Night-Bloom (31 page)

“But he didn’t know anything about this other man?” Fritzi asked.

“The Bombardier?” Mooney stared pensively at the rose-streaked twilight sky above the river. “The guy’s a nut case. He doesn’t know anything about anything.”

They were silent for a time, sipping their coffee. Then suddenly he turned to her. “Listen, I been meaning to ask you …”

“What?”

His hands rose outward into the shadows of the unlit apartment. “Us together like this. I mean, I take up a lot of your time.”

“I’ll let you know when it gets to be a sacrifice.” The fact that she was amused annoyed him. “I mean”—he persisted awkwardly, trying to articulate what had been gnawing at him for days—“I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m enjoying myself. You’re good for me. Maybe too good. I just want to go on record as saying I’m not … Well … you know me. I’m pretty set in my ways.”

“So am I.”

“I wouldn’t want you to get any dumb ideas.”

“You know me, Mooney. I don’t have too many dumb ideas.”

“Well, I mean all this stuff about my managing the Balloon and our going off to Spain together. I don’t like that, see. Makes me uneasy. Like jumping to conclusions.”

“I don’t jump to conclusions,” she said. Something shrewd and tough leaped in her eyes. He saw now a side of her she had seldom shown him—the side that had made her the proprietor of a highly successful East Side tavern and a woman of not inconsiderable means. “For me it’s strictly business,” she went on. “Like an investment. Like horseflesh. I see a creature I like, I bet him. If I lose, I lose. No hard feelings.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Just so we understand each other.” He appeared momentarily placated. She knew, however, the subject would come up again.

“We understand each other perfectly.” She smiled, and there was the wisdom of the ages in that smile. “But you know me, Mooney. When I bet, I seldom lose.”

“The escapement is the Grimthorpe Double Three-Legged Gravity.”

“Excellent, Charles. Now recite the table of error for the clock signals.”

Charles Watford spoke earnestly into the shadows of the little sitting room. The sudden chiming of nearly fifty clocks jarred him from his reverie even as the voice of his father receded into the upper reaches of the house.

“Can you recall anything at all about the man?”

“No.”

“His name? What was his name?”

“No. I told you. I don’t recall.”

“Think. Think.”

Watford stared blankly at the worn little settee with the antimacassars and pillows crushed and askew, where the policeman had sat the day before.
“Was it Boyd?”

“No. I don’t think
…”

“Think. Think.”

Still in his robe and slippers, unkempt and unshaven, he had not ventured out for several days. Much of the brow he had shaved off had started to grow back in. Across the way he could see lights flickering in the upper stories of the house abutting his yard. Within it people walked about like robot figures—mechanical, impersonal, inhuman.

When he looked again, the man on the settee was gone. He was alone, bathed in sweat, his heart thumping wildly. “I’m guilty,” he whispered. “Guilty.” Of what, he could not say.

Upstairs in his bedroom, in the rickety pine bureau that had been his since childhood, he found at the back of a bottom drawer, secured within a small leather case, his needle and hypodermic syringe. He rinsed them off under the sink tap in the bathroom and padded slowly back down the stairs into the kitchen.

“Oh, Charles. Look what you’ve gone and done now.”

“If anything should come to mind you can always reach me at this number.”

“Pardon my saying so. You really missed an opportunity not notifying your insurance company at once. It’s not as if you’re stealing, or anything like that. You’ve paid for it. You’re entitled to it. First thing I would’ve done was to get the name of the contractor.”

When he looked up he was standing in front of the refrigerator, peering at the bright, harsh glare from within. There was nothing much there in the way of food. An open jar of jelly and some overripe vegetables sat about forlornly on the bare shelves. A sweet, slightly disagreeable odor wafted outward on the smoky waves of condensation.

“I don’t have to take this harassment, Sergeant. I had nothing to do with any bank robbery in Kansas. I know no Myrtle Wells. I want to speak to my lawyers.”

“Charles, your father will be getting home shortly.”

At the rear of the top shelf he found precisely what he was looking for.

“For your own good and mine, I don’t think it would be good if he found you here, still in your pajamas.”

A quarter of a container of cream that had been sitting there nearly a month had curdled and a green furze had settled like a lacy mantle over it.

“… Wait till he hears you’ve been sent home from camp.”

Prizing open the collapsible crush-top lid, he raised the container to his nose and sniffed gingerly. Strong, rank fumes came up at him in waves. The nauseous odor of putrefaction was almost voluptuous. He closed the refrigerator and took a small saucer down from the cupboard above. Even as he decanted a portion of the green curdled substance into the saucer, the voices continued to racket about his whirling thoughts.

The voice of a man sounded from across the way. It was loud and blustery. It conveyed to him a suggestion of anger and impending violence.
“You’ve got a bad temper. You must learn to control
…”

Slowly, fastidiously, Watford inserted his needle into the reeking green substance, drawing it upward into the syringe. With almost hypnotic intensity, he watched the fluid creep past the red calibration lines until the shaft of the column was at last full.

In the next instant he turned and started back up the stairs.

“I’m coming, Mother. I’ll be right there.”

“That’s a good boy, Charles. That’s my good boy.”

Once in his room he lay down and extended his body the full length of the bed. Then, closing his eyes and still holding the needle poised above him, he inhaled deeply several times, like a man about to dive deep into cold water.

He waited for his breathing to slow, along with the agitated pulsations in his chest. Without further hesitation, he jerked the elastic band of his pajama pant down below his thigh and with faintly tremulous fingers, he sought an ideal location (for him, a point not easily detected) for venipuncture.

His fingers wandered down over his bare, flat stomach to a spot high up on the inner thigh. He sought a point near the scrotal area, on the inner wall of the thigh. Pinching the flesh there hard between his fingers, and without any hesitation at all, he drove the needle far in.

There was a momentary prick and a short muscular spasm, followed by the sensation of fluid infused into the vein. With his eyes closed, he gnawed the inside of his cheek and waited until the syringe was empty.

When at last it was, he rose, rinsed off the needle and replaced it in the drawer. In the medicine cabinet of the bathroom he found several packages of a fairly common laxative he knew to contain phenolphthalein. From his readings he knew the substance to be a pyrogen, having the effect upon ingestion of raising body temperature. While normal dosage was one to two tablets at most, he had unhesitatingly swallowed the contents of nearly two full packages.

Afterward, he went directly to bed, lay down in the dark and waited.

Like a huge silvery moth, the helicopter rose and fell, its engines drumming, blades battering the hot air that rose in wind drafts all about it. Each rotation hurled down a shower of dull concussive blows into the steamy streets below.

They veered north, bucketing up the West Side Drive. Ahead of them the long, graceful span of the George Washington Bridge loomed lacy and luminescent above the river. Somewhere at Seventieth Street the copter’s engines whined as the craft curved right and headed eastward toward the park. Turning through a wide arc, the centrifugal force tilted Mooney sidewards, sending his stomach upward into his chest. Defasio seated directly to his left appeared to sag rightward and across him.

The chopping of the blades and the heat of the cabin were taking their toll. With each rise and descent of the craft, Mooney had grown queasier. At the last turn over the park, he’d tasted the sour chyme of his partially digested supper. At the same moment a grayish pallor spread across the characteristically pink flush of his cheeks.

Hovering above the West Side of New York, bucketing low over the rooftops with nothing but a thin aluminum skin between himself and the concrete pavements several hundred feet below, Mooney felt himself the butt of some cosmic amusement. Once again the plaything of the gods—particularly with the door of the craft open only a few feet to the right of him.

Out that door a police officer by the name of Ramirez peered straight downward into the green-orange neon sheen. He was scanning the rooftops through powerful infrared night surveillance equipment. To his left a stolid, young black man by the name of Youngblood piloted the copter impassively.

Youngblood seldom spoke. Ramirez chattered incessantly, mostly into the helmet microphones linked up to the radio patrol cars and the rooftop stakeout teams working below. At the moment it was 10:16
P.M.
, and the helicopter was coasting low over the rooftops between Eighth and Ninth in the Fifties.

“I got what looks like a pair of suspects on a roof on Fifty-third, just east of Ninth. Lemme see now.” He checked the street map spread out on his lap. “Looks like 366 West Fifty-third. Would you give us a check on that and call back?”

Ramirez clicked off his radio and shot a toothy grin back at Mooney. “Probably nothin’, but we gotta check it out. Right, Lieutenant?”

“Right,” Mooney gasped. Waves of hot, fumey air wafted through the open door, battering his face and making a tuft of dark hair dance crazily upon his skull.

“There’s the Felt Forum,” Defasio shrieked wildly. He’d been going on in that fashion ever since they’d started two hours ago, like a tour guide, pointing out landmarks.

“Wonderful,” Mooney muttered. He’d begun to regret that he’d insisted upon coming. Surely Defasio could have handled this part of the operation himself, while he might just as well, and far more profitably, have stayed below with one of the radio reconnaissance cars.

He could well imagine the barrage of scornful jibes he’d incur at the hands of his colleagues at Manhattan South had he taken such a course. Even more troubling, Mooney was suddenly paralyzed with doubt. The cabin radio began to buzz and crackle. Ramirez flicked it on. At once the small space filled with the scratchy static of voices from one of the radio cars below. “On your query, 366 West Fifty-third—your party on the roof was just a guy and n dame ballin’. We chased ‘em off and sent ‘em home.” Ramirez flicked off the radio, glanced back at Mooney and smiled. “That’s life, ay, Lieutenant? You lose one, you lose one.” Ramirez thought that was immensely funny. Mooney scowled as the copter momentarily lurched, suddenly tilted ponderously forward like a harbor buoy rising on a swell.

“Lotta ballin’ on the rooftops,” Defasio said. “That makes five tonight alone.”

“It’s the season,” Mooney muttered. “Warm weather gets their blood up.”

Ramirez nodded in agreement. “In my time we used to screw in the basement. Never the roof.”

“There’s the UN,” Defasio wheeled and gazed back.

“Little too public for me.” Ramirez popped a wad of gum into his mouth and proceeded to chew. “To exposed like, you know? I’d never drop my drawers on a rooftop. Ain’t that right, Youngblood?” The pilot muttered some barely audible reply.

Mooney’s stomach rumbled as the pall settled more oppressively upon him.

“Well,” Ramirez went on with unflagging good cheer, “so far we got us a man training a pigeon, a man with binoculars watching ladies undress, another guy barbecuing chicken illegally, and five separate couples screwing, one of which was a pair of queens. How much longer you wanna keep this up, Lieutenant?”