CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (4 page)

S
EVEN

T
he parking lot, like the garden and the building itself, was a rectangle running the length of the block, built up over the retaining wall. I walked the lot in the moving shadows of paper birches planted along the fence and in the small turnaround. Their leaning trunks and weeping branches gave them an old-fashioned, Victorian look. The turnaround had a stone bench on it, between two trees; I wondered how long it had been since anyone sat there, waiting for a car or a carriage or a visitor dropping by during a Sunday stroll.

I walked to the edge, looked over the wall at Chester Avenue thirty feet below. Two young women wandered along, pushing carriages. A man worked on a car to the urgent rap beat of its radio. There was no sign that there’d been a fight down there earlier. There was no sign of the Cobras.

I checked the side door on the south, found it well locked. I
ambled back through the lot, tried the north side door. Locked, too. I went in, perched on Fuentes’s desk, took out a cigarette.

“Hey, you better not,” he grinned at me. “Can’t smoke in here, man. Nowhere in the buildin’. An’ you better not get caught sittin’ around, too. La Gringa see you, she gonna get on you ass. She won’t care what kinda hero you are.” I had told him the story, minus the part about the gun, when I’d first gotten back to work. “Then she gonna call Mr. Moran an’
he
gonna get on you ass.”

“La Gringa?” I stood up off the desk, tucked the cigarette back in the pack.

“Lady runs the place. Mrs. Wyckoff. She got hair sorta like this.” He made round gestures at the top of his head.

“I thought Dr. Reynolds ran the Home.”

“Well, yeah, Dr. Reynolds, he’s the boss, but she’s his boss. You look out for her, man. She think everyone born was born to cheat her. You know?”

“Thanks.” I checked my watch. “I’ll be back in half an hour, relieve you for lunch.”

He grinned again. “That’s good, ’cause by then I’m gonna have to pee real bad.”

I turned to go, turned back. “Fuentes—”

“Pablo,” he said. “You call me Fuentes, I think I’m my
papi
.”

“Pablo,” I acknowledged. “How long have you been working here?”

“Maybe about a year.”

“Ever had any trouble before the other night?”

“Never had the kinda trouble you just had.”

“Have you had any, at all?”

He smoothed the ends of his mustache. “Not me. I mean, there’s trouble round here all the time, but usually it don’t make no difference here. Even all that equipment stuff, that don’t happen here.”

“What do you mean, equipment stuff?”

“Oh, man, you don’t know about that? Big problem over here,” he said, but he was grinning. “They steal equipment you got outside your buildin’. Air-conditionin’ stuff, and ducts, and you got copper pipin’ from your roof, they steal that too. Sometimes they go right in your basement. Like in the summertime, they stole the burner out from a boiler they got down the street. Super didn’t know
nothing about it until he goes to turn it on in the winter, give the people some heat.”

“He never checked before that?”

“Hey, you go down in the cellar every week, make sure your boiler still got a burner in it?”

I had to admit I didn’t.

“An’ those faces,” he went on. “Like they got on churches?”

“Gargoyles, you mean?”

“
Gargola, sí
. Monster faces on the roof. Some of the fancy buildins around here, they got them.”

“They steal those?”

“Man,” he grinned, “they steal them faces right off the buildins. They steal them faces right from under you nose.”

I grinned back, rubbed my nose. “But no one tries that here?” I asked. “Because there are guards?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think just that. It’s like we got a ‘Off Limits’ sign. That guy who was beat up, that was about the only thing. Until, you know, Mike.”

“The guy who was beat up. You mean the trucker?”

“
Sí
. Makin’ a night delivery. You heard about it? Got the shit kicked outta him. Right down here.” He gestured to the lot, the wall, Chester Avenue below. “Still in the hospital. Been six weeks. Over at Samaritan.”

“He didn’t work for the Home, did he?”

“No, man. Just some trucker deliverin’ here. What I’m sayin’, usually no one here gets trouble. Like there’s some kinda truce. We keep outta the neighborhood, you know, just come and go from here, and nobody bothers nobody. Like it’s a island, you know? Like a different world.”

I did the doors again, while Fuentes and then Dayton had lunch. Dayton brought me a roast pork sandwich from the bodega on the corner. I badly wanted a beer, too, but I’d given Dayton enough to worry about for a while.

“You can eat downstairs. There’s a room the maintenance staff uses,” he told me. I went on down, found the place he meant. It was on the east side, the buried side. Green-and-gray linoleum tiles, fluorescent lights, vinyl-covered chairs taped where the stuffing had tried to escape. I sat in one of them, ate, drank thick Latin coffee. I
listened to the lights buzz and tried to pretend I didn’t ache.

When I was done I went and found the lockers, in an alcove near the boiler room. There were two dozen of them, dented, green, and old. None of them had names; about half of them had locks.

“There are empties,” Dayton had said. “Ask Pete Portelli.”

“Who’s he?”

“Building superintendent.”

I went looking for Pete Portelli.

I found him in an office off the boiler room. The plastic sign on the half-open door read, “Stationary Engineer.” The office was small, windowless, and smelled of cigarette smoke and beer, both stale. I knew the man behind the battered wooden desk was Pete because it said so in red stitching on his coveralls. The desk was piled with invoices, bills, notes scrawled in thick pencil on torn scraps of paper. Over the file cabinet was a girlie calendar from Aberg Tool Works.

When I knocked he looked up and grunted.

“I’m Smith,” I told him. “I’m the new guy on days for Moran.”

“Swell. What’re you doing here?”

“Supervisor said to talk to you about a locker.”

He leaned back in his chair, surveyed me. I stood in the doorway and did the same to him. He was stocky, gray-haired, sloppily shaven. His hands were square, the nails dirty.

One side of his mouth tugged upward. “Where’d you get the mouse?”

“Interrupted something that was none of my business.”

His smile widened; he seemed to think that was funny. “Smith, huh? That for real?”

“Uh-huh.”

He shrugged. “If you say so.” He stuck out his hand. “Pete Portelli, that’s me.”

“Pleasure,” I said.

“It’s a crappy job.”

“Mine or yours?”

“Ahhh, both. But I get to sit down sometimes, and guys work for me.”

“And I get to stroll around and I have no worries.”

“Oh, yeah. Except some punks climbing over the wall and beating your brains out.”

“You mean like happened to Mike Downey?”

He snorted in agreement. “Bunch of moulies playing Knockout. Fucking animals. They’ll break your head for no reason, no reason at all.”

“Knockout?”

“Yeah.” He picked something out of his teeth. “It’s a game the moulies play up here.”

I must have looked mystified; he grinned in satisfaction. “Knockout, way you play is, kid jumps a guy, tries to knock him out. Some stranger, y’know, a man, not another kid. Longer it takes, worse his score is. You didn’t hear of that?”

“No,” I said. “I hadn’t.”

“Well, think about it. Big guy like you’s probably worth double. Except you’re messed up already, so maybe not.”

“You think that’s what happened to Mike Downey?”

“Well, no one stole nothing that night, car radio, nothing.” He spread his palms. “Ask me, they were out hunting. Jungle hunting.” He smiled some more; he must have thought this was funny, too.

“Maybe they got scared off.”

“By who? Some basket case from upstairs? Not that asshole Howe. He didn’t hear a fucking thing.”

“I thought he found the body.”

“Yeah, when he finally caught on Downey wasn’t doing his route and went looking.” He shook a Camel from a crumpled pack, held the pack toward me.

“I have my own,” I said. “But I thought you couldn’t smoke in the building.”

“Why, Wyckoff might getcha?” He lit his cigarette, dropped the match in an overflowing ashtray. “Funny, I wouldn’t’ve figured you for a guy afraid of women.”

“Some women,” I answered.

“Mistake.” He shook his head. “You gotta show them who’s boss early, then you don’t get no more trouble. Me, I got Wyckoff under control.”

“Really? How’d you manage that?”

“Broads scare easy.” He grinned a brown-toothed grin. “Like my wife. You married? Kids?”

“No.”

“Lucky you. Single guy, you get variety, huh? Spice of life.” A wink went with that. “ ’Course, being married don’t slow
me
down,
you know? Carter!” he suddenly yelled past me. I half turned, moved out of the doorway and into the room. My new cousin stood behind me in the hall. He nodded vaguely to me; I took the cue and did the same. “Carter, where the fuck you been? I been looking for you half an hour!”

“I been upstairs rehangin’ the door to Miz Weeks’ room,” Carter said.

“Oh, yeah? And just who the hell told you to do that?”

“No one told me. Miz Weeks ask me yesterday, say she can’t close her door.”

“Her mouth, you mean! That old bat could talk the ear off a fucking fish.” To me, Portelli said, “Him and her was probably sitting around exchanging stories about the good old plantation days. Carter, you work for
me!
You don’t scratch your ass unless I tell you to. You understand that, or you want I should use smaller words?”

Carter’s spine stiffened, but all he said was, “I understand.”

“Swell. Now get the fuck back to work. Ahh, shit, wait.” He sighed, a man weary with the burdens life thrust upon him. “Doctor Feelgood’s looking for you. I told him he had ten minutes, then I want you back here. See him first.”

Carter turned and left, without a look at me.

Pete looked at me, though. “Damn moulies stick together, don’t they? You suppose he’d’ve spent ten minutes hanging a door for some one of those kikes up there?” I didn’t answer. He smashed out his cigarette. “So, you got nothing to do? What’re you hanging around here for?”

“A locker,” I reminded him.

“Oh, shit, yeah, okay.” He rummaged through a desk drawer, came out with a file folder with a couple of pieces of ruled paper in it. He looked through them. “Eighteen,” he said. He scrawled my name next to the number, with the note “Moran” next to my name. “Bring your own lock. G’bye.”

The garden was a welcome relief after Pete Portelli’s office, and my own company a welcome relief after his.

E
IGHT

I
ran into my new cousin toward the end of my shift, invited him to join me for a quick beer after work.

“Can’t do it.” He shook his head. “Got somewhere to be. Rain check?”

“Sure.”

“Look forward to it. Hey, thanks for staying cool with Pete before.”

“Well, I don’t know what I was staying cool about, but you obviously didn’t want to know me.”

“Not exactly that. Pete find out I been messing with the Cobras, he’ll fire my ass.”

“What about Dr. Madsen? Didn’t he tell Pete why he wanted you?”

“Naw. He tell Pete he need a quick look at me, have to do with my health insurance.”

My respect for the cynical Dr. Madsen rose an abrupt notch.

“That Pete’s a real peach, isn’t he?” I said as we fell into step along the corridor. “Is he always like that?”

“Nope. Sometime he in a bad mood. Unless you Italian. You Italian?”

“Uh-uh. Half Irish, half cracker.”

“Cracker from where?”

“Kentucky. Louisville.”

“Don’t sound it.”

“Didn’t live there long. Listen, I’m on break and I’d just about kill for a cup of coffee. Is there a coffee machine or something around here?”

He hesitated. “No machine. But if you really desperate, they got coffee in the staff room. We not suppose to go in there, and probably you not either, but seeing as you new, maybe it be all right.”

“I’ll take my chances. Point me toward it.”

I thought about that cup of coffee a lot, later. If I’d focused less on finding some caffeine, more on why I was there, I might have remembered what I’d already forgotten. A simple question, a simple answer, and I might have cleared up what I was there to clear up and left a lot of other things untouched. As it was, before I saw the answer floating on the surface I was in so deep that I was turning up the mud at the bottom, exposing things that couldn’t stand the light.

The staff room was bright and neat, three square tables with chairs around them, two sofas, a small kitchenette with a stainless-steel counter. Rectangles of late-day sunlight striped the floor in front of the barred windows. It was quiet and empty and smelled of coffee.

A full Mr. Coffee on the counter was waiting patiently just for me. I poured a cup, clinked a quarter into a can with a slotted top, and took the cup to the windows, to lean and drink and watch.

Golden sunlight outlined each leaf on the parking-lot birches. I thought of the maples on the hillside above my cabin, wondered if they’d turned yet. I felt the coffee warm my chest, caught the gentle jolt in my brain as it kicked in.

A flash of sunlight bounced across the parking lot as the back door opened. Dr. Madsen, medical bag in hand, strode briskly through the lot and down the hill. That was curious, I thought. The subway was the other way; if he drove to work, his car would be in the lot. Maybe he was picking up a sandwich at the bodega, but then why take his bag?

These were interesting questions, but my musing on them was interrupted by a silken, angry voice.

“Mr. Smith!” Mrs. Wyckoff stood rigid in the doorway. “You’re paid to patrol these grounds, not to hide from your work in rooms where you don’t belong!”

“Union gives me a fifteen-minute break twice a day.” I finished my coffee. “To take care of bodily functions. My body needs caffeine to function.”

“This room is for professional staff only.” She wouldn’t be mollified. “Possibly you didn’t know that, but you know it now.”

“Mrs. Wyckoff,” I said, rinsing my cup, setting it on the counter, “we seem to have started off badly. If it was my fault I’m sorry. I’m only trying to do my job—”

“Then I suggest you get back to it.” She interrupted my apology, held the door open for me. It was too bad. I’d been about to say something nice about Helping Hands’ good name; she might have liked that.

At four, when my shift ended, I left my tie and uniform jacket in my locker, changed into a windbreaker of my own. I took the car and headed north and west across the Bronx to Kingsbridge, to meet Hank Lindfors at a place of his choosing, the way Bobby had set it up.

I drove the full length of the Concourse this time, curving with it as the apartment buildings gave way to short bursts of bustle at Fordham and again at Kingsbridge Road. I waited for a stoplight beside Poe Park, where the trees blazed red and gold in the long low sunlight.

Where the Concourse ended I swung west, worked my way down to Broadway. A block over I found the place I was looking for: Ehring’s Tavern, a corner bar. I circled for a place to park. The neighborhood was small apartment buildings, one-story stores, a library, a couple of churches. Paper pumpkins and black cats hung in the window of the candy store where I stopped for cigarettes; the granite bank had a show of third graders’ artwork in the lobby.

North of here lay the vastness of Van Cortlandt Park, and then Yonkers, Westchester, and the rest of the world; south was Manhattan. East, where I’d come from, the Bronx faded through tired and shabby to desolate and desperate. And to the west, up the hill, was Riverdale, the high ground where the money in the Bronx had retreated so it wouldn’t get its feet dirty.

Across the street from Ehring’s I found a phone in one of those perforated metal enclosures that pass for phone booths now. I punched in Bobby’s number, lit a cigarette while I listened to the ring. I waited longer than I usually have the patience for, but sometimes it took Bobby time to get to the phone.

The seventh ring was cut off by a sharp growl. “Moran!”

“Smith,” I countered.

“Ah, Jesus!” Bobby growled some more. “Where the hell are you? Are you all right?”

“Never felt better.”

“Al Dayton says you’re a mess.”

“He exaggerates.”

“Al Dayton,” Bobby said pointedly, “had to give up fishing because he couldn’t lie. He’s a regular George Washington. You, on the other hand—”

“I’m at a pay phone. If you’re going to critique my character I’ll have to get more change.”

“Forget it. You can’t afford it. What happened?”

I told him about the fight.

“You made some enemies,” he said, when I was through.

“And a friend. Listen, Bobby, there are a few things I want to ask you about, now that I’ve spent some time at that place. Can you meet me for dinner at Shorty’s?”

“Yeah, sure. When?”

I looked at the clock in the bakery window. It was four-thirty. I might be an hour at Ehring’s, another half hour getting home. “Eight?” I asked. That would give me two hours at home, and I wanted that.

“Okay,” Bobby said. Then, “Kid? You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine, Bobby. I’ll see you later.”

We hung up. I gave the phone another quarter, punched in Lydia’s number. It was answered on the second ring, but it was answered by a machine.

“You have reached the offices of Chin Investigative Services,” it told me. “There’s no one available to take your call right now, but if you leave a message we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.” Then it told me again, in Chinese.

“It’s me,” I said, after the beep. “Are you there?” I waited a few seconds but she didn’t pick up. “Okay, listen. I’m having dinner with Bobby Moran at Shorty’s at eight. Can you meet us there?” I was out of things to say, so I just said, “See you later,” and hung up. Feeling slightly cheated, I crossed the street to Ehring’s.

There weren’t many people in Ehring’s, but it was the kind of place that could never look empty. The heavy, paneled door brought me into the end of a long, narrow room, where the bar ran down the left side, leaving no space for tables on the right. Beyond the bar was a room where booths lined both walls and an aisle ran between; to the left of that was a dining room.

The walls were dark-paneled wood, and every inch was hung
with framed photographs, ancient fraternal banners, and menus from testimonial dinners given in 1923. There were shelves of decorated beer steins and oversized pilsners, hunting horns on pegs, and a string of Christmas lights above the bar. The whole place was watched over by trophy heads: three deer, a moose, a wolf, a civet cat. One of the deer had Christmas lights for eyes.

I sat at the bar under the suspicious eyes of the trophies and the regulars. The bar stool was leather, worn soft with the years. Down at the far end, the red-cheeked, round-shouldered bartender was talking to two men who looked like they were spending their retirement here. In time he wandered over, dropped a coaster on the bar, asked affably, “What can I get you?”

“Beer,” I said. “Bud.”

As he pulled the handle and my beer foamed into the mug, he asked, “How about some ice for that eye?”

That was my opening to tell my story, draw the regulars into talk, buy a round and get bought one, begin not to be a stranger here. But I was tired, and I was here for a different reason.

“Too late for that.” I dropped four bucks on the bar, didn’t pick up the change when he brought it back. “I’m meeting a guy here. I don’t know him, but he said to ask at the bar. Hank Lindfors.”

“Why didn’t you say so? He’s here.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the back room. “You’re Smith? You’re early. He said to look for you around five.”

“Thanks.” I took my beer and headed down the narrow room to the booths in the back.

Only three were occupied, only one by an obvious cop. He had the lined cop face and the walrus cop mustache and the hard, guarded cop eyes. He was a big man, broad, his age hard to tell. He could have been younger than I was, not much over thirty; or older than I, pushing fifty. His weathered face and thick dark hair would swear to either story. He sat facing the door, one arm flung along the low back of the booth. His expression didn’t change as he watched me walk toward him, and his big hands were still, but I knew that deceptive cop quiet, too. I knew that if he thought he had to, he could drop me fast.

“Lindfors?” I said, standing above him. “I’m Smith.”

He nodded; he knew some things, too. He gestured with his
glass at the green leather bench across from him. “Sit down.”

As I slid in, he said, “You’re early.”

“So are you.” And probably for the same reason, I thought. For the edge.

He took a drink—he was drinking something brown, with ice—and said, “Look, I told Moran and I’ll tell you. I don’t like P.I.’s.” He looked at me out of eyes like glass, glittering and dark. “Cowboys and shakedown artists. I don’t want you screwing up this case and I don’t want to be sitting here talking to you.”

“Why are you?”

He drank some more, emptied his glass. “You’re Dave Maguire’s boy, aren’t you?”

I felt myself stiffen a little, as though my skin were hardening protectively. “Dave was my uncle.”

Lindfors signaled the bartender. “Maguire talked about you a lot. I don’t know if you knew that.” He didn’t look as if he cared if I knew it, either. “He was a fucking good cop, Captain Maguire. I had him at the Academy. Served under him at the Third Precinct. I felt it when he got taken out, Smith. I felt it.” His hard eyes searched mine. He said, “You were there.”

It wasn’t a question, but I answered it. “I was there.”

“You were hurt bad. You took out one of the trigger men before you went down.”

This wasn’t a question either, and I didn’t say anything.

“I was on the task force,” he said. “To find the other hit man and the fucker who ordered it. We weren’t fast enough. Someone else smoked the hit man, and fucking Malaguez went back to Colombia and got whacked in a coke turf war. You know all that.”

I did, but I waited.

“So I guess what I think is, they got what was coming to them, but it wasn’t justice.” He spat that word, as though he’d long ago lost his taste for it. “I guess what I think is, I owe Captain Maguire one.”

A waitress in a dirndl skirt appeared then, with a fresh drink for Lindfors. She made a gesture toward my beer and I shook my head.

Lindfors tried the new drink. “So I’m talking to you.”

I lit a cigarette, shook the match into a ceramic ashtray that said “Ehring’s” at the bottom. “Bobby Moran was a friend of Dave’s. You were pretty rough on him.”

“Moran’s all busted up because the vic was his nephew. And
worked for him. Screws hell out of your guard business if you can’t keep your guards alive.” Under his mustache his upper lip curled. Maybe it was a smile; I didn’t know. “He’s got this asshole idea that the killing was more than it was.”

“What was it?”

“Random,” he said, looking at me, emphasizing the word. “Oh, maybe not quite. Maybe because the kid was in uniform, that’s why it was him and not three other guys. But it had nothing to do with the kid, any more than you gave a shit in Nam who you were shooting at. Anyone in those fucking pajamas was the fucking enemy. Were you in Nam?”

I shook my head. He narrowed his eyes with the unasked question.

“I was in the Navy,” I said. “I didn’t see any action.”

“Well, you should’ve. It would’ve prepared you for this.”

“For what?”

“For fucking war, asshole. What the hell you think is going on out there? Why the hell you think that kid was killed? He was the enemy. White kid in uniform over there, what did he expect?”

Lindfors looked down into his glass again. It was still almost full, but he emptied it in a sudden fierce gulp, slammed it on the table. The young couple in the next booth jumped.

Lindfors spoke without looking at me. “They got armies over there. They got fucking kid armies and they got no reason in hell not to kill you. They’ll kill you for cash so they can buy crack and sneakers and they’ll kill you for fun. They’ll kill you to be tougher than some other kid that never killed anyone. They’ll kill you to see if their gun works. There’s nothing in control over there, Smith. There’s no one in charge. You don’t know who’s shooting at you and if you did you couldn’t stop him. Just like Nam. Fucking kid armies!”

He stopped, looked at his empty glass, looked up at me. He smiled a bitter smile. “That’s what happened to your vic, Smith. He got killed in the war.”

I took my cigarette from my mouth. “Who killed him?”

He stared at me; then he made a sound like a laugh. He signaled the waitress, motioned for new drinks for us both. I looked around the small room, at the menus and newspaper clippings and photos of another time, of the time before the war.