by Sara Gran
“Oh, it’s all right,” I said. “I know I must be in your way here.” He apologized a few hundred more times and then left me alone, and after a few more minutes I made myself stop crying.
Shelley came in at a little after nine. She was wearing a white spring dress, just a plain cotton sundress, but it fit her so snugly and looked so nice I knew it had cost a fortune. She was carrying an armload of shopping bags from different stores, which she dumped at the doorman’s feet without even a word. I guess he was supposed to carry them upstairs for her.
Then she saw me. She didn’t try to cover up her disappointment. “Joey,” she said, flatly. “What a surprise.”
I stood up. “Hi, Shelley. Can I come up? I need—”
She cut me off. “I’m happy to see you, Joe, I really am. It’s just that Jake is supposed to come by any minute now, and he doesn’t like it so much when I have girlfriends over.” I didn’t know who Jake was. I thought the guy who paid for the apartment was named Mike. This must have been a new one. But I didn’t care.
Without ever talking about it, Shelley and me had made kind of a deal. I wasn’t her sister anymore. Not in public, at least. She was going places and me . . . well, I’d been places, and far too many of them. For me to be here now was making her angry. I could see it on her face. What if one of the neighbors saw us, me in my cheap suit and nylon stockings? What if Jake or Mike or whoever it was came by? He probably didn’t even know Shelley had a sister.
I had always stuck by my end of the deal. But this was different. I glanced over at the doorman. He was busy helping some old broad into a taxi. “You take me upstairs right now,” I hissed to Shelley under my breath. “Or I swear to God I’ll call up every fat old lady in this building and tell them you’re a goddamned whore. I’ll get you thrown out of this place faster than you can blink.”
She turned around and without a word we walked into the elevator and went up to her apartment. When you walked into Shelley’s place everything was white. There were white marble tables and a white velvet sofa and little white chairs that you couldn’t sit in and white china and even the bar glasses had white flowers painted on them.
We sat down on the white sofa. She glared at me. I didn’t think she’d ever been so angry at me before. “Look,” I said. “You’re gonna tell me everything you know about Jerry McFall. And don’t try telling me that you didn’t know the guy, not now.”
Shelley looked astonished. She really was a good actress, after all. “Joey, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Really, I—”
I felt bad for Shelley. I really did. Our mother was a good-for-nothing drunk, a drunk and a whore. We didn’t have the same father, at least we thought we didn’t, because neither of us knew who our father was. And she ended up with a worthless junkie as an older sister. Life’s tough for some people, and for Shelley it was tougher than most. But I didn’t have time to worry about that now. She’d lied to me, and that was fine, but now I needed to know the truth.
I did something then that I’d never done before. I hurt her. I grabbed her arm and turned it around, not hard enough to really cause pain but enough to give her a taste.
“Okay!” she finally said. “All right, I’ll tell you.”
I let go and she grabbed her arm and started rubbing it, as if it still hurt. Her face fell and she didn’t look angry anymore, just tired and maybe ashamed of herself. “I heard about what happened,” she said softly. “About him getting shot and everything. Guess that screwed everything up for you, huh? I mean, there’s no way for you to find that girl now.”
“I don’t know, Shell,” I said. All the steam had gone out of me. I couldn’t stay mad at her. “I’d like to. But I’m not really worried about her right now.”
Shelley looked at me with her eyes wide. “You didn’t have nothing to do with him getting killed, did you?”
I’d always tried to protect Shelley, even though I had never done a very good job of it. But I would protect her from this if it was the last thing I did. There was no way Shelley was getting mixed up in this. I swallowed hard, and hoped I was a better liar than Jim. “No, of course not. I just need to know.”
“I knew McFall,” she said quietly. “I used to buy junk from him once in a while. Save your damn lectures—I don’t need them. I know it was stupid, but sometimes . . . I don’t know. I got bored, I guess. Usually I met him at this little coffee shop in Times Square so no one I knew would see me. I mean, my kind of crowd—they never go around there.”
“Jesus, Shelley.” I was going to say more, but I didn’t know what to say.
“I know,” she said. She put her head in her hands and laughed the way you do when nothing’s funny at all. “I’ve always been the smart one, huh? Jeez, what a ninny. I don’t know why I do it. I don’t know why I do half the things I do really—it’s like I can’t help myself.” She laughed again. “Hey, did you hear? I got the part, the part on the television show.”
I smiled. “Yeah, of course I heard. I’m proud of you.”
She looked down. “Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be if you knew how I got it.” She sat up and looked at me. “Want a drink?”
“Sure,” I said. “Scotch is good.”
She went to the kitchen. I picked up a business card off the coffee table. Jake Russo, Real Estate.
She came back with a water glass full of scotch for each of us. “This him?” I asked. “The guy who pays for the apartment?”
She nodded. “Cheap bastard,” she said. But she said it softly, like her heart wasn’t in it. “He doesn’t even pay for this place, you know. He’s in real estate, rents out places all over Manhattan. He just fixed the books a little and he doesn’t have to pay for this place at all.” She looked down at the floor. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Joe. About McFall. I wanted to help, I really did. I just didn’t want you to know how stupid I’d been, that’s all.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. You can tell me now. Do you know the girl, Nadine?”
Shelley shrugged. “I dunno. I might have met her with McFall before. She was one of his girls, right?”
I nodded. “Do you know where McFall got his dope from?”
She took a long drink of her scotch. “I really don’t know, Joey, honest. But I did go to a buy with him once.”
I nearly hit the roof. “So you do—”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t see who it was. What happened was, I was supposed to meet him at that place in Times Square. You know, to get dope. So I get there, and he’s got nothing. He buys me a cup of coffee and then after an hour or so, he says he’ll be right back. Well, after a while, he’s not back, and I’ve already given him my money, so I go outside to look for him. He’s just getting out of a car. So we go back to his place, he cuts the stuff, bags it up, and gives me a few papers.”
“But you never saw who it was?” I asked.
Shelley shook her head. “All I saw was the car,” she said. “A brand-new Rocket 88.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Gramercy Park was a private park with a locked gate, and inside it looked like something from a movie, even at night; the flowers were starting to come out and the plants were starting to grow and you could tell that every little thing, the plants and the flowers and the trees and the benches, had been placed just so, probably by a staff of full-time gardeners. I walked by it on the way home. Just a few blocks south and east there was another park, if you wanted to be generous, because a better word would probably be a square or a plaza. There wasn’t much grass and only a few trees, with a lot of concrete in between. I’m sure it had a name but I didn’t know what it was, and I doubted anyone else did, either. There was a hospital with a mental ward nearby, and newly released patients were the only people who enjoyed the landscaping. This was the side of town I lived on, and this was the side of town I always would live on.
When I got to the Sweedmore, Jim was waiting for me in the lobby. He was sitting on the one chair Lavinia had put out;
it was a small old-lady chair with faded black velvet padding, covered in dust and as uncomfortable as a straitjacket. I was surprised to see Jim on something so dirty. It might mess up his suit.
He stood up when he saw me come in. “Joey,” he said. “I was worried about you. How’s it going?”
I told Jim it wasn’t looking too good.
“Come on,” he said. “Let me buy you dinner.”
It was close to midnight. It was too late for dinner. But I said that would be fine. We walked west on Twenty-second Street without talking. I didn’t know where we were going but it didn’t matter. Any direction was fine.
We were on Twenty-second between Third and Lexington. It was always a quiet block and it was especially quiet now. All the neat little houses had their doors shut and their curtains down. No one was around. We turned north onto Lexington. All the shops were closed for the night, the small, sad little stores no one ever seemed to go into: the Italian cheese shop and the wig maker’s and the radio repair shop and the breakfast counter that served awful breakfasts. We made a left onto Twenty-third. Everything here was closed, too, the store for nurses’ uniforms and the art supply store and the bank and the florist’s and the grocery. No one was around. It was a wide street and it seemed like a waste—all that space and no one there but me and Jim. All that space to ourselves.
“Find anything out?” Jim asked.
“Nah,” I said. “Not really. Nothing I didn’t already know.”
We walked down the street quietly again, Jim in his perfect suit from Orchard Street and his new hat from Belton’s. Just like he always wore.
“You want to go to Lenny’s? I think he’ll still be open.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’ll be fine.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Jim said as we walked. “Maybe this wasn’t about the drugs, after all. I mean, I’m sure plenty of people had reason to kill McFall. One of the girls, maybe, or one of their parents—”
“I talked to Shelley,” I said.
Jim stopped and looked at me.
Sometimes, if you’ve been unlucky enough to find out the truth, you’re better off forgetting it. Especially when there’s not much you can do with it. It was unlikely that anyone would believe me. I’d probably just go to jail for twice as long, for two murders. Or maybe get the chair twice. All I’d be getting was revenge. And what if the law did believe me? What did I have to fight for, anyway? Another thirty years of running from the law and trying to stay off dope and never having enough dough for much more than a good meal—it didn’t seem worth trying too hard to keep. I could go to Springer, tell him to write down whatever the hell he wanted, and be done with it. At least that way I’d have three hot meals a day and a cot to sleep on at night for the rest of my life. That was more than I could say now. He’d be doing me a favor, when you looked at it like that. Maybe I should just try to take it like a man, take my medicine and go down with dignity and not take it personally.
But I couldn’t.
“Joey,” Jim said. “I’ve been thinking. About Shelley. I don’t know, Joe, I hate to say it, but I’m not sure if you should trust her as much as you do.”
I looked around. No one was coming our way. I couldn’t see another person anywhere. It was as if the whole city had cleared out and left just us, just us two poor dumb schmucks here on Twenty-third Street left to work everything out for ourselves.
It wasn’t just what Shelley had said about the car. That was just the icing on the cake. There were lots of little things like that. His number being in Jerry’s book. What Harry had said Jerry told him: I’ll tell you, Harry, it was all worth it just to stick it to that son of a bitch. You know the type, thinks they’re better than everyone else. The girl at the Royale said almost the same thing: Guess the guy thought he was really someone, thought he was better than Jerry. It really burned him up. Harmon had McFall saying his connection was a “dirty Jew.” That could have been a lot of people—but maybe not. As far as I knew there weren’t too many Jewish fellows, with heroin connections and a reputation for being full of themselves, who knew Jerry McFall, driving around in Rocket 88s. But there could have been more than one.
There was the fact that Jim was the only person I knew who could pull off a con so perfectly, who would even think of sending in shills and doing it so cleverly. There was the fact that Jim had given me so many good leads, been so interested in helping me. He’d sent me to Paul’s, sent me to Bryant Park. He was the only person who knew I was going to Brooklyn that night. And there was the way Jim didn’t lift a goddamned finger to help me once he knew I was in trouble.
But that didn’t prove anything, either. It could have all been coincidence. Jim happened to work with a con man, he happened to be full of good ideas on how to find McFall, he happened to know where I was going that night, and then he happened to lose interest in me all of a sudden. It was possible.
None of that mattered. I knew it was Jim because it couldn’t have been anyone else. There was no one else in the world who knew me well enough to set me up just like this. That was why I had known it was Jim from the very beginning. I had spent the past three days trying to prove it wasn’t so. But I couldn’t, because it was so. It was just like this.
I had the gun I’d bought from Harmon in my purse, and I wrapped my hand around it while we kept walking, while Jim was saying why it wasn’t really about the drugs, after all. Then I stopped and pulled the gun out of my purse and held it in both hands. I pointed it at Jim.
“Jesus, Joe,” he said softly. “What the fuck are you doing?”
He took a step toward me.
“Stop,” I said. He stopped.
“All right,” Jim said, “I’ll do whatever you say. Just take it easy.”
“I am taking it easy,” I said. “I’m taking it very easy. Why me, Jim? What the hell did I ever do to you?”
“Joey,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked at me like he was looking at a crazy woman. “Joey. Come on. What did Shelley tell you?”
We circled each other on the dark street. There were no sounds except a faraway car rumbling down Third Avenue.
“Who was the man in the Chevy, Jim? Does he work for you, or do you work for him? Which one of you killed McFall?”
Jim didn’t answer me. He just kept looking at me.
He took a step closer.
“Don’t, Jim. I’ll kill you.”
He stood still and looked at me.
“Why me, Jim? If you were in a bind I would have helped you out of it. You should have told me, Jim. You didn’t have to do this.”
“Joey,” he said, slowly. “You’re exhausted, that’s all. You’re not thinking clearly. Come back to my place with me, take it easy for a while—”
“Shut up!” I said. Sweat was running down my forehead and into my eyes. I took one hand off the gun to wipe my eyes clean. When I opened them Jim’s hand was in his coat pocket. He quickly pulled it out. I knew what was in that pocket. A gun. Probably bigger than mine. And I was sure he knew how to use it. He’d shot plenty of people in the war, and probably some before. And at least one afterward.
“Joey,” he said. He said my name like nothing had changed. Like we were friends again.
“Jim.”
He wasn’t going to tell me anything. It was time. I felt like I was floating. I was seeing everything from a strange angle I had never seen from before. It all looked different from up here. Simpler. I was glad to be up here, floating all above it. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the ground, right there in the thick of it.
Except that I wanted to kill him.
I pulled back the hammer on the gun and aimed it at his chest the best I could. He pulled his arm up and straightened it out, and in the dark I saw a flash of shiny metal.
I had my finger on the trigger and I heard an awful shot and Jim went down. He fell back and landed on the sidewalk with a heavy thud, bouncing a little before he lay flat. Bits of him flew around and bl
ood sprayed out in every direction.
But it wasn’t possible. I hadn’t fired.
I hadn’t killed him. Someone else had.
The streets swayed to the right and then to the left, and back and forth a few times before they evened themselves out. I tasted something awful in my mouth. My dress was soaked in sweat. I thought I would throw it out when I got home.
I looked around. A flashlight was shining in my eyes. I blinked a few times. It was coming from across the street. I heard someone say, “He’s down now, Joe. We got him good.” I was sure it was a voice I knew, and knew well. But I couldn’t place it. “You’re lucky we were here,” I heard. “Your aim was way off, you would have missed him by a mile.”
He turned the flashlight down and I could see his face. Detective Springer.
Springer and his thug came out from the shadows across the street. We all walked over to Jim, who lay on the ground where he had stood ten seconds before. He’d been shot above his stomach and below his heart, and his suit was torn up and stained red. Blood poured out from his back and made a pool around him. The bullet had gone clean through him. He had a grimace on his face. I guess the last few seconds had hurt like hell. A pistol was in his hand, ready to fire.
I wished none of this had happened. I closed my eyes again and thought maybe none of it really had.
The two cops poked him around a little, made sure he was nice and dead. Then I heard sirens, and four squad cars rolled around with about a dozen officers inside. They got out of the car and drew their guns and began swarming around the street toward me. Sergeant Springer started yelling, ordering everyone around. A couple of the guys yanked me toward their car, searched every inch of me, and then threw me in the backseat and took me over to the precinct, lights flashing all the way.
Chapter Twenty-seven
