Mitchell Smith

by Daydreams

  Tucker took his glasses off and put them in his raincoat pocket.

  “-I’ve just been informed that you, Budreau, and Mason have been made.

  -Budreau and Mason are already down in the safe in Greenwich Village, and that’s where you’re heading, pronto, Two junkies at that methadone clinic can supposedly identify all three of you that great idea!-you, by those damn glasses, just like at the Classman thing.”

  “Those two people should be no problem, sir,” Tucker said, and picked up a robot, a small, stocky, bright gold machine with fat, articulated legs, green eyes, and a car-grill grin. It was dressed like a boxer, in shorts and high-lace athletic shoes. Tucker shifted a silver lever at the robot’s chest, and the machine, batteried for display, squawked a sentence in what sounded like French, put up its small, gloved fists, and began to pat irregularly at Tucker’s chest.

  I

  “The junkies aren’t the problem, Sergeant. The investigating officer running them is the problem. Pursuing the investigation. -Pursuing it!

  The New York City Police Department is the problem.”

  Tucker put the little robot back in front of its box, and it spoke, and sparred busily with a larger, murderous blue machine, horn-headed and armed with a small ax, but silent and still.

  “Let’s move … let’s move,” the Colonel said, took Tucker’s sleeve again, and towed him away down the wall of robots to the second floor’s central aisle.

  “It seems to me, sir,” Tucker said, `—that this would be a really good time to get our asses out of this town.”

  “And I might agree with you, Sergeant,” the Colonel said, and walked to the left around a cashier’s station to avoid a young woman, dressed as a clown, handing out balloons to children passing by. `-However, Washington does not agree with you. -They think these assholes in blue have been handing us nothing but bullshit since this mission came up.

  Beginning with steering us to try and recruit that goddamn maniac that murdered Bob. -They think our police friends are being very cute, pushing us to see how far we’ll push-playing politics, sticking their big New York Democratic noses into a very delicate matter of national security.”

  The young woman dressed as a clown-red fright-wig, white polka-dotted costume, an enormous lipstick smile had, full of initiative, trotted around the cashier’s station to intercept them, now performed a giant-shoe shuffle, and handed them each a balloon. Tucker, a blue. The Colonel’s, orange.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here. The Colonel, gripping the string of his balloon, headed for the escalator, and Tucker-pausing to give the blue to a young man with a baby in his arms-followed after, catching up to the Colonel halfway down. ‘-We have orders,” the Colonel said, “—4o call these people’s bluff. Raise and call.”

  On their way to the front door, walking against a tide of children and patient parents, eddies and whirlpools of toddlers around the stuffed animals, Tucker said, “Sir, we’re not fooling with a bunch of Centrals here, don’t know better than shit in their breakfast. -We already lost one man, just screwing around.”

  “Tell me about it,” the Colonel said, and had difficulty getting his balloon through the revolving door.

  The walk was windswept, the air still damp and cool, remembering rain.

  “Ours not to reason why, Tuck,” the Colonel said, and released his balloon to ride the weather.

  At just after four, Ellie left Headquarters, walked over to the Lexington line through slight, wayward breezes, the tiger-stripe shadows of traveling overcast, and took the train up to Sixty-eighth.

  She walked east toward the hospital from there, the wind, blowing a little harder as she neared the river, tugging at the hem of her raincoat, opening the coat below its last button, toying with that flap and letting it fall. Ellie thought of Audrey Birnbaum as she walked, and hoped the woman wouldn’t look too dreadful. A vision of a huge black plumber’s assistant lying swollen, dying, massive new breasts with milking nipples exposed by the down-turned sheet as he stared up at the ceiling TV. -Pro football . . . opening game of the season. A yellow, murderous rolling eye when Ellie walked into the room. . . .

  Tired of imagining this, standing on an uptown corner on First, waiting for the light, Ellie began to review her day instead, saving until last her lunch with the Stakeout man-who’d been as tall as she’d remembered, but harsher-faced, not as handsome. He was wearing brown slacks, white shirt, a dark brown sports jacket, tan raincoat. Loafers. They’d eaten lunch at Chow-Chow’s, and at Shea’s prompting, “Let’s get sick-make it memorable,” they’d ordered four chili dogs, fat fries, and black and-white shakes.

  “I hear your partner’s a damn good cop,” Shea had said when they found a side booth beneath a wall-sized photograph of Lou Gehrig saying goodbye to Yankee Stadium.

  “He checked on you, too,” Ellie said.

  Shea had talked of this and that, then mentioned his young boys. “-About a year after Celeste died, every lady in Sheepshead Bay was looking for a mother type for me. I was the target of the year.”

  “No longer?”

  “They gave up. -I wasn’t looking for a mother for the boys. I figured if I was lucky enough to find a woman I loved-loved me, well, she’d be a mother to the boys if she felt like it-and if she didn’t … that would just be their bad luck. Kids have to take their chances getting loved, just the way we do.”

  The chili dogs had been awful. They each ate their two, then ordered one more and split it.

  Shea had done two years at Fordham law before joining the Force, and was still being pressured ‘to go back and finish. “-But I just can’t get it done. That’s a profession is either boring or disgusting-it’s even worse than police work.”

  :‘But you like police work.”

  “I love police work.”

  He talked about a case two of his men were handlings heartbreaker. A plainclothesman named Taubman, on stake-out with two others at a gas station on Staten Island, had, last spring, shot and permanently paralyzed a fifteen-year-old boy who tried to rob the place with his grandfather’s revolver. The attempted robbery had been a bluff, the revolver unloaded. The grandfather, who’d raised the boy, was a retired Suffolk County cop-and in August, at the boy’s request, had procured another pistol, gone to the hospital, and shot his grandson to death.

  “I read about it,” Ellie said.

  “My people are trying to prove it was a temporary insanity thing—depositions from the old guy’s doctor and his friends-keep the poor bastard out of prison . . . not that they’d put him away for long. -Well, let me be honest. My people will prove it was a temporary insanity thing. Period. There’s enough tragedy, without making it worse. Harry Taubman’s a basket case, as it is. Kid gave him no time to say maybe.”

  Ellie had mentioned the Gaither case and its circumstances, and Shea found it odd. “-All kind of cold and careful, wasn’t it? -Even if she died hard. Man kills a beautiful woman, it’s usually kind of sudden, sloppy. Not so careful. Not so neat.”

  While they were finishing their milk shakes, Ellie mentioned her painting, her old art classes-comparing that to his two years at law school.

  “No comparison,” Shea’d said, abruptly. “-Painting’s more worthwhile.

  You sound like you’re ashamed of not staying with it-right?”

  “No, I’m not,” Ellie said.

  He’d picked up his metal milk-shake container, and poured the last into her glass. “I’ll tell you what-you come out hunting with me this year-you don’t have to shoot any birds. You come out and look at the colors on the Sound just before the sun comes up. Everything out there looks like silver, you know, with some tarnish on it? -You come out there and paint that. You give that a try. You don’t freeze, you’ll get some damn good work done.”

  He’d kissed her on the cheek, when they parted after lunch, and said he’d call her. “Not tomorrow,” he’d said.

  “-You’ll need time to digest me and the chili dogs. . . .”

  Ellie
turned at the hospital’s gate, at the entrance drive, then went up the curved concrete walk—only three or four early autumn leaves scudding across the pavement–climbed the wide steps into the building’s lobby, stopped at reception-information, and asked an elderly oriental woman for Audrey Birnbaum’s room number.

  The woman asked for the spelling of Birnbaum, then looked up the name on her Rolodex.

  “Mrs. Birnbaum is on Communicable, seventh floor, room seven-fourteen.

  You’ll need to check with the station nurse before you go in.” The elderly woman had a girl’s thick, gleaming black hair. The rich tarry fall looked odd framing her round, soft, crumpled face . . . as if a Chinese princess had been cursed by a witch to suddenly suffer age.

  Ellie shared the elevator going up with a young couple and their little boy. The husband was slim, snub-nosed and handsome . . . he smiled at Ellie as the elevator rose. His wife was pretty, in an angular auburn way. She had freckles on her wrists, just below the cuffs of her green sweater. Ellie supposed she had freckles on her face, too, under her makeup.

  The little boy-about eight years old, Ellie thought-in dark blue corduroy pants and a blue-checked flannel shirt, had hands as thin and white as bone, but his face was fat, his cheeks puffed out as if he were holding his breath, filling them with air. He was wearing a white knit watch cap pulled down to his ears, and no hair appeared from under it.

  He noticed Ellie looking at him, and glanced sideways to look back at her. He had light blue eyes; the pupil of his left eye was bigger than the right’s.

  These people got off at the fourth floor, and a tall, stooped, balding doctor in a wonderfully cut dark blue suit with real button cuffs on the jacket, got on and rode one floor up. He had his cuffs unbuttoned and folded back-to examine a patient, or, Ellie thought, show what a wonderful suit it was. His stethoscope was stuffed into the jacket’s right side pocket.

  On the fifth floor, no one else got on, and Ellie rode up alone to seven.

  On seven, she stepped out onto shining, waxed white flooring, streaked with patterns of black, and immediately felt guilty satisfaction at just visiting, at being all right, and not sick at all. Seven-fourteen was down the long leg to the left, past the nurses’ station, and Ellie stopped at the station as the oriental woman downstairs had said she should. A nurse-very pretty, blond, with cheekbones like a Ukrainian girl’s—was sitting at the station counter, making some sort of notes on a page in a small black loose-leaf notebook. There was very faint blond down on her upper lip.

  Ellie said, “Excuse me . . .” and the nurse looked up and said, “Be with you in a second . . .” looked down, and went on entering her notes. She hadn’t been as pretty, full-face, as she’d seemed with her head bent.

  Ellie heard a soft announcement on a speaker above and behind her. They were asking for a Mr. Carlson . … or Dr. Carlson. It was hard to tell.

  “Yes?” The nurse put her notebook away in a drawer.

  “I’m here to see Mrs. Audrey Birnbaum.”

  “Are you a relative?”

  “I’m a friend.”

  “Well … you’ll have to sign a disclaimer, Miss … ?”

  “Klein.”

  “You’ll have to sign a disclaimer, Miss Klein, since Mrs. Birnbaum has a serious communicable disease.”

  She tugged a small gray form out of a slot below the counter, and reached up to put it in front of Ellie to sign.

  And reached up again with a black Bic pen.

  IL

  “I thought Mrs. Birnbaum had cancer,” Ellie said, and signed the form.

  “Well, she does. But she’s suffering from AIDS as well, and the hospital’s been sued by a few people who claim they caught it visiting patients-which is ‘a lot of nonsense, but this is to protect us against that.”

  Ellie pushed the form back over the counter. “O.K.?”

  “O.K. Just go down the hall; her room is fourth on the left. -And you probably don’t want to stay too long. She tires kind of easily.”

  Ellie walked past three doors on her left, and paused at the fourth; it was open a few inches, and a small white cardboard sign reading Communicable Disease in red letters, was thumbtacked to it.

  Ellie took a breath-floor wax, food (smelled like sweet potatoes), and some sharper, chemical odor-and pushed the door gently open to go in.

  “Toddy … ?”

  “No … I’m sorry,” Ellie said to lustrous gray-black eyes set in an elegant dark brown skull. The skull rested propped on a blue satin pillowcase, and beneath it a narrow rack of shoulders was draped in a bed jacket of lighter blue satin, bordered with cream lace. The arms were long, brown, nobbed sticks, blackly bruised-the hands, large, skeletal, an IV needle taped onto the back of the left one. A white open-weave cotton blanket mounded down over more bones in a long, slight, irregular ridge, almost to the bed’s foot rail.

  “The lady cop.” Mrs. Birnbaum had a Southern woman’s husky voice and complicated vowels, not yet ruined to match her. She wore a pale cream turban, the same shade as her jacket’s face.

  “That’s riiht,” Ellie said. “My name’s Ellie Klein. —O.K. if I come in?”

  “I’d be plenty P.O.“d if you didn’t,” Audrey Birnbaum said. ‘-Except for Toddy, an’ a gay friend who’s too insane to fear anything’ I have found myself resoundingly short of visitors.”

  Ellie walked in, and hesitated about taking off her raincoat.

  “Take it off, sugar, and hang it over there in the closet. -Where’d you get that?”

  “Tabouri’s.”

  ,‘That shit costs a fortune. -Have you been a naughty little cop?”

  “No,” Ellie said, hanging the raincoat up, “-it was a birthday present from me to me.” She came back to the bed, and sat to the right of it in a small armless chair upholstered in maroon plastic. She put her purse down on the floor beside her.

  “Toddy told me about you,” Audrey Birnbaum said, -but it got so late, I thought you just decided to skip it.” A small black machine, a white tube coiled and clipped to its top, rested on a steel bedside table.

  Kleenex, paperback books, and a six-ounce bottle of Fleurs, Fauves were lined up in front of it.

  “No,” Ellie said. “-I had a lot of work to get done before I came over.” The walls of the room were covered with pictures. All pictures of flowers. Reproductions of Van Goghs, Eugene Tillerys, Redon and de Heem. Some, Ellie didn’t know. -There were no real flowers in the room.

  Slowly, carefully, the skull finished turning on its blue satin to face her. “-See all these pretty paintin’s? I told Toddy I didn’t want to be seem’ cut flowers die, so he’s buyin’ me these. Every few days I get a new one.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “Which one you like the best?”

  Ellie looked at them, looked over her shoulder to see the ones on the opposite wall.

  “I like the de Heem. -That one.” The picture was between the far window and the door to the bathroom.

  “You know who painted that paintin’?”

  “I just happened to recognize it,” Ellie said. ‘-I like that one because he makes the whole vase of flowers seem to be still growing. As if the flowers were still alive.”

  “That’s right,” Audrey Birnbaum said. “-It does look like that. Either he was real good, or those flowers were real fresh.”

  :‘Which is your favorite?”

  “Depends how I feel. If I feel good, I look at the bright ones, where it really looks like summertime. If I don’t feel so good, I just pick one of the dark ones doesn’t hurt my eyes. -Listen … how much did you pay for that raincoat?”

  “A hundred and ninety-two dollars,” Ellie said.

  “I had my eye,” Audrey said, “-I had my eye on a light brown leather coat over there-you know, light cocoa? But it was a trench-coat style, and honey, at the time-I had not yet had my pecker removed-I just couldn’t afford to be dressin’ so butch.”

  “I think I know the one you mean,” Ellie said. “Di
d it have a sort of woven belt ? Light and dark kind of ropes of leather?”

  “That was it! Did you see the price tag on that mother?”

  “No.”

  “Six hundred and sixty-one dollars. -I mean, give a girl a break!”

  “It was very pretty.”

  “Oh, honey-it was beautiful. It was Italian or Brazilian, some place where those people know leather.”

  Having said so much, Audrey appeared to tire. Lids curtained down over anthracite eyes. She’d been made up carefully; a tongue tip, very pale, almost white, came out to touch lips tinted tropic coral.

  Ellie sat quiet, thinking the woman might be drifting off, sleeping. .

  . . She was surprised to find the small room—sunlit, as clouds drifted away over the river-restful after all. The dying woman’s silence restful as well. Ellie sat at ease in the maroon chair, relaxing, looking at the pictures on the walls.

  After two or three minutes, Audrey said, “Well? -What’s the news?” She didn’t open her eyes.

  “We don’t know who killed her. We’re still digging.”

  “Well, sugar, you are going’ to have to dig deep-because there was no one, as far as I know, who disliked Sally, let alone hated her enough to do that. -To do what they did.” Audrey opened her eyes, and they shone with such luster it seemed impossible they were soon to rot. She appeared to put all she had left of beauty into them.

  “-Only person I know who had any motive for that, was me.”

  “How so?”

  “Well—you want to hear a confession?”

  “You bet.”

  “Well, here it is. I loved Sally Gaither like a sister, and better’n a sister. An’ if I had a choice whether I was going’ to be the one lyin’

  here, or she was, I honest-to-God don’t know which I would choose.

  -However, an’ here’s the confession … I’m happy she died before me, an’ died even harder than I’m going’ to. -And that, sugar, is how lonely dyin’ is, how desperate a dyin’ person gets for company. I’d take the whole damn world with me if I could-except for children, and my Toddy. An’ I was raised in the Church an’ a Christian, too.”