Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  This last thought left me sick. How would they have known to follow me? They had to have visited Caroline first. I called her and let the phone ring. I let the god-awful phone ring five, ten, fifteen times. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. Caroline hadn’t left the answering machine on. I let it ring fifteen more times. Then, just as I was about to hang up, the phone picked up.

  “Yeah.”

  “Caroline?”

  “What?” This was a voice I’d never heard—dead, full of hatred, tougher than I’d ever be.

  “It’s Porter.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “Yeah. And I wish some people wouldn’t let the phone ring eight hundred fucking times when I’m in bed.”

  “Hey, I’m—”

  “Call me later.”

  She hung up. I hit the redial button. She picked up the phone but said nothing.

  “Did some guys come looking—”

  “Yeah. I told them I didn’t have it.”

  “They left?”

  “Well, at first they didn’t believe me.”

  “Then?”

  “Then they believed me. It only took them two minutes but they believed me. They could have fucking killed me.” She gave an anxious sob. “Now you know why I’m so scared of Hobbs. After they left I almost called you.”

  “But you don’t have my home number,” I said.

  “Fancy that.” Her voice was bitter. “But I was worried. I checked information.”

  “Unlisted.”

  “Yes. Totally unreachable.”

  I needed to change the temperature of the conversation or she would hang up again. I couldn’t think of anything clever. “Okay, why are you so pissed at me?”

  “Why? Why?” she screamed. “Because it took you until eleven-thirty in the morning to figure out that I might have had a problem. You were probably pouring goddamned Sugar Pops and milk into your kids’ cereal bowls and kissing your pretty wife good-bye on the way to work while I could have been lying dead in the kitchen with a knife in my neck!”

  “That could, in fact, be true.”

  “Well?”

  “But, in fact, it is not true.”

  “Then what took you so goddamned long?”

  “I had to explain to my wife why I didn’t want breakfast.”

  “What?” she screamed. “That’s all?”

  “I also had to explain why there was blood in our bed, blood in the snow outside our house, in the broken capillaries of my left eye, in my hair, on my shirt, on my tie, and in the toilet bowl.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Maybe in there, too.”

  “Stop.”

  “I think I will indeed have to stop for a few days, let my testicles knit themselves back together.”

  She was laughing. “You’re okay?”

  There was a picture of Lisa on my dresser. I picked it up. “I’m running on three wheels, but I’m all right.”

  “Good.” She sighed. I heard her light a cigarette. “What did you tell your wife?”

  “I told her three guys jumped me and took my money.”

  “Did she believe you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I heard her exhale smoke. “I could never get married again.”

  “What about Charlie? What’s that gig?”

  “That gig? Well—”

  “Wait, let’s talk about the tape Hobbs wants.”

  “Let’s.”

  “Tell me the truth now—you don’t know where it is or who has it?”

  “No,” she breathed. “Not at all.”

  “You can tell me a million other lies, but please tell me the truth on this.”

  “I am.”

  “Okay. What did Simon do with his tapes?”

  “He ran around with them, he left them in his car, he had them in L.A., in his office here. I don’t know.”

  “So someone might have made a copy?”

  “It’s possible, I guess. But he didn’t lose things. He was messy but he didn’t lose things. Also he was pretty jealous of me, so he wouldn’t have just let that particular tape drift around among people.”

  “What’s on the tape?”

  “Oh …”

  “I mean, I’m assuming it’s you and Hobbs screwing, something like that.”

  “Well, I’ve never actually seen the tape. But we don’t—well, mostly we just talk.”

  “What’s the most compromising thing about it? For Hobbs, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Honestly, we mostly just talked. Chitchat between a girl and a billionaire Australian—the typical, you know.”

  This was no good. “Who controls all of Simon’s business stuff?”

  “Lawyers.”

  “It’s complicated?”

  “Very.”

  “Here in the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “He has an estate, right?”

  “Well—”

  She was stalling, unsure about telling me the financial structure of her existence.

  “Caroline, I already know that your apartment is owned by a trust in Simon’s name and that it cost two point three million dollars. The annual taxes on it are nineteen thousand, incidentally.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “Reporters know everything. Now, I want to go over Simon’s arrangements at the law firm. This afternoon at, say, one. Please call them, line it up.”

  She told me the name of the firm.

  “One of the best.”

  “I don’t see why the law firm will be useful,” she said.

  “It’s just a lot of bills and papers.”

  “Well, look at it this way: You made the tape, then Simon took it. If he destroyed it, we would not have this problem. If he gave it away, that would be contrary to his character, according to you. There was no reason to sell it; he had plenty of money. To me this would suggest that he kept the tape, valued the tape. Maybe in his financial plan he made—”

  Caroline laughed. “Simon? He couldn’t keep anything straight. He was terrible with money. He didn’t understand it, really.”

  “Do you understand money?”

  “No, but I can tell when someone does.”

  “Like who?”

  “Charlie understands money,” she answered quickly.

  “I see. Another reason to marry him, no doubt.” It was an insane conversation; I was in my bedroom looking at a photo of my wife while listening to a woman I was sleeping with compare her late husband with her fiancé.

  “Maybe the firm is paying for a safe-deposit box or something that you don’t know about.”

  “Maybe.”

  There was a hesitancy in her answer, a reluctance to deal with the law firm.

  “Why aren’t you handling the money?” I pushed. “I mean, they could be robbing you blind, you know.”

  “They could?”

  “Sure, that’s what law firms do.”

  That worked. One o’clock. Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street.

  “How will I recognize you?” Caroline asked.

  Jokes. We were still making them.

  I stood on the front porch watching my breath steam in the cold and listing some bad things that could soon happen. Hal Fitzgerald and I would definitely have a bad conversation. Hobbs and I might soon have a bad conversation. Lisa and I would not yet, I hoped, have a bad conversation. Perhaps men like to stand on porches thinking about bad news; perhaps once upon a time a Tory farmer had stood on this same porch, or a previous version of it, worrying about the revolution, and looked down at a dirt road or a field and seen General George Washington ride by, adjusting his wooden teeth or scratching his syphilitic crotch. History—chews up the best of them. My groin and ribs and head ached, but it was like after a football game; you hurt like hell afterward, but you were secretly pleased. The pain reminded you that you were three-dimensional, occupying space in the universe, someone the world had to deal with. On the other hand, I didn’t rea
lly want to deal with the world from my front porch. The two business executives could come back, and, behind my wall, no one would see or hear what they were doing. They knew where I lived.

  So I decided to do a little business before going uptown to Caroline’s law firm. I hobbled down the path, through the tunnel and gate, and around the corner to Eighth Avenue. Was anyone following me? Maybe there was a way to find out. I ducked into one of those alternative video-comic book stores that specialize in animated Japanese pornography. I stayed in the shop a few minutes, bought a cheap video, tore away the cover and peeled off the label, junked the trash, and walked out, the video in my hand. Then I walked into a deli, asked for a paper bag, and could be seen stepping out of the deli into the winter sun while slipping the video into the paper bag. This I kept tucked under my arm as I strolled south for fifteen minutes, away from my neighborhood.

  The restaurant was a small place with a tile floor wet from the snow and little tables too close together. The clientele was mostly people from the big galleries nearby or tourists who wanted to see people from the big galleries nearby. At the bar was a guy in a suit with a ponytail, maybe forty-five. I’d talked to him exactly twice; he had one story that he told to the tourists, and the first few lines went like this: This city, let me tell you, heh, this city calls your bet, boy. It calls your fucking bet. Heh. You’re not looking, that’s when the big finger taps you on the shoulder. Heh, heh. Happened to me, back in ’eight-seven. I was a major guy at Morgan Stanley—The place had liquor licenses up on the wall that went back to 1883. There was a lot of talk about art, and all of it was about money. I dialed Hobbs’s New York office from a pay phone. Three transfers, through successive layers of secretaries. He was in Brazil, I was told. But I’ve talked with mayors and senators and mobsters; big men can always be reached; it’s just a matter of who has today’s phone numbers. I hung up, called back, and asked for Campbell. “I’m his neighbor. It’s not a matter of great importance,” I said, “it’s just that our apartment building is on fire and I thought he might want to know.”

  That worked. “Campbell,” I said when he came on, “the tape your guys took off me last night isn’t the one Hobbs wants. You probably know this by now. It’s a tape of a policeman getting whacked. Now, the cops know about this tape. And they want it. I’m going to have to tell them that you have it and that you took it from me.”

  There was no pause to consider. “Mr. Wren, I do not follow your rather strange story. In the meantime, I’ve quite a schedule today and—”

  “Listen, you fucking British prick! You don’t understand the New York City Police Department. All I have to do is tell them that you guys have the tape of a cop getting whacked and they get this little smile on their faces. They love taking down guys in suits. It’s a class-warfare thing. The deputy commissioner of police knows about the tape. He’s just one phone call .away from knowing that you have it. And after that, anyone could know about the story. Especially the other papers in New York.”

  “Then we would have a very interesting situation, Mr. Wren,” Campbell said with the smooth violence of a man who was paid big dollars to slap problems back into the face of the people who presented them. “We would have the owner of your newspaper suing one of his former columnists for defamation. And he would win. He would also sue any other newspaper that hired this columnist to tell his libelous story. But then again, this is all, as they say, idle speculation, because I am confident that things will not come to such an unhappy climax. My guess is that you will exercise prudent discretion.”

  “Give me the tape back, Campbell. And tell Hobbs that you fucked up.”

  “We have nothing more to discuss here, so far as I can see, Mr. Wren.” And then he hung up.

  I put another quarter in the phone and called Hal Fitzgerald. “I need to talk, Hal. I’ve got a problem.”

  “Problems are a problem. You still have a tape for me?”

  “No.”

  “Where are you?”

  I told him, then asked the waitress for a window seat. I went back outside the restaurant and casually tossed my paper bag with the video in it into a trash can on the corner. Not looking back, I returned to the restaurant, glancing at the way the sunlight worked against the window. I would be able to see out, but from across the street no one could see in. In my seat I watched the early lunch birds arrive. One of them sat next to the guy with the ponytail, who was contemplating his cigarette smoke.

  Twenty minutes later an unmarked police car pulled up at the restaurant, Hal in the back. I watched him get out; he closed the door and smoothed his tie, which was a mannerism he’d adopted on his way up. He was getting vain as the years went by; soon it would be Italian loafers and monogrammed shirts. We shook hands without enthusiasm.

  “I got to be uptown in, like”—he shot his wrist out of his sleeve, looked at a big gold watch—“in like forty-nine minutes.”

  “Get the chili.”

  “Yeah. All right, listen, this tape thing. We need the tape, Porter.”

  “I need the tape.”

  “What, somebody took it off you?”

  I nodded. “Last night. They thought it was something else. They thought it was another tape.”

  “They took it right off you?”

  I glanced outside. If someone was following me, he would have to see what I’d put in the trash. “Yes.”

  “What’d they do, show you a gun?”

  “They showed me that and they showed me their shoes.”

  “Kick you around?”

  I nodded. “I’m all right.”

  “What’s on the other tape?”

  “It wouldn’t interest you. Not professionally, I mean.”

  “People fucking?”

  “Maybe, I’m not sure.”

  “I’m always interested in people fucking.”

  We ordered the chili.

  “You know who they are?”

  “More or less.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t get into that.”

  “You can’t.”

  “No, Hal, I can’t.”

  “I still need the tape.”

  “When I get back this other thing, this other tape, I can trade it for the Fellows tape. They’ll give it back to me, they don’t want it.”

  “You’ve seen the Fellows tape.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you could tell me exactly what’s on it.”

  “Big white guy hits Fellows with a bat, runs away.”

  “What else?”

  “He runs right at the camera.”

  “What else?”

  “Blond, maybe twenty-eight, thirty. Big guy. It’s very fast. I’ve seen it only once. Your guys would have to—”

  “They’d blow it up and everything. They’d get it. Could you ID someone in a lineup?”

  “No. It’s too fast.”

  “We need the tape.”

  A man in a suit was standing next to the trash can. He might have been one of the entrepreneurs from the night before. “See how I’m doing in a week,” I said.

  “Porter, you don’t understand. I got to go back there with something.”

  “Five days.”

  “Three.”

  The executive had the arm of his nice suit in the trash can. A quick dip at the knees, he had the paper bag, he was gone. “I’m doing the best I can, Hal,” I mumbled. “I’m under a lot of pressure here.”

  “Hey, Porter, I don’t want to start talking about pressure.” Hal leaned over his chili. He could have detectives looking up my rainspouts in fifteen minutes if he wanted to. “You fucking call us up and say you got the tape that solves the Fellows murder and you can give it to us, and then you tell me you can’t give me the tape? It’s getting very complicated. I mean, I vouched for you, said this guy, you know, he likes cops, is fair and everything, but now the story is getting complicated. It starts to make me look bad, starts to make me look compromised, which I’m not. All I did was pick up the p
hone when you called and then, afterward, naturally, I went to my boss, my guy, who has got don’t let me tell you how many fucking problems of his own, and I give him a little good news, cheer him up, we’re going to collar the guy who killed Officer Fellows a couple of years ago, looks good for the cops, detectives still on the case, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association feels the allocation of resources was sufficient, because it’s one of about fifty-eight little things that’s bugging them. I mean, we had that young kid killed on the beat a week ago partly because of a radio malfunction problem, okay?”

  I gave him an obligatory nod.

  “You got to understand after you tell me all this stuff I naturally go in there to my boss and give him the good news, and then I gotta go back in there now and give him the bad news? That’s complicated. He looks at me like he wants to scramble my fucking eyeballs and maybe eat them, all right? You don’t understand the budget pressures. Giuliani doesn’t have any fucking money; Dinkins gave it away to the teachers’ union. So then I go tell him, Sorry, there’s been a delay, my guy has some kinda little problem, there’s some other tape with a bunch of people fucking on it, and the tapes got mixed up, and so maybe we don’t have the Fellows thing after all? You think that goes over good? It doesn’t. You know what my boss’s favorite expression is? It’s this, he says this all the time, he says, ‘Sorry doesn’t feed the cat.’ That’s it. ‘Sorry doesn’t feed the cat.’ I go in there with nothing, he’s gonna say that to me.”