77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  Mary Helen Frady Rich lived in a neat green bungalow on a street lined with established shade trees and similar neat pastel bungalows. Before I was out of the car, she came out a side gate, a slender middle-aged woman. Mike had told me she was beautiful when he knew her, when she was still married to Roy Frady. At forty-four, she was attractive under her heavy makeup and frothy, permed hairdo. Even in gardening clothes, jeans, and a work shirt tied at the waist, she would turn heads.

  “Miss MacGowen?” Mary Helen took off a cotton gardening glove and offered me her hand. She seemed intensely interested in me, giving me an evaluation as if she were casting me for a part. I began to feel uncomfortable under her scrutiny.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I said. “I know the topic is difficult for you.”

  “It’s been a long time. When you called, I hadn’t even thought about Roy for weeks. Happens after a while; you forget to remember someone. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why you’d want to make a movie about Roy.”

  “The film is as much about the craziness of the mid-seventies as it is about Roy. Society on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”

  She smiled sardonically. “Hell, and I thought it was just me. What do you think I can tell you?”

  “Everyone who knew him had a different angle on Roy. I need to hear yours.”

  “Whatever. I’ll help you as much as I can, as long as you get Tommy Lee Jones to play Roy in the movie and you put in a big sex scene—and believe me, honey, if you’re doing a story about Roy Frady you know you’ll have a big sex scene. Tommy Lee is one man I would like to see naked.”

  “So would I, but I’m not making that kind of a movie.”

  She frowned.

  “We’re doing the story as a documentary. I’ll be filming you talking about Roy.”

  “Me?” She blushed, but she laughed. “Okay, then you write me into that sex scene with Tommy Lee Jones. Come on around back. I made us some coffee.”

  She led me through the side gate and into a Japanese garden fantasy: surreal bonsai woods, a Shinto shrine, a cherry-wood bridge over a pebble stream, a small teahouse. Mary Helen caught me staring.

  “My neighbors think I’m crazy.” She ushered me into the teahouse, where she had mugs and a carafe of coffee set out on a low table. “But, hell, my kids are grown, don’t have a husband anymore, and I only go in to work four days a week. I have to have something to do with my time.”

  I set up my tape recorder while she poured coffee. She put Asahi beer coasters under everything.

  “Today, all I want to do is talk in generalities,” I told her. “Later, we’ll bring a film crew, powder our noses, and do it all again in more depth for the cameras. That okay with you?”

  “I don’t mind.” She pinched the extra flesh under her chin. “I have time for a little tuck job?”

  When I laughed she leaned closer to me, watching my face. She said, “You aren’t what I expected.”

  “I keep hearing that.”

  “You don’t look like you’d put up with any fooling around.”

  “Me?”

  “You look like a smart girl. What are you doing with a cop?”

  I turned off the tape and studied her more closely. Sometimes we forget to take beautiful people seriously. I said, “I thought I was going to ask the questions.”

  “I knew who you were when you called the other day. I still talk to Leslie now and then—you know, Mike’s number-one ex? She told me about you and Mike a couple of years ago. We went out one night, rented some of your movies, and got bombed together watching them. Cried our eyes out. They’re good, but don’t you ever do comedy?”

  “There’s more money in social outrage.”

  “Too bad.” She stirred her coffee. “Are you going to Hector’s funeral?”

  “Yes. Mike’s giving the eulogy.”

  “Poor Hector.” She shook her head slowly. “He finally gets his life straightened around, gets sober, and that happens.”

  “I never knew Hector when he was drinking.”

  “You’re lucky. He wasn’t a pretty drunk.” She tasted her coffee. “I’ll look for you at the funeral. There’ll be plenty of people there who can talk about Roy. I don’t know about all the things he did. And I don’t want to know. But I’ll be happy to point out some of the old-timers who know chapter and verse.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t want to talk about him.”

  “I don’t much. But the thing is, my kids keep asking me about their dad—they barely remember him at all. Now I have grandkids and it’s starting all over. I’d appreciate having someone besides me tell them about Roy. I’m tired of lying.”

  “Lying?” I had the tape running again.

  “My kids grew up without a daddy. I remarried when they were in high school, but my second husband was more a pal to my kids, not a father. They feel they missed out on something. I always told them their dad loved them and he was the best dad a kid could have, but the truth is, he was too busy working and screwing around to pay much attention to them. If he’d lived they probably would have hated him for abandoning us. Instead, he died, so he gets to be a hero.”

  “Do you resent that?”

  “Damn right I do. In their minds he’s always as perfect as a plaster Jesus. But I’m not. I’m too real. I was there every day, making them eat their vegetables and clean their rooms and do their homework. They love me, but their father is way up there on a pedestal. It’s too late for me to change my story now. I want you to tell them the truth for me.”

  “What is the truth?”

  From the heat I was hearing in Mary Helen’s voice, I expected invective to flow. Instead, she gave me that sardonic grin again. “Roy Frady had the biggest, brownest puppy dog eyes you ever saw.”

  “Is that what got him into trouble?”

  “That’s how it started. He was good with girls. They’d look at him and he’d act kind of shy, make the girls be the aggressor. It worked on me, and I’m no pushover.” She leaned in to whisper. “He was the best I ever had. If he could have sold it, he’d have been a millionaire.”

  “You loved him?”

  She frowned. “Hard to separate good sex from love. Leslie said the same thing about Mike. We never denied them, never wanted to. So why did they have to go out looking for it?”

  I didn’t want to hear about Mike anymore. I needed to believe that Mike had finished with all that. Like faith, sometimes that belief defied logic, but I still clung to it.

  I said, “According to the police report, you slept with Roy the day he died.”

  “I was his last.” Pride snapped in her eyes. “He left me for this bimbette who worked in the emergency room. But he cheated on her with me, and I was his last. That’s rich, isn’t it?”

  “You had a bad time after he died. Talked about leaving your kids with Roy’s parents and joining the Peace Corps.”

  “Yeah, well.” She waved it off. “Two kids, no job; it was too much to deal with. What I wanted was, out. Peace Corps wouldn’t have me. Hell, even the army wouldn’t take me because of the kids.”

  “How did you get through that period?”

  “Mike and Leslie, Doug and whoever his wife was that month, Hector and what’s-her-name. They’d take me out or come and sit with the kids. Mike made sure our pension benefits got through the system, took care of the hassle with Social Security. As soon as the insurance money came, well, I knew we wouldn’t be on the street.”

  Mary Helen gazed off into the bonsai woods. “It’s such a shock at first. All that day he died, I’m thinking my husband and I might get back together; I made him come twice in a row and he said he loved me. Then, out of nowhere, he’s dead. It’s too much to take in at once. With some help, you work through it. But those first weeks are a killer.”

  “Can we talk about Roy’s insurance?”

  “I got asked plenty about the insurance. Did I kill him for the money? Hardly. Roy had a twenty-one-thousand-dollar policy,
double jeopardy for accidental death. Forty-two thousand dollars looked like a lot of money back then, but it wasn’t when you break it down. I made a down payment on this house—hardly a castle, but the way prices were going up back then, you had to get into something or you’d get eaten alive. I set up college funds, bought us a car. The insurance gave us a little cushion in the bank. Social Security gave the kids something—less than Roy’s support checks did—and I started getting Roy’s pension, but I still had to work. Trust me, I wasn’t a rich widow. But I’ll tell you this, people were a whole lot nicer to me when I was a widow than when I was the estranged wife.”

  All I said was, “Hmm,” but she read volumes into it.

  “Divorced?” she asked, and poured more coffee. “If women knew how lonely divorce is, more of them would arrange to become widows.”

  “I hope not.”

  “I heard my divorced friends tell stories, but I didn’t believe them until I went through it myself. People I thought would be my friends for the rest of my life dumped me like the plague.” Now there was heat in her voice.

  I said, “Hanging on to some fair-weather friends is hardly grounds for murder.”

  “If you’re desperate enough, anything can be grounds for murder.”

  I felt a chill. I turned away from Mary Helen to pull out my notes.

  She reached for my hand and gave it a gentle pat. “Don’t worry, Maggie. Sometimes they settle down. Doug did. It took him three wives before he found the right one, but do you know anyone happier now? Maybe Mike is at that point. I don’t talk to him, so I wouldn’t know. If Roy had lived long enough, he would have found whatever it was that made him so itchy all the time and he would have given it a good scratch and been done with it. Looking for that itch is what got both him and Hector killed.”

  “That isn’t how Hector died.”

  “Sure it is. He wouldn’t have been in that apartment to take the shot if it wasn’t for the whore lieutenant, Gloria Marcuse. Hec left his wife to move in with Gloria, you know. He hadn’t even finished unpacking when she dumps him for some sheriff she met over on Catalina, leaves Hec with the lease. Ask Mike about her.”

  “I’ve met her,” I said. “The four of us went out together a few times.”

  “Then you know.”

  From that point, the conversation drifted from the life and death of Roy Frady to the loves of Mike Flint, Hector Melendez, and Doug Senecal. My purpose in coming had been to establish some contact, to put her at ease. We had accomplished that with “Hello.” We made progress; I felt I understood Frady better and maybe I had gained some insight into Mike.

  I could happily have stayed all evening, talking to Mary Helen. But I needed to go sweet-talk Michelle Tarbett. We promised to look for each other at the funeral and said goodbye.

  Straight up the Long Beach Freeway, going against rush-hour traffic, the trip to East L.A. wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected.

  Michelle Tarbett was more than just another of Roy Frady’s women. In 1974 Roy took some heat for seeing her, because she also had a rap sheet for solicitation and possession. Association with her made Frady vulnerable to all sorts of suspicions. His sergeant had warned him off, but he kept seeing her.

  I had seen Michelle’s twenty-year-old cheesecake pictures and had spoken to her on the phone. But the babe in the pictures and the middle-aged voice on the phone didn’t seem to belong together, so I did not know what to expect.

  When I first asked Michelle to participate in the film, she jumped at it, talked about her experience in the “business” and how nice it would be to be back before the camera—according to Mike, her film experience had been making porno flicks for her customers. When she changed her mind, I was more than curious to know why.

  Michelle greeted me on the porch of the old yellow bungalow off Brooklyn Street she shared with her sister Flora and various other relatives. Michelle was a bosomy, hippy, older version of the tiny, birdlike, no-nonsense Flora. Both women ran businesses out of the living room, Flora doing piecework for a bridal shop and Michelle booking services for senior citizens confined to retirement homes.

  I felt suffocated in the small, hot house. Flora’s sewing machine never stopped droning, and it was difficult to talk over the noise. Everywhere, there were billows of seafoam green chiffon ruffles; Flora was making the gowns for a quinceañera, the elaborate fifteenth-birthday celebration Mexican families give their daughters. Michelle’s scarred desk was stacked with bolts of the fabric, leaving her hardly any room for her telephone and schedule book.

  Michelle came back from the kitchen with a can of cold beer for each of us.

  I took the beer she offered and opened it. “Can we go somewhere quieter to talk? My tape recorder is picking up the sewing machine.”

  “I have to hear my phone. But we can go sit out on the porch.” Michelle opened the window, and we sat on old folding chairs in front of it, so it was only marginally more quiet outside.

  Her looks were gone. Michelle was in her mid-forties but looked fifty-something. Chain smoking, hard drinking, and coke sniffing take a toll. But she still had something about her, attitude I suppose. It was attitude that carried her in the old posters I had seen from the Hot-Cha Club: big seventies hairdo, more dark eyeliner than a raccoon to draw attention away from a heavy chin and small, close-set eyes. She’d had a great figure—long gone now—but had never been pretty. In Michelle’s old line of work, maybe the face doesn’t count for that much. And I believe she didn’t know she wasn’t beautiful.

  I started the interview by lying to her. “You look great, Michelle. You shouldn’t worry about the cameras. But come early tomorrow. Our makeup people are the best. They’ll make sure everything is perfect. And, I promise, head shot only. It’ll be fun.”

  She made some girlie faces that meant she was sold but wanted more coaxing.

  “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning still work for you?” I asked. “My stud muffin cameraman, Guido, will take good care of you.”

  “Stud muffin?” She got up to answer the telephone. I overheard the conversation through the window. “I can see you at six, Mr. Reynolds. Anything special tonight? Okay, hon, see you.”

  When she came back out she had another beer.

  I turned on my tape recorder and started over. “Tell me about your business.”

  “It isn’t much,” she sniffed. “Old people in retirement places can’t get out much, they call me, tell me what they need and I get it to them.”

  “Could be interesting,” I said.

  She apparently didn’t think so. She drank from her beer, touched her full lips with the back of her hand and covered a little belch. “It isn’t like the old days, you know, with customers all the time making a fuss over you. Back then, they was real nice guys—businessmen, cops, college kids. Quality, you know? They treat you real good, give you tips, take you out after to some nice place. They pay attention to you like you’re somebody.”

  “What you’re doing now is safer.”

  “I liked dancing a whole lot better than I like taking care of stinky old men.” She sighed. “But you can’t do that line of work forever. I always thought I’d get me a club like the Hot-Cha—it was a real classy place—but it’s hard for a woman. There’s a lot more to it than booking acts and serving drinks. A lot more.”

  Flora came out on the porch, stretched her back, and yawned noisily.

  I asked Michelle, “You knew Roy Frady?”

  “Oh, sure.” She fluttered a layer of her Pic ’n Save eyelashes. “He was a real cutey, that one. And good. Mmm-hmm. Not real hung, you know, but he knew how to please a woman. I was real broke up when I heard he died. I think we coulda’ gone places together.”

  Flora sneered. “He was married.”

  “He was separated,” Michelle snapped back, reflex born of long-term bickering. “He told me as soon as he straightened out some things, took care of his kids, we could date out in the open, be a couple.”

  “Funny, ain
’t it,” Flora mused, “how when a man comes, his memory of all that mush he said just flows right out the end of his dick. How many guys told you that same thing, Chelle?”

  Michelle got huffy. “Roy was different.”

  “I don’t remember you ever saying you was getting together with this Roy till after he was dead. What about them others?”

  Michelle’s riposte: “How many dresses you have to finish by five o’clock?”

  “Twelve. Give me a hand, will you?”

  “Bring ’em out here.”

  Flora went back inside, eased the screen door shut so it wouldn’t slam.

  Michelle leaned in close to me, smelling of beer and sweat and supermarket cologne. “Don’t listen to her. She never had a real career like me, so she gets a little jealous when I talk about the old days. Flora jumped into that husband, kids routine right off. She never had a good time in her whole life, now she’s too old to start.”

  “Did you ever marry?” I asked.

  “Couple times. Never amounted to much. Men get too possessive when you tie the knot. Want you to earn money, don’t like it when you do.” She drained her can and sat back. “You married, Maggie?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You’re better off on your own.”

  Flora came out with her arms filled with clouds of those seafoam green ruffles. She spread a white sheet on the porch and piled the gowns on top of it. Then she gave Michelle thread, needles, hooks, and eyes. “One at the neck,” she ordered, and went back inside.

  Michelle picked up the top cloud and found the top of the zipper among the neck fluff.

  “Ain’t this ridiculous?” She threaded a needle, bit off the end of the thread. “These little girls turn fifteen, their families go into debt to give them this big party, dresses for all their friends just like a big wedding. Caterer, bands, hundreds of guests, ceremony in the church with the priest—all on a loan they can’t pay back. And you know what’s sad?”