77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  “He told you my name and my birthday, too?”

  “No. That information I took from your jacket. Look, MacGowen, while you’re up north, you might want to drop in on an old friend of mine. Name’s Carlos O’Leary. He might have something interesting to tell you.”

  “Is he an FBI agent?”

  “Not hardly.” He told me where to find O’Leary, by the banyan tree in People’s Park. “Be patient. O’Leary’s a little gun-shy.”

  “Give me an opening gambit.”

  “O’Leary was a card-carrying member of the Symbionese Liberation Army.”

  Immediately after we said good-bye, I left a message on Mike’s voice mail to call me.

  Guido and I watched the five o’clock news, and it was just about what I had expected: sensational lead-in, little substance in the story. The facts were all right, though. I would have preferred that the story not be broken so soon, and so far from my control.

  Around six, Michael came home from the library. I hadn’t seen him since the funeral.

  “Any leftovers?” Michael asked, looking at the ends of tacos on the table.

  “Sorry.” I wadded up fast-food wrappers and stuffed them back into their greasy bag. “Let’s go see what we can find for you in the kitchen.”

  I love Michael. He isn’t my son, so I have no qualms about spoiling him. I hooked my arm through his and walked him to the kitchen, grilling him about school.

  “I talked to Casey last night,” he said. “She sounded happy.”

  “She’s happy. But I miss her.”

  Michael put his arm around me, as he often does, and it felt so strange. Now and then Mike says to me, “If I’d met you way back before either of us was married, would you have even looked at me?” The answer is, probably not. We were in enormously different phases of our progress toward wherever the hell it is we’re headed. Besides, I was still in high school the first time he got married. So, when I look at Michael, I search for some essence of his dad as he was back then. Some clue to what I missed. Or what I was spared.

  The comparison between father and son is not a fair one, even though physically the two men are much alike. Michael, honor student at a fine private liberal arts college, would have turned my head. Mike, representative of the running dogs of capitalism, i.e., uniformed cop, probably would not. Except, I always liked bad boys.

  I looked inside the refrigerator, found eggs, zucchini, and mushrooms, and offered to make an omelette. As soon as the butter started melting and I tossed in diced garlic, Guido joined us. Peering over my shoulder, he said, “Make me one of those, too. Okay?”

  “Take out three more eggs,” I said.

  “Where’s the Anthony Louis tape?” he asked, walking to the refrigerator. “I haven’t seen it since we shot it.”

  I had to think for a moment before I remembered. “It’s upstairs in my room. I forgot to bring it down.”

  He asked for permission to retrieve it, and left me and Michael alone again.

  “Where’s Dad?” Michael asked, grinding coffee beans.

  I said, “He’s protecting and serving. I don’t know when he’ll be home.”

  “I saw something about your sister on the news last night. It didn’t make any sense to me. What happened?”

  “Nothing, really. I’m going up to Berkeley tomorrow to see her.” I tossed eggshells into the disposer, wiped my hands on a towel. “What’s your schedule tomorrow, Michael?”

  He thought. “Classes till eleven. Peer counseling at noon. Teach a math tutorial at the high school till three. Then I pick up Sly at his group home and coach his soccer team.”

  Sly was a street kid Mike and I brought home not long after we got together. Sly helped us find a murderer, and Michael kept him. Or Sly hooked Michael. I’m not sure which way it worked, but they remained a team. Sly had just celebrated his eleventh birthday in our backyard.

  I beat the eggs.

  “Do you need some help with something tomorrow, Maggie?” Michael asked.

  “No.” I poured the eggs on top of the sizzling garlic. “But company would be nice. I’m flying to San Francisco in the morning, and I wondered whether you might be free to come with me. But you’re busy.”

  “Too bad. Another time, though.” He was studying me the way Michael studies all of his projects, with intense interest. When Guido came back into the kitchen with a videocassette under his arm, Michael looked at him, too. Then he asked me, “Did you say Dad is working?”

  “Watch the eleven o’clock news,” Guido said.

  “No thanks.” Michael took plates out of the cupboard. “I’d rather see Dad in the flesh.”

  Guido took his omelette, toast, and coffee back to the workroom. I sat with Michael while he ate, and drank coffee while he put his dishes into the dishwasher. When he dried his hands and picked up his books, he said, “Is Dad okay?”

  “He’s fine. I think that he has taken on a heavy workload to keep his mind off Hector.”

  Michael frowned. “Hector’s funeral was hard to get through—Hector was like an uncle to me. Dad didn’t want to tell me how he died.”

  “He didn’t want to worry you.”

  He smiled in a self-deprecating way. “Tell Dad I can vote now.”

  “You’ll always be his baby,” I said. “Do me a favor? While I’m gone, look in on your father for me.”

  He hugged me good night and I kissed his stubbly cheek. And I ached to see my daughter. The best I could do was leave another message on her machine.

  Guido, lulled by food and the boring chore of watching videotapes in fast-forward mode, sat quietly on his side of the room. I was finally able to get to Hector’s disk.

  Mike often told me that Hector was the best detective he ever worked with; he was smart and methodical. Sometimes he pushed methodical to the point of being anal, and annoyed the more freewheeling Detective Flint. I was happy for Hector’s method: he left me a long list of names and addresses, and his calendar of scheduled interviews. I turned on the printer and ran several copies of those two files.

  “Maggie, look at this.” Guido was running a tape in reverse, showing Hector moving from the sofa in his apartment over to the lens of a camera he had obviously set up on top of his kitchen counter. The field of vision included most of the living room and the hall beyond the doorway. Guido started the tape forward, and I walked across the room and sat down next to him.

  Hector, wearing running shorts and a T-shirt, crossed his living room and sat down on his sofa, too. He leaned back, crossed his legs, smiled.

  “Hi, Maggie. Hi, Guido. We’ve been talking to everyone we can dig up about Roy Frady and the good old, bad old days. I thought, hell, I’ve got nothing but time, I might as well use it. Put in my two cents.

  “I’ll probably never give you this tape, but if doing this helps get me through the night, I guess I’m ahead. It’s Friday night and I’m all alone. I think I miss Gloria, but I can’t be sure. Maybe all I miss is having a hedge against being single, because the singles scene looks more like a toxic zone to me all the time.

  “Generally, I guess, my life is in the shit can. I can’t see my daughters until next weekend, and I really miss them. I’m trying to stay straight—I’ve been sober for two weeks—and everywhere I normally hang and everyone I normally hang with is gonna get me into trouble.

  “Maggie, I called you and Mike a while ago to see if you’d want to get some dinner, maybe go to a movie, but you were out or you weren’t taking calls. I started to feel sorry for myself and that gets dangerous. So, well, here goes.

  “For twenty years I’ve been talking about the night Roy died. Every time a couple of us get half in the bag, Roy comes up. It’s like Kennedy. You know, where were you the day Kennedy was shot? Everyone who’s old enough to remember can tell you exactly. I can tell you what I had on at school that day—chinos and a blue madras shirt—and what I bought for lunch—a tuna sandwich. When something like that happens, something that really hits you where your hea
rt is, you can’t help but remember.

  “It’s the same with Frady. Ask any cop who was on the force at the time, and he can tell you where he was when he heard Roy Frady was murdered.

  “I first heard that Roy was dead at around noon the day they found him. On Saturday. I wasn’t due to report for roll call until ten, ten-thirty that night—I was working morning watch. But they called us all in around noon. I hadn’t been to bed yet; my wife was still at me for coming home drunk at dawn, so I was kind of relieved when the call came.

  “In the locker room at Seventy-seventh, everyone was talking about Roy, a lot of rumors going around because they weren’t giving out details yet. At first I didn’t believe Roy was dead. I thought the guys were screwing with me because I felt like hell, and maybe Frady was late because he was in bad shape, too. I thought that if what they were saying was true, if Frady was dead, he must have had a wreck on his way home from the academy. He had been pretty juiced.

  “Then they said he was shot—it was Mike who told me. He was in shock. Right away, I thought Roy must have been caught with another man’s woman. In Roy’s life, that sort of trouble was pretty normal.

  “At roll call, the captain came in and told us Roy had been assassinated. Roy’s car was still outstanding and there was a lot of talk that there was a contract out on all cops. Back then, that wasn’t such a crazy speculation, because there were radical groups out there claiming they were taking out cops. We had a couple go down in our own division and there was some talk they were assassinated.

  “The brass wanted a strong presence on the street. They told us to contact our snitches and find out what the word was.

  “The truth of what happened to Roy took a while to sink in. To begin with, I didn’t feel so good, and I’d missed a whole day’s sleep.

  “My first reaction after disbelief was anger. We all got pissed. A lot of talk about radical hit squads taking out police all across the country. I thought that if some misguided bastards wanted war, I was more than happy to join up. I did my time in Vietnam. I knew more about jungle warfare than those draft-dodging commie sons of bitches ever would, and I was more than willing to show them. That’s how I felt.

  “Frady was my partner. But that rotation he was on assignment to CRASH, so I got teamed with the division problem child, Barry Ridgeway. I got along okay with Ridgeway. Everyone was worried about me and how I was going to handle the Frady thing. But what I was thinking when we went in to roll call was how Ridgeway would take the news about Frady, because there was a history between them.

  “When I drove in, I’d seen Ridgeway’s car out in the lot, so when he didn’t sign in, I went looking for him. We were all on edge. Frady’s car was still missing, rumors were getting out of hand about how he had gone down, like everyone was saying he had his dick shot off. So I go out to the lot and I see Ridgeway curled up on the backseat of his car. I thought he was dead at first; he looked dead. I broke the window getting in. He was just drunk. Jesus, he was drunk.

  “Ridgeway already had a bad-checks beef hanging over him. We didn’t want him to go down on a drunk charge. Any other day I might have left him to take his lumps. But because of Roy, we were all sticking close, you know? Feeling protective of each other. Sort of us against them.

  “Mike and Doug and I got Ridgeway into uniform and put him in the back of my unit, let him sleep it off. All day he was back there moaning while I was up front driving. Couple times I pulled over so he could throw up in the gutter. I didn’t care. All I had on my mind was finding the assholes who killed Roy. And staying alive.

  “We were on the radio constantly, me and Mike and Doug, keeping track of each other. All day, it was, you okay? and where are you now? and meet me here, let me see you. Every time shop eighteen A ninety-seven rolled up, I nearly cried I was so relieved to see those two guys were all right.

  “Evidence trickled in. We got an approximate time of death, a description of a getaway car. Something concrete to look for. Every time I saw one of my informants, I pulled him over, questioned him, told him to get the word out: we’re looking for a green Buick. Anyone hear or see anything around half past midnight? We wanted to find them so bad, we got awfully aggressive. I threatened and bribed and promised anything to anyone with good information. I got nothing but more rumors for my efforts.

  “We pulled a double shift. By morning watch, Ridgeway was sitting up front, but he was still in a bad way. We stopped at a liquor store for a bottle so he could get through the night. A little hair of the dog.

  “Around eleven, we got a call that Harbor Division had spotted Roy’s car down by Ascot Raceway. I heard Mike’s voice on the radio first thing, claiming the call. He and Doug went straight down there to verify the ID.

  “I stayed on patrol another half hour, then I went down to Ascot because I had to see for myself. When I got there, Mike and Doug were parked next to Roy’s little gold Pinto.

  “It was a piece of crap car, a little station wagon—couldn’t afford anything better. Roy hated driving that car, and there we all were, standing over it like it’s a shrine or something. None of us had seen Roy at the crime scene; all we had to hang on to was that fucking Pinto—sorry Maggie, I need a bleeper, I guess.

  “Whoever dropped the car wiped it down. Oil or something, had a film of some kind all over it. Ridgeway went back to sleep and we three just stood out there in the cold and damp and talked about Roy and some of our capers. Talked about his kids and how they’d handle knowing their father was dead—they were two and four, something like that. How rough it would be growing up without a father.

  “We all said we’d try to stay close to them, look over them. But Mary Helen had different ideas. We talked about her, too. She was a good-looking woman. We thought she’d connect with some guy pretty soon, if she hadn’t already; she and Roy had been separated for a while.

  “We talked about our own families and how they’d get along without us. Mike’s wife was pregnant with Michael. They weren’t getting along real well—they never did—but he wanted that kid real bad. He always said he wasn’t ready to get married, but with the kid coming, he was in for the long haul.

  “I had the feeling my wife wasn’t ever going to let me inside the house again.

  “We stayed out there all night. SID didn’t come to check out the car until end of watch—seven, eight o’clock the next morning. By the time the sun came up that Sunday morning, the three of us who were still alive had told each other things we had never told anyone. I have never felt closer to two human beings than I felt to Mike and Doug that night.”

  Hector got up off the couch, walked into the lens, and the screen went black.

  “Is there more?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Guido said. “He taped this at the end of another interview. I’ll have to go through all of the tapes and see.”

  Mike came home before nine. I walked out to meet him in the entry. He looked tired. He had his collar open and his tie loose, and held his suit coat draped over his right hand. In his left hand he carried the stack of unsorted mail that had been accumulating for a few days on the front table.

  When I kissed him, his cheek felt clammy and he smelled funny. Medicinal.

  “Guido found a tape Hector made. You should see it.” I reached for his coat to hang it up for him. But he moved it out of my reach.

  “What’s on the tape?” he asked.

  “Hector talking about the day after Frady died.” I snatched the coat away. The tough guy had a two-inch square of gauze across the palm of his hand, all taped down with a Big Bird Band-Aid. My stomach did a roll, but all I said was, “‘Splain this to me, Lucy.”

  He looked sheepish. “Anthony Louis didn’t want to come in. Had to take a knife away from him.”

  “Stitches?”

  “Two.”

  “Did you cry?”

  “Hardly a whimper. All in a day’s work.”

  “Did you find anything in Anthony’s room?”

  �
�Not yet. We don’t have the warrant, yet. Tell you what though, assault on a police officer gets him out of circulation for a while. I hope the DA requests no bail and makes it stick at least until we get a better handle on Anthony’s involvement.”

  “How’s Rascon?”

  Mike smiled. “I’m going to like working with the boy. He gave Anthony some pretty impressive dummy bumps pulling him off me.”

  I peeled up the edge of the gauze, saw some neat black macramé in the center of his palm. “Looks clean.”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “You think this will get you out of washing dishes, think again.”

  He laughed, pulled me close. “If I can wash dishes, guess I can take a bubble bath.”

  “My thinking exactly.” I kissed the underside of his chin.

  Guido interrupted. “Darl something-or-other is on the phone, Maggie. Says she found your gun.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  Las Vegas is trying hard to become a real city. Beyond the hard-core gaming dens downtown, out past the glitter domes and pleasure palaces of the strip, lies creeping urban sprawl that would put any good-size burg to shame. It seemed somehow fitting that counterculture fugitives would choose the edge of this brave new world to hide out, cool off. Disarm.

  A fairly new neighborhood minimall now covers Les Alls-worthy’s junkyard, possibly burying forever the story about how Roy Frady’s revolver turned up during the winter of 1976. The motel where Patty Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris lay low on their way to a safe house on the East Coast has been consumed by the expansion of the county hospital. The motel managers, the parents of the man who aided and abetted the fugitives, long ago walked into the light.

  I stood in the parking lot atop the leveled junkyard, held in the eye of Guido’s video lens, and read aloud the Las Vegas PD report Darl Incledon had found. “Mrs. Anita Allsworthy reported that while sorting through the belongings of her deceased husband, Lester Allsworthy, she discovered a thirty-eight-caliber Smith and Wesson Airweight revolver, serial number three two eight four one four. Mrs. Allsworthy stated that she did not know how her late husband came into possession of the weapon. LVPD accepted custody and gave Mrs. Allsworthy a property receipt.