New York Nocturne

by Walter Satterthwait

  Neither Mr. Vandervalk nor Becker asked questions. Mr. Vandervalk occasionally scribbled something into his notebook.

  When I finished, Mr. Vandervalk smiled at me again. “Very good. Thank you, Amanda.” He turned to Becker. “Lieutenant?” he said.

  Becker looked at me, and for the first time, he produced a smile. It was brief and bleak. “We’ve been in touch,” he said, “with the police in Boston.”

  “Yes?” I said politely, and I felt the skin of my back prickle, as though a chilly breeze had curled across it.

  Becker said, “This isn’t the first time you’ve bumped into a dead body, is it?”

  I wondered who among the Boston police had told him. It didn’t matter, of course. Any of them could have known, and any of them could have told Becker. Although the murder had been committed outside of Boston, in a small town along the shore, for a time it had been Big News in all the city newspapers.

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

  “Your mother,” he said.

  “My stepmother,” I corrected him.

  “And she was killed with a hatchet, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s right. Yes.” I glanced at Mr. Vandervalk. He sat there with his arms crossed over his chest, his lower lip pushed out. He was looking at me with concern. He narrowed his eyes and nodded.

  Becker said, “No one ever did figure out who did it.”

  I corrected him again: “No one was ever arrested.” In the end, the local police did actually know who had done it. But for various reasons, the identity of the murderer had been kept secret.

  I turned to Vandervalk, my one ally in the room, my one ally in the city of New York. “You don’t really think I killed my uncle.”

  He smiled again, a friendly, kind smile. “Amanda, all we’re trying to do here is get to the truth.”

  “But I’ve told you the truth. I don’t know who killed him.”

  Becker said, “It’s an amazing coincidence, isn’t it? One little girl finds two dead people. Both of them killed with a hatchet.”

  “I was only thirteen years old then.”

  “Old enough to hold a hatchet. Old enough to use it.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t.”

  Mr. Vandervalk waved Becker gently away. “Now, Amanda,” he said softly. “Listen to me, dear. We’re not ogres here. Lieutenant Becker and I are trying to help you.” He leaned toward me, his smile friendly beneath his mustache. “You know what? I’ll bet you had a good reason. An excellent reason.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It happens all the time. We know that. A good-looking young girl. An older man living alone. There’s an attraction. Perhaps, at first, it’s even mutual. We can understand that. Believe me, we can. But then the older man, well, he takes things a little bit too far. He demands more from the girl than she’s prepared to give. He reaches out, and he touches—”

  “‘Touches’?”

  “If your uncle touched you, if he—”

  “‘Touched’ me?”

  “If your uncle touched you, if he—”

  “That’s crazy,” I said.

  But I knew that it wasn’t, not entirely.

  In a sense, Mr. Vandervalk was right. Mutual or not, there had been an attraction. I remembered the way I had looked at John while he was reading or writing or sitting beside me watching a show; I remembered the way my glance—tentative, always ready to dart away—had caressed the clean lean lines of his face. I remembered the flecks of gold floating in the blue of his eyes. . . .

  “It’s natural, of course,” said Mr. Vandervalk. “It’s inevitable. But then one night, things went a little too far—”

  “Things never went anywhere.”

  “Maybe he didn’t touch you,” said Becker. For the first time, he smiled at me. Slyly. “Is that it? That’s why you hated him? That’s why you killed him?”

  I shook my head, not so much to deny the idea as to shake it away, to shake away the nightmare that was beginning to settle around my shoulders. “This is . . . crazy. This is absolutely crazy. I didn’t hate my uncle. I admired him.”

  “Of course you did,” said Vandervalk, nodding again, encouraging me. He smiled, and all at once I realized that his smile and his concern were both utterly false. He was as convinced as Becker that I was responsible for John’s death. Or convinced that I should be.

  “Of course you did,” he said. “You admired him. You respected him. And then he did something that frightened you. Something you could never forgive. One night when you were sleeping, he came to you and—”

  “That is just not true,” I said. I turned to Becker. Of the two men, he had suddenly become the less unpleasant. His hostility, at least, was open. I said, “I’d like to talk to a lawyer, please. I have a right to talk to a lawyer.”

  I sounded enormously grave to myself, but clearly I amused Lieutenant Becker. “Where’d you hear that?” he asked me.

  “It’s in the Constitution of the United States.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “The Constitution of the United States? Does that say anything about minors? Because that’s what you are, little girl.”

  The words were spoken with such easy contempt that for a moment I was stunned. My throat clamped shut, and I felt a swelling behind my eyes. I blinked, swallowed painfully, and took a deep breath. I would not cry in front of this man. I would not cry in front of either man.

  Sensing my vulnerability, I believe, Vandervalk leaned forward. “Look, Amanda,” he said, sincerity purring in his voice, “we’re trying to help you. Believe me, no jury in the world would convict you if they knew the truth.”

  “But that isn’t the truth.”

  He sat back, sighed, and shook his head, vastly disappointed in me.

  Becker attempted another approach. He said, “Did your uncle lock the door when you two came back last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many keys are there?”

  “Pardon me?” I said.

  “Was that a complicated question? How many keys to the apartment?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I had one. Albert had one.”

  Becker turned to Vandervalk. “Albert Cooper. The butler. We talked to him, he’s alibied.”

  I realized that until that moment, I had never heard Albert’s last name. I wondered how Becker had learned it.

  Becker said to me, “And your uncle’s key—it was in his pocket. That makes three.”

  “There could’ve been more,” I said. “Someone else could have come in last night. Anyone.”

  “Who?” said Becker.

  “I don’t know. But—”

  “The door was chained shut,” he said.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “The front door to the apartment. When the detectives got there, they heard you unchain it.”

  I glanced at Vandervalk. His arms were crossed, and his head was cocked.

  “Yes,” I said, “but I chained it shut myself. This morning, after I called the police.”

  “And why do that?”

  “To stop—to keep out whoever did that to . . . my uncle.”

  “Little late, wasn’t it?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “You know what defensive wounds are?”

  “No.”

  “Wounds on the hands and arms. They happen when someone’s trying to stop someone else from cutting him. With a knife. Or a hatchet. Your uncle didn’t have any.”

  “So?” The single word was so adolescent that, hearing myself speak it, I nearly cringed.

  “So,” said Becker, smiling his wintry smile, “that means he knew the killer. He knew you. You walked right up to him, and he never knew what you were planning. You—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “How could I walk up to him with a
hatchet in my hand?”

  “You hid it. Behind your back.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Maybe you wrapped it up in some clothes. Or maybe he was nodding off. It was late. He’d probably put away a fair amount of booze last night.”

  “If he was nodding off,” I said, “then anybody could have killed him.”

  “There wasn’t anybody else in the apartment.”

  “There had to be.”

  “Here’s what happened,” said Becker. “Something went on between the two of you. Maybe he did do something he shouldn’t have. Maybe, like Mr. Vandervalk says, he went over the line and he deserved to be punished for it. We can take that into consideration. But last night you went and you got the hatchet—”

  “I didn’t even know there was a hatchet.”

  “In the kitchen pantry, in the wood box. You had to know that.”

  “I’ve never seen the wood box. I’ve never been inside the pantry. We haven’t used any wood since I got here. It’s summertime.” My voice was reedy, and I could hear the panic crackling in it. They could hear it, too, I knew, and that shamed me.

  Another thought occurred to me. “What about fingerprints?” I said to Becker. “You didn’t find my fingerprints in there. You couldn’t have.”

  “You wiped them off,” he said. “Obviously, you know about fingerprints. For a little girl, you’ve had a lot of experience.”

  I looked from him to Mr. Vandervalk. “But this is crazy! I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill anyone. It’s crazy for me even to have to say that.”

  Mr. Vandervalk unwrapped his arms, leaned forward, and put his hands on the table. “Now listen to me, Amanda,” he said earnestly. “We can’t help you if you won’t help yourself.”

  “But I didn’t kill him!”

  He smiled sadly. “Sweetheart,” he said, “come on. Do yourself a favor. All you’ve got to do is tell us how it happened—how your uncle, you know, touched you. It upset you. Naturally it did. It frightened you. And you were all alone in the big city. You had nowhere to go, no one to talk to. Anybody in the world could understand that. So last night—”

  “But it’s not true.”

  “This’ll all be over, Amanda. We can get you out of here. Get you a nice big meal, eh? Find you a nice comfortable place to stay.”

  The notion that I would betray my uncle for a “nice big meal” was so infuriating that I threw myself back in the chair. “No,” I said. I folded my arms, locking them across my chest. “I won’t. My uncle was a good man. He didn’t do what you said. He didn’t and he never would have.”

  I raised my chin in a defiance that seemed feeble even to me. But it was all I had. “And I didn’t kill him,” I said.

  He looked at me for a moment. Then, shaking his head, he sighed. He turned to Becker. “Tell Mrs. Hadley to take her downstairs.”

  Chapter Six

  The cell was perhaps seven feet by eight and it stank, like just about everything else in the building, of pine disinfectant. Overhead, a single lightbulb dimly glowed behind metal screening. The floor was bare concrete. Two of the walls were cinder block, painted a flat dull gray; the other two consisted of long black metal bars, running vertically. Along the two cinder-block walls were narrow cots, each holding a swaybacked mattress, a threadbare cotton sheet, a flat pillow in a shabby cotton case, and a stiff brown woolen blanket. In the corner, about four feet from the floor, hung a small metal sink with a single faucet. A metal cup, identical to the one in the room upstairs, rested on the sink’s ledge. Underneath the sink was a single small metal bucket. Next to that, upright on the floor, someone had carefully placed a thin roll of brown toilet paper.

  No other cells were nearby. Mrs. Hadley had led me down three flights of stairs, along a cinder-block corridor, and into a small basement area. The cell took up half of it. The rest was stuffed with a jumble of old furniture—desks, chairs, stools, tables—hastily thrown together and thickly layered in dust.

  “What is this place?” I asked Mrs. Hadley. I meant: Where are the other cells? Where are the other prisoners? Surely a building the size of police headquarters would hold more prisoners than a single sixteen-year-old girl.

  Until that moment, she had not spoken to me. Now she smiled sweetly and said, “This is where we put the little girls who don’t tell the truth.”

  Her voice was much softer than I expected. But the softness and the sweetness of her smile made the words themselves sound patronizing and spiteful—as they were meant to, of course.

  I flushed. Spite is something with which I have never dealt well. It is simple naked cruelty, and even now, years later, I am always startled when someone actually wishes to be seen as cruel.

  “I am telling the truth,” I said.

  “If you were,” she said with the absolute conviction of a minor functionary, “you wouldn’t be here.”

  She reached for the chain hanging from her belt, lifted the ring of keys, immediately found the one she wanted, and unlocked the barred door to the cell. She swung the door open and then turned to me, holding out her hand. “Purse,” she said.

  I handed it over. She clamped it under her arm, and once again I smelled the sharp aggressive tang of old, dried sweat. She held out her hand again and nodded to my wrist. “Watch,” she said.

  I hesitated. Susan, my stepmother, had given me the watch on my sixteenth birthday, a lovely Bulova with a narrow rectangular gold case and four small emeralds notched into each corner. It was my very first wristwatch.

  Impatiently, the woman twitched her fingers. “Watch.”

  I would not beg. I unfastened the band and handed it over. The time then was two thirty.

  I felt bereft, as though a good friend had abandoned me.

  Indifferently, Mrs. Hadley shoved the watch down into the pocket of her uniform. She jerked her head. “Inside,” she said.

  I swallowed, took a deep breath, and stepped into the cell.

  With that single step, everything changed. I went from being one kind of person, in one kind of life, to someone entirely different, with an entirely different and uncertain set of ragged possibilities.

  I was abruptly weak and frail. My breath left me, sighed itself hopelessly away, and, beneath my blouse, a droplet of perspiration wormed down my side like a small sinister snake.

  Mrs. Hadley shut the door. It clanged loudly. She locked it—click click—and then without another word she walked away, her heavy shoes snapping against the cement.

  Breathing quickly now, hyperventilating, I glanced around. Everything was horrid and menacing. But that thin brown roll of toilet paper, standing at attention beside the drab gray bucket, seemed especially ominous. Someone had used it before I arrived, perhaps more than one person—what had happened to them? Where were they now?

  I could still hear the distant brittle snap of Mrs. Hadley’s shoes. I did not start crying until it had faded into silence.

  Without a timepiece to contain it, time expanded like vapor, thinning, dissipating, until finally it vanished altogether.

  After I had cried myself dry once again, I lay there on one of the cots, staring up at the ceiling.

  I remembered things I had not thought about for years. My father laughing at the shore, knee-deep in a foamy surge, his sunbrowned arms held out to me as he cheered at my awkward, lumbering splash through the water. My grieving brother in our living room, wailing because he and his new slingshot had actually killed a small sparrow. My first day at a new school, second grade, walking in line outside beside a stunning young boy named Adam whose blond hair caught and held the sunlight.

  I thought about my uncle. Who had killed him, and why? Who had come up to the apartment last night to take his life? Why would he—or she—risk coming up there? People lived in the building. They were moving in and out of it all day and all night. Any one of them could have seen the killer.

 
I could have seen him. Why enter an apartment where you might be seen?

  And why were the police so convinced that I was responsible?

  Well, the hatchet, of course. As Becker suggested, I had a history with hatchets.

  But why had the killer used such a weapon? Certainly there were guns available in New York City, probably an endless supply of them. And there were knives and explosives and a thousand other means by which to take a life.

  Why a hatchet?

  But who? Who would want to kill John?

  Daphne Dale? That man at the Cotton Club, the man in the white dinner jacket?

  Someone else? Someone I had never met, a person I could never imagine?

  I harried myself with these questions, but sooner or later, inevitably, I would sink back into self-pity: How could they put a sixteen­-year-old girl in jail? How could they do this to me?

  At some point, much later, I heard footsteps coming toward me, and the jingle-jangle of keys. Mrs. Hadley. I sat up, swung my legs from the cot, and straightened my dress.

  She held a small metal plate.

  I stood up. Between the bars was a small horizontal opening. Without a word, Mrs. Hadley shoved the plate through and held it there. I stepped forward and took it from her. The plate was heaped with some thick substance the color of rust, and lying atop the heap was a worn metal spoon.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She crossed her arms and said, “They want to know. Upstairs. If you’re ready to tell the truth.”

  “I’ve already told the truth.”

  She nodded, as though this were exactly the mulish answer she had expected. She pointed a bony finger toward the food. “Either eat it or give it back. I’m waiting right here.”

  I sat back down on the cot.

  The rust-colored substance was beans, boiled nearly beyond recognition but cold now.

  Although I had not eaten since last night, I believed that I owed it to John to spurn whatever food these people offered me. I hated beans, and my good intentions should have prevailed. But, like most of my good intentions, they failed me. I started scooping up the beans and shoveling them down. The body, as we learn over time, does not really care much about our good intentions.