“I’m in trouble, man,” I said and immediately, through the language barriers and across the cultural prisms, heard Eric settle down to help. Not much good at taking care of himself, he understood trouble better than most and how we all are required to take care of one another.
I told him Nigel might be after Kevin and Janet.
“What?”
“Keep Nigel away from my son and away from Janet. If they come in, bring them in the kitchen and keep them there. If Nigel comes in, call the cops and lock him in the walk-in.”
“What’s coming down, man? You mad at Nigel?”
“Nigel might kill Kevin.”
Dead silence on the other end of the phone.
“Eric! Eric!” I screamed.
“This no good, man.…Man, Brian, I didn’t know. Don’t tell me this—”
“What? Eric, what’s the matter?” I tried to keep my voice down, but I kept punching the telephone as hard as I could to get him to answer.
“Kevin’s around, man. He said not to tell you. Last night, he stayed in your apartment.”
The lights around me grew dimmer; I got colder and colder.
“Nigel’s been around, too, Brian. He walked up with us last night. He knows Kevin’s at your place.”
“Janet?”
“I don’t see her. I’ll do something,” Eric said. “I’ll go look.”
Back in the car, I stared into the darkness and at my reflection when the headlights from passing cars flashed it onto the window and thought about how easy it would be for me to give my life for Kevin’s. I felt no anger, only terrible regret for getting him into this, and hope against what I knew to be terrible truth. Ntango stared grimly into the darkness in front of him and we flew.
When we hit Bruckner Boulevard, Ntango pulled over at another phone. It was after midnight. I called Oscar’s. Eric was back.
“They’re together, the three of them,” he said. “Nick saw them getting in a cab in front of the Terrace.”
Trying to keep my voice from shaking, I asked Eric to go downtown and ask the bartenders around 79th Street for a kid, a woman drinking bourbon and water, and a man drinking ginger ale—or perhaps vodka and orange juice.
Over the Triboro and across 125th Street to Broadway, Ntango flew. I craned my neck, bouncing from one side of the cab to the other, peering out the window.
“Try Riverside Drive,” I said, and Ntango cut across 123rd. Six blocks later I wanted to go back to Broadway.
“We can get down into the park at 96th,” Ntango said; his expression clear and resolute, but calm as always.
We drove by Oscar’s. I hopped out. Sam the Hammer stood in the doorway. Freshly shaved, his hair slicked back, he was waiting for the Greek to go to the track. “That kid of yours,” Sam said.
“Where is he?”
“With that broad and Nigel.”
“Where?”
“Downtown, near 72nd Street.” His face had gone tough, like he was ready for a scrape—and he was—but he wouldn’t show me any sympathy.
A cab stopped in the inside lane on the uptown side of Broadway; Eric the Red came dancing through the traffic toward us waving and yelling. “They were in a burger place and Teacher’s,” he said, “near 83rd.”
“We can get into the park at 79th,” Ntango said.
Eric and Sam piled into the cab with me, and Ntango tore along Broadway, using the sidewalk for a half a block when the street got crowded at 86th Street. We drove into the park, under a stone bridge and in by the boat basin. The walkway along the river that ended up near 110th Street began there at 79th. I knew the walk was wide enough for a car because the cops used it, and the area was deserted, so we began following it. It was the walkway where, way uptown, they’d found Angelina’s body.
The walkway curved away from the river about three blocks from the boat basin. Ntango navigated the twists and turns of the asphalt walk until, a hundred feet up the path, it became a two-lane white cement walkway with a grass island in the middle. Almost directly across from us was a gigantic tunnel-like structure that housed the railroad tracks running beneath the park and Riverside Drive. Nango turned, drove up against an entryway in the wall, and shone his headlights into the darkness. It was cavernous like a field house with a dirt floor and rows of railroad tracks. From inside, their eyes glittering red in the reflected light, a dozen rats looked back at us.
I told Ntango we should go back to the walkway, so he backed out and headed north. After a short distance, the path sloped down and ran beside the river again. There, far in front of us, specks appeared against the sky beneath the canopy of the bridge far in the distance. They were specks in motion, running every which way like the vanguard detachment of ants when you’ve kicked over their hill.
“It’s them,” I screamed, not knowing if it was or not. The cab groaned like a dynamo, hit passing gear, and shot forward. The noise froze the specks. But one figure began moving again before the headlights hit them, running north on the path. Ntango slowed for one split second while I rolled out of the car, then sped after Nigel. Kevin watched wide-eyed as I gingerly picked myself up off the ground after a couple of somersaults. I expected him to be in hysterics. He seemed unruffled, except perhaps a mite bewildered by his dad’s entrance. Janet looked scared. I didn’t know if Nigel had scared her, or if she thought I’d killed myself tumbling out of the car.
They were both all right, so I hugged and hugged Kevin instead of talking. When I reached out my arm for Janet, she came closer, holding a gun.
“Did you take that from Nigel?”
Janet looked down at her hand as if she had forgotten she held it. Then she dropped it. Lying on the ground it looked harmless enough. It was the gun I’d gotten from Sam.
“From my apartment?”
She nodded. “I had it with me. I’ve kept it since—”
“The key. You found the spare key to my apartment?”
She nodded again, this time without raising her head.
“Why…?” I began to ask.
Then the quick flash of hatred in her eyes when she looked up, and I knew why.
“You weren’t going to use it,” she said.
We began to walk quickly, following the path of the cab. Around one short turn, we saw its taillights at a strange angle, in against the fence next to the river, and I knew it had stopped. After a few more steps, I could see some figures. There was a struggle going on. It was dark. But there were dim streetlights scattered along the walkway and shadows, so I could make out who everyone was by the shapes. Ntango, even in the struggle, was regally straight, slim, and tall. Sam, thick, lumbering, massive like stone, slow-moving, relentless, outlined against hollow sky above the river. Eric, quick, slight, hunched into his tight pants and short jacket, his long-flowing beard twisting and turning like the silhouette of a shrub in heavy wind.
The smallest shape—weak and tentative in his movements—took on the attack of the other shapes, trying to run, flopping, scrambling to get up and run again. It was like watching when a pack of wolves have cornered a deer. The deer is fighting back but it’s doomed, and you see the doom in the weakness of how it fights back and the strength of the pack as they rip at it with their teeth and the animal offers a feeble kick of resistance.
This was the dance I watched as Nigel struggled against Ntango, Eric, and Sam. These were hard men, who’d been in battles for their lives before. Nigel struggled and got away, but they caught him and held him. They dropped him to the ground. But he scrambled up again. Then, all at once, in his desperation, Nigel bolted from them, breaking away, blindly charging along the path in our direction. I braced myself; I’m not sure for what. Sam and Ntango came after him, not running, not even hurrying, yet coming after him relentlessly all the same. When Nigel got close enough to make out who we were, he faltered and tried to turn in toward the park, but fell. He scrambled to his feet, looked at me. He was close enough now for me to see his expression in the hazy light of the street lamp. I exp
ected to see fear. I expected to see in his face an expression that asked for forgiveness, for sympathy, for help. But that wasn’t what was there. Not panic, not fear. Was it anger? Resignation? Hate? I couldn’t tell. But it was terrible, his expression. It was evil.
Then with a burst of movement, Nigel surged wildly toward the steel fence that ran along the river. He grabbed at it with both hands, then hand over hand, feet digging into the chain links, he scrambled up to the top, heedless of the barbed wire. For seconds, he froze at the top of the fence—standing, it seemed, standing up straight on the top wire at the top of the fence—and then flung himself—almost gracefully—almost soaring—into the murky river. His initial plunge sent up a plume of water that cascaded back down stirring up the water all around him. Then his wake rippled out toward the middle of the dark river until the ripples began to shine and glitter from lights far across on the Jersey side.
Nigel took his dive not twenty feet in front of us. I don’t know how long it was after Nigel plunged into the water before I was able to move. I didn’t know what I was watching—an escape, a death, a murder. When I could move, I ran to the place where he jumped and hoisted myself, feet kicking against the fence, hands grabbing the chain links, climbing to the top, ripping my skin, cutting my hands on the wire, then lowering myself onto the other side, getting my feet onto the stone wall that served as the bank of the river, stepping carefully, knowing I was dead if I slipped, reaching for Nigel and calling him. Calling all this time, I realized later, calling him the whole time I clambered over the steel fence.
Seeing him then in the water, struggling, sinking, still wearing his glasses, his face contorted with that same terrible look—knowing then what the expression was and hoping against hope that Kevin hadn’t seen it. What I saw in Nigel’s face was disgust, total contempt for life and everybody in it.
I called and he turned his face full toward me, those fogged-up Coke bottles pointed right at me as he went down and there again as he came back up and as he went back down again. He made no sound. I thought I should go in after him, to save him. But I didn’t jump in. I don’t know if I could have saved him, or if he would have taken me down, and I would have been lost with him. I don’t know if he killed himself. Or if we killed him. I don’t know if he would have been glad I saved him. But I didn’t.
***
Before long, Eric came over the fence after me. He more or less lifted me, while I climbed. Then Sam the Hammer and Ntango helped me down on the other side. We stood around with no one saying anything, watching the spot where Nigel had gone down. Pretty soon, we heard sirens in the distance.
Sam started to walk away. “Better for me not to be around,” he said, casting his “you wanna make somethin’ of it?” look at me. “It was his idea,” he said, gesturing with a jerk of his head toward the river.
When we reached the cab, Ntango radioed the cops. But we could already see the blue and red lights coming toward us inside the park. Ntango’s expression tried to tell me something, but I couldn’t figure out what. “Ditch the blow,” he said.
I chucked it over the fence, and the gun right behind it, hoping I wouldn’t hear Nigel scream for help from the murky river, hoping, too, that his body wouldn’t surface right in front of me, or come back to haunt me, since I’d driven it to its watery grave.
***
Sheehan arrived with a convoy of police cruisers. Not at all disconcerted, he watched the river for a while with us. “I checked him,” Sheehan said, as if we were sharing a professional confidence. “No record. How would I figure it? No one even put his father on the same block with her.” Sheehan jerked his head toward the river. “Him and his old man, real Alibi Ikes. I give you five to one the old man comes up with a half-dozen witnesses for that night when we get to court.”
“Rich people don’t play by the same rules as the rest of us,” I told Sheehan. “Nigel left the door to Ozzie’s apartment unlocked. Ozzie passed out. He wouldn’t wake up to let someone in. Maybe Nigel forgot to lock the door, I thought. But no way. Somebody in Dubuque may forget to lock his door. Nobody in New York would. Why did he leave the door unlocked? I had to keep wondering about the door.
“Angelina’s mother’s life was made out of lies. Why should I believe anything she tells me? But mostly that poor terrified girl, Sharon. I couldn’t get her voice out of my mind. Ozzie could have identified Edwin Barthelme, and I’ll bet Danny saw him that night, too. I know a doorman on West End who saw Angelina with Barthelme that night.”
“We’ll put a case together,” said Sheehan. “Fuck the lawyers.”
“There’s a dead girl in Connecticut, and Barthelme’s car somewhere. Maybe that’ll mean something.”
***
Later, we drank in Oscar’s. No cook, no bartender, and the waitress got pissed off at Oscar’s bitching and left, so he ran the bar, cooked, and waited on tables. Amazingly enough, he carried it off. When we ordered our second round of drinks, he went to get them, but after a minute or two behind the bar called me over to the service bar to ask me gruffly where the olives were. Then, while I looked in the bottom of the cooler, without saying anything, he left me behind the bar. A little later, Eric went back into the kitchen to put out whatever fire had caused a cloud of black smoke to gush from the place, and he stayed.
“Was Nigel going to kill us?” Kevin asked when things quieted down. He was a little kid again, sipping his Shirley Temple, working out his bad dreams, still young enough to think I took care of things.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “When you were a little kid, I told you never to go anywhere with strangers. Why would you go somewhere with him?”
“Nigel wasn’t a stranger. He was going to take us out on the boat, and I’d never been on a yacht.” Kevin’s lip trembled. Monsters had shown up after all in his life. Nothing I could do would keep them away forever. “Why would he kill us?”
“Killing’s a bad habit, like drugs. Once you start, it’s hard to stop.” I looked him over. “Listen to your father. Don’t do drugs, and don’t kill people.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Delight took him over again, almost a grown-up, perched on his barstool between Sam the Hammer and Ntango.
I honestly didn’t know that Nigel would have killed Kevin. Leaving the door open on poor Ozzie was one thing, pulling the trigger something else. Edwin went off the deep end once he killed Angelina, arrogant enough to think he was entitled to kill those who got in his way—conscienceless. I wasn’t sure that maybe Nigel did have a conscience and saw the murky Hudson a better alternative than facing up to Edwin.
“Nigel was really nice to me,” Kevin said, “except he began drinking, and I’d never seen him drink before. I was worried he wouldn’t be able to drive the boat. Then he made us walk into the park instead, and he said, ‘Brian thinks I killed Angelina. He went to Connecticut where my father will take care of him. What can I do with you?’
“I felt creepy. He said, ‘Your dad, dumb as he is, came out on top after all.’ I think maybe he already planned to jump in the river.”
I put my arm around my son’s shoulder, thinking of the monsters that would invade his dreams. Thinking about Angelina without a father and Nigel with a father who cared more about the family name than the family, and my own distant and distracted father, I wondered what might be in store for Kevin. He didn’t reach for me so blindly anymore; he was getting older and he expected more from me.
“Wait ’till I tell Mom,” he said. There was enthusiasm in his voice. He’d be okay. His mom would work him through this. He’d been through worse things—like his dad leaving home. Watching him bounce back now from what he’d been through, I wished it were me who’d be working him through things. I wished he needed me as much as I needed him.
***
Carl van Sagan came in then. I was happy to see him and really happy he wasn’t a murderer. “I just left my post,” he announced. “It’s pretty easy to slip out without getting caught. I don’t know why I never thought
of it before.”
I poured him a scotch. “I knew you’d bring him in,” he said when he’d sipped on his drink. “Where’s Janet?”
“She’s packing to go back to Massachusetts…”
He looked at me for a long moment over the rim of his scotch glass. “Back to the right side of the tracks, eh?”
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