A Ticket to the Boneyard

Page 23

"I get the point."
"You want to get a handle on the Third Step? Here's a two-point program for you. A- just turn over the small stuff. B- it's all small stuff."
"Thanks," I said.
"You all right, Matt? You're not going to drink, are you?"
"No. I'm not going to drink."
"Then you're all right."
"Yeah, I'm terrific," I said. "You know, someday I'm going to call you and you're going to tell me what I want to hear."
"Entirely possible. But the day that happens is the day you better get yourself another sponsor."
I checked the desk around six and there was a message to call Joe Durkin. He'd left for the day but I had his home number. "I just thought you'd want to know," he said. "I talked to the assistant medical examiner and he said forget it. He said it was hard to tell where one of them started and the other left off. He said, 'Tell your friend to go up to the top of the Empire State Building and throw down a grapefruit. Then tell him to go on down to the sidewalk and try to figure out what part of Florida it came from.' "
"Well, we tried," I said. "That's the important thing."
I hung up, thinking that Jim would have been proud of me. My attitude was improving by leaps and bounds, and any minute now I'd be a prime candidate for canonization.
Of course it didn't change anything. We still had nothing, and were going nowhere.
I went to a meeting that night.
My feet, creatures of habit, started heading for St. Paul's shortly after eight. I got to within a block of the big old church and something stopped me.
I wondered whom I'd be endangering by showing up there.
The thought sent a chill through me, as though someone had drawn a piece of chalk squeaking across the Great Blackboard in the Sky. My aunt Peg, God rest her, would have said that a goose just walked over my grave.
I felt like a leper, a Typhoid Mary, carrying a virus that could turn the innocent into homicide victims. For the first time since I'd walked in the door, it was unsafe for me to go to a meeting of my home group. Not unsafe for me, but unsafe for others.
I told myself it didn't make sense, but I couldn't shake the feeling. I turned and retreated to the corner of Fifty-eighth and Ninth and tried to think straight. It was Tuesday. Who else had a meeting on Tuesday night?
I caught a cab and got out at Cabrini Hospital, on East Twentieth. The meeting was in a conference room on the third floor. The speaker had a full head of wavy gray hair and an engaging smile. He was a former advertising account executive and he had been married six times. He had sired a total of fourteen children with his various wives, and he had not filed an income-tax return since 1973.
"Things got a little out of hand," he said.
Now he was a sporting-goods salesman in a discount retail store on Park Avenue South, and he lived alone. "All my life I was afraid of being alone," he said, "and now I've discovered that I like it."
Good for you, I thought.
There was no one I knew at the meeting, although there were a few familiar faces in the room. I didn't raise my hand during the discussion and I ducked out before the closing prayer, slipping away without saying a word to anybody.
It was cold out. I walked a few blocks, then caught a bus.
Jacob was on duty, and he told me I'd had some phone calls. I glanced at my box. There was nothing in it.
"She didn't leave a message."
"It was a woman?"
"Believe so. Same one each time, asked for you, said she would call back. Seems like she calls every fifteen, twenty minutes."
I went upstairs and called Elaine, but it hadn't been her. We talked for a few minutes. Then I hung up and the phone rang.
The voice was a rich contralto. Without preamble she said, "I'm taking a big chance."
"How?"
"If he knew about this," she said, "I'd be dead. He's a killer."
"Who is?"
"You ought to know. Your name is Scudder, isn't it? Aren't you the man's been showing his picture all over the street?"
"I'm the man."
There was a stretch of silence. I could tell she hadn't hung up, but I wondered if she might have set the phone down and walked away. Then, her voice little more than a whisper, she said, "I can't talk now. Stay where you are. I'll call back in ten minutes."
It was more like fifteen. This time she said, "I'm scared, man. He'd kill me in a hot second."
"Then why call me?"
" 'Cause he might kill me anyway."
"Just tell me where I can find him. It won't get back to you."
"Yeah?" She considered this. "You got to meet me," she said.
"All right."
"We got to talk, you know? Before I tell you anything."
"All right. Pick a time and a place."
"Shit. What time is it now? Close to eleven. Meet me at midnight. Can you do that?"
"Where?"
"You know the Lower East Side?"
"I can find my way around."
"Meet me at- shit, I'm crazy to do this." I waited her out. "Place called the Garden Grill. That's on Ridge Street just below Stanton. You know where that is?"
"I'll find it."
"It's on the right-hand side of the street if you're going downtown. And there's steps leading down from the street. If you're not looking for it you could miss it."
"I'll find it. You said midnight? How will I know you?"
"Look for me at the bar. Long legs and auburn hair, and I'll be drinking a Rob Roy straight up." A throaty chuckle. "You could buy me a refill."
Ridge Street runs south from Houston Street seven or eight blocks east of First Avenue. It's not a good neighborhood, but then it never was. Over a century ago the narrow streets began filling up with mean tenements, thrown up in a hurry to house the mob of immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The buildings left a lot to be desired when they were new, and the years have not been good to them.
Many of them are gone. Stretches of the Lower East Side have seen the tenements give way to low-income housing projects, which have arguably become worse places to live than the hovels they replaced. Ridge Street, though, remained an unbroken double row of five-story tenements, with an occasional gap in the form of a rubble-strewn lot where someone had torn down a building after someone else had burned it out.
My cab dropped me at the corner of Ridge and Houston a few minutes before twelve. I stood there while the driver made a quick U-turn and looked for greener pastures. The streets were empty, and of course all of the shops on Houston were dark, and most of them shuttered, their corrugated-steel shutters black with undecipherable graffiti.
I walked south on Ridge. On the other side of the street a woman was berating a child in Spanish. A few houses further on, a trio of youths in leather jackets looked me over and evidently decided I was more trouble than I was worth.
I crossed Stanton Street. The Garden Grill, not all that hard to find if you were looking for it, was in the fourth building from the corner. A scrap of neon in an otherwise opaque window announced its name. I walked a dozen yards past it and checked to see if I was attracting any attention. I didn't seem to be.
I retraced my steps and descended a half-flight of stairs to a heavy door with steel mesh over its window. The glass itself was darkened, but through it I could see the interior of a barroom. I opened the door and walked into a real bucket of blood.
A bar ran the length of a long narrow room. There were twelve or fifteen people standing or occupying backed stools, and a few heads turned at my entrance but no one took an undue interest. A dozen tables ranged across from the bar, and perhaps half of them were occupied. The lighting was dim, and the air was thick with smoke, most of it tobacco but some of it marijuana. At one of the tables a man and woman were sharing a joint, passing it back and forth, holding it in an elaborate roach clip. They didn't look in fear of arrest, and no wonder; busting someone in here for possession of marijuana would be like handing out jaywalking summonses in the middle of a race riot.
One woman sat alone at the bar, drinking something out of a stemmed glass. Her shoulder-length hair was chestnut, and the red highlights were like bloodstains in the subdued lighting. She wore red hot pants over black mesh tights.
I went over and stood at the bar, leaving an empty stool between us. When the bartender came over I turned and caught her eye. I asked her what she was drinking.
"A Rob Roy," she said.
It was the voice I'd heard over the phone, low and throaty. I told the bartender to give her another, and ordered a Coke for myself. He brought the drinks and I took a sip of mine and made a face.
"The Coke's flat here," she said. "I should have said something."
"It doesn't matter."
"You must be Scudder."
"You didn't tell me your name."
She considered this and I took a moment to look at her. She was tall, with a broad forehead and a sharply defined widow's peak. She was wearing a short bolero jacket over a halter the same color as her hot pants. Her midriff was bare. She had a full-lipped mouth with bright red lipstick, and she had large hands with bright red polish on her nails.
She looked for all the world like a whore, and I didn't see how she could possibly be anything else. She also looked like a woman, unless you paid attention to the timbre of the voice, the size of the hands, the contour of the throat.
"You can call me Candy," she said.
"All right."
"If he finds out I called you-"
"He won't find out from me, Candy."
"Because he'd kill me. He wouldn't have to think long and hard to do it, either."
"Who else has he killed?"
She pursed her lips, blew out a soundless whistle. "I'm not saying," she said.
"All right."
"What I can do, I can take you around, show you where he's staying."
"Is he there now?"
" 'Course not. He's somewhere uptown. Man, if he was anywheres this side of Fourteenth Street, I wouldn't be here talking to you." She raised a hand to her mouth, blew on her fingernails as if they were freshly painted and she wanted to speed their drying. "I ought to get something for this," she said.
"What do you want?"
"I don't know. What's anybody always want? Money, I guess. Afterward, when you get him. Something."
"There'll be something for you, Candy."
"Money's not why I'm doing this," she said. "But you do something like this, you ought to get something for it."
"You will."
She nodded shortly, got to her feet. Her glass was still half-full, and she knocked it back and swallowed, her Adam's apple bobbing as she did so. She was a male, or at least she'd been born one.
In some parts of town a majority of the street girls are men in drag. Most of them are getting hormones, and quite a few have had silicone breast implants; like Candy, they're equipped with more impressive chests than most of their genuinely female competitors. Some have had sex-change surgery, but most of the ones on the street aren't that far along yet, and they may have hit the pavement in order to save up for their operations. For some of them, the surgery will eventually include a procedure to shave the Adam's apple. I don't think there's anything available yet to reduce the size of hands and feet, but there's probably a doctor somewhere working on it.