How hurt? Who hurt him? They shouted. Why’d they hurt him? Did you hurt yourself? Did you try to kill yourself? Will you try again?
We managed to get in the car.
Surrounded. Faces, flashes, mouths at the windows. Baying for blood.
Terry sounded the horn and edged the car forward.
The ones in front of the car got the message, looked uncertain for a moment and began to clear out of the way.
Terry rammed his foot down. It wasn’t an F1, but I could see the crowd recede fast enough as I watched through the rear window.
We headed out of the city district.
“I want to go to Carol’s place. Tribeca.”
“She’s not there, Fin,” Terry said. “You rang, remember?”
“She didn’t pick up. Doesn’t mean she isn’t there. Look, Terry, you’ve done enough. Just drop me off and I’ll take it from here.”
“Ernie wouldn’t like it if I dumped you,” he said.
“Ernie’s dead. He let me go to Bombay, his fingerprints are all over this filth. Why would he give a shit?”
“Ernie had his own nightmare,” Terry said.
We pulled up outside Carol’s building. It seemed quiet enough, a few late-nighters rolling along the sidewalk, someone with their dog bending over to scoop up Lassie’s pavement art. An ambulance screamed by, narrowly missing the passenger door of Terry’s ancient Caprice Classic as I opened it wide onto the street without thinking.
Inside, the lobby was deserted. The building didn’t have a doorman, no elevator either. We climbed three flights, the injury on my hip getting madder at me at every creaky step.
We stared at Carol’s door.
A helter-skelter of blue plastic tape stretched across it. Police tape. A notice warned not to enter and a crudely fixed bolt and padlock put the lid on it.
“Jesus,” Terry said.
Terry took out his cell phone and a business card. “I’ll call Manelli.”
I touched the tape as if it were a live wire, that it could transmit the news through my hand.
We didn’t need any more phone calls.
On the other side of the hall a fire extinguisher hung on a wall bracket.
I lifted it out. My arms grumbled at the strain. I ignored them; the sheer bulk of it felt somehow satisfying.
“Don’t call anyone,” I said, beginning a pendulum motion with the extinguisher.
“Fin, no.” Terry stepped smartly out of the arc traced by the red cylinder.
I stepped forward and let it crash into the police padlock.
The impact sent a seismic judder through me. The padlock stayed put.
I swung again.
This time there was a gratifying crack as the wood around the screws split.
“Kick it now,” I said. “My legs aren’t up to much.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Terry said.
I began swinging the extinguisher again. “I’m not leaving here until we’ve seen inside.”
Terry pushed me aside and aimed a kick just beneath the handle. It looked like he knew what he was doing in kicking terms.
The door flew open.
Inside, the sight was pretty much what had greeted us in my own apartment.
The difference was that Carol had possessions that were really worth trashing. The furniture, the glass, the pictures, the clothes, the plants, the knickknacks. Everything had been caught up in a whirlwind of hate that had spun through her home.
And the same names on the wall; same red, same violent spatters.
I stood in the living room. The couch where we’d started to make love; upturned, bleeding red paint. I moved into the bedroom. The bed where she’d clung to me was now desecrated, shredded.
“Where is she?” I said out loud. Where had she run to? Mom? Or farther, out of town, out of state? Where was her refuge? She would be scared, confused.
I wandered, trancelike, into the bathroom.
Porcelain smashed; her unguents, creams, sprays, foaming scummy islands in the pool of water that spread across the floor.
I picked up an empty pill bottle, pocketed it.
Back in the hall, Terry was kneeling near a smashed telephone. He was gingerly poking around in the torn-up, red-stained paperwork that had been scattered across the floor.
“Anything there?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Utility bills, bank statements, and a whole lot I can’t make out because of the paint.”
I joined him. He was right, there didn’t seem to be much, other than the ephemera of household management. It seemed so sad. As if someone was telling her she didn’t have a home anymore. Look, he was saying, you’ve ripped my life to shreds. Now it’s your turn.
I picked up one of the more complete pieces of paper. Maybe this held the answer to where she was.
“We better get out of here,” Terry said. “Someone’s bound to have heard the noise.”
Scooping up a few more bits of paper, I got up.
“Okay,” I said.
There was nobody on the stairs, nobody in the lobby.
As we reached the car, I could hear sirens approaching.
Terry didn’t accelerate hard, a gentle coast to the junction at the end of the street and a seamless merge into a line of traffic. We were now just anybody in an endless line of bouncing, honking automobiles.
As we drove north, I shuffled the papers from Carol’s floor. They were medical insurance forms. She’d had some routine checks, a few hundred dollars. But it was the account from somewhere called St. Cecilia’s that interested me. It gave no hint as to the course of treatment. Just seven-fifty bucks a day. No itemization, an all-inclusive price. It didn’t even say it was a hospital. A hospice? No, people didn’t come out of hospices.
Why the hell had Carol been there?
An address in Fort Tryon; a mere censer-swing from the Cloisters.
Carol had said that she had been somewhere that was both good and bad. St. Cecilia’s wasn’t a hospital for the body. And the roller-coaster that had been her affair with JJ Carslon had left Carol needing a place that dealt with the mind and spirit.
A refuge.
“I have to see her,” I whispered.
“You’ve got Manelli tomorrow, fix on that, Fin. One thing at a time.”
“There isn’t time for one thing at a time,” I said. “Tochera made certain of that.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on Pablo. He stuck his neck out for you.”
“He stuck my neck out.”
“No,” Terry said firmly. “Not just yours. He’s in a tight place. He doesn’t know why McIntyre put him on the case in the first place. It isn’t really his field, and he doesn’t know why McIntyre was so happy to take him off it. He was obstructed every step of the way, and he’s diligent, but there comes a point . . .” Terry took one hand off the wheel and waved it vaguely. “He’s astute, he has an attuned sense of fear, both his own and others. He’s compassionate too.”
“How do you know so much about him?”
“People like me have plenty of reason to be grateful to Pablo Tochera.”
“People like you?” What did he mean? Legal executives? People who wear glasses?
The penny dropped. “He does work for the gay community,” I said.
Terry nodded. “Everyone assumes that in a place like New York, gays have an easy time of it. That isn’t necessarily so, and there are plenty of people whose lives are better because of Pablo Tochera. You don’t think that any ordinary attorney could have got you out of JFK in anything but a police car?”
“I thought it wasn’t his field,” I said.
“Not when on official Schuster business. But when he’s wearing the pro bono hat . . .”
“And does McIntyre know how Pablo spends his evenings?”
“He didn’t,” Terry said. “But Pablo believes he does now. I think that what’s frightening Pablo so much. He has good reason to be afraid.”
Even with the little I knew of Jim M
cIntyre, I had no trouble believing that Terry was right.
“You still got Ernie’s letter?” I asked. Sure he had; he’d said he would treasure it and Terry wasn’t the sort to say what he didn’t mean.
“Of course.”
“I’ve been wondering about the numbers on its reverse,” I said.
Terry nodded. He kept his eyes on the road looking out for drivers and pedestrians to whom he could bestow courtesies, letting vans out of parking spaces, allowing taxis to swerve in front of him, waving jaywalkers across his path so that the vehicles in the other lanes had to brake sharply and curse him.
“I think those figures are code,” I said.
“It’s possible,” Terry said, betraying neither surprise nor skepticism. “I was never convinced they were merely Ernie’s accounting entries. He was a lawyer; he couldn’t count.”
Terry’s apartment lay two blocks behind Central Park West. A hip address, but not as hip as JJ’s aerie overlooking the Park itself.
In his own habitat, I appreciated how different Terry looked from when he was in the office. Sheldon Keenes wouldn’t allow informal dress, so everyone wore suits. For some, the contrast between the uniform and casual wear is hardly noticeable. With Terry, the change was more profound. Sure, a black jacket, black T-shirt, and rimless spectacles perched on the bridge of a petite nose made him more Madison Avenue than Wall Street. But it was more than that. In the office, he didn’t seem complete, the fact that he wasn’t a qualified attorney somehow diminishing him. But here—since I’d seen him at JFK, in fact—I’d recognized that he was a whole person; there was nothing missing.
He moved like a black cursor on a white computer screen as he led me through the apartment. Everything was white, except for a few splashes of color on the wall, pastel blobs and squares. Inaccessible art, expensive. A bronze male nude, abstract, but recognizable, followed us with its distorted eyes.
And a tiny white bedroom, more of a box room with wall-to-wall futon, overlooked by a giant photo of Maria Callas, mid-aria at fullsoprano throttle. There was nothing else in the room save for a black telephone next to a single pillow at the head of the futon.
“Bathroom’s down the hall,” Terry said. “Don’t worry about blood on the sheets. I’ll understand.”
He plumped up the pillow and then stood up straight. His whole body seemed in a state of hesitation.
“What did Ernie look like?” he asked at last.
“He didn’t die from a heart attack,” I said.
“Of course not,” Terry snapped. He unzipped my garment bag and started to remove my smelly, crumpled possessions as if they were priceless artifacts. He stopped unpacking for a moment and smiled at me. “I’m sorry.”
“It was like he had been strangled,” I said.
Terry’s eyes burned with both fear and hunger for knowledge.
I hesitated. “He was shaven. Not a hair of his own on him. But there was a wig. He was wearing a wig.” I remembered how it had slid down his forehead, like some shaggy guinea pig trying to eat his face, and how I had arrived in time to stop the furry bastard before it reached Ernie’s eggplant tongue.
Terry looked up at the ceiling and I heard him catch his breath.
“We can talk tomorrow, if you like,” I said.
“No,” he said quietly. “Now.” He continued to unpack.
My mind panned over the bathroom scene. “I had the sense of . . .” What was it? Deliberation, premeditation, a grotesque order, a perverted still life. No, it wasn’t like a painting. It was about a human being as part of a process.
“Ritual,” I said. That was it, part-performance, part-sacrifice. Something choreographed.
“His testicles were tied tightly with twine,” I said.
Terry stopped mid-movement and shut his eyes. He whispered something I didn’t pick up. It sounded Indian.
He opened his eyes and motioned me to lie on my side and he started to undo my shirt buttons.
It was as if he was in a trance, but still his hands kept working: delicate, sensitive, precise.
He eased my arm out of one shirtsleeve without adding to the pain.
Terry stood up and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up. He didn’t offer me one. “Ernie was a complex man,” he said, exhaling the words with the smoke.
“A giant intellect, who allowed himself to be a figure of fun,” he continued. “But he wasn’t funny, really. He once said it was like he’d got on the wrong train to work and he could see another alongside him—the right one—and, as the journey progressed, the correct train peeled further and further away. He had laughed and said that he’d written a stinker to the Railway Users Association to ask for his life back by way of refund.”
Terry pressed his fingers against his eyelids. “Cigarettes. They play havoc with the contacts.”
“But why the twine, the wig?” I asked. “If he didn’t set the scene, then who did and why?”
Terry shrugged and carefully flicked ash into a little silver box he pulled from his pocket. “Who knows, Fin. But I know that right now he’d want you to get some sleep and sort out your own mess in the morning. He loved you, you know. I know you lost your clients, I know you went to Bombay—and he didn’t stop it. You have a choice, Fin: Either draw the conclusion that he didn’t really care about you or accept that life is complex and that sometimes people take a wrong turn.” He shrugged. “I don’t know—I’m not the qualified attorney, you are. I thought they weren’t supposed to be so judgmental.”
Suddenly a new wave of exhaustion swept over me.
I turned over onto my front and closed my eyes.
FORTY-TWO
At ten the next morning I was in Fort Washington, a stone’s throw from the Cloisters, scanning the frontage of a high-gabled building smothered by creepers and shrubs at its lower reaches, but whose dark brown brick soon gave way to a half-timbered glory of yellow plaster and railroad tie-sized oblongs of black wood from which dozens of mullioned windows sparkled in the sun.
Terry had left the apartment just after dawn, telling me that Pablo Tochera would be along later. I hadn’t waited for him. I needed to see Carol and I wasn’t convinced that Detective Manelli could afford to give me compassionate leave to do so, now that my picture was on TV and in the papers. Whatever Terry said about Pablo, he didn’t yet have my unconditional confidence.
From the outside, the building wouldn’t concede that it was St. Cecilia’s. But the street number matched. Maybe the neighbors didn’t want the fact that they abutted a genteel madhouse advertised. And to keep the peace, the good sisters of St. Cecilia’s had obliged.
As I pressed the discreet bell, I wondered whether this was a fool’serrand. I had some old medical insurance forms and an empty bottle of Prozac look-alike from Carol’s bathroom floor.
A smiling man in T-shirt and jeans opened the door.
He let me into a high-beamed hallway reception area; from the lofty windows arms of moted light reached down to a floor laid with a threadbare and uneven blue carpet.
Deep and frayed comfy chairs lined the wall, within easy reach of large oak coffee tables laden with bright magazines. No newspapers, I observed. In one corner was a cart with coffee, cookies, and bottled water.
It felt safe. The paintings and poems of incumbent and previous residents pinned to notice boards were, for the most part, competent and displayed psychoses under some measure of control. The few people wandering around in tracksuits appeared spaced-out but comfortable.
“I’ve come to see Carol Amen,” I told a cheerful-looking receptionist who was performing lightning keystrokes on a switchboard, cocking her head as incoming calls flowed into her ear from a near-invisible set of headphones.
“I’m Fin Border,” I added.
Her eyes narrowed, like the name meant something but she couldn’t place it. “She expecting you?” she asked before tapping a few keys on her switchboard. “Please hold,” she trilled into the little rod in front of her mouth.
“Yes, she’s expecting me,” I said.
The receptionist glanced at a notice board on the side of her little booth.
“She’s got group in fifteen minutes, then dance therapy.” She looked up at me. “You sure she’s expecting you, honey?”
I smiled confidently. “I’m sure.”
Another attendant in jeans and T-shirt appeared and was sent to check with Carol as to my bona fides.
“Make yourself at home,” the receptionist said. “Take a seat, have some coffee.”
With a magazine—the latestVogue—open on my lap, I stared into the middle distance. I could guess what had driven Carol to this place. Had it worked the last time? And what about now?
***
Somehow I’d expected Carol to be a shuffling shadow swaddled in a dressing gown or an ill-fitting tracksuit, her hair matted and lank.
But her hair shone, her face appeared fresh and natural. She wore a tracksuit, but it wasn’t ill-fitting. It perfectly framed her sensuous athleticism.
As I stood up, she motioned me to remain seated and joined me on the couch at an ambiguous distance.
“You look great,” I said. But as my hand touched hers in a gentle squeeze, I felt the clamminess. Close, I could see that clever cosmetics masked the pallor of her face, the sadness. Now that she was sitting, her body crumbled inside the tracksuit.
She managed a smile. “You look terrible,” she said. Before leaving Terry’s apartment, I’d attempted some superficial work with my hair, trying to spread it out a little, dispel the post-bushfire scrubland look.
I now found myself fingering my stubble self-consciously, as another resident chose a spot immediately in front of us to read a magazine and slurp loudly on a cup of coffee.
“Is there somewhere more private?” I asked.
“We don’t have secrets in here,” Carol said flatly. “Thisisprivate.”
“I’ve missed you.” It sounded so lame.
Carol’s face hardened. “I’m here to deal with my own feelings, not yours.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not about blame either,” she said.
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