Manhattan Nocturne (32 page)

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Authors: Colin Harrison

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“Why me?” I said, trying not to feel angry.
“Oh, I don't know,” Caroline exhaled, her voice tired and confessional. “I thought maybe you might be able to help me. Maybe just give me advice or something. I've hired private investigators or whatever they call themselves, and they can't help me. I don't know where the tape is. I don't know what's on it that's so bad, really.”
I stared at her. “This whole thing with us is about getting me to help you find the tape?”
“Well—”
“Just tell me.”
“Yes.”
I found myself looking toward the window.
“Do you forgive me?” she asked.
“No. Or myself.”
“I like you, Porter, I like being with you. But I was hoping that I could get you to help … I mean, if I
don't
find that cape … I thought I could ignore it, just not think about Hobbs. I get these—”
And here she flicked on a table light and fumbled nervously through a drawer, pulling out a sheaf of letters on heavy bond. The law firm was London-based, with a sizable office in New York.
“I got this last week,” she said. “And this one was before t, and—”
Dear Mrs. Crowley,
Pursuant to our last communication with you, dated January 12, we still seek to impress upon you the serious
nature of this matter. Your purposeful reluctance to call this office or to respond to Mr. Hobbs's direct inquiries is most troubling. We continue to maintain that you are in possession
—
And so on. “Why don't you hire a lawyer to deal with this?” I asked. “Certainly Simon had an attorney who handled the disposition of the estate?”
“Yes.”
“So there was a complete accounting of the estate, no?”
“Yes.”
“Why not ask that lawyer to respond to Hobbs? Write him a letter saying that no such tape was in Simon's possession at the time of death, something like that. I mean, this is pretty simple stuff.”
“I haven't wanted to deal with the lawyers. The estate was so complicated …” She looked at me with hope in her eyes and took my hand. “Please help me, Porter.”
But I felt only a smoldering fury, and I got up, saying nothing, and went into the bathroom; there I washed my face and looked in the mirror. I'd heard a lie in Caroline's voice somewhere, maybe more than one, and I wanted to think carefully about what she'd told me. But I was tired and my head swam with the drink. And now home seemed a better place to be.
 
 
Napoleon was off-duty and, without his impressive buttons and collar, was only some guy in a T-shirt, sleeping in a cheap apartment, dreaming the gray dreams of depression. In his place in the apartment house's lobby was an old man whose lower eyelids sagged so far down that the lips of them hung outward from the curved surface of his eyeballs, as if he had not slept in twenty or thirty years. One of those New York night characters who seems to have stepped out of an Edward Hopper painting. He watched me walk down the hallway, past the lilies again, a few pink petals of which had now fallen to
the table, time passing wretchedly as always, and then he croaked, “Cab there, fella?”
I nodded, and while his eyes seemed too tired to move from my face, his hand crept over the worn mahogany desk to a round brass switch, which he flicked back and forth with irritating energy, like a man urgently signaling the end of the world. By the time I was outside, a cab was sitting there, roof light haloed by the swirling snow, the driver sipping coffee.
“Cold night, pal,” he said when I got inside. “I mean cold.”
“Yeah.”
“Starting to get some real accumulation here.”
I moved my head in the affirmative. He had a little jazz coming out of the radio, soft, lulling even, and I pulled my coat tight and slumped sleepily back in my seat. I was exhausted and vaguely anxious. It was nearly. five A.M. The cabbie nosed the car into the light traffic, then glanced back in his mirror.
“You all right back there?”
“Aaah, yes and no.”
“Yes and no? Ain't going to crap out on me here or something? I had a guy with a heart attack once. Not a bowl of cherries, I'll say that.”
The cab flew down the avenue past the snow-flickering lights, past the few shades hunching along the white sidewalks, the city a fantasy of dreams, in which the morning world would never come. I watched the driver change lanes without signaling. The interior of the cab was suffused with bluish light, some kind of saxophone coming faintly from the radio. The entire night seemed impossible to me, impossible and true. We sailed past a white, double-length limo. The boys in it—sailors or high-school football players—had taken off their shirts and were hanging out of the windows and sitting on the roof. “Look at those fuckers,” the cabbie muttered.
We pulled up next to my brick wall. The street was quiet. I paid the driver and walked heavily toward the gate. Ten feet away, I looked up to see a car jerk to a stop. Two men jumped
out. They wore good wool coats, and one was hatless, I remember that. I didn't like their interest in me, and I got out my key.
“Wren.”
I had the gate unlocked when they reached me. The bigger man put his foot inside the gate. They looked like businessmen. They weren't cops. No one could see me inside the tunnel.
“What can I do for you guys on this lovely evening?”
“Give us the tape.”
The snow was making me blink. “I don't have it yet.”
“You have a tape in your coat.”
I was astounded. “That's not the right one.”
“Give us the tape now and there's no problem.”
The closer man pulled something from his coat and swung at me. I jumped back but was off balance. The other man kicked me between the legs like the guy who knocks them into the end zone for the Giants, and I defecated instantly, a shocked shit right there in my pants. Then I was down, down hard. A gloved hand was at the back of my neck, pressing my right cheek against the cold brick walk while my coat was searched. They took the tape.
A voice close to my ear: “Hey, Wren, you're an asshole, you know that?”
I heard the sound of aerosol, and then my left eye and nose and throat ignited in pain, my mouth became a great hyperventilating orifice, and as I writhed I heard myself howling, as if from a far distance. And they kicked me a few more times, once in the head and twice in the stomach and once more in the balls, and, rolled tightly inside myself, clenched and blind and brain aflame, I yelled for mercy, the sound loud in the tunnel. No answer came, and I tightened, waiting to be hit again, covering my head, drawing my legs up. And then I realized that nothing was happening. My right eye, the one pressed to the cold brick, had taken only an incidental shot of the Mace, and I opened it to a watery blinking slit and began dragging myself toward the open gate. It was maybe six feet away. I wanted to cry. I crawled some more but made
no progress. There were many parts of my body I needed to think about. I collapsed to my belly. Finally I was able to cup my balls tenderly, determine that they were still more or less there. I rolled over onto my back, feeling the shit move in my pants. The burning in my nose eased. I forced that same right eye open again to look with watery clearness beyond the open gate into the January sky, where one late star winked against the fading darkness, cold and beautiful. It was that moment when night gives way to day. Snow was still falling. I could see it drifting into the tunnel doorway, landing on my coat sleeve. I could feel it against my cheek, on my lashes. I remembered that I had told Caroline about finding the dead man in the snow. It was snowing, but I was not a dead man. I would be fine. In general I was drinking too much and fucking around and getting beaten up, but I was fine. Yes, I would be fine in a few minutes. But minutes are a strange thing. You do nothing and they pass. You do nothing but lie on a brick path with the gate still open, reasonably warm in your wool coat, your face cold, waiting for something, an answer, perhaps. I hoped that my balls would still work. I saw now that I was no longer in control. Events were running past and over me. I was in a kind of trouble that suggested that all that was bad would soon be worse.
Then a car stopped outside the gate. I could hear the motor running. A door opened, footsteps on snow, footsteps closer, the sounds clear in the still, cold air. The gate remained open. Were the men coming back? I tried to push myself up. Nothing. Arms were dead. The steps were coming closer. Get up, you drunk fucker, save your own life. Be a hero. Steps. One person. I staggered to my knees.
“Please,” I cried.
No answer came. Something flew in through the open gate, hitting me in the chest. Flopping to the ground.
The newspaper. Page one. PORTER WREN: DIARY OF A MADMAN.
G
ood morning! You have a furious wife, you have blood in your piss, you have a great story in the paper. But—after Lisa had given me a cold look on her way out the door with Sally—I couldn't think about these things. No, what really needed to happen was that Hobbs had to call off his two businessmen. I could only assume that once they saw that they had the wrong videotape they would practice some other beautiful tricks. Did they know that I was alone in the house right now, Lisa gone and Josephine out with Tommy? And how had they learned that I was carrying a videotape? Except for being hidden while at home, the tape had stayed in my coat pocket from the moment I'd left the Malaysian bank. I had never taken it out in public, never showed it to anyone. It occurred to me that Caroline had been lying about Hobbs and almost everything else and had called Hobbs or Campbell or the two executives and told them I was going down in the elevator with a videotape. She was, after all, the only one who knew that I had it in my pocket. But following our long conversation the previous night I wasn't ready to believe this about her; it made no sense. Maybe Hobbs had her apartment bugged. That was a little far-fetched, though not impossible. You could bribe the building's management, get inside. Obviously the doormen were already paid off and kept track of the comings and goings of people—obviously this had not been obvious to me. Then I remembered
that I had taken the tape out of my pocket on the way up in the elevator to check that it wasn't one of Sally's. In a premier building like Caroline's, the elevator would have a closed-circuit video camera hidden in it, available for review if necessary. They had seen me go up, perhaps observed on a monitor as I had smiled stupidly at the old woman, watched her get off on the second floor, and then reached in my coat pocket for the tape. Then it was just a matter of a phone call. Had they waited for me to go home, thinking they would grab it when I got out of the cab? That didn't make sense—I could easily have left the tape with Caroline.
This last thought left me sick. How would they have known to follow me?
They had to have visited Caroline first.
I called her and let the phone ring. I let the god-awful phone ring five, ten, fifteen times. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. Caroline hadn't left the answering machine on. I let it ring fifteen more times. Then, just as I was about to hang up, the phone picked up.
“Yeah.”
“Caroline?”
“What?” This was a voice I'd never heard—dead, full of hatred, tougher than I'd ever be.
“It's Porter.”
“Yeah?”
“Did I wake you up?”
“Yeah. And I wish some people wouldn't let the phone ring eight hundred fucking times when I'm in bed.”
“Hey, I'm—”
“Call me later.”
She hung up. I hit the redial button. She picked up the phone but said nothing.
“Did some guys come looking—”
“Yeah. I told them I didn't have it.”
“They left?”
“Well, at first they didn't believe me.”
“Then?”
“Then they believed me. It only took them two minutes but they believed me. They could have fucking killed me.”
She gave an anxious sob. “Now you know why I'm so scared of Hobbs. After they left I almost called you.”
“But you don't have my home number,” I said.
“Fancy that.” Her voice was bitter. “But I was worried. I checked information.”
“Unlisted.”
“Yes. Totally unreachable.”
I needed to change the temperature of the conversation or she would hang up again. I couldn't think of anything clever. “Okay, why are you so pissed at me?”
“Why?
Why?”
she screamed. “Because it took you until
eleven-thirty in the morning
to figure out that I might have had a
problem.
You were probably pouring goddamned Sugar Pops and milk into your kids' cereal bowls and kissing your pretty wife good-bye on the way to work while I could have been lying dead in the kitchen with a knife in my neck!”
“That could, in fact, be true.”
“Well?”
“But, in fact, it is not true.”
“Then what took you so goddamned long?”
“I had to explain to my wife why I didn't want breakfast.”
“What?” she screamed. “That's all?”
“I also had to explain why there was blood in our bed, blood in the snow outside our house, in the broken capillaries of my left eye, in my hair, on my shirt, on my tie, and in the toilet bowl.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Maybe in there, too.”
“Stop.”
“I think I will indeed have to stop for a few days, let my testicles knit themselves back together.”
She was laughing. “You're okay?”
There was a picture of Lisa on my dresser. I picked it up. “I'm running on three wheels, but I'm all right.”
“Good.” She sighed. I heard her light a cigarette. “What did you tell your wife?”
“I told her three guys jumped me and took my money.”
“Did she believe you?”
“I don't know.”
I heard her exhale smoke. “I could never get married again.”
“What about Charlie? What's that gig?”
“That gig? Well—”
“Wait, let's talk about the tape Hobbs wants.”
“Let's.”
“Tell me the truth now—you don't know where it is or who has it?”
“No,” she breathed. “Not at all.”
“You can tell me a million other lies, but please tell me the truth on this.”
“I am.”
“Okay. What did Simon do with his tapes?”
“He ran around with them, he left them in his car, he had them in L.A., in his office here. I don't know.”
“So someone might have made a copy?”
“It's possible, I guess. But he didn't lose things. He was messy but he didn't lose things. Also he was pretty jealous of me, so he wouldn't have just let that particular tape drift around among people.”
“What's on the tape?”
“Oh …”
“I mean, I'm assuming it's you and Hobbs screwing, something like that.”
“Well, I've never actually
seen
the tape. But we don't—well, mostly we just talk.”
“What's the most compromising thing about it? For Hobbs, I mean.”
“I don't know. Honestly, we mostly just talked. Chitchat between a girl and a billionaire Australian—the typical, you know.”
This was no good. “Who controls all of Simon's business stuff?”
“Lawyers.”
“It's complicated?”
“Very.”
“Here in the city?”
“Yes.”
“He has an estate, right?”
“Well—”
She was stalling, unsure about telling me the financial structure of her existence.
“Caroline, I already know that your apartment is owned by a trust in Simon's name and that it cost two point three million dollars. The annual taxes on it are nineteen thousand, incidentally.”
“How do you know all that?”
“Reporters know everything. Now, I want to go over Simon's arrangements at the law firm. This afternoon at, say, one. Please call them, line it up.”
She told me the name of the firm.
“One of the best.”
“I don't see why the law firm will be useful,” she said.
“It's just a lot of bills and papers.”
“Well, look at it this way: You made the tape, then Simon took it. If he destroyed it, we would not have this problem. If he gave it away, that would be contrary to his character, according to you. There was no reason to sell it; he had plenty of money. To me this would suggest that he kept the tape, valued the tape. Maybe in his financial plan he made—”
Caroline laughed. “Simon? He couldn't keep anything straight. He was terrible with money. He didn't understand it, really.”
“Do
you
understand money?”
“No, but I can tell when someone does.”
“Like who?”
“Charlie understands money,” she answered quickly.
“I see. Another reason to marry him, no doubt.” It was an insane conversation; I was in my bedroom looking at a photo of my wife while listening to a woman I was sleeping with compare her late husband with her fiancé.
“Maybe the firm is paying for a safe-deposit box or something that you don't know about.”
“Maybe.”
There was a hesitancy in her answer, a reluctance to deal with the law firm.
“Why aren't you handling the money?” I pushed. “I mean, they could be robbing you blind, you know.”
“They could?”
“Sure, that's what law firms
do.”
That worked. One o'clock. Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street.
“How will I recognize you?” Caroline asked.
Jokes. We were still making them.
 
 
I stood on the front porch watching my breath steam in the cold and listing some bad things that could soon happen. Hal Fitzgerald and I would definitely have a bad conversation. Hobbs and I might soon have a bad conversation. Lisa and I would not yet, I hoped, have a bad conversation. Perhaps men like to stand on porches thinking about bad news; perhaps once upon a time a Tory farmer had stood on this same porch, or a previous version of it, worrying about the revolution, and looked down at a dirt road or a field and seen General George Washington ride by, adjusting his wooden teeth or scratching his syphilitic crotch. History—chews up the best of them. My groin and ribs and head ached, but it was like after a football game; you hurt like hell afterward, but you were secretly pleased. The pain reminded you that you were three-dimensional, occupying space in the universe, someone the world had to deal with. On the other hand, I didn't really want to deal with the world from my front porch. The two business executives could come back, and, behind my wall, no one would see or hear what they were doing. They knew where I lived.
So I decided to do a little business before going uptown to Caroline's law firm. I hobbled down the path, through the tunnel and gate, and around the corner to Eighth Avenue. Was anyone following me? Maybe there was a way to find out. I ducked into one of those alternative video-comic book stores
that specialize in animated Japanese pornography. I stayed in the shop a few minutes, bought a cheap video, tore away the cover and peeled off the label, junked the trash, and walked out, the video in my hand. Then I walked into a deli, asked for a paper bag, and could be seen stepping out of the deli into the winter sun while slipping the video into the paper bag. This I kept tucked under my arm as I strolled south for fifteen minutes, away from my neighborhood.
The restaurant was a small place with a tile floor wet from the snow and little tables too close together. The clientele was mostly people from the big galleries nearby or tourists who wanted to see people from the big galleries nearby. At the bar was a guy in a suit with a ponytail, maybe forty-five. I'd talked to him exactly twice; he had one story that he told to the tourists, and the first few lines went like this:
This city, let me tell you, heh, this city calls your bet, boy. It calls your fucking bet. Heh. You're not looking, that's when the big finger taps you on the shoulder. Heh, heh. Happened to me, back in 'eight-seven. I was a major guy at Morgan Stanley
—The place had liquor licenses up on the wall that went back to 1883. There was a lot of talk about art, and all of it was about money. I dialed Hobbs's New York office from a pay phone. Three transfers, through successive layers of secretaries. He was in Brazil, I was told. But I've talked with mayors and senators and mobsters; big men can always be reached; it's just a matter of who has today's phone numbers. I hung up, called back, and asked for Campbell. “I'm his neighbor. It's not a matter of great importance,” I said, “it's just that our apartment building is on fire and I thought he might want to know.”
That worked. “Campbell,” I said when he came on, “the tape your guys took off me last night isn't the one Hobbs wants. You probably know this by now. It's a tape of a policeman getting whacked. Now, the cops know about this tape. And they want it. I'm going to have to tell them that you have it and that you took it from me.”
There was no pause to consider. “Mr. Wren, I do not follow
your rather strange story. In the meantime, I've quite a schedule today and—”

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