New York Nocturne

by Walter Satterthwait

  “You go get ready, Amanda.”

  I made one other telephone call, very brief, and then I left the living room. Quietly and warily I padded down the hallway to the kitchen. It was as silent as an empty ballroom, and it was impossibly sad. I knew where the kitchen knives were kept, and I tugged open the drawer, found the big chef’s knife, and wrapped my fingers around the comforting wooden handle. Carrying the knife with its blade pointed straight down, in stabbing position, I padded warily back to my room.

  I left the knife on the bed within easy reach as I dressed. Panties, a bra, a silk slip, a white cotton blouse, a flouncy white cotton skirt, white cotton socks. It seemed somehow absurd to be going through such mundane, everyday motions, putting on the same sort of mundane, everyday clothing that I had worn yesterday, pretending that the world hadn’t drastically changed since then, that it hadn’t become an altogether different sort of place.

  When I was finished, I picked up the knife again and walked to the entryway of the apartment. I checked to see if the front door was locked. It was.

  But it was only slam-locked. The dead bolt had not been shot into the jamb; the security chain had not been snapped into the brass slider on the door.

  I tried to remember if John had fully locked the door last night.

  And then I did remember; he had. The two of us had been talking about his upset stomach at the time.

  He had definitely turned the dead bolt and latched the security chain, which meant that later that night, John had opened the door for whomever it was that came into the apartment and killed him.

  Detective O’Deere and his partner, Detective Cohan, along with two uniformed policemen, were the first to arrive. The others trickled in slowly, four or five of them, individually or in pairs, looking like idle passersby with time on their hands. It seemed to me a peculiar way to run a murder investigation, but at that point, my experience of murder investigations was limited to only two: this one and one other, some three years previous.

  Detective Cohan was still in the library with the body.

  Detective O’Deere asked me, “Did you touch him?”

  “Who?” I said. “John? No.”

  “Did you go up to him, to the body?”

  “No. I didn’t even cross the room. I couldn’t. I was . . . sick.”

  “You called him by John, did ya?”

  “Yes. He asked me to call him that.” I could hear it in my voice: I sounded defensive. In my experience, the police always make you sound defensive, whether they intend to or not. Usually they intend to.

  He nodded. “You touch anything at all in the room?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Anything in the apartment?”

  “No. He told me not to. The man I spoke to on the phone. Sergeant Halloran.”

  He glanced down at his notebook then looked back up at me. “Right. Now tell me about this Albert fella, will ya? Over in Queens.”

  I told him, once again, what I knew about Albert.

  O’Deere said, “He was what, then? Like an assistant?”

  “And a friend. My uncle said he was a friend.”

  “You don’t have an address for him?”

  “No. He lives here during the week, but I don’t know where he stays in Queens.”

  He took another look at his notebook then looked back to me. “He wasn’t here last night?”

  “No. I told you. He left around five thirty.”

  “He—”

  O’Deere looked to his right and then abruptly stood up, his hands held stiffly at his sides as though he were standing at attention.

  A man had entered the living room, a fedora in his hand. Perhaps forty years old, he was tall, well over six feet. Under his expensive and well-tailored gray suit coat, his shoulders were broad and square. His dense blond hair was parted on the left. The features of his face were handsome in a rugged, outdoorsy way, but they were utterly empty, no expression in them at all. His gray eyes were blank and his mouth was set.

  “Lieutenant,” said Detective O’Deere, his voice snapping.

  The man nodded at O’Deere and then looked me over with a cold, cursory glance, up and down. It took barely three seconds. But for some reason, the thought went through my head that thirty years from that moment, even if he had never thought about me once in all that time, he would be able to describe me exactly, down to the color of my shoes.

  He looked back at O’Deere. “Where is it?” he asked him.

  “In the library, sir. Cohan’s in there.”

  “The medical examiner?”

  “On his way, sir.”

  The big man nodded. He glanced at me once more, his eyes still blank, and then turned and walked from the room. His shoulders nearly filled the doorway. Despite his size, he moved lightly on his feet.

  O’Deere sat down, still staring at the door through which the man had gone. He puffed up his cheeks and blew out a small, quick whoof.

  “Who was that?” I asked him.

  “Lieutenant Becker,” he said. He turned to me. “One of the big brass. From headquarters.”

  “The big brass?”

  “A very important fella, Lieutenant Becker.” He looked down at his notebook as though he had forgotten it and flipped over a sheet. “Right, then.” He glanced at the door then turned back to me. “Suppose you tell me about last night.”

  Once again, I told him about the night before. I had reached the point at which John and I were eating at Chumley’s, just before Daphne Dale had materialized in her silk, when the big man, Lieutenant Becker, returned to the room.

  “That’s enough,” he told O’Deere.

  For an instant, O’Deere looked like he was about to say something. But then he shut his mouth, and his face went vacant.

  Becker said, “Get rid of everyone but Cohan. And don’t let anyone else come in, except the ME.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No one,” Becker repeated. “Especially not the press.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Becker turned to me. “You have a purse?”

  “Yes.” The clinical directness of his stare had tightened my throat. I cleared it.

  “Get it,” he said. “We’re going downtown.” He shoved the fedora onto his head.

  I turned to Detective O’Deere.

  He nodded. “You go along now,” he said, and then he smiled. “Everything will be just fine.”

  He was, as it happened, entirely wrong.

  I sat alone in the wide rear seat of Lieutenant Becker’s car, a long black Packard. The lieutenant sat up front with his driver, a short, swarthy man wearing a patrolman’s uniform and cap.

  For the entire trip, Becker never turned back to me, never said anything to me or to his driver. He simply sat there, looking straight ahead as the big, expensive car hummed along the streets.

  Drained and limp, I simply stared out the window and watched the city unfold around me. What glided past us, as the big car sailed down Broadway, was a surreal kind of summary of what I had seen and where I had been during the previous week—Times Square, Madison Square, Union Square, Wanamaker’s department store. But everything—the trees, the buildings, the pavement, the crowd—was different this morning. What had been thrilling and genial was bleak and alien now. Even the sky had changed; it had become morose and overcast, the color of lead.

  We drove farther south, past Houston and Prince and Spring streets, and then turned left at Broome Street. Three blocks later we turned right, onto Centre Street. We slid past the broad, arched entrance of an enormous stone building where four or five men in shoddy suits lounged along the broad set of stairs, sucking on cigars and cigarettes. Another hundred feet on, we came to a stop beside a smaller door in the same building.

  Becker turned to me. “Here.”

  He opened his door, and
I opened mine. We stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  I looked up. The structure was as imposing as the Dakota, but it was darker and more somber and much, much longer. Four gray stories tall, festooned with grim Baroque columns and pilasters, it seemed to stretch off, left and right, into infinity.

  “This way,” said Becker.

  I followed him up the narrow stone steps and through the door. Inside, the tight corridor was painted a pale green. The air smelled of disinfectant and acrid old cigar smoke.

  We tramped down this corridor, then another, and then through another door and up a cramped wooden stairway. The dark green steps were scuffed, their centers worn down to the bare wood. The air held more smells: varnish, dust, hair oil. We saw no one.

  One flight up, we passed through yet another door, out into yet another corridor, this one broader and carpeted. Like all the others, its walls were pale green, the air spiked with the stink of old cigars. Men strode along the carpet as though they knew exactly where they were going and planned to get there very soon. Some wore uniforms, some did not. Most of them, passing us, nodded respectfully to Becker and glanced at me, but none of them said anything.

  By this point, I had no idea which direction was north or south or east or west. I had no idea where in the building we might be, or where we might be going.

  We arrived at another door. Becker came to a halt and held up a hand, signaling me to stop. He reached into the right pocket of his trousers, pulled out a small ring of keys, searched through it until he found the one he wanted, and then used it to unlock the door. After pushing the door open, he stepped in, flicked a wall switch, and waved me forward.

  It was a small room, windowless, smelling even more strongly than the hallways of pine disinfectant. The walls were, once again, pale green. The floor was dark green linoleum, in the center of which was a screened circular drain, about six inches wide, like a wider version of the drain in a standard shower.

  I wondered about that drain. Why install a drain in a room like this?

  On the far wall was a wooden table that held a dented metal pitcher and a flimsy-looking metal cup. On one side of the table was a single wooden swivel chair, and on the other side were two more.

  Becker said, “Take a seat.” He nodded to the single chair.

  I walked over to the table then turned back to him.

  He was watching me, his face still expressionless.

  He shrugged, lightly, almost invisibly. He said, “Breaks of the game, kid.” His voice was flat.

  It might have been an explanation; it might have been an apology. But as an explanation, it left a lot to be desired. And as an apology—well, I did not believe that Lieutenant Becker was capable of apology, to anyone, and least of all to me.

  He turned, walked out, and drew the door shut. I heard the key click in the lock, the sound punctuating the moment like the period at the end of a sentence.

  Chapter Five

  I discovered that all three chairs were bolted to the floor. So was the desk.

  I swiveled the single chair around and sat down. I placed my purse on the table. I checked the metal pitcher. It held about a quart of water. I poured some into the cup and tasted it: warm, flat, and rusty.

  I had nothing to read, nothing to look at but the empty room around me; nothing to do but to wonder what Lieutenant Becker had meant—the breaks of the game?—and to remember my morning, remember the sight of my uncle, bloodied and battered on the far side of the library.

  My hands and feet were cold. I realized I was shaking very faintly. I wrapped my hands around my upper arms and held onto myself, as though I were afraid I might shatter into pieces that would go spinning across the room.

  Very soon, perhaps only five or ten minutes after I arrived in that room, I began to cry.

  I cried for John, so handsome and so elegant and so wickedly brutalized. I cried for my parents, so good, so compassionate, so far away.

  And then, of course, as in the end we all do, I cried for myself. Cried long, quivering sobs, choking on loneliness and loss.

  I was leaning forward, my head resting on both my arms, which were folded along the table. A key clicked in the lock, and I jerked upright. My eyes were dry; I had cried myself out. But my nose was still stuffy and red.

  The door opened, and Lieutenant Becker stepped into the room, big and craggy and grim, his fedora gone, his hands in his pockets.

  He was followed by a jolly, heavyset man in his fifties. Like Becker, the man wore an expensive gray suit, but his was vested, and a thick gold chain hung across the vest’s smug round belly. Except for gray muttonchops and a few thin gray hairs that seemed to be shellacked across his shiny pink scalp, he was bald. As though to make up for this, his eyebrows were bushy and his mustache was thick and carefully brushed. His puffy cheeks and bulbous nose were curlicued with the broken veins of a serious drinker. He was grinning at me happily, and behind a pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses, his warm brown eyes sparkled with good cheer.

  Lieutenant Becker said to him, “This is Amanda Burton.” He turned to me, his face still blank. “This is Police Commissioner Vandervalk.”

  Mr. Vandervalk smiled heartily and held out his plump red hand. “Hello there, Amanda,” he said enthusiastically. “How are you doing?”

  I shook his hand. His was dry, but mine wasn’t. “I’m all right,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He nodded as though he had expected no less. “Sorry we couldn’t get to you before this, but it’s been a madhouse here today.” He grinned cheerfully at Lieutenant Becker. “Run, run, run, eh, Lieutenant? No rest for the weary.”

  Becker just stood there, watching me.

  Commissioner Vandervalk turned back to me. Behind the wire rims, his eyebrows rose. “Is there anything you need, anything we can get for you?”

  “May I use the bathroom, please?”

  “What? Oh. Of course, of course. Come along.”

  I glanced at Becker. He still stood there with his hands in his pockets, watching me.

  Outside the door, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, stood a thin, middle-aged woman in a starched black uniform. She was rather alarming, with pinched eyes and a bitter mouth. Behind her narrow, corded neck, her gray hair was clenched into a ball as tight as a fist.

  “Mrs. Hadley,” said Mr. Vandervalk, “take young Amanda down to the WC, would you?”

  Without a word, the woman led me down the hallway. She smelled of talcum powder and peppery old perspiration, and she jangled as she walked—attached to her thin black belt was a short chain and a ring of keys. When we came to a wooden door, she knocked on it and waited. Nothing happened. She opened it and gestured for me to go inside. I entered into the reek of old cigars and older urine.

  It was a men’s toilet, and I had never before seen a wide porcelain trough like the one that ran along the entire wall. I would be happy, I decided, if I never saw one again.

  Before I left the room, I rinsed the salt from my face and tried to wash the red from my eyes. I looked around. The towels hanging on the wooden racks were grimy, streaked with black. I shook my hands in the air, then dried them, or attempted to, along the back of my dress.

  I looked at my watch: one o’clock.

  Silently, Mrs. Hadley led me back to the room, knocked on the door, pushed it open, and looked down at me. After I stepped into the room, she pulled the door shut behind me.

  Mr. Vandervalk and Lieutenant Becker were sitting in the two adjoining chairs. In front of Mr. Vandervalk was a large notebook and a fountain pen. He nodded to me. “All right now,” he said. “You just take a seat over there, Amanda, and we’ll get this over with as soon as we can, eh?”

  I walked around the table and sat down in the single chair, opposite them.

  Lieutenant Becker’s hands were on the table, his long, thick fingers interlaced. Blond hair, like bris
tles of thin white wire, grew on the skin between the knuckles. He looked at me now as he had looked at me from the very first, without even the tiniest flicker of interest.

  Mr. Vandervalk had uncapped the pen and opened the notebook. He smiled at me again and adjusted his glasses. “Now, Amanda,” he said. “First of all, why don’t you tell us where your mom and dad are right now. Are they here in the city with you?”

  “Tibet,” I told him. “They’re in Tibet.”

  “Tibet?” he said merrily. “My goodness! What are they doing in Tibet?”

  “They’re traveling. They’ve always wanted to go there.”

  “Well, good for them,” he said. “Well, travel is broadening, I always say.” He looked down to write something in the notebook. I thought it was the single word Tibet. He looked up at me. “And when will they be getting back to the USA? Do you know?”

  “In September or October. It’s a long trip.”

  “It is, indeed,” he said and smiled again. “It is, indeed.” He wrote something in the notebook—September, probably—and then adjusted his glasses. “Now. Tell me. Do you have any other relatives?”

  “My brother. In Boston.”

  “Here in the city, I meant. Here in New York.”

  “No.”

  “No.” He nodded. “All right. Fine, thank you.” He wrote something else in the notebook. Then he sat back and clasped his hands together on his lap. He made his face go serious. “Now suppose you tell us just exactly what happened.”

  I had nothing to gain by pointing out that I had already told my story to Detective O’Deere. Lieutenant Becker knew this, and so, probably, did Mr. Vandervalk. The police were still dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s.

  “Where should I start?” I asked him.

  “Why don’t you just start with last night? You and your uncle went out to dinner, I understand.”

  The only way he could have known about that was from Detective O’Deere. If he had heard that much from O’Deere, then presumably he had heard the rest of it, too. But he wanted to hear it again, so I recounted it all—Chumley’s, El Fay, the Cotton Club—and then the events of this morning.