77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  She seemed so emotionally fragile that I was afraid that after the second or third knucklehead on the staff declined to contribute, in his or her own crude manner, that she would come apart; it was tough enough to get the staff to kick in for people they knew. Thea seemed so desperate to be needed that I lied.

  “The production will send flowers, Thea. Maybe you’d like to take around a card and have it signed.”

  She liked the idea. While she was standing there, I asked Fergie to order flowers to be sent to Michelle’s sister Flora. Thea lumbered away and caught up with Jack at the elevator. I saw their heads bent together in rapt discussion before the car arrived. By the time the door shut behind them, Thea seemed wonderfully cheered.

  I wheeled Fergie out to the lot on a freight dolly and drove us to Le Mistral on Ventura Boulevard, where we met Guido.

  “How was the wake?” I asked Guido as we were being led to a quiet corner table.

  He dipped his head close to mine lest he offend the subdued elegance of the room. “Wild, and probably still going strong. I’ll show you the footage later.”

  At the table, Fergie delivered the bomb to Guido about Michelle Tarbett.

  “She’s dead?” Guido was incredulous. “How could she be dead?”

  “Ice pick in the neck.” Fergie savored his reaction. “Quick and dirty.”

  Guido asked, “Was it a rough customer?”

  The waiter hovered over water glasses. I leaned into Guido. “She serviced old men in retirement homes.”

  “She told me she ran a registry,” he said. “Now I’m sorry I never met her. She could be her own movie, ‘Senior Sex.’”

  “You’re the second one to say that,” I said.

  “I can’t believe she was a call girl.” Fergie, age twenty-one, curled her lip. “She was so old.”

  I asked her, “When you talked to Michelle about Frady, what did she say?”

  “She sounded hot for him.” Fergie seemed to expect us to share her disdain for geriatric passion. “She said Frady was always nice to her.”

  “Who found her number for us?” I asked.

  “Hector.” Fergie motioned for us to come closer. “You know what she told him? She tried to go straight, work in an office. But she missed all the attention, and went back into the life. Isn’t that sad?”

  “Pathetic.” Guido turned his attention to food.

  The restaurant was full, but quiet. We ate a beautiful meal, followed by coffee and brandy. When I folded my napkin on the table, I must have sighed.

  Guido grabbed my knee. “What’s the matter?”

  “To quote Brady, overload.”

  “Too tired to see some footage from the Embers Room?”

  “Does Mike disgrace himself?”

  “Royally. See for yourself.”

  Guido’s house in the Hollywood Hills wasn’t far away. Fergie rode with him and I followed. The night was so dark that once we left the streetlights on Highland and headed into the depths of his canyon, I could only see that which fell into the range of my headlights and Guido’s taillights in front of me. If Guido had gone over the side, I would have gone over right behind him.

  Fergie made herself comfortable on Guido’s living room sofa, looked as if she knew where things were. I sat on the floor in front of her and rewound two hours’ worth of videotape while Guido made drinks: Bacardi and Coke again.

  When I waved away the offered drink, he insisted. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “I followed your weaving lights up the hill,” I said. “If I need a ride, I’ll call a cab.”

  Guido started the tape. At first I looked at it from a technical perspective. The content was good, but there wasn’t enough light in the bar for good definition. Guido said it could be enhanced. We watched men drink. For a brief time, the wake was a private party, and then it was cocktail hour and the bar filled up with the usual crowd, which included legions of too-young women wearing too-short skirts and too much makeup: trashy, flashy, big-busted youngsters. Mike’s crowd, in the bag by that time, greeted the women the way starving artists go after gallery opening hors d’oeuvre trays.

  Guido swept the room with his camera, focused on a couple of very emotional reminiscences between old friends. Got a lot of leg shots. The screen went black, then there was a tremendous amount of background laughter and hooting, and Mike appeared, drunker than I had ever seen him, with a young Chicana, wearing a short, flippy skirt, balanced on his lap.

  Mike waved to the camera. “Hi, honey, wish you were here.” That waving hand then dove down toward the girl’s cleavage, and the camera was gone. I hated what I saw. It left a skid mark as it dumped acid down into that black hole in my chest. And I was embarrassed.

  “Thanks, Guido.” I stood up, reached for my bag. “That’s what friends are for. Gotta go now.”

  “It was funnier at five o’clock.” He seemed genuinely chagrined. He pulled me down onto his lap, crushed me against his hard chest, made me feel even worse. “I was drunker at five o’clock. Don’t go. I’m sorry. It looks bad, but it was nothing. Just fooling around. I’m sorry.”

  I have too much history holding up one side of a triangle to have found the humor in the stunt. I was thinking that a lot of things weren’t as funny to me as they used to be; that black hole, again.

  Fergie, blushing furiously, turned off the tape and switched to the eleven o’clock network news. In silence, with Guido, repentant, clutching me tight, rubbing my back as I rested my head on his shoulder, we watched the coverage of Hector’s funeral. A bite of Mike’s eulogy, the only part where he teared up and almost couldn’t go on. The chief’s generic fallen warrior remarks. The impressive cortege of black and whites, sobbing mourners, the rifle volley, bagpipes, and the helicopter flyover finish.

  “I wish I’d been there,” Fergie said. The toes of her good foot burrowed under Guido’s leg.

  Guido was massaging both my neck and her ankle when I pulled free of his grip and started to stand. I felt uncomfortable, like a third wheel. “It really is time for me to go, children.”

  I glimpsed the TV, and stopped, stunned by what I saw. The human interest story fed from San Francisco to network affiliates across the nation, with both archival footage and live shots filmed in front of my sister Emily’s nursing home, was, “Two years after an assassin’s bullet left Dr. Emily Duchamps in a coma, her family faces the decision of life or death. Dr. Duchamps, the renowned social activist, lingers in a twilight between this world and the next. Sources say that her family has asked the medical staff at this Berkeley nursing facility to remove her from the life support that has sustained her since the shooting incident in a Los Angeles alley two long years ago. Her family and doctors have refused comment.”

  Guido chimed in first. “I forgot she was still alive.”

  Fergie looked at me. “Take her off life support?”

  I was too busy dialing the phone to answer. The studio switchboard ran to ground Bob, the editor in whom I had confided that morning, the most obvious source of the story. I had the attack advantage—I caught him asleep in a hotel room in Las Vegas. Tired, plain old up-to-here, I let it all out on old Bob.

  “To begin, Bob,” I snapped, “you got the story wrong. You damn well better get your butt working on a correction before the right-to-lifers start picketing my sister’s bedside. The next thing you need to think about is this: it’s none of your business. If I spoke to you in confidence, one colleague to another, I sure as hell didn’t expect to hear my family problems echoed back to me on the goddamn national news. Where’s your heart?” I covered the mouthpiece and appealed to Guido. “I need vocabulary.”

  “Hair ball, ass wipe, douche bag, putrescent vomitus.”

  I stuck with the traditional, “Fucking idiot.”

  “I’m sorry.” Bob sounded sorry. “I simply went downstairs and said, ’Emily Duchamps is alive and living in Berkeley.’ I didn’t expect the news board to assign someone to the story, but they did.”

 
“There is no story,” I said.

  “Look, I’m sorry, really sorry if you’re upset and I’m the cause of it. But there is a story. You’re a newsman, you know how it goes down.”

  “Emily Duchamps is not, has never been, never will be on life support. You go file a correction before the end of the broadcast, or I fry your ass.” I hung up.

  Guido pulled me back down, held me in his wire-arm grip. “Sorry, kid. Once you put a loved one on life support, you have to do some big-time maneuvering to get them off again. You’re in a tough one, all right.”

  “Emily is not on life support,” I said. I said it very slowly.

  “Well, then,” Guido said, “you have nothing to worry about.”

  Guido asked me to stay. Fergie, it was clear from her body language, wanted him to herself. I wasn’t very good company. So, I drove myself home.

  The house was dark. Bowser was sleeping with Michael in his cottage at the bottom of the yard. When I crossed from the garage, Bowser pressed his nose against the glass to give me a token yelp.

  I went upstairs, showered, and climbed into bed, alone. It was after midnight. I expected Mike to come home at any time. For an entire year, we hadn’t spent a single night apart. We didn’t always get in and get out of bed at the same time, but we always met there at some time during the night. Pulling up the cold sheets that night, I missed him as I never had. And I admit that, knowing where he was and what his history was, I felt the raw, gnawing pain of jealous uncertainty.

  New anxiety sprang from old grievance, a defense mechanism; once bitten, twice shy. My ex-husband was a cheater. I didn’t like it, and I could not live with it. Not then, not ever again.

  I read for an hour, watching the clock. The bar closed at one. Half an hour later, no Mike. I turned off the light, rolled over, and tried to sleep. At about two, I gave up on sleep and turned on the TV—Rear Window, fragmented by commercials and cut in places that ruined the seamless story.

  Knowing better, I switched on the VCR and started the tape. The people making love in the bathtub didn’t even look familiar.

  I turned off the TV and called Guido. “Can you talk?”

  “Now?” He sounded sleepy. “Something happen?”

  I heard Fergie’s voice in the background. I said, “It’ll keep,” and hung up.

  I was still awake, lying in the dark, when Mike came home at 4:30. He fumbled with the bolt on the front door, ran into something in the entry, then either fell on the stairs or missed the turn at the landing and hit the wall. All during his procession through the house, he hummed “Fleurs of the Forest” in imitation of a bagpipe.

  While I listened to him come closer, I was both enormously relieved that he had survived and I was angry. All the nights I had lain awake waiting for my ex to show up made me a veteran of middle-of-the-night rage. That history also confused the situation: whom was I mad at, Mike or Scotty?

  I felt physical pain, an elephant sitting on my chest, listening to Mike stumble around the bedroom shedding his clothes. He opened the balcony windows and stood in front of them for a few minutes taking deep breaths, his slender nakedness silhouetted against the blue-gray night sky. I wanted to go over and hold him, to feel his skin against mine. Instead, I rolled over, turned away from him.

  Mike got into bed, pressed himself against my back, his face between my shoulder blades, his knee wedged between my thighs. When he draped his arm over me, I took his hand and kissed it.

  Maybe the light scent of the season’s last roses blooming in the garden below the open window drifted into the room. Or maybe his hand smelled vaguely of perfumed cunt.

  CHAPTER

  13

  I was in my workroom at home, getting materials organized for the day, when I answered the first call.

  “Is Mike there?” The female voice sounded young, full of sugar.

  “Mike can’t come to the phone.” Mike was still sleeping. “Can I give him a message?”

  “Tell him Olga called.”

  “Does he have your number?”

  “Oh, yes.” She giggled. “Mike has my number.”

  I hated her, whoever she actually was. And the guys who put her up to it.

  The volume of the VCR was too low to get through the sudden ringing in my ears. I turned it up so I could hear the raspy voice of Frady’s former gang unit sergeant. His name was Houlihan.

  “Roy Frady was one of the best officers to work CRASH detail. He went out and developed a network of reliable snitches.” Houlihan took a hit from the oxygen tank next to his chair; he had emphysema so advanced that Hector and Guido had gone to his home for the interview. “Nothing gangrelated went down in South Bureau without Frady knowing about it.”

  Hector asked, “What made Frady so effective?”

  “Girls.” Houlihan coughed. “Frady was good with the girls. Back then, the girls didn’t count for much in gangs. Still don’t. The boys would strut and brag about their crimes and their caper plans just like the girls weren’t even there. When the girls heard something, they’d go straight to Frady with it. ‘Bam Bam’s picking up a load of bud tonight.’ ‘Sugar Bear and Undertaker took out that liquor store on Manchester.’ They’d tell him anything.”

  “What did the women get from Frady in exchange?”

  Houlihan thought about it. “He was probably the only man in their lives who didn’t beat them daily. Maybe all he had to do was buy them a soda and listen to them.”

  Hector paused for effect; by that time he was an experienced interviewer watching for Guido’s cues from behind the camera. “Did you ever go back to the snitches and ask them if they heard anyone talk about killing Frady?”

  Houlihan nodded, his red face somber. “Every one of them tried to deliver the killer. Little girl named Tina snitched off that Sugar Bear I mentioned, told us the Bear’s car had been used—sure enough, Sugar Bear drove a Buick that fit the description the witnesses gave—and that he had used his own nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson to take out Frady. And then he was going all over town bragging about it. The Bear was the only actual arrest made in the case. As I recall, his polygraph showed guilty knowledge of the crime, but all that the investigators got from him was one more version of street rumors. Couldn’t make the charges stick, and he kicked.”

  I turned off the tape. Sugar Bear was a dead end, literally. Six months after Frady’s killing, the Bear died in a shoot-out with rival gang members. More than half of the gang members on my list were dead, most of them by violent means, and most of them before the age of twenty-five.

  Frady’s murder didn’t look like a gang killing. It was too organized. Even in 1974, drive-by shooting was the MO of L.A. gang bangers. Handcuffs, kidnapping, moving his car and wiping it down were not their style. Not that they all didn’t want credit on the street for taking out a policeman, or that they weren’t creative in the manner they claimed credit. It’s just that they didn’t do it.

  The next level of claimants was the small-time drug dealers. Seventy-seventh Street narcotics dicks heard through a “previously reliable source” that a kid in old County Jail was saying he had arranged for Frady to be killed by his associates while he was in custody so that he would have an alibi. He told the snitch that Frady had arrested him several times, and he was tired of being harassed. Frady was cutting into his business and making him look like a fool to his customers. He said his crime partners used a girlfriend as a decoy, had her lure in Frady by telling him that her friend needed help in the alley behind Eighty-ninth Street.

  The source said Frady fell for it because the decoy was beautiful. She got into Frady’s Pinto and took him to the alley, where he was captured, handcuffed, forced to crawl on all fours like an animal and beg for his life. He was shot and dumped. They dropped the murder weapon into the flood-control channel.

  Frady never crawled anywhere. Never wrinkled his crease.

  If people on the street knew anything that was useful, it had been buried under the sheer volume of fabrication and
false confessions. For the film, I was putting together a montage of a dozen or so versions: he crawled, he was beaten, he took it in the groin, he took it in the head, he took it standing up and lying down, he had his pants around his knees, he was emasculated, he was set on fire, he was in uniform, he was robbed, he wasn’t robbed. He was shot with his own gun.

  I went upstairs to dress for work. Mike was still sleeping it off. He lay naked and uncovered on his back in the middle of the bed with his arms out and his legs spread, his morning erection like a leaning pole. He snored like a foghorn.

  On the bathroom mirror, where he would be sure to notice it, I left his phone message—“Olga called”—written in shaving cream letters ten inches high. I finished the message by going back to the bed and adding a shaving cream flag to his pole. He didn’t move.

  I drove down into South Central before going in to the studio. I wanted to know why Sal Ypolito didn’t just go away.

  First, Sal gave us permission to film in his club, then he tried to back out. So, when we didn’t use his place after all, I thought, given the circumstances, that he would be happy. He could keep the money, and we wouldn’t inconvenience him. But I had a letter from his attorney, delivered by courier, claiming high-dollar damages for lost publicity because we weren’t going to showcase the glorious Hot-Cha Club in the movies. The stunt was too bogus to ignore.

  I arrived at the Hot-Cha Club before opening, just about the time we would have been filming with Michelle the day before. Sal had told us he was always there early to sign for food and liquor deliveries and to oversee setting up for the day.

  When I walked through the kitchen entrance, Sal was mopping the floor. Without looking up, he said, “Be right with you.”

  “I can wait,” I said, and he nearly lost his grip on the mop handle when he heard my voice. He glanced up, drilled his cigar deeper into the corner of his mouth, and turned his attention back to the floor, swabbing in wide arcs, working his way toward me, or toward the open door behind me. He put the muscles of his thick shoulders into the job like an old deckhand.