Nightbird (4 page)

“The woman from the Big Apple Circus could come today,” Pinto said.

“Forget the Big Apple Circus, Pinto. They don’t want us, and I don’t want them. This summer is my last in this city.
Finito
.”

“Oh, I forgot. The man with big plans.
El patrón
, strutting around his fancy restaurant in his white suit. Fucking all the little waitresses.”

“
Silencio, por favor
. Your bad breath is making dark clouds.”

Victor angled his body so he could watch the flow of detectives coming in and out of the Broadway Arms. He could tell the
detectives by the way they walked. Cocky little bastards, strutting around as if they owned the city. Pale, paunchy guys in
cheap suits, hair sprouting from their ears. Cops didn’t frighten him at all. He’d already buried one in a tropical swamp.

“Show time,” Pinto said. “Grease the crowd for the star… the Mexican stud horse. Maybe some rich lady is here who will buy
restaurant for you. All you have to do is fuck her five times a day. Right, my friend?”

“Find her and tell her it’s a deal.”

Victor heard the laughter as Pinto began. He worked the back of the crowd slowly, pretending they weren’t there, like Emmett
Kelly sweeping away the spotlight. Then the scarf trick; he blew his nose in the last one. Bodily functions were guaranteed
laughs.

Across the street, cops on the eighteenth floor of the Broadway Arms lined up on the terrace. All doing the same thing: looking
down. As if that would somehow reveal the answer. Their heads lined up along the rail like painted coconuts on the cart of
a Juarez street vendor. If he had an M-16, he could pick them off one by one. Splat, splat, splat.

On the sidewalk, under the green canopy of the Broadway Arms, the big red-faced detective flailed his arms at the doorman.
Victor wondered where the other one was, the thin one. The one who had climbed onto the roof of the van.

Victor reached into his bag and took out his performing gloves. Right on top for a change. He pushed his hands into the tight
leather fingers. He rolled his shoulders back toward the statue and heard the pop of cartilage. The sounds of his body grew
louder every day, crying out to him that enough was enough. The family curse of rheumatoid arthritis had not skipped his generation.
But he could sense change in the air, the life he’d dreamed of, a life he could almost taste.

Opportunity knocked, and he had answered. The days of passing the hat were numbered, days of sunshine promised to be endless.
He could pull it off. It was like the trapeze. The critical moment in trapeze was the moment you left the platform. The timing
had to be perfect, and his was flawless. The courage to push off… he’d always had that. Victor Nuñez was fearless. It was
the most exhilarating feeling in the world, the rush of danger. Off into the darkness. Without a net. No turning back. He
was airborne.

E
verybody in my family sneezes twelve times,” Detective Joe Gregory said, the back of his hand up to his nose. “Exactly twelve.
Physically impossible for any of us to quit before twelve sneezes.”

He was sitting on Gillian Stone’s bed, recovering from sneeze number six, surrounded by delicate lacy bras and French-cut
bikini panties in shimmering Jell-O colors.

“Maybe you’re allergic to perfume,” Danny Eumont said.

“It ain’t perfume I’m allergic to, kid,” he said. “Trust me on that one.”

Danny told Gregory the same story he’d told his uncle: the time sequence they were so worried about. Gregory added that the
Broadway Arms night doorman said Gillian got out of a cab a little before ten-thirty. They both seemed to think this backed
up Danny’s story.

“Do you still have a key to this place?” Gregory said.

“I never
had
a key to this place.”

Gregory registered sneeze number seven. Ryan excused himself, saying he was going to see what the Crime Scene Unit had done
on the terrace. A male uniformed cop from the precinct sat in the living room, reading magazines.

“You’re sure you never had a key,” Gregory said. “Young stud like you might have so many keys he forgets which is which.”

“I was never even
in
this place before. When I was going out with her she lived on the East Side. And I never had a key to that place, either.”

Danny had overheard Gregory saying that detectives responding from the Mid-Town North Precinct found Gillian’s door locked—dead-bolted.
It was one of those locks where the dead bolt could be engaged by a thumb switch from the inside but needed a key to be locked
from the outside. Gillian Stone’s house keys had been found in her purse.

“Who, to your knowledge, might have a key to this place?” Gregory said.

“Trey Winters, of course.”

“The squad interviewed him in the precinct this morning. Anybody else?”

“Maybe her sister, only other one I can think of.”

“Faye Boudreau,” Gregory said. “One hundred eighty-five East Sixty-fourth Street, apartment three-K.”

“Gillian’s old apartment. I’ve been in that one.”

“Faye surrendered a key to detectives at the morgue this morning. What’s your take on the sister? Little wifty, isn’t she?”

“I met her three or four times,” Danny said, wondering what “wifty” meant. “Hardly opened her mouth. Hello, goodbye.”

“This morning at Bellevue,” Gregory said, “she came off as a bit of a space cadet. Wouldn’t even set foot in the viewing room.
Now we have to wait for the parents to fly in from Arizona to make the official ID.”

That’s one for my book on cops, Danny Eumont thought. The fact that Joe Gregory found it strange that Faye Boudreau was unable
to look at the body of her sister. It was another piece of irrefutable evidence that cops, like the rich, were different from
the rest of the world.

“I gotta tell ya,” Gregory said. “The thing that bothers me about all this is
you
. Why call
you?
You say your relationship ended six months ago. Now she’s involved with someone else. But… out of the blue, when she’s upset,
she calls you.”

“I’ve been trying to explain that. The reason she called me… and why she was so upset… was that she was afraid she might be
getting dropped from the show. Her producer, Trey Winters, trumped up this phony rumor that she had a substance abuse problem.”

“So she calls you for a shoulder to cry on.”

“She couldn’t exactly cry on Trey Winters’s shoulder, could she?”

My bombshell, Danny thought, and Joe Gregory didn’t even look up. As if he’d heard it all before. He continued to pick his
way through her underwear, nonchalantly, enjoying it.

“Still seems strange,” Gregory said, “she calls
you
. Seems to me she’d have to have a damn good reason to call a boyfriend she dumped six months ago. You think maybe it was
because you’re a magazine writer, and she’s thinking—”

“
She
didn’t bring that up.
I
asked
her
if she wanted me to write a story.”

“Are you writing this story? Let’s get that out on the table right now.”

“No, I’m not writing this story,” Danny said. “But you’re missing the point. The point is that there was no drug problem in
the first place.”

“Winters made it all up.”

“Exactly. That’s what needs to be looked at. Not what happened six months ago.”

Gregory’s Charlie Chan style of questioning was beginning to get on Danny’s nerves. His uncle had told him that interrogation
was becoming a lost art. He said that some detectives got so used to easy cases, or “ground balls,” that they forgot that
sometimes they actually had to solve one.

“According to Winters,” Gregory said, “Gillian’s drug problem has been an ongoing issue for over a month. If so, what set
her off last night?”

“Winters did. He called her last night and insisted she had to be tested by a lab of his choosing.”

Gregory changed the focus of the questioning to Gillian’s family. Danny told him the little he knew. Gillian was Arizona born
and raised. Gillian’s mother, Lynnette, was active in theater groups around their home in Scottsdale. Her father, Evan, was
a high-profile investor and developer, known mostly for extravagant shopping malls in the Southwest. On the dresser was a
picture of a smiling Evan Stone arm in arm with Barry Goldwater, both wearing cowboy hats and bolo ties.

“So what’s the bottom line here, Danny? Was she doing drugs or not? Toxicology will eventually settle the issue, but it might
take a while.”

“Let me put it like this: I went with her for almost a year, and we were very close. Very, very close. I’d know if she was
doing drugs, believe me.”

“Then why was she so upset about the test?”

“Because Winters had her trapped. Once the word got around, no matter what the outcome, her reputation on Broadway would be
damaged. People would remember the fact she was tested, not the results.”

“You buy that?”

“Yeah. Broadway is a small town.”

“What kind of shape was she in when she left the bar last night?”

“She had a buzz going,” Danny said. “A minor buzz.”

“Slurring her words, according to the bartender. Wobbly on her feet, according to the doorman. After only three drinks.”

“She only weighed about one oh five. It doesn’t take many drinks at one oh five.”

“But she was drunk, right?”

“Maybe she didn’t eat; I don’t know.”

“See, now that bothers me,” Gregory said, looking up from a stack of Broadway show T-shirts. “She’s someone you care for,
and you admit she had half a load on. Yet you didn’t even offer to see her safely home?”

“See her safely home? What century are you from? For your information, I
did
ask her if she wanted me to take her home. She said no. End of story.”

“Number eight,” Joe Gregory said, and sneezed into a camisole.

A
nthony Ryan stood on the terrace, looking down onto Times Square and wondering what it would be like to fall upside down in
the wind, your last glimpses of life confined to fleeting glances into the windows of the neighbors below… seventeen sad scenes…
a flickering stack of Hopper paintings, subtly hinting that everyone was lonely and desperate, the rest of us only one disappointment
away from going off a terrace ourselves.

A few floors below, a large-winged bird floated in the murky heat. It was odd watching a bird from above. A hawk, maybe. Ryan
had read there were hawks in the city. He didn’t know anything about birds. But he did know about his son, who had flown through
the canyons of immense western states on nylon wings that failed. He couldn’t stop seeing his son falling through space, the
sound of collision suddenly so catastrophic that the mere thought sucked the breath from him. He clutched the railing as his
legs buckled and his knees banged against the opaque panel.

Ryan had always been terrified of heights, but with the death of his son all fear of death evaporated. What difference did
it make?
Death will come, sure as shit it will, but we’ll all be together again. How bad is that?
He’d lost all patience for people who complained about niggling crap. At night he’d sit in front of the TV and watch people
complaining about taxes, traffic, politics, prices, about every stupid thing. How shallow were the lives of these people to
get worked up over such inconsequential bullshit. Try losing a child. See what’s important then.

The hawk flew closer. Ryan spoke his son’s name aloud, and the hawk floated toward him. Anthony Ryan was angry with himself
for not having been a better father. But he was comforted by the thought that his son was no longer falling.

D
id you know Trey Winters owns this apartment?” Gregory said.

“I figured he did,” Danny said. “A lot of the production companies own apartments. They use them to lure big-time stars. It’s
a major perk, especially in New York.”

“But Gillian’s small potatoes in this show. Doesn’t a major perk like this apartment sound a little generous to you?”

“I know exactly what you’re driving at,” Danny said. “And I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“Did she actually say they were having an affair?”

“Not in so many words. But the point I got was that this trumped-up drug charge was Winters’s way of insulating himself from
any accusations she might make.”

“You got all that from ‘not in so many words,’” Gregory said. “Did Gillian tell you that she expected Winters to visit her
last night? Here in this apartment?”

“No, she didn’t,” Danny said.

He was aware that Gregory was staring at him, trying to gauge his reaction. It was surprise. Genuine surprise.

“Well, he was here,” Gregory said. “Apparently the last person to see her alive.”

“She didn’t say anything about it to me,” Danny said, and he wondered if it would be too nervy to take out his own notebook.
“Maybe he dropped by unexpectedly.”

“And by the way,” Gregory said, reaching into a dresser drawer, “contrary to your prediction, we found these three nightgowns.”

“I swear to God, I never saw her wear one before.”

“Did you know Gillian was the understudy for the role of Maria?”

“No,” Danny said.

“I guess she forgot to tell you that, too. Yeah. Actually, what she was wearing when she died was a costume, not a nightgown.
It was a dress from the show’s wardrobe, for the ‘I Feel Pretty’ number. A costume Trey Winters brought over last night for
her to try on.”

“I had no idea,” Danny said. “He brought her a costume to try on?”

“That doesn’t sound like someone who is about to be dropped from a show, does it?”

“Why would he bring a costume at that time of night?”

“That was my next question, kid.”

O
n the terrace, Anthony Ryan went through Gillian’s motions again. He always walked in the victim’s footsteps. Only two steps:
door to hassock. The hassock was short and wide with small, round wooden legs. Her white ballet shoes had been found, side
by side, next to the hassock. Apparently she’d stepped out of the shoes, then up onto the hassock, thus destroying Joe Gregory’s
“clean feet” theory.