Night-Bloom (2 page)

Mooney was therefore, in all respects, a survivor, a master at the art of staying afloat in the treacherous swamps of municipal bureaucracy. His ordeal, however, had not particularly ennobled him. As a youth he’d been striking and tall, in the blue-eyed, darkhaired Gaelic mold. But now age and chronic dissatisfaction had transformed the once alert, agreeably regular features into something flaccid and unshaped through which one might still glimpse the ruins of a more comely past.

The overall effect was heightened by a strangely cultivated voice that clashed with the stream of vileness steadily leaching from his mouth. He was emphatically a thorn in the department’s side, a wart on the spanking-clean image they were always at such pains to promote.

Catalonia, Alonzo. Went out in April ‘75. Thirty-pound chunk of tile pried or fallen from a rooftop, 308 West 51. Busted his head. No witnesses. No suspects. Cause subsequently determined to be accidental. Case closed August ‘75. O’Meggins, Harold. May ‘76. Age 48. Locksmith. Skull crushed by 80 pounds of limestone chimney capping dropped or fallen from construction site, 423 West 47. No witnesses. No suspects. Cause subsequently determined to be accidental. No further investigation. Case closed July 4, 1976. Quigley, Wayne. Decapitated—Jesus, decapitated—May 12,1977, by flying slate believed to have dropped or fallen from rooftop, 315 West 48. No witnesses. No suspects. Cause subsequently determined to be accidental. Case closed, June 14, 1977. Kim, Chai Soong—Christ—what the fuck kinda name is that? Oh, here it is. Korean. Waiter. Age 19. Death from falling concrete slab, April 13,1978.

That’s a year ago today. Causes subsequently determined to be … Case dropped. Case dropped.

Case dropped. Bullshit.

Mooney flung the precinct files aside with an air of disgust. Tilting his sizable girth backwards in the chair, he rummaged deep within his jacket pockets for a cigarette.

“Five people die over a space of five years, from bricks or slabs, or flying objects falling from rooftops, all of ‘em around the West Forties or low Fifties, or generally the theater district. All of ‘em round ten or eleven at night. Two in May, three in April. But that roof was clean tonight. At least when I seen it. And nobody in the building, on the top floor, heard anybody movin’ at that hour around up there. Can all the rest be coincidence? No witnesses. No suspects. Bullshit.”

It was getting well on to 3:00
A.M.
and he was still at the station house. He had filed his initial reports and he pondered now the wisdom of going home. He lived in a large, nearly unfurnished apartment up in the West Bronx around the Yankee Stadium. All he had in the way of household possessions was a large-screen color television, a couple of canvas director chairs, a Formica kitchen table, a couple of pots and pans, a few dishes, and a permanently unmade bed. His neighbors were all Puerto Ricans and Blacks, with a sprinkling of terrified geriatric Jews. Everyone in the building, except Mooney, was collecting one form of welfare assistance or another. Mooney never spoke to any of them.

Though he was bone-tired, he had no wish to go home. Home terrified him. He knew that if he went there now he would not sleep. Instead, he would merely lie in bed half-undressed in the sour rumplement of his sheets, toss and turn and stare at the nightmarish shadowshow that never ceased to play across his ceiling.

His mind was far too active for sleep. Disquieting images flashed across his fretful eye. Images of violence and carnage, tawdry and bizarre. Generally, they depicted the apocalypse of the urban night.

Murder and mayhem. He could neither avert his eyes nor turn them off. Then came the images of lust. Vibrantly, pulsatingly pornographic. Dreams of murder and lust in the nighttime doodles of a lapsed Roman Catholic. He had not been to Confession for fifteen years. He was too haughty to go down on his knees before a priest and beg forgiveness. He was not a penitent. He had other ways, more circuitous but less demeaning, for assuaging guilt.

As always, after mental work he was famished. If he could not sleep then at least he would eat. The thought of hamburgers came to him, greasy fries and sweet, black coffee. A groan issued from the great vacant cavern of his stomach and shortly he was in his battered ‘70 Buick Skylark, heading crosstown toward the FDR Drive.

At Forty-fifth, in the shadow of the UN, he would get on the FDR Drive heading north. Despite the temperature or the time of year, he would drive with all the windows open, gulping frigid air for dear life, cooling his overheated body, freshening his clogged, drowsy brain.

Though it was the longer route, he would take the Willis Avenue Bridge which had no toll as opposed to the Triborough which tithed him a dollar. From Willis Avenue he would swing left onto the Major Deegan, tearing up the thruway to 161 Street, where he knew he could depend on an all-night White Tower to be open.

There were other all-night eateries in the area, establishments where he knew the food to be superior. There was the Bun & Burger on 168, Arthur Treacher’s, the Taco Gaucho and the Chicken Shack. All stayed open the night. All served a credible hamburger, most of them better than the thin, leathery thing about the size of a half dollar the White Tower still foisted off on its unwitting clientele.

But to Mooney all of these places were parvenus, upstarts, spoilers. He didn’t like the class of people that frequented them. Undesirable ethnic types, he reasoned, whereas the White Tower catered to the older, more established folks in the neighborhood.

But, more importantly, it had been the White Tower he knew as a moody youth growing up around the West Bronx. It was the place he haunted as a chronic truant, a friendless, sullen child whose premature obesity had doomed him to mostly solitary pleasures. He had been the neighborhood “fat kid,” ridiculed by his peers into a sharp antipathy for all adolescent tribal codes of bonding. Gangs, teams or clubs he had no use for. Instead, he had made a fetish of aloofness, grew up distrusting the world in general and any number of things specifically. He sought the solace of isolation, finding it, oddly enough, in the high places—the rooftops of those onetime benign West Bronx polyglot neighborhoods where of a summer night he contemplated the evening sky and taught himself the stars, while the baking pavements of July and August suffocated all the sweltering life below.

His love of stargazing persisted well into adulthood. As a passion he kept it very much to himself, certain that among his colleagues at the station house it would become the butt of much amusement to be used against him. Astronomy was no doubt an improbable passion for such a man but, then again, Mooney was an improbable man. The son of strict Roman Catholic parents whose notions of faith fastened on the punitive, whatever intimations of divinity might have been lurking about in his boyish heart were quickly throttled. Why bother with a god if this is what it got you?

He pushed the swinging glass doors open and entered once more into that familiar harsh blue fluorescence. Warm, doughy, meaty odors came at him in waves—meat patties sizzling on a griddle, the smell of coffee in a large aluminum urn, sodden pickles in a plastic counter bowl, stale pound cake in cellophane encased in a thumb-stained cake-saver, all evoking in him the pleasant sensation of homecoming.

The place was empty except for the black counterman who instantly recognized the lumbering figure looming in the doorway. Quickly he tossed a number of frozen patties onto the grill and turned up the coffee.

Before the detective left that morning, somewhere near 5:00
A.M.
, having excoriated the police, harangued the judges, and denounced the entire penal system in general, he had consumed four hamburgers, three plates of fries saturated in packet ketchup, and four cups of a lethally treacly coffee.

“I will in a minute if you just give me a chance.”

“I don’t have a minute.”

“I have a perfectly good excuse.”

“You always do.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s good about being gone four days? No call. No communication. What could be good about that?” Her voice grew increasingly shrill. As she spoke she flung clothing into the yawning mouth of a Gladstone bag.

“Where do you think you’re going at four in the morning?”

“Anywhere. It can’t be far enough for me.” Watford watched her with an air of quiet amazement. The lurches and charges, the sweeping, scythelike motion of her arm chucking clothing, as if she were fencing with some invisible adversary. “Put the bag away, Inez. Let’s try and talk.” When he made a gesture toward the bag, she darted, snatched a lead paperweight, and brandished it above her head. “Put your hand on that again and so help me, I’ll bash you.”

“Inez—”

“Don’t touch it. I warn you. Don’t touch it.”

“Okay, okay. Just stop shouting. It’s four
A.M.
”

“Shouting?” She was ashen, her body so taut she appeared to vibrate like a plucked string. “You want shouting. I’ll give you shouting.”

“Inez, the neighbors …”

“Fuck the neighbors. You just stay where you are. Not a step closer or, so help me, I’ll brain you.”

He watched her fling clothing with an air of quiet awe. The energy level she’d achieved inspired wonder in one for whom lassitude was virtually a way of life. “Won’t you just let me try to explain?”

“I don’t want explanations. I’ve heard all of them by this time. I told you, I’m nobody’s nigger. I don’t sit around the house. I don’t twiddle my thumbs. I wait for no one.”

“I said there’d be times when I’d go off like this.”

“You did. You sure did.” A spray of spittle arched outward from between her snarling lips. “But I’m dumb, you see. Slow on the uptake. I didn’t realize what it really meant.”

“That was all part of the arrangement.”

“Agreed. It was. Only now I’m finished with the arrangement. Finito. Kaput. Up the arrangement.” She jammed a toilet kit into the overflowing lip of the bag and, breathless, panting, pushed down with the full weight of her drab, frail body. Grunting, as if for punctuation, she wrestled the bag’s zipper closed. “What kind of fucking arrangement, for God’s sake? I sit around here. Clean your house. Cook your supper. Do your stinking wash. I was better off on my own. At least I was independent. What I made I kept. And I was beholden to no one. Least of all, some weirdo screw who thinks I should be grateful to him just for taking me off the streets. You lost your job again, didn’t you?” She laughed at the stunned, rather hurt expression in his eyes. The laugh was more a cackle. It rose shrill out of a slightly crooked, heavily painted mouth.

“Who said so?”

She laughed again, cheerlessly, forcing it, using the laughter like a goad. “Your office called wanting to know where you were. That was yesterday. They said you hadn’t been in for five days. I said you were away on personal business. Just like you told me. That I’d have you call the moment you got back. They said not to bother. They’d be sending your severance check along in the next day or so, along with the junk in your desk. Whadya think of them apples, Charley?”

Watford was a fairly good-sized man, easily six foot, who contrived somehow to convey the impression of someone smaller. His stride was tentative, his shoulders stooped, and he went along at something of a crouch. Standing still, he could achieve a sense of motionlessness that was extraordinary in a human being, as if all his vital signs had closed down and he was in a state of suspended animation.

In a room full of people one had to look hard to see Watford. He had the gift of assimilating himself perfectly into the surrounding landscape.

Now he could feel something starting to stir and swell within him. For a moment his vision dimmed and there was no air left in the room to breathe. The sensation that he was on the brink of blowing apart passed, followed by a strangely impressive calm. “You can go now, Inez.”

That wasn’t exactly the reply she’d been expecting. Her eyes opened and she gaped at him. Then once again that shrill, grating laughter. “Oh, may I? Well, thank you. I’m so grateful to you for permitting me to leave. ‘Cause I can’t breathe in this place anymore—this house with its doilies and lace and the funny little chintz chairs. All of that goddamned ditsy old-lady porcelain locked up in cabinets and your precious cranberry glass. It all smells of old lady. Camphor and mustiness and rubber stockings.”

“It was my mother’s glass.”

“I know very well whose glass it was.” She peered hard at him. Whatever coarse, slatternly attractiveness there was in her had now turned pinched and haggish. “So I’m very glad it’s okay for me to leave this house now; leave you here with your antiques and your art-i-facts.” She pronounced the word in mocking imitation of him, then watched him walking slowly toward her. She watched him warily, the way a rabbit, paralyzed and quivering, is transfixed by the approaching snake.

“You better go now, Inez.”

“I don’t need no second invitations, Buster,” she murmured under her breath, grabbed the Gladstone, then lunged for the door, yanking it open so hard that it banged against the wall. In the next moment she was clattering down the stairs to the outside door.