by Sara Gran
“If you’re looking for dope,” I said finally, “you can forget it. I’m clean and you know it.”
“We ain’t looking for dope,” Springer said. “I don’t give a shit about that. We’re looking for a gun.”
I was slow that morning. “Why would you be looking for a gun?”
“Because someone killed Jerry McFall last night,” Springer said.
I looked at him.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he went on. “I bet you’re real shocked, Joe. I bet you’re just heartbroken. I got it, and you can wipe that damn look off your face now.”
I tried to wipe off whatever look I had on my face.
“Jerry McFall was shot last night,” he said. “And seeing as you’ve spent so much time looking around for him lately, we’re thinking you’re good for the shooting. A nice old lady even saw you hanging around the building earlier in the day. I got a tip to check you out, Flannigan, and I started asking around.”
I didn’t know what to say. So for a good long time I didn’t say anything at all.
“Put some clothes on,” Springer finally said, sick of waiting for my witty comeback. “You’re coming with us.”
Chapter Sixteen
In the car on the way to the precinct I told Springer about the Nelsons. I explained that the only reason I was looking for McFall was because the Nelsons had hired me to find their daughter, and she used to go with him. I gave him their phone numbers and the address of Mr. Nelson’s office.
“Sure,” Springer said, and let out a laugh. The uniform chuckled, too. I wasn’t sure if he even knew what he was chuckling at, or just did whatever his boss did. “You expect me to believe that out of everyone in New York City, they hired a junkie whore like you to find their daughter? Don’t treat me like a jerk, Josephine, that’s all I ask of you. Don’t treat me like a fool.”
While we drove Springer told me that McFall had been found dead in a girl’s apartment in Sunset Park last night at about eight o’clock. The girl, who he’d picked up in a bar a few days before, had invited McFall to stay with her. She’d gone out to have dinner with a girlfriend and when she came back he was dead, shot through the chest. Springer got a tip that I was involved and he started asking around. He wouldn’t say where the tip came from.
I started to feel sick.
Springer took me up to the old station on Fifty-fourth. “Hello Detective, Josephine,” the desk sergeant said, nodding to both of us when we came in. “Hey Phillips,” I said, forcing a smile. In fact I recognized a few fellows there, cops and the men and women they’d arrested, but it wasn’t really a good time for catching up. Springer yanked me through to an interrogation room with a steel table and four steel chairs and no windows. I’d been in plenty of rooms like it before, maybe even the exact same room.
“You’ve been in this room before, Joe,” Springer said, lighting a cigarette. He sat across from me in one of the steel chairs. “Two or three years back. Remember that? You sat right there and you wouldn’t say a goddamned word. Not even when cold turkey started coming on and you started sweating and shaking and you threw up all over your dress. Remember?”
“Sure,” I said. “I remember.”
“What’d you get,” Springer said, exhaling smoke from his cigarette. I would have liked one myself but I wasn’t going to ask. “Thirty days? Ninety?”
“Thirty. Obstructing justice.”
He nodded and looked down at the ashtray. “How about the time before that? We had you for boosting, what was it?”
“Dresses,” I answered. “From Saks Fifth Avenue.”
He smiled. “Right, sure. And what’d you get for that?”
“Six months,” I told him. I stayed as cool as I could. I’d had fun with Springer before. But I didn’t want him to think I was having fun with him now. This was a whole new ball game, one with different rules.
“You want a cigarette?” he asked, like he suddenly realized he wasn’t being a gentleman.
“Yeah. Thanks.” He shook one out of the pack, put it in his mouth, lit it, and handed it to me. I tried to hold my hand steady as I took it. He moved the ashtray to the middle of the table. “And before that?” he asked.
“Possession of a controlled substance,” I answered. “Six months. Before that, aiding and abetting. You remember, the Minelli thing?”
Springer laughed. “Sure, I remember. You almost went away for a good long time for that one.”
I laughed a little, too, even though I didn’t feel like laughing. “I was lucky. The judge was pretty hip.”
“What else? I don’t want to go and get your file, Joe. It’s on my desk under a heap of papers and I won’t be happy if I’ve got to go find it.”
I thought for a minute. “Possession, I think two more times. Soliciting—I don’t even know how many times. Four, maybe five. Theft, back when I was about eighteen.”
Springer nodded and looked at me with a strange look on his face, a look that was almost kind. “You were just a kid then. You know, Joe, you’re pretty good at what you do. Only two theft charges in a whole lifetime of stealing. That’s a hell of a lot better than most of the characters we see around here.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He looked at me again for a long moment. It was almost like he was thinking. “You know I always thought you were smart, Joe,” he finally said. “Always thought it was a shame, how things turned out for you. You never really got a chance in life, did you, with your mother and all? You were just a kid when you started turning tricks, trying to put food on the table, trying to look after Shelley. I’m talking about before you got messed up on dope, before you even met Monte. You could have run off a thousand times but you didn’t want to leave your sister behind. I know that. You did all right by her—got her those acting classes, got her out of Hell’s Kitchen, set her up with that job at the El Sahara. Why, I saw her in the paper just a few days ago, made me kind of proud. But you—you never got a break, did you? You married that bum and got yourself hooked on dope and—”
“Thanks,” I said. “But it hasn’t been so bad.”
“Anyway,” he said, still looking at me. “What I’m trying to tell you is that what you’ve gotten yourself into now—well, it’s not anything like those other times. You’ve gotten off easy so far. Never done more than six months or so. But this McFall thing—this is murder. This is a whole different can of worms, Joe. If you go to court for this, you’re going away for a long time, maybe even getting the chair, no matter the judge likes your looks or how much you cry up on the stand. You’re older now. None of those tricks are gonna work anymore.”
“I know,” I told him, stubbing out the cigarette. None of those tricks had worked for a long time. “But I didn’t kill McFall. I’m telling you the God’s honest truth, Springer, I didn’t do it.”
He smiled and lit me another cigarette. “Joe. You’re not listening to me. What I’m telling you is that if you tell me the truth now, the whole truth, I can cut a deal for you with the DA. I’ll do everything I can to keep you out of the chair, you have my word on that. Maybe we can even get you a nice short sentence, get some mitigating circumstances in there. I’m sure they were there. I’m sure you had a reason. I know you, Joe. You wouldn’t have done this without a reason, a good one. And there’s your background—your mother, how you sent Shelley to acting classes, all that sort of thing, they’ll take that into account.”
I told him about the Nelsons again, and everything I had done since then, and all I had found out about Nadine Nelson and Jerry McFall. It was no secret to him that Monte and Yonah were using and that prostitution was going on at Rose’s and the Royale, so there was no reason to hold anything back. I told him everything.
He laughed again. “Josephine,” he said. “Come on.” Then he stood and picked up the ashtray and threw it at the wall behind me. “GODDAMN IT, Joe!” he screamed. “You tell me the truth this very minute or I swear to God, I SWEAR TO GOD I’ll knock your fucking head off.”
/> I sat perfectly still and looked at the table and didn’t say a word. The ashes from the ashtray settled down all over the room like snow. Springer sat back down. His face was bright red. He took a deep breath. “Get the ashtray for me, will you, Joe.”
I picked up the ashtray and put it back down where it had been in the middle of the table.
“Another cigarette?” he said, lighting one for himself.
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”
He lit one for me and his face faded back to its regular pink. Just as he was handing me the cigarette there was a knock on the door. Springer said to come in and a young cop opened the door and poked his head in and nodded out toward the hall.
“Excuse me.” Springer went into the hall for a second with the kid. He came back in and sat down.
“O’Reilly called those phone numbers you gave us, Joe. There’s nothing there.”
“What?” I asked. “What do you mean, nothing there?”
He shrugged. “They’re bogus, Joe. Whatever pals you were hoping would cover for you, their numbers were disconnected. Guess they spent the bill money on dope. There are no Nelsons, and we both know it.”
For a minute I didn’t say anything. It took a minute to sink in.
There are no Nelsons.
“It’s impossible,” I finally said. “Springer, they’re real. I swear to God, I’ll find them. I’ll bring them down here—”
There are no Nelsons. Which meant I was left holding the whole bag. For the first time I saw myself through Springer’s eyes. I didn’t look good.
Their phone must have gone out of order. Phones go out of order all the time. Or maybe the stupid kid Springer had sent to make the call didn’t know how to dial a phone number.
“It’s like I told you,” Springer said, looking right at me. “The sooner you tell me the truth, the better. No one’s buying this story about someone paying you to find a girl.”
“But I’ll find them,” I said, trying to sound more sure than I felt. “I’ll find them and—”
Springer held up his hands to shut me up. “Come on, Joe. It’s bullshit, you know it and I know it. It’s like I said—what kind of people would hire you to find their daughter? Come on. Now, I don’t have any evidence against you. Not yet. There’s nothing tying you to the death, and that’s a fact. So I’ve got to let you go now.”
I stood up but he waved me back down with his hand. I sat back down.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “it isn’t looking so good. I know you’ve been looking for the fellow, and I’ve got witnesses for that. You could say you’ve got nothing to do with the man, and that’s fine. But someone else might look at the fact that you know some of the same people, he’s a dealer, you’re a junkie, and see a deal gone wrong. That’s the way I see it, and that’s the way a jury’ll see it, too. You know it and I know it. This is it for you, Joe. You’re not getting out of this one.”
Finally he told me to go, with a lot of threats about keeping my nose clean and how they’d be keeping their eyes on me and not to do anything stupid and so on.
I went outside and walked to the nearest pay phone.
I called the Nelsons at home. An operator picked up the line.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That number’s been disconnected.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Because I don’t think so. I just don’t think that could have happened.”
“Ma’am,” she said, getting annoyed, “I’m sure.”
I hung up and called Mr. Nelson’s office. An operator got on the line again. I hung up.
I took a taxi back to First Avenue, where Jim’s car was parked, and then I drove down to 28 Fulton. The whole way I thought about what Springer had said: You expect me to believe that out of everyone in New York City, they hired a junkie whore like you to find their daughter?
When you put it like that, I had some trouble swallowing it myself.
Chapter Seventeen
At the building on Fulton Street, the same doorman opened the door and the same fellow sat behind the counter and the same elevator operator brought me up to the fifth floor.
The door to Mr. Nelson’s office was unlocked. I went inside and looked around.
My hands started to shake, and I felt sick to my stomach.
The desk was gone. So was the leather sofa and the typewriter and the rug and the telephone and the paintings on the walls. So was the pretty girl. All that was left was a phone cord sticking out of the wall in a dingy room.
I went through to the second room. It was empty. The sun was shining in through the window and I could see dust floating in the air. I turned around, and my footsteps echoed in the empty space.
I began to feel dizzy, and I sat down on the cold wood floor for a minute until the room stopped spinning.
It was like no one had ever been there at all.
My hands were still shaking as I took the elevator back down. I asked the fellow behind the counter what had happened to Mr. Nelson.
He frowned. “Mr. Nelson?”
“The lawyer,” I said. I was surprised at the sound of my own voice. It sounded like I was begging for something. “The lawyer on the fifth floor.”
The man looked at me from below his smart blue cap. “Nelson . . . let me check the book.” He took a black loose-leaf binder out from a drawer and thumbed through it. “Nation?” he suggested.
“No.”
“Norman?” he tried.
“Nelson,” I said again. “I’m sure. It’s Nelson.”
He looked some more and then shook his head again. “Sorry, Miss. No Nelson here.”
“Fifth floor,” I said. “Last office.”
He looked confused. “That office has been empty for months now. Sorry, lady. I don’t know what to say.”
What had happened was this: Jerry McFall had stolen a fair amount of dope from someone and they wanted it back. They wanted it back over Jerry’s dead body. But they didn’t know where he was. If they’d looked themselves, they would have left themselves wide open to the cops, just like I had. So they got two people—out-of-work actors, retired con men, friends who owed them a favor, it didn’t really matter—two people to pose as the Nelsons. They thought Jerry and Nadine were still together, so they had me look for the girl. It was an easier pill to swallow—no one would have an honest reason for wanting to find Jerry McFall. So they asked me to look for the girl, and gave me a thousand dollars. The dope Jerry stole must have been worth at least five times that, so it was worth it. Now they’d gotten their dope back, gotten rid of McFall, and left me holding the bag.
When I left 28 Fulton I drove around for a while, because I liked to drive, and because my hands were still shaking and after talking to the doorman my teeth were chattering, too, and there wasn’t much else I could do in that state. I drove without really paying attention to where I was, and after I had calmed down a little I was surprised to find that I was on Forty-second Street. Right next to Bryant Park.
I parked by a fire hydrant, but I didn’t get out of the car.
I had a craving like I hadn’t felt in years. Every muscle in my body felt weak, and I felt something sour come up in my throat. Like my last taste of dope had been eight hours ago instead of two years. Like I’d never kicked at all.
Monte was in the park. I was sure of it. He’d give me a taste. He’d give it to me and he’d be glad to do it. I could stay with him until Springer came to get me or I took my last shot, whichever came first. Jim would shed a few tears, so would Monte and a few others, but not too many, and not for long. Shelley—well, she’d be better off without me. She’d made that clear enough. I’d done what I could for her and now I was just a problem for her, an embarrassment. No one would miss me.
The odds were against me in every way. If I could win with this McFall business, chances were I’d slip up and get on dope again. Almost everyone did. I was no better than Yonah or Monte or Cora, and they’d probably kicked a hundred times between them. And if I g
ot hooked again, I wouldn’t have much longer to live. I was sure about that. Some people were lucky—they never bought stuff that was too pure or cut with poison, never got caught ripping someone off, never got busted by the cops. But I’d never had any luck that wasn’t bad.
Sometimes when I was a kid, charity ladies would come around to Hell’s Kitchen, rich ladies from uptown, and they’d pick out the kids who had special talents or who were extra cute and they’d try to help them: buy the kids clothes and food, help them in school, make sure things weren’t too bad at home. Sometimes these ladies even adopted kids from Hell’s Kitchen. But they sure never lifted a finger for me. I figured they knew what everyone else knew: there was no hope for Josephine Flannigan. I’d heard people say that when they were little they wanted to be a nurse or a schoolteacher or something like that. But I always knew I’d never be a nurse or a schoolteacher. No one ever thought I had a chance in hell of making it to twenty, let alone thirty, and right now someone, somewhere, was betting that I wouldn’t make it to forty.
But the thing was, I wanted to decide for myself. I didn’t want Springer or Monte or drugs or anything or anyone else to decide for me. I didn’t have much to live for, that was true. But what I had was mine. I’d earned it the hardest way I knew how. And I was going to keep it until I was ready to give it up.
I was going to find out who had set me up and killed McFall. And when I did, I wasn’t going to take him to Springer, either. I was going to take care of him myself.
I found a legal parking spot nearby and walked past the park to the library. My hands were still shaking and my knees were weak but I could ignore that. Inside the library I tried not to look at any single men too closely, and I found the reference desk and asked the librarian if she had a directory of lawyers who practiced in New York City. She glared at me. I had interrupted a good reading of Murder in Manhattan, the paperback novel on the desk in front of her.
