A Time to Scatter Stones Page 7

  “I’d do that anyway,” he said. “When you showed me his picture, you know I recognized that man right away.”

  “I got that impression.”

  “Why I lied about it, I was ashamed of myself. Taking that man’s money, letting that man into her apartment.”

  “You thought he was her brother.”

  “Not by the end of it I didn’t. You know what he did?”

  Went in the closet, I thought, and had a look at her alligator handbag.

  “I said he touched her things.”

  “Yes, you told me.”

  “Almost like he was touching her, and not like a brother. And you know what else? He went into the bathroom.”

  “Oh?”

  “She has this clothes hamper. Wicker, you know? He screened it with his body, so I wouldn’t see, and then he lifted the lid and reached in and fumbled around with her dirty clothes. Took something out.”

  I waited.

  “Panties, I think. Didn’t get a good look, didn’t want to get a good look, but I think it was panties. Panties from the dirty clothes.” He took a deep breath. “So that’s why I acted like I didn’t recognize him.” He corrected himself. “Why I told you I didn’t recognize him. On account of I wanted to put all of that out of mind.”

  I laid a hand on his shoulder. “No worries, Henry,” I said. “It’s all going to work out.”

  PANTIES.

  Not a good sign.

  I WAS SITTING AT the computer when Elaine came in, pleased to report that Father Tomislav would be happy to rent out the basement room for a second meeting. Fridays wouldn’t work, but they could have it every Thursday evening from 7:30 to 9.

  “Then Marjorie and I had lunch, and then we went to her place and called everybody to let them know we’d be having a meeting tomorrow night. He’s nice.”

  “Father Tomislav?”

  “I’m not sure who he thinks we are.”

  “You didn’t tell him the group name was the Tarts?”

  “I said we were affiliated with Working Women of America.”

  “Is that a thing?”

  “It would have almost to be, don’t you think? I probably could have said Working Girls of America, he seems too innocent to be familiar with the term.”

  “Or it’ll remind him of the Meg Ryan movie.”

  “Melanie Griffith,” she said gently. “I think I gave him the impression that it’s like AA for women who work for a living. Which isn’t that far from the truth, is it? And how was your day?

  I told her, and she complimented me on having accomplished so much, and I moved a hand to wave the words aside. “I did everything wrong,” I told her. “Sit on your ass for a few years and your instincts go south. I got most of my way through the conversation with the super before I remembered to ask his name, or tell him mine.”

  “You should have done that right away?”

  “Of course, and it should have been automatic. I should have asked Henry to let me into the apartment, so that he could have seen me do nothing but look around. That would let him decide it was okay for me to be there.”

  “But you didn’t ask?”

  “He asked me,” I said, “if I wanted to go upstairs, and I said there was no need. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I wanted to change my mind, but the timing would have been off. Jesus, I hope he didn’t call Paul’s burner phone five minutes after I left.”

  “You think it’s possible?”

  “I took the number with me, but he could have copied it down somewhere. Or even memorized it.” I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I don’t think he made the call. I think he knew beyond question that Paul—I wish I had something else to call the son of a bitch.”

  “Mr. Lipscomb?”

  “Yeah, right. He knew it wasn’t her older brother. And that means he’d been lied to, and tricked, and a hundred bucks wasn’t adequate compensation for that.”

  “And you’d matched the hundred, sort of canceling it out.”

  “But you know what really did it?”

  “The panties?”

  “Far as Henry’s concerned, that makes him a pervert. And that’s good, but it’s also not so good.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s dangerous,” I said.

  “Didn’t we know that?”

  “Stealing her soiled panties,” I said, “right out of the hamper, with every chance he’d be observed doing so.”

  “Purposely tempting fate?”

  “More like too obsessed to hold himself in check. We knew he was dangerous,” I said. “We just didn’t know how dangerous.”

  AGES AGO, WHEN THEY swore me in as a NYPD cop, I wore a uniform I’d bought at Jonas Rathburn & Sons, a cop shop around the corner from the old Centre Street headquarters. Over the years I picked up other gear there—handcuffs, a Kevlar vest, a nightstick to replace the one that disappeared one whiskey-soaked evening. Rathburn stayed put when the department relocated at One Police Plaza, which was around the time that I ended my first marriage and my first career, moving from a house in Syosset to a hotel room on West 57th Street, turning in my service revolver and my shield.

  It was a gold shield by then—I’d made detective some years before the day when I realized that I was done being a husband, just as I was done being a cop. So I hadn’t worn the blue uniform in a long time. I’d packed it up, along with the gear a detective had no use for, and we stored it in the basement.

  I was a few years out of the marriage and out of Syosset when Anita called to tell me a pipe had broken in the basement, and the consequent flooding had soaked my uniform and whatever else was in the carton. What did I want her to do with it?

  I was surprised she still had it. Throw it out, I said. All of it? All of it.

  So Thursday morning, after a night of running scenarios in my mind, I took a train downtown and found my way to The Police Building, which was the name a developer had fastened on the Beaux Arts building on Centre Street, after he’d converted it for residential use. I walked around the corner to where Rathburn & Sons had always been, and their storefront was now a Starbucks.

  Nobody remembered that particular cop shop, including Google. It took me ten or fifteen minutes to walk to One Police Plaza, and I spent most of that time wondering what had led me to assume Rathburn would still be around, doing business in the same old location.

  On Madison Street, I spotted a shop with a big poster in the window, Jerry Orbach as Lennie Briscoe. I went in and found where they kept the batons, picked one up, and remembered the comfort mine had provided in my early days in uniform. I’d had a .38 on my hip, a more formidable weapon than any nightstick could possibly be, but I thought of it just for show. The last thing I wanted was to have to yank it out of its holster.

  I found one that had a nice balance to it and took it to the counter. The man behind it, who’d shaved his head to hide a bald spot, asked if I was on the job.

  “Years ago,” I said, and smiled. “So I’m afraid I’m no longer eligible for the discount.”

  “You’re not even eligible to pay full price,” he told me. “Police baton’s classified as a deadly weapon.”

  Which meant he couldn’t sell it to anyone but a working police officer. I was trying to make sense out of this when he told me he bet he knew why I wanted it.

  “Amateur theater,” he said. “You’re in a play, they’ve got you playing a cop, and since you used to be one it’s good casting. Am I right?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “You rented a uniform at a costume shop, or maybe you can still fit into the one you wore on the job, in which case congratulations. But what you want is one of these, and the law won’t let me sell it to you. That about right?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Not because I’m psychic. I won’t say I get this all the time, but you’re not the first person ever came in here looking for a prop. I can help you out. Give me a minute.”

  He went in back, came out carryin
g a nightstick, slapping it gently against his palm. It was a twin to the one I’d picked out, and from his smile I guess my puzzlement must have shown on my face. “Here,” he said, and began to hand it to me, then yanked it back and smacked himself full force on the crown of his hairless head.

  BALSA, OF COURSE, AS he explained when he finally stopped laughing at the look on my face. Perfect for film or theater, looked just like the real thing, and cheap enough to smash one over somebody’s head in every performance or dress rehearsal. Twelve bucks, and an NYPD-approved baton was over a hundred when you added on the sales tax. So how many would I like?

  I said I’d have to check first with the director.

  YOU COULD GO ONLINE and order a dozen different kinds of ninja shit, blowguns and throwing stars and nunchucks and other things I don’t know the name of. You could walk into a gun show and walk out with an AR-15 and mow down a few dozen schoolkids. In those states with a righteous commitment to the Second Amendment, you could get yourself a mortar and a bazooka and, if you had the place to park it, a fucking cannon.

  But if you were in New York City and you couldn’t show NYPD identification, they wouldn’t let you get your hands on an overpriced wooden stick.

  I walked around for a few minutes, picked up a cup of coffee at a hole in the wall called Joe-2-Go, sat on a bench in a pocket park long enough to drink it.

  It didn’t have to be a nightstick, I decided, or a sap, or anything else that the local authorities didn’t want me to have. What it did have to be was something I could buy that very day, over the counter and for cash.

  I used my phone’s MapQuest app to orient me, tossed my Joe-2-Go cup in the trash, and followed the suggested route to the Bowery.

  IT USED TO BE all flophouses and bars. The bars were dives, but of a different order of magnitude from what nowadays get called dive bars. The term of choice back then was bucket of blood, and it fit.

  The flophouses were a warren of cubicles, each just large enough to accommodate a cot. They were separated from one another by partitions, their lower halves wallboard, topped with chicken wire reaching to the ceiling. The cacophony and the odor and the lack of privacy were enough to make real sleep impossible, even for men unaccustomed to quiet or fresh air or a private life. You had to be drunk enough to pass out, and when they woke you for early morning checkout, it didn’t break your heart to get out of there.

  I never got down that far, and my personal history is such that I doubt it would ever have happened; I’d have been safely dead of an alcohol-induced seizure before I got all that close to the Bowery. But in various storefronts and church basements I’d heard the stories of men who’d put in their time in those bars and flophouses, or lit fires in trash cans for warmth and warmed themselves more with Night Train or Thunderbird. Some of them got sober and some of them stayed sober, and one who’d reached the early stages of Korsakoff’s syndrome, with swiss-cheese holes in his brain, had somehow wound up managing a 54-bed rehab facility in New Jersey, just outside of Trenton.

  The job had taken me in and out of flophouses. That was back in my uniformed days, and I went there with a partner when a desk clerk called the precinct house to report a death. Sometimes the clerk didn’t find the body right away, or delayed making the call, and on such occasions the smell was even worse than the usual flophouse stench. But it was always awful.

  I’d been in a bucket of blood a handful of times, on occasions when they lived up to their name. An argument got out of hand, and one man hit another with a bottle or stabbed him with a knife. When you had to deal with something like that you needed a drink, but I never needed one badly enough to have it on the premises.

  Of course a lot of Bowery habitués stayed out of the flophouses and passed out on the sidewalk, and that was a better idea in the warmer months. During the winter, a van made the rounds first thing in the morning, and anybody who still had a pulse would be hauled off to the drunk tank, because there was no such thing as detox then, not unless you were somebody rich drying out in Connecticut.

  Then a second van would pick up the dead ones, and their next stop was Potter’s Field.

  That was then. Now the Bowery is a prestige address, with artists’ lofts that artists can no longer afford, and condominiums built for absentee Russian oligarchs. I walked past designer boutiques and other hallmarks of over-the-top gentrification, but what the Bowery had the most of was establishments dealing in kitchen supplies, wholesalers who did a retail business as well.

  I tossed a mental coin, walked into a shop named Edvard Magnusson, who must have been the firm’s founder or proprietor. I browsed, and a helpful clerk turned up to show me variations on a theme. I made my selection and paid for it in cash.

  I’d been keeping an eye open for a sporting goods store, but if I passed one I never spotted it. I remembered that there was a big one on my way, but I couldn’t recollect the name and wasn’t sure about the address.

  I hauled out my phone and let Yelp tell me I was thinking of Paragon, at 18th and Broadway.

  It was a long walk, but a nice day for it. Paragon was right where my phone had told me it would be, and I didn’t need a clerk’s help to find what I was looking for. I was waiting to pay for it when I noticed a kid with a backpack, and I gave up my place in the checkout line and found one for myself—small, navy blue, inexpensive and anonymous.

  I got back in line, paid cash, and walked out with a Paragon shopping bag to go with the one from Edvard Magnusson.

  Nobody at either place of business asked me to prove I was a cop. They just rang up the sales and let it go at that.

  I WALKED ON, HEADING uptown. Along the way I realized I was hungry, and got a strong sudden urge for a tuna melt. I knew right where to get one, with a side of well-done fries, but decided that would be stupid. I didn’t need to renew my acquaintance with that counterman, the one who never forgot a face or a food order.

  New York diners, with breakfast served all day long and menus the size of phone books, had become an endangered species. Most had been done in by rent increases, like so many of the shops that made the city a joy to explore; some had gone out of business when the sons or grandsons of the Greek immigrants who’d started them decided there had to be an easier way to make a better living. I walked clear over to Second Avenue without finding one, and by then the curious yen for a tuna melt had dissipated. I ducked into a Thai restaurant and would have asked the waitress to confirm that the Drunken Noodles didn’t contain any alcohol, then realized I wouldn’t take her word for it anyway and said I’d have a plate of Pad Thai.

  After I’d ordered, I took my shopping bags to the bathroom, where I locked myself in and did some consolidation, tucking two of my purchases into the third. I shouldered the backpack, got rid of the shopping bags, and wasted a few moments hand-shredding the receipts and flushing them down the commode.

  Silly, I thought. Passing up the tuna melt from Mr. Memory was at least marginally sensible, but this was not.

  And it was not as though I’d need the receipts for tax purposes. The JanSport backpack was under $25, and it was the most expensive item of the lot.

  I PUT THE BACKPACK on the floor next to me while I ate my Pad Thai and drank a Thai coffee, which was essentially a milkshake with caffeine. I paid cash for my meal—it was good I’d hit an ATM early on, as I was paying cash for everything—and donned the backpack. I started out with it centered on my back with an arm through each of the straps, and then I shifted it to my right shoulder, and then to my left shoulder.

  I felt about the way I’d feel if I bought a baseball cap and wore it backwards. Just as well I didn’t have that far to go.

  I FOUND A PLACE to stand across the street from Ellen’s building. I stayed put for a full ten minutes, during which time nobody came in or out, and no lights went on in what might have been her apartment. I hadn’t thought to ask Henry about the floor plan, and didn’t suppose it mattered, but it was another thing I hadn’t thought to do, and thus another
unwelcome sign that I’d lost a step.

  I was really too old for this shit.

  I brushed the thought aside. I hadn’t seen anybody enter or leave the building, and as far as I could tell I was the only lurker on the block. I went across the street and buzzed the super.

  When he answered, I gave my name. He said he’d be right up.

  “No, just buzz me in,” I said. “I’ll come down to your place.”

  At least I remembered the route. I found the back staircase, walked down to the basement. Henry Loudon met me at the foot of the stairs and led me back to his apartment. He’d just made coffee, he told me, and would I like a cup?

  I let him pour me a cup, and when I complimented him on his coffee he launched into a riff about how he was fussy about coffee, and where he bought the beans, and the brewing method he’d settled on. Then he stopped abruptly and apologized for going on and on.

  “You want to know about Miss Lipscomb,” he said. “I don’t think she’s been back. Though she could get in and out and I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

  Actually, I said, I was more interested in the man.

  “The one who’s not her brother. Haven’t seen anything of him, either. I’d have told you if I did.”

  “And no phone calls?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s just as well,” I said. “He won’t be expecting a call from you.”

  “You want me to call that man?”

  I explained what I had in mind, and he was clearly troubled. I asked him what was wrong.

  “I don’t even have his number,” he said. “Gave you that slip of paper.”

  “I have the number, Henry.”

  “That’s the least of it, anyway. My mama raised us not to tell lies.”

  “Well, in special circumstances—”

  “Oh, it’s not the right or wrong of it. It’s the training. Comes to lying, I’m just not very good at it. I get flustered, and what I say comes out sounding untruthful.”