busting the rich and famous didn’t get a street narc anywhere. How would he even get on the list? Taylor walked up to the bouncer and told him his name was on the press list. He was sent to a side door—reporters rated the service entrance—followed a hallway, and came out into the former theater’s cavernous space, the music throbbing but the dance floor nearly empty.
More waiting.
The bartender laughed at the idea of a Rolling Rock and was unimpressed with the idea of beer in general. Taylor slid an obscene seven bucks across the bar for a Heineken.
Prices like that will definitely keep me sober.
He positioned himself so he could watch people as they came in. Once the place got busy, it could take him all night to find Charlie DeVries. The flow slowly increased. The music, one bit of fluffy trash after another, played without a break, one track flowing into another, the DJ overlapping the beats to make it one unending awful song. The costumes—you couldn’t call this clothing—made the arriving guests a peacock parade. Look at me! The men in tuxes and sparkly suits. The women dressed in less and less and less. Naked would arrive any minute.
Just when he thought his beer tab was going to hit $21 with no discernable buzz, Charlie walked in with a woman on each arm, each in a skimpy, blood-red dress that looked like the type of metallic paper you wrapped Christmas gifts in.
What is it about dressing identically with disco people?
As he watched, Taylor understood why Charlie, though a rough copy, wasn’t as good-looking as his father. He had a pinched, perpetually sour face that became plain ugly when he smiled, which he did when he entered the big room. Following right behind Charlie was Bobby Livingston, chin raised high like he’d come out of the womb that way. He also had a woman on each arm, also in identical dresses.
Shown to a table right away, they popped a bottle of champagne, danced some, and ordered another bottle. Taylor headed over. He didn’t want Charlie too shitfaced. Drunks made awful sources. Tell you anything and everything, and you never knew what was fact.
“Evening, Charlie.”
He looked up from the woman on his right.
“The reporter. How’d you get in here?”
“This place likes to show up in the papers.”
“Chasing celebrities now? That’s fine. We’re celebrities.”
The girls laughed. Bobby didn’t.
“Trying to figure out who killed your father. Who … and why.”
“What, you think I did it?”
“No. Doesn’t work like that. Interviewing everyone in the family to see where that leads me. Do you have an alibi?”
“That Saturday morning I was at an after-hours club with forty of my closest friends. The police already have the list.” He finished his glass and refilled it. “Buy us a bottle, and I’ll talk about anything else you like.”
Taylor didn’t have the cash for a bottle of champagne. He barely had enough for another beer, that and a Macy’s charge card maxed out from furnishing the Manhattan apartment. He was embarrassed, and it pissed him off that Charlie could do that to him.
Some speech about not buying interviews would only get him laughed away from the table. Bobby frowned. At Taylor’s delay? At having a reporter standing there?
“I’m afraid I don’t—”
“I’ll take care of it,” said Bobby. “Have a seat.” He pulled over an empty chair from the next table.
The bottle came. Everyone drank and Bobby took all four girls out on the dance floor. Maybe he was trying to help Taylor—that noblesse oblige thing—or maybe he liked dancing with four girls.
Taylor set down his glass and slipped out his notebook. “How’d you get along with your father?”
“We were up and down. Think you saw that. As I’m sure you heard, he wanted more focus in my life. Me, I think I’m pretty focused on what I do.” He laughed. “I wanted him to do a better job managing the family money. I did not want him to get killed.” More champagne went down Charlie’s hatch. “I am crushed.”
He actually looks it.
“What was wrong with how he managed his money?”
“Not his, ours. We’re all supposed to inherit. He let twenty-five million go missing.”
“Mr. DeVries said Denny Connell stole it. You blame your father for that?”
“He hired the guy. Fired the white-shoe firm we’d used for four generations to go with this crook.”
<
br /> “What about your father’s new plans?”
“The farm, the foundation, all that? Craziness.”
“How’s it crazy to simplify your life?”
“Losing twenty-five million bucks certainly simplified his life. All our lives.”
“Any idea who wanted him killed?”
“Of course not. Or the police would know already.”
“There is one person, so far unidentified. Martha Gibson overheard a conversation before she died. In the sitting—”
“She was eavesdropping?”
“She was taking care of the fresh flowers outside. Her job, right? She heard two people, a man with a deep voice and another person whose voice she couldn’t ID or hear distinctly. The doors were closed.” Taylor flipped forward to a folded page in his notebook and went through the quotes again. He finished with, “ ‘All right. As long as we take care of him by then. Final and done.’ ”
“Well, that’s shocking stuff.” Whatever jokiness was in Charlie’s voice left it. His tone was serious and low; Taylor leaned closer to talk over the thudding music.
“Yes, a threat, a threat that seems to have been carried out.”
“Have you told the cops?”
“The detectives investigating Martha’s death know. The one on your father’s case won’t return my calls.”
“I’ll make sure he does.”
“Some of what the man said in the sitting room, some of it sounds a lot like your criticisms of your father.”
“I didn’t like what he was doing. I didn’t make threats. Did Martha say it sounded like me?”
“No, in fact, she said it didn’t. The person she could hear clearly, that is.”
“No! It wasn’t me. I’d never do that.”
“I’d be careful what bits of that sitting room conversation you repeat. Hearing it may be what got Martha killed. The murders could be connected.”
Charlie shifted in his seat, agitated. “You’ve heard all our secrets. The missing money. Papa’s plans. I don’t know who was in the sitting room. I don’t even know anyone was there. This is coming third-hand from a dead woman.”
Lights Out Summer Page 14