Little Easter (16 page)

She moved out. She began drinking. She began dating other men. She told one of her new beaus she was having trouble sleeping. He got her a script to ease that problem. The pills worked for awhile. In the end, nothing worked. Tallenger tried making nice, wanted to reconcile. She nixed the idea. One night a cop from the Fifth Precinct called her at her desk and suggested they meet at Tallenger’s.

Tallenger had done his last gig. He’d never have to play another wedding or bar mitzvah to make ends meet. His end was met. The unstable sax man had consumed enough sleeping pills to kill a standing-room-only crowd at Shea. Cops didn’t find a note, but they did trace the pills back to Barnum and the prescription her new beau had supplied. Odd thing was, Kate swore never to have given any of the drug to Tallenger. Another odd thing happened. Three days after they found the permanently sleepy Tallenger, the cops received a package in the mail.

You guessed it. The package was from Barnum’s late husband. In it they found a note repeating Tallenger’s accusation that Kate was plotting to have him executed. In addition, the deceased jazz man charged that Kate Barnum had recently had meetings with several known felons; some suspected of contract killings. Tallenger also claimed that his estranged wife had been busy trying to take out a life insurance policy in his name. It was all very dramatic, very Hollywood, but the cops looked into it anyway. And when they did, things got curiouser and curiouser.

Kate Barnum admitted to the meetings with the known felons, but asserted she was researching a story. When pressed for the names of these felons, Barnum refused on the grounds that these people were confidential sources. And a few insurance companies had records of calls from a woman asking if their firms covered people with a history of mental illness; specifically, manic depression. Even Tallenger’s doctors thought there might be something to his suspicions as people suffering from his condition tended not to be paranoid or delusional. The cops smelled a rat, but the D.A. liked the case. He was sort of partial to fat headlines and reelection. The Grand Jury was less impressed and didn’t have to worry about reelection. They refused to indict.

The victory was a small and fleeting one. In spite of the
Times
’ best efforts to keep the Barnum business hushed, some of the details reached the ears of Kate’s confidential sources. Fearing she might be forced to roll over on them to save her own neck or might subpoena them to testify in open court to corroborate her story, Barnum’s sources cut her off and dried up like the Great Salt Lake. Without their help, Kate’s big series was deader than Kelsey’s nuts. She completed the work anyway. Unfortunately, it was a considerable batch of lies pieced together by an alcoholic journalist who was under police scrutiny and whose husband had recently committed suicide. She neglected to clue her editor into that fact, and he ran with it.

The whole paper ran with it, advertising the Barnum series on local TV, on the backs of buses and in the subway. Kate’s blue-collar appeal, showing how the average Joe’s wallet is picked by organized crime, struck a resounding chord with people who usually read the
News
or the
Post
or
Newsday.
It was a coup built on a house of cards. The coup and the cards tumbled when a fellow reporter, who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who worked for a member of the Pulitzer Award Committee, patted her on the rump and informed Kate she was a veritable shoe-in for the prize.

Barnum’s admission of guilt was a blow to the
Times,
but not as severe as the one the
Washington Post
had received under similar circumstances. At least Kate hadn’t actually been given the award. The
Post
reporter had to return hers. Kate resigned, kissed her career
au revoir
and went into unsuccessful alcohol rehab. The paper printed excerpts from her letter of resignation and an apology to its readers.

God, she
had
fallen and all the way down. Now she longed to be a phoenix risen from the ashes. But Barnum was reinventing the phoenix myth, for if she was to fly again, not all the ashes would be her own.

“The cops get back in touch with you?” MacClough sat across from me just as I was slapping the rubberbands about the Barnum files.

“Not yet,” I looked around and noticed we were alone.

“Meeting in the City, huh?” Johnny had taken the hook and bait.

“Big meeting,” I yawned a burlesque yawn. “The biggest.”

“About your writing?” What, you finally get some agent with bad enough taste to take you on?” the ex-detective was straining.

“Answers for answers, MacClough. That’s the way it’s gotta be,” I stood to go.

He grabbed my free arm. “Answers for answers.”

I sat back down. “Tell me about her.”

“I was just out of—”

“Not about you,” I cut him off, “about her.”

“What about her?”

I thought for a second. “Her name.”

“Azrael?”

“Yeah, who names their kid after the angel of death?”

“Her full name was Azrael Esther Wise. The Esther was for her mom.”

“But we,” I caught myself, “Jews name only after—”

“—the dead,” he finished. “Yeah, her mom died giving birth to her. So her father’s this nutty bastard and he hangs the albatross on her forever. Then when she was four or five her dad got his right in front of her.” John made a pistol of his thumb and forefinger and placed the barrel against my chest. “Bing. Bing. Blew his fucking heart out his shoulder blade. Murdered for a buck and change. Too bad in a way.”

“How’s that?”

“Azrael started believing, believing in the name. Believed it until . . .”

“The Dain Curse. A book,” I explained before MacClough could inquire. “Just a book.”

I wondered if Azrael had ever read it. Maybe living it had been enough.

“The meeting,” MacClough clapped his glass of Bushmills down to let me know my turn had come.

“Here,” I tossed an envelope on the unsteady table. “Take a peek. It won’t bite.”

“There’s a . . .” the barman began counting.

“A hundred grand, give or take five thousand.”

“How’d’ya come by this?” Johnny snapped a thousand between his fingers.

“An old running mate of yours: Dante Gandolfo.” MacClough threw his whiskey in my face. “It’s for Azrael,” I went on, using my sleeve to rub the burning Irish out of my eyes. ”Pretty strange, considering she’s dead. Pretty fucking strange since we both know who had her whacked. I guess maybe we don’t know. I guess that’s why it’s taken you so long to hit back.”

“Get out,” he didn’t shout it. He didn’t have to.

“What happened to answer for answer?”

“Get out,” MacClough threw the neat pile of bills at me, their newness keeping them together. “I told you to stay out of it. This is my business.”

“Not just your business anymore,” I waved the stack of cash at him. “Now it’s my business, too.”

I left before MacClough could repeat his desire for me to exit. But there was no exit anymore, really. Not for him. Not for me.

Punch the Clock

I sat at the keyboard staring at the odd arrangement of letters. My fingers didn’t find any combination of keys particularly appealing. I thought writing might help clear my head, but that was a typically silly notion. I usually needed a clear head to write. I turned everything over and over again. From Christmas Eve forward, I turned. But instead of crystallizing or sorting out, the facts just twisted together like a bucket of worms.

Since I couldn’t mentally unscramble the case, I decided to spread it out on the floor, literally. I laid out every sheet of the Barnum files, all the pilfered microfilm, the article and pictures I found behind the portrait of O’Toole’s dead kid. I even spread the sticky cash out, bill by bill and end to end. I took sheets of paper and wrote out the names of everyone I’d come in contact with since Christmas Eve— one name per sheet—and scattered them on the floor. Mojo’s name looked up at me and Vinny’s and Larry’s and Sato’s and Tadamichi’s. On other sheets I listed events and the approximate times of their occurrence, i.e. I meet Barnum/After midnight, Christmas Day.

The assembled material took up considerable floor space and painted me into a corner. I sat there for a second, eyes closed, trying to reach back, squeeze out any details my weary head might have omitted. Once satisfied that there was nothing left, I walked the room. I stopped by each part of the patchwork and considered its merit, its relevance, its relationship to other pieces. That done, I ripped the mosaic apart, shrinking it down, removing names of people that had no bearing on the case, throwing out events that were inconsequential or led nowhere. The puzzle got smaller. I still hated puzzles.

Nothing jumped out at me and bit me on the ass. There were no revelations to make me slap my thigh and shout: “Eureka!” But, there was definitely something. Facts and things no longer stuck together like that bucket of worms. No, things were clearer. Arranged like the letters on my keyboard, the details of recent times were distinct but meaningless; or rather, their meaning was limited. With a typewriter keyboard, if you could hit upon the proper combinations, there were words and, sometimes, art. With my patchwork puzzle there would be no art, only solutions. Unfortunately, as in my vain attempts at writing, no particular combination appealed to me.

I slept a haunted sleep. Like a man who’d worked too many hours at his job, my dreams would not permit me to punch the clock. Sleep was work. There was a blackness to the disconnected images that flashed in my head. They weren’t dreams, per se. It was more like the album cover game we played in college. After tripping out on acid, we’d sit in a totally dark room. I mean totally dark. We’d even tape up the door space. One of us would pull out albums and spark a cigarette lighter just beneath its bottom edge. That brief spark would burn the vision in your head like a photographic negative. That’s what the pictures in my sleep were like, photographic negatives.

When I woke up, the negatives were gone, but my dreams had educated me. Even before pissing, I ran to the paper mosaic laid out on my floor. The answer was there. I was sure of it. Of all the names, events, articles and pictures that filled my sleep, there was only one I could not account for, explain away or discard. The key was a blurry woman getting into a blurry car in an overexposed photo taken from too far away. I should have understood that when I found her along with the articles and other pictures behind the portrait of the late O’Toole’s late son. She hadn’t been hidden there coincidentally.

I plucked her snapshot up from the floor, but I couldn’t determine anything more about her or her hazy universe than I had when we first met. She was the point on which this whole nightmare turned. I knew that, somehow. I just did. Precisely who she was and where she fit in this dark chain of being, I couldn’t say. She was an answer given in a foreign tongue to a question posed in English. Regrettably, I didn’t speak the language and none of the people who did, would or could translate. But I could guess. Sometimes, I was good at guessing. Just ask my ninth grade French teacher.

I had some other hunches, too, but now was not the moment to ponder. It was all a bit much for me in the morning without a piss and coffee. I cleaned up the patchwork puzzle decorating my floor, putting the pieces back in their proper folders, envelopes or pockets. My next appointment was in the kitchen with a coffee pot. That taken care of, I headed for relief. As I did my long-delayed business, I looked in the mirror, making plans to prove myself prophetic.

The phone let me know there was at least one someone out there with little or no interest in my pissing or future as a prophet. I let the phone do its chirping thing until my answering machine kicked in.

“Klein? Klein!” Detective Mickelson’s angry voice shouted over my recorded greeting. “I know you’re there. Pick this up!”

I was inclined to disobey, but sensed that in the long run it was preferable to try and fence with him now than to have him come get me later.

“Yeah, what is it? Who is it? What time zone we in?” I tried sounding deathbed ill and marathon tired.

“You sound like shit.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t lie. After all, he had bought the sick act.

“Seems like a regular thing for us, me calling you to come pick up a piece of clothing we run a nitrate test on. Maybe I should’ve been a French cleaners,” Buddha belly smiled through the phone.

“As long as the tests show negative, I can live with it.”

“Problem is, the stiff’s you find, can’t. Live with it, I mean.”

“That’s a joke, right, Mickelson?” I wanted this conversation to end.

“You know where to find me and your scummy leather jacket. You won’t find one without the other.”

It was tough, but I let that straight line pass untouched. “When should I find you?”

“Now,” he commanded.

“Not now. Maybe later.”

“Leave out the maybe. I’ll be waiting.” Something clicked in my ear.

I went back to the bathroom, finished what I’d started and got some coffee. I even got to drink some of it. I had a morning full of phone calls ahead of me. The first one was to Kate Barnum. We hadn’t spoken since the evening I used her chin for target practice and, in the interim, I’d had a chance to read up on her tumble from grace and her husband’s suicide. I decided no small talk would be best.

“Can you get me in to see the coroner or the doctor that did the bird woman’s autopsy?” I followed my own advice and skipped the niceties.

“And a fine good morning to you as well, Sir Walter. Have you been working on your jab?”

“Can you or can’t you get me in?” I refused to spar.

“Why?” A fair question.

“I need it for the soup.”

“If I had to, I could manage it,” she yawned.

“Manage it. Tomorrow or the next day,” I ordered.

“Anything else, Sir Walter?”

“Yeah. You gonna be in the office later?” I wondered.

“No. Why?” the reporter was reasonably suspicious.

“Because I’m gonna be in town later and I thought we might straighten a few things out.”