New York Nocturne

by Walter Satterthwait

  “Sure!”

  It was impossible to miss. Located on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 142nd Street, it blared its name in gigantic electric lights across the marquee out front, and for good measure, on an ornately blinking neon sign above that.

  It was nearly midnight, and the sidewalks were aswarm with people. All of them, I was surprised to see, were white. Our taxicab had driven us here on Lenox, north from Central Park, and once we passed 125th Street, everyone on the street was black. In the glare of the streetlamps, we saw men, women, couples, entire families bustling happily along the pavement, all of them looking exactly like the folks who lived south of 125th, except perhaps for the color of their skin. (And except, perhaps, for a certain exuberance of style that was, so it seemed to me, somewhat lacking in the white souls to the south.)

  Yet, as we left the taxi, we stepped into a throng of well-dressed white people, young and old, male and female. Milling about, shuffling from foot to foot as they stood in line, murmuring, whispering, giggling, giving off the giddy scent of money, cigars, perfume, and cologne, they were alight with excitement.

  When John led me to the head of the line, I heard some angry mutters behind us. Someone called out “Hey!” but John ignored it all and so did the very large white man in a black dinner jacket who was guarding the door. His mouth opened in an enormous grin. One of his upper front teeth was missing.

  “Hey, Mr. Burton,” he said. He raised his big fists and pretended to throw a punch at John. Beaming back at him, John pretended to block it and then pretended to throw a punch back. I confess that I was a tad surprised, and perhaps a tad disappointed, to see my elegant uncle stoop to such adolescent silliness. (But I have noticed over the years that nearly all men, especially those who have never fathered children, remain partly adolescent. This is almost always less endearing than they believe it to be.)

  Stepping back easily from John’s punch, the large man grinned. “You got the moves, Mr. Burton.”

  “Not like you, champ,” said John. He turned to me. “Amanda, this is Bobby Minton.” He held up his right hand, finger and thumb separated by a quarter of an inch. “He came this close to being the heavyweight champion of the world.”

  Mr. Minton grinned. “Close don’t count,” he said. He leaned toward me and held out a hand the size of a hubcap. “Put ’er there, sweetheart.”

  I took his hand. Like Albert’s, his grip was surprisingly gentle.

  He released me, stood back up, grabbed the long brass door-pull, and tugged open the big wooden door. Music had piled up behind it like a torrent behind a dam—guitars and drums and horns—and now it all came rumbling out onto the sidewalk.

  “Thanks, Bobby,” said John. He reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a bill, and handed it to the man. And then we slipped into that surge of pounding sound.

  Inside at the reception desk, another large man in a dinner jacket smiled at John, shook his hand, smiled at me, said something that I couldn’t hear over the clamor of the music, and led us to our seats.

  The place was huge. The dining area was arranged around the cavernous space in a two-level horseshoe shape, each floor packed with tiny tables and chairs and scattered artificial palm trees that looked bravely tropical.

  There must have been nearly a thousand people, all of them, it seemed, bobbing their heads to the throb of music. At the far end there was a proscenium stage on which a small orchestra of neatly tuxedoed men was somehow producing this marvelous din. Beneath the stage, on the polished wooden dance floor, a line of slender young women in skimpy costumes shimmied and swayed. Behind them, acting almost as the backdrop, a line of men danced, tall and graceful.

  All the customers, without exception, were white. All the performers were black.

  Not black, exactly—at least not all of them. While black might describe most of the musicians and the male dancers, it is not really the proper word for those women. Lithe and young (none of them over twenty-one, I later learned), their smooth, unsullied skin was every possible shade of pale brown: cinnamon and mocha and milk chocolate and café au lait.

  They pranced through the blaze of the spotlights, flashing their long satiny arms and long satiny legs. Their teeth sparkled, and their sleek black hair shone. The men behind them were handsome, but the women were extraordinary. They were vibrant. They were spectacular.

  First Daphne Dale and now these glistening marvels. I felt dim and gray and hopeless, and thought that I should be giving serious consideration to a nunnery.

  The man led us to a table near the stage that was, inexplicably, empty. We sat down, and the man leaned forward and murmured something into John’s ear. John nodded and the man left.

  The music built to a crescendo, drums rumbling, and then it crashed to a dramatic stop. The audience erupted as the chorus girls flounced off the dance floor.

  John leaned toward me again, grinning, but another man in yet another dinner jacket appeared at his side. In his late forties, this man was even taller than the former boxer at the front door—but rounder, more heavyset. His face was lumpy and sad-looking, the loose flesh sagging away from big brown eyes, like the flesh of a basset hound. He glanced at me, nodded, bent forward, and whispered into John’s ear.

  John looked up at the man, nodded, and turned to smile at me. “I’ve got to go for a minute. Amanda, this is Frenchy DeMange, the manager. Frenchy, my niece, Amanda.”

  Mr. DeMange smiled, and his rumpled face lit up abruptly with an unexpected and radiant charm. “Very pleased to meet you,” he said, taking my hand.

  “I’ll be right back,” John told me, standing up.

  Mr. DeMange asked me, “Get you something, Amanda? A Coca-Cola? A cherry phosphate?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll wait.”

  “Okee-dokee,” he said. He touched John on the back, as though guiding him, and the two of them slipped away.

  I looked around.

  The room held an edgy sort of excitement. Even after arriving inside, these people were still keyed up. Their faces were shiny, their features animated, their movements abrupt, impatient. They were all awaiting something, expecting something, something exotic and perhaps dangerous. I had no idea what it was, and it was possible they had no idea either.

  I sat there for perhaps ten minutes, admiring the outfits, speculating on their costs, when suddenly John was at my side. “Come on, Amanda,” he said. “We’re going.”

  I looked up at him. His face was closed, his mouth grim.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Stomach,” he said and touched his side. “Coming down with something, I think.”

  This seemed unlikely to me, and it was certainly unfair, but I stood up. Together we walked toward the entrance.

  We had nearly reached it when I noticed a couple standing against the wall, watching us. The woman was blonde and short, like Daphne Dale but voluptuous rather than slender. Her petite white hand rested on the man’s arm. She wore a white dress that clung more closely to her body than was fashionable in that year—or, really, in just about any year of the twentieth century. But she wore it, I thought, with a loose, languid, lovely bravado.

  The man, perhaps six inches taller than she, his hair black, wore a brilliantly white dinner jacket and black slacks. He was quite handsome, his face craggy and brooding, his shoulders square, his back held straight. His brown eyes were sleepy, the eyelids half-shut against the smoke from the cigarette that dangled from his lips.

  As we approached, he used his right hand to pluck away the cigarette, and he took a step toward John and me. Without changing his pace, John looked at him and said, very distinctly, “No.”

  The man stopped moving, and an expression flitted across his face, cold and hard, and then, in an instant, it was gone. John and I passed him by and went out the front door.

  As we headed south in the taxicab,
back toward the apartment, John stared out the window.

  “Do you think it was the fish?” I asked him.

  He turned to me. “What, sweetie?”

  He had never called me sweetie before. I pretended not to notice. “The fish you ate,” I said. “Maybe it was bad?”

  He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It was probably the fish.”

  He turned and looked out the window again, like someone who did not wish to speak about fish, or about anything else.

  By the time we got home, it was nearly one o’clock. John told me that he was going to bed. I asked him how his stomach was. Better, he said, and added that he would see me in the morning. I placed my orchid back in its cardboard container, put the container into the icebox, and went off to my room. I carefully changed into my nightgown, brushed my teeth, and finally lay down in bed.

  If this were a novel rather than a kind of memoir, just about now I would be describing my difficult sleep, my troubled dreams, my feverish premonitions. But in fact, I slipped almost instantly into sleep, and I had no dreams that I can recall. Certainly I had no premonitions.

  When I awoke, it was nearly nine. I threw on my robe, stepped into my slippers, and wandered out to see if John was awake.

  The door to his bedroom was opened, and the bed was made.

  I expected to find him in the kitchen, sipping his coffee. But the kitchen was empty. No smell of coffee, no sign of John.

  The living room, too, was empty. But the door to the library was closed.

  I knocked. No answer.

  I turned the knob, pushed open the door, and stepped in. In the air was a sour, coppery odor. It was oppressive—bullying and sharp—an odor that, distantly, I remembered from some other place, some other time.

  Across the room, in the brown leather chair illuminated by a tall, futuristic brass floor lamp, something sat unmoving. I had a sense that at some point in the past, years ago, I had once seen a somewhat similar thing, and for a moment I did not understand what this was exactly. Part of it was dressed as John had been dressed last night, in black trousers and a pleated white shirt. But part of it, the upper part, was draped with a wild confusion of strips and stripes and splotches of some dark, tarry substance.

  And then I realized that the tarry substance was blood, John’s blood, and that there was ever so much of it—pints of it, quarts of it—splattered across the chair and across the shelves of books behind it; and I realized that John’s face had been smashed and shattered; and I realized, as my stomach cramped and began to betray me, that the short wooden rod poking impossibly from the side of John’s skull was the smoothly worked handle of a hatchet.

  Chapter Four

  “And how did ya know it was a hatchet?”

  “I’ve seen hatchets before.”

  Balding, red-faced, thick-bodied, wearing a white shirt, a narrow black tie, and a funereal black gabardine suit that was shiny at the elbows and knees, Detective Daniel O’Deere leaned toward me. His breath came in little gusts of darkness, the smell of a cave where damp things moldered and died. “And where would a girl like yourself see such a thing?” he asked.

  He seemed to be a kind man. But he was not terribly appealing, physically or mentally. And he was not, I suspected, terribly competent.

  We were in the living room. I was sitting on the sofa, Detective O’Deere on a chair he had wrestled from the side of the room. He held a fountain pen in his right hand. In his left hand, he held a small notebook, opened.

  Other police officers wandered about the house, some in uniform, some in civilian suits like O’Deere’s. They seemed very casual to me, ambling here and there, picking things up, putting them down, all of them moving with a sort of blasé, easily satisfied curiosity, like bored tourists.

  “At our house in Boston,” I told him, “we have a hatchet there. We use it to chop the kindling. For the fire, in the winter.”

  “‘We’?” said the detective. He smiled in a manner that he probably believed to be avuncular. His teeth were gray. “That would be you, would it, miss?”

  “My father. My brother. They use it.”

  He nodded. “Right, then. Tell me again how it was ya happened to find him.”

  “But I’ve already told you.”

  He nodded amiably. “’Course ya have. And look, I know you’ve had yourself a terrible shock and all, but this is the way we do things. We get all the details down just so. We dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. You follow me?”

  “Yes.”

  “So suppose you just tell me the way of it again, how it all happened.”

  I told him again.

  I had been standing at the opened door into the library when I realized that the battered thing in the chair was John. I had doubled over, clutching at the outside of my stomach as its insides came mushrooming up through my center, exploding out of me and splashing against the wooden floor.

  I reeled away from the door, out of that horrible room, and slumped back against the hallway wall, panting. My throat was raw and bitter, scorched with bile, and I could not catch my breath—I sucked in air, again and again, but for a time there was not enough of it, and it seemed to me that there would never be enough of it, ever again. I could feel a thick thread of spittle swaying from my lower lip. With the back of my hand, gracelessly, I wiped it away.

  It suddenly occurred to me that this had happened while I slept only a few feet down the hall.

  Whomever John had let into the house, that person had done that to him, spent that enormous fury and hatred in killing him—and, all the while, I had been blithely sleeping away in my room.

  Breathing heavily, moving on legs packed with sawdust, I shambled back down the hall into the living room, over to the sofa, and sank down into it. I turned to the end table and reached for the telephone. It was English, a fat chrome base and a black Bakelite cradle and handset. My reflection in the shiny, spotless metal was distorted, my forehead swollen, my chin shrunken.

  I picked up the handset and listened to it, hearing the banal, indifferent dial tone. I stuck my finger into the last opening of the dial and spun it all the way around.

  It took forever for the dial to spin back into place, the earpiece clicking remotely against my ear. It took another forever for the telephone at the opposite end to start ringing. It rang once, twice, three times, four times . . .

  “Operator,” came a woman’s flat, nasal voice. “How may I help you?”

  “The police,” I said. “I need the police.”

  She seemed not at all alarmed. This was, after all, New York City. Calmly she asked me, “It’s an emergency?”

  “Yes. No . . . Yes.”

  She sighed impatiently. “Which is it? An emergency or not?”

  “It’s an emergency. Yes. Please.”

  “One moment.”

  At the other end, another telephone rang. Once, twice . . .

  “Twentieth precinct. Sergeant Halloran.”

  “There’s been . . . There’s been a murder.”

  He was as calm as the operator—even calmer, perhaps. “And who am I talking to?”

  “Amanda Burton.”

  “And where are you, Miss Burton?”

  “The Dakota apartment building. It’s on—”

  “We know where it is. What apartment number?”

  I gave it to him. “It’s my uncle’s apartment. John Burton. He’s the one who’s—I came into the room, the library, and he was dead. He got hit with a hatchet, and there’s blood all—”

  “Miss Burton?”

  I took a long, wavering breath. “Yes?”

  “Is there anyone else in the apartment?”

  “No. No, just me and my uncle.”

  But then I realized—I couldn’t know that for sure. I hadn’t checked. There were bedrooms, bathrooms, closets that could be hiding
the person who had done that to my uncle.

  “I think so,” I said. “I think just me and my uncle.”

  He heard the quaver in my voice. “Don’t you worry, Miss Burton, we’re sending someone right away.”

  “Yes. Yes. Thank you.”

  “And you’re sure your uncle’s dead?”

  “Yes, of course I’m sure. There’s . . . blood everywhere.”

  Abruptly he seemed to sound a bit kinder. “Are you hurt? Have you been hurt yourself?”

  “No. I just got up, a few minutes ago. I was sleeping.”

  “And how old are you, miss?”

  I took another deep breath. “Sixteen. I’m sixteen.”

  As the words left my mouth, I had the sudden dreadful notion that the man would simply hang up, refusing to talk to anyone so young.

  “All right,” he said. “Now listen to me. What was your first name again?”

  “Amanda.”

  “Amanda. Here’s what’s going to happen, Amanda. First of all, you don’t touch anything. Anything at all. You clear on that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right. I’m going to send some police officers over there. You stand by the front door. There’s a peephole? In the door? A little—”

  “Yes, there’s a peephole.”

  “When they come, they’ll ring the bell. Before—”

  “I need to get dressed.”

  “What?”

  “I just got up. I need to get dressed.”

  “No. I don’t want you wandering around that place. You—”

  “I’m wearing my bathrobe. I need to get dressed.” I could hear a faint, thin ribbon of hysteria running through my voice.

  The sergeant no doubt heard it, too. He took a breath and then slowly exhaled. “Right,” he said. “Right. You get yourself dressed. When the officers arrive, you ask for their identification. You ask through the door, before you let them in. Understand me? They’ll hold their badges up to the peephole.”

  “I understand.”

  “They’ll be there as soon as they can.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”