77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Uh-huh.” He tugged off my shirt, kissed my belly, unzipped my jeans. “I’d rather watch your front side.”

  Mike turned off the lights, leaving the room illuminated by only the fire.

  It was pretty, but I said, “I want to see you.” And he turned the lights right back on.

  Bubbles crested the top of the tub when we stepped into the water.

  Later, snuggling in bed, I found the TV remote, rewound the tape in the VCR, and pushed Start.

  “I’m already having nightmares,” Mike sighed. “I don’t want Anthony Louis’s face to be the last thing I see before I go to sleep.”

  “Me, either. Just watch.” A few seconds of snow on the screen cleared to reveal the bathroom. I had placed the mini-cam atop the shower door and focused it downward onto the tub. On tape, foreshortened from above, I poured bubble bath into the running water. Mike came in, stripped, did a pirouette. Turned off the lights. Turned them back on.

  “Now I get it,” he said.

  “Aren’t you darling?” I said as on the screen we started getting more interesting. “This is the best way to get used to seeing yourself on film—in the raw.”

  On the screen, Mike had his face buried between my breasts. In the flesh, Mike was shocked. Scandalized. He blushed. He never took his eyes from the screen. “You taped us?”

  “Look at that; it’s like a miracle. You kiss my breast and your lever rises.” I reversed the tape and ran it again. “Isn’t that the sweetest thing you ever saw?”

  “We’re not really going to watch this, are we?”

  “I am.” I snuggled my back in closer against him, pulled his arm around me. “We don’t have a family album. I thought it was time to start one.”

  “This is the first time, though, right? You haven’t been taping us right along?”

  I looked back at him. “Relax, baby. You can erase the tape later. But if you’re uncomfortable watching it now, I’ll turn it off.”

  On the screen, my back to the camera, I rose out of the water, straddled Mike’s lap, and slid down onto him. As he bucked under me, bubbles and water poured over the side of the tub. Mike’s eyes glazed over, both on tape and in the flesh.

  “Want me to turn it off?” I asked.

  When he didn’t say anything, I wrapped my top leg over his and nudged him. “Mike? Do you want me to turn it off?”

  He picked up the remote and rewound the part where my bubble-streaked abdomen arched back in ecstasy, and he played it again.

  The funeral was scheduled for eleven. I went in to the studio around eight, intending to stay only briefly.

  The interviews we had accumulated so far were, like the Anthony Louis tape, done piecemeal in a variety of locations, under different conditions. I was worried about how the inconsistent lighting and quality would look when we patched them together to make the final cut.

  I took a rough tape in to Bobby, a staff editor. Bobby was an old friend, a social guy in a job that required hours of solitude. He was always looking for an excuse to have company sit and gossip with him. He also knew more about editing videotape than anyone in Hollywood, one of those valuable network resources Gaylord Smith had talked about.

  “You wanted noir, you got it,” Bobby said. “The trick will be in the transitions. I’d like to sit down with you and play around.” He paused, he grinned. “With your footage, that is.”

  “I don’t have time right now,” I said. “Maybe this afternoon.”

  “Nope. I’m leaving for a conference in Vegas. Only be gone a couple days. How about Friday?”

  I shook my head. “I’m flying up to Berkeley to see my sister on Friday. Make it Monday?”

  “Emily?” He half rose from his seat. “You’re going to see Emily? I didn’t realize she was still alive.”

  “Alive is a relative term,” I said. I popped out the tape and rose to leave. I didn’t want to talk about Emily with Bobby—he wasn’t that good a friend. And at that moment, with Hector lying in a coffin waiting for his ride to the church, Emily was too perilous a topic to get into.

  “I remember Emily Duchamps.” Bobby grabbed my hand and held me back. He was in the thrall of strong memories. “She was so powerful, so charismatic. She’d show up on a press conference about Vietnam or some other federal screw-up, and God, she’d light up the screen, set my head spinning.” He dropped his gaze, like a kid during prayers. “I can’t believe she’s still alive.”

  Genuine concern, or conversational gambit? I didn’t know. Maybe he was genuinely surprised and wanted to commiserate, and maybe he just wanted me to stay and talk. I didn’t have time for either, nor fortitude for either. We made an appointment for Monday morning, we shook hands, and I left.

  I tried to get out of the building, but I ran into one problem after another, three of them relating to Brady’s firing alone. With no cushion of time left, I ran out to the parking lot.

  “Maggie! Have a moment?”

  I turned and saw Thea D’Angelo loping behind me. Big and ungainly, she reminded me of the kid in grade school who always gets picked last for teams; tries hardest, does the worst. Inwardly, I groaned. But guilt left over from being the kid who did the team picking made me slow down enough for her to catch up.

  I said, “Thea, sorry, I don’t have time right now. I’m late for a funeral.”

  “The funeral of that police officer?” is what she said instead of catch you later. “I read about it. He was a friend of your boyfriend, wasn’t he? I’m really sorry. Tell Officer Flint I’m really sorry.”

  “Sure. Thanks, Thea, I will.” I started away but she tugged on my arm. And she tugged too hard. I looked from her hand to her earnest, sweaty face. I said, “I’m late.”

  She let go, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. Really sorry.”

  That was four sorrys in a row. Feeling like a schmuck, I stopped. “What is it you want to tell me?”

  For a moment she went blank, and then she blushed again. “I have a question about calculating overtime on location shoots. I have the list of scheduled interviews and I want to get spreadsheets set up.”

  “Well, Thea.” I said it slowly, as if speaking to a dense child. “You need to address that sort of question to Lana or to the union. Now, please excuse me.”

  Too needy, was my assessment when I left her, her thick shoulders rounded with chagrin, fighting back tears as she stood in the middle of the parking lot.

  “Maggie,” she called after me.

  I sighed and turned around. “Yes?”

  “Jack, the reporter? He says you’re hard to keep up with, so I made him a copy of the shooting schedule. I hope that’s okay.”

  “It’s fine, Thea. Thanks for being helpful.”

  When I finally got back into my car, if traffic had been with me I would have had just enough time to say a word or two to Mike before the funeral; he had been awfully nervous when he left the house. But traffic was dense all the way down La Brea.

  I felt frantic. At that moment, I hated L.A. and its never-ending dense-pack of cars. I blew a Stop sign, sailed through on the tail ends of three yellow lights in a row, and then, when I turned onto Wilshire, I hit a solid, gridlocked mass. Add together subway construction under Wilshire, hundreds of blackand-white police units from as far away as San Diego and Santa Barbara, then the press, a motorcycle contingent, family, friends, and the morbidly curious. The result was urban paralysis. I gave up six blocks away from the Scottish Rite Temple, parked in a bank’s lot, and walked. I longed to be at home in San Francisco, where moving from one place to another is usually a pleasure.

  The walk gave me time to settle down. I was hot by the time I got to the temple, but composed.

  Police take care of their own, and they make sure none of the brotherhood goes down unheralded. Hector’s services had all the pomp and circumstance of a state funeral. Because the old Scottish Rite Temple, the traditional venue for police funerals, was slated to be closed forever after Hector’s services, there was an added element o
f poignance to the proceedings, and a few extra reporters. Along the curb on Lucerne, I counted five news vans. Ours was among them.

  I almost collided with Guido, who was running toward the vans.

  “What’s the rush?” I asked, grabbing his shoulders.

  “Michelle was a no-show. We waited for her, now I’m late,” he panted. “Not a good day, Maggie. Not a good day. That bar owner, Sal, is one scary guy.”

  “What happened?”

  “He threatened to sue us for breach of contract. He said he’d lose a lot of publicity if we didn’t film his place.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “With or without Michelle, the bar is a good interior.”

  Guido checked his watch. “Later,” he said, and ran on toward the vans.

  I crossed the street and entered the temple on the Lucerne Street side. Inside, the ornate hall was filled with honor guards, huge flowers, waving flags, a deputation of city brass, the chief, row upon row of men and women in uniform, Bach booming from the pipe organ, and television cameras to make sure none of it was lost.

  I felt suffocated, wondered what any of it had to do with Hector.

  Mike sat up front with the brass, facing the congregation, watching over Hector in his box. He seemed to be preoccupied, nearly distraught. He kept glancing through the notes he had written for the eulogy, over and over as if nothing was sticking. I decided right then to save myself a lot of grief and die before Mike did.

  The family filed in from a side door. Hector’s two teenage daughters looked to be in shock and in need of help, but the adults who should have attended to them were so intent on gaining chief-mourner status and claiming front row center seats that everyone seemed to have forgotten where they were, and why. Ex-wife and children, estranged wife, elderly mother already half-smashed at eleven o’clock in the morning, all argued. The issue seemed to be who was entitled to the big prize. That is, to whom would the police chief present the flag that was draped over the coffin?

  Doug Senecal, handsome in his uniform with sergeant stripes on the sleeve, was doing duty as a pallbearer. It was Doug who thought of Hector’s girls, who stepped away from the dais to hug them, to make sure they were seated close to their father and had funeral cards. He lingered near them like the alpha wolf watching over the young in his pack, found the younger girl tissue when she began to cry, reminded her older sister to hold her.

  Watching Doug, I teared up and couldn’t clearly see where I was going. Mary Helen Frady came and got me, sat me next to her about halfway back in the auditorium.

  “How’s Mike holding up?” she asked.

  “He’s trying to be a tough guy. He really loved Hector.”

  “Hector would be proud to know all the old gunslingers from Seventy-seventh are here. Those guys are the meanest, hardest sons of bitches going. They’re all in the back crying like babies.”

  I leaned in to whisper, “Did Gloria Marcuse come?”

  “She’s back there with the honor guard.” Mary Helen glanced over her shoulder. “The bitch. Later, we’ll get smashed and I’ll tell you how she slept her way to the top. She’s still going down on the captain.”

  I’d heard the stories. “Who else is here?”

  “I think I saw Barry Ridgeway. If it’s him, he looks like shit. I’ll introduce you to some wives at the cemetery.”

  Doug came over and knelt down beside me. “Need you up front,” he said.

  “I’m fine here. I can see Mike and I can get out in a hurry when it’s over.”

  Doug leaned in closer to me. There was some gray at his temples I hadn’t noticed before. “We have a situation, Maggie. Hec’s wives got into some big hair-pulling scene at the little girl’s junior high graduation last year. Looks like they’re warming up for a repeat. I need you to sit between them.”

  “I don’t even know them.”

  “Yeah.” He took my elbow and impelled me up. “So maybe they’ll behave better in front of a stranger.”

  “Where’s your wife?”

  “She’s keeping Hec’s mom from falling off her chair. Mom’s loaded.”

  Mary Helen said, “Good luck,” as I gathered my bag and got up.

  For Mike, I went with Doug, holding on to his muscular arm as he worked forward through the crush of people.

  Among the second-string mourners in the second row—Hector’s various sets of in-laws, stepchildren and could-have-been stepchildren—were young Michael Flint and both of Mike’s former wives. I had never had a problem with exes. They were both long gone before I came onto the scene, but it was weird to see them sitting together with Hector’s peripheral family.

  As Doug seated me directly in front of the two ex-Mrs. Mike Flints, Mike’s second wife, Charlene, the slick and perfect decorator, leaned into number one, Leslie, the schoolteacher saint—Michael’s mother—and muttered loudly enough for me to hear, “Why is she in front? She hardly knew Hector.”

  I wanted to turn around and ask Charlene if she thought that knowing Hector in the biblical sense entitled her to something special, other than the certificate of divorce Mike had already awarded her for the caper. But Michael was there and I didn’t want to embarrass him.

  Michael had heard Charlene’s remark and reacted the way I would expect Mike Flint’s offspring to react: he laughed. Michael rose and leaned over me from behind, gave me a hug and a noisy kiss. “How are you?”

  “I’m all right. How does your dad seem to you?”

  “Sad. I’m glad you came up front where he can see you.”

  I reached up and pressed my hand against his cheek. “And you, too.”

  Michael’s gesture toward me at that sticky moment was very sweet, and eased the awkwardness all around. Yet I noticed that, as he squeezed my hand, he glanced over at his former stepmother, Charlene, to make sure she was watching, then grinned at her malevolent leer. In many ways, Michael is a chip off the old block.

  The organ music stopped and the police chaplain stood up and called the congregation to prayer. Michael went back to his seat as both of Hector’s wives began to weep.

  When Mike came forward to deliver his eulogy, I watched him trying to hang on to his composure. Clutching his reading glasses, he looked from me to Michael and gave us each a wink.

  I knew he was afraid he would break down before he finished his planned remarks. I winked back at him, and, down low where you’d have to be looking for it to see it, flashed him an obscene gesture that made him smile a little. The only way I got through hearing Mike’s wavering baritone talk about Hector the good cop, loving father, true and constant friend, was to think about Mike in the bathtub the night before.

  Mike rode to the cemetery in a black-and-white unit behind the hearse. Mary Helen offered me a ride. We were somewhere in the middle of the mile-long cortege, hoping her car wouldn’t overheat during the long delays.

  “How are you?” I asked her. “Does all this fuss bring back Roy’s funeral?”

  “I don’t remember much about Roy’s funeral, I was so stoned on Valium.” She slipped Garth Brooks into the tape player. “Want to know what I remember about Roy’s funeral?”

  “What?”

  “No gas. Roy died during the oil crisis. Can you imagine this country in such a mess you can’t even get a tank of gas to get to your husband’s funeral? You were assigned a day you could line up at the pumps, and then you waited a couple of hours for your eight- or ten-gallon allotment. Remember that? The day before the funeral was my day. But where was I going to find two or three hours to wait in line at a service station? The kids needed dress shoes and there were all the funeral plans. I ran on empty for two days.” She threw back her head and laughed, reached out for my arm. “I was so afraid I’d run out and have to spend the night at my in-laws that I promised God we’d start talkin’ regular again, if he’d just get me through the day.”

  “Are you talking to God?”

  “No. And I’m not talking to Valium anymore, either.”

  At t
he cemetery in the Hollywood Hills, Mike and Doug and four of the other old gunslingers carried the coffin up a terraced slope to the grave site. Doug was behind Mike, and twice I saw Doug reach up to touch Mike’s shoulder. When they set down the coffin, the six pallbearers embraced, and it was the most heart-wrenching moment of the day.

  Mike found me and Mary Helen, hugged her, wrapped his arms around me. The day was hot and his dark wool uniform felt damp.

  I whispered, “You did well. I’m proud of you, Mike.”

  “Left out a few things,” he said. “I’m just glad it’s over. What’s your schedule this afternoon?”

  “Work. What’s yours?”

  “I told Hec’s mom I’d put in an appearance at lunch at her place. I’d like your company.”

  “Okay.”

  The graveside services were concluded with a lone bagpiper playing “Fleurs of the Forest,” a tradition at police funerals ever since the murder of Officer Ian Campbell in an onion field thirty years ago, and finally with a helicopter flyover. I leaned against Mike through it all. He was fine until the coffin began its descent into the grave, and then he was leaning against me, breathing in short gasps.

  Mike stayed near the open grave, talking with old friends, while the crowd dispersed and traffic cleared. Barry Ridgeway, wearing new-looking slacks and a blazer, drew me to the side.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  He turned his back on the uniformed crowd. “I don’t mind telling you, I feel damned awkward. Most of these people I never saw before, and the rest of them seem to think I shouldn’t be here.”

  “Why? Hector was your friend.”

  “Old beefs die hard.” He smoothed the short hair at his temples. “When your partner dies, you’re supposed to do something about it. But what could I do that the whole goddamn police force couldn’t do?”

  “You mean Frady?”

  He started to say something, but Mary Helen walked up before he got started, and he clammed right up. She studied him hard before she seemed to figure out who he was.

  “Ridgeway?” she said. “It’s been a long time. You look different.”

  He gave her a crooked smile. “This is the way an old cowboy looks when he’s had the shit kicked out of him. But you look just fine.”