SoHo Sins (33 page)

“Daddy?”

“No.” I answered her under my breath: “No, honey. It’s Uncle Jack.”

“Oh good, I’m not dreaming. It’s you.”

“Your mother asked me to check.”

“She did? You didn’t want to see me yourself?”

“More than you know.” Groping in the dark, I found the tangled blanket and sheet. I straightened them with my good hand, guiding her leg underneath.

“That feels so nice,” she said.

“The covers?”

“Your hand, Uncle Jack.”

“I’m going now.”

“No one ever stays with me. Why?”

“Maybe someday, Missy.”

“Someday you’ll stay, or someday I’ll know why you don’t?”

“Yes, one of those.” I took a step back and paused, listening as her breathing deepened.

“Night, night, love,” she said. “Kiss me.”

My own breathing slowed.

“I did once,” I lied. “You’ve forgotten already.”

“Oh? I’m sorry. One more.”

She was not really awake, and I did not bother to explain. What could I say, anyhow?

“Please, Uncle Jack.”

It was her last plea, arising out of a dream. As she sank into sleep again, I turned and closed the door of the bedroom behind me and walked back to the dim living room.

Settling, depleted, into the chair, I poured another scotch and watched the liquor turn the melting ice cubes to amber. I breathed in the fumes with each sip.

In this world, I thought, the world where Melissa sleeps, there has to be limit, a boundary you don’t cross.

Well, obviously, I had done as well with that resolution as with all the rest. Face it, Jack, the crossing begins the moment you first imagine, too vividly, just how the encounter would unfold, what you would see, how forbidden and good it would feel. The beauty, the excitement. That was sin. Even if you’re an artist—or, like me, an artists’ pimp.

And I’m not even the worst. I thought of the
Virgin Sacrifice
audience, those eager perverts watching expectantly for the climactic moment, fast-forwarding to El Burro’s clinch. At least I had never rooted for someone with Paul’s disease to succeed, never waited with delirious longing for the violation to occur. Which is more than some people can say, including those who might presume to judge me.

I was losing count of my drinks.

Oddly, intoxication was my small moral victory that evening. It distracted me. In my hour of greatest temptation, I did not yield to the worst urgings of my impure heart.

Are there virtues of inaction, I wondered, just as there are sins of omission? I would have to ask Hogan.

One thing was certain, no one will ever know the pain it cost me—that simple act of forbearance on a cold night at the end of November years ago. Was it a great accomplishment? Was it even worth mentioning? Probably not. But it has enabled me to look back at my life without utter revulsion.

I got up and paced the room, touching small random objects, forbidding my feet to turn toward the guestroom and Melissa.

I ended up by the high windows, looking out, seeing nothing.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
That was one of the verses Hogan had e-mailed me from that damned bible he reads too much, the black leather-bound volume that almost falls apart in his hands. Now the words were stuck in my head.

Well, I had an answer: I can know it—my desperately wicked heart. After so many nights lying alone in the dark, sleepless, I have gotten thoroughly familiar with its every weakness and quirk. I know my deceitful heart very well.

Better make a list of all your little moral victories, Jack. No, not later. Right now.

Surely there had to be some.

Let’s see, I may have failed my wife, terribly, but at least I had acted—or failed to act—out of emotional injury, not out of malice. Over the years, I had even managed to do a proper thing or two with Hogan, for people like Mandy, Angela, and Melissa. I felt I could meet Philip’s criterion: my accounts were square.

That was all. Still, it seemed like a reasonable tally for a guy in the world I inhabited—a flawed man adrift among faithless lovers and hustlers, in a vast city, alone….Or so I thought as I stood by the windows and watched the wet snowfall and waited for Angela.

Just as I turned and started to walk back across that enormous dark room, I heard a knock at my door.

Angela swept into the loft, late and ashen, glancing around quickly.

“Melissa’s quiet tonight, is she? Thank goodness.”

She took the girl’s vacant spot on the couch.

“I’m doing everything for Philip now,” she said. “Claudia has nearly abandoned him, and his old mother is useless. The damn biddy can’t grasp that her son is dying before her, just like her husband.”

“It’s a lot to take in.”

“Tell me. But blanking out is just a cheat.”

Angela joined me in a last drink, rehearsing her woes.

Few visitors relieved her these days, even momentarily. Claudia appeared less and less often, standing helplessly among the IV stanchions and monitors, holding Philip’s hand sometimes but unable to speak to him, crying. She watched, tight-lipped, as his ex-wife lifted his bony hips onto a bedpan. Angela comforted the girl. She told Claudia what few coherent phrases her wasted lover,
their
dear one, had uttered in the course of the day. She said not to worry, that Philip would want her to go on with her life and career.

Much later, I would learn that Claudia was granted nothing from the estate—possibly because Philip’s dementia had set in before he could get around to making a codicil, possibly because he actually wanted things that way, to square his accounts. Nevertheless, his lover did all right for herself. Claudia’s family had a little money of its own, and after the publicity of the Oliver case her career soared for a few years. Her work was featured in international surveys from Germany to Japan to Australia, before she faded from the art press and the galleries, from critical consciousness altogether, after becoming the wife of a famous auto manufacturer in Turin.

But that was still the unknowable future, as Angela and I sat—fatigued and drinking—in the Wooster Street loft that cold night.

“How’s Melissa?” she asked. “Did the two of you have a good time tonight?”

“Yes.”

“What a relief. I was hoping you might.”

I couldn’t make sense of her facial expression. Resolved to tell her what had happened, I began by explaining that Paul was even worse than she had suspected. I filled her in on his relationship with Amanda, on the Balthus Club, on
Virgin Sacrifice
—and on his plan for Melissa. Finally, I described the Crosby Street party.

“How could you, Jack?” Angela said. “I can’t believe you used Missy that way.”

“It’s not like that.”

“No? Wheedling Mandy’s laptop away from her. Dangling her in front of Paul like fresh bait.”

“I know how it sounds. But I didn’t really use Melissa. If anything, I kept her from being used.”

Angela was too spent, too deeply outraged, to argue. The weight of it all—the failure of her show, Philip’s dismal condition, my recklessness with her daughter—all of it seemed to crush her now. She fixed me with her weary, red-rimmed eyes.

“You’ve never been a father, Jack. You’ll never understand.”

“No, I won’t.”

“This is no lark for me, this damn SoHo life. I’m not a gypsy like you. I have a child to raise. It’s what I live for now.”

She must have felt utterly abandoned in that moment. I had deceived her, Melissa was growing smugly independent, and her beloved Philip was about to fade out of her life for a second and final time.

Over the months that followed, Philip’s slipping away from Angela, from life itself—through a protracted round of vomiting, spinal pain, hallucinations, and morphine—was neither fast nor decorous, though it was faster than the doctors predicted. The disease took over his being, and he was spared no bodily humiliation: dribbling oatmeal on his chest, spilling cups of pills, staining himself repeatedly with excrement.

Nevertheless, my friend would eventually manage to accomplish his dying rather bravely—for Angela’s sake, I think. Although he did not know who she was, Philip intuited that this woman would remain by his side to the end. Someone would be there to watch his face, to hold his thin hand as he died. Occasionally he called her, weakly, “dear child.” When others turned away, in sadness or disgust, his ex-wife stuck with him—stubbornly, unquestioningly—through the last fetid days.

For that loyalty, for those tortuous hours, I was ready to forgive Angela almost anything.

On Christmas Eve, Hogan called at about ten o’clock. He had gotten stuck late at his office and, sure that I wouldn’t be doing much that night, invited me out for a drink. We had steaks and beers at Fanelli’s, amid the old boxing pictures, and when the waitress laid our bill on the checkerboard cloth, Hogan picked it up.

“I owe you one,” he said.

“Thanks, I’m not sure for what.”

“For serving up Paul Morse.”

“It doesn’t seem like so much.”

Hogan grinned at me, an unusual sight. “A Christmas present came today. The porno bust gave the cops probable cause to search the creep’s loft. You know, confirming residence, looking for additional evidence. McGuinn’s vice squad pals found plenty, too. Rows and rows of
Virgin Sacrifice
tapes lined up on the hallway bookshelves. And behind them, a gun.”

“Amanda Oliver’s?”

“Same serial number.”

“With Paul’s prints on it?”

“No, it was wiped clean.”

“But why the hell would Paul keep it?”

“Another half-ass job,” Hogan sniffed. “That’s how it is with amateurs. They figure out how to kill—or they just lose their cool and do it, blow somebody away in a frenzy—but then they suck at the cover-up.”

I thought I understood. “That’s where the real art lies, right? In disguising your crime.”

“It’s not so easy, Jack. Murder is a big, scary thing. Most people, their heart starts pounding, their mind rushes. Adrenaline kind of short-circuits the brain. They screw up like Morse—take the incriminating laptop away, but stash it with a friend. Muster enough sense to buff down the gun, but not enough to deep-six it somewhere far away.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought it out.”

“That’s my job.”

I nodded. “Still, I wish we had a clearer idea of why Mandy was shot. Sure, she threatened to turn Paul in for the
Virgin Sacrifice
scheme. But he could have sweet-talked her out of that. He didn’t have to murder her—not when a little more sex would have kept her quiet.”

Hogan looked away across the sparsely populated room. “Why does anyone kill?” he said. “For that matter, why does anyone die?” He paused for a second, as if waiting, not for the first time, for an answer that did not come. “I’m still working on that one. For now, let’s have another beer.”

Once the two bottles of Rolling Rock came, I asked him if Philip was in the clear once and for all.

“The cops won’t give him a second thought anymore,” Hogan said. “They’ve got Morse in the crosshairs now. I ran into McGuinn in here the other night, fairly gone. He blurted.”

“Anything you didn’t expect?”

“Just the tidiness of it. The Homicide boys don’t usually get so lucky.”

“Such as?”

“Ballistics did a test. The gun is a perfect match. Same barrel grooves as on the slugs that killed Mandy. The DNA inside the lady was Morse’s, too, like he’d already admitted.”

“No more surprises then.”

“There better not be.”

Glancing around at the bar’s hardcore loners, I avoided Hogan’s eyes.

“What does Paul have to say?” I asked.

“The usual. That he never saw the gun before. He has no idea how it got there. What else would you expect him to say?”

“He could confess, like Philip.”

“He’s not that crazy.”

“No,” I admitted. “Not that honest, either.”

Hogan raised his bottle. “Anyway, the cops have pulled him off the streets, away from Melissa Oliver and other young girls.” He drank deeply. “Once they get the porno and prostitution convictions, he’ll be on ice for a long, long time. They’ll have years, if they need them, to build a solid murder case against him.”

“Makes the prosecutor’s job easy.”

“That’s right.”

He sat in silence for a few moments while I poured half my beer into a glass.

“You know,” I said, “there’s just one thing that bothers me.”

The news did not make Hogan look happy.

“We never completely accounted for Angela’s time on the day of the murder.”

I expected a quick response but instead got nothing. Not even a blink.

“Suppose little Melissa fibbed to us,” I said. “Either because she was forced to or because she just wanted to protect her mother.”

“What if she did?”

“Angela would have had plenty of time to get back and forth between Westchester and SoHo. Then the girl might have covered for her afterwards—that whole yoga and cookies bit—until the heat from you and McGuinn got too intense. Or until she found the computer in Angela’s room.”

“Yeah, go on.”

“Then Melissa—with or without her mother—might have decided to shift the blame to Paul Morse, after he came on to her, wanting her cherry.”

As Hogan leaned forward slowly, his jacket gapped open and I saw the butt of his gun appear and disappear.

“Forget it,” he said. “They’ve got no case against Angela. No evidence to compare to the stolen nine millimeter or to Paul’s misplaced semen and his big urge to get his hands on Mandy’s laptop. No e-mail link.”

I said nothing for a while. Finally, when the other conversations around us picked up in volume, I reminded Hogan of an awkward fact.

“That’s not exactly true, you know. Mandy wrote Angela to ask for a meeting.”

“That’s right, Flash. But Angela explained everything. To you, to me. And eventually to McGuinn.”

“Most times, you’re not so easily sold.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Just that Angela is quite a persuasive person, once you get to know her the way you did.”

“And?”