It was in the stripped bathroom that the odor was the most intense. Still, there was no smoke. Then I understood: that odor was the aftermath of a fire. But what could have been burning? He hadn’t left so much as a bar of soap in there.
I looked behind me then, at the plain white bathtub where Henry and I had showered together, come together, where he had washed and soothed me so tenderly. Fear shot through me, freezing my brain. Oh no … no … please no …
Slowly I pulled back the shower curtain, trying to prepare myself for the horror that was surely there waiting.
But the only thing I saw in the tub was a large scrub bucket. I peered into it. Inside were some shreds of partially burned paper. And when I looked down at the floor I could see a trail of soot going over the lip of the tub, across the tile, and up the front of the toilet bowl.
Clearly Henry had burned a pile of papers in the pail and then flushed some of the debris down the toilet. He had vacated the premises in such a hurry that there had been no time to do the job thoroughly or clean up after himself.
I opened the linen cabinet and found a bath towel he had left behind. I took it into the living room and spread it out on the rug. Then I retrieved the pail from the tub and placed it next to the towel.
I set about reconstructing the shards of blackened paper, trying to force them, will them, back into a coherent whole. For more than an hour I worked in deadly, fevered seriousness—as though I had the tatters of Kunta Kinte’s birth certificate in my fingers.
The tatters beat me, though. I couldn’t make them anything close to coherent. All I had were pieces of charred paper on which hundreds of numbers in small print and the words Arrivals and Departures kept showing up. I couldn’t make out much of anything else.
I stood up in disgust, legs and back aching. There were tears of frustration and hurt threatening to burst from my system and wash the room away.
And at the very moment when I lifted my boot heel to grind the papers into the towel in a fit of hatred and rage, another set of disembodied figures and letters flitted across my brain. They had to do with Inge.
As she had lain sleeping in her apartment, right after I told her Sig was dead, I had rifled through the collection of books on her shelf. In one of the steamship books, I had seen a reproduction of an art deco menu from the dining room on a luxury liner, and on the opposite page there was a reproduced Arrivals/Departures schedule.
A link between Inge—or more likely, Siggy—and Henry. What the hell was up with that? If it was a link at all. More likely, I was just grasping at straws.
Another thought occurred to me. One not nearly so fantastical. At least it had a nodding acquaintance with logic and reality: Henry wasn’t interested in the same arcane kind of reading as Sig; romantic devil that he was, he was simply leaving the country—by ship.
I knelt once more and again rooted methodically through the charred pieces. I began to turn some of the larger pieces over to reveal their flip sides. There was printing on a few of the scraps, but nothing new appeared, just the same tiresome numbers and symbols. I had almost given up when one of them startled the hell out of me. “ORK HERALD TRIBU” the tiny type read, and the paper appeared to be photocopy stock. The old New York Herald Tribune?
Not the International Trib, which I’d read once in a while when I was in France, but the New York Herald Tribune. In reduced type. And Xeroxed.
Either Henry was linked to Sig by an interest in ships—which meant nothing and was hardly a crime—or he had planned an escape based on information in a newspaper that had last appeared on the stands some thirty-five years ago—which meant he was nutty as a fruit cake.
I took aim and kicked the pail halfway into the next dimension.
Back in the lobby, “Where did Mr. Valokus go?” I asked the doorman.
“Who?”
“Mr. Valokus. In 31G. He moved in a hurry, didn’t he?”
“I don’t believe we have a tenant by that name.”
“Don’t give me that shit.”
“As a matter of fact, miss, I think 31G is unoccupied.” His expression was serene and vacuous.
“Yes,” I said at last, “you got that one right.”
CHAPTER 9
Blue monk
Why hadn’t I been more shocked when the door opened onto Henry’s vacant apartment?
Because I knew—somewhere inside me—I knew. The great lover with melting eyes who was too good to be true. The Bird-struck musical naif who lived only for my black womanly wisdom. Who boiled milk for my coffee. Massaged my feet. The lonely Greek émigré, who had, he said, like me, bummed around Europe. Who late at night reminisced with me about the cakes in this patisserie in Montmartre and the blood sausages at the brasserie next to the jazz joint on the Rue de Buci. Kind, sensitive, generous. My Henry. Whose mouth I dreamed about. The mafia lackey. Ha ha. Gotcha, Nan. You dumb bitch.
Too bad for him, his scam got blown before he got what he wanted from me. Too bad for me, I’d never really know what that was.
Was Henry dead or alive now? Had those creeps in the van gotten to him? Was he a real criminal whose scene with me was part of a mob plan? Or was the thing with me for real and somehow interfering with what he was supposed to be accomplishing for the mob? Either way, I guess he had fucked up. And he must have been pretty scared to pull up stakes that quickly.
Scared. Like that old bastard, Wild Bill. Who had clearly put those people in the van onto me. I wished I had him in my hands at that moment. I could have shown him a couple of things about playing the blues. And I’d have begun by shoving that fucking harmonica up where the sun never shines.
Mom called. I know because I listened to her leave me a message.
Aubrey called to find out what I had wanted yesterday at the Emporium.
My prospective music coach called to invite me to a party on the Upper West Side, a party for Monk.
Walter called to say what’s happening? His voice faltered then and he hung up.
I drank vats of camomile tea. And when that didn’t work I found and played the Carmen McRae album that she had autographed for my pop back in 1959. And when that didn’t work I made a rogue’s gallery of the faces of all the tenor players whose records I had been collecting for the past ten years. And when that didn’t work I paced.
The knocking at the front door was loud and desperate. I stood in the middle of the room as the pounding continued. What would I do if it was Henry? I realized how much I wanted it to be him. How much I wanted him to walk in here and laugh at me for thinking my weird nightmares were reality. To tell me I’d been asleep for two days—dreamed all of it—and he was here to wake me with some sprightly Beaujolais and hundreds of kisses on my eyelids.
It wasn’t Henry Valokus I saw through the peephole. It was Walter. And he was holding a bunch of flowers.
When I let him in, I could see that the flowers were only part of the deal. He had brought take-out fried chicken and sweet potato pie from a place we used to frequent, up on Amsterdam. He had also brought a couple of arcane Irish beers. Finally, he was toting a huge cardboard box that carried the Hugo Boss label; he had obviously bought a new suit.
I suppose Walter could see how crazy and depressed I was, but he never said a word about it. He just set the table quietly, and when the meal was over, he asked, equally quietly, whether “my thing was over now.”
“Yeah, it’s over,” I confirmed.
I did the dishes while he searched the TV guide, looking, I knew, for exhibition basketball games. For the past year and a half he’d been paying for cable service, which was kind of a waste given my crummy black and white set, but there was no way he was going to miss a single Knicks game. I watched him fiddle with the channels, his sleeves rolled up.
Mom liked Walter, she always had. I guess he looked like a real provider, and she figured, correctly, that I was going to require a fair amount of being provided for. I glanced over at him from time to time while I cleaned up in the kitchen. I didn�
��t know how to begin to tell him about all the things that had happened to me in the past few weeks. Especially about Henry. So I put it all away for the night.
I set a bowl of popcorn in front of him, the kind with fake red pepper sprinkled on it, his favorite. He looked up briefly and laid an appreciative hand on my butt for a minute before turning back to the game.
“I’m whipped, Walter,” I said. “Going to bed.”
“I work all day but you’re whipped. Nobody like you, Nan.”
I sat up in bed thinking about the dark green sheets on Henry’s bed, about the frantic swiftness of Wild Bill’s gait, about the feel of that gun on my skin, and about a terrified young Dominican enunciating the goofy words of a country and western song.
What had I really done to Diego’s words?
Had I massaged them into the phrase Rhode Island Red? Or translated them? Or debauched them? I had put the phrase together. Diego had not.
But I was a translator. I knew that words lie.
After all, take Verlaine.
Je suis un berceau
Qu’une main balance
Au creux d’un caveau …
Some have said this means:
I am a cradle being rocked
by a hand in the
center of a crypt …
But someone else maintains it means:
Deep in the hollow earth
my childhood is ravaged by
a fist …
Ask Verlaine which is closer to the truth.
But Verlaine is long dead.
Diego, however, wasn’t. Maybe if he were presented with those very words, they’d mean something to him.
They had meant something to Charlie Conlin and to Inge. I was fairly certain the two of them had died because of those words.
I heard a muffled cheer from the next room. Somebody must have made a basket or something.
It was only a little after noon, but the day was over for the bulk of the workers in the flower district. Their shift began at three or four in the morning. I looked up and down the cramped streets with their double rows of potted plants squeezing the pedestrians into single file, and I wondered where the workers ate their lunch at, say, 6.30 A.M. What would you have for lunch at six-thirty in the morning? There had been this guy, Dale, a fellow grad school student, who liked prowling the streets at all hours of the morning. He used to take me into these funky coffee shops—places where the transsexuals were the respectable folks and the rest of the patrons went down the social ladder from there—where he would down gallons of shitty coffee and natter at me in that sincere Marxist way of his about the hidden injuries of race and class. I sometimes thought he got off on people assuming I was a hooker.
What made me think of that? I was wasting time. I was stalling, postponing my entrance into the wholesale market where Diego worked. But I picked up my feet and walked toward the place.
I evoked a couple of half-hearted lewd remarks from the guys lounging outside the front door. Ignoring them, I looked up at the window of the apartment where Inge had died.
An old man was slowly squeegee-ing a sheet metal table on which a million flowers had been trimmed. Wet leaves and petals clung to his trouser legs like appliqué.
“Is Diego here?” I asked him.
He gestured to the rear of the room. I walked through a set of swinging doors and into a dingy room with nine lockers nailed against one wall. In front of them was a long wooden bench where Diego sat lacing up his sneakers. Beside him was an open beer can in a paper bag and a cigarette left burning at the edge of the seat.
I called his name.
The boy looked up dumbly.
“Diego?” I called again.
It took a full thirty seconds for him to react, and when he did he only heaved a tremendous sigh. Diego was good and high.
“Do you remember me?”
He swayed a little on the bench. “Yeah. You one of the lady cops.”
“No, I’m not, Diego. I came in with them, but I’m not a cop.”
He smirked then, enjoying a joke I wasn’t in on.
I sat down at the edge of the bench. Not only was Diego stoned, he looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.
“I need to talk to you for a minute, Diego.”
No answer.
“It’s about Inge, the woman who was killed upstairs.”
“What?” He sat a bit straighter then, and suddenly ran his hands over the post adolescent stubble on his chin.
“I want to know if Inge ever mentioned something called Rhode Island Red to you. Do you ever remember hearing those words before—from her or anybody else?”
“Say what?”
“Rhode … Island … Red.”
“No. No. I don’t remember.” He found his cigarette and took a desperate pull on it but it had gone out.
“Are you sure, Diego? See, maybe when you thought you heard—”
He picked up his beer then but apparently the can was empty. I guess that tore it, because in a second he was on his feet, hurling the empty can against the nearest locker.
“I didn’t hear nothing, man!” he bellowed. “I don’t know what those stupid fucking words are!” Next, he grabbed the bench itself, nearly knocking me to the floor, and sent that flying against the wall. His little frame was trembling with rage.
I wanted to get out of there but I was afraid any sudden move might send him after me. He took a step toward me. I tensed, searching the room for something to fend him off with.
But Diego had no more violence in him. He staggered over to the lockers and collapsed against them. “Don’t you think I remember everything she said to me?” he choked out. “Don’t you think I know what she said, man?” Then he was overtaken by the sobs.
Oh wow. Damn. He had been in love with her.
“Diego, will you—”
“Fuck you, man! Get out of here. Get out and leave me alone. I wish I was dead, I wish I was with her—dead. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. I just hope that fucking cop of hers is burning in hell. I just wanna see how much she loves him now.”
I took a couple of tentative steps in his direction. When he turned toward me his face was soggy, old. Then he opened his mouth and a raw, primordial scream came out. The elderly man I’d seen earlier appeared then, along with one of my admirers from out front. I pushed my way past them.
Out on the street again, I walked quickly, taking deep breaths of the heady green air. Talk about burning in hell, Diego’s pain had scorched me. I wanted to put some distance between me and all that throbbing hurt.
I didn’t get very far.
That fucking cop of hers. See how much she loves him now.
That cop. Diego wasn’t talking about Leman Sweet. He meant Charlie Conlin—Sig. Except, Inge didn’t know Sig was a cop. So how did Diego know? Unless … Oh.
There had been nothing in the papers about Sig’s death. Presumably because the police had suppressed the story. The murder of a poor blind girl and her dog had made a splash in the news, but there had been no mention of a lover killed a few days earlier. Certainly there had been no mention of Charlie Conlin at the time Diego was questioned.
The lovesick little b-boy from the Dominican Republic seemed to know one secret too many.
I called Leman Sweet—again.
Diego had obtained a fresh beer. He was just leaving when Leman Sweet swung into the locker room, with me two paces behind him. We three had a kind of slapstick collision in the doorway.
The boy stood paralyzed, his eyes locked with the massive cop’s. Sweet’s big booted foot spasmed suddenly and Diego landed upright on the bench he had tried to destroy fifteen minutes ago.
Sweet strode over to the boy. “You got something to say to me, don’t you, Pancho?”
Diego only winced.
Sweet snatched him up off the seat as though Diego were a shopping bag full of air. Fingers against his throat, he flung the boy in my direction.
I screamed and tried to thr
ow my arm protectively across Diego’s chest.
The detective sent me halfway across the room with a shrug of one shoulder.
“Don’t kill him!” I shouted.
“Open that motherfucking locker, you,” Sweet boomed.
“Open it yourself,” the kid wheezed.
Sweet hit him in the stomach savagely and Diego crumpled.
I moaned then and covered my eyes.
Sweet took a fistful of the boy’s hair and twisted him over to the wall. “Open it!”
“Open it!” I cried, echoing him. “He’ll kill you!”
Diego complied.
“You move and I’ll shoot your heart out,” Sweet told him. The detective thrust both hands into the locker and began pulling objects out in a frenzy. Diego stood there maniacally squeezing his palms together. “What’s the matter, you think I’m gonna break your crack pipe? What am I gonna find in here, Diego, huh? What am I gonna find?”
Sweet picked through tee-shirts and hairbrushes and jock straps and plastic shampoo containers, heedlessly flinging each thing away from him. Then he came out with what appeared to be a crowbar and a small precision drill. “Somebody started working on the cylinder of your door lock that night. Probably using just this kinda stuff,” he said over his shoulder to me. He placed the objects gently on the floor.
Next came a grimy white envelope closed with a paperclip. He spilled out the contents onto the wooden bench: photographs. He looked through them quickly, replaced them, walked over to the silent Diego and slammed the envelope into his ashen face. Once Sweet had handcuffed the kid, he took the envelope and tossed it over to me.
I opened the flap and removed the stack of photos. They were all of Inge, in various stages of nudity. She may or may not have known she was being photographed—or spied on—whatever.
A hundred questions were running through my mind. About Diego and Inge. About Inge and Sig. About love turned to madness, and madness to murder. Was Diego, too, part of the Rhode Island Red mystery? Was he possibly connected to Henry? Or was his part in all this mayhem and unhappiness strictly localized, coincidental—having only to do with his obsession with the blind woman?
Rhode Island Red Page 8
