Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  I read on. I was smashed and could read anything now. The report digressed at length about the detectives’ questions regarding the security of the demolition site. The wrecking company, Jack-E Demolition Co., of Queens, had erected a fourteen-foot-high sidewalk shed of plywood and heavy timber at the front and back of the building, as required by city regulations, then strung a double coil of concertina wire over that. Access to the building’s double front doors could only occur via a door in the front wall of the sidewalk shed. Access to the back of the lot came through a section of the shed wall that was unchained to let heavy equipment in. There appeared to be no damage to the front or back sheds and concertina wire nor to any of the chains or locks used to secure the openings. Anyone bringing the corpse onto the site would have had to hoist the body over the concertina wire at the rear, which seemed unlikely, given how difficult and obvious such a task was.

  How, then, did the body get onto the site? It was not possible that it had been thrown from a nearby rooftop, for the body lay in the middle of the site, a good thirty-five feet from the perimeter. To reach that distance, the body would have to have been shot out of a cannon. And even if the body had somehow been hurled from the one adjacent rooftop, that would not explain how it had come to be buried in the rubble.

  Thus the evidence suggested that the body had been in the building prior to demolition. But this explanation created its own problems. Could the doors—first to the sidewalk shed and then the double front doors to the building itself—have been unlocked by someone? The building’s Korean owner had no idea how someone had gotten into the structure. Because he had recently bought the site anticipating the building’s demolition, he had never bothered to become familiar with it. But yes, he did have keys to the building—he’d had new locks put on—and he’d given them to the demolition company’s site manager, who claimed he’d spent each of the previous six nights at home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, keys in pocket, in the hale company of, alternately, his bowling buddies, his poker group, and his volleyball team, claims that checked out. Did he make a copy of the keys? No. Did he give the keys to anyone? No way, pal. We got half a million bucks’ worth of wrecking equipment in there.

  Moreover, the building itself had been secured against local squatters a year prior, all lower windows filled in with cement blocks. There was no record that they had been broken. To get into the building had required clearance from the owner, and the only individuals let in had been from the various utility and service companies involved in turning off the water, gas, and electricity. The last person known to have been inside the building was the foreman for the demolition company, checking the structure one last time on the morning that demolition began. Had he conducted a thorough room-by-room investigation? the detectives asked. No, just glanced into the basement and first floors. But, he’d explained, it was impossible to go higher in the building, because the elevator was disabled and the fire doors to the stairwell were locked.

  The roof, I thought.

  The detectives had asked about the roof. Perhaps the decedent had gained access to the roof of 537 via 535, the only adjacent building, and then died there, or perhaps had been murdered there, the killer making his escape through 535. But the superintendent of 535 didn’t remember anyone going in or out of his building he didn’t know, and besides, the roof door was carefully locked so that kids wouldn’t go up there. And only he had the key.

  Even if the body had somehow found its way onto the roof of 537 prior to the building’s demolition, there was the difficult problem of the rat activity, the detective had noted. The body appeared to have been ravaged by rats since the time of death, for at least a week, and rats do not live on the roofs of buildings in summer—too much sunlight and heat, not enough water. And pigeons don’t eat carrion. It was true that crows were sometimes found in the city, but crows do not gnaw flesh, they peck at it viciously and then pull it away in strips, leaving a distinctly different pattern of mutilation. Moreover, the eyes had not been pecked out. Such information seemed to indicate that the body had not been on top of the demolished building, which might then mean that it had been buried in the lot, which, given what they had already learned, meant that the detectives were utterly stymied.

  Another paragraph of the file indicated that the race of the corpse and what still could be discerned of his height and weight matched a missing-person report filed by the decedent’s wife seven days prior, on August 8, two days after he’d last been seen. The report had been filed in the Nineteenth Precinct, which is on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The wife identified the clothes and the wedding ring that had been removed, with some difficulty, from the corpse’s left hand. She was shown a photo of the tattoo found on the groin of the deceased. This, too, she identified. She was shown the jade fragment. She could not identify it. Then she was shown the body. There was no doubt as to the identity; it was one Simon Crowley, twenty-eight years old, of 4 East Sixty-sixth Street.

  I knew this name. “You’re Simon Crowley’s widow?”

  “Yes.”

  “The young guy who made movies?”

  She nodded.

  “Jesus.” I hadn’t done a column on it because I was deep into a piece about drug dealers in Harlem at the time. “You were married to Simon Crowley?”

  “Yes.”

  The famous young filmmaker. “I had no idea.”

  Caroline sat down in the chair opposite me.

  “How did you get this?” I asked.

  “I paid a lot of money to a man who said he was a private investigator. He said he used to be a detective and could get files, that he knew what to do.”

  “You’re a resourceful woman.”

  “Yes.” She blinked at the thought of this. “Did you ever see any of his movies?” she asked.

  “No. I never get a chance to go much.”

  “But you heard of him?”

  “Sure. I know he was sort of an outrageous filmmaker and that he died badly.”

  She nodded, with irritation.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t keep track of all the Hollywood stars. I mean, like that guy River Phoenix, and Kurt Cobain—”

  “Simon was not a so-called Hollywood star.”

  “Right.”

  “But you know who Simon was, you appreciate who he was?”

  Seventeen months prior, when Simon Crowley died, I had been working my ass off at the paper and was severely sleep deprived, because Tommy had just been born and we had two babies keeping us up all night long. So, no, I didn’t appreciate who Simon Crowley was, not in the way his beautiful widow wanted, and she saw this in my face.

  “Wait a minute.” She left the room and came back with a gigantic scrapbook, six inches thick. “These’ll fill it in for you.”

  Someone had kept every magazine and newspaper article. Yes, here it all was. Simon Crowley, I was reminded, had been a young New York City filmmaker of note. He’d risen from obscurity on the strength of several innovative low-budget films that had become cult hits, then had been discovered by the Hollywood corporate edifice. I flipped through the articles noting certain specimens of language—gusts of breathless admiration, platforms of commentary, pearls of false insight. How stupid is the American magazine industry, really, how helplessly fawning. But I read on. Simon Crowley’s first movie, Good Service, only forty-four minutes long, had been shot on unexposed pieces of film—called short ends—discarded or sold by other filmmakers. Using volunteer actors and technicians, Crowley had written and directed the story of a young busboy at a swank restaurant who becomes fascinated with an older woman who patronizes the restaurant. The woman, about forty, wealthy, still with a certain hard need to her face, finally notices the unnecessary attentiveness of the busboy and allows him to think he is seducing her, until the last scene when—I skipped on. Simon Crowley’s work was marked, the articles generally agreed, by characters who lived their lives on the margins of the city, who inhabited the urban noir. Crowley himself had grown up in Quee
ns, the only son of an older, working-class couple. Father repaired elevators, mother volunteered in a Catholic school, both lived small lives of habit and devotion. Mother died early. Father dutiful. Simon had been a strange and unruly boy, bright but bored with all his classes except art, hooking up with the underground party scene as a teenager, working as a busboy in various restaurants while he went to NYU film school, having his second film, Mr. Lu, discovered by an agent from the most powerful Hollywood talent mill at one of the film festivals, arcing his way upward through layer upon layer of fame. The black-and-white photos by Annie Leibovitz in Vanity Fair revealed him to be short, with a skinny, caved-in dissolution to his posture, as if he had been smoking cigarettes since the age of eight (which was the case, said the article), and beneath a mop of black hair and black eyebrows a face that appeared to dare one to describe its ugliness. It was not so much that he looked deformed; rather, his features seemed large and mismatched, as if they had been scissored out of three or four rubber Halloween masks from a costume shop. The effect was a face that was grotesque, carnal. “Several hours into the interview,” an article in GQ read, “I came to the realization that Simon Crowley doesn’t smile—or at least not like most people. His grin, when it rarely occurs, is usually in regard to the sad illusions held by some other person; his mouth—sort of a dark gash—flies open, revealing many unfortunate teeth. Next, a cynical rasp of laughter. Then the mouth snaps shut tightly and Crowley stares at you with unblinking concentration. The effect is purposeful and disconcerting. He is not a nice person, particularly, and he doesn’t care if you know it. In his pursuit of great movies, woman upon woman, and cigarettes—in about that order—niceness is irrelevant and manners mask the desperate chase of existence; one may conclude that Crowley’s conceitedness has not yet been adjusted by life’s disappointments and suffering, but then, a humble, selfless person would not have made the brilliant movies that Crowley has.”

  I looked up. Caroline was watching me.

  “Go on,” she said.

  So I did: Despite the fact that Crowley had come to dine in the company of stars and Hollywood executives, reported another piece, he still remained notorious for his late-night “investigations” into the city, and kept a small, trusted retinue of fellow debauchers with whom he traveled, one of them apparently a paroled murderer, another the dissolute son of a billionaire. After his nocturnal sojourns, Crowley was sometimes discovered passed out—in a locked limousine, naked on the Italian-marble floor of an apartment house lobby, etc. Actresses clamored to be in his movies, even those who publicly proclaimed themselves unimpressed by “asshole macho directors.” Crowley’s third big-budget movie went over its planned cost by thirty percent, and there were rumors of fighting on the set, of studio executives screaming at him in private lunchrooms. It was reported he’d spat back that he didn’t fear any of them, and to prove his determination had picked up a steak knife and drawn a cut three inches long in his forearm, which later required twenty stitches and apparently shocked the executives into submission. His star, the very young, very ravishing Juliet Tormana, who had tantalized Hollywood’s old stags (including the now-married Warren Beatty), declared that she was sleeping with Crowley and that “the sex is the best I’ve ever had.” And so on. The usual hype, the usual drivel of celebrity culture. When The Time of No Return was released on nine hundred screens nationwide, it was a gigantic hit, grossing $24 million in the first week—an unheard-of sum for a “serious” film—and lauded by critics as a valuable, challenging portrait of fin de siècle America, “stark, huge, and immensely disturbing.” The work was nominated for three Academy Awards, and won one for best screenplay, which Crowley had written. He was seen in every Hollywood and New York watering hole. He was arrested for picking a fight with Jack Nicholson in a Brentwood café, calling him, in front of others, “an old bag of shit with one or two cheap actor’s tricks.” He proclaimed that Spike Lee was “an inconsequential talent, a token black director whose work everyone knows is mediocre.” Kathleen Turner, he noted, “has become fat and mean, with the fat and mean little chin of a lousy actress who can’t even act the tart, so why should I want to film her?” Quentin Tarantino, he announced, made cartoons.

  And so on. I set the file aside, looked up.

  “They never solved it,” Caroline said.

  “I guess I remember that.”

  “They never arrested anyone, nothing.”

  “They probably tried pretty hard.” Certainly Crowley’s death had received any and all proper official attention, given the intense media speculation. The death of a celebrity in American culture is a commodity worth quite a bit of money, so long as it flickers in the nation’s consciousness.

  Caroline brought me another drink, and although I did not want it, I took it. We were, I assumed, now where she wanted us to be.

  “So this is what you wanted me to look at?” I said.

  “No, actually.”

  “No?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “This is what I needed you to look at first, before I show you what I want you to look at.”

  “Have I been tricked?”

  She smiled. “No, not really. It will all make sense, eventually.”

  “Shall I look at the thing you actually want me to see?”

  “I want you to see it, but not tonight. Tomorrow, or the next day?”

  There was something selfish about her answer, as if I didn’t have a job and a family already scheduled, or as if she was so beautiful that I would drop my duties to both to study the life of her dead husband, which, so long as she was around, might, on further reflection, be true. “What do you want?” I asked. “You want me to write a story about your dead husband? Everything’s already been written about him.”

  Caroline sighed. “No.”

  “What, then? The police apparently can’t solve this.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I know all this, Porter.”

  She seemed distracted by melancholy, and I realized that I had not asked her what it all meant to her, to have her husband killed, to have her life brutally jolted like that.

  “How long did you know him?” My voice sounded thick, stupid now with drink.

  “We were together only about six months.”

  “You got married fast?”

  “Yes. Very. He was like that …” She carefully closed the thick album. “I was like that, too.”

  The minutes passed with a strange luxury to them. We said nothing. Caroline rolled three cigarettes, laid two of them on the glass coffee table, and sat back to smoke the third. I took myself into her kitchen for a little ice and felt suddenly aware of the white starkness of the counters and cabinets and appliances. I did not necessarily expect to see a picture of her dead husband, but there was nothing there, no phone numbers of family or friends on the refrigerator, no pencils in a jar or mail in a pile or battered cookbooks or seashells from last summer. When I returned to the living room, only then did I realize that the entire apartment was sterile. Like a hotel suite, though in much better taste, it had no character, no essence of its inhabitant. When people have lived in the city a long time, their dwellings become encrusted with their personal history; this is true not only of the poor but also of the rich, maybe even particularly of the rich, who tend to be interested in documenting their own accomplishments. I have been in many wealthy homes as a reporter; if the living rooms betray nothing but good taste and a disdain for clutter, then by compensation there is a green-trimmed den with a trophy from a club golf championship or pictures of the children on the sand in Nantucket or framed professional degrees or a photo of the occupant shaking hands with Bobby Kennedy thirty years ago. But Caroline’s apartment revealed no such personality, only expensive surfaces. It occurred to me that the absence of historical detail was not because she had no history but because she had no history that she wanted to display.

  “You’re not from the city,” I said when I
returned.

  She looked up at me, lost in her own thoughts. “No.”

  There was, in her absentminded confirmation, a revelation for me. I suppose it could be called intuition, or a lucky guess, but then again I have been banging around New York City for twenty years now, long enough to come to understand a few things, and in the case of Caroline Crowley, what I suddenly knew was that she had worked very hard for what she possessed, or rather, that what she possessed had cost her a great deal—and not just a husband. I have often thought that the most determined people in New York City are not young lawyers trying to make partner or Wall Street traders or young black men who might have the stuff to be pro basketball players or executives’ wives competing viciously on the charity circuit. Nor are they the immigrants who arrive from desperate places—the Bangladeshi taxi driver working one hundred hours a week, the Chinese woman working in a sweatshop—such people are heroic in their grim endurance, but I think of them as survivalists. No, I would say that the most determined people are the young women who arrive in the city from America and around the world to sell, in one way or another, their bodies: the models and strippers and actresses and dancers who know that time is running against them, that they are temporarily credentialed by youth. I have lingered at night in the dark back rooms of the city’s two or three best strip clubs—the rooms where in order to be caressed by young women, men buy bottle upon bottle of $300 champagne as if they are putting quarters into a parking meter—and I have talked with the women there and been astounded at the sums of money they intend to earn—$50,000, $100,000, $250,000 by such and such a time. They know precisely how long they will need to work, what their operating expenses are, and so on. They know what kind of physical condition they must be in and how to maintain it. (Consider, for instance, the stamina necessary to dance for one man after another, sexily, in heels, in a smoky club for eight hours straight, five days a week.) Like fashion models, they live in little apartments where no one remembers the name on the lease, the rooms being passed along like links in a chain as each woman makes her money and then moves back to Seattle or Montreal or Moscow. Likewise, the sufferings of fashion models, which are well known. Jazz and ballet dancers don’t have it any better. (Once, visiting an orthopedist for a knee injury, I saw a lovely woman of about twenty-five hobble into the room on crutches. She was in tremendous pain and was waved into the doctor’s office. The nurse accidentally left the reception-area door open, and I was just able to hear the woman’s desperate request: “Please give me the shot.” An indistinct male voice responded. “Please,” the woman wept, “I have to dance tonight.”) Caroline Crowley was not a stripper or a model or an actress, not so far as I knew, but I could only guess that she had once brought the same sense of purpose with her when she came to New York, that she had arrived in the city to have a dialogue with fate, and that she knew, as any genuinely beautiful woman knows, that the terms of the conversation would include her face and teeth and breasts and legs.