by Archer Mayor
It was nearing dark when Willy Kunkle approached the city. It shouldn't have been that late. It normally took under five hours to drive from Brattleboro to New York, and he'd gotten the call from Ogden first thing in the morning. The traffic wasn't to blame, however. It had been the turmoil in his head that had slowed him down and finally forced him off the road somewhere in Connecticut. He'd ended up going for a long, aimless walk before finding himself at a diner, drinking countless cups of coffee and pushing something slimy and uneaten around a plate with his fork.
None of it had helped. If he'd been more focused, he would have recognized the dangers of reverting to old, destructive, brooding habits, and moved to avoid feeding them. Increasingly, Willy had found that his best chance for peace of mind was in simply getting things done. He didn't talk about most issues, large or small. He definitely didn't ask how other people felt about them. He avoided even thinking about them. He just set himself a task, from cooking dinner to running an investigation to making love with Sammie, and then he did it. The trick was to get down that corridor between conception and goal without wasting time, without opening doors along the way, and without suffering fools who might try to make him do so. That's how he'd finally dealt with the nightmares after 'Nam, how he'd beaten off the alcohol, and how he'd learned to cope with the crippled arm. It's how he'd partitioned off what he'd done to Mary and what the attending loss of self-respect had cost him.
He'd finally concluded at the diner that he would therefore cut his ties to Vermont and to Joe Gunther, Sammie Martens, and the hope they represented. That way, if he didn't survive this trip down memory lane, if he slipped and was dragged under as was already beginning to happen, at least he'd have gone down alone, leaving behind only the memory of the world's most irascible colleague, friend, and lover.
And there was a hardheaded correctness to this that he willed himself to believe: He'd be goddamned if he was going to be the kind of excess emotional baggage for others that he'd always claimed others were for him.
However, as he crossed the Harlem River on the Henry Hudson Bridge with his pager off, and passed the very neighborhood he grew up in and where his mother still lived, he knew in his gut there would be enough baggage to go around for everybody.
And it wouldn't be long in coming. The visit to Bellevue only aggravated the roiling anxieties Willy was trying so hard to tamp down. Even with a recent and extensive remodeling, the huge hospital and the familiar journey to the morgue reached up like a stifling fog to constrict his throat. As a rookie New York cop so many years before, he'd made this trip a half dozen times, collecting paperwork or dropping things off to help in some busy detective's investigation. He'd enjoyed being part of something outside a patrolman's routine and had found the morgue's forensics aspects interesting and stimulating: all those racked bodies offering entire biographies to those clever and motivated enough to decipher them. These visits had helped him to believe that although at the bottom of the ladder police work left something to be desired, the promises it held justified sticking it out for the long run.
Of course, that was before he'd drowned all such thinking in the bottom of a bottle.
The white-coated attendant greeted him at the reception area with little more than a grunt, and he followed him down a long, windowless, antiseptically white hallway, through a pair of double doors. There they entered a huge enhancement of Willy Kunkle's memory of the place: a tall room, shimmering with fluorescence and equipped with two opposing walls of square, shiny floorto-ceiling steel doors. The sight of it made him stop in his tracks, struck by the image of a storage room full of highend dormitory refrigerators, stacked and ready for shipment, gleaming and new.
The attendant glanced over his shoulder. "You are all right?" he asked in broken English.
Willy sensed the man's concern was purely self-interested. He didn't want to deal with a hysterical next-of-kin and miss more than he already had of the television program he'd been enjoying out front.
"Yeah." Kunkle joined him almost halfway down the row of cold cubicles.
The attendant consulted the clipboard in his hand one last time and pulled open the drawer directly before him with one powerful, practiced gesture.
Like a ghost appearing through a solid barrier, the white-draped shape of a supine woman suddenly materialized between them, hovering as if suspended in midair.
The attendant flipped back the sheet from the body's face. "This is her?"
Willy watched the other man's face for a moment, looking for anything besides boredom. He thought he might be Indian, but in truth, he had no idea. He'd recently heard that forty percent of New York's population was foreign-born, now as in 1910.
The man scowled at him, suspicious of Willy's expression. "You see?"
Willy dropped his eyes to the woman floating by his waist, looking down at her as if she were asleep on the berth of a spaceship and they were about to share a voyage to eternity.
He studied her features, feeling as cold as she seemed, his heart as still as hers. A numbness filled him from his feet to his head, as if he were a vessel into which ice water had been poured.
Romantics would have the dead appear as marble or snow sculptures. The reality was far less remote and pleasant. Whatever blemishes the deceased once had were enhanced by death's yellow cast, and the tiny amount of shapeliness the musculature had maintained even in sleep was lacking, allowing the cheeks to pull back the smallest bit and the entire face to strain against the boniness of the skull beneath. This was truly a corpse, and little else.
He reached out slowly, but stopped short of touching her, struck by the vitality of his large, powerful right hand next to her drained, thin, mottled face, the same face he'd reduced to tears a dozen times over. She looked tired, as if the sleep she was engaged in now were of no use to her whatsoever. For some reason, that made him saddest of all. Surely she'd wished for some peace and quiet when she'd opted for this state. It almost broke his heart to think she hadn't been successful.
The attendant sighed. "It is Mary Kunkle?"
He'd butchered the last name. Willy glanced down the length of her shrouded body and noticed a toe tag ludicrously sticking out from under the far end of the sheet. It made her seem as if she were for sale.
He moved down to read the tag. It had her name and an address in Manhattan's Lower East Side, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge.
That small detail triggered the dormant analytical part of his brain and made him lift the sheet off her left arm. The detective on the phone had said she'd died of an overdose, and there, as stark evidence, was not only the single fresh wound of a needle mark in the pale, skinny crook of her arm, but ancient signs of similar abuse clustered about it like memories refusing to disappear.
"Yes, that's her," he finally answered, stepping back, allowing the attendant to flip the sheet back over Mary's face with all the detached flair of a custodian covering a sofa. Willy stepped out into the city at night-huge, enveloping, teeming with life, extending for miles beyond reason. He looked around at the vaulting, gloomy, light-studded buildings looming over him like haphazardly placed monoliths, their black profiles outlined against a sky whose stars had been blotted out by the dull ocher stain of the city's reflected glow. He knew it was a cliche, but he couldn't shake the feeling of being just one of a million insects lost in an enormous ant farm, each a part of something whole, and yet, perhaps precisely because of that, utterly isolated. Mary had been one of them, and now lay dead, unnoticed and unmourned, for all he knew. He'd been one of them, too, and was feeling the ambivalence of being back in the fold. He wondered if erstwhile prisoners of Alcatraz felt the same way when they returned as ancient tourists.
The air had turned cooler and felt good against his forehead. He was hot and slightly dizzy, still teetering over the abyss between his past-exemplified by this city and the body in the morgue-and what he'd once thought was his future, but which all of a sudden was feeling impossibly remote. He stood on the sidewalk struggling t
o make sense of this time warp, worrying that the weight of the past would prove too heavy to shake off.
The smart thing would have been to get back in his car then and there and return to Vermont. He'd signed the morgue's paperwork on the way out. The police and other authorities would be satisfied with his service and would know where to find him in any case. He could even make arrangements for Mary's disposal long-distance, perhaps shipping her to her mother as a small poetic gesture.
But he knew he wouldn't be doing any of that. He'd known it on the drive down. Mary's death had made clear the need to settle issues he'd tried to abandon by escaping New York, but which had continued to cripple him as surely as any rifle bullet.
The real question, therefore, wasn't whether he would stay in the city to discover what had pushed Mary to virtual suicide. It was whether the small glimmerings of hopefulness he'd recently been acquiring in Vermont would be strong enough to fight the undertow he could already feel tugging at his ankles.
He shivered and pulled his light coat tighter around his neck. The twilight season between winter and summer was hard to call spring in a world of concrete and steel. The days were pleasantly warm, but the nights still held a snow-sharpened edge. Burying his hands in his pockets, he set off toward the Lower East Side, some thirty blocks to the south.
The decision to walk had immediate benefits. It put him in motion, it let him blow off steam, and it took him outside of his own head, a place he knew wasn't the healthiest of environments. In a telling paradox, however, walking these streets helped resurrect memories he'd been struggling to suppress since hitting the city limits.
He'd grown up in New York, near the George Washington Bridge at the north end of Manhattan. He knew these urban sounds and moods in particular, and was familiar with the almost organic energy that seeped from the city's pavements like a steady pulse, twenty-four hours a day. Alone in the middle of a darkened street, you knew you were amid a huge number of people. You could almost hear their collective breathing.
And despite the sterility implied in the "concrete canyons" of lore, there were as many smells to this world as might linger in any rain forest. As he strode along, reacquainting himself with the rhythm of the evenly spaced city blocks, ignoring the metronomically regular pedestrian crosswalk signs in favor of what the traffic was really doing, Willy Kunkle picked up dozens of odors, some sour, some surprisingly sweet, most reminiscent of food, cooking or rotting, depending on his proximity to restaurant or alleyway. Most surprising was the occasional whiff of grass or silage, a furtive gift from an elusive Mother Nature.
Willy had walked such streets as a beat cop, fresh out of the academy, both proud and nervous to be in uniform, conscious of the heavy.38 bumping his hip, and honing the sarcastic, tough-guy demeanor he'd used defensively at home and which would become his trademark. He instinctively sought the company of the rougher crowd at the precinct, the guys who bent the rules and made sure the law was enforced to their own best advantage-the bullies and braggarts who in later years would turn his stomach and rank among his favorite targets.
It seemed so long ago now, before he went to Vietnam, before the booze he began sharing with those same men became more than a social habit, before he fled to Vermont, got married, and hit bottom.
There had been good times during his short stint as a New York cop, times of redemption and grace when his actions had benefited others. Why those moments hadn't guided him instead of being mere oases, he didn't know. Nor did he fully remember why he'd left to enlist, although there was a typical perverseness to joining a wrongheaded war everybody knew was a defeat in the making, and which even the right-wingers were hardpressed to defend. When Willy landed in Vietnam, the fall of Saigon was barely a year away.
But there were other reasons pushing him to leave, too. Not just his own tension-filled family dynamics, but larger, cultural ones. New York in the late thirties, when his parents arrived from Europe, was the most powerful, influential city on Earth. Then, over the next forty years, hundreds of neighborhoods were gutted by expressways and gargantuan building projects. The autocratic Robert Moses and his urban renewal cronies sacrificed a city of people to a future devoted to the automobile, disturbing the intricacy of a living human tapestry and encapsulating huge numbers of displaced poor inside towering clusters of bland, geographically marginalized housing units that served as thinly disguised penitentiaries. The postwar economic expansion challenged the concept of centralized urban powerhouses like New York, and with startling speed the city went broke, garbage piled up in the streets, and the fuse began to burn. It became a city to abandon, and Willy took the hint.
He was in the East Village section by now, going strong, no longer mindful of the night air, watching how both the architecture and the mood had changed from that of just a few blocks earlier. This was the fringe of old New York, where numbered streets became names, and the strict grid pattern slowly yielded to the quirky remnants of an agrarian past, where waterways and farm-tomarket paths marked the way people traveled hundreds of years ago. The city of neighborhoods began opening before him, the buildings becoming lower, older, more eccentric in design, their ground floors occupied by a bazaar of mom-and-pop outlets selling everything and anything. This was where the opposition to Moses and his road builders had finally succeeded, and made of New York one of the few big cities in the U.S. without a freeway splitting the downtown in two.
There was the inevitable dark side, of course, and ample evidence of decay. As he neared the Lower East Side-a slum virtually from its inception-where Mary had last lived, this transition grew exponentially, until at last all that was left, up and down her actual street, was a grimy, silent, commerce-free backwater of urban depression: a home for rats, cockroaches, and humanity's rejects.
Willy stood across from his late ex-wife's address and thought back to how often he'd gone to buildings similar to this, both here and in Vermont's grittiest corners, knowing that all he would find would be hopelessness personified.
For a man who pretended he'd lost the habit, this was way too much thinking. Willy took a deep breath and crossed the street.
Chapter 3
The security in Mary's building was poor, no great surprise. Willy punched ten of the call buttons above the row of dented, graffiti-decorated mailboxes, got an atonal chorus of mixed replies over the loudspeakers, and at least one person who merely hit the buzzer opening the front door lock.
He decided to reconnoiter first, climbing to the third floor to find the apartment number he'd seen in the lobby under Mary's name, reacquainting himself with the familiar smell of poverty that clung to the walls like fresh paint. One flight up, however, he was stopped by an elderly woman who stepped out from behind her door.
"You ring downstairs?" she asked, her voice sharp and her jaundiced eyes narrowed. "Somebody rang."
He put on a surprised expression. "Me? No. Why?"
She ignored the question. "I don't know you."
He reached into his back pocket with feigned boredom and flashed his Vermont badge too fast for her to read it. It didn't actually look much like a New York detective's gold shield, but it was the right color, and he had the right attitude.
"Believe me, lady, the pleasure's all mine."
Her faced reddened and she slammed the door. He continued upstairs.
On the third floor, he caught sight of the yellow crime scene sticker down the hall to the left. The apartment was halfway to the end, the telltale sticker carefully applied to span where the door met the jamb. He studied the door briefly-old, battered, in need of paint, but undamaged- and gave the knob a tentative twist.
That would have been too lucky.
He checked out the rest of the floor, getting a feel for the place, before retreating back downstairs, past the lobby, and descending to the basement. There, he found a door labeled, "Super," just as he'd hoped.
A small, dark-skinned man with a thick mustache opened the door at the second knock. Willy already ha
d his pad out, opened to a blank page.
"What?" the man asked.
Willy glanced at the pad. "Mr. Martinez? Detective Murphy. I need to get into apartment 318." Seemingly as an afterthought, he did the same dismissive badge flash he'd pulled on the old woman.
The super didn't even glance at it. "My name is Jose Rivera. I don't know Martinez."
Willy flipped back a couple of pages. "Jerks. Somebody screwed up-has you as Martinez in one place, Rivera in another. Typical. You got the key?"
Rivera looked disgusted. "Yeah, I got the key. Why, I don't know. Somebody dies and I lose the place for a year. You watch. What good's a key for a place I can't rent? You people need to fix that. The system stinks, and the apartment stinks, too. All the shit that's in there, and nobody to clean it up. The neighbors bitch and I can't do nothing about it. I had a guy die two years ago and rot for a week before I found out. I lost three places that time- the people next to him moved out 'cause of the smell. Three places I was out." He held up three fingers.
Willy nodded. "Key?"
Rivera stared at him a moment. "You guys," he muttered disgustedly, before unhooking a key from the wall just inside the door. "Here." He pointed to an oldfashioned mail slot cut into his front door. "When you're done with it, put it back here." Back upstairs, Willy paused before Mary's door, again listening to the murmurs of life around him, and more specifically to how well he could hear them. It was a reflex born of years of practice. His pilgrimage here was emotionally stimulated. He wasn't running an investigation. But habits, good and bad, were hard to break, and this one told his subconscious that the walls in this building were as thin as might be expected-and, as the woman downstairs had demonstrated, not without ears.
He carefully slit the police label at its crease, fitted the key to the lock, and pushed the door open.
The smell that swept out to envelop him wasn't staggering, but it wasn't good, either: cloying, sweet, with an overripe pungency that caught in his throat. He began breathing through his mouth and closed the door softly behind him.
