Goodnight Sometimes Means Goodbye (Wrong Flight Home, #2)

by Noel J. Hadley

  Ten seconds. That's how long it took for a top floor jumper to leave his foothold and marry the street below; there is a tragic photo that attests to this fact; also the same allotted time for the North Tower to crumble. But for those of us inside New York City, 10048, ten seconds was an allotted time best measured in eternity. Eternity, of course, is outside of time.

  For the rest of the world, it was 10:28am.

  When the silence finally settled into the embrace of darkness I opened my eyes to see what had survived, if anything at all. The homeless man, shouting absurdities about reclaiming childhood and six fingers (I can't recall everything about my dreams, I mean, who really can?) was gone. Elise was gone. Everyone was gone, except for me. Somehow I’d survived. How was any of this possible? And the darkness, that too had survived.

  Only darkness.

  Seven years later, the darkness lived on.

  7

  WHEN I WOKE UP, GRAY LIGHT welcomed an early Wednesday morning. Aristotle had positioned all four paws on either side of my ribcage and was presently staring down at me without a stitch of emotion about him. The thought occurred to me that he was plotting my murder. CSI would never suspect a dog. He knew it and I knew it; a typical scene in the Chamberlain apartment, especially when his food bowl was empty.

  My iPhone read ten minutes till seven, just enough time to flush a porcelain-full to the ocean, replenish Aristotle’s food bowl (hostage crisis diverted), and flip the coffee pot on before The Today Show announced itself over the airwaves. Matt Lauer. Meredith Vieira. Ann Curry was even more beautiful in person than television dared to dream. I thought about making a trip over to Rockefeller Plaza on my upcoming trip to New York, maybe wave at her through the window. She’d totally wave back. I knew she would. There was upcoming Beijing Olympics talk and talk of who Senator McCain’s presidential running mate might be (an announcement was soon expected), tropical storm Dolly talk courtesy of Al Roker, and even Senator Barrack Obama made it into the morning talk with his most recent visit to the country of Jordan. As always, Ann Curry was the top story of the day. They'd be crazy not to.

  And then there was the hollow pizza box, scattered Sam Adams beer bottles, Summer Ale and Irish Red, and a build-up of mail in the living room to consider. Overlooking a few discrepancies, the late Ira Chamberlain’s Belmont Shore apartment was kept immaculately tidy. Only a couple of months earlier, when Elise was physically present, her clothes were scattered everywhere. She never could manage dresser drawers, and hampers vomited regularly. Desire for order and cleanliness had finally been realized, but otherwise everything seemed out of place. The furniture was cold and empty, not a coveted quality in a home. An assortment of Ira Chamberlain’s iconic twentieth century photographs hung a little too straight in the hallway, and even the sunlight, as it shone through the windows, felt sterile. I had to face the facts. Hampers simply weren’t the same without Elise. That messy center is where I needed to be.

  It was fifteen minutes past eight when I jingled Aristotle’s leash and chain. Private Beatle Bailey reported at full salute for jogging duty, there was a double-double and fries to shave off the thighs, and we were on our way southbound to the Belmont Pool, which had played a part in the Los Angeles Olympic narrative a quarter of a century earlier. Turning east on Ocean Boulevard we ran with various oil tankers in view and beyond that hazy Catalina; continuing on all the way to Alamitos Bay, where I circled into the tiny community of Naples, which built individualistic glass-plated homes on narrow streets of water, similar to Venice and a world unto its own. On the trip back we jogged behind a cutie patootie in black spandex and her purebred boxer. They were both slow on the trail. Aristotle and I decided to run a little slower too, just to be gentlemanly, and equally enjoyed the scenery. The Beach Boys weren't lying when they wrote California Girls.

  We were home by 9am.

  I showered in five minutes and slipped into my clothes, a red button-up shirt with rich flowery composition (some designer, I couldn't recall his name, but Michael's wife Susan probably knew him in person, being a fashion buyer for Frank McCormick and all) and a tattered pair of faded blue jeans, flip-flops and a newsboys cap. I exited through a pair of French doors that led onto the iron balcony and private courtyard below, with my late grandfather’s two adjoining apartment buildings, and made the short trip past lawn chairs and the Jacuzzi to grandmothers. Ira's widow, her name was Adele, answered apartment 7's screen before I had the opportunity to knuckle it, and Jazzy Calico was already waiting for Aristotle. Their noses met on either side of the mesh as two ambassadors of the canine and feline republics. War was imminent, but probably not today.

  “You’re late with rent,” Adele said.

  I clamped my teeth together and scratched the back of my head. “Didn’t I just pay you last month?”

  “The last time you gave me money for the privilege of living in that upstairs apartment, it was November of 2005.”

  “What was today’s date again?”

  “July twenty-second or third, 2008, I think.”

  “That bad, huh? I’ll have you know that I fixed Shaquana’s toilet in apartment 5 last week like you wanted, and I even made sure the Jacuzzi was clean. You know how Craig and Debbie abuse it.”

  “Oh goodie. Now I can finally overlook your lack of rent in December of 2005.”

  “We’ll close that gap, Grandma.” I smiled.

  “Mm-hmm. That’s a lot of toilets.”

  “Well, the way Shaquana takes a dump in them, and with all of Craig and Debbie’s late night Adam and Eve sessions…” I held a hand to my mouth as I whispered it.

  “Cheap currency. We still on for breakfast this morning or do you intend to make an old widow starve?”

  “I’ve got a flight to catch at Long Beach Airport in about twenty-four hours, so there is a window of opportunity.”

  “I’ll make sure not to keep you out too long then. Where to this time?”

  “New York.”

  “You fly back to New York a lot.”

  “I sort of like it there.”

  “Staying with Cousin Joe again?”

  “He's in the Riviera. I’ve found other arrangements.”

  “What you need is more diversity in your life.”

  “I’ll have you know that I spoke with a potential bride on the phone yesterday. She’s getting married in Texas.”

  “Texas?” Adele tightened her lips disapprovingly. “Dear God, not Texas.”

  “You’d better be careful how you say that. A lot of Texans just may be prone to believe that God lives and breathes exclusively in Texas.”

  “People still getting married down there?”

  “I believe so.”

  “You’re not actually thinking about taking the gig, are you?”

  “I have a reputation to keep as America’s greatest and most diverse wedding photographer since what's-his-face photographed Pocahontas and John Rolfe speaking their marriage vows. Ira would understand. Sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty.”

  “Well let me tell you something. Ira didn’t become the most recognized war photographer of the Twentieth century by visiting Texas.”

  “There was that whole JFK and book depository building in Dallas thing. I do believe he jumped on a plane the moment he heard. I do believe he captured those exclusive photos of Lee Harvey Oswald in the police station .”

  “It wasn’t exactly America’s brightest hour.”

  “I almost forgot that part.”

  “Dear God,” she said again. “Texas?”

  8

  MAKING MY WAY BACK through the side gate (Adele and I promised to regroup again for breakfast in five minutes after she mourned a potential visit to Texas), I overheard a couple of car doors clamp shut, and from the looks of it, two men were eager to speak with me even before I turned the corner past Estelle’s bottom floor apartment. The first man, he was tall and handsome, broad shoulders, boxed jaw, a nose that looked as though it had been once or twice broken,
with thick but silvery hair, the whole works. His companion contrasted him in every way. Short and stubby, fat around the chin, balding, and his cheeks looked miserably red, as though in a permanent state of alcohol flush despite there being absolutely nothing Asian about him.

  They swiftly swept in.

  “This is Detective Hurley. I’m Detective Mello.” Mello, he was the tall handsome one, had another thing going for him. He spoke deeply enough that I’d believe he traded in a career as a DJ to become a cop, had he tried to convince me of it. Another look at his nose and I wondered if he'd ever boxed.

  “What can I do for you boys?” I stopped at the base of my stairs with a ring of keys jingling in my fingertips and studied their badges carefully. I’d never seen detective badges before and hadn’t a clue what separated a genuine from a forgery, but they looked good.

  “Does an Ira Chamberlain live here?” Hurley chewed on a toothpick as he spoke, no disk jockey to speak of in his voice.

  “Has Estelle been telling you war stories again?” I looked towards the frail old woman with paper-thin skin, presently sniffing a rose in her little garden, and playfully smiled at her. “Estelle, what have you been telling them?”

  “Are you going up to see Ira too?” She said to me.

  “Yes, Estelle, something like that.” I lowered my voice as I turned back to the detectives. “Ira died twenty years ago this autumn. He’s my grandfather and he used to live up here. My grandmother lives around the back now. Come on up. Can I get you boys anything?”

  “Then who are you?” Hurley said, who was more than eager to trudge up the stairs behind me.

  “You know those Dos Equis commercials with the most interesting man in the world?”

  “Yeah,” Hurley said. “What about him?’

  “I’m his college drop-out son.”

  Hurley didn’t seem pleased.

  “I guess I can’t fool you. You guys are too good. The name’s Joshua, Joshua Chamberlain.” I extended a hand.

  The short fat man chose not to take it.

  “Is that your car parked down there, Chamberlain?” Mello said halfway up the stairs. He directed my attention towards Alex’s BMW convertible, idling just across the street. Even from two steps below my feet he lumbered over me.

  “Oh, that? No, it belongs to a recent business associate of mine. It will probably sit there for several days, that is, if his wife doesn’t move it first. Street sweepings on Thursday, so if he gets a parking ticket it’s not on me.”

  “This business associate of yours wouldn’t happen to be an Alex Parker, would it?” Mello continued his line of thought.

  “That’s the one. Is that dumb-ass in trouble again?”

  I laughed the thought off like a bad joke, despite the fact that the detectives didn’t look amused, and opened the front door. Hurley and Mello helped themselves into the room, but were just as quickly paraded on by Aristotle, who went right after Hurley, the weak one in the pack, and probably because they were equal in height when standing on his hind paws. Hurley reared into the wall and hung there until I wedged them apart.

  “In fact he is,” Mello said as I drug the hound unwillingly across the room, apparently unsympathetic to his partner’s fear of dogs. “When was the last time that you spoke with him?”

  “Recently.”

  I locked Aristotle outside on the porch. He pressed his nose to the glass, twitching eyes between both detectives, and puffed his cheeks like the wolf that plotted to blow the piggy’s house down. Blood would probably be spilled.

  “How recent is recently?” Mello.

  I headed straight for the coffee pot in the kitchen and poured myself a helping. “We were in San Francisco together this past weekend. I only got home on Monday. Coffee anyone?”

  “Did you fly together?”

  “Drove, actually.”

  “Together?”

  “No, separately. He might have stayed an extra day. I’m not sure. I know he was home as late as yesterday though. What’s this about?”

  Mello withheld an answer but peeked into my bedroom door. Hurley had already made his way to the coffee table, studied two mugs set atop recent issues of PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, it was Elise's Bible, and ETIQUETTE MAGAZINE (the later featured my series on Global Warming), and picked up Gracie’s hat. His tongue swished the toothpick from one end of his mouth to the other as he studied it. The pizza box and Sam Adams beer bottles caught his attention too.

  Mello said: “Did he drive that car?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Look, dumb-ass. Either he did or he didn’t.” Hurley clamped his teeth down on the toothpick in a sudden spurt of anger.

  “I take it this isn’t a friendly visit.”

  “No shit. I’m not happy, Chamberlain. It was our day off.” Hurley tried not to let my canvas photographs overpower him, but I could tell his peripheral vision was distracted.

  “On a Wednesday?”

  “I had planned to take my daughter to the zoo,” Mello said. “Buy her balloons and everything.”

  “Did you hear that? The zoo.” Hurley’s cheeks reddened. “Balloons and everything. Me, I like to sleep in. My partner and I get a call at six this morning because a jogger finds a young woman, who just so happens to be Mancini’s only begotten daughter, folded up neatly in a trashcan with an eggshell for a head and scrambled brains. And now look at us, here, talking with you in this dump of a photography museum.”

  “Gracie?” I sat down in the nearest chair I could find.

  “That’s the one.” Mello. “You know her?”

  “She's dead? How is that even possible?”

  “You tell us.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” The threat of tears formed in my skull. I washed them away the best I could, but my fingers trembled, so I tucked them under my legs. Hurley and Mello noticed, and it made them perspire with thirst.

  “How about your pal, Parker. Where’d he run off to?”

  “Alex couldn’t have done that.” I was having a tough time breathing too.

  “Yeah and why’s that?”

  “He just couldn’t. That’s all. This has to be some sort of mistake. You’ve identified the wrong woman.”

  “You have someone over last night, Chamberlain,” Hurley pulled the toothpick from his mouth as he combed the room (taking the time to eye half a dozen of my Global Warming portraits) only to slide it between his lips and clamp down on it again, “An attractive young girl, perhaps?”

  “We got a witness who claims a young woman came up here last night just after dark.” Mello eyed the pizza box and empty beer bottles. “I see you've taken up to International travel.” He picked up ETIQUETTE Magazine and noted the front cover matched an identical image on my wall. “Is adultery a side hobby?”

  “You must have been talking to Estelle, our community watchdog. Who was visiting this time, Marilyn Monroe or Ingrid Bergman?”

  Mello and Hurley eyed each other.

  “Okay, here’s what we have,” Mello said. “We’ve got the automobile of a suspect parked out front of your house after he disappears from the scene of a crime.”

  “We don’t like that,” the short fat one said.

  I said: “Yeah, I don’t either.”

  “Then start talking.” Mello. “Where’d he run off to?”

  “All of a sudden I don’t like your attitudes.”

  “You know what I think?” Hurley looked to his taller partner. “I think this son of a bitch had a little too much to drink last night. He looks a little agitated.”

  “I think he does, Hurley.”

  “Hey, a little coffee in the morning and I’m fine.”

  Mello pushed me into his partner. Coffee spilled all over Hurley’s stubby shirt, and my Charlie Brown t-shirt mug went spiraling down. From the series of thumps and thuds it made on the hardwood floor you'd think it would have shattered into pieces, but it slid to a halt, unharmed.

  “What the hell?” Hurley wiped at the coffee stain. “You
take a swing at a cop, I can forgive that. But you spill coffee on my new shirt, that’s where I draw the line. My wife bought this for my freakin' forty-fifth birthday.”

  “She must like thrift store shopping then.”

  “Well look at what we have here, Mello. He’s not only a few beers short of a six-pack, his other cheek pulls double duty as a smart-ass.”

  “I loved you guys in Twins.”

  “How many comebacks are you going to pull out of that ass, Chamberlain?”

  I came up with another, but kept it to myself.

  “Alright, a smart-ass like you knows the drill. Let’s go.” Mello wrapped five fingers around my arm and directed me towards the door. “We’ve got a nice comfy bed and breakfast waiting for you downtown.”

  “I want my lawyer,” I said.

  Mello likely knew the line well. It brought a smile to his face. “They’ll be plenty of time for that later.”

  9

  HURLEY AND MELLO had me processed at Police Headquarters, 400 West Broadway, my alleged crime, attempting to kill Detective Hurley with a cup of coffee. I’d never been booked of anything before, much less having any sort of book thrown at me, but the procedure involved a series of beauty shots from various angles, as you might imagine, and the fingerprinting came next. None of the photographs included an action shot, as I had suggested, like jumping or something. Everything in between involved various odors from fellow bookies without deodorant and breath that screamed of alcohol. To top it off, lots and lots of waiting. The worst part was the waiting. And then there was more waiting, this time in my very own prison cell.

  “You know where the real prison is?” The guy on the bottom bunk said. “It’s out there, man. And the bars are in their heads!”

  “Huh, I never really thought of it quite like that.”

  “The war, man. That’s the real prison. And we’re not just fighting one of them, like Vietnam. No, we’re fighting two of them. Don’t you see? Afghanistan. Iraq. It’s all a distraction. The politicians, man. They don’t want you to know that the real prison is their lies!”