The Night and The Music

by Lawrence Block

  I made the bars that night but drinking didn’t have the urgency it had possessed the night before. I was able to keep it in proportion and to know that I’d wake up the next morning with my memory intact. In the course of things I dropped over to the newsstand a little past midnight and talked with Eddie Halloran. He was looking good and I said as much. I remembered him when he’d gone to work for Sid three years ago. He’d been drawn then, and shaky, and his eyes always moved off to the side of whatever he was looking at. Now there was confidence in his stance and he looked years younger. It hadn’t all come back to him and maybe some of it was lost forever. I guess the booze had him pretty good before he kicked it once and for all.

  We talked about the bag lady. He said, “Know what I think it is? Somebody’s sweeping the streets.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “A cleanup campaign. Few years back, Matt, there was this gang of kids found a new way to amuse theirselves. Pick up a can of gasoline, find some bum down on the Bowery, pour the gas on him, and throw a lit match at him. You remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Those kids thought they were patriots. Thought they deserved a medal. They were cleaning up the neighborhood, getting drunken bums off the streets. You know, Matt, people don’t like to look at a derelict. That building up the block, the Towers? There’s this grating there where the heating system’s vented. You remember how the guys would sleep there in the winter. It was warm, it was comfortable, it was free, and two or three guys would be there every night catching some Z’s and getting warm. Remember?”

  “Uh-huh. Then they fenced it.”

  “Right. Because the tenants complained. It didn’t hurt them any, it was just the local bums sleeping it off, but the tenants pay a lot of rent and they don’t like to look at bums on their way in or out of their building. The bums were outside and not bothering anybody but it was the sight of them, you know, so the owners went to the expense of putting up cyclone fencing around where they used to sleep. It looks ugly as hell and all it does is keep the bums out but that’s all it’s supposed to do.”

  “That’s human beings for you.”

  He nodded, then turned aside to sell somebody a Daily News and a Racing Form. Then he said, “I don’t know what it is exactly. I was a bum, Matt. I got pretty far down. You probably don’t know how far. I got as far as the Bowery. I panhandled, I slept in my clothes on a bench or in a doorway. You look at men like that and you think they’re just waiting to die, and they are, but some of them come back. And you can’t tell for sure who’s gonna come back and who’s not. Somebody coulda poured gas on me, set me on fire. Sweet Jesus.”

  “The shopping bag lady — ”

  “You’ll look at a bum and you’ll say to yourself, ‘Maybe I could get like that and I don’t wanta think about it.’ Or you’ll look at somebody like the shopping bag lady and say, ‘I could go nutsy like her so get her out of my sight.’ And you get people who think like Nazis. You know, take all the cripples and the lunatics and the retarded kids and all and give ‘em an injection and Good-bye, Charlie.”

  “You think that’s what happened to her?”

  “What else?”

  “But whoever did it stopped at one, Eddie.”

  He frowned. “Don’t make sense,” he said. “Unless he did the one job and the next day he got run down by a Ninth Avenue bus, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Or he got scared. All that blood and it was more than he figured on. Or he left town. Could be anything like that.”

  “Could be.”

  “There’s no other reason, is there? She musta been killed because she was a bag lady, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ, Matt. What other reason would anybody have for killing her?”

  The law firm where Aaron Creighton worked had offices on the seventh floor of the Flatiron Building. In addition to the four partners, eleven other lawyers had their names painted on the frosted glass door. Aaron Creighton’s came second from the bottom. Well, he was young.

  He was also surprised to see me, and when I told him what I wanted he said it was irregular.

  “Matter of public record, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “That means you can find the information. It doesn’t mean we’re obliged to furnish it to you.”

  For an instant I thought I was back at the Eighteenth Precinct and a cop was trying to hustle me for the price of a new hat. But Creighton’s reservations were ethical. I wanted a list of Mary Alice Redfield’s beneficiaries, including the amounts they’d received and the dates they’d been added to her will. He wasn’t sure where his duty lay.

  “I’d like to be helpful,” he said. “Perhaps you could tell me just what your interest is.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I don’t know why I’m playing with this one. I used to be a cop, Mr. Creighton. Now I’m a sort of unofficial detective. I don’t carry a license but I do things for people and I wind up making enough that way to keep a roof overhead.”

  His eyes were wary. I guess he was trying to guess how I intended to earn myself a fee out of this.

  “I got twelve hundred dollars out of the blue. It was left to me by a woman I didn’t really know and who didn’t really know me. I can’t seem to slough off the feeling that I got the money for a reason. That I’ve been paid in advance.”

  “Paid for what?”

  “To try and find out who killed her.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

  “I don’t want to get the heirs together to challenge the will, if that was what was bothering you. And I can’t quite make myself suspect that one of her beneficiaries killed her for the money she was leaving him. For one thing, she doesn’t seem to have told people they were named in her will. She never said anything to me or to the two people I’ve spoken with thus far. For another, it wasn’t the sort of murder that gets committed for gain. It was deliberately brutal.”

  “Then why do you want to know who the other beneficiaries are?”

  “I don’t know. Part of it’s cop training. When you’ve got any specific leads, any hard facts, you run them down before you cast a wider net. That’s only part of it. I suppose I want to get more of a sense of the woman. That’s probably all I can realistically hope to get, anyway. I don’t stand much chance of tracking her killer.”

  “The police don’t seem to have gotten very far.”

  I nodded. “I don’t think they tried too hard. And I don’t think they knew she had an estate. I talked to one of the cops on the case and if he had known that he’d have mentioned it to me. There was nothing in her file. My guess is they waited for her killer to run a string of murders so they’d have something more concrete to work with. It’s the kind of senseless crime that usually gets repeated.” I closed my eyes for a moment, reaching for an errant thought. “But he didn’t repeat,” I said. “So they put it on a back burner and then they took it off the stove altogether.”

  “I don’t know much about police work. I’m involved largely with estates and trusts.” He tried a smile. “Most of my clients die of natural causes. Murder’s an exception. ”

  “It generally is. I’ll probably never find him. I certainly don’t expect to find him. Just killing her and moving on, hell, and it was all those months ago. He could have been a sailor off a ship, got tanked up and went nuts and he’s in Macao or Port-au-Prince by now. No witnesses and no clues and no suspects and the trail’s three months cold by now, and it’s a fair bet the killer doesn’t remember what he did. So many murders take place in blackout, you know.”

  “Blackout?” He frowned. “You don’t mean in the dark?”

  “Alcoholic blackout. The prisons are full of men who got drunk and shot their wives or their best friends. Now they’re serving twenty-to-life for something they don’t remember. No recollection at all.”

  The idea unsettled him, and he looked especially yo
ung now. “That’s frightening,” he said. “Really terrifying.”

  “Yes.”

  “I originally gave some thought to criminal law. My Uncle Jack talked me out of it. He said you either starve or you spend your time helping professional criminals beat the system. He said that was the only way you made good money out of a criminal practice and what you wound up doing was unpleasant and basically immoral. Of course there are a couple of superstar criminal lawyers, the hotshots everybody knows, but the other ninety-nine percent fit what Uncle Jack said.”

  “I would think so, yes.”

  “I guess I made the right decision.” He took his glasses off, inspected them, decided they were clean, put them back on again. “Sometimes I’m not so sure,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder. I’ll get that list for you. I should probably check with someone to make sure it’s all right but I’m not going to bother. You know lawyers. If you ask them whether it’s all right to do something they’ll automatically say no. Because inaction is always safer than action and they can’t get in trouble for giving you bad advice if they tell you to sit on your hands and do nothing. I’m going overboard. Most of the time I like what I do and I’m proud of my profession. This’ll take me a few minutes. Do you want some coffee in the meantime?”

  His girl brought me a cup, black, no sugar. No bourbon, either. By the time I was done with the coffee he had the list ready.

  “If there’s anything else I can do — ”

  I told him I’d let him know. He walked out to the elevator with me, waited for the cage to come wheezing up, shook my hand. I watched him turn and head back to his office and I had the feeling he’d have preferred to come along with me. In a day or so he’d change his mind, but right now he didn’t seem too crazy about his job.

  The next week was a curious one. I worked my way through the list Aaron Creighton had given me, knowing what I was doing was essentially purposeless but compulsive about doing it all the same.

  There were thirty-two names on the list. I checked off my own and Eddie Halloran and Genevieve Strom. I put additional check marks next to six people who lived outside of New York. Then I had a go at the remaining twenty-three names. Creighton had done most of the spadework for me, finding addresses to match most of the names. He’d included the date each of the thirty-two codicils had been drawn, and that enabled me to attack the list in reverse chronological order, starting with those persons who’d been made beneficiaries most recently. If this was a method, there was madness to it; it was based on the notion that a person added recently to the will would be more likely to commit homicide for gain, and I’d already decided this wasn’t that kind of a killing to begin with.

  Well, it gave me something to do. And it led to some interesting conversations. If the people Mary Alice Redfield had chosen to remember ran to any type, my mind wasn’t subtle enough to discern it. They ranged in age, in ethnic background, in gender and sexual orientation, in economic status. Most of them were as mystified as Eddie and Genevieve and I about the bag lady’s largesse, but once in a while I’d encounter someone who attributed it to some act of kindness he’d performed, and there was a young man named Jerry Forgash who was in no doubt whatsoever. He was some form of Jesus freak and he’d given poor Mary a couple of tracts and a Get Smart — Get Saved button, presumably a twin to the one he wore on the breast pocket of his chambray shirt. I suppose she put his gifts in one of her shopping bags.

  “I told her Jesus loved her,” he said, “and I suppose it won her soul for Christ. So of course she was grateful. Cast your bread upon the waters, Mr. Scudder. Brother Matthew. You know there was a disciple of Christ named Matthew.”

  “I know.”

  He told me Jesus loved me and that I should get smart and get saved. I managed not to get a button but I had to take a couple of tracts from him. I didn’t have a shopping bag so I stuck them in my pocket, and a couple of nights later I read them before I went to bed. They didn’t win my soul for Christ but you never know.

  I didn’t run the whole list. People were hard to find and I wasn’t in any big rush to find them. It wasn’t that kind of a case. It wasn’t a case at all, really, merely an obsession, and there was surely no need to race the clock. Or the calendar. If anything, I was probably reluctant to finish up the names on the list. Once I ran out of them I’d have to find some other way to approach the woman’s murder and I was damned if I knew where to start.

  While I was doing all this, an odd thing happened. The word got around that I was investigating the woman’s death, and the whole neighborhood became very much aware of Mary Alice Redfield. People began to seek me out. Ostensibly they had information to give me or theories to advance, but neither the information nor the theories ever seemed to amount to anything substantial, and I came to see that they were merely there as a prelude to conversation. Someone would start off by saying he’d seen Mary selling the Post the afternoon before she was killed, and that would serve as the opening wedge of a discussion of the bag woman, or bag women in general, or various qualities of the neighborhood, or violence in American life, or whatever.

  A lot of people started off talking about the bag lady and wound up talking about themselves. I guess most conversations work out that way.

  A nurse from Roosevelt said she never saw a shopping bag lady without hearing an inner voice say There but for the grace of God. And she was not the only woman who confessed she worried about ending up that way. I guess it’s a specter that haunts women who live alone, just as the vision of the Bowery derelict clouds the peripheral vision of hard-drinking men.

  Genevieve Strom turned up at Armstrong’s one night. We talked briefly about the bag lady. Two nights later she came back again and we took turns spending our inheritances on rounds of drinks. The drinks hit her with some force and a little past midnight she decided it was time to go. I said I’d see her home. At the corner of Fifty-seventh Street she stopped in her tracks and said, “No men in the room. That’s one of Mrs. Larkin’s rules.”

  “Old-fashioned, isn’t she?”

  “She runs a daycent establishment.” Her mock-Irish accent was heavier than the landlady’s. Her eyes, hard to read in the lamplight, raised to meet mine. “Take me someplace.”

  I took her to my hotel, a less decent establishment than Mrs. Larkin’s. We did each other little good but no harm, and it beat being alone.

  Another night I ran into Barry Mosedale at Polly’s Cage. He told me there was a singer at Kid Gloves who was doing a number about the bag lady. “I can find out how you can reach him,” he offered.

  “Is he there now?”

  He nodded and checked his watch. “He goes on in fifteen minutes. But you don’t want to go there, do you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Hardly your sort of crowd, Matt.”

  “Cops go anywhere.”

  “Indeed they do, and they’re welcome wherever they go, aren’t they? Just let me drink this and I’ll accompany you, if that’s all right. You need someone to lend you immoral support.”

  Kid Gloves is a gay bar on Fifty-sixth west of Ninth. The decor is just a little aggressively gay lib. There’s a small raised stage, a scattering of tables, a piano, a loud jukebox. Barry Mosedale and I stood at the bar. I’d been there before and knew better than to order their coffee. I had straight bourbon. Barry had his on ice with a splash of soda.

  Halfway through the drink Gordon Lurie was introduced. He wore tight jeans and a flowered shirt, sat on stage on a folding chair, sang ballads he’d written himself with his own guitar for accompaniment. I don’t know if he was any good or not. It sounded to me as though all the songs had the same melody, but that may just have been a similarity of style. I don’t have much of an ear.

  After a song about a summer romance in Amsterdam, Gordon Lurie announced that the next number was dedicated to the memory of Mary Alice Redfield. Then he sang:

  “She’s a shopping bag lady who lives on

  the sidewalks of Broadway


  Wearing all of her clothes and her years

  on her back

  Toting dead dreams in an old paper sack

  Searching the trash cans for something

  she lost here on Broadway —

  Shopping bag lady …

  “You’d never know but she once was an

  actress on Broadway

  Speaking the words that they stuffed in

  her head

  Reciting the lines of the life that she led

  Thrilling her fans and her friends and her

  lovers on Broadway —

  Shopping bag lady …

  “There are demons who lurk in the corners

  of minds and of Broadway

  And after the omens and portents and

  signs

  Came the day she forgot to remember her

  lines

  Put her life on a leash and took it out

  walking on Broadway —

  Shopping bag lady …”

  There were a couple more verses and the shopping bag lady in the song wound up murdered in a doorway, dying in defense of the “tattered old treasures she mined in the trash cans of Broadway.” The song went over well and got a bigger hand than any of the ones that had preceded it.

  I asked Barry who Gordon Lurie was.

  “You know very nearly as much as I,” he said. “He started here Tuesday. I find him whelming, personally. Neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but somewhere in the middle.”

  “Mary Alice never spent much time on Broadway. I never saw her more than a block from Ninth Avenue.”

  “Poetic license, I’m sure. The song would lack a certain something if you substituted Ninth Avenue for Broadway. As it stands it sounds a little like ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’ ”

  “Lurie live around here?”

  “I don’t know where he lives. I have the feeling he’s Canadian. So many people are nowadays. It used to be that no one was Canadian and now simply everybody is. I’m sure it must be a virus.”