A Long Line of Dead Men
Page 8

In the morning I deposited Lewis Hildebrand's check and walked over to the main library at Fifth and Forty-second. A young woman with the unfocused energy of a marijuana smoker got me set up at a table and showed me how to thread the microfiche rolls into the scanner. It took me a couple of tries to get the hang of it, but before long I was all caught up in it, lost in yesterday's news.
The next thing I knew it was almost 2:30. I bought a stuffed pita from one sidewalk vendor and an iced tea from another and sat on a bench in Bryant Park, just behind the library. For several years the little park had flourished as the epicenter of the midtown drug trade. It got so no one went into it but the dealers and their customers, and it had degenerated into a nasty and dangerous eyesore.
Just over a year ago it had been born again, with a couple of million dollars spent to re-create it. An architect's heroic vision had been brought to life, and now the park was a showplace, and an absolute oasis in that part of town. The junkies were gone, the dealers were gone, the lawn was lush and green, and beds of red and yellow tulips made you forget where you were.
The city's falling apart. The water mains keep bursting, the subways break down, the streets are cratered with potholes. Much of the population is housed in rotting tenements, scheduled for demolition sixty years ago and still standing. The housing projects that went up after the war are crumbling themselves now, in worse shape than the hovels they were built to replace. Living here, it's very easy to find yourself seeing the decline as a one-way street, a road with no turning.
But that's only half of it. If the city dies a little every day, so is it ever being reborn. You can see the signs everywhere. There's the subway station at Broadway and Eighty-sixth, its tile walls bright with the paintings of schoolchildren. There's the wedge-shaped garden in Sheridan Square, the pocket parks blooming all over town.
And there are the trees. When I was a kid you had to go to Central Park if you wanted to stand under a tree. Now half the streets in town are lined with them. The city plants some and property owners and block associations plant the rest. Trees don't have an easy time of it here. It's like raising kids in the Middle Ages, you have to plant half a dozen trees to raise one. They die for lack of water, or get snapped off at the base by careless truckers, or choke to death in the polluted air. Not all of them, though. Some of them survive.
It was a treat to sit on a bench in that little bandbox of a park and think that maybe my town wasn't such a bad place after all. I've never been too good at looking on the bright side. Mostly I tend to notice the rot, the collapse, the urban entropy. It's my nature, I guess. Some of us see the glass half full. I see it three-fourths empty, and some days it's all I can do to keep my hands off it.
I went back to the library after lunch and put in another three hours, and that was my routine for the rest of the week, long sessions looking up old newspaper stories interrupted by lunches in the park. At first I concentrated on those members who had unquestionably been murdered, Boyd Shipton, Carl Uhl, Alan Watson, and Tom Cloonan. Then I went looking for any sort of coverage of the thirteen others who had died, and then I started in on the living.
I took the weekend off. Saturday afternoon I spelled Elaine while she scouted out thrift shops in Chelsea and a flea market in a school yard on Greenwich Avenue. I made a couple of small sales, and in the middle of the afternoon Ray Galindez dropped by with two containers of coffee, and we sat and talked for a while. He's a police artist with an uncanny ability to depict people he's never seen, and Elaine has some of his sketches hanging, along with a notice of his availability for portraits from memory. He had done a remarkable drawing of Elaine's father, working with her over several sessions; that had been my gift to her one Christmas, and it was not on view at the gallery, but stood in a gilt frame on top of her dresser.
Saturday night we saw a play at one of the little houses way west on Forty-second Street. Sunday afternoon I watched three baseball games at once, flipping from channel to channel, working the remote like a kid playing a video game, and to about as much purpose. Sunday night I had my usual Chinese meal with Jim Faber, my AA sponsor. Afterward we went to the Big Book meeting at St. Clare's Hospital. During the sharing, one fellow said, "I'll tell you what it means to be an alcoholic. If I went into a bar and there was a sign that said, 'All You Can Drink- One Dollar,' I'd say, 'Great- give me two dollars' worth.' "
Monday I was back at the library.
Monday night I stopped by my hotel and picked up a message from Wally at Reliable, the agency that has some work for me now and then. I called in the next morning. They wanted me to give them a couple of days, scouting out witnesses in a product-liability case. I said I'd do it. The job I was doing for Hildebrand wasn't that urgent that I couldn't fit in other assignments along the way.
The plaintiff in the product-liability case contended that his deck chair had collapsed, with painful results and dire long-term consequences. We were working for the company that had manufactured the chair. "The chair's a piece of crap," Wally told me, "but that don't mean the guy's on the up-and-up. An' he's got this personal-injury lawyer, Anthony Cerutti, scumbag goes around reporting damaged sidewalks on Thursday, putting the city on notice so his clients can trip over them on Friday and bring suit. Our client would love to stick this one straight up Cerutti's ass, so whyntcha see what you can do."
The injured party had driven a UPS truck before the accident and hadn't worked since. I found out that he never left his house much before two in the afternoon, so I arranged my own schedule accordingly, putting in a few hours in the library each morning, then catching the F train to the Parsons Boulevard stop. I generally managed to be nursing a Coke in McAnn's Hillside Tavern when our man paused at the door, shifted both clear plastic canes to his left hand, drew the door open with his right, then hobbled in with a cane in each hand.
"Hey, Charlie," the bartender told him each and every time. "You know somethin'? I think you're walkin' better."
I would slip out for a while and find people to talk to, and before I headed for home I would stop back at McAnn's for another Coke. After a couple of days of this I told Wally I was pretty certain Charlie wasn't working anywhere, on or off the books.
"Shit," he said. "You think he's legit?"
"No, I think the limp's bogus. Let me put in another day or two."
The following Monday I showed up around noon at Reliable's offices in the Flatiron Building. "I had a hunch," I told Wally. "Saturday night I took Elaine to Jackson Heights for curry, and afterward we went looking for Charlie."
"You took her to McAnn's Hillside? That must have been a rare treat for her."
"Charlie wasn't there," I said, "but the bartender thought he might be at Wallbanger's. 'A bunch of 'em went over there,' he said. 'They got that Velcro shit.' "
"What Velcro shit?"
"The kind where they've got a patch of it on the wall, and you attach some to yourself, and you take a running leap at the wall. The object is to wind up sticking to the wall, generally upside down."
"Jesus Christ," he said. "Why, for God's sake?"
"That's not the question you're supposed to ask."
"It's not?" He thought about it, and his face lit up. He looked like a kid confronting a gaily wrapped birthday present. "Oh, boy," he said. "This is the son of a bitch never takes a step without both canes, right? Did he do it, Matt? Did he wrap up in fucking Velcro an' take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut? Tell me he did it."
"He came in second."
"Come on."
"They were egging him on," I said. " 'C'mon, Charlie boy, you gotta try it!' He kept telling them to be serious, he couldn't even walk, how could he go stick himself on the wall. Finally somebody brought over a glass with four or five ounces of clear liquor in it. Vodka, I suppose, or maybe Aquavit. They told him it was holy water straight from Lourdes. 'Drink it down and you're cured, Charlie. Miracle time.' He said, well, maybe, as long as we all understood it was just a temporary cure. A five-minute cure, like Cinderella, and then we're all pumpkins again."
"Pumpkins, for chrissake."
"He's a tall, skinny guy," I said, "with a potbelly from the beer. According to the paperwork he's thirty-eight, but looking at him you'd say early thirties. The way the thing works, you run up, hit the mark, and take off. On his approach he looked as though he could have been a hurdler in high school, the way he moved those long legs. He only missed winning by two or three inches, and they tried to talk him into taking another turn, but he wouldn't have any part of it. 'Are you kidding, man? I'm a cripple. Now, listen, all of you. Nobody ever saw this, right? It never happened.' "
"Ah, Matty, you're beautiful. You actually saw this, right? And what about Elaine? Can she give a deposition, or testify in court if it comes to that?"
I dropped an envelope on his desk.
"What the hell is this?" He opened it. "I don't believe this."
"I'd have been here earlier," I said, "but I stopped at the one-hour photo place first. The light wasn't great, and it was no time to start popping flashbulbs, so it's no prizewinner. But-"
"I call it a prizewinner," Wally said. "If I'm the judge, I give it First Fucking Prize, and while you're at it you can throw in the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. That's him, by Christ. Upside down, and stuck to the wall like he's fucking pinned there. Well, scratch one lawsuit. What a stupid son of a bitch."
"He figured he was safe. He knew everybody in the joint except me and Elaine, and he'd gotten used to seeing me at McAnn's."
"I still can't believe you got a picture. I'm surprised you even had a camera along, never mind you got a chance to use it." He held the photo to the light. "This isn't so bad," he said. "When I take pictures of my grandkids I have the light positioned just right, I pose 'em, and the shots don't come out any better than this. The kids always manage to move just as I'm clicking the shutter."
"You should try Velcro."
"Now you're talking. Glue the little bastards to the wall." He dropped the photo on his desk. "Well, that's one in the eye for Phony Tony. He can call his client, tell him to see if he can get his job back at UPS, because his days as a professional invalid are over. Good job, Matt."
"I think I should get a bonus."
He thought about it. "You know," he said, "you fucking well ought to. That's up to the client, but I can certainly recommend it. This isn't just a case of digging up some eyewitness, some neighbor lady with a resentment who's willing to swear she saw him walk down to the corner without the canes. This is the kind of thing where all you really have to do is show Tony Cerutti what you've got and he drops the case like a hot rock."
"Imagine what Cerutti would pay for the picture."
"Now let's not even get into that," he said. "What did you have in mind?"
"That's up to the client," I said. "He can figure out what it's worth. But along with it I want a letter to me personally expressing appreciation for the work that I did."