Mr. Apology

by Campbell Armstrong

  “What are you writing after that?”

  Jamey shrugged. “I’m not sure yet.”

  Madeleine hesitated. There was an opening here, a place she could jump into. She took the handbill from her purse and slid it across the table to her friend. Jamey picked it up and read it through.

  “What’s this? A joke?”

  Madeleine shook her head. “It’s no joke.”

  “Why are you showing it to me?”

  “I thought it might make an interesting story for you, Jamey. You know, the idea behind it, why it exists, the mysterious identity of the person who runs the Apology line.”

  Jamey stared at the handbill again. “Where did you get this?”

  Madeleine didn’t say anything.

  “You’ve got that secretive look on your face again, Maddy.”

  “I do?”

  “Sure you do. You want to tell me about this Apology business in a couple of short sentences?”

  Madeleine hesitated again. Then she said, “If you decide to write a story, you’d have to keep his identity hidden.”

  “You’re getting ahead of me, kid. Whose identity?”

  “Harry’s.”

  “Harry is behind this?” Jamey stared at her.

  “Yes.” A whisper.

  Jamey pushed her chair back from the table, lit a cigarette, crossed her legs. “Are you perfectly serious?”

  “Perfectly.” Madeleine nodded.

  Jamey was silent for a moment. She scanned the handbill a third time, shaking her head from side to side. “Let me get this straight. He’s got this confession line going, right?”

  “Look, I was as puzzled as you at the start—”

  “People call in and confess things?”

  “I’ve heard the tapes, Jamey.”

  “Does your boy know what he’s doing?”

  “Talk to him. He can explain it far better than me.”

  Jamey folded the paper, stuffed it into her purse, looked at her watch again. “It sounds pretty wacky, Maddy.”

  “I know how it sounds.”

  “It’s out of left field.”

  “I know.”

  “You feel he needs some publicity?”

  “It can’t hurt him, can it?”

  Jamey shook her head. “I don’t suppose it can.”

  “You sound uncertain, Jamey.”

  “If I think there’s a good story behind this and I decide to do it, I have to keep his identity concealed, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Because there are some real loonies out there running around.”

  Madeleine nodded. “And secrecy is part of the whole deal.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Will you do it? Will you do it, Jamey?”

  Jamey snapped her purse shut. “I can’t promise. I’ll look into it.”

  “You wouldn’t print his name?”

  “I didn’t say I’d print anything, did I?”

  Madeleine smiled at her friend. She watched as Jamey rose from the table and slung her purse over her shoulder. She knew it, she just knew it: Jamey is intrigued—it’s written all over her face—there’s that small concentrated light in her eyes she gets when she’s onto the scent of something good, something she can bite into.

  “God, you really are Harry’s private booster, aren’t you? Does he pay you for doing his PR work?”

  “I don’t think he even knows what PR stands for.”

  “The detached artist, huh? The ivory tower approach.”

  Madeleine reached out to touch the back of her friend’s hand. “He deserves some recognition—”

  “Even of the anonymous kind?”

  “Even that.”

  Jamey shook her head. “It’s such a bizarre thing to be doing.”

  “It’s not so weird when he explains it.”

  “I’m sure,” Jamey said. “Look, kid, I need to rush. I’ll read the paper over again. Then I’ll be in touch. Okay?” She leaned over and kissed Madeleine on the side of her face and then was gone, hurrying across the restaurant, brushing past waitresses, skirting tables, dashing through the front door to the street. Madeleine watched her go, then pushed her salad aside. It was a risk, she thought. Cold print was always a risk, but she knew Jamey and knew that she wouldn’t divulge Harry’s identity. Madeleine knew that much. So the secrecy, the anonymity, of the Apology project would be preserved. And Harry, even if indirectly, would get some decent publicity. How could that fail to help with the members of the grants committee? She sat back in her chair, feeling good, feeling somewhat pleased with herself. She’d just done the kind of thing Harry wouldn’t have done for himself. She’d just helped move him a little closer into the kind of spotlight she thought he deserved. And he does deserve it. He does.

  She picked up her purse and rose from the table.

  5.

  The woman, Camilla Darugna, lay with her head propped up against the kitchen wall and her legs splayed. Her pink slip had risen up her thighs and her arms were spread at her sides. A saucepan filled with oil smoldered on the stove. Black smoke hung heavily in the kitchen; it was drifting slowly towards the window Moody had opened earlier but was still dense and choking. Nightingale watched as the Boy Wonder stepped over the body of the woman and gazed at her upper thighs. You need a gas mask in here, Nightingale thought, something to keep the fumes out of your lungs.

  “When did you last see one of them?” Moody asked.

  “One of what?”

  “A garter belt. A garter belt in the age of panty hose.”

  “I thought they were before your time, Doug.”

  “I’ve seen movies of the period.” Moody turned his young face away from the remains of Camilla Darugna and smiled at Nightingale; that face, that young face, smooth skin and bright eyes and a baby’s mouth—did Moody shave yet? Going around with Moody made Nightingale feel older than forty-nine. Old, overweight, and looking along the borderline to fifty, the magic five-oh, the mystical number. He wondered why he felt fond of Moody. Maybe it was because they were both, in a sense, victims of their last names. People made jokes, always the same ones. Depressed today, Moody? Or, Hey, Nightingale, whistle something for us. A buck for every one of those he’d heard and he wouldn’t be standing in this smoke-filled kitchen right now—he’d be out in Palm Springs with Bob Hope and Gerald Ford, playing some casual rounds of golf. He coughed into his hand, looked out the window. On the street below he could see the lights of two cop cars flashing and the usual small gathering of those with a morbid interest in the movements of policemen. Did they smell death in the air, those ghouls? He turned away from the window. As if it were a valuable museum piece, the garter belt still held Moody’s attention. Gruesome, Nightingale thought. He stretched out his hand and tugged on the dead woman’s slip, drawing it down to her knees. She deserves something, he thought. A little bit of dignity. He stared at the bruises on her throat. If it hadn’t been for the smoke you could never tell how long she might have lain here, undetected, rotting away, deteriorating. The smell would have brought the neighbors buzzing around finally. The terrible smell.

  “Strangulation isn’t as fashionable as it used to be,” Moody said.

  “Fashions come and go in murder,” Nightingale said. There was something aloof about Moody, about the way he looked at death. It was like he surveyed the world from behind the safety of a plastic sheet. He should have been an undertaker, maybe, or an embalmer. Something suitably morbid.

  Moody looked thoughtful a moment. “We live in times of technology running amok, Frank. We invent new weapons and we make them easy to get. Which means people can distance themselves from their victims when they get into a killing frame of mind. That’s why it’s so unusual to see a victim whose assailant employed such an intimate technique of murder.”

  “The laying on of hands,” Nightingale said. Moody was given to such ruminations from time to time. Given to little speeches that tended to ramble. Speculative outbursts. He’ll mellow w
ith time, Nightingale thought. He glanced at the dead woman. Thirty maybe. Black hair held back by a little plastic clasp. Somebody had come in here and strangled her, put his hands up around her neck and squeezed and squeezed until everything was gone out of her—the fight, the struggle, the will to survive. He looked through the open kitchen doorway. A uniformed cop was rummaging around in the living room. A clumsy big guy.

  “What do we know about her, Doug?”

  “Camilla Darugna. Thirty-one, according to her driver’s license. Lived alone. It seems she was separated from her husband, who had returned to his native Mexico. No offspring. She worked nights as a waitress at a place called Leaves and Shoots, a vegetarian restaurant on Bleecker Street. That’s about it for now. We’re checking for next of kin.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend? Anybody special?”

  “The neighbors are like brass monkeys, Frank. See nothing, hear nothing, do nothing.”

  “It figures.” Nightingale went back to the window. The crowd below had grown; the spoor of a fresh murder had drawn them from the safety of their little locked boxes. “So how do you see it, Boy Wonder?”

  Moody shrugged. “Passion. Hatred. No premeditation. A lover maybe. He comes in, jealous, outraged, discovers the evidence of his own cuckoldry and ties his fingers in a knot around the woman’s neck.”

  Oil on the stove and a sliced green pepper; she had been about to make herself some lunch. Fried peppers, maybe. A few pieces of sliced onion, a couple of dissected mushrooms. A lunch she never ate. Nightingale wandered around the kitchen. Why hadn’t the killer used the kitchen knife that lay on the counter beside the veggies? Passion, like Moody said. Blind rage, torrent of anger, wham. You don’t think in those situations, do you? You yield to the blood urge. The hunger to hurt. “A lover,” he said, more to himself than to his young partner.

  “That’s conjecture,” Moody said.

  “She opens the door for him and he comes in.”

  “Yeah. She knows him.”

  “And we go from there. An argument.”

  “Right. He says, ‘What the hell, you’ve been fooling around’ and she denies it and from there it escalates into total war.” Moody stepped over the corpse.

  “The knife,” Nightingale said. “Why didn’t he use that?”

  “Could be he didn’t think about it. Or, more premeditatively, he didn’t want to get blood all over himself and go walking around this city of ours.”

  Premeditatively, Nightingale thought. What a mouthful, what an ugly word. He smiled to himself. He strolled across the kitchen, paused at the refrigerator, stared at the message board held there by a magnet in the shape of a butterfly. The scribblings were mainly connected with the woman’s work, the hours of her shift and her nights off. There was a tiny shopping list: broccoli 3 carrots potatoes milk

  He tried to imagine her counting carrots in a supermarket.

  Call Alex was written beneath the list.

  Just that. No number. Nothing else. Man or woman? he wondered. How could you tell in this age of unisex names?

  He twisted his head around quickly when he heard the sound of something breaking in the living room; he saw the uniformed cop standing there looking like a wet St. Bernard that has spotted a leak in its brandy barrel. He held a shattered picture frame in his hand; a print of the Virgin Mary hung halfway out of broken glass.

  “Sorry, lieutenant,” the cop said. “I don’t know how it happened. This madonna fell on my head when I was bending over.”

  “You a Catholic, Seitzman?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then you can bet your ass it wasn’t meant to be an omen.” Nightingale turned away from the cop and looked across the kitchen at Moody, who was sifting through a drawer and making mmmm noises.

  “This must have been her all-purpose drawer, Frank. Nails. Coupons. Safety pins. Plastic Baggies. Ah-hah, what have we here? A roach clip that still contains the relic of a joint. Want to light up and get stoned?” Moody was holding the clip in the air.

  “I never use the stuff,” Nightingale said.

  “Never tried it?”

  Nightingale shook his head. “It’s no big deal she smoked dope anyhow. Christ, millions of Americans go around red-eyed all the time. It just never appealed to me.”

  Moody put the clip back in the drawer. “I used it at college,” he said. “I had this girl friend who was something of a small-time dealer. She’s an instructor there now. Every so often I get this funny notion.…” Moody laughed to himself. “I get this funny idea I’ll go back to Buffalo and pretend to just bust her. I like the prospect of seeing her expression.”

  “Then you say April Fool,” Nightingale said. What was the goddamn point in making an issue out of something like grass, in any case? He saw it in terms of a waste of manpower. You bust some kid for a couple of lids and you only clog up the system and waste a hell of a lot of time. He looked out the window a moment. Then he said, “What was the name of that restaurant?”

  “Leaves and Shoots. Bleecker Street.”

  “Let’s run over there.”

  Nightingale went inside the living room where the big cop was trying to hang the broken picture back on the wall. He stepped out of the apartment and into a long hallway that led to the stairs. Neighbors were standing around, talking in the kinds of whispers people reserved for funerals. There were a couple of uniformed cops relentlessly taking statements. The scene would be photographed, the place dusted for prints, the statements read and weighed and compared, a bunch of people would begin to ask a bunch of questions; none of this activity would restore life to Camilla Darugna. He began to go down the stairs. He thought: Somewhere in this city there’s a guy with the flesh of a dead woman under his fingernails.

  In the street the wind was chilly. Frank Nightingale could smell winter on it. The season’s turning, he thought, the coming of snow, the last leaves dying on branches. He turned up the collar of his coat and shivered, then slid onto the passenger seat of the car. Moody could drive. Moody enjoyed the plotting and the scheming that went on against his fellow drivers, that whole struggle for survival in the bedlam and kamikaze assaults of city traffic. The small crowd on the sidewalk was staring at him—it was almost as if he were expected, like some courtly physician, to read a bulletin from a prepared statement. I have to inform you that the condition of Camilla Darugna is now stable. Permanently so.

  Moody got in and started the car, moving it away from the sidewalk. When he’d gone a couple of blocks he reached inside the pocket of his coat and fished out a crumpled piece of paper. He passed it to Nightingale. “I’ve been meaning to show you that. You seen it already?”

  Nightingale smoothed the paper out against his knee. He read it through. “This city’s filled with jokers, Doug. We got standup comics coming out the kazoo.”

  “And you think that’s a joke?”

  “Why not?”

  “A damn elaborate joke. You go to all the trouble of printing the thing, then you need to run around putting it up on display. I’ve seen it in a few places already.”

  Nightingale stared at the sheet again. The tone of the thing—what could you say about it? Shrill? Melodramatic? It sounded crazy to him.

  ATTENTION

  CRIMINALS

  BLUE COLLAR, WHITE COLLAR

  YOU HAVE WRONGED PEOPLE. IT IS TO THE PEOPLE YOU MUST APOLOGIZE. NOT TO THE STATE. NOT TO GOD. GET YOUR MISDEEDS OFF YOUR CHEST!

  CALL MR. APOLOGY (212)555-2748

  Nightingale passed the paper back to Moody. “Maybe you could use it, Doug. You look like a guy with something heavy on his mind.”

  “And here I figured I was doing you a favor,” Moody said.

  Nightingale stared out the window. Already there were lights in restaurants, glimmering against the oncoming dark. WHEN YOU CALL YOU WILL BE ALONE WITH A TAPE RECORDER. Guaranteed anonymity, the privacy of an electronic confessional. You call the guy’s answering machine and you apologize for something and then you hang up. What
was the point behind it all? Maybe the guy got his jollies listening to people saying they were sorry, itemizing their assorted misdeeds. Voyeurism of a kind. Peeping Tom replaced by Telephone Tom.

  He watched as they approached Sixth Avenue. ATTENTION CRIMINALS. What kind of calls did the guy get? And what kind of people would call him anyway? He said, “If he’s serious, Doug, I figure he’s asking for trouble. Would you go around giving out your phone number like that?”

  “I guess he’s installed a private line or something,” Moody said. He slowed the car at a red light, tapping his fingers on the rim of the wheel. “I don’t see it as a joke. I think he might be offering a genuine service. I could see that. You get your disillusioned, your lonely—”

  “‘Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”

  “Seriously, Frank. Take a guy with something on his conscience, okay? He doesn’t give a monkey’s fuck about church because God hasn’t kept him supplied in the folding green and every priest he ever met was a raging queen, and he doesn’t trust the state because he doesn’t like cops and all the lawyers he ever knew only wanted his bread and all the judges he ever saw had electric chair shining in their eyes. Where does this guy turn when he wants to let some of the pressure out?”

  “You’re saying he might turn to a tape recorder?”

  “Damn right,” Moody said. “It’s the same distancing I talked about before, Frank. The priest updated. Why not confess to a goddamn machine? Why not say you’re sorry to a recording device?”

  Nightingale sat back, closed his eyes. He tried to imagine himself dialing the number of this Apology character. He tried to imagine what he might say. Hi, this is one of New York City’s so-called finest, and what I’d like to do is apologize to my wife Sarah for all the unholy hours of this profession and for all the loneliness she had to put up with, and how sorry I am she walked out. I’d also like to apologize to my mother for slipping a buck out of her purse when I was nine years old.…