Nightbird (27 page)

Valentine Carlson, once a promising infielder in the Milwaukee Braves organization, retired from the Tampa PD into his own
investigative firm. His “offices” were located in a rusting travel trailer on a forgotten corner off Route 175 outside Gulfport.
The blue sign above the trailer read, “Honest Val’s: Used Cars and Discreet Investigations.” A dozen old cars sat in the sandy
lot in front of the trailer. Not one of the grimy vehicles had rolled off its respective assembly line subsequent to the presidency
of Jimmy Carter.

When Danny drove up, Carlson was stretched out in a hammock on his porch, reading the sports page. He wore a green Hawaiian
shirt covered with toucans. The porch was a flatbed truck backed up to the trailer door.

“Welcome to Honest Val’s,” he said, extending his hand, as Danny came up the makeshift stairs to the wooden truck bed. “Finest
auto showroom in the subtropics.”

As if he’d sensed Danny’s need, Honest Val Carlson moved to his ice chest with the grace of a shortstop going into the hole.
He had a deepwater tan and a big smile and looked too young to be retired. Only the gray on top hinted that the engine might
have a few more miles than it appeared from the body.

Danny accepted a seven-ounce Coronita and brushed ice chips onto the truck-bed floor. He sat across from his host on the backseat
of a late fifties Chevy. Like his yard adornments, Honest Val’s porch furniture had its origins in Detroit.

“How’s the car business?” Danny said.

“See something you like? I can put you in the car of your dreams. Low credit, no credit, don’t matter to me. Get you out of
that rice burner, into a real machine.”

“These cars drivable?”

“Probably not even pushable,” Honest Val said. “About six months ago a guy stopped, looking to buy. He wanted to cannibalize
that Fairlane for parts. I chased him.”

“Business is so good you’re chasing customers away.”

“The last car sold here was in 1988, the year my dad died.”

Carlson said his father was the original Honest Val. He’d inherited the nickname, the auto business, a huge Hawaiian shirt
collection, and a love for life. The original Honest Val had taught him everything about life except how to hit a curve-ball.

“I worked here as a spinner when I was a kid, turning back odometers,” Val said. “By the time I was fifteen I had standing
arrangements with every major car dealer in the country. Made more money rolling back miles than I did in triple-A ball.”

The beer tasted good, as a cold Mexican brew always did on a hot, hungover morning. The seven ounces went quickly, and Danny
was tempted to reach for another. But he thought better of it.

“I came down here after the funeral,” Val said, gesturing at the trailer behind him. “You could still smell his cigar. This
place was a clubhouse more than anything else. Him and his buddies. They’d play cards, have a few beers, work on tout sheets.
Laugh… Jesus, those guys would laugh. They’d all pile in that big red Caddy and head for the dog track. I couldn’t let it
go. So I retired and opened this dynamic PI business.”

Danny made a call to Joe Gregory to see if Ryan had surfaced. He hadn’t. They left in Honest Val’s old pickup; he refused
to ride in the rice burner. They drove south toward Sarasota on the Sunshine Skyway, the Gulf of Mexico vast on the right.
Below Bradenton they picked up Route 70 and headed inland toward Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. Honest Val began the
story.

“Lynette gave birth to Faye in a Chevy Impala in the parking lot of the Pier House Hotel in Key West,” Honest Val said. “The
Impala had the keys in it, so she turned on the AC and gave birth. Security called the cops. Lynette and the baby went to
the hospital for a couple of hours. Then she split with the baby. She walked back to the hotel parking lot. See, they never
took the car keys from her. While the town was toasting the sunset, fifteen-year-old Lynette stole the same Impala and drove
straight here with the baby.”

“Why here?”

“Lynnette grew up in St. Pete. She knew the convent was back here.”

“What convent?” Danny said. “ ‘Sisters of the Swamp’?”

Danny didn’t see any signs of a convent as Honest Val made the left down a gravel road cut in the cattails and marsh grass.
They drove about a mile past an “Alligator Crossing” sign. The Convent of the Blessed Sacrament was hidden in a grove of dormant
orange trees, marked only by a rusting mailbox atop a wooden post.

“The only thing Lynnette Stone told me when she first called,” Honest Val said, “was that she placed the baby on this doorstep.
She rang the doorbell and ran. She waited in the stolen Impala until a nun came to the door. Then she floored it and never
looked back.”

The doorstep was a red brick patio under the shade of a
ramada
, the slats heavily braided with shiny green vines. Danny got out and took half a dozen pictures. Except for a wooden cross
on the wall, the building was not overtly parochial. Just a simple Sun Belt stucco with a red tile roof.

Inside, it was cool and dark as a cathedral. They followed Sister Mary Celeste down a long hallway as she proudly filled them
in on the order. Once strictly a cloister, Blessed Sacrament now served as a retirement home for the exploding population
of aging nuns. Mostly they sewed altar cloths and vestments and baked for the archdiocese. Honest Val’s sneakers squeaked
on the hardwood floor.

They entered a round room with a high arching ceiling and three metal filing cabinets. It smelled of candle wax and abstinence.
A long oak table sat in the center. On the ceiling was a mural depicting thirteen nuns of the order beheaded during the French
Revolution. Sister Mary Celeste opened a folder and spread it out on the table.

“This was the information we showed Mr. Carlson when he was last here,” she said softly. “It’s all we have. Faith only stayed
with us for a few hours. We had to call the police. We had no facilities to care for such a small child. The county took her.
Social Services.”

“I thought her name was Faye,” Danny said.

The nun put her finger to her lips, the universal Catholic school warning to lower your voice. The first warning.

“I’ve heard she calls herself Faye now,” the nun said, almost whispering. “But Faith is her birth name. The county asked Sister
Mary Elizabeth to name her, and she picked Faith. It’s the name on her birth and baptismal certificates. Sister Mary Elizabeth
has gone on to her reward, but she kept in contact with Faith for many, many years. She thought a lot of the child.”

“What about the name Boudreau?” Danny said.

“As you see in this entry,” the nun said, “Faith was adopted by the Boudreaus at the age of three months. The Boudreaus were
a circus family from Canada. Dancing bears. Sister Mary Elizabeth was worried about the baby, with the bears and all. We prayed
for her, and hoped all would be well.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Not because of the bears. Mrs. Boudreau died of breast cancer when Faith was five, just starting school. Her husband disappeared
soon after. He left Faith with the neighbors and just vanished. They found zoos for the bears.”

Danny was startled when he heard noise directly behind him. What he thought was a wall was really a black screen. He could
make out the dark habits of the sisters as they rose from their knees, rosary beads clattering. They came around the screen
and walked through the room, smiling and nodding politely. Nine ancient Marys with ebony crosses on their chests.
Give me nine Hail Marys
, Groucho whispered.

“Where did Faith wind up?” he said.

“In foster care, with the Nuñez family. A trapeze act. Lovely people.”

Danny’s head was foggy, but he remembered the list he’d copied off the mailbox at 210 Echo Place in the Bronx. He took out
the Neary’s cocktail napkin. Nuñez was not on the list. He used the convent phone to make one more call to Gregory’s office.
Gregory was out in the field, and he couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone else. On the way out, past the kitchen, he
could smell communion wafers baking.

W
ednesday morning a tropical storm moving up the coast brought wind and rain to New York City. Anthony Ryan in his Ma Bell
windbreaker and bloody chinos stood at the corner of Broadway and Forty-seventh under the overhang of the Morgan Stanley Building.
Times Square was a sea of black umbrellas. Taxis pulled their foul-weather fade. Street people wore paper-bag hats, neatly
cuffed. Some chose plastic as their headgear and tied the bag handles around their ears. Ryan’s head was covered by his Yankee
hat, which also hid a gash that should have been stitched. His hair, gelled and sticky with dried blood, curled around the
bottom edge of the sweatband. His right hand was broken.

Across the street, Trey Winters remained in his office in the dingy Theater Guild Building. Ryan waited. He figured they’d
meet in Scorza’s office above the Orpheus Lounge or a neutral location like a restaurant. The odds were that he’d be walking
west toward Eighth Avenue. He had set himself up so he’d be behind Winters. A tailman anticipated, bet with the odds. Fifty
stories above Ryan’s head the electronic ticker of stock market prices raced in three huge, Vegas-like bands of yellow lights.

Ryan leaned against the skyscraper’s green metal squares and realized he was hungry. That had to be a good sign. He’d called
Leigh, told her he was fine but tied up on a case. She hadn’t even pretended to believe him. They’d lived together more than
half their lives, and Leigh saw through his most artful stories. He wasn’t sure how much she’d intuited, but he didn’t tell
her he’d been hurt. And he certainly didn’t mention he’d spent the night in Faye Boudreau’s bed.

He remembered Faye pulling him onto the bed. He remembered being sick, and Faye cleaning his face and bloody scalp with a
damp cloth. In the morning she and her suitcase were gone, and he had more questions than ever.

Who was Victor? What money were they talking about? Was it possible they were working with Winters or Scorza? His head itched
and ached. He reached his hand up to touch it as Trey Winters came out of the office door.

Quickly Ryan came off the green metal and began backing up. Winters fooled him, turning east, walking directly toward him.
Ryan ducked around the corner into the driving rain. He looked for an alley or nook, but before he could find one Winters
entered the huge office building Ryan had been leaning against.

Ryan needed to take only a few steps to the glass doors to watch Winters traverse the block-long lobby. The center of the
lobby’s marble floor was empty, roped off to limit damage from wet feet and dripping umbrellas. A path of carpet steered all
traffic around to the left. Ryan lost sight of Winters. He wondered if he was heading for the elevators, but then he came
around, back into view. He’d made a half circle. He was cutting through the building in the rain. When Winters got to the
revolving doors on the other side, he stopped and looked behind him. Then he exited onto Forty-eighth Street.

Ryan ran directly across the center of the lobby as a security guard yelled, “Hey, yo! Hey, yo!” He reached the north door
in time to see Winters cross the street and pull the same stunt again. This time he used the covered driveway entrance of
the Crowne Plaza Hotel as his personal umbrella. The hotel underpass led all the way through the block. Ryan waited, listening
to the
whoomf, whoomf
of the revolving door. Winters was using all the shortcuts to avoid rain on his expensive haircut, and he was looking back
continuously.

Winters turned left on Forty-ninth. In the rain and against moving traffic, Ryan dashed across to the hotel underpass. He
could smell the chlorine from the waterfall on the west wall, the water echoing as if in a cave. Slamming taxi doors reverberated
like bombs going off in his head. He got to Forty-ninth in time to see Winters duck into St. Malachy’s Church. The Actor’s
Chapel.

Ryan was breathing hard when he got to the church and looked through the glass doors. Reflected in the glass was the hot pink
exterior of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, across the street, behind him. He could read the graffiti painted on the building
for the run of
Grease
. Rama lama dingitty ding da dong, wah, wah, wah. Backward it looked like Latin.

He slid into a pew, behind a pillar, opposite the ninth station of the cross. Jesus falls the third time. He removed his hat
and a little skin with it. With his fingers he wiped a trickle of blood near his hairline. A few worshipers were scattered
in the angled pews. One was a cop in uniform, kneeling in a front pew. An old woman just looking into space. And on the altar,
a priest in a baby blue cardigan sweater puttered near the tabernacle, softly whistling “Stardust.”

Opposite the pews a few dozen folding chairs had been set up for sold-out performances. Stars floated on a blue ceiling, angels
flew in the curves of the arches, spotlights angled down from the pillars. On the seat next to him was a brochure, the history
of the Actor’s Chapel. He picked it up as the uniformed cop blessed himself and came down the center aisle.

The cop looked hard at Ryan, probably sizing him up as a local drunk grabbing a few minutes’ peace. Ryan kept reading: a list
of former altar boys, including Jimmy Durante and Don Ameche; the funeral of Valentino; the wedding of Joan Crawford and Douglas
Fairbanks Jr. Ms. Crawford signing her name Lucille Le Sueur. The cop walked around a white marble baptismal font the size
of a hot tub and out the door.

Ryan stood up and started looking for other exits. He wondered if Winters had merely cut through again. If so, he’d won; he’d
beaten the tailman. Ryan walked around to see if he could pick up a trace of fresh raindrops or wet shoes on the hardwood
parquet. Then he saw the elevator.

The elevator went up only one flight to the choir loft. Ryan pressed the button and nothing happened. He could hear the murmur
of voices echoing in the shaft. Someone was holding the door. He pressed the button again, more insistently. After a few minutes
the door closed and a motor whirred. Cables and pulleys rattled and squealed. The cab stopped. It bounced once, then balanced
itself. The door opened onto the stunned face of Trey Winters.