Dry Bones (29 page)

N
EW
Y
ORK
P
UBLIC
L
IBRARY
, M
ANHATTAN

“Y
OU HAVEN
’
T LOST THE KNACK FOR THE KNUCKLEBALL.” DUNNE
stood in the library hall beside the same backless marble bench on which he’d left Bassante the previous day.

“‘Luck is fate’s knuckleball. It has a will of its own.’ So an OSS colleague once opined to me.” Bassante dangled his hat between his knees.

Dunne studied the thinning weave of gray-black threads atop Bassante’s head. “You have a good memory.”

“You told me that once before. It’s still good, I guess—just not as good as it used to be, like the rest of me.” Bassante patted the empty space beside him. “Sit.”

Dunne unpocketed the letter and offered it to Bassante. “Quite a story.”

“Keep it. I don’t want it back.”

“Did the police investigation of Pully’s suicide turn anything up?”

“There was no note.”

“No sign anyone else was in the room?”

“Pros don’t leave clues.”

“Any idea what the autopsy showed?”

“Alcohol in the bloodstream. But he wasn’t drunk.”

“No drugs?” Dunne sat.

“No LSD, if that’s what you mean.” Bassante rested his hat on his knees. “But you have to know what to look for. The coroner hadn’t a clue.”

“Pully was acting kind of odd even before that, don’t you think?”

“Odd?”

Dunne searched for a better word.

A group of tourists came up the stairs. The redhead librarian/guide from the day before was in the lead. Same curves but different package: pink blouse and tight black skirt replaced by blue dress with white polka dots. They stopped in the middle of the floor. She pointed at the ceiling. They raised their heads in unison.

It came to him: “‘Agitated’—that’s how you put it in the letter.”

“He had his reasons. You read the whole letter, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Did you see the dossier on Oscar Hemmer?”

“Pully told me what was in it.”

“But you never saw it?”

“No.”

“And the Swiss couple who weren’t really Swiss?”

“What about them?”

“Who were they?”

“He didn’t say.”

“You never met them?”

“No.”

“Or talked to them?”

“What are you getting at? That Pully made all this up? That he’d lost his mind?”

“I’m trying to figure out where to go with this.” Dunne held up the letter.

Bassante snatched it out of his hand. “Well, if you think this is a lot of BS”—there was as much fury in his eyes as his voice—“I’ll tell you where to go.” He put on his hat and stood.

“Sit, please.” Dunne tugged Bassante’s sleeve. “I’m only following ‘the simplest and most necessary rule of all,’ the one Pully imparted to you, and you passed on to the rest of us:
Pay attention.
”

“Pully wasn’t paranoid or deluded. He suffered from an excess of integrity, a handicap in most professions, a fatal one in the profession he chose.”

“I’m not doubting the truth of what he told you. I’m trying to figure out what we should be paying attention to and aren’t.”

“I did what I could to help. I owed him that much. But he knew I didn’t want to get sucked back in. He did his best to respect my wishes.” Bassante sat down again and handed back the letter.

The tour group moved toward the Main Reading Room. Redhead guide/librarian turned with easy, unstudied Miss Ginny Thompson–esque sway, a resemblance he almost pointed out to Bassante but didn’t. It couldn’t be a happy association.

Dunne repocketed the letter. The marble bench had caused a throbbing at the bottom of his spine, old ache, old wound. His coccyx. “Who’d Pully trust besides you?”

“You.”

“But I was in Florida for the winter.” Dunne dug his thumbs into where the ache was.

“He kept to himself. You know that. We were two of a kind.”

“He didn’t have any friends?”

“That was his private business.”

“What was?”

“He saw Dick Van Hull now and then.”

“Van Hull?”

“They traveled some of the same … er … the same circuit.”

“Which circuit?”

“The Bird Circuit. Pully knew I knew. But we never talked about it. I respected his privacy.”

“Where’s Van Hull?”

“I don’t know where he lives. Pully used to meet him every once in a while at Red’s Bar and Grill, corner of Fiftieth and Third. He teaches at a hoity-toity girls’ academy on the East Side. He usually stops in for the cocktail hour. I was never inside. He had me drive his car and pick him up a few times. Van Hull was a regular. Pully worried about him.”

“Why?”

“Booze. ‘Van Hull’s drinking too much,’ Pully said.”

“I’ll do my best to keep you out of this, but at least give me a phone number where I can reach you.”

“I don’t have a phone. I live in a rooming house in Park Slope, on Union Street, off Seventh Avenue.” Bassante salvaged pencil stub and paper scrap from his pocket, scribbled on it. “Here’s my address. I move, I’ll let you know.”

They walked to the staircase. Bassante stared at the mural directly in front, on the north flank of the Reading Room. He swept his hand in an arc, indicating the companion murals in the hall, two on each wall, all four painted, he said, by the same artist who put Prometheus on the ceiling. “Standard-issue art of the didactic WPA sort.”

Dunne stood back. He’d barely noticed them.

“They’re meant to sum up the progress of the written word. This is my favorite.” Bassante tipped his hat at the scene in front of them: Two white-robed monks in a scriptorium, one resting while the other labored at his desk over a sheet of parchment; in the distance, a building aflame and a barbarian on horseback thrusting his spear into a figure on the ground. He pointed at the mayhem in the background. “Something to be said for the cloister when the time comes around at last, as it always does, for our species to revert to its homicidal, bloodthirsty worst.”

The sand in the hourglass on the monk’s desk was running low.

“I was hopeful you’d be willing to take the lead on this.”
Bassante extended his hand. “I’ll give you what support I can. Just let me keep my distance.”

They shook. Bassante went down the stairs and out of sight.

Red’s Bar & Grill had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. Thanks to the local precinct captain—brother to the owner, Red McGinnis—it had enjoyed protection from the raids and shakedowns most speaks experienced at one time or another. When liquor became legal again, Red’s privileged status allowed him to cater to a clientele more decorous and better behaved than the sullen, pugnacious crew found in many nearby gin mills.

Eventually, the joint became the anchor of the “Bird Circuit,” the string of watering holes in the forties and fifties, on or right off Third Avenue—the Swan Club, White Gander, Blue Parrot, Yellow Cockatoo, et al. Red’s heyday came at war’s end and right after. “I’ll meet you at Red’s” became the unofficial motto of the men—soldiers, sailors, and civilians, birds of a feather—who frequented the Circuit.

The best time to find Van Hull was after five, Bassante emphasized, when cocktail hour arrived and the afternoon crowd of neighborhood widows, pensioners, and laborers ceded the premises to a white-collar, middle-age crowd made up exclusively of men, most of whom worked in the office towers on the other side of Lexington.

Dunne told the cabbie, “Red’s, Fiftieth and Third.”

“Yeah, sure, I know the place.” The cabbie chuckled to himself.

They pulled up in front of Red’s. Dunne paid the fare. The rearview mirror framed the driver’s insinuating leer. “Want me to wait?’

He shook his head. The defensiveness he felt made him uncomfortable, as if he owed anyone in this city an explanation of his relationship with Dick Van Hull. He got out and slammed the door.

Unshackled from the shadows of Third Avenue’s elevated railway that had rattled above for three-quarters of a century, the ravaged facade of Red’s found its only consolation in the equally sad condition of the structures on either side. Marble pediments and sills had been torn away. Fumes from coal, oil, and gas formed a toxic mix with rain, ice, and snow, dripped down decade after decade, cracked and eroded limestone slabs, mottling them into morbid shades of black and gray.

At either end of the block, the much-ballyhooed redevelopment and construction boom promised in the wake of the El’s demolition was under way. Modern high-rise, high-rent office buildings were replacing tenements and saloons. The recent recession had slowed but not stopped the inevitable changes. The Bird Circuit was fast becoming a flock of wild geese in flight, south and west. Red’s impending fate seemed foreshadowed in the electrical malfunction in the neon sign that hung above the door:
RED’S BAR & ILL.

A dozen men were at the bar in hushed conversations. No one took note of him as he entered. A row of high-backed booths ran along the back wall. The jukebox played Rosemary Clooney warbling “Come on-a My House.”

He ordered a scotch, plenty of ice. He stuck a cigarette between his lips.

The bartender put down a glass, dropped in a handful of ice cubes, and poured the scotch directly in. A generous dose. He held out his lighter. Short, with a handsome, angular face, he had the thick forearms of a boxer.

Dunne inhaled. “Thanks.”

The bartender stayed where he was. “Looking for somebody in particular?”

“What makes you ask?”

“That’s the way it is around here.” The bartender gripped the bottle by the neck and rested it on the bar. A blue anchor and “U.S.N.” were tattooed on the back of his hand.

“What way is that?”

“Customers know each other or been recommended by somebody who does.”

“Sounds like a private club.”

“Not private. Just careful.” His face was expressionless.

“My kind of place.”

“You a cop?”

Dunne dragged on his cigarette, exhaled, sipped.

“Just so you know, the local precinct captain don’t abide freelancers.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“I’d say you were once. I can tell.”

“I’ve been a lot of things.”

“What are you now?”

“A customer.”

“I bet you’re a private dick.”

“I bet you’re good at playing poker.”

“Look, enjoy your drink. Red’s has a reputation as a friendly place. A man can meet old friends, be introduced to new ones, and not worry about being harassed or bothered. My job is to keep it that way. So no prying. No interrogations.”

“It’s all right, Terry.” The voice came from behind Dunne. “He’s an old friend.” A hand rested on his shoulder. “Give me the usual, only make it a double.”

“Your usual
is
a double, TR.”

Dunne didn’t recognize the voice, didn’t detect a trace of the upper-crust Hudson Valley accent it once had. Yet he was certain who’d spoken. Turning around, he thought he’d been mistaken. For an instant, he didn’t recognize the wasted, hollow face, white hair atop—not gray, white as cotton. “Been a while, Dick.”

“Come on, join me over here. Terry will bring our drinks.”

Dunne followed him to a booth. The bartender delivered their drinks.

“Put them on my tab, Terry.”

“Will do, TR.”

“Sounds like you’ve got yourself a new handle.”

“I ditched Richard, tossed Thornton, and vanquished Van. I’m TR Hull now.”

“I guess that’s why I couldn’t find you in the phone book.”

“It’s more likely you couldn’t find me because I don’t have a phone. Here’s to what?” Van Hull held up a highball glass, no ice, half filled with rye. “What’s worth toasting these days, besides marshmallows?”

Dunne tapped glasses. Slight as it was, the sliding consonant in that last word—“mar
shhh
mallows”—gave away the jump Van Hull got on cocktail hour. “Here’s to us.”

“I’ll drink to that!” Van Hull emptied half the glass in a single swallow. He shook his finger, reprovingly. “Look at you, Fin. You’ve hardly aged at all. You look as fit as the last time I saw you.”

“The last time you saw me I was in the hospital.”

“You know what I mean. Most of us have gone to seed since we left the service, but you—you’re still trim, hardly a gray hair.” He finished his drink and called over to the bar: “Terry-o, give us another round!”

Dunne waved his hand. “Not for me. I’m still working on this.” He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray.

A steady tide of quietly stylish men in business suits—mix of young and middle-aged—filled the room. The bartender dimmed the lights. He went over to the jukebox and raised the volume a notch or two as Judy Garland sang “The Man That Got Away.”

The bartender delivered a fresh drink. Van Hull twisted the glass in his hands. “You’d think I’d be shocked out of my pajamas to see you after all these years—and in Red’s, no less—but I’m not. I’ve thought about you a lot. Pully often brought up your name. He said you were in New York a good part of the year.”