Barnum’s admission of guilt was a blow to the Times, but not as severe as the one the Washington Post had received under similar circumstances. At least Kate hadn’t actually been given the award. The Post reporter had to return hers. Kate resigned, kissed her career au revoir and went into unsuccessful alcohol rehab. The paper printed excerpts from her letter of resignation and an apology to its readers.
God, she had fallen and all the way down. Now she longed to be a phoenix risen from the ashes. But Barnum was reinventing the phoenix myth, for if she was to fly again, not all the ashes would be her own.
“The cops get back in touch with you?” MacClough sat across from me just as I was slapping the rubberbands about the Barnum files.
“Not yet,” I looked around and noticed we were alone.
“Meeting in the City, huh?” Johnny had taken the hook and bait.
“Big meeting,” I yawned a burlesque yawn. “The biggest.”
“About your writing?” What, you finally get some agent with bad enough taste to take you on?” the ex-detective was straining.
“Answers for answers, MacClough. That’s the way it’s gotta be,” I stood to go.
He grabbed my free arm. “Answers for answers.”
I sat back down. “Tell me about her.”
“I was just out of-”
“Not about you,” I cut him off, “about her.”
“What about her?”
I thought for a second. “Her name.”
“Azrael?”
“Yeah, who names their kid after the angel of death?”
“Her full name was Azrael Esther Wise. The Esther was for her mom.”
“But we,” I caught myself, “Jews name only after-”
“-the dead,” he finished. “Yeah, her mom died giving birth to her. So her father’s this nutty bastard and he hangs the albatross on her forever. Then when she was four or five her dad got his right in front of her.” John made a pistol of his thumb and forefinger and placed the barrel against my chest. “Bing. Bing. Blew his fucking heart out his shoulder blade. Murdered for a buck and change. Too bad in a way.”
“How’s that?”
“Azrael started believing, believing in the name. Believed it until. .”
“The Dain Curse. A book,” I explained before MacClough could inquire. “Just a book.”
I wondered if Azrael had ever read it. Maybe living it had been enough.
“The meeting,” MacClough clapped his glass of Bushmills down to let me know my turn had come.
“Here,” I tossed an envelope on the unsteady table. “Take a peek. It won’t bite.”
“There’s a. .” the barman began counting.
“A hundred grand, give or take five thousand.”
“How’d’ya come by this?” Johnny snapped a thousand between his fingers.
“An old running mate of yours: Dante Gandolfo.” MacClough threw his whiskey in my face. “It’s for Azrael,” I went on, using my sleeve to rub the burning Irish out of my eyes. ”Pretty strange, considering she’s dead. Pretty fucking strange since we both know who had her whacked. I guess maybe we don’t know. I guess that’s why it’s taken you so long to hit back.”
“Get out,” he didn’t shout it. He didn’t have to.
“What happened to answer for answer?”
“Get out,” MacClough threw the neat pile of bills at me, their newness keeping them together. “I told you to stay out of it. This is my business.”
“Not just your business anymore,” I waved the stack of cash at him. “Now it’s my business, too.”
I left before MacClough could repeat his desire for me to exit. But there was no exit anymore, really. Not for him. Not for me.
Punch the Clock
I sat at the keyboard staring at the odd arrangement of letters. My fingers didn’t find any combination of keys particularly appealing. I thought writing might help clear my head, but that was a typically silly notion. I usually needed a clear head to write. I turned everything over and over again. From Christmas Eve forward, I turned. But instead of crystallizing or sorting out, the facts just twisted together like a bucket of worms.
Since I couldn’t mentally unscramble the case, I decided to spread it out on the floor, literally. I laid out every sheet of the Barnum files, all the pilfered microfilm, the article and pictures I found behind the portrait of O’Toole’s dead kid. I even spread the sticky cash out, bill by bill and end to end. I took sheets of paper and wrote out the names of everyone I’d come in contact with since Christmas Eve- one name per sheet-and scattered them on the floor. Mojo’s name looked up at me and Vinny’s and Larry’s and Sato’s and Tadamichi’s. On other sheets I listed events and the approximate times of their occurrence, i.e. I meet Barnum/After midnight, Christmas Day.
The assembled material took up considerable floor space and painted me into a corner. I sat there for a second, eyes closed, trying to reach back, squeeze out any details my weary head might have omitted. Once satisfied that there was nothing left, I walked the room. I stopped by each part of the patchwork and considered its merit, its relevance, its relationship to other pieces. That done, I ripped the mosaic apart, shrinking it down, removing names of people that had no bearing on the case, throwing out events that were inconsequential or led nowhere. The puzzle got smaller. I still hated puzzles.
Nothing jumped out at me and bit me on the ass. There were no revelations to make me slap my thigh and shout: “Eureka!” But, there was definitely something. Facts and things no longer stuck together like that bucket of worms. No, things were clearer. Arranged like the letters on my keyboard, the details of recent times were distinct but meaningless; or rather, their meaning was limited. With a typewriter keyboard, if you could hit upon the proper combinations, there were words and, sometimes, art. With my patchwork puzzle there would be no art, only solutions. Unfortunately, as in my vain attempts at writing, no particular combination appealed to me.
I slept a haunted sleep. Like a man who’d worked too many hours at his job, my dreams would not permit me to punch the clock. Sleep was work. There was a blackness to the disconnected images that flashed in my head. They weren’t dreams, per se. It was more like the album cover game we played in college. After tripping out on acid, we’d sit in a totally dark room. I mean totally dark. We’d even tape up the door space. One of us would pull out albums and spark a cigarette lighter just beneath its bottom edge. That brief spark would burn the vision in your head like a photographic negative. That’s what the pictures in my sleep were like, photographic negatives.
When I woke up, the negatives were gone, but my dreams had educated me. Even before pissing, I ran to the paper mosaic laid out on my floor. The answer was there. I was sure of it. Of all the names, events, articles and pictures that filled my sleep, there was only one I could not account for, explain away or discard. The key was a blurry woman getting into a blurry car in an overexposed photo taken from too far away. I should have understood that when I found her along with the articles and other pictures behind the portrait of the late O’Toole’s late son. She hadn’t been hidden there coincidentally.
I plucked her snapshot up from the floor, but I couldn’t determine anything more about her or her hazy universe than I had when we first met. She was the point on which this whole nightmare turned. I knew that, somehow. I just did. Precisely who she was and where she fit in this dark chain of being, I couldn’t say. She was an answer given in a foreign tongue to a question posed in English. Regrettably, I didn’t speak the language and none of the people who did, would or could translate. But I could guess. Sometimes, I was good at guessing. Just ask my ninth grade French teacher.
I had some other hunches, too, but now was not the moment to ponder. It was all a bit much for me in the morning without a piss and coffee. I cleaned up the patchwork puzzle decorating my floor, putting the pieces back in their proper folders, envelopes or pockets. My next appointment was in the kitchen with a coffee pot. That taken care of,
I headed for relief. As I did my long-delayed business, I looked in the mirror, making plans to prove myself prophetic.
The phone let me know there was at least one someone out there with little or no interest in my pissing or future as a prophet. I let the phone do its chirping thing until my answering machine kicked in.
“Klein? Klein!” Detective Mickelson’s angry voice shouted over my recorded greeting. “I know you’re there. Pick this up!”
I was inclined to disobey, but sensed that in the long run it was preferable to try and fence with him now than to have him come get me later.
“Yeah, what is it? Who is it? What time zone we in?” I tried sounding deathbed ill and marathon tired.
“You sound like shit.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t lie. After all, he had bought the sick act.
“Seems like a regular thing for us, me calling you to come pick up a piece of clothing we run a nitrate test on. Maybe I should’ve been a French cleaners,” Buddha belly smiled through the phone.
“As long as the tests show negative, I can live with it.”
“Problem is, the stiff’s you find, can’t. Live with it, I mean.”
“That’s a joke, right, Mickelson?” I wanted this conversation to end.
“You know where to find me and your scummy leather jacket. You won’t find one without the other.”
It was tough, but I let that straight line pass untouched. “When should I find you?”
“Now,” he commanded.
“Not now. Maybe later.”
“Leave out the maybe. I’ll be waiting.” Something clicked in my ear.
I went back to the bathroom, finished what I’d started and got some coffee. I even got to drink some of it. I had a morning full of phone calls ahead of me. The first one was to Kate Barnum. We hadn’t spoken since the evening I used her chin for target practice and, in the interim, I’d had a chance to read up on her tumble from grace and her husband’s suicide. I decided no small talk would be best.
“Can you get me in to see the coroner or the doctor that did the bird woman’s autopsy?” I followed my own advice and skipped the niceties.
“And a fine good morning to you as well, Sir Walter. Have you been working on your jab?”
“Can you or can’t you get me in?” I refused to spar.
“Why?” A fair question.
“I need it for the soup.”
“If I had to, I could manage it,” she yawned.
“Manage it. Tomorrow or the next day,” I ordered.
“Anything else, Sir Walter?”
“Yeah. You gonna be in the office later?” I wondered.
“No. Why?” the reporter was reasonably suspicious.
“Because I’m gonna be in town later and I thought we might straighten a few things out.”
“Like my jaw? I don’t think I want to see you yet, Dylan.”
“Fine. ’Bye.”
Actually, in spite of my one word of feigned disappointment, I was glad that Kate Barnum would be out at Dugan’s Dump all day. I had some questions to ask her boss. They were the kinds of questions I couldn’t ask with her there to listen. They were the kinds of questions that had to do with hunches.
To play another hunch, I fetched my phone book and looked up a Louisiana exchange. I started to punch in the numbers for Baptist and Saviour Hospital in Baton Rouge when something paralyzed my finger. The number. There was something about the number. I’d seen it written someplace else, written in another hand. I shot up like I’d just sat on a skunk. I ran over to my writing desk where all the photos and files and articles were. I pulled out a list of phone numbers. Some were old and smudged and in pencil. Some were more recent and written in pen. And two of the numbers matched numbers in my phone book; one for Baptist and Saviour, the other for the Dixieland Pig and Whistle in Biloxi, Mississippi.
What an idiot I’d been not to make the connection until now. The day I found O’Toole dead, I had looked right at the sheet of phone numbers. Nothing had clicked then. It clicked now. MacClough’s late partner had been sniffing along the same trail as me. That much was clear. What I needed to know currently was if he had followed me down that trail or had I followed him. If the latter was true, I’d have to do some serious rethinking about Terrence O’Toole’s part in all of this. I put my fingers to the phone buttons again. This time I finished punching.
“Patient Records, Marie Antoinette Gilbeau speakin’,” I would have recognized that bright voice even if she had omitted her name.
“Hey, yo, Marie Antoinette.”
“Officer Bosco?” she hesitated.
“Detective Bosco, but dat’s good. I said ya had a good ear, didn’t I?” I couldn’t give her roses so a compliment was the best I could do.
“Did y’all ever catch dat-”
“S’why I’m callin’,” I cut her off to add to the sense of urgency. “We are real close, Marie Antoinette. I got an important question for ya.”
“Anytin’, detective, jus’ ask.”
“Ya said ya got two calls besides mine about Carlene Carstead; one from a reporta and one from a cop.”
“Dat’s right as mud on de delta,” she confirmed.
“Now try and go back, way before my call or de ones we just mentioned. As far as a year ago, did anyone else evuh make inquiries about Carlene Carstead by phone or in person?”
She didn’t answer right away. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it added to my already high opinion of the queen of France.
“Sorry, Detective Bosco, but d’answer gotta be no,” she sounded hurt.
“Hey, don’t sweat it. I ap-”
“Ya know,” Marie stepped on my words,“even folks workin’ in dem hospitals been takin’ sick days every now and den. Let me check wid de girl dat sits fa me when I’m out.”
“It might speed stuff up some if I describe de suspect I’m wonderin’ about.”
Marie Antoinette agreed with that notion. I described O’Toole as best I could and said he might’ve claimed to have been a cop. She offered to call me back, but I told her the New York taxpayers wouldn’t mind me waiting on hold. Besides, I didn’t feel like explaining my Long Island area code to her.
“Shaw ’nough, detective, dat man been here. Priscilla Odile’s positive. Big man wid a nose as red as boiled crawfish, even had a New York policeman’s badge. Priscilla say she know dat from de television. She recalls him askin’ ’bout dat little girl.”
“Does she remember when?” a stream of sweat was running alone my spine.
“Dat would be ’round deterd week in August, lass year. I was down de bayou visitin’ and Priscilla Odile had my desk dat whole week.”
“I could kiss ya, Marie Antoinette.” I could have.
“Well, if ya down Louisiana and ya don’t. .” she trailed off.
We spent a few minutes on the good-byes. I determined that if and when things got settled, I’d write her a letter explaining what had really gone on and who I really was. There are just some people on this earth that deserve to understand.
I understood now that O’Toole had flushed Azrael out of hiding. He had tracked her down. But why? It was hard for me to accept that he woke up one August day and decided he had nothing better to do. No, someone had come to him. But who? And why O’Toole? I was pretty sure it wasn’t Dante Gandolfo. If he had wanted Azrael’s hide, he’d have better resources than some broken-down drunk of a retired cop. The truth is, I was convinced Don Juan had no part in whacking his old flame. Oh, I didn’t buy that bullshit about his not caring or knowing whether Azrael was amongst the dead or the living. But if it wasn’t Gandolfo. .
I made a call to the Dixieland Pig and Whistle, the place Azrael, alias Carlene Carstead, once managed. I originally had planned it as a call of discovery, but talking with Marie Antoinette had transformed it into a call of confirmation. The new manager was a nice fellow and he was a sucker for my Brooklynese and New York Detective schtick. They all were. I spoke to about ten employees bef
ore I found one who could remember another Yankee cop fishing around about Carlene. Sue Anne Maples, an assistant manager, told me that the Yankee cop had called a few times and once even spoke to Carlene herself. Carlene had been real upset by that call. About a week later, she took a leave of absence. They all wished me luck in finding Carlene’s killer. I didn’t bother explaining that Carlene Carstead had drowned a very long time ago.
Okay, someone approaches O’Toole to track down Azrael. He finds her in Biloxi, Mississippi. But instead of going to his employer, O’Toole talks to her on the phone, warns her she’s been found. That’s the first thing that doesn’t make any sense. The second is that instead of going to her guardians at Witness Protection and letting them know she’s been found out, she runs straight back to New York. It’s tantamount to pouring antelope blood over your head and running into a lion’s den after twenty years of hiding in the tall grass. What could O’Toole have said to her? What did he know? I thought about the blurry woman and wondered if O’Toole’s call had been about her. I went and got her picture again.
I called the other numbers on the sheet. One was disconnected. One was for Delta Airlines reservations. One was a local liquor store. Gee, what a surprise. And one was either a bust or a revelation. I couldn’t know that yet.
“Hello, I’m-”
“Uncle Jack,” a little boy shouted in my ear. “Mommy, it’s Uncle Jack.” The excitement in the boy’s voice told me Jack had a nephew who loved him.
“Sorry, son, but I’m not-”
“Hello, Jack,” Mommy got on the phone. “Jack, are you in New York or calling from the office?” Mommy had a throaty, inviting voice with a bit of sadness around the edges.
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