New York Nocturne (6 page)

“The front door to the apartment. When the detectives got there, they heard you unchain it.”

I glanced at Vandervalk. His arms were crossed, and his head was cocked.

“Yes,” I said, “but I chained it shut myself. This morning, after I called the police.”

“And why do that?”

“To stop—to keep out whoever did that to . . . my uncle.”

“Little late, wasn't it?”

“I wasn't—”

“You know what defensive wounds are?”

“No.”

“Wounds on the hands and arms. They happen when someone's trying to stop someone else from cutting him. With a knife. Or a hatchet. Your uncle didn't have any.”

“So?” The single word was so adolescent that, hearing myself speak it, I nearly cringed.

“
So
,” said Becker, smiling his wintry smile, “that means he knew the killer. He knew
you
. You walked right up to him, and he never knew what you were planning. You—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “How could I walk up to him with a hatchet in my hand?”

“You hid it. Behind your back.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Maybe you wrapped it up in some clothes. Or maybe he was nodding off. It was late. He'd probably put away a fair amount of booze last night.”

“If he was nodding off,” I said, “then
anybody
could have killed him.”

“There wasn't anybody else in the apartment.”

“There
had
to be.”

“Here's what happened,” said Becker. “Something went on between the two of you. Maybe he
did
do something he shouldn't have. Maybe, like Mr. Vandervalk says, he went over the line and he deserved to be punished for it. We can take that into consideration. But last night you went and you got the hatchet—”

“I didn't even know there
was
a hatchet.”

“In the kitchen pantry, in the wood box. You had to know that.”

“I've never seen the wood box. I've never been inside the pantry. We haven't used any wood since I got here. It's
summertime
.” My voice was reedy, and I could hear the panic crackling in it. They could hear it, too, I knew, and that shamed me.

Another thought occurred to me. “What about fingerprints?” I said to Becker. “You didn't find my fingerprints in there. You couldn't have.”

“You wiped them off,” he said. “Obviously, you know about fingerprints. For a little girl, you've had a lot of experience.”

I looked from him to Mr. Vandervalk. “But this is crazy! I didn't kill him. I didn't kill anyone. It's crazy for me even to have to say that.”

Mr. Vandervalk unwrapped his arms, leaned forward, and put his hands on the table. “Now listen to me, Amanda,” he said earnestly. “We can't help you if you won't help yourself.”

“But I didn't kill him!”

He smiled sadly. “Sweetheart,” he said, “come on. Do yourself a favor. All you've got to do is tell us how it happened—how your uncle, you know,
touched
you. It upset you. Naturally it did. It frightened you. And you were all alone in the big city. You had nowhere to go, no one to talk to. Anybody in the world could understand that. So last night—”

“But it's not
true
.”

“This'll all be over, Amanda. We can get you out of here. Get you a nice big meal, eh? Find you a nice comfortable place to stay.”

The notion that I would betray my uncle for a “nice big meal” was so infuriating that I threw myself back in the chair. “No,” I said. I folded my arms, locking them across my chest. “I won't. My uncle was a good man. He didn't do what you said. He didn't and he never would have.”

I raised my chin in a defiance that seemed feeble even to me. But it was all I had. “And I didn't kill him,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment. Then, shaking his head, he sighed. He turned to Becker. “Tell Mrs. Hadley to take her downstairs.”

Chapter Six

The cell was perhaps seven feet by eight and it stank, like just about everything else in the building, of pine disinfectant. Overhead, a single lightbulb dimly glowed behind metal screening. The floor was bare concrete. Two of the walls were cinder block, painted a flat dull gray; the other two consisted of long black metal bars, running vertically. Along the two cinder-block walls were narrow cots, each holding a swaybacked mattress, a threadbare cotton sheet, a flat pillow in a shabby cotton case, and a stiff brown woolen blanket. In the corner, about four feet from the floor, hung a small metal sink with a single faucet. A metal cup, identical to the one in the room upstairs, rested on the sink's ledge. Underneath the sink was a single small metal bucket. Next to that, upright on the floor, someone had carefully placed a thin roll of brown toilet paper.

No other cells were nearby. Mrs. Hadley had led me down three flights of stairs, along a cinder-block corridor, and into a small basement area. The cell took up half of it. The rest was stuffed with a jumble of old furniture—desks, chairs, stools, tables—hastily thrown together and thickly layered in dust.

“What is this place?” I asked Mrs. Hadley. I meant: Where are the other cells? Where are the other prisoners? Surely a building the size of police headquarters would hold more prisoners than a single sixteen-year-old girl.

Until that moment, she had not spoken to me. Now she smiled sweetly and said, “This is where we put the little girls who don't tell the truth.”

Her voice was much softer than I expected. But the softness and the sweetness of her smile made the words themselves sound patronizing and spiteful—as they were meant to, of course.

I flushed. Spite is something with which I have never dealt well. It is simple naked cruelty, and even now, years later, I am always startled when someone actually
wishes
to be seen as cruel.

“I
am
telling the truth,” I said.

“If you were,” she said with the absolute conviction of a minor functionary, “you wouldn't be here.”

She reached for the chain hanging from her belt, lifted the ring of keys, immediately found the one she wanted, and unlocked the barred door to the cell. She swung the door open and then turned to me, holding out her hand. “Purse,” she said.

I handed it over. She clamped it under her arm, and once again I smelled the sharp aggressive tang of old, dried sweat. She held out her hand again and nodded to my wrist. “Watch,” she said.

I hesitated. Susan, my stepmother, had given me the watch on my sixteenth birthday, a lovely Bulova with a narrow rectangular gold case and four small emeralds notched into each corner. It was my very first wristwatch.

Impatiently, the woman twitched her fingers. “Watch.”

I would not beg. I unfastened the band and handed it over. The time then was two thirty.

I felt bereft, as though a good friend had abandoned me.

Indifferently, Mrs. Hadley shoved the watch down into the pocket of her uniform. She jerked her head. “Inside,” she said.

I swallowed, took a deep breath, and stepped into the cell.

With that single step, everything changed. I went from being one kind of person, in one kind of life, to someone entirely different, with an entirely different and uncertain set of ragged possibilities.

I was abruptly weak and frail. My breath left me, sighed itself hopelessly away, and, beneath my blouse, a droplet of perspiration wormed down my side like a small sinister snake.

Mrs. Hadley shut the door. It clanged loudly. She locked it—
click click
—and then without another word she walked away, her heavy shoes snapping against the cement.

Breathing quickly now, hyperventilating, I glanced around. Everything was horrid and menacing. But that thin brown roll of toilet paper, standing at attention beside the drab gray bucket, seemed especially ominous. Someone had used it before I arrived, perhaps more than one person—what had happened to them? Where were they now?

I could still hear the distant brittle snap of Mrs. Hadley's shoes. I did not start crying until it had faded into silence.

Without a timepiece to contain it, time expanded like vapor, thinning, dissipating, until finally it vanished altogether.

After I had cried myself dry once again, I lay there on one of the cots, staring up at the ceiling.

I remembered things I had not thought about for years. My father laughing at the shore, knee-deep in a foamy surge, his sunbrowned arms held out to me as he cheered at my awkward, lumbering splash through the water. My grieving brother in our living room, wailing because he and his new slingshot had actually killed a small sparrow. My first day at a new school, second grade, walking in line outside beside a stunning young boy named Adam whose blond hair caught and held the sunlight.

I thought about my uncle. Who had killed him, and why? Who had come up to the apartment last night to take his life? Why would he—or she—risk coming up there? People lived in the building. They were moving in and out of it all day and all night. Any one of them could have seen the killer.

I
could have seen him. Why enter an apartment where you might be seen?

And why were the police so convinced that I was responsible?

Well, the hatchet, of course. As Becker suggested, I had a history with hatchets.

But why had the killer used such a weapon? Certainly there were guns available in New York City, probably an endless supply of them. And there were knives and explosives and a thousand other means by which to take a life.

Why a hatchet?

But who? Who would
want
to kill John?

Daphne Dale? That man at the Cotton Club, the man in the white dinner jacket?

Someone else? Someone I had never met, a person I could never imagine?

I harried myself with these questions, but sooner or later, inevitably, I would sink back into self-pity: How
could
they put a sixteen­-year-old girl in jail? How could they do this to
me
?

At some point, much later, I heard footsteps coming toward me, and the jingle-jangle of keys. Mrs. Hadley. I sat up, swung my legs from the cot, and straightened my dress.

She held a small metal plate.

I stood up. Between the bars was a small horizontal opening. Without a word, Mrs. Hadley shoved the plate through and held it there. I stepped forward and took it from her. The plate was heaped with some thick substance the color of rust, and lying atop the heap was a worn metal spoon.

“Thank you,” I said.

She crossed her arms and said, “They want to know. Upstairs. If you're ready to tell the truth.”

“I've already told the truth.”

She nodded, as though this were exactly the mulish answer she had expected. She pointed a bony finger toward the food. “Either eat it or give it back. I'm waiting right here.”

I sat back down on the cot.

The rust-colored substance was beans, boiled nearly beyond recognition but cold now.

Although I had not eaten since last night, I believed that I owed it to John to spurn whatever food these people offered me. I hated beans, and my good intentions should have prevailed. But, like most of my good intentions, they failed me. I started scooping up the beans and shoveling them down. The body, as we learn over time, does not really care much about our good intentions.

Mrs. Hadley had been watching me. I placed the spoon in the empty plate, stood up, walked to the door, and slid the plate back through the opening in the door.

“When can I see a lawyer?” I asked her.

She sniffed. “When you start telling the truth,” she said.

She lifted the plate and then walked away, her shoes clapping at the floor, her keys jangling. I stepped back to the cot.

Once again, her footsteps ebbed into the distance. And then, just as the sound stopped, all the lights went out.

My heart slammed against my chest.

At home, in hotels, in John's apartment, everywhere I had ever slept, in all of my life, there had always been some residual light seeping into the room from somewhere. From beneath the door, from between the curtain and the wall. Even starlight, sifting through the draperies, can soften the darkness.

But there were no windows down here. The darkness in that cell was absolute. I could see nothing at all; it was as though the cell, the city, the world had ceased to exist. Or I had.

I sat there, listening to my heartbeat, willing it to slow.

It would not.

I was alone, utterly alone, in the utter blackness. Around me there was only the silence and the stink of disinfectant.

But worse than being alone in the darkness, of course, is the realization that you are not alone.

And, very soon, over the thumping of my heart, I began to hear other sounds.

A low mechanical mutter, as of some distant machinery.

A faint scratching sound, not so far away. Someone in another cell?

A scrabbling sound, much closer, of tiny claws scratching on stone. And then again, closer still. Something scuttling along the concrete nearby.

Rats
.

Once again my heart juddered.

The scrabbling sound came again, nearer this time.

I tried to quell fear with reason. They were only rats.

What, then, did I know about rats?

They were mammals, yes. They were filthy, sodden with sewage, and once upon a time they had carried the plague. I recalled stories from the war, of men in trenches falling into exhausted slumber and awakening to find their fingers gnawed away.

Reason was not doing an especially good job of quelling. It seldom does.

Another scrabbling sound. Even closer.

I knew that they were in the cell with me, scurrying along the floor, thirsty, hungry.

I swung my feet up onto the cot and held my breath.

I have no idea how long I stayed awake. Today I cannot reckon how long it might have taken a rather spoiled young girl, frazzled by the events of the day, to overcome her fears—or be overcome by them—and finally fall asleep.

Possibly by that point in the night I was so weary that I simply surrendered, reaching a point at which I decided that the rats could have me.

But fall asleep I did. I know this because, sometime later, I was suddenly awakened.

The lights were on, seemingly brighter than before, and footsteps were rattling toward me. More than one set of footsteps.

It was Mrs. Hadley once again, but this time she was not alone. With her was a girl, perhaps eighteen years old, an inch or two shorter than I but much broader through the torso. She wore a frayed white cotton shirt, gray at the collar; a pair of denim overalls; and heavy black lace-up boots, scuffed and scratched. Beneath her straight black hair, cut in the shape of a large inverted soup bowl, her dark face was broad and heavy—small hooded brown eyes, a snub nose, and a plump narrow mouth that was turned down at the corners in a permanent, sullen frown.

Mrs. Hadley smiled at me. Sweetly. “We brought you a little friend. This is Ramona. Ramona, say hello to Amanda.”

From beneath her fringe of black hair, the girl merely glowered at me.

Mrs. Hadley plucked the keys from her belt, unlocked the door, swung it open, and turned to Ramona. The girl entered, looked coldly down at me on my cot, and then turned to face the door. Mrs. Hadley pushed it shut, locked it, and went off, her shoes
clip-clopping
.

This time the lights stayed on. I wasn't sure whether this was a good or a bad thing.

When the sound of Mrs. Hadley had died away, the girl turned back to me. She glanced down at my pumps, which I had set beside the cot. She glanced over at the other cot. Then she looked directly at me.

“That's my bed,” she said. “Get out.”

For a second or two I was baffled. I could see no reason for anyone to prefer one cot over the other.

Then I realized that the cots were not her real concern. Her real concern was establishing the dynamics of power in that cramped gray room.

One might think that a sixteen-year-old girl such as myself would know nothing of the dynamics of power. But there are few places better to learn about it than a Boston finishing school like the one I had been attending for the past few years.

Carefully, I eased back the covers. I sat up and put my stocking feet onto the cold concrete floor. I stood.

Ramona looked me over, up and down. Then she smiled—a small, cunning smile. “Real pretty,” she said.

She took a step closer to me. “We're gonna get along just fine, aren't we, pretty?” She put out her hand to touch my face.

I backed away.

Her plump lips turned down again. “Maybe I gotta teach ya how,” she said, moving toward me.

Three years before, during the investigation of my first stepmother's murder, I had spent time with a squat, balding Pinkerton detective named Harry Boyle. We had talked about many things as we drove around that small seaside town, and one of them had been self-defense.

“When you know someone wants to hurt you,” he said, looking out at the road, “what you got to do is hit him first, and hit him as hard as you can.”

He had explained the technique: a knee to the groin, a grab of the hair, then a dash toward the nearest wall, smacking the head into it:
klonk
.

“What about a girl?” I asked him.

The car hit a pothole, and the steering wheel bucked lightly in his hand. He swung it gently back to center and looked at me. “If it's a girl wants to hurt you?”

“Yes.”

Another nod. “A stomach punch. Right below the rib cage. You don't aim for the stomach, see. You aim for a few inches behind it. You aim for the spine, and you put all your weight behind it. Everything you got. That'll double her right up. Then you do the same thing with the hair.” He looked at me. “Straight into the wall.”