Lights Out Summer

by Rich Zahradnik

  The lock buzzed. Taylor opened a front door of black wood with wrought-iron grillwork. He crossed the lobby to the elevators.

  He’d been living the gypsy life for the past two years, and was now in his fourth place in his fourth New York borough. Only Staten Island remained. As he pushed the button to call the elevator, he shook his shoulders with an exaggerated chill at the thought of getting stuck on that island borough located closer to Jersey than New York. Where you commuted by ferryboat if you worked in Manhattan. He couldn’t count ten stories—any stories, forget good stories—he’d covered on Staten Island. Even the crime was distant, different out there. Maybe because the cops and the mobsters lived cheek by jowl, and that kept things quiet. Taylor didn’t care. He didn’t want any part of the place.

  The elevator rose to six.

  Am I crazy doing this?

  His gut tightened in answer to the question.

  If he had a job at the News or the Post, they’d think he was completely nuts to care about Martha Gibson.

  Maybe. It wasn’t that he couldn’t compete. He didn’t want to. The .44-caliber guy wasn’t the kind of story that had made his name. Victims no one cared about. Victims people had written off, or hadn’t bothered to write a single word about. Telling those stories—that had been his business.

  Still, the tightness running through his stomach felt like a warning. Could he still make a career out of what he was best at? For six months through the end of last year, he’d tried to get a job back on a big newspaper. The economy sucked. Taylor had disappeared from every editor’s radar since his last paper, the New York Messenger-Telegraph, went out of business in the fall of 1975, right as the city’s near bankruptcy and the recession were crushing businesses left and right. There were no journalism jobs when he looked. He started moping. His moping had driven Samantha crazy. It had even driven him crazy. He’d made a promise to himself and to Samantha. He’d quit the search, work at the little wire service, and do his kind of stories. His boss (and friend) Henry Novak didn’t care, as long as the radio stations and suburban papers were happy to get what they couldn’t from the AP or steal from the big dailies. Cramly complained. He always complained.

  Taylor told his stomach to quit bitching. He’d made his decision. He had a story to do. The pain stayed. His stomach never listened.

  The elevator doors opened. He walked around the hallway until he found what he was looking for—the shadow of a murder. There was no chalk outline or police tape. This hadn’t been a homicide for the movies. No big deal here. A large elongated stain in the light gray carpet marked where Martha had done her bleeding. Gray and red together turned into a muddy color that looked more like murder than the red of blood itself. A big dried splotch. A sickly, sour odor of death and dirt hovered over it.

  On the right wall, four narrow slashes of red—from the fingers of a hand?—ran from about three feet up to the floor, looking like the start of one of those modern paintings that weren’t of anything. His guess was that Martha Gibson had put her hand to the wound, gone for the wall for balance, and fallen to the floor. Detective McCauley had said Gibson was shot in the back. Unless Gibson reached around to the wound, the bullet must have exited from somewhere in the front of her torso. A .32 slug traveling all the way through the midsection? Killer had to be awfully close. Pretty much pointblank.

  He walked from the bloodstain, checking the left wall and then the right. The hole was midway up on the right, circled in pen. He assumed the slug had been removed by the cops.

  Taylor paced off the steps from apartment 613 to the trash chute. Fifty, and the trip went right past the stairwell door, which had a shoebox-sized window in it. The chute and the door were fifteen paces apart, and Gibson had dropped five paces farther on, give or take the difference in Taylor’s and Gibson’s strides.

  The killer could have seen her through the window, jumped out after she dumped the garbage, and fired at extremely close range. The landing in the stairwell was clean, pink-painted cement. He walked down and back up, huffing a little as he reached the top. He’d found nothing along the way, which was no surprise. The cops would have done a good sweep of what was the likely escape route.

  Taylor returned to Apartment 613. Aside from the steel numbers attached with brass screws, the light-blue metal door had a wreath of plastic flowers surrounding the doorbell/peephole unit, a true New York signifier.

  We need to know who you are before we open our doors.

  Taylor pressed the bell once.

  Chapter 3

  Martha’s sister, Abigail Gibson, answered the door. Her eyes were reddened and sleepy looking.

  “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone played on a stand-alone 8-track sitting on a milk carton.

  How’s it possible that song’s almost a decade old?

  “I’m Taylor with the City News Bureau. Doing a story on your sister.”

  “I was here.” She used one sleeve to wipe her nose. “Happened right outside.”

  “See anything?”

  “No, nothing.” She found the couch and lolled back in the corner, eyes closed. “Just the noise. The Fourth of July noise. I came out. Gone. The ones that did it, gone. She was near gone.”

  “Did your sister work?”

  Abigail paused to think, or do something. The song “I Want to Take You Higher” came on next. Stand! was such an amazing album, with “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” pushing hard against the tune playing now, like the jig was already up on the sixties when the LP came out in the spring of ’69.

  “She worked.” The subject of Martha perked her up a bit, but there was something off about her. “My sister was the smart one. A real hard worker.” Her voice lowered. “Not like me. She got out of Bed-Stuy. Got her bachelor of arts,” the last three words pronounced like they were mystical, a prayer, “from City College. If only that was enough. You can try and do it all but … was hired right after college by Manning Corp. Offices in the Empire State Building. Went from secretary to sales in two months. That’s hard with all the prejudice. ’Course she was promoted to call on their Black clients.”

  “Was she well liked at Manning? Any enemies, anyone angry at her?”

  “She lost that job a few months ago. The boss man in charge had this habit of putting his hands on her. All over. She told him to stop. I told her to put up with a bit of it. Teasing him along some. It’s what happens if you want a job. Didn’t she want to stay out of secretarial pools? Nope, not Martha. He came on real strong. She said no. He fired her.”

  “Real strong?”

  “Groping. Six sets of hands. Dirty suggestions. What men do. Like I said, she was expected to put up with it. Should have. Wouldn’t. He booted her.”

  “What’s the boss’s name?”

  “Ricky MacDonald.”

  “Was she working when she died?”

  “Martha wasn’t one to give up. With her bachelor of arts in history and economics, she was hired as a maid by the DeVries family on Park Avenue. Eight Twenty-Seven Park. Big old apartment. College degree stuck cleaning toilets. She wouldn’t let it get her down. It was paying our bills. She kept visiting offices for interviews, offices that pretty much said no soon as they saw her. She knew why. Racial prejudice. Wouldn’t admit to it. Mr. DeVries up there on Park Avenue was nice to her. Sent her to a couple of jobs he heard about. The wife there was tougher—wanted everything done one way and only one way in her house. There’s a son and a daughter, grown and living at home. The son sounded like a brat. Martha told me there were some dark secrets in that family, but she wasn’t sure what was going on. Or probably Martha didn’t trust me to know.”

  “I know this part is painful—”

  “It’s all painful. You new at this job?”

  She was right. It was all painful for the family. There were phrases you were simply supposed to say anyway.

  “I’m sorry. I know it is. Did the police tell you how she died?”

  “Some bastard ambushed her du
mping the garbage. Shot her in the hallway.”

  “The killer lay in wait and came out of the stairwell after she returned from the chute. He must have been targeting her. That means a plan and a motive. Who would want to murder your sister?”

  “No one.” Abigail began weeping. Her head tipped to one side like she couldn’t quite control her neck. Taylor looked for a box of tissues, but saw it was on a side table next to the couch. He waited.

  After wiping her eyes, she said, “Makes no sense, someone doing that to her. She picked this neighborhood because it was safe. She worked hard to stay here.”

  ‘Makes no sense.’ The unending chorus of the families of the murdered.

  Abigail went to a small black table crowded with pictures and handed him a portrait of a pretty, Black woman in a black graduation gown looking over her shoulder as people did in such shots. Her smile was on the edge of laughter, like she’d cracked up right after the shutter snapped. The eyes, a deep brown almost-black, were in on the joke, crinkled at their corners. Her hair was parted in the middle, wavy and thick, falling down around her shoulders.

  “You don’t understand. Martha didn’t make enemies. She didn’t make mistakes. Her high principles wouldn’t allow her to stay at Manning. She moved on. She was going to get another office job. She was going to do whatever she wanted.” Abigail had probably been sitting here for two days, waiting for someone to tell this to. “I don’t have a job …. She was taking care of me.”

  The phone rang. Abigail went to the kitchen to get it. The low mumbled conversation lasted a couple of minutes.

  “That was her boss, Mr. DeVries. He wanted to know if I was okay. If I needed anything. I said I couldn’t think now. I’d let him know.”

  Shows a lot of concern for the sister of a murdered maid. Is that normal?

  Taylor didn’t know. He didn’t know much about big Park Avenue apartments and the maids working for the families inside them. The police beat rarely took him to such homes. Maybe this DeVries was being a good human being. Good people lived at all sorts of addresses in New York City. Still, he circled the name and address in his notebook. A visit to the victim’s workplace was always worthwhile.

  He lifted his head from the pad, and as he did, Abigail, who was absently scratching her lower arm, yanked the sleeve of her thin red sweater all the way down, holding it in place with her fingertips. Before she could get her arm covered, Taylor caught sight of bruised blotches—the ruptures of needle tracks.

  Drugs got you killed in New York City. Easy. All the time. Mess with the wrong pusher. Owe too much. Turn snitch or get accused of same. He observed Abigail with fresh eyes. He’d taken her for too thin and not thought much of it, but there were hollows in her cheeks and dark patches under her eyes. She’d been slumped on the couch and slow in her speech, which he’d thought was grief. Those were also signs of being high.

  “You live here too, then?”

  “When I’m not at my boyfriend’s.”

  “When is that?”

  “Here two or three nights a week. My boyfriend never comes over. Martha wouldn’t allow it.”

  Without the thinning of the face and the dark areas under the eyes, she resembled Martha—as far as you could tell from a photo. Abigail’s hair was pulled back, so it was hard to guess at length.

  “Do you think you two looked alike?”

  “Some say. We didn’t think so.”

  “Could a killer have been gunning for you?”

  “Me?”

  “Lotta guns and gunmen circling the heroin business.”

  “Get out of here.” She stood, swayed, steadied herself.

  “You have a habit. That’s clear. Do the cops know? Where’d you buy your smack?” She walked over to the door and pulled it open. “If it was a case of mistaken identity, the killers will come back. You’re in danger.”

  “Get the fuck out of here. You didn’t come to help anyone.”

  “I’m trying to figure out what really happened to your sister.”

  Taylor stood for a moment near the doorway, hoping she’d have a change of heart. There was a three-shelf cherry bookcase next to the door. An economics textbook. Books on the Napoleonic Wars and Elizabethan Britain. The Invisible Man. A Raisin in the Sun. A calculus textbook. Native Son.

  He moved closer and brushed his fingers across the spines. Some were emblems of her college education, one that had been hard won. He doubted the books by the Black authors had been taught at City College. He knew all the titles and had read a couple, back when the riots in Harlem first broke out, hoping to better understand the anger. It was one way he’d tried to get underneath what was going on. It’d helped a little, but not enough. He’d needed to talk to Black people in their neighborhoods—not just the cops and those arrested. Even down at the level of a police reporter there was a White city and a Black city. He knew too little of the Black city.

  What was Martha trying to learn or understand or affirm by reading these books? He’d like to ask Abigail.

  She didn’t have a change of heart. She jabbed a finger toward the hallway and he stepped outside. The door slammed.

  He might have asked his father, the City College English professor, at least about literary views on the books. Too bad his father was in a coma, dying from liver failure. Standing in the hallway, he wrote down the titles. Maybe they meant Martha was interested in how she fit—or was supposed to fit, or was supposed to avoid fitting—as a Black in New York City—or anywhere for that matter. That was a topic Taylor knew nothing about. In reporting, there was one answer for ignorance. Interviews, lots of interviews.

  Virginia Voskerichian, the latest victim of the killer using a .44-caliber gun, had been getting her college degree, still attending the much more upscale Columbia, coming home from classes when she was shot here in Queens. There seemed to be as little motivation in Martha Gibson’s murder as in those killings done by the guy carrying the Charter Arms Bulldog .44. Someone wanted Gibson to go away, and she had.

  He walked the scene one more time and took detailed notes about how he saw the ambush happening. He’d need to check his take on it with the cops, but it was always a better plan to try and confirm a theory than to ask the detectives cold what happened and hope they were in a generous mood. Detectives liked knocking down reporters’ theories or taking them in other directions. He learned more that way, even when he was dead wrong.

  Always make ’em feel smarter.

  He walked the stairway one more time, for the hell of it, and came across more nothing. He called into the office from a payphone in the apartment building’s lobby. Novak got on.

  “This is some stuff about this forty-four guy.”

  Here we go.

  “It’s something.”

  “What have you got?”

  “I filed everything with Cramly. I gave Cramly stuff I don’t usually put in a shooting story. You think they’ve made an arrest in the last hour?”

  “What’s your angle?”

  “I don’t have an angle. I’m looking into a woman murdered the same night. In the hallway of her apartment building. She was single, working, trying to make her way in the city. College degree but stuck in a maid’s job. No one else has this one.”

  “But this crazed gunman—”

  Taylor exhaled loudly. “The police find a cigarette butt that’s related to the story, they’ll announce it. The AP will put it out and our clients all have the AP. I don’t jump on bandwagons. You know that. I report surprises.”

  “Taylor’s always Taylor. Okay, keep one eye on it for me please. I don’t want to hear from our clients.”

  “You won’t. Remember half the stories in the Post are made up now that Murdoch owns it. Might as well be crime fiction, though the Post stories are probably better written than most crime fiction. No flipping out because the Post has some fantastic story. Fantastic because it’s fantasy.”

  “Okay, all right. Stay in touch. File soon.”

  “I always do.�
��

  Chapter 4

  One of the two doormen at 827 Park Avenue said he would have to call up to the DeVries’ residence first.

  Residence. There’s a word I’ve never used to describe a place I’ve lived.

  The other doorman was hailing a cab for a straight-backed old woman in a purple coat. Both men wore white shirts, striped ties that looked like they came from a prep school, crisply pressed blue slacks with gold stripes down the side, and jackets with more stripes. The uniform made Taylor wonder if doormen had ranks. Maybe he’d spent too much time dealing with cops.

  When the doorman asked what Taylor’s business was, Taylor said, “Reporter. I’m doing a story on Martha Gibson. She worked as a maid for the family.”

  The doorman looked taken aback, but it was hard to know whether it was because of the mention of the dead woman or of a news story.

  Mickey, that was the doorman’s name, walked Taylor across a lobby of polished brass with wood furniture that it seemed no one ever sat in. Evenly spaced lamps provided evenly spaced lighting. Mickey pushed the button for the elevator.

  “Which apartment?” Taylor said.

  “The Eighth Floor.”

  “Number?”

  “The entire floor. Each family owns a floor.”

  “I guess residence makes sense then.”

  Mickey left him at the elevator without comment. Taylor stepped in, and the operator closed the outer door and the inner iron gate and slammed the elevator’s control to the up position like he was driving at Daytona. The mirrored, ornate elevator began to climb. Taylor pushed his hand through his short brown hair a couple of times to neaten it. He was a comb-once-a-day guy. Did it matter? He doubted an Army field jacket made the grade at 827 Park Avenue.