Reborn ac-4

by F. Paul Wilson

  Actually he wanted her to quit her job. After all, they no longer needed the money, he said, so why should she drag herself off to the hospital every morning? Good, logical reasons, but Carol didn't want to quit. Not just yet. Not until she had kids to stay home for. Until then there were people at MCH who needed her. People like Mr. Dodd.

  Kay had called from the hospital this morning to tell her that Maureen Dodd had agreed to take her father home. She was picking him up tomorrow. The news had made Carol's morning.

  "Jefferson Airplane?" Jim said around a mouthful of food as he walked into the room. He had a well-bitten apple in one hand and one of Hanley's journals in the other. He had done little else but pore over those things since they'd arrived this morning. "Don't really care for much of their new stuff. Why?"

  "Oh, just wondering. Korvette's has After Bathing at Baxter's on sale for two thirty-nine."

  Jim swallowed and laughed. "On sale? Honey, we don't have to worry about sales ever again! If we want it, we'll buy it at list and pay the whole four seventy-nine! We'll buy a stereo and never buy mono records again! Don't you understand? We're rich!"

  Carol thought about that a second. They were spending an awful lot of time here at the Hanley place but still slept and ate and made love in their own little house. Maybe she should stop referring to it as the Hanley place. Legally now it was the Stevens place.

  "I don't feel rich," she said. "Do you?"

  "No. But I'm going to start working on it. It's scary, though."

  "How do you mean?" She knew she was scared, but Jim?

  "The wealth. I don't want it to change us."

  "It won't," she said.

  "Oh, I know it won't change you. It's me. I don't want to stop writing, but what if the money makes me too comfortable? What if I stop being hungry? What if I mellow out?"

  Carol had to smile. Every so often he would do this—break out of his tough-skeptic persona and become vulnerable. At times like these she loved him most.

  "You? Mellow?"

  "It could happen."

  "Never!"

  He returned her smile. "I hope you're right. But in the meantime, what say we hit Broadway this weekend?"

  "A play?"

  "Sure! Best seats in the house. Our penny-pinching days are over." A new cut began on the Nyro album. "Hear that? That's us. We're gettin' off the Poverty Train. You've got the section there. Pick a play, any play, and we'll go."

  Carol thumbed to the front. She saw ads for I Never Sang for My Father, How Now Dow Jones, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, none of which much appealed to her. Then she came to a full-page ad quoting rave reviews for Neil Simon's latest.

  "Let's see Plaza Suite."

  "You got it. I'll call a ticket agent and see if he can dig us up a couple of good seats—price no object."

  Carol hesitated. "Do you think we could make it a matinee?"

  "I guess so. Why?"

  "Well, after last week…"

  "Sure," Jim said with a reassuring smile. "We'll be out of the city by dark. We'll drive back here and have dinner at Memison's. How's that sound?"

  "Absolutely wonderful!"

  In a burst of warmth for Jim, she opened her arms and he fell into them. She wanted to make love to him right here and now in this big old chair. She kissed him, trailing her hand into the tangle of one of his sideburns. He pulled away for a second to place the journal he had been reading on the table beside the chair. That was when Carol noticed the writing along its bottom edge.

  "What do those mean?" she said, pointing.

  Jim picked up the book again. "Never noticed them."

  He held it closer. A series of numbers and letters had been printed in a line:

  33R—21L—47R—16L.

  "My God, Carol!" he said, leaping from the seat. "That's a safe combination! And it's written on the bottom of the 1938 journal, the one right before the gap! Got to be to the safe upstairs!"

  Carol was filled with a sudden foreboding. She grabbed at Jim's arm.

  "Why don't we leave it locked?" Jim's expression was frankly puzzled. "Why?"

  "Because if Hanley—your father—locked it away so securely, maybe it should stay that way. Maybe there's stuff in there he didn't want anyone to know, stuff he would have destroyed if he'd known he was going to die."

  "Whatever's in that safe is the truth. And I've got to know the truth—about who my mother is, or was; and about my father's relationship with her."

  "What difference does that make? It's not going to change who you are!"

  "I need my past, Carol. I've got the Hanley half. Now I need the rest—my mother's side. This Jazzy Cordeau he mentions may be her. But no matter what Becker digs up on her, I'll only be guessing as to whether she's the one. But I've got a strong feeling that after we open that safe, I'll know."

  Carol hugged him against her. "I just hope you don't regret it. I don't want you hurt."

  "I can handle it. I don't know what Hanley's hiding. The truth may not be pretty, but it's got to come out of that safe." He smiled. "What's that they say, 'The truth will set you free'? That's the way I feel about what's in that safe. Besides, how bad can it be?"

  He stood up and held out his hand to her.

  "Come on. Let's open it together."

  Carol felt her queasiness double as she rose and followed him upstairs.

  3

  It took Becker most of the early afternoon to track down anything on the Jasmine Cordeau murder. After all, as the cops told him time and again until he was sick of hearing it, the case was nearly twenty years old.

  Yeah, so what? he wanted to shout.

  But he kept his cool, kept smiling in their faces. After all, his press card could only take him so far, especially with his long hair and all. Longhairs tended to call cops pigs, and cops didn't take too kindly to that.

  A desk cop took him to the basement and pointed to a jumble of filing cabinets and told him that if the file on that old murder was still around—and no one was saying it was—it would be in one of those.

  Maybe.

  More scut work.

  Gerry had spent the morning in the New York Public Library's periodical section, spinning through an endless stream of microfilmed pages, scanning the obits and local news, determined to find Jazzy Cordeau.

  Because Jazzy Cordeau was Jim Stevens's mother.

  No doubt about it. Something deep inside Becker was as sure of that as he was sure of his own name. And that wasn't all. The journal's casual mention of her "pitiful attempt at blackmail" left little doubt that there was something ugly between Hanley and the Cordeau broad. Something juicy.

  But what?

  That was what made this search so intriguing, what had kept his burning eyes fixed on the screen all morning, fighting vertigo as the pages whirred by.

  Finally he had found it, buried in the lower right-hand corner of the October 14 late edition, a single paragraph:

  WOMAN STABBED IN MIDTOWN ALLEY

  THE BODY OF A YOUNG WOMAN, WHO WAS LATER IDENTIFIED AS ONE JASMINE CORDEAU, WAS DISCOVERED IN AN ALLEY OFF FORTIETH STREET BETWEEN EIGHTH AND NINTH AVENUES EARLY THIS MORNING. SHE DIED OF MULTIPLE STAB WOUNDS. HER PURSE WAS MISSING.

  That was it! Jasmine—Jazzy—it had to be!

  Excitement still quivered through him. Stabbed to death. Why had she been killed? To shut her up? To put an end to another "pitiful attempt at blackmail?"

  He rubbed his sweaty hands together as he approached the filing cabinets. Despite the drudgery ahead, the thrill of the hunt began to work its spell on him. This was going to be good!. There was something really rotten here. Even twenty years later he could still catch a whiff of the stink.

  After two hours of bending and kneeling and pulling and sifting until his hands were filthy and his back was killing him, Becker found a single sheet on Jazzy Cordeau. And that was by accident. It was folded between two other files, as if it had dropped there by accident.

  He held it up to the naked bulb hanging f
rom the ceiling and cursed after he read it. This was no damn good! It was a summary face sheet from the coroner's report, saying Jasmine Cordeau had died from a deep laceration to the left carotid artery and multiple stab wounds to the anterior chest causing lacerations to the anterior wall of the myocardium.

  So? She'd had her throat cut and was stabbed in the heart. That didn't tell him anything new, other than the fact that someone seemed to have wanted Jim Stevens's mother dead real bad. Who? That was what he wanted to know. Who was Jazzy Cordeau, and who had killed her?

  He took the face sheet up to the Records Department. The sergeant there wasn't too surprised that the file couldn't be found. He took one look at the sheet and grunted.

  "When'd y'say dis happened?"

  "October 14, 1949. On West Fortieth."

  "Kelly might be able to help yiz. Used to walk dat beat."

  "And where do I find this Kelly?" Becker said.

  "Dat's Sergeant Kelly. Right here. He's on d'next shift. Be here'n a coupla minutes."

  Becker took a seat and wondered what kind of cop was walking a beat twenty years ago and was now only a sergeant in the Records Department. When the balding, overweight Kelly finally strolled in, Becker got a pretty good idea why: The whole department was suddenly redolent of cheap Scotch.

  He gave the shifts a chance to change, gave Sergeant Kelly a chance to settle in, then approached him. He showed him his press card and the coroner's face sheet.

  "I was told you might be able to help me find the rest of this file."

  "You was, was you?" Kelly said, eyeing him briefly, then glancing at the sheet. He started, then laughed. "Jasmine Cordeau? It's an old one you've got here! I knew that one well! What's the likes of you doing looking up the likes of Jazzy?"

  Becker decided a piece of the truth might appeal to this old rummy. "A friend of mine, an orphan, has reason to believe she might be his mother."

  "You don't say? Jazzy a mother? It don't seem likely. She was one of the top whores in midtown in her day."

  "Whore?" Becker felt the blood start to race through his vessels. Stevens's mother had been a prostitute! What a story! "You're sure?"

  " 'Course I'm sure! Had a record a mile long!"

  This was too good to be true. And getting better by the minute.

  "Did they ever find her killer?"

  Kelly shook his head. "Nah! Some John did a hit-and-run on her. Cut her up and took her roll."

  Something didn't fit here.

  "If she was such a high-priced piece, what was she doing in an alley off Fortieth?"

  "She started off high-priced, but she got on the H and began the slide. At the end she was doing b-j's in alleys. Shame. She was a beautiful woman in her prime."

  "What happened to her file?"

  "You wanna see it?" Kelly said, rising from behind his desk. "C'mon, I'll show you."

  It was back down to the musty old cellar, but this time to a secluded corner where Kelly pulled a dust cloth off a relatively new file cabinet.

  "My personal files," he said. "Any case I had anything to do with, any victim or perpetrator I knew, I keep the files here."

  "Far out!" What a stroke of luck! "How come?"

  "For my book. Yeah, I'm gonna write me a book about walking a beat in midtown. Think it'll sell?"

  "Depends on how it's written," Becker said, sensing which way the conversation was going and dreading it.

  "Say, you're a writer, right? Maybe you could help me."

  "Sure. That's cool. Sounds real interesting," Becker said as sincerely as he could. "But do you have that Cordeau file?"

  "Sure."

  Kelly unlocked his private cabinet, flipped through the top drawer—Becker noticed a half-empty fifth of Scotch at the rear—then pulled out a manila folder. He opened it and started paging through the contents. It was all Becker could do to keep from snatching it away.

  "Is it all there?"

  "Looks like it. I just wanted to see if I still have that eight-by-ten glossy she had done when she was a dancer, before she found out there was more money in hooking. Yep. Here it is." He handed Becker the photo. "Wasn't she a piece?"

  For a moment Becker stared at the picture in mute shock. And then he couldn't help himself—despite the crushing disappointment, he began to laugh.

  4

  Jim's palms were sweaty and his fingers trembled. It took him three tries at the combination before the tumblers clanked within the safe door.

  Why am I making such a big deal of this?

  He yanked the lever to the right and pulled the door open. He saw three shelves inside—two of them empty, the third nearly so.

  "Looks like a crash dieter's refrigerator," he said.

  He emptied the third shelf and brought everything to a nearby table. The entire contents of the safe consisted of four yearly journals, uniform with the others he had found, a small black-bound volume, and an oversize green book. The only other item was an unsealed legal-size manila envelope. Jim picked this up and found a few hundred dollars in tens and twenties within.

  "Mad money," he said.

  Carol had opened the big green book.

  "Look at this."

  Jim leaned over her shoulder. Inside the front cover was a faded black-and-white photo of a shirtless Hanley holding an infant, tiny enough to be a newborn, in his arms. It was dated Jan. 6, 1942.

  "I'll bet that's me!" Jim said. "I must be that newborn!"

  "Look at how hairy he is," Carol said. "Remind you of anyone?"

  Jim smiled. "I wonder if he had hairy palms?"

  Wonder filled him as he looked into Roderick Hanley's smiling face. A proud father if there ever was one. He turned the page and saw another photo of a brick-fronted garden apartment. He recognized it immediately.

  "That's Harbor Terrace Gardens! We lived there till I was seven!"

  There followed a few blurry, long-range photos of an unrecognizable child playing in front of the apartment complex, then a shocker. A class photo with an inscription in Hanley's now familiar hand: Kindergarten, 1947.

  "That's my class! That's me at the end of the second row!"

  Each page had a different class picture, even an occasional portrait shot.

  Carol said, "Where did he get these? Do you think Jonah and Emma—?"

  "No. I'm sure they didn't know anything about Hanley. It would be easy enough for him to go to the photographer and buy prints, don't you think?"

  "Sure. I guess so." Carol sounded uneasy.

  Jim looked at her. "What's wrong?"

  "Well, don't you feel kind of creepy knowing he was secretly watching you all the time?"

  "Not at all. Makes me feel good in a way. I mean, it tells me that although he'd let go of me physically, he hadn't let go emotionally. Don't you see? He lived most of his life in a Manhattan town house through 1942. Then he suddenly sold it and moved to Monroe. Now I know why—to watch me grow up."

  Thinking about it gave Jim a warm feeling inside. He didn't raise me, but he never forgot about me, never completely abandoned me. He was always there, watching over me.

  "Here we go," Carol said with a little laugh that sounded forced. "The Football Years."

  There followed page after page of newspaper clippings. Anyplace his name was mentioned, even if it was simply a list of the players who had seen action in a game, Hanley had cut it out, underlined Jim's name, and pasted it into the scrapbook.

  Jim was struck now by the irony of those football games. Jonah and Emma were in the stands for every game. In his mind's eye he saw himself turning on the bench and waving to his parents—all three of them—for right behind them sat Dr. Hanley, enthusiastically cheering Our Lady's Hawks—and one running back in particular—to victory.

  Weird. And touching, in a way.

  He wondered how Hanley had reacted to the injuries his son inflicted on the field. Did he cringe at the pain he saw, or did he hunger for more?

  After football came photos cut from the Stony Brook yearbooks,
and later on, even Monroe Express articles with the James Stevens byline.

  "He was really some sort of completist, wasn't he?"

  "Yeah. From reading his journals I feel I know him. He definitely wasn't the kind of guy to do anything halfway."

  The doorbell rang.

  Who the hell—?

  Jim went to the window and looked down toward the front driveway. He recognized the rusty Beetle.

  "Oh, no! It's Becker!"

  "He's kind of late, isn't he?"

  Then Jim remembered what Becker had been looking into and decided he'd better talk to him.

  "Maybe he's learned something about Jazzy Cordeau."

  He hurried downstairs with Carol close behind and pulled open the door as the bell rang a third time. Becker stood there on the front porch, grinning.

  "What's up, Gerry?" Jim said.

  Becker kept grinning as he stepped into the front hall.

  "Still think Jazzy Cordeau might be your mother?"

  "What did you find out?"

  "This and that."

  Jim felt his fists clench and his muscles tighten. He had wanted to be the one to uncover her identity before anybody else—especially before Gerry Becker! And now Becker was playing cute.

  "What?"

  "She was a hooker."

  Jim heard Carol gasp beside him. His anger grew, fueled by Becker's taunting tone.

  "Very funny."

  "No. It's true. I have it on reliable authority—first from a Sergeant Kelly, N.Y.P.D., and later from an old pal of his who used to work vice—that she was midtown's finest piece of ass in the late thirties and on through the war. Except for a period of time right before the war when she dropped out of sight for almost a year. Some people say that in her final years, when she was shooting smack like I drink Pepsi, she talked about having a baby someplace, but no one ever saw the kid. The timing's right. Think that kid might be you, Stevens?"

  Anger had ballooned into barely suppressed rage. Jim could see how much Becker was enjoying this. He forced himself to speak calmly.