77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  If Frady ran into Nancy the next night … If Frady made a date to meet Nancy the next night …

  The ferry was ready to board and the line surged forward. Carlos offered his hand, which had a slip of paper in the palm. “Call me,” he said.

  I put the number in my bag as we followed the people ahead. I was lost in thought for a moment and slowed down so suddenly that the man behind me stepped on the back of my shoe. “Sorry,” I said, and hurried along with the line.

  We were moving so fast it was difficult to talk. I grabbed Carlos by his arm and kept him close as we approached the gangway. I said, “The LAPD never heard any of this. Michelle was questioned several times, and never mentioned Nancy ling Perry. Why should I believe you?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  I stepped onto the gangway and had to let him go. “Show me evidence.”

  He dropped back, stepped to the side. He had to shout: “I think you already have it.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  Always know where your shoes are.

  Always know where your Molotov cocktails are.

  —Symbionese Liberation Army, “Defense Plan,” January 1974

  I called Guido from a pay phone in the Berkeley Marina ferry terminal.

  “Where the hell have you been all day?” he demanded. “I’ve left messages with Lyle and your mom and Mike and no one knows where you’ve been.”

  “You sound like a mom. I’ve been talking to the FBI.” I told him what Carlos had said about Michelle and Nancy Ling Perry. And about Jack Newquist showing up in Berkeley.

  “Come home,” he said. “I have a lot to show you.”

  “Maybe I can get a late flight. Right now I have to see my parents.”

  He nagged a little more before I got him off the line. Then I called Mike at Parker Center and no one knew where he was. I left a message on the machine at home and a message on Michael’s machine in the guesthouse. I dialed Mike’s voice mail and told the recorder I would be at my parents’ house.

  Mom and Dad were unloading groceries from the trunk of Mother’s car when I pulled Dad’s car into its space in the garage.

  “There you are,” Dad said, handing me a bag with eggs and milk inside. “Next time you come up, sweetheart, bring a secretary.”

  “Who called?”

  “Mike. Guido. Lyle. Special Agent Kellenberger. Lana Howard. Uncle Max.” He combed his hand through his sparse white hair. “That’s all I remember. I wrote them down.”

  The trunk was full of their marketing, too much food for people planning to leave town in a few days. I picked up a second bag. “They have awfully nice food in France.”

  Mother said, “We aren’t going, not even to take a look around. Daddy called and told the consortium he isn’t interested.”

  “Just like that?” I asked, puzzled by the quick turnaround.

  “I’m sorry we even considered leaving.” Mother held the back door for me. “It was cowardice, pure and simple. I was afraid that if we were here when the time came for Emily, we wouldn’t have the courage to let her go. I don’t know how to explain it, but signing the documents clarified everything. It may not be easy, but I have no qualms that we will do the right thing. Thank you for taking care of the legal end, darling. Now you’re stuck with us.”

  “Good. You can come to Houston with us for Christmas and see Casey in the Nutcracker.”

  In several trips, we carried the groceries inside and put them away. Dad handed me my list of messages, all of them needing urgent response. I tore off the page and stuffed it into my pocket.

  The kitchen clock said 5:50. If there was room on the 6:30 flight from Oakland, I could be at home within two hours. My father was getting a saucepan out of the cupboard. I said, “Mom, Dad, could we do dinner another time?”

  They both smiled at me as if I had said something clever. Mother said, “Of course. We aren’t going anywhere. Next time, bring Mike.”

  Dad drove me down to the Oakland airport. On the way, I told him what Carlos had said about surveillance.

  “You met one of them?” he said, bemused. “All through your sister’s antiwar period, they were like ticks on my butt. Several of us had tails. Became a competitive thing: what, you aren’t under surveillance? Project must not amount to much.” He patted my knee. “It was worse in the fifties. People had to leave the country.”

  “You left the country,” I said. “Is that why? Were you a subversive physicist?”

  He laughed. “That’s an oxymoron. We went because it was easier to work without McCarthy and J. Edgar in the closet.”

  “That’s a pun.”

  He hugged me at the departure gate and waited for the plane to take off. I felt very young, and very safe, having my dad watch over me from the terminal window.

  At 7:35 I was on the ground in L.A. At 7:45 I was in the shuttle that would take me to the external lot where I had parked my car. I called Guido from the car and asked him to meet me at my house. I still hadn’t connected with Mike.

  At 8:35, Guido and I, over the remains of his bottle of single-malt scotch, began to swap information.

  “There is a Michelle video,” he told me, and went to the stack of tapes on my workroom floor. “Not her exactly, but Hector talking about her. He took the list of people he had contacted for us and went through them, gave a little rundown.”

  He found the tape, put it in the player, and forwarded to the preset stop. Hector came on, wearing running shorts and a two-day beard.

  “Michelle Tarbett,” Hector said, reading from a sheet of paper. “Heart-of-gold whore, nice ass, face like a train wreck. I never understood what Frady saw in her. She did drugs, she did tricks, she was a breakdown ready to happen. He kept saying she was okay. I know he got information from her because Frady’s thing was street news. That’s what made him so effective on CRASH, hooking into the pipeline. But he could pat her on the bum, buy her a drink, and get the same information. He didn’t have to bleep her.

  “The big turn-on with Michelle, if you ask me, was the danger factor. She had a boss who was into the mob. She had a pimp plugged into big-time drug distribution. No one wanted her to fool with Frady, and that’s why she did it. He could take on the bad guys for her. Besides that, she was a sweet kid. Michelle worked a pretty tough client list. White woman in the ghetto—big pay, big grief.”

  The phone in Hector’s apartment rang and he walked off to answer it, leaving the tape running, focused on an empty sofa. After the call, he must have forgotten about the tape. I heard what sounded like a refrigerator opening and closing, the fizz of a can being opened, before Guido turned off the machine.

  “When was the tape made?” I asked.

  “Mike said those are the shorts he was wearing in the morgue. My guess is, last Sunday.”

  “What time?”

  He shrugged. “Draw me a diagram of the apartment’s orientation. Then we’ll chart the shadows in the room. I think we can get within an hour or so.”

  “You’re a genius, Guido.”

  “That’s what I keep telling you.” He took the remote from me. “How’s Emily?”

  “Status quo.” I took out the tape and slid it into its box. “Is there a JoAnn tape?”

  “No. He goes after Mary Helen, but I think he was talking more about his own ex-wife or ex-girlfriend. Mike took that one.”

  “Where the hell is Mike?”

  “Haven’t seen him since this morning when he dropped off some tapes he wants me to work on. He was all bothered about not knowing exactly where you were, so he came by the studio looking for you.”

  “He knew I was up north.”

  “He knew you were up north. He just didn’t know exactly where you were at the moment.”

  “Go on.”

  “He collared me about that stupid tape we made at the academy. He wanted me to reassure him you knew it was a prank.”

  “And you said?”

  “I let him suffer.”

  “Do
you know where he is now?” I asked.

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about all that. I didn’t mind making Mike squirm now and then, but I didn’t need or want my friends to help me do it. I read some undercurrents in what Guido told me. Guido had felt pushed out from the day Mike walked into my life. Guido made it clear way back in the beginning that he didn’t think that Mike was exactly suitable for me. Or even housebreakable.

  I got up and packed the tapes into a carton for Guido to take with him. I said, “You were busy today.”

  “Kept my nose to the grindstone.” He handed me an empty cassette box. “Every time I wander, I get buttonholed by that number cruncher, Thea. How many penalty hours do I estimate and what budget line do I want to assign lost equipment? All that stuff is bullshit. I tell her to be creative and get scarce. But she is omnipresent.”

  “Thea’s job is the details. She’s good at it.”

  “She’s a pain in the butt.”

  “That, too.” I closed the carton and handed it to him. “How’s JoAnn today?”

  He frowned. “She’ll recover. She’s still pissed about how she looks, but she’s okay.”

  “I need to see her. Want to come with me?”

  “Uh.” He demurred. “I told Fergie I’d give her a hand. Those crutches make doing things around the house difficult.”

  “Has Mike seen all the tapes?”

  “I made copies for him. But I don’t know if he’s gotten to them.”

  I stood up and stretched, yawned until my eyes ran. “Anything else I need to know?”

  He shook his head. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. We’re filming background along Manchester, and then we’re going down to Long Beach for the same.”

  “Do you need me?”

  “No. I’m sending my interns out to do it—class project. They don’t even need me.” Guido rose and picked up his leather jacket. “I’ll be busy putting together my costume for tomorrow night.”

  “Oh my God,” I groaned. “I forgot all about it. Lana’s Halloween party. I don’t have a costume. I don’t want to go.”

  “It’s mandatory,” he said. “Go as a foreign correspondent. You can assemble that, can’t you?”

  We were walking toward the front door. “I’ll think of something to wear. But how am I going to talk Mike into a costume?”

  Guido put his hand on the front door. “You make your bed, you lie in it.”

  That was a dig I didn’t acknowledge. I gave him the Polaroids from Berkeley and asked him to fool around with them. Then I kissed him good-bye and went back to the workroom for my car keys.

  In her semiprivate hospital room, JoAnn was propped up on lacy pillows, her hair pulled back in a red ribbon. When she heard me come in, she snatched her reading glasses off her taped nose and tucked them under the covers.

  I handed her a stack of magazines I had bought on the way over. “How are you feeling?”

  “I hurt. But they’re giving me good drugs. I might stay around for a while just for the drugs.” She seemed a little loopy. “Doctor says I’ll have black eyes for a couple of weeks, so I don’t know when we can film your thingy.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I pulled up a chair, sat close to the high bed. “Can we talk, though?”

  “Oh, sure.” She primped. “I saw you on the news. Too bad about your sister. I think I remember her name. What did she do?”

  “She was a doctor.”

  JoAnn’s grotesque face pulled into a pout. “I thought she got shot.”

  “She did.”

  “Boy, they’ll shoot anybody nowadays. When Roy got it, well, it was pretty unusual. But now …”

  I hoped she was loopy because she was beginning to sound like an airhead. “Tell me about Roy.”

  “He was a wild one. But I loved him.”

  “I read all the police reports, and I don’t remember anyone asking what you did when he never came home the night he was shot. Telephone records show he called you, and he told his friends he had a date with you at ten-thirty or eleven. What did you do when he didn’t show?”

  “Nothing.” She reached for the magazines and thumbed through the top one. “All he said was, he would try to come by. I was in pain. I took a sleeping pill and I didn’t know he wasn’t there until the police woke me up the next morning.”

  “You’d had surgery,” I said.

  She picked at the bodice of her gown over her ample bosom. “Roy gave me these babies. They were still ugly when he died; they were brand-new. I always bruised pretty easy.” She touched her discolored cheek. “Roy said he would try to come by that night, and I told him he didn’t have to because I didn’t want him to see me looking like that. He had vacation coming, starting the next day, so we were going to have a lot of time together, trying on lingerie and stuff when I felt up to it.”

  What she said didn’t quite square with the Frady lore. “You weren’t expecting him?”

  “Sort of.”

  “He told his friends he had a date. He called you. Everyone thought the date was with you.”

  She closed her magazine. “You’re going with a cop. Does he always come straight home?”

  I didn’t bother to answer. “What did Roy say about his plans? Was he going to stop somewhere, or see anyone?”

  “He was drunk,” JoAnn said, as if that explained a lot. “He told me how happy he was to be back at Seventy-seventh with the boys. He told me he loved me, and he told me what he had planned for my new chest. He liked to talk dirty. That’s what we talked about, sex. He was really getting into it, so I thought he’d be right home. I was supposed to wait up, but, like I said, I fell asleep. He knew the best he could expect from me that night was a blow job—he couldn’t touch me, I hurt too much.”

  “Kind of like now,” I said.

  “Wasn’t this bad. God, I’m glad he can’t see me now.”

  “A lot of people miss him,” I said.

  “I guess the way I said that sounded bad. I’d like to see Roy, sure. But I wouldn’t want him to be turned off by how I look. The way their women look is important to cops.”

  “Did you know Michelle Tarbett?”

  “I knew of her. I dated a couple of the guys in the division before Roy. They used to talk about her.”

  “What did they say?”

  “She was a pro.” She drew in a breath, coughed, touched her taped ribs. “Damn.”

  “You know she’s dead?”

  JoAnn grimaced. “If I hadn’t got in one good shot … Look, I’m tired. It hurts to talk.”

  “Maybe tomorrow you’ll feel better,” I said.

  “I doubt it.” She closed her eyes and turned away from me.

  I went home to an empty house. There were no new messages, and I couldn’t locate Mike. I began to worry about him for all the usual reasons. I was worried about where he might be, and who might be with him. It was too late to call Casey, so, for someone to talk to, I dialed my parents. All I reached was their machine, meaning they had probably gone to the Perlmutters for their usual Saturday night bridge game. Everything was back to normal.

  I took Bowser for a short walk, combed some burrs out of his fur when we got home, played catch with him for a while. He followed me around as I locked up. We left a light burning in the kitchen for Mike and went upstairs. Looking bored, Bowser waited for me to take a quick shower, and then jumped up on the bed when I folded back the quilt.

  Mike’s voice mail pager beeped. He had left it on his night-stand with his extra reading glasses and a plumber’s wrench. I picked it up, watched his office number scroll out on the tiny screen, signifying that someone at Parker Center wanted to talk to him. When I pushed message retrieval, I got a readout of fifteen numbers, the device’s limit, and calculated that half that fifteen had come from me.

  I read for a while, and at eleven I turned on the news and watched the updates on my own life: Emily was hanging in, there were no developments in the Documentary Deaths, though there was s
ome talk about a movie deal in the works—a movie about a movie. Then I turned the set off, rolled over, and fell asleep with Bowser in my arms.

  I thought I heard Mike come in, but it might have been a dream. Cool air brushed my face, I felt the opposite side of the bed sag down—probably Bowser moving. I didn’t look at the clock or turn over. I only remember feeling tremendous relief that Mike was home. And then Bowser started to bark.

  I snapped on the light to see why; Bowser is not a barker. Bowser bounded to the floor and started pacing by the door, urging me to come with him. I had never seen him so agitated, keeping track of me, watching the stair landing, alternately barking and growling.

  There was a strong breeze coming up the stairs, and the faraway hum of the freeway. I had never before heard the freeway from inside the house. I went to the closet and got Mike’s .357 Magnum revolver off the shelf, found a box of the right ammunition among his socks, and, with shaking hands, loaded six rounds.

  The house was cold and all I had on was underpants and one of Mike’s T-shirts. I whipped the lap quilt off the end of the bed and wrapped it around my shoulders. With the gun in one hand and a portable phone and the edges of the quilt in the other, I whispered to Bowser, “Go get ’em, old man.”

  Bowser took off for the stairs, nails clicking on the hardwood as he tried to get traction. I followed more slowly, listening for sounds that did not belong in my night house.

  Bowser never barked at family. But, if Michael had come into the house for something and had brought a friend, maybe that would set off Bowser. As I walked down the stairs, I dialed Michael’s cottage, just to see whether he was there. In the distance, I heard his phone ringing, four rings; then the machine kicked on. I rang off, and called out his name. But there was no response out of the dark beyond the end of the stairs.

  Bowser paced along the bottom step, waiting for me to tell him to go ahead. I gave him the signal, and followed at a distance as he ran across the entry.