77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  “I know,” I said, and she bent over her work again.

  “What made you change your mind about giving up Michelle’s appointment book?”

  “I’m a little scared,” she said. “I got some phone call last night from one of her men, wanted me to come over, like I’m going to take over the business for her. It makes me think maybe the police should tell those dicks-for-brains where they should jump off. Know what I mean?”

  I nodded. “Did he give you a name?”

  “Not until I told him I was going to hang up. You know how late it was? Scared me, phone rings in the middle of the night. I met him a couple of times when Michelle and him had some kind of deal going on. That was a long time ago. I barely remembered who he was when he started calling Michelle again.”

  “A week ago?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Michelle kept telling him they had nothing to talk about. The past is past.”

  “Maybe she changed her mind,” I said.

  Mike came in with the appointment book, smelling of coffee grounds and dead flowers. He gave me a thumbs-up and walked across the room toward the front door. He said, “Thank you, Flora. I’ll keep you posted.”

  She nodded her head but didn’t look up. I saw her dab at two fat tears before they could fall on the snowy fabric in her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

  “All she wanted was something better.” Flora caught my hand as I picked up the chair to put it back. “Maybe she has it now.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Yeah.”

  We left her bent over the baby dress.

  Back in the car, I asked, “What did you find?”

  “Ridgeway’s phone number penciled in for ten o’clock Tuesday night, and the address of a coffee shop east of downtown. She was found in her car a couple of miles from there.”

  “Did they have sex first?” I asked.

  “No. Whoever did her didn’t even get into the car, just reached in through the open window and stabbed her.”

  “Maybe he was kissing her when it happened.”

  “Maybe, but who cares?”

  “It would have been important to Michelle.”

  “If you say so.” He took the First Street exit toward downtown and pulled into the first parking space past the end of the off-ramp. We were in one of the scarier parts of the city, at the edge of Aliso Village, the dean of the city’s crumbling federal housing projects. The neighborhood where Anthony Louis grew up—a jumping place.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “You tell me. You’ve made up your mind about Ridgeway, but I’m not there yet. Where is he?”

  “If this were a movie of the week, he’d be in a patrol car in the Seventy-seventh Street lot, sleeping it off.”

  Mike called Seventy-seventh Street and asked to have the lot checked. While we waited for a call back, he asked me, “Why would Ridgeway go after Michelle and JoAnn?”

  “Because there’s no statute of limitations on murder. Just when Ridgeway is beginning to feel safe again, Hector comes along and starts digging around about Roy Frady. JoAnn and Michelle can somehow connect Ridgeway to Frady that night.”

  Through clenched teeth, Mike said, “Ridgeway didn’t kill Frady.”

  “You keep saying that.” I crossed my arms over my chest, slouched down in the seat, and looked out the window, too tired to risk getting into anything with Mike. He was tired, too. I said, “I don’t want to be in this place anymore. You driving on, or shall I catch the next bus?”

  He started the engine. “Are you mad?”

  “Hell no.” I flipped the radio dial from his hokey “There’s a tear in my beer” country music to “The Mozart Hour” on NPR and turned up the volume.

  “You’re mad!” he shouted over the music.

  “Do you want the truth about what happened or do you just want to be right?”

  He snapped off the radio when his telephone buzzed. The conversation comprised no more than a dozen words: Barry Ridgeway was not cooping at Seventy-seventh Street.

  We crossed the bridge over the Los Angeles River, a thin black stream in the middle of the concrete channel, and passed into Little Tokyo.

  “If you’re talking,” Mike said, “I’m listening.”

  “Okay. Jump in anytime,” I said. “If I were going to dramatize my version of events, this is how it would play.” I leaned into him. “May ten, 1974, ten-thirty p.m. Roy Frady, coming off his high, swings off the freeway to get a six-pack. He runs into his old pal Barry Ridgeway again. They’re both drunk. Ridgeway has one of his babes in tow, Michelle, and he’s all over her. But maybe it still burns Ridgeway that Frady is sleeping with his former girlfriend, maybe it makes him feel better when he sees Frady take off with one of Michelle’s friends, knows he’s going to cheat on old JoAnn. A little payback on its way.

  “If it were my script, I would have Ridgeway call JoAnn and tell her that her guy is out screwing a dancer named Nancy, and not to wait up for him. JoAnn has never mentioned any such call; it’s too bad that reality doesn’t always make the best drama.”

  “Then what?” Mike asked.

  “That’s it. Frady never goes home and Ridgeway is afraid to confess that he may have been the last man to see his old partner alive. He knows he’ll be a suspect. It’s possible that he was so drunk that the exact sequence of events is unclear to him. I think that when he sees Frady’s car and realizes what it means, he gets sick. He stays drunk for the better part of a week, and when he gets sober enough to sort things out, the SLA is ashes and the obituary of the girl he set up with Frady is all over the papers—Nancy Ling Perry of the Symbionese Liberation Army. It’s too late to start talking at that point. Besides, he’s into a loan deal with the mob and he can’t bear the close scrutiny that would follow if he talked.”

  “Why doesn’t Michelle come forward?”

  “Two reasons: she hopes things work out between her and Ridgeway, and she’s in on the mob loan. She’s going to be Ridgeway’s partner in this club, remember? Would an optimist like Michelle toss away a shot at something better than dancing for Sal and servicing his clients just to snitch off a killer who’s already dead? Of course not.”

  Mike had a crooked smile. “That’s how you figure it?”

  “That’s how I’d play it. One hundred minutes long, one hundred pages of script, a plot hook slapped at the end of every fifteen minutes to bring the audience back after the commercial breaks.”

  He picked up my hand and kissed it. “When you write this potboiler, where will Ridgeway be when he’s found?”

  “I’ve been thinking. It appears at first that he has a bizarre need for symmetry. That’s why he left my car where he did. On second look, I decided that he simply has no imagination and he just couldn’t come up with something new when he was shedding blood on my upholstery. So, I wonder, where would a streetwise guy go if he had a bullet in him?”

  “And?”

  “Remember that bullshit story you told me about arresting the torture killer down on skid row?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where does a desperate man go for shelter?”

  CHAPTER

  25

  We missed church services and dinner at Victory Outreach down on Manchester. The dormitory was closed until 9:30, so men who held tickets for beds that night were passing the time by watching television in the dayroom downstairs or finishing the chores that earned them their cots and showers.

  Two cars from Seventy-seventh Street had come in with us. When we paraded through the dayroom—four uniforms, Mike, Rascon, and I—a couple of the men slithered out. The others not only stayed but seemed to regard us as the evening’s entertainment. They drew in uncomfortably close.

  “Who you lookin’ fo’?” “I didn’t do nothin’, honest (followed by laughter).” “Leave the sweet one down here, boys.”

  At that last remark, I pushed right up against Mike and held on to his elbow: fif
ty newly scrubbed, semisober, gap-toothed, homeless bachelors were not my choice of companion.

  “We missed Barry this morning.” The director was a thin, soft-spoken, white-haired man with wire-rim glasses. A holy-looking man. “He usually escorts the women’s shelter residents to Sunday mass. I was afraid he had fallen victim to Saturday night temptations.”

  “Has he called you?” Mike asked.

  “No. Sorry.” The director selected a key from his ring. Then he turned to me. “You’ll have to wait down here. No women are allowed in the men’s dormitory.”

  “But the dorm’s empty,” I said. “Everyone is down here.”

  He raised his hands to show the policy was not his to break. “Something happens to our residents when a woman passes through their sleeping quarters. I can’t explain it—a scent left behind, perhaps, that sets off their buttons. I only know that it leads to fights.”

  Mike gave me a look that said, Please don’t push it; but if I was going to be the source of contention in an empty dormitory, what could happen in a fully populated dayroom? I didn’t want to find that out, so as Mike went up with the director and the uniforms, I hurried back out toward the reception area. On the way, I gathered in half a dozen admirers, two of whom got into a shoving match when I said I wouldn’t mind a drink of water and they each wanted to show me where to find it.

  I asked the little gnome who tucked himself up close to me, “What happens if you come in after curfew?”

  “Nothing.” He had no teeth at all in his smile. “They lock up at eleven. If you ain’t inside by then, you ain’t gettin’ in.”

  “What if you’re sick and you want to come in during the day?”

  “Call the paramedics. They lock us out of the dorm from eight in the morning until nine-thirty at night. This ain’t a hotel, you know, girlie. You can’t just come and go. And they don’t make exceptions for nobody.”

  “If you were going to sneak someone in, how would you do it?”

  His face went all mushy and he pressed in closer to me. “If it was you, honey, I’d find us a way. But we could have us a whole lot more fun over behind Jimmy’s, where we could be alone. Upstairs, every asshole would expect a piece of your sweetness.”

  “What if I was a man?”

  He winked. “I ain’t interested in that kind of stuff.”

  My gnome was shoved aside by a younger man. “You’d have to get to the guy with the key. I’ve tried talking my way in before, and it never did me no good.”

  “Anyone else have a key?”

  “Nope. Just him.” He gestured toward the stairs the director had taken.

  “Is there another door in?”

  He pointed toward the dining room. “It’s locked just as tight.”

  I said, “Thanks,” and moved off toward the office, where the staff was having coffee. If Ridgeway had gone up either set of stairs, someone would have seen him, and everyone would have heard about it. Unless there was a hole in the time line I had worked out, and if in fact it was Ridgeway whom I had shot, then he could not have arrived at Victory until about the time the others were going down for seven o’clock breakfast. My best guess was that he had stayed at Thea’s until I called, and then he had bolted. Knowing what I did about Ridgeway, if he was being sheltered by his friends at Victory Outreach, he would not be found in the men’s dormitory.

  I shook my escorts and walked through the office to the back passageway that led to the supply room where I had first met Ridgeway. The supply room door was closed, but not locked, so I went in.

  Rows of setups—a sheet, a towel, toiletries, and a New Testament—were neatly stowed on shelves. The counters and floors were still damp from their evening cleaning. Bags of dirty laundry were lined up next to the back door—a door that I knew led out to the alley.

  Ridgeway sure as hell wasn’t folded into a laundry bag. Anything else that might be found inside them was Mike’s department. I followed a draft to its source, the back door, and found that the door was ajar, as if someone had neglected to give it a last tug to drop the latch. Careless about locks in that neighborhood?

  I pushed the door open and peered into the dark alley, saw no one there, and closed the door firmly. When I turned, there was a woman in the room behind me. She held a tearful child by the hand and carried a plastic diaper pail. We startled each other. And she failed to ask me the usual question.

  I asked her, “Where did you come from?”

  She pointed toward the ceiling as she brushed past me. “Gotta get these in to soak,” she said, dumping soiled diapers into a stationary tub. She poured out soap flakes and ran hot water. “We’re running low. I think someone’s triple diapering, ’cause they sure went fast. We just washed the whole lot of them yesterday.”

  The woman watched me more closely than she watched the tub. And when I left the supply room and went back out to the passageway, she came with me. I found a door propped open with a child’s wooden building block, and opened it. The door led to a narrow stairway that ended at a second door, this one also propped open. When I started up the stairs, the woman tried to get in front of me.

  “Residents only,” she said. “You can’t go up there.”

  “Sure I can.” There was no way she could stop me; I was taller than she and didn’t have a child tugging on me. But she followed as closely as she could, scolding all the way up the stairs and into the women’s shelter.

  The rigid rules downstairs about staying out of the bedrooms did not prevail upstairs. Six or eight women and their children lived like a big family, sharing a kitchen and television room, with each family apparently assigned private sleeping quarters.

  It was bedtime for the younger children, homework time for the older ones, popcorn and cocoa time for the mothers. Through the open door of a bedroom on the far side of the dining alcove, I could see a baby sleeping in his crib, a mother reading to a toddler tucked into a bed next to it. The activity in the common areas did not seem to bother them, or anyone.

  A girl about age ten was the first to speak to me, the first to ask the usual question. “You from the county?”

  “No,” I said, watching the diaper lady hurry away to caucus with the women sitting at the dining table.

  The girl looked me over carefully, shrugged, and went back to her board game on the floor. While the kids, perhaps accustomed to strangers moving through their quarters, paid me no attention, their mothers were obviously concerned.

  I invaded, began peeking into open doors. When I reached for a closed door, an older woman, too old to belong to any of these small children, came up behind me. She wore a rosary on her belt, looked like a nun in plain clothes. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a sick friend,” I said. “He’ll be in big trouble if he doesn’t get help soon.”

  “He?” She had slipped between me and the door. “Men aren’t allowed on this floor.”

  “That’s why I’m checking beds. I heard a rumor.” I reached past her and turned the knob.

  Mike had said he could smell blood as soon as he walked into Thea’s house. What I smelled when I opened the door was baby and the sharp, acrid sweat that accompanies cold fear.

  As I reached for the light, the door slammed into me, hitting me on the side of the face hard enough to make me reel backward. Barry Ridgeway streaked past me. For a wounded man, he ran pretty well. I started after him, but two of the women tried to hold me back. I broke free, vaulted a low coffee table, sprang at Ridgeway’s back before he reached the exit, and dropped him facedown into the middle of the kids’ game. They squealed with both terror and delight as their dice and playing pieces went flying. I hung on and wrapped my arms and legs around his middle.

  Ridgeway was a big man, trained in street brawling. He rolled up, brought me with him, had his fist hauled back and ready to fly at my head when I said, “You’re okay.”

  “What the …?” was all he said, keeping the fist in check as he seemed to realize who I was.

 
“I didn’t shoot you?”

  He relaxed his fist and I untangled my legs and slid to my feet. I kept patting his chest, finding nothing but solid, intact flesh.

  He demanded, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “More than a few people want to ask you the same question.”

  He pulled down his shirttail and smoothed back his hair. “I suppose you brought your film crew?”

  “No. Just six cops. Where were you last night?”

  “Here,” he said, looking a little dopey. “I needed to lay low.”

  “Why?”

  “Because for the last week, every time I made a date to see an old friend, they ended up dead. Hector, Michelle, JoAnn—I got calls, they went down. So when I got a call from some guy said he was your pal Guido, said you wanted to see me at your house, I figured it was a setup. Lana told me you were out of town. I thought I would lay low up here until I could get enough money together to get out of town.”

  By that point, I had made three complete circuits around him, and he was all there. I peered up into his ruddy face. “Do you really date Thea D’Angelo?”

  “Date her?” He smoothed his hair again, seemed thoroughly perplexed. “We had a dinner meeting about scheduling an interview in the studio, but I sure as hell wouldn’t call it a date.”

  “Were you at Hector’s on Sunday?”

  “Yeah.” His eyes suddenly filled. “I got there just about the time they took his body away. We were going to talk about Roy. For twenty years I wanted to talk to Hec about that night. I finally get there, and it’s too late.”

  “What did you want to tell him?”

  “That I was sorry. If I hadn’t been drunk off my ass, things might have been different.”

  “How?”

  “I never told anyone before.” He put his hand up to still the quivering at the corner of his mouth. “It’s none too easy to talk about now.”

  “Three people are dead, and one is still in the hospital. If you do talk, could anything worse happen?”

  He gave me a sardonic grin. “If you don’t have a film crew, maybe you’re bugged.”