Mitchell Smith (41 page)

Third picture. The celebration-the dancing and singing-is moving away down the street. The naked girl, so very young, lies sleeping high on the crowd’s uplifted hands. Their cheering makes her silence, their activity her peace. Here-left behind, the bag woman crouches at the curb, her head a rich and royal blue-folding the afterbirth like a small red sweater, tucking it into a Macy’s shopping bag. She’s calling out her warnings, shouting out her threats to people running by to join in singing, screaming, dancing under the sleeping girl. They pay no attention. She’s only what the girl is dreaming. . .

Just before they reached the entrance doors, Ellie saw three men standing with their backs turned in the recessed doorway of the Hoffritz store. Knives glittered beside them through the glass. She saw they were facing someone standing against the door. The store was closed for the day.

“Look at that,” she said, but Nardone, having noticed her turned head and attention, had seen them and started that way, cutting across the stream of people passing by.

Ellie hurried and caught up, and as they got closer, saw between two of the men a slender soldier in uniform standing against the store door, a girl standing beside him with her hand up to her mouth. Their suitcases were at their feet. The soldier looked young, and frightened as the girl.

One of the men-the biggest, with a Rasta dreadlock “do” and wearing a long brown leather jacket, was leaning on the store window’s glass with an outstretched hand. He was leaning down, saying something to the soldier. The other two men, one wearing a dirty white sweater, were standing almost side by side, fencing the doorway in.

Ellie heard the big Rasta say, “-both going’ suck my cock”-and stepped up behind him and kicked him in the ass as hard as she could.

He spun around like a top-handsome black, big nose like a blade, and was reaching under the back of his leather jacket when Ellie said, “Police,”

and put her hand in her purse, feeling for the Smith & Wesson. She heard a light sound, whack, and saw Nardone had cracked the other two men’s heads together.

“What are you going’ to do, motherfucker?” Nardone said, apparently feeling some resistance from the man on the right, the one in the white sweater-and shoved the other man away to seize the struggling one more firmly, gripped him by the back of his neck (the man was young, bulky, a Puerto Rican with a pleasant face-contorted now), and shoved his head against the steel framing dividing the store’s display windows. That made a solid sound.

“Have you got anything back there?” Ellie said to the big man, and nodded at where his hand was still reaching behind his back. She had the revolver in her hand, now, in the purse.

“No.” He let that hand fall to his side.

“That’s good,” Ellie said, stepped a little closer to him, and stomped down on his right foot with her left high heel. He grunted with the pain of that. “You’re not a bad guy,” Ellie said, “-are you?”

“Where you going’?” Nardone, talking to the man he’d shoved away.

Gripping the other by the back of the neck.

“Don’t be in such a hurry. -Stick around.”

The soldier and his girl were still standing against the store door.

“What was going on, here?” Ellie said to them.

“They was looking’ to buy some grass,” the Rasta said.

“Man-we don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that shit … an’ they tried an’ give us some shit about the bread-you understand’

“Is that so?” Ellie said to the soldier, and saw Nardone shake the Puerto Rican and let him go. “-Is that so?”

The soldier had nothing to say.

Nardone looked at Ellie, and shrugged.

“You smart enough to get out of here?” Ellie said to the Rasta.

“You fuckin’-a.”

, Then go,” Ellie said, “-and take your girlfriends with you.”

“You got it,” the Rasta said, and turned and walked away, favoring his injured foot a little.

“You hurt my head, man,” the Puerto Rican said to Nardone, lightly stroking at his hair where it hurt. As he walked past Ellie on his way, the other Hispanic, smaller, slighter, circled to join his friends.

A number of commuters, stopping to see what was happening, had blocked the flow of people at those spots.

Now, these moved on, and the crowd flowed with them.

“You try to buy something from those people?” Ellie said to the soldier.

“-Did you?”

“I guess so,” the soldier said. The voice was from out of town. The girl said nothing.

“Where the fuck are you from?” Nardone said.

:‘Wisconsin.

“Are you kidding’ me?”

“No, sir,” the soldier said. He looked to be about eighteen.

“We’re from Green Bay,” the girl said-her first words.

She looked younger than eighteen. There was a wedding ring on her finger.

“Well-you’re not in Green Bay, now, are you?” Ellie said.

“No, ma’am,” the soldier said.

“So-use your fuckin’ head,” Nardone said. “Wake up-watch out who you’re talkin’ to.”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said.

“You have someplace to stay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said. “We have a reservation at the Mansfield Hotel.”

“All right,” Ellie said. “You go out those doors, and turn left, and walk up two blocks to Forty-fourth Street. -O.K.?”

The soldier and girl both nodded.

“Then you turn right, and walk down Forty-fourth Street for three blocks, across Seventh Avenue and Broadway, and just before you get to Fifth Avenue, you’ll see the Mansfield. -O.K.?”

“O.K.,” the soldier said.

“If you stop at a newsstand,” Ellie said, “-you can buy a map, a guide to the city. That’s a good thing to have.”

“Thank you very much,” the girl said, and held out her hand to Ellie to shake. “Thanks for helping us.”

“Thanks,” the soldier said to Nardone, and shook his hand.

“They’re just babies,” Ellie said, as she and Nardone walked to the entrance.

“There’s another one,” Nardone said, and veered over to the center door, where a young Transit patrolman, blond and mustached, stood amid the crowd hurrying in.”

“-You’re doin’ a real shitty job, pal,” Nardone said to him as they went by.

The sun had almost set-bands of black cloud a mile above swung slowly east between the borders of the building tops, barred with ribs of purple, lighter reds, and gold. It was a cool evening, a gusting breeze driving trash and paper down the gutters now and then as they walked to the car. People on the street went with their heads slightly lowered before the wind.

“That’s it for summer,” Nardone said. He disliked the cold. “You can kiss summer goodbye.”

“I like the fall,” Ellie said. “-It doesn’t bother me.”

A gust sent a paper cup tapping down the sidewalk alongside them for a few steps, then rolled it into the street.

No one had disturbed the Ford, though they’d left it parked up on the dirt backhoed out of a pipeline ditch beside the site.

“What’s going up here?”

“Hotel,” Nardone said. “-One of those weirdo’s got a jungle in the lobby. Two hundred a night, birds shit on your head in the restaurant.”

He unlocked the car, climbed in, and leaned over to unlock her side.

“You remember?” he said, waiting to pull out into the traffic. “-You remember we got court appearances day after tomorrow?”

“Oh, crap.”

“You and me both in the mornin’, then me in the afternoon. You got Prescott; I got Siniscola.”

:‘I forgot it came up this week.

“Well, it did.”

Edgar Prescott, two months before, had publicly threatened the life of Samuel Prinz—Comptroller of the city during an open session of the City Council. Ellie, escorting the visiting mayor of Delft, Netherlands—a pale, plump, tough woman with very good English-had unfortunately been standing close to Prescott, and heard his shouted threat, which had been

“to get a fucking gun and put a bullet through your head, you fucking thief!” -Prescott at the time being involved in litigation over payments due from the City to his firm. He hauled garbage, privately.

Nardone’s case was more serious, a patrolman named Siniscola being accused of entering into conversation with a thirteen-year-old boy outside Joan of Arc Junior High School, then escorting the boy behind two Dumpsters alongside the school yard to compare penises. -The case complicated by Siniscola’s older brother, a division commander for Manhattan South in Internal Affairs-who might or might not have attempted to cover the matter up. Same time tomorrow,” Nardone said, driving out into a ace in traffic vacated by a delivery van swinging in to doublepark, “—tomorrow, we got to spend some time gom, over that Gaither stuff. All the papers, her bills the print reports, the whole damn thing. Leahy’s going’ to see if we can’t get a copy of her state tax return, an’ her will out $I of probate court. -You know she had a will?”

:‘No.

“Well, she did. -Guess who was attorney of record.”

“Birnbaum.”

“Good guesser. So, we gotta go through all that shit.

We could still get lucky talkin’ to people-but if we don’t … You want to solve that case, we’re going’ to have to dig for it.”

The light changed, and Nardone took the right onto Forty-second.

“I know it,” Ellie said. “I’ll read those letters tonight, and if there’s anything there, I’ll bring them in.”

“Could be evidence, you know, honey.”

“I won’t lose them.”

As they drove east, the cars in traffic, the pedestrians’ clothes-all colored objects in bright or muted shades took up tints from the sunset’s yellows and reds. The same sunset colors were reflected in car windows and this and that plate glass along their way.

“I’m not sayin’ we can’t get lucky-maybe bust it in a week,” Nardone said, stopped for the light at Madison.

“Better be diggin’ just in case, though.”

“O.K., but if I can see Audrey Birnbaum, I think I should.”

“Oh, yeah-if she’ll talk to you, that’s great. That lady-whatever you want to call her-could be she knows a lot about a lot, if she wants to say something’.” Nardone reached into his right-side jacket pocket for a box of Tic Tacs, and thumbed one out as the light changed and he drove on. “By the way, Leahy talked to me up at the funeral-before you showed? He’s got another crappy checkout for us. Do you believe this?

-This Internal guy is partners with his brother-in-law in a sailboat out in Patchogue. -An’ we’re supposed to drop everything, go out there an’

hang around the friggin’ dock, find out who paid for the anchor, who paid for the sails, who paid for the ropes…. Came right down from Anderson.”

“Well, fuck that,” Ellie said.

Nardone took his hand from the wheel and reached over to pat hers.

“That’s exactly what I said to him. -I said, ‘Fuck that.”

“

“What did he say?-Did he say where we’re supposed to get time for the Gaither thing?”

“Nope. He gives me a look, that’s all.”

“And the UN session’s coming up.”

“That’s right. -We’re going’ to get buried in a sea of shit.” He drove across Lexington.

the tram; you got no need to come downtown.”

As they stopped behind a florist’s delivery truck for the red light at Forty-second and Third, Ellie saw a young woman walking, holding hands with her little boy. The little boy had light brown hair, and was wearing a green wool sweater with a smiling chipmunk’s face knitted into the front in yellow. Brown corduroy trousers. He was saying something as they walked along, his mother’s head bent to listen. His mother was pale and pretty, with long, straight light-brown hair falling free. She was wearing jeans, and her legs were short-not long and slender, as Ellie had thought they would be, glancing at her face.

There had been a time, Ellie supposed, that Classman and his mother had walked like that, one young, one younger, pleased to be together.

“Tommy-you don’t think Morris was happy, do you?”

“Happy? -Hell no, I think the poor son-of-a-bitch was miserable. Always mopin’ around there, callin’ his mother.

How could the guy be happy? -An’ he was a nut case, to boot!”

“You don’t think he got the slows up there? You know … on purpose.

Sort of a way to go?”

Nardone looked over at her, astonished. “Are you kidding’ me? Jesus-I didn’t say the guy wanted to die, did I … ? He was just a miserable guy. You can be a sad person without wantin’ to be a corpse! He tried…. He gave it a good try!”

:‘I guess so,” Ellie said. “He was so quiet.

“Well … he was a troubled guy, but he wasn’t fuckin’ crazy; he wasn’t going’ to stand there and let some asshole shoot him. -Besides, I told you what could have happened up there to Classman……

“You are going to butt out of that, aren’t you, Tommy? -No fucking around with that case … please.

It could get us into real trouble. . . .”

“I’m not going’ to mess with it,” Nardone said, caught the green, and made his left turn up First. “-I did all I’m going’ to do. I’ll let Leahy know what I got, and if those assholes can’t grab the brothers and get a description on those guys-then fuck ‘em. Let ‘ern explain to the papers they haven’t caught anybody on that killin’.”

drop you up at

“-And I need to know what dishes Connie is using for Sunday. If it isn’t the white and gold, be sure and have her call me-O.K.?”

“O.K.”

A half block south of the tram station, just short of the ramp up to the Queensboro Bridge, Nardone pulled the car over, doubleparked.

“Listen,” he said. “Don’t worry about Classinan. Did you know Morris liked you? He liked you; he told Serrano you were a nice girl. -What about that?”

“It doesn’t make me feel better, Tommy. I never even said anything nice to him. -I could have asked about his mother. . . .”

“You did ask about his mother.-You asked plenty of times.” Nardone leaned over and kissed Ellie on the cheek. Spearmint Tic Tacs. “Now-get out of here, an’ forget all this shit. Go shoppin’, get yourself something’. -what’s over with, is over with. Morris isn’t worried about nothin’ anymore.”