Night-Bloom (44 page)

In the light of all the bitterness that had transpired between them, Mooney was mystified by Fritzi’s insistence that he come home with her. Three times he refused. He wanted to go back to 161 Street, he said, where he belonged. The fourth time, and out of pure exhaustion, he capitulated and went back with her, instead, in a cab to Seventy-third Street.

For three weeks she fed him thin unsalted consommé and dry salad. All he drank was water and, occasionally, tea. He’d lost five pounds in the hospital. He lost another ten pounds over the three-week period he spent with her.

In the morning she gave him his medication and breakfast—a half grapefruit, a slice of unbuttered toast, a cup of unsugared tea, along with an eighty-milligram indiral, followed by a diuril. Then she’d go off to work, leaving him with the
Daily News, TV Guide
and the
Racing Form.
To the refrigerator she would tack a luncheon menu, generally consisting of a half-cup of cottage cheese with either vegetables or sliced fruit.

At the end of three weeks he was down an additional eighteen pounds. None of his clothing fit. When Fritzi took him back to the cardiologist after four weeks for a checkup, the man beamed with pleasure and declared that some kind of miracle had taken place.

In all of that time Mooney spoke to Manhattan South only four times, three times to Mulvaney and once to Defasio. He was on sick leave with full pay, Mulvaney assured him, and urged him not to worry about the investigation. Everything was proceeding apace. The captain sounded pleased over the phone. “Take your time, Mooney. Don’t rush back till you’re one hundred percent better.”

Those calls rankled. Each time Mooney hung up, he did so convinced that Mulvaney was delighted to have him out of the way. More than anything, that spurred him on to full recovery.

While Fritzi was off at the Balloon, Mooney watched TV, sat in the park and read endless 87th Precinct mysteries. Strangely enough, he did not think of Watford or even Peter Quintius. He had put them both aside as if he perceived in them the root of all his misfortune.

On weekends Fritzi would bundle him into the car and off they’d go to the track to see the yearling and watch the trainer put him through his paces. Invariably, Fritzi came away exhilarated. The Roses was three weeks off and, studying Gumshoe’s daily workout chart and fractions, she computed his chances.

Going back in the car Mooney would sit glum and unspeaking. He was brooding over the unsatisfactory past and the uncertain future. While Fritzi chatted happily about handicapping odds and sprint fractions, Mooney toted up his scorecard and computed his own odds for winning. None of the figures, however, had anything to do with racing.

During the period of Mooney’s recuperation, they were both civil, even overly solicitous to each other. Nonetheless, a stiffness and reserve hobbled each daily encounter. On one occasion they spoke of what they called their “Last Supper” brawl the night of Mooney’s attack. But neither of them had broached the subject of the attack itself and the rather indelicate circumstances under which it had occurred.

It was going on five weeks that Mooney had stayed out of work. With each day he grew increasingly restless. It was brilliant October weather. There was a snap in the air. All the trees in the park had gone a vivid wine red, shot through with threads of russet and yellow. Squirrels scampered over the footpaths, trundling off precious cargoes of acorns down winter holes.

Coming in late one afternoon from the park and waiting for Fritzi to get home, he put on the 6:00
P.M.
news and was nearly knocked off his seat by a report that the police had had their first major break in the seven-year-old Broadway Bombardier case.

A thirty-year-old itinerant by the name of Gary Holmes from Seattle had been picked up by one of the Special Task Forces men on a West Forty-ninth Street rooftop.

Holmes had a police record. There was a long string of arrests. Ever since his fifteenth birthday he had been in trouble with the police and in and out of various correctional institutions. His crimes had been mostly of a minor order, but more recently, his operations had escalated into armed robbery.

Holmes admitted that he had lived for years on various rooftops round the city. Asked why he chose rooftops he maintained that (1) they were easily accessible, and (2) they were safer than basements or abandoned buildings, both of which frightened him.

Apprehended by two plainclothesmen on a roof in the theater district, Holmes admitted to raining objects down on the crowds below. They were good-sized rocks, however, nothing of the forty-pound cinder-block class. When questioned specifically regarding the cinder-block incidents over the past years, he proudly proclaimed himself to be the Broadway Bombardier but he had no clear recollection of specific events. In addition, he conceded that he suffered from a severe drinking problem, had lapses of memory and couldn’t remember much of what he’d been up to over the past five years. Taken into custody that day, he was now at Bellevue undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

They then showed some footage of rooftops where Holmes had been active. Two or three people were interviewed on the street. They smiled and said they could now breathe a bit more easily, knowing that this “maniac” was in custody.

Next, pictures were shown of Holmes being booked at the station house. He was a lank, scruffy individual with furtive eyes and a huge mop of uncombed hair. All the while he was being booked, there was an idiotic grin on his face—a look of satisfaction as if after a life devoid of any significant accomplishment, he had finally hit the big time.

Mooney watched it all with a sense of mounting anger. Surely a good part of that stemmed from the fact that it had taken place without him. He perceived something unjust in that—even conspiratorial, as if his good friends at Manhattan South had meanly and deliberately stolen his show.

When Dowd came on the screen, expatiating on the ardors of the investigation, which he personally had moved forward, despite one heartbreaking setback after the next, Mooney was nearly purple with rage.

The next day Mooney went back to the cardiologist. An EKG and a series of blood tests were done.

He was weighed, then clapped on the back by the doctor and pronounced fit enough to return to work. On the following day, dressed in blue serge, but still a bit wobbly on his legs, he strode purposefully through the heavy swinging front doors of Manhattan South.

Holmes did not look at all like the man Mooney had seen on TV. This was a tall, bony man, all sinew and knots who gave the impression of great physical strength. The first thing Mooney noted were the hands clasped lightly together, as if in prayer, then the face, phlegmatic and dull, staring out at him from behind the wire mesh. The dark, beetled brow and the prognathous jaw created a vaguely simian expression. His large hands moved incessantly, as he spoke nonstop to Mooney, who all the while scribbled into his pad.

“It wasn’t that I disliked any of them,” Gary Holmes’s voice was unexpectedly wispy. “It wasn’t as if I cared one way or the other which one of them or who I got. Just so’s I got me one.”

“Did you plan any of those things?” Mooney asked.

Holmes’s eyes flared with indignation. “Hell. Sure I planned them. I sat down and planned ‘em all. Right down to the last detail. I hadda do it that way. It was that important to me.”

“Important? How?”

“How?” Holmes gaped at him as if he pitied the man’s stupidity. “I wanted to get it right. I was makin’ my statement.”

“Your statement?”

“Sure. Like I told you. About injustice, like, and bigotry and folks beatin’ up on each other. Kids starvin’ like, you know?” Pathetic bravado made him appear to swell behind the mesh screen, and his head nodded as if in passionate agreement with himself.

“What does creaming a crowd with a forty-pound cinder block have to do with starving kids?”

“Can’t you see that?” Holmes snapped. “All them folks comin’ out of theaters. Goin’ to fancy restaurants with their credit cards and all. Feedin’ their faces, like, while little kids starve.”

“What little kids?”

The question appeared to baffle Holmes. He shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. They’re all around.” They were sitting in a small visitors area of the Creedmore Psychiatric Hospital. The room was small, institutional green, with low ceilings and a wire partition dividing the patients’ area from that of the visitors’. On either side of the partition were long green metal tables with hard wood chairs set at intervals down its entire length.

At that moment no one else was in the room, only Mooney and Gary Holmes, the man who had proclaimed himself the Broadway Bombardier. Mooney had been granted a half hour to speak with him and he’d had to fight with Mulvaney for every minute of that time.

“Who was it you confessed to, Gary?”

Holmes’s brows arched as if the question had made him suddenly wary. “How would I know their names?”

Mooney sighed. “When making an arrest, police officers often identify themselves. I was just curious.” Mooney watched him gauging the effect of his words. “Did they?”

“No. They didn’t do nothin’ like that.”

“Never mind. I can find out who they were. How come you let them catch you?”

“I didn’t let them catch me. I was just up on the roof tossin’ rocks …”

“And you tossed a couple and just waited around for someone to come up and get you. Right?”

The intent of the detective’s question appeared to elude him. Mooney attempted to clarify it. “When you toss rocks down on crowds of people, do you generally wait around for the cops to come up and … Never mind. What kind of rocks were these you tossed? How big?”

Holmes’s face flodded with childish animation. “Big as footballs.” He demonstrated the size by spreading his thumb and forefinger. “That big.” Mooney didn’t have to ask the question. He knew very well the size of the missiles, having examined shattered fragments of them closely at the police laboratory. The rocks recovered from the area where Holmes had hurled them down into the theater crowds weighed one or two pounds apiece, certainly nothing of the order of a football. As missiles deigned to be dropped from a height, they might have done damage, but it was doubtful they would have killed.

By this time Mooney had learned quite a bit about Gary Holmes—an itinerant, a bit of plankton that had washed up in the city. As criminal records go, Holmes’s was decidedly small beer. What he did have going for him was a hefty psychiatric dossier. In and out of mental institutions all of his life, he’d been examined on several occasions by state psychiatrists—a number of times for petty theft, and once for having exposed himself to lady passengers on a subway platform.

“What were you doing up on the roof that night, Gary?”

“I told you, man. I was makin’ my statement.”

“Oh, you mean the starving kids?”

Holmes looked hurt. “That’s right. The starvin’ kids. And you’re part of that same stinkin’ system that takes the food out of their mouths and gives it all to the rich.”

“Okay,” Mooney conceded. “I’m part of that system. Still, if you’ve gotta cream people to make your statement, you could just as well do it on the street. Anyplace. Why does it have to be the roof?”

” ‘Cause I like roofs, man. Like I told you. When I first come to the city I used to live up on the roof. I can breathe up there. I’m free.”

“How long did you live on the roofs?”

Once again Holmes’s eyes narrowed with distrust. “How long? Like ever since I come to New York.”

“When was that?”

“In 1975.”

“When in seventy-five?”

“Hell, I don’t know. The spring sometime.”

“And you got yourself a roof as soon as you arrived?”

“No. Not then.” The questions had started to come a bit too rapidly for Holmes. “When I first come, I lived in the Village.”

“The Village?”

“On Barrow Street. Then after that I lived up in Harlem awhile. It was a lot cheaper but I couldn’t stand the jigs. They’d rip you off for anything up there. For a nickel.”

“So that’s when you took to the rooftops?”

“Sure. Much safer. Safer than bein’ on the goddamn ground.”

“When’d you cream your first victim?”

“In 1977.”

“Who was that? Do you know?”

“Sure. That was Carrera.”

Mooney shook his head. “You mean Catalonia? That was seventy-five.”

Holmes frowned. “Oh, seventy-five? Oh, that’s right. Catalonia was seventy-five.”

“When did you do the second?”

“The second? That was 1976. May thirty-first. That was O’Meggins.”

Mooney’s eyes fluttered. “I gotta hand it to you, Holmes. You know your stuff.”

It was pure ridicule, but Gary Holmes took it as a compliment. He grinned with good-natured idiocy. “I make it my business to know.”

“When’d you first go to Wilmette, Gary?”

“Where?”

“Wilmette. Wilmette, Illinois.”

“Illinois? Never been there.” Holmes leered smugly as if he’d felt he’d just successfully parried a clever investigative thrust.

“When’d you start using the Boyd alias?”

“Who?”