A Stranger Lies There (20 page)

I looked away and spoke to the passenger next to me, a woman in a gray pinstriped business suit. “Excuse me. Uhh … do you live in New York?”

The plane took a sudden dip, and we both tensed.

“It's just that I've never been here before,” I continued after we smoothed out.

“You need help with something?” she asked, closing her laptop.

“You know how much cab fare into the city will cost me?”

“Manhattan?”

“Yeah.”

“Thirty bucks, flat fee. But why would you want to do that? The subway's cheaper. Faster too.” And when I didn't reply: “What part of Manhattan?”

“Greenwich Village.”

“A train'll get you there.”

“A train.”

“Yeah.” She had a pretty face that needed little makeup, and her skin, one shade lighter than her dark brown hair, was smooth and unblemished. “Air Train first, then the subway. You can ride with me if you want.”

“That's very nice of you. Thank you.”

“Just don't let anybody sell you the Brooklyn Bridge,” she said, and laughed.

“I won't,” I replied sheepishly.

“You here on business?”

I didn't know quite how to answer that. “Yeah.”

The seatbelt sign came on with a soft ding. I strapped in as the landing gears rumbled into position below us.

After landing, I picked up a map of Manhattan. We boarded the Air Train, then transferred to the subway at Howard Beach. Miraculously, we each found seats across the aisle from one another. Finally we introduced ourselves, and she told me her name was Lynn. She flashed me a quick smile as the subway moved out, but it was too noisy to really talk. A guy standing near the door holding on to a handrail was checking her out, until he noticed me looking at him.

“Pizza-man can't throw anybody out,” I caught from a few seats away. A young man with sunglasses over his head.

“He's still going to the Hall,” his companion said. “I mean, come on.…”

The train ran more smoothly than I expected, with a rhythmic sway as it traveled through Queens and Brooklyn, each stop identified by large black signs with white letters. The stations were colored with splashy murals and graffiti, and the music of street performers could be heard from the platforms. Next to me, a lady with a baby in her arms cooed softly to him. Lynn had pulled an appointment book out of her jacket pocket and was paging through it.

When we stopped again, I leaned forward into the aisle. “I … ahhh … I'm not sure where to get off.” The smell of food wafted into the train car along with the pungent odor of oil and hot metal and electricity.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Lynn said, putting the book back in her pocket. “You're just two stops after mine.”

“Thanks. I really appreciate your help.”

“No problem,” she said around someone that had just stepped in front of her. “I know it can be kind of intimidating.”

“You lived here long?”

“Few years,” Lynn said as we jerked into motion, and that was it for a while. A bridge took us over the river to Manhattan, then back in the tunnels again, which were punctuated by recurring strips of yellow tracklighting. Halfway there, I was startled by another train whipping by in the opposite direction.

The seat to my right was vacated eventually, and Lynn came across the aisle to sit next to me. “What about you? Where are you from?”

“California. Palm Springs area.”

She nodded, smiling. “Desert playground for the rich and famous. Which one are you?”

“Neither one, I'm afraid.” Was she old enough to remember the war that had brought my notoriety way back when? Probably just barely; she looked to be in her late thirties. I glanced down at her bare ring finger, surprised that she seemed interested in me. But she wasn't Deirdre, and no woman ever would be.

Feeling a sudden pang, I looked away quickly, and Lynn, picking up on the expression that must have clouded my features, quieted. Suddenly we were two strangers on a crowded train.

In the darkness of another tunnel, I saw my face reflected in the opposite window, and the noise all around me began fading away. Deirdre had told me once about how, when she was in high school, she used to come down here and randomly pick a train, then stay on it until the end of the line. Just to try and get away from what was eating her up inside.

“Never worked,” she said, sitting on the hood of our car out near Garnet Hill, while the Southern Pacific freight lumbered past. Deirdre had always liked traveling songs, and a taped collection was playing on the stereo. “Sometimes I'd end up near the airport, watching the planes take off, wondering how far I could get. Maybe I'd find one that would never land, just fly off and never come back.” She shook her head and smiled faintly. “Then I'd get back on the subway, thinking I'd be stuck in New York forever.”

Lynn spoke from miles away. “My stop's coming up. You're going to be looking for the West Fourth Street station.”

I nodded, still with Deirdre in that hot desert. “West Fourth. Okay.”

She didn't respond, just held my gaze for a moment. Took a breath like she was about to speak, then swallowed it. We came to a halt and she stood with the other debarking riders, laptop under her arm and overnight bag in hand. Somebody bumped her on his way out, but she didn't seem to notice. She pointed to a plastic subway map inside the door with colored lines all over it.

“This is us,” she told me, putting her finger on the blue line. Just above her head, I saw strips of advertisements in English and Spanish.
Got a drug problem? Get help!
“West Fourth is two stops from now. Here.” She indicated a white dot further up the line, then gestured outside. “See the signs?” Hers was Chambers Street.

“I got it. Thanks again.”

Lynn turned back to me just before she left. “Take care, Tim,” she said, and I couldn't think of a damn thing to say before she was gone, high heels clicking on the platform outside as the door slid shut.

Needing some fresh air to clear my head, I got off at the next stop, one before the Village. I jostled my way off the subway carrying the bag I'd packed at home. I stopped to watch the train pull away, its taillight blinking slowly as it receded into the tunnel. Then I went up the steps into the graying evening light.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A blast of warm, supercharged air hit me when I reached street level, and the city moved all around me. Pedestrians rushed by on the sidewalks. Traffic ebbed and flowed in slow-moving packs, yellow cabs lined up like marching ants. Fleeting clouds of steam escaped from curbside subway vents. Across the way, neon signs advertised tattoos and piercings in a shop window. The din of the streets vibrated in my bones. It was the sound inside a seashell amplified a thousand times.

Pulling out the map, I tried to fix my bearings. On one side, Canal Street extended west to the crowded Holland Tunnel exit. Toward Chinatown, it was lined with a vast array of shops and businesses: electronics and hardware stores, furniture dealers proclaiming the best prices on futons, and a varied assortment of bargain retail outlets. Across Canal and down: Tribeca, the “triangle below Canal,” I remembered from somewhere. Soho was in the opposite direction, just before the Village.

I went that way, north on Sixth, moving away from the steel and concrete thickets of the downtown high-rises. At Grand, I waited for the light to change. An imposing presence loomed over my shoulder, and I turned to see a fifty-foot model staring down at me from a huge Gap billboard plastered to the side of a building. As I stepped into the crosswalk, I felt the man shadow me, keeping track of my progress. I actually seemed to be making better time than the gridlocked traffic inching forward a few feet away. I passed sidewalk vendors hawking magazines, flowers and food. The smell of singed pretzels made my mouth water.

A few minutes later I was wishing I'd stayed on the subway. The humidity in the air seemed to suspend all the dirt and grit and exhaust rising from the pavement. I was more used to the dry desert heat. A young woman wearing snakeskin pants handed me a coupon for free admission to some nightclub, which I put in my pocket without really looking at.

“Doors open at ten,” she said after me. “I'll be looking for you.”

I pushed on, through milling throngs of shoppers, tourists and businesspeople. Streetlamps and headlights were coming on in the dusk. Together with the lights from shop windows and signs, they bled into the atmosphere like viscous smears of colored oil on glass.

In Soho, I looked up at the cast-iron facades with their identically painted fire escapes. The metal staircases zig-zagged up and down the buildings, bisecting large windows that reflected back the twilit city. Back in the early seventies, when Deirdre was living in New York, this area was just another fading commercial district, inhabited mostly by artists. Then, she'd told me, the developers began moving in and, from what I could see, they'd been entirely successful in transforming the place into a dining and shopping mecca for the trendy elite. I passed open-air cafés and coffee houses, hair salons and art galleries, jazz clubs and hip bars, all vying for attention and dollars.

Houston Street divided Soho from the Village, and I found a small hotel a few blocks in. The bored-looking desk clerk gave me a room on the second floor, accessible only by stairs. It was hard not to collapse next to my bag on the bed. But if I slept now I might not wake up for hours, and I had too much to do. Al's Bar wasn't far away.

Outside again, I found MacDougal, and walked up toward Washington Square. The Village, with its coffee houses, jazz clubs and cafés, had an aura that reminded me of its long-standing reputation for radicalism. It felt like I was walking through my own counter-cultural past. Somewhere nearby was the townhouse that the Weathermen had accidentally blown up during the height of the Vietnam War protests in 1970. They'd been making pipe bombs in the basement.

Still on MacDougal, I passed a used record store blasting ferocious speed-metal onto the sidewalk. My attention was drawn to the front window, where a poster advertising tonight's Spine concert was taped. Hoping to get some useful information on the band, I ventured inside. It was dark and incense-filled. Racks of used vinyl in front. Glass cases holding smoking paraphernalia labeled “for tobacco use only.” In the back of the shop, silkscreened T-shirts, leather and velvet clothing, and candles in all shapes and scents. The guy behind the counter was reading a book while the music raged around him. He wore a Misfits T-shirt and a nose ring. He looked up as I approached, and turned the music down.

“The band in your window,” I said, pointing to the poster.

“Yeah?”

“Know anything about them?”

“Like what?”

“Where they're from. Who their friends are.”

He frowned. Flicked off the music, then put the book down, mystified. “I don't get it.”

I decided to get right to the point. “One of their fans showed up dead on my front lawn a few days ago. In California.”

He studied me, trying to tell if I was bullshitting. “You're kidding.”

“Wish I was.” No reply. “I know it's a shot in the dark, but the shirt he was wearing is the only lead I have.”

“You a cop or something?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

He put his hands on his hips. “But you came all the way from California.”

“It's a long story. Anyway, he had a Gravity Throttle T-shirt on. I'm told they mutated into Spine.”

“Yeah, that's right.”

“Why the change?”

A shrug. “I don't know. The singer ended up in rehab. Heroin or something. Guess they got sick of his bullshit. Kicked him out and changed the name.”

Heroin. Another drug thing.

“Do you know them at all?” I asked.

“Yeah, a little. They've done a few in-stores here. But I don't see how that can help you.”

“Anything else going on with them that sticks out?”

“They were talking about getting a manager a few weeks ago. But the guy hasn't been around in a while.”

“What happened to him?”

Another shrug. “Don't know. I guess he split. You'll have to ask them.”

“You didn't know him did you? The manager?”

“No. And there's not much else I can tell you.” He picked his book up. “Check 'em out tonight. Maybe they'll talk to you.”

“I plan to,” I replied, just before he turned the music back on.

Outside, I took another look at the poster in the window, which was vibrating with the force of the music. The club was right around the corner. If I was lucky, maybe I could catch the band now, before the show.

Al's Bar, renamed The Coven one night a week, was between a body piercing parlor and a cheese shop that advertised in its window over one hundred different varieties. Al's Bar had the Spine poster in a glass-enclosed bulletin board by the front door. From inside I could hear music and the crack of billiard balls. A couple of biker types leaned against the wall outside smoking cigarettes. They paid no attention to me as I entered.

It was a large, dimly lit space that looked like it had been converted from another type of business. A bar off to the left once you got through the small foyer. At the edge of the dance floor, in the center of the room, were numerous tables and stools, with some old thrift-store sofas and coffee tables mixed in. Another bar filled the opposite wall to the right, near the pool tables I'd heard from outside. The stage took up the entire rear wall. Drums and amplifiers and guitar stands sat beneath racks of professional lighting equipment. A slowly rotating disco ball, most of its mirrored squares missing, was suspended over the sound console and mixer set up in a cleared space across the room. In the far corner, a strange sculpture stood at least ten feet high. It was filled with Dante-esque figures, all bulging eyes, yawning mouths and grasping claws. Eerily illuminated by a couple of purple spots, it sat in a position of prominence under a stained-glass skylight. Curiously, the whole affair didn't seem out of place.