Night-Bloom (45 page)

“Boyd. Boyd.” Mooney’s rising bark momentarily stunned him. “When you called yourself Anthony Boyd and were in the import-export business at 3143 Crown Drive, Wilmette.”

Holmes’s confusion deepened. “I never … Say, what the hell is this, anyway?”

“That’s what I’m asking you, Gary. What the hell is this? What the hell are you trying to pull here?” Holmes half rose, then sat, then rose again. “I don’t …”

“Have you ever been hospitalized in New York?” Mooney snapped at him through the cage. “Hospitalized?”

“Have you ever been treated for injuries of any sort at Beth Israel Hospital?”

For the first time, Holmes seemed frightened. “Beth Israel,” Mooney shouted the words at him. “What the hell’s that?”

Mooney stood. “Never mind. You’re a phony, Holmes. You’re nothing.”

“Who the fuck you callin’ nothin’?” The heavy boned face came up close against the wire mesh, sending a blast of warm sour breath against Mooney’s cheek.

“You’re a lot of bullshit,” Mooney snarled. “You did nothing.”

Holmes lunged at the divider, flinging his chair backward against the concrete wall as he did so. Mooney watched the chair shatter. The wire mesh swelled outward toward him, along with Holmes spread-eagled athwart it. His stubby fingers squirmed toward Mooney like serpents through the reticulations.

Mooney stepped back, watching the mesh sag toward him, bearing with it the bulk of Holmes’s big frame splayed wide against it.

“I wasted them fuckers,” Holmes bellowed, “all seven of them. The honeymoon couple last spring. And the guy that’s crippled for life. I suppose you didn’t read about that? I did him, too. That was me.” Mooney watched three guards slip unseen into the inmates’ pen behind him.

“You call that nothin’? Hah! I suppose you didn’t see me on TV. I suppose …”

Mooney watched transfixed as the three guards pounced on the big, flailing figure, wrestling him to the ground. The noise was sickening. Holmes’s bellowing had the sound of a stricken animal being slaughtered.

After, when they’d subdued him and led him off, Mooney slumped back down into a chair. His damp forehead propped in the palm of his hand, he tried to compose himself.

Outside in the hospital parking lot, Michael Defasio watched him climb back into the car, then switched the ignition on. He peered across at the big detective through the gathering dusk. “You look like you seen a ghost.”

They started to roll out down the wide gravel drive, wet and steaming from the recent rain. Out on the Van Wyck Expressway the tires began to whine over the wet macadam. Mooney, who’d been silent, suddenly started to speak. “Don’t tell me you swallowed that bullshit in there? How’d you get this confession? Come on. Out with it. Did Mulvaney put you up to it? How’d they get this phony confession? Come on. Tell me.”

“Phony? Hey, wait a minute …”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t steamroll this poor apehead.”

“No one steamrolled anyone.” Defasio’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. Rain streamed down the windshield, and the wipers, carving clear arcs in the glass, made a high, squeaking sound.

“For one thing, the guy’s a nutso. He’d confess to anything, including snatching the Lindbergh kid. Don’t you see what you’ve done, dummy? You got the wrong fucking guy.”

“I don’t care what you tell him, or how. Just so long as you tell him.”

“Why don’t you tell him?”

“If I have to tell him, Mulvaney, you might just as well turn in your shield. You’re of no use to me. I still can’t believe you authorized that visit to Creed-more.”

“I couldn’t very well deny it, could I? As of that moment he was still in charge of the investigation. So far as I knew, right?”

“Well, now you know differently. As of now it’s official,” Commissioner Dowd bellowed into the phone. On the other end Mulvaney winced and yanked the receiver away from his ear. “He’s off the investigation. Now you go tell him.”

The voice continued to rail, but distantly now, into the roiled dusty air of the ancient precinct house.

“I take it you’ll be issuing a directive then, Commissioner?”

“The moment I hang up this phone. And you keep him away from Holmes now. Away from anything that has to do with this case. I don’t care what you tell him. Just keep him out of everyone’s hair. Give him something else to do.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“I don’t care, I told you. That’s your job, Mulvaney. You just keep him off this. As far as we’re concerned the case is closed. Holmes is our man. The investigation is closed. Everything’s peaceful. Everyone’s happy.”

Dowd slammed down the phone. Mulvaney winced again on the other end, but he was smiling. It was a smug little smile, full of triumph and self-vindication. What he’d been telling them all along had finally come to pass. Mooney was a fraud, and now everyone knew that.

Why he continued to insist without qualification that this Mr. A. Boyd, the man in the hospital, and the Phantom Bombardier were one and the same was beyond comprehension. Mulvaney took it to be just one further proof of the stupid, mulish, irrationality that had doomed Frank Mooney’s career from the start.

The Bombardier had done them the singular good turn of surrendering himself and getting everyone off the hook. Mooney, of course, could never be content with that. It had all happened while he was away. Gary Holmes had not even the simple decency to time his surrender so that Mooney could have been there to make the arrest.

Now Mooney was going about discrediting the suspect’s story and, at the same time, the DA’s case. Mooney had to be silenced before he blew the case against Holmes out of the water, causing not only profound embarrassment to the department, but to Mulvaney himself. There was no question of firing Mooney as a means of silencing him. Such actions, Mulvaney knew only too well, would have Mooney out broadcasting his story to every newspaper and network within shouting distance. And there were plenty, with axes to grind, who would be more than happy to tell the story of how the police railroaded a demented itinerant into confessing that he was the Bombardier. It was not that Mulvaney didn’t believe that Holmes was the real Bombardier. He did, but he also understood that there were enough holes in his story to demonstrate effectively that he wasn’t the Bombardier, even if he did toss a few rocks off a rooftop.

The most effective way to silence Mooney, Mulvaney reasoned, was by rewarding him with some new investigation. Even if it was somewhat less than a plum, it had to be all gussied up to look like one. It had to be perceived by one and all as a bonus for superb investigative work on the Bombardier case and not the chastisement and banishment it really was.

Mulvaney lit his cold cigar and buzzed the intercom on his desk. In the next moment a tall, black female police sergeant, who served as Mulvaney’s administrative assistant, poked her head in the door.

“Priscilla—is Mooney still out there?”

The sergeant checked her wristwatch. “He should be. He doesn’t go off duty for another twenty minutes.”

“Send him in, will you please?”

The investigation Mooney was reassigned to had been given a Class I priority. A molester of small children rampaging through a low-income West Side housing project was sensational enough for it to have brought out the media in droves. Pressure from parent and school groups had been persistent enough to have earned the investigation its priority rating.

Mooney had been told that his assignment to the case was a reward for the splendid job he’d done on the Bombardier investigation.

He tried hard to believe that but the tough realist in him told him otherwise. His work on the Bombardier case, he knew, was perceived by his colleagues and superiors as a total failure. Now he’d been given a jackal to hunt while the lions had gone to all the others. The molester, he knew, was a nickel-and-dime operation. The spoor he left behind each of his predations was about as subtle as a rhino track. The man they were looking for begged to be caught and shortly, Mooney knew, he would oblige him.

Meanwhile, there were the outraged parents, the concerned deputations of educators, church groups, all deploring the demise of solid, middle-class neighborhoods. Politicians up for reelection mounted lecterns to suddenly rediscover long-forgotten pieties. Inevitably, there were the windy denunciations of the police in newspaper editorials and the promises by the mayor to restore calm and guarantee that more police would be out in force in the affected area.

It was a bitter Christmas for Mooney. On the one hand, there was a part of his life that had never been better. The Fritzi Baumholz part. He had lost nearly seventy pounds (down from 245 when they’d first met). He was, for Francis Mooney, lean, vigorous and, in some oddly indefinable way, even attractive. For one thing, his face had recovered its once youthful bone structure. For another, his stride was more erect and he seemed taller. His relationship with the proprietress of Fritzi’s Balloon was also better than ever. To be sure, they still quarreled on any subject and on almost a daily basis. But there was always the tacit assurance that by dusk there would be truce. It had taken him over six decades to unlock the mystery of living with another person. Knowing that he had undoubtedly forfeited significant freedoms under the new arrangement, he would have now conceded that it also brought to him certain undeniable advantages.

The sense of warmth and cheer at finally belonging to something other than himself stirred deep within him. He could not say why, but it had roused some barely suspected part of himself that had long been dormant. And yet, coming to him almost daily, creeping up on him, soundless, furtive, the lion stirred in the bush behind so close, so tantalizingly near, that it seemed to Mooney he could feel the hot, meaty fetor of its breath upon his cheek.

One late winter afternoon, with time to kill, Mooney strolled up Madison to Sixty-seventh Street, past the windows of Quintius Gallery. In keeping with the season the gallery was decorated with a Byzantine crèche. He didn’t stop but, instead, peered in while striding by, as if trying to discern through the gray reflective surface of the glass the vague, shadowy figures that moved behind there.

On Christmas Eve he thought of Watford and was surprised that he had. An image flashed in his eye of the forlorn, forgotten man in the seedy flannel robe, in the musty parlor with the clocks and the old-lady furniture—the chintz and brocades, the bead lampshades, and the antimacassars still bearing the imprint of oily heads no longer present. He thought about their two or three encounters and wondered what the season of the Prince of Peace had brought for Watford.

On New Year’s Eve the Pleiades hung low in the bright clear sky. The little cluster of five stars glittered like a rabbit’s paw above the jagged East Side skyline near the river. In the gray dawn of the New Year the constellation rose higher, like some blessed augury of renewal.

It had been three months since Watford had seen Francis Mooney. That had been on the stormy occasion of their visit to Quintius & Sons.

The episode had stayed very much in Watford’s mind. In the interim since that visit he had been unable to find work. Finally, though the idea of it filled him with repugnance, he sought and gained public assistance.