Where Is Bianca? (11 page)

Corrigan turned off Park Avenue and stopped Car 40 at the sidewalk canopy of the stately apartment building. The doorman glanced into the car and quickly opened the door. “Good evening, Mr. Ainsley. Mr. Ainsley?”

The actor woke up. He got out wobbling.

“I'll see you upstairs,” Jean said, “if Captain Corrigan doesn't mind waiting.” To Corrigan she added: “I'll only be a minute, Tim.”

“Take your time.”

“Good night, sir,” Ainsley said, beginning to bow and thinking better of it. “You have restored my faith in the horse marines. Or something.”

“Good night.” Corrigan watched father and daughter disappear into the building. He rubbed his nonexistent eye; it itched. It always itched when he was upset. The thought was disturbing; the fact that it was about Jean Ainsley's father also made it unpleasant.

Bianca Fielding Lessard lived just a few blocks from here. A few blocks east a manhole cover had been raised five nights ago and a dead girl disposed of in a sewer. Tonight Ainsley had been the guest of the woman whose adulterous relationship with Vincent Lessard had caused Bianca to walk out.…

When Jean returned to the car, she said, “Now you know all about me.”

Corrigan started the car. Maybe there were a few skeletons she didn't know about. “Don't worry about it. Where to?”

“How about a nightcap? I mix a mean drink if you like Scotch on the rocks or bourbon with branch.”

“I'm a nonmixer myself.”

“I live across the park,” Jean said. “On Central Park West.”

Her apartment was as he had imagined it, direct and uncluttered and warm as she was. She had made no attempt to go in for periods or styles or fads; each piece of furniture had evidently been picked for its own sake, its lines or its utility or the way it looked in the spot where she had placed it. There were bright prints on the walls, some as delicate as the Dufys, others as forthright as the Utrillos, and not a trace of abstraction or pop art or the other trends in art Corrigan despised. There was a little fireplace with a real charred log, and scatter rugs on the chestnut random-board floor (and what that floor must have cost her he tried not to think about). The fiberglass drapes let in what sun Manhattan and the across-the-way park allowed. On the mantelpiece stood a Swedish glass Madonna with lovely lines, as simple as faith, and a few pieces of Mexican pottery. The bookcase was full of books that looked as if they had been read. There was a modest stereophonic player, and a shelf of recordings.

She put Wanda Landowska softly to work on some Bach for background, seated him in a deep chair, made two drinks, and kicked a hassock toward him. “Put up your feet and loosen your tie. There's nothing as useless and ridiculous as a necktie. If I were a man, I'd simply refuse to wear one.”

“We're sheep,” Corrigan said. “Far worse than women.”

She slid her shoes off and tucked her feet under her on the raw-silk sofa. “Have you been a policeman very long?”

“One kind of cop or another just about all my life. I was in Korea, and pulled a hitch in the OSS before a New York police inspector lassoed me.”

“You love New York, Tim, don't you?”

“I'm afraid I do.”

“I've never felt at home here. I suppose it's because I grew up in California.”

“I know,” Corrigan said. “I looked into your father's background.”

“Oh,” she said, and took a sip of her bourbon.

“He seems to have done well since he was released from San Quentin.”

She laughed. “You mean that rich-bitch East Side apartment where he's staying?”

Corrigan nodded.

“It's borrowed. Daddy stayed here, with me, until recently. Do you know a man named Dmitri Karam?”

“I've heard the name. Isn't he a big wheel in television?”

“That's the one. He happens to be a friend of my father's from the old Hollywood days. In those days Dad had connections and influence, and Dmitri was just getting his toe in the studio door.”

“Your father helped him?”

She made a small, disturbed gesture. “Dmitri Karam is brilliant He even has that obsolete word, integrity. He doesn't forget his friends. He's never forgotten that Daddy helped him when he needed help.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Corrigan said. “That aspect of your father wasn't in the reports I read.”

Jean nodded slowly. “Daddy is basically a generous man. And impulsive. Like a child in many ways. He's always needed someone. He never got over losing my mother. She died when I was ten.”

And you've been his mother ever since, Corrigan thought But he did not say it.

“I won't make excuses for him, but that childlike side of him is what got him into trouble in California. He was all aglow with the prospect of breaking out of the mold of typecasting in films of his own. It was pitiful, Tim, when he realized he'd been played for a fool and that his partner had made off with the investors' money. But the thing that hurt him most was that he'd lost his chance to star. It nearly killed him.”

She made a face and suddenly laughed again. “There's something about you that brings out the true confessions in people. Here I am, ruining your evening with a lot of morbid personal talk. Is that what's made you such a success as a policeman?”

“Mother Corrigan, they call me,” Corrigan said with a grin.

“And did anybody ever tell you that you're a pretty nice guy?”

“Just my mama and a few old ladies I've helped across the street.” He felt his neck warming.

“Let me join the crowd.”

“No crowd,” Corrigan heard himself saying. “I've never met a girl I could stand for more than one night. Until I met you.”

She looked away. “I wish you wouldn't say that, Tim,” she said in a low voice.

“Because of the case I'm working on?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” he said, “but only until this Bianca-Nancy-Noreen things shapes up.” He consulted his Scotch. “Now tell me about your father and Dmitri Karam.”

“Dmitri was in Europe when the trial came up. He flew back just to appear as a character witness. When Dad was sentenced, Dmitri suggested that I might want to relocate. This was more than five years ago. Dmitri recommended me to Fielding Realty, and I had a job.

“When my father was released, he came and shared my apartment while he haunted the agents for any kind of acting job. Nobody would hire him. A few weeks go, Dmitri Karam called. He was planning a new TV series, and there was a role in it, he said, that should fit Dad perfectly. One of those second leads that offers a character actor a chance to go all-out.

“My father went to see Dmitri, and it was like the old days. He and Dmitri put their heads together over the series idea and the treatment almost around the clock.

“Then one of those foul-ups occurred in a film Karam was shooting in Europe, and he had to fly over there. That was a couple of weeks ago. Dmitri maintains the East Side apartment the year round, and he invited Daddy to live there, continuing script and idea development on the TV thing.”

“When is Karam due back?” Corrigan asked.

“In about ten days.”

The way she said it put Corrigan on the alert. “You sound as if you dread his return, Jean.”

“Maybe I do,” she said, wrinkling her little nose. “Everything was going so beautifully when Dmitri had to take off. Dad was getting back his old zing. But as soon as Dmitri left, he went on a bender. A bartender who knew him phoned me. I searched high and low before I located him.” She shivered. “In a buggy flophouse, the most horrible place I ever saw. I sobered him up, and just before you came to my office that first time Carlton was there, assuring me it wouldn't happen again.”

“It will, I'm afraid,” Corrigan said.

“Don't you think I know it?” she cried. “Something's eating away at him, Tim. That mess tonight in Fran's apartment—it would never have happened if Dad were himself. He gets belligerent only when he's scared.”

“What would he be scared about?” Corrigan asked, wondering if certain grim possibilities had occurred to her.

“I don't
know
. Maybe it's that he's lost confidence in himself. I thought he'd regained it during that session with Dmitri, but it could have been a false confidence that left him the minute Dmitri had to go back to Europe. To let himself get involved in a brawl with that dreadful blond boy!”

“The character was baiting him, and your father'd had too much to drink.”

“That wasn't the real cause. I know the signs.” For the first time, bitterness crept into Jean's voice. “I've had plenty of practice reading them.… Sometimes I wonder if I haven't hurt Dad as much as I've helped him.”

“How so?”

“By babying him. Maybe I should have let him battle out his own problems.”

Baby, Corrigan thought, you don't know what problems he may have!

11

Meisenheimer, Detective Second Grade, was waiting in the 10 × 12 office when Corrigan passed through the Main Office Squad room the next morning. A big man with bushy gray hair and mustache and a meerschaum usually fuming at his lips, Meisenheimer was absorbed in one of the police periodicals from the stack on the table beside the filing cabinet.

The detective rose as Corrigan came in, and immediately sat down again to relight his pipe. “It can wait a minute, Tim. Go ahead and check your mail and the morning report.”

Corrigan got his chores out of the way quickly. Then he said, “Okay, Meis. Let's have it.”

“We went all the way back to Nancy Gavin's beginning,” Meisenheimer said. “Nancy and her mother Anna moved from dump to dump, each time a little dumpier. The old gal was a boozer and a nympho. The kid grew up like a scorpion. By the time Nancy ran away, Anna had wandered to Greenpoint in Brooklyn, where some rummy Don Juan paid her rent for a while.

“They lived in a cockroach-infested flat over a hole-in-the-wall Italian grocery store. Under all those hanging cheeses I found an old Italian woman who remembers everything that's happened in the neighborhood for a quarter of a century. She came up with the name of the slug who hustled Nancy off. Mrs. Vermicetti remembers his name well, she says, because her husband—he died last year—couldn't stand the idea of a guy forty-five years old running after a fifteen-year old, and the old man told this crumb off but good.”

“And you've traced the man?”

“Traced him? I've worn my legs down to the knees. He's right in your morning report. James Darson. The sheet on him is a yard long, all the same charge. Only a legal lobotomy, or castration, or both, is going to stop the creep.”

Corrigan went back to the morning report:

…
James Darson. Age 55, arrested on suspicion of molesting a minor child, female … complaint made by mother of child, Mary Menendez, 243 East Ninety-sixth Street
.…

Corrigan dropped the report on his desk. “Let's take a look at Darson in the line-up.”

The line-up room on the fourth floor was in its usual prebusiness state of chaos. Detectives stood about, smoking and comparing notes, while prisoners were being brought into the bullpen.

Snatches of talk went by Corrigan's ear:

… When I made the collar it wasn't the punk who gave me trouble, it was his girl friend.…

… Three decks of horse on him.…

… Hit a lamppost with a stolen car and the door handle flew off and went straight into the face of this old lady on the sidewalk.…

… Six inches of steel in his switchblade, and I like my liver the way it is, so I hit him with the gun barrel and broke his arm, and now that crew uptown are trying to get a charge of brutality slapped on me.…

At the wooden table near the platform, Lieutenant McHenry blew against the microphone to test it.

“All right, all right! Let's bring them in.”

Corrigan reached the table just as McHenry made the announcement. The room was settling into quiet McHenry glanced up. “Hi, Tim.”

Corrigan put his palm over the microphone. “You've got a James Darson this morning. I want to talk to him in an interrogation room.”

“Now?”

“No, the arresting officers need their sleep to pull night duty. What I want to discuss with this Darson goes back ten years. It can wait a few minutes.”

Corrigan eased from the table to a nearby chair.

The interrogation room was furnished with a table, four straight chairs, and a fluorescent light mounted in the ceiling.

Corrigan was leaning against the edge of the table and Meisenheimer against the wall, filling his pipe, when James Darson was brought in by a patrolman. The patrolman closed the door and put his back to it.

Close up, Darson was even more repulsive than he had looked in the line-up, an obese man with the features of a pig and a blotched, greasy bald head.

“Sit down, Darson,” Corrigan said.

Darson backed into a chair, overflowing it. His little bloodshot eyes, imbedded in fat, flicked from Corrigan to Meisenheimer. “Look, that Menendez woman has a grudge against me. She's using her kid to get me. I never touched the kid. I swear it!”

“This has nothing to do with your arrest last night,” Corrigan said.

“No?” The little eyes became cautious. “You trying to make a deal?”

“Not with you, friend.”

Corrigan's change of tone was unsettling. Darson heaved to his feet. “Listen, I got a right to a lawyer, I want a lawyer.”

“Sit down,” Meisenheimer said. His voice had ice on it, too. “Nobody's getting hurt. The captain is just going to refresh your memory.”

“Of a girl named Nancy Gavin,” Corrigan said.

“Never heard.”

“You're a liar,” Meisenheimer said, “and we can prove it. Wise up, Darson. This time the truth won't hurt you. We just want information.”

Darson searched their faces. “What's the pitch?”