Manhattan Is My Beat (13 page)

Not because she was on a quote date unquote with Richard, not because they were lying side by side in the loft, with hazy stars visible overhead through the peaks of glass.

But because when she’d watched it before, it had just been a movie that a nice, quirky old man had rented. Now it was the rabbit hole—a doorway to an adventure.

The film was hokey, sure. Filled with those classic images from that whole cumbersome era she’d told Frankie Greek about—the baggy suits, stiff hair, the formalities of the dialogue. The young cop, twirling his billy club, would say, “Well, now, Mrs. McGrath, how are the Mister’s corns this morning?”

But she paid little attention to the period costumes and the words. Mostly what she noticed, watching it this time, was the grit. The film left a sandy uneasiness in her
heart. Shadows everywhere, the contrasty black and white, the unanticipated violence. The shootings—where the robber winged one of the hero’s fellow cops and a bystander, for instance, or the scene where the cop died in front of the hotel—were very disturbing, even though there was no Sam Peckinpah slow-motion blood splattering, no special effects. It was like that great old Alan Ladd movie
Shane
—unlike modern thrillers, there’d been only a half dozen gunshots in the entire film but they were loud and shocking and you felt each one of them in your gut.

Manhattan Is My Beat
also seemed pretty G-rated. But Rune felt the studio pulling a fast one in its portrayal of the cop’s virginal girlfriend, played by—what a name— Ruby Dahl. It was so clear to Rune that the poor thing was lusting. You’d never know it from her lines (“Oh, I can’t explain my feelings, Roy. I just worry about you so. There’s so much … evil out there.”) But if her dresses and sweaters were high-necked, Ruby’s bosom was sharp and beneath the tame dialogue you knew she had the hots for Roy.
She
was the character that got the long camera shot when the judge announced that her fiancé was going to prison. She was the one Rune cried for.

At two A.M. Sandra threw a shoe at them and Rune shut off the VCR and the TV.

“Not bad once,” Richard said. “Why’d we have to sit through it twice?” He himself had given up his own quest for the evening and had kept his hands off her for the past several hours.

“Because I didn’t take notes the first time.” She rewound the tape, the bootleg copy she’d made for Robert Kelly. She looked at the scrawl of notes she’d written on the back of a flier for a health club.

Richard stretched and went into some weird yoga position, like a push-up with his pelvis pressed into the floor, his head back at a crazy angle, staring at the stars
above them. “Okay, I slept through most of it the second time, I have to be honest. Were you joking about the killer?”

“The movie is why that customer I told you about is dead.”

“He saw it
three
times. He couldn’t take it anymore. He killed himself.”

“Don’t joke.” She was whispering and he missed the flare in her voice.

She pulled her bag toward her and handed him the clipping she’d found in Kelly’s apartment. He looked at it but put it down before he could have read more than a couple of paragraphs. He closed his eyes. She frowned and took the yellow, brittle paper.

“What it is,” she explained, “the movie was a true story. There really
was
a cop in the thirties who stole some robbery money and hid it. He denied the whole thing and nobody ever found the million dollars. He got out of Sing Sing and got gunned down a few days later. And supposedly he never had a chance to collect the money. It’s just the way it happened in the film.”

Richard yawned.

Rune, on her knees, crouched like a geisha, holding the clipping. “I think what happened was Mr. Kelly bought an old book at a secondhand store on St. Marks…. You know the book vendors near Cooper Union? There was this clipping in it. He read it—I think he was interested in New York history—so he got a kick out of it but didn’t think too much about it. Then what happens?”

“What?”

“Then,” she said, “last month he’s walking past Washington Square Video and sees the poster for the film. He rents it, he watches it. And he gets the bug. You know what I mean? The bug.” She waited. Richard seemed to be listening. She said, “That feeling that gets to
you when you know there’s something out there. But you don’t know what. But you
have
to find out what the mystery is.”

“Like you. You’re mysterious.”

She felt a trill of pleasure. “That’s what my name means, you know.”

“Rune? I thought a rune was a letter.”

“It is. But it also means ‘mystery’ in Celtic.”

“And what does ‘Doris’ mean?”

“Anyway,” she said, ignoring him, “I think Mr. Kelly and I were a lot alike. Sort of like you and me.”

She let that sit between them for a minute, and when he didn’t respond she wondered, And what’s
your
mystery, François Jean-Paul Vladmir Richard?

After a moment he said, “I’m awake. I’m listening.”

Rune continued. “What Mr. Kelly did was decide he was going to find the money.”

“What money?”

“The money the cop took! That was never recovered.”

“The million dollars? Come on, Rune, the robbery was when, fifty years ago?”

“Sure, maybe somebody found it. Maybe it got burned up…. You can always find excuses to give up on your quest before you start. Besides, quests aren’t just about finding money or grails or jewels. They’re about adventures! Mr. Kelly’d been alone for years. No family, not many friends, living by himself. This was his chance for an adventure. What was his life? Just sitting by the window all day and watching pigeons and cars. Here was a chance for a treasure hunt.” She started bouncing up and down, remembering something. “He told me, listen to this,
listen
, when he took me out to lunch, he told me when his ship came in, he was going to do something nice for me. Well, what was the ship? It was a million dollars.”

Richard said, “I’m tired. I have to work tomorrow.”

“On your novel?”

He hesitated for a minute. And she didn’t think he was being completely honest when he said, “That’s right.”

First date. Too early to push. She asked, “Are you going to put me in it? In your novel?”

“Maybe I will.”

“Will you make me a little taller and grow my hair out?”

“No. I like you just the way you are.”

As he rolled over on his side she reread the old newspaper clipping.

“Now, remember, in the movie, what the cop did with the money?”

The groggy answer: “He snuck outside the bank and gave it to a shoeshine boy, who took it home. The cop broke into the kid’s house and stole it. I was awake for that part.”

“And there was that totally melodramatic struggle, all that loud music, and the boy’s mother fell down a flight of stairs,” Rune pointed out. “That was big in old-time movies. Old ladies falling down flights of stairs. That, and angelic kids getting the dread unnamed disease guaranteed to make them waste away slowly.” She thought back to the film. “Okay, in the newspaper stories there
was
a shoeshine boy. The cop—his real name was Samuel Davies, not Roy—gave the kid the money and said take it home or, basically, I’ll beat the crap out of you. That was the last anybody every heard of the money in real life. But in the movie the cop gets it back from the kid and buries it in a cemetery someplace. Who came up with that idea? Hiding the money in a graveyard?”

“The writer, who else? He made it up.” Richard’s eyes were closed.

The writer … Interesting …

Then her attention returned to the TV. She turned the VCR on again and fast-forwarded it to the scene where Dana Mitchell, playing the dark-haired, square-jawed cop, buries the suitcase in a city cemetery.

She hit the freeze-frame button on the VCR and advanced the tape one frame at a time.

As the images shuffled slowly past, Rune said, out loud but mostly to herself, “The answer’s here. It’s here someplace. He watched it eighteen times, eighteen, eighteen, eighteen….” Chanting the word. “Mr. Kelly gets a clue, he finds out something. And then he figures out where the money is. Or, okay, maybe … he can’t get it himself, he’s getting old. He had arthritis, a limp. He can’t go digging around in cemeteries alone. He needs help. He tells somebody. A friend, an acquaintance. Somebody younger—who can help him. Mr. Kelly tells this guy everything and then, what’s he do? He gets the money and kills Mr. Kelly. Maybe he was the guy in the green car….”

“What green car?”

She hesitated. Another good social rule: On a first date don’t tell the guy that a killer just tried to run you over at a murder scene.

“The police mentioned the killer was driving a green car.”

Richard pointed out, “In which case it’s gone. The killer left town with his million dollars. So what can you do?”

“Find him is what I can do. He killed a friend of mine. Anyway, part of that money’s mine. And there’s this friend of my friend in the building who’s going to get deported if she doesn’t get some money.”

He said, “Why don’t you just go to the police?”

“Police?” She laughed. “They don’t care.”

“Why else?” He was looking at her closely now.

“All right,” she admitted. “Because they’d keep the
money…. I know it’s out there. I mean, it could be. What you said before … about the writer making it up. He must’ve researched the real crime, wouldn’t you think?”

“I’d guess,” Richard responded.

“I mean, isn’t that what you do for your novels? Research?”

“Yeah, sure. Research. A lot of research.”

Rune mused, “Maybe he knows something…. ‘Course he wrote the script fifty years ago. Think he’s still alive?”

“Who knows?”

“How could I find out?”

He shrugged. “Why don’t you ask somebody at the film school at NYU or the New School?”

It was a good idea. She kissed his ear. “See, you like quests as much as I do.”

“I don’t think so. But I also have a feeling I can’t talk you out of this, can I?”

“Nup. You never give up on a quest. Until you succeed or you …” Her voice trailed off, seeing once again the pale skin of Robert Kelly dotted with his own blood, the green car speeding toward her, Susan Edelman flying into the brick wall. “Well, until you succeed. That’s all there is to it.”

She looked at Richard’s face, his eyes closed, lips parted slightly. She tried to decide which she liked better, his looking dreamy—he was real good at dreamy—or the intense paisley eyes gazing intensely back at her. Dreamy, she concluded. He wasn’t a warrior knight—not an Arthur or Cuchulain or Percival de Gales. No, he was more of a poet-knight. Or a philosopher-knight.

She heard his breath, steady, slow. How nice, she thought, to feel the warm weight of somebody next to
you in sleep. She wanted so badly to lie beside him, feeling him against her whole body.

But instead of stretching out, she pulled off her Wicked Witch socks and aimed the remote control at the VCR, then watched the movie one more time until the scripty words
The End
splashed up on the screen.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A karate flick was on the monitor.

Oriental men in black silk trousers sailed through the air, fists hissing like jet planes. Every time somebody got hit, it sounded like a cracking board.

One of the Chinese actors stepped toward a couple of rivals and spoke in a southern drawl. “Okay, you two, back outa here real slow and you won’t get hurt.”

Rune leaned back on the stool in front of the register at Washington Square Video. Squinted at the monitor. “Hey, you hear that? That is completely wild! He sounds just like John Wayne.”

Tony held his blue deli coffee cup and cigarette in one hand and flipped through the
Post
with the other. He looked up at the screen critically. “And he’s going to beat the shit out of those guys in ten seconds flat.”

It took closer to sixty and while he was doing it Rune mused, “You think that’s easy? Dubbing, I mean. You think I could get a job doing that?”

Tony asked, “Don’t tease me, Rune. You quitting? … Or you mean when you get fired?”

Rune spun her bracelets. “They don’t have to memorize their lines, do they? They just sit in a studio and read the script. That’d be so cool—it’d be like being an actress without having to get up in front of people and memorize things.”