Nightbird (25 page)

“Then where’s Faye?”

“Howling at the moon, who knows? She gives me the screaming meemies, that broad.”

A few detectives were at the bar, conversing with the lawyers and the trust funders. Gregory called them “old school cops,”
a reference to how they carried themselves and their worldly secrets. Old school cops considered themselves gentlemen, and
in places like Neary’s they acted as kindly consiglieres to the citizenry. In here they would never show the drink or mention
the ugliness.

“You got a medallion number on the cab?” Gregory said.

“It was a gypsy. Tremont Taxi, on the door.”

Gregory grabbed his notebook and stood. “What time does your flight leave?”

“Six oh-five
A.M.
But I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

“Finish your drink,” he said. “I’m going to make a few phone calls. Then we’re going for a ride.”

V
ictor’s thighs pressed against the towel he’d draped over the sink. The tiny bathroom was poorly lit and not half the size
of his own in the Bronx. He preferred a lighted mirror, preferably one with 5X magnification. This one was cheap, like everything
else in the apartment. The mercury that silvered the back was peeling badly. Black images dulled and deadened his reflection.

His face needed care. He’d spent too much time on the city streets, his skin absorbing soot and car exhaust. He searched the
medicine cabinet for a little oil or cream. One tube was all he found. The label listed aloe as the first ingredient, but
the smell was lilac. Too feminine for him, but better than nothing. With a circular motion he massaged cream into his cheeks
and the tiny lines around his eyes.

Soon there would be time to relax and stroll on the sunny beaches. In Mexico he could buy pure aloe from street vendors for
a fraction of the price of this designer cream. His face would be tan and healthy as he walked among the blond
turistas
from Seattle and Minneapolis who came into his restaurant.

He planned to invest in a nice restaurant. Not too high end, but classy. One that didn’t serve the Sonoran food of northern
Mexico, with its heavy sauces, all tortillas, tacos, and lard, the kind of cooking most Americans think is the sum of Mexican
food. Cheap and heavy. He’d specialize in the fresh vegetables and seafood. Take advantage of the fishing boats that returned
daily with the day’s catch. Octopus would be the house specialty.

He was only days away from his dream. Today had gone beautifully, his plan delivered. At nine-thirty
A.M.
Victor had handed an envelope containing instructions to Trey Winters. He’d met Winters just as he was entering his office
in the Theater Guild Building. His hat pulled low over his face, Victor had shoved the envelope into Winters’s hands and walked
quickly away. It was even easier than the first envelope, in front of the El Bravado restaurant. This time Winters had clutched
the note to his chest, as if expecting it.

Victor heard a key in the lock and instinctively grabbed the straight razor. He flattened himself against the wall.

“You shouldn’t be here, Victor,” Faye said, quickly locking the door behind her. She was dressed in black jeans and a blue
blouse that he knew Gillian had bought for her. French blue, she’d called it. She wore dark glasses, but they didn’t hide
the bruise. The eye was less swollen, less purple, than yesterday.

“You expecting your policeman?” he said.

“My face like this? I hope nobody ever sees me.”

“It was your own fault.”

She took a six-pack of Coronas from a paper bag and put them in the refrigerator.

“I came to get you,” he said.

“I already told you I’m not going. What is that cooking?”

Red sauce was cooking on the stove. A bag of corn tortillas sat between the burners, steam fogging the inside of the bag.

“I know it won’t be as good as Mama’s,” he said. “But I try.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“The way you eat. It’s a wonder you’re not sick.”

“I am sick,” she said. “Sick in the head.”

“Mama’s cooking will fix you.”

“Mama’s food won’t help what’s wrong with me, Victor.”

Faye saw her suitcase opened on the bed. Victor had found it in the closet, and he’d packed some of her clothes and others
he’d left folded next to it.

“Remember how she fixes the house with flowers, Faye? Bouquets in every room. Her eyesight is going bad, now. She has to feel
her way along the street to get to mass. Along the walls and the parked cars. But every morning she goes.”

“I miss her, too, Victor,” she said.

“Come with me. We’ll stay in the Bronx. One night. Tomorrow we’ll drive to see Mama.”

“I’m not going to Mexico with you.”

“Stop being stubborn. You have no life here. You belong with us, your family.”

“Gillian was my family.”

She opened a beer and put on the television. An old movie with Bogart and Bacall. She pushed the suitcase aside and sat on
the open sofa bed. Victor picked up the clicker and changed it to the all-Spanish station.

“We better get used to the language,” he said.

“How many times do I have to say it, Victor?”

“Faye, I’m sorry for what happened to Gillian. Sorry with all my heart. But it didn’t have to happen. All she had to do was
tell him she didn’t know how it was missing. Someone could have stolen it. A burglar. Thieves steal every day in this city.”

“But you stole it, and I have to live with that.”

The phone rang, and Faye ignored it. It kept ringing, and Victor looked at the phone, then back at her.

“Answer your telephone,” he said.

“I don’t answer the telephone anymore.”

“Answer it!” he yelled. “Or they will come over here to find out why.”

Faye picked up the phone with a soft “Hello.” She listened, then said no several times before hanging up. She told Victor
it was a detective wanting to know if Detective Ryan had stopped by.

Victor knew where Ryan was.

After delivering the message to Winters, Victor had stayed around and watched the Theater Guild Building for signs of police
activity. But all he saw was Detective Ryan following Trey Winters to lunch. He suspected only Trey Winters, saw nothing else.
Ryan would be Victor’s Popeye Doyle.

“You should go now,” she said.

“We haven’t eaten.”

“I’m not hungry, I told you.”

He snatched the beer out of her hands and poured it down the sink. She went to the refrigerator for another, and he grabbed
her and held her by the wrists.

“It was fine when I fixed your police friend in Miami,” he said.

“I never asked you to kill him.”

“He was beating you, Faye.”

“So you beat me now, instead.”

“You make me do that,
querida
. With your disrespectful mouth. These people did nothing for you. Your own birth mother did nothing. That’s not family. Your
own sister didn’t help you.”

“Gillian loved me.”

“You were a novelty to her; she would have forgotten.”

Faye slapped him in the face.

Victor hit her back, quick and hard with his open hand. Faye fell backward and slammed into the stove. She slid to the kitchen
floor, and red sauce spilled down the white porcelain stove and onto her French blue blouse. Victor knelt down. He touched
her cheek with his fingers.

G
regory came off the Cross Bronx and made the left on Webster Avenue. Skeletons of Chevys and Fords sat helter-skelter along
the sides of the sad streets, as if abandoned in haste by the conscripts of a retreating army.

“We should have stopped at Faye’s apartment,” Danny said.

“I called her from Neary’s.”

“She was home?”

“Yeah, and she said Ryan wasn’t there.”

“And you believed her.”

“If your uncle was there, he wouldn’t let her tell me he wasn’t. Besides, he’d never miss a trip to the Bronx. My guess is
he’s going to put Trey Winters to bed, then we’ll hear from him.”

Anthony Ryan loved the Bronx. He loved talking about how much the South Bronx had improved in the past few years. A new dawn
was rising over Fort Apache, he said. Every other block showed evidence of new construction. But to Danny the predominant
look was still the bombed-out landscape of a battle lost. Rubble-strewn lots seeded with shards of shattered brick; abandoned
five-story walk-ups shuttered blind with tin; the twin war orphans of poverty and apathy playing on cracked sidewalks.

“Tremont Taxi, right?” Gregory said.

“That’s what it said on the side of the cab.”

“There used to be an eye and ear clinic over here on Tremont Avenue, right off Webster. I used to drive a cop there once a
week for treatment. This was in the late sixties, maybe early seventies. Treatments lasted three hours sometimes. Some psycho
woman tossed lye in his face, partially blinded him. Lye used to be a big thing. Big danger to cops. This woman nailed five
or six cops at once. Coming up the stairs, some Harlem tenement. He was one of them. You don’t hear so much about lye anymore.”

When the Bronx was all one big farm, they named this section Tremont for its three hills: Mount Hope, Mount Eden, and Fairmont.
The gypsy cabs congregated atop Mount Hope, outside a storefront on Tremont Avenue near the Grand Concourse.

“He’ll call you, right?” Danny said. “If he needs you.”

“He knows my beeper number by heart.”

Joe Gregory said the reason the city allowed the gypsy cabs to operate was that they’d go into areas like this. Gregory parked
in front of Tremont Taxi, behind a primered Plymouth Aries with a plastic taxi sign on the side door.

The front window of the taxi office had once been the showcase of a bakery or butcher shop, some place with wares to display.
Inside, a bitter smell, coming from the dark green leaves steaming on the hot plate. A two-way radio crackled.

The dispatcher was a heavyset black man in a wheelchair with “Property of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital” stenciled on the back. He
sat beside a rickety card table, the shiny pages of a skin magazine open before him, all flesh and hair.

Gregory identified himself and told him that he needed to speak to someone who worked late last Sunday night. Someone with
knowledge of a fare dropped off at Third Avenue and Sixty-fourth in Manhattan. The dispatcher gave him the obligatory sneer,
then spoke into the radio.

“That’s two one one five Bathgate,” the dispatcher said, his mouth against the mike. “Two one one five.”

A smattering of porn mags spilled over a greasy vinyl sofa against the wall. Coke cans jammed with cigarette butts. A poster
of Pam Grier as Foxy Brown was taped to the wall above the sofa. The radio crackled again, the voice unintelligible.

“Return to base,” the dispatcher said.

Then he said to Gregory, “Sorry, I can’t help you.”

Gregory walked behind the desk and put both hands on the back of the man’s wheelchair. He yanked it quickly and powerfully,
as if he were going to dump the dispatcher onto the floor. He leaned down and whispered something to him.

“Miguel is the dude you want,” the dispatcher said. “He probably took that run. Probably coming in at midnight.”

“Two probablys,” Gregory said.

“Sometimes he shows, sometimes he don’t.”

“What’s his phone number?” Gregory said.

“You gotta be joking.”

“Maybe it’s in these files,” Gregory said. He opened the single file cabinet against the wall and took out a bottle of Gilbey’s
gin. He opened the second drawer and threw movie cassette tapes onto the vinyl couch.

“You don’t need to screw up my files,” the dispatcher said. “I can’t speak for last Sunday, but Sixty-fourth and Third is
a regular…. We pick her up around the corner, Two Ten Echo Place. Three, four in the morning, maybe once a week. Maybe less,
I don’t keep no statistics.”

“What apartment at Two Ten Echo?” Gregory said.

“She calls, we pick her up out front of the building.”

“Our little talk won’t get back to her,” Gregory said, picking up a stack of mail on the counter.

“I’m not exactly planning to sweet-talk the bitch, myself.”

Gregory gave him the zipped-lip sign. “How did that happen?” he asked, pointing in the general direction of the dispatcher’s
lower body.

“’Nam,” he said.

“Sorry, man,” Gregory said quietly. “Sorry I hassled you.”

He took a business card from his pocket and told the dispatcher to call him if he needed anything. He apologized twice more
before they got out the door.

T
hey had no trouble finding 210 Echo Place, a large private house carved into several apartments. Three metal garbage cans
sat out front, with the number
210
painted vertically in black. A thick chain looped through the lids. Seven steps led up to a stone stoop. Gregory kept driving
past the building.

“We passed it,” Danny said. “Two Ten is back there.”

“I know. That was just a look.”

He went around the block and came through more slowly the next time.

“What are we doing now?” Danny said.

“Looking for your uncle.”

“Why would he be here?”

“Because he’s capable of getting Faye to admit she had a boyfriend up here. And he’s crazy enough to look for the guy himself.
That’s why I went through the block. To check for his car.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t at Faye’s?”

“Never assume, Daniel.”

Gregory parked at a hydrant three houses away. He turned off the lights, let the car idle.

“What we got here is tricky,” Gregory said. “The trick is to find out exactly who lives here without raising anybody up.”

“How do you do that?”

“Several ways. Con Ed billing tells us who’s paying the electric, but maybe this place isn’t broken down to individual meters.
The phone company is a source, but maybe our subject doesn’t have a phone. My personal favorite is the mailman. The mailman
knows it all.”

“It’s almost midnight,” Danny said. “Good chance the mail-man’s been here already.”

“That’s the conundrum.”