Little Easter (13 page)

“Word in town was,” Piper drew her cruel lips close to me, “the city police were trying to build a murder case against her. I don’t think she did it though.”

Yeah, sure she didn’t believe it. Little Missy Piper sounded as convincing as a hungry leopard swearing off fresh-killed gazelle.

“So that’s why the
Times
let her go?”

“I’m sure it had something to do with it. Her drinking too. But it was the Pulitzer Affair that did it,” the gangly madame let that hang in the air for a minute before going on. “Apparently, Katy was a lock for the Pulitzer Prize a while back. But out of the blue, she goes to her editor and admits to faking some research and using some questionable sources. Imagine the embarrassment.”

“Yeah, just imagine,” I turned my back on Miss Piper. Suddenly, I wasn’t liking the way she smelled. “Thanks for the help,” I choked on my words.

“If there’s anything else I can assist you with . . .” she hinted hopefully.

“One thing,” I didn’t turn around. “Would I be way off if I guessed that this Pulitzer thing happened within a year, one way or the other, of her husband’s death?”

Miss Piper’s answer was this: “Are you sure you don’t know Kate Barnum?”

I didn’t reply. I listened to her footsteps fade away.

This microfilm thing was pretty tedious work. I mean I liked newspapers, but this was total sensory overload. I knew it was getting to me when I began rummaging through Mets’ boxscores from April of 1966. About two hours into the ordeal, I found the first articles relating to the trial. You know the kind of headlines; “Reputed Crime Boss Indicted,” “Underworld Trial Set To Begin,” “Government Witness Takes Stand Against Mr. Gandolfo,” “Jury Sequestered,” “Verdict In: ‘Not Guilty’. ” I garnered only inconsequential details from these additional readings. Apparently, Roberto Gandolfo liked to take long siestas in the courtroom and the pressure of testifying made Azrael nauseous and faint. Not very earth-shattering stuff.

Eventually I came to the clone of the article I found behind the snapshot of O’Toole’s deceased kid. And like I suspected there were accompanying pictures; the usual grainy, blurry, newspaper fare. There were headshots of the accused, their attorneys, the prosecuting attorney and of Azrael. Even in this photo you could see some of the life and beauty had already been bleached out of her. Azrael’s face was bloated and her eyes were full of only surrender. And in those eyes I saw the makings of the dead woman I discovered in the snow on Christmas Eve. But there was nothing in these pictures to explain why they had been ripped away from O’Toole’s copy. Maybe I just wasn’t seeing the obvious. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I rubbed my eyes, looked around and slipped the relevant sheets of microfilm into my pants. My ribs were probably sore, but my back hurt so much it was difficult to tell. I replaced the files, minus my deletions, and went for the door. Miss Piper had returned to her reading. When she stood to say her good-byes, I just waved her down, mouthed a silent thank-you and blew her an insincere kiss. Once outside, I removed the acetate sheets from my pants and thought about getting caught. I thought about Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth. It’s funny what you think about.

America’s Dairyland

I drove by the Scupper. For the first time since I’d relocated the piece of Brooklyn that was myself, the pub was closed when it shouldn’t’ve been. It’s unscheduled darkness added to my jacketless chill. MacClough had always taken great pride in just being open according to the sign that hung in his door. A man of his word, John MacClough. A man to set your watch by. He’d never say any such thing, but you knew he wanted desperately for the world to believe it. I believed it.

We were an odd mix, Johnny and I. The superficial differences were obvious. He was older—in years anyway—an Irish Catholic, a veteran, a cop, a fighter. He’d seen Europe on maps and globes and the colleges he went to taught only hard knocks. His politics, like his stickball pitches, came overhand and from the right. Did I already mention that most of his hair follicles still functioned and that they seemed incapable of producing gray or silver growth?

But MacClough was an anchor to me, someone who remembered Brooklyn the way I remembered it; fireworks on Tuesday nights on the boardwalk, fifteen-cent subway rides, black and green police cars, chalkbox stickball, basketball on night-blackened courts with very bent rims and making out with high school girls on the abandoned lifeguard chairs at Brighton Beach. After our first year, MacClough and I didn’t talk about home much. We didn’t have to. We didn’t want to. That Brooklyn no longer exists. And with each year, I wonder if it ever did. I know Johnny wonders, too.

To explain my relationship with MacClough, I usually tell this story: I lived in Wisconsin for a few years once. Why I lived there’s not important to anyone but me and my heart. Well, anyway, things were going poorly for me in America’s Dairyland and I’d been drinking too much. One night I found myself in some faceless bathroom in some nameless bar in Milwaukee. I’m pissing, head against the snotty tiles, when something taps my shoulder. “You went to PS 252, right?” I look up and there’s this guy, whose name I still don’t know, smiling at me like he’s a crusader just found the Holy fucking Grail.

Meanwhile this guy’s the same asshole Irish kid who used to mug us on Saturday mornings on the way home from synagogue. This is the kid who used to tie kids up with their prayer shawls and leave them hanging from No Parking signs. You know what I did? I put my dick back in my pants, pulled up my zipper and washed my hands. Then I gave that asshole Irish kid a great big hug and bought him a beer. Don’t ask me why, but seeing that jerk there just then felt awfully like salvation. Johnny and I are sort of like that, I guess; a bit of the home we’ve lost forever. I can’t reason it out for you. It’s beyond that.

I pressed my face up against the Scupper’s darkened window and wondered if MacClough was still busy entertaining the troops. I wanted answers. He’d promised them to me. But the Rusty Scupper’s closed door was a broken promise. That’s the funny thing about reliable people, it only takes one broken promise to shatter your faith in them. With people like Kate Barnum, faith was almost impossible to destroy because it was impossible to establish.

I had to get home and rest up. Body finding takes a lot out of me. I had an appointment with Kate Barnum. She didn’t know that. Suddenly, we had lots to discuss. She didn’t know that either. It was okay for her not to know these things. Today I’d learned there were plenty of things she didn’t want me to know.

Soup’s Done!

She opened the door to me. The mop of shaggy ringlets atop her head was captured in a stolen motel towel turban. I wondered just how big her collection of those towels might be. She pulled a cigarette out from between her unpainted lips and nicked it past me into the virgin snow. Dugan’s Dump was quiet enough to let me hear its dying hiss. She bent to kiss me. I let her. I kissed her back, sort of. I kissed her the kind of kiss that raised questions. She was smart enough not to ask them. She knew about such kisses. She gave me a beer, told me to sit and excused herself. I waited.

She reappeared armed with a brimming bourbon tumbler, her turban-free curls dangling wet and disordered about pale cheeks. The white tails of a men’s dress shirt hung far below the waist of her panties. A fresh cigarette had replaced the one that lay extinguished in the snow. The lips that held it were newly red and the air smelled of raw patchouli. She did not sit. I stood up.

“How’s the research coming at the
Times?
” I accused more than asked.

“So far,” she shrugged without much conviction, “it’s a dead-”

I slapped her jaw with the back of my right hand. The tumbler and cigarette flew off to her left. The spinning cigarette’s tip traced a red trail of its flight. Amazingly, most of the bourbon managed to ride out the launch intact, in glass. Contacting the stone fireplace ended that good fortune.

I’d like to say it was a playful poke and that she laughed it off with an endearing wink. I’d like to say that I was immediately overwhelmed with remorse and that even the thought of striking her again made me sick to my stomach. The fact was I smacked her down hard and it felt, if not tingly good, then, at least, satisfying.

She was down and before she could think of collecting herself, I was over her shoving stolen sheets of microfilm in her stunned face. “Dead end, huh?” I pulled her up by the shirt collar much as MacClough had done to me and held her face very close to mine. A red stain that wasn’t smeared lipstick dribbled from the right corner of her mouth. I thumbed her chin clean.

“If it isn’t Sir Walter Raleigh,” she delivered straight-faced and then proceeded to spit in my eyes. I let her go and wiped.

“Why the lies, Barnum?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “You were tryin’ to cut me out of it. You were gonna go to print and leave me holdin’ my dick in my hand. But we got a deal and you’re sticking to it.”

“Or else you’re going to slap me again, Sir Walter?” she taunted, licking some fresh blood from her cracked lips. “Promises, promises.”

“How long you have the articles about the trial?”

“A week, maybe. Ten days, maybe,” the reporter turned her back on me to search for a new cigarette. “Long enough to figure out the Gandolfos pushed the button on Azrael Esther Wise. There!” she found the smokes.

“Well, if you got it all figured and you don’t need me, where’s your by-line, where’s the revelations?” I picked up a copy of the
Whaler,
ripping it into ragged confetti. “Where, baby? Where?”

Barnum lit up the Chesterfield, blowing smoke as she spoke: “I’ll print it when it’s ready to print. Didn’t your momma tell you never to serve the soup until it was all cooked?”

“We never discussed soup much, Mom and I.” I tried smiling and failed.

“What are you all torn up about anyway?” Empowered by the cigarette, she went searching for more bourbon. “I practically had to drag you into this mess kicking and screaming. Now that I’m giving you the out, you don’t want it. What’s the buzz? I think we both know your buddy MacClough didn’t whack the girl. And the stiff out back,” she threw a thumb in the general direction of the pinky-ringed sapling, “he probably did the job and then got fed some of his own medicine. Silence is golden.”

She was making sense, but it was sophistry. Her reasoning wasn’t logic at all. It mocked it. If her story appeared now, MacClough would come out basically unscathed. And that’s what I had gotten mixed up in this for. But if it came out now, no matter how much of a scoop it might be, the story’s impact would be negligible and certainly not enough to resurrect a ruined career. We’re talking about the murder of a forgotten witness from a forgotten trial. A murder committed by a forgotten man. No, she wasn’t serving the soup because it wasn’t done cooking.

“Nice try, Barnum,” I applauded as if she’d sunk a thirty-foot putt.

That raised an eyebrow, but it didn’t stop her from raising a new jigger of bourbon. “Cheers!”

“You’re waitin’ for Johnny’s revenge,” I slapped the bourbon out of her hand.

“Stop it,” she screamed and swung at me wildly. I grabbed her wrists.

“You’re biding your time for Johnny’s revenge,” I repeated.

“You’re hurting me,” Barnum twisted her arms like epileptic snakes.

“The story as it stands now won’t do a thing for your career.” I let go of the snakes. She stood back and rubbed their sore necks. “But let’s say there’s this Mafia kingpin; dapper, stunningly handsome, a hero to some and current darling of the media. And let’s say he gets whacked. While every other journalist this side of the Pacific rim is scratchin’ their balls tryin’ to come up with a ‘Mafia War’ angle, you serve them a love triangle and John Francis MacClough on a silver platter. Soup’s done! Come and get it.”

“You’re talking crazy,” she looked everywhere but into my eyes.

“Am I? Am I really?” I thought about making empty threats. I thought about throwing her husband’s suspicious suicide in her face. I thought a lot of things and did none of them. “Okay, Barnum. We’ve got a deal. You’re letting me out of it. I don’t want out. You’re gonna get your story and maybe we can pump it up enough to get you back to the top of the hill, but you’re not climbin’ up using Johnny’s bones. There isn’t gonna be any revenge killing. Got it?”

She did not reply. It really hadn’t been a question.

“There’s angles to this mess even you don’t know about.” I was thinking about O’Toole and Larry Feld.

“What angle? The dead cop?” she laughed at me, blowing smoke into my face. “I know about the dead cop. O’Toole, right? You’re like a magnet for dead bodies.” Barnum echoed Mickelson’s sentiments.

“Other angles,” I sounded unconvincing.

“Which angles might those be?”

“The bottom line is, without Gandolfo’s demise you’ve got a story that will get you as far as your piece on zoning laws.” The smile ran away from her face. “And like I said, there isn’t going to be any more killing. Fact is, I’ve got all the info from you I require and all you’ve done lately is lie. The way I see it, you need me more than I need you. Without a fresh angle, you’re dead in the water. You’ll be penning zoning law articles for the rest of your fucking life. But a deal’s a deal,” God, I could be such a prince, “so you’ll still get your story if there’s one to be had.”

“Oh, thank you,” she got down on her knees and gave a mocking bow. “Oh, thank you my saviour,” she stood. “Now get the fuck outta my house.”

I got out. I was wearing my high school football coat and would until the Suffolk cops finished with my leather jacket. I remembered ordering the coat and the coaches telling me to buy it two or three sizes bigger than I was. I’d grow into it. I never did. Grow into it, I mean. But that was all right. Life buys us lots of coats we never grow into.

Humpty Dylan

Now I was guilty, plenty guilty. But that was about right. Fifteen minutes of denial is all I’m good for. There was no sense to slapping Barnum. Even the flash of satisfaction I’d felt in doing it had deserted me. All I had left was forever to beat myself up over hitting her. Yet neither that giddy prospect nor the guilt brought any relief.