Mr. Apology Page 12

  “What is it? A subpoena? Something awful from the bank?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing like that.”

  “Am I supposed to read it?”

  “Please.”

  “Very well.” He lifted it in a hand she noticed was trembling. He read in silence for a moment, then put the poster down on his desk again. I’ve chosen the wrong time, she thought. I’ve screwed up.

  “Can you explain it to me?” he asked.

  “It’s really self-explanatory.”

  “You mean I should take it at face value?”

  She nodded. She watched as he smiled.

  “Where did you find this?”

  “It’s the work of a friend of mine.”

  “Ah,” he said, as if some hollow penny had dropped inside his head. “A special friend?”

  “A special friend,” she admitted.

  “And he’s established some form of public forum for the uttering of apologies?”

  “That’s right.”

  Berger stood up, glanced at the handbill again, turned towards the window of his office. “A very odd notion, Madeleine. But why are you showing this to me?”

  She paused. A vague apprehension: Is he going to laugh at me?

  “I thought it might be of some interest to you, that’s all. I’ve heard the tapes and they’re revealing, they’re sad, they’re pathetic, they’re fascinating—”

  Berger held one hand in the air. “I am beginning to smell some kind of odd scent here, my dear. I am beginning to perceive, in a small oblique way, the reason you’ve shown this curious piece of literature to me.”

  “Well, you said you didn’t know what you were going to do after Tahiko’s stuff goes out, didn’t you?”

  Berger nodded. He pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead in the manner of a stage swami trying to divine the contents of a wallet in the audience. “Are you suggesting I turn my gallery into an auditorium for these tapes?”

  “What have you got to lose?” she asked, wondering if suddenly she’d come on too strong, if she sounded brazen. “The tapes would generate a great deal of publicity; they’d draw people in—”

  “I daresay.”

  “And you could charge admission,” she said.

  Berger sat down again, looking at the handbill. “My dear, I display paintings here. I show works of art. That’s what the gallery is all about. That is the function of the gallery.”

  “This is art. Okay, it’s a different kind of art, a different kind of form.”

  Berger sighed, closing his eyes. “I will not engage you, Madeleine, in a fruitless discussion concerning what passes as art and what does not. I happen to think that a Campbell’s soup can does not constitute art, no matter how well it’s done. How are you going to convince me that the recorded voices of the misfits of our great society amount to artistic expression?” He opened his eyes, looked at her, smiled. “Do you understand my point of view?”

  “I understand it, sure. At the same time, I’m trying to tell you that it’s worth a try. Think of the publicity. Think of that.”

  Berger came around the front of his desk and took her hand and clasped it between his own. He suddenly reminded her of an uncle attempting to dispel the youthfully foolish notions of a highstrung niece. Don’t elope with Charlie, dear. Think of your parents, their feelings. Besides, you might fall from the ladder and do yourself an injury.…“Madeleine, you have the makings of an entrepreneur, I’m sure. But I have the distinct impression that your apparent adoration for the person behind this Apology project is clouding your judgment somewhat.”

  Madeleine sighed. The wrong time, I just chose the wrong time. She refused to be beaten, though. She said, “Please just listen to the tapes. Maybe you can even talk with Harry and he’ll explain it all to you.”

  “Harry? Is Harry the genius behind this wild scheme?”

  Madeleine nodded. She hadn’t meant to let his name slip like that.

  “I admire his nerve,” Berger said. “As for using the gallery …” He walked around the office for a minute, then said: “Let me think about it. Maybe I’ll listen to a tape. But I really must say I am not remotely optimistic about my gallery being the place for such an undertaking. Is that clear?”

  Madeleine smiled. It was a start; it was something, a frail thread.

  Berger said, “Love is a great clouder of judgment, my dear. Never forget that.”

  The bell rang in the gallery. Madeleine turned and looked towards the front door; a man had stepped inside, a man of about sixty who dressed as if he were in contention for the part of Peter Pan. He walked as if he were gliding on a cushion of air, his feel failing to touch the floor. He wore light makeup on his face, faint rouge on his cheeks, and he dangled his wrists in the fashion of an old queen. She was about to go out and help him when Berger moved past her into the gallery; she watched him approach the man. They talked together about something, words she just couldn’t catch. Maybe they were discussing the rainbows. Maybe not. She folded her arms under her breasts. And then she became conscious of something else, someone else, a face pressed to the window of the gallery. A young man with reddish hair. His features were indistinct beyond the glass. She had an odd feeling, something strangely tenuous—as if she perceived a frail connection, a fragile web of some kind, that linked Berger and the customer and the young man in the street together. The sensation passed. The face disappeared from the window. The old guy shook Berger’s hand then went outside. Berger came back to the office. He didn’t mention the customer. Instead he said, “Do not build up any hopes, Madeleine. I will listen to one tape, that’s all. Nothing more than that.”

  “You won’t be disappointed.”

  “Every time I’ve-tried to catch the elusive tail of some new artistic trend, I’ve always been disappointed,” he said. He went back behind his desk and he sat down. Madeleine stepped back inside the gallery. I will listen to one tape, that’s all. She smiled and looked out into the street. But there wasn’t any sign of the old guy now, and the kid who’d been looking through the window had disappeared as well. Swallowed up, lost in the rain of 57th Street.

  2.

  Gooch stood at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes. Hacking them, Nightingale thought, watching the guy’s big clumsy hands work with the small peeler, huge chunks of white falling into the sink along with the peelings. The trouble with Gooch was how you kept waiting for him to change back into Bill Bixby: He must have been six-eight in his bare feet. Nightingale glanced at Moody, who was looking at the comic books on the floor beside Gooch’s bed. This joint’s a disaster deserving of federal aid, Nightingale thought. Wallpaper hung from walls, bare wood floors were stuck with old food droppings, gooey things, and comics and newspapers, open at the racing pages, lay spread everywhere.

  “Potatoes au gratin?” Moody asked. The Boy Wonder had moved to the sink and was staring up at Gooch now. “Or Parmesan patties? Pommes frites?”

  “Hunnh?” Gooch asked.

  “Skip it,” Moody said.

  Gooch put the potato peeler down and wiped sweat from his huge brow, which overhung a Neanderthal face. You don’t want to go meeting this character on a dark night, Nightingale thought. You’d think something had escaped from the zoo. Gooch snapped a potato in half and placed it between his thick lips and began to chew on it loudly. Nightingale looked at the big guy for a moment and was overcome with an urge to sit down, but one glance around the room told you to forget any ideas you might have about comfort. Two armchairs with springs arising. A dining room chair with its fretwork seat unraveling. A narrow bed that was out of the question.

  “Been having any luck with the ponies, Gooch?” he asked.

  “Naw. I got on this real bad streak.”

  “Tough,” Nightingale said. He nodded his head. He watched Gooch swallow the potato half. The Adam’s apple moved menacingly: He might have had a grenade stuck in his throat.

  “Figure my luck might change.” Gooch leaned against
the sink and stared at Moody for a moment. “You guys. I don’t like you guys coming into my private room. I get a reputation with the neighbors, they see me talking with the heat. You know?”

  “We won’t be here long, Gooch,” Moody said.

  “I don’t talk to you, man. I only talk with Nightingale here.”

  “He’s okay, Gooch.”

  “Yeah, you can say that, Nightingale. But I don’t know him from jack shit.”

  “Trust me,” Nightingale said. “He’s called Moody.”

  “That’s me,” Moody said.

  Gooch sucked in air and looked at the walls of his room. They were covered with pictures of weight lifters, tom badly from the pages of magazines. Nightingale leaned against the table. He folded his arms. The room was stuffy and overheated and the lack of breathable air was hurting him. Billy Chapman’s prints. Three words go off inside your brain like small bombs. Billy Chapman’s prints. His own goddamn sister.

  Nightingale rubbed his eyes and tried to open them real wide. Sometimes Gooch had reliable information; other times he just seemed to make up off-the-wall stuff.

  “Gooch, you know a guy called Chapman?”

  “Chapman who?” Gooch asked. He took his eyes away from Arnold Schwarzenegger for a moment.

  “Other way around, Gooch. Billy Chapman. William.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Try real hard,” Moody said. There was a patronizing tone in his voice—he might have been offering a peanut to a large simian creature.

  “Hey, Nightingale, you tell this fucker I don’t want to talk with him?”

  “I’ll tell him,” Nightingale said. “Doug, don’t talk with Gooch, okay?”

  Moody smiled and stepped away. He put his hands inside the pockets of his coat and roamed the room.

  “Billy Chapman, Gooch. You ever run into a guy with that name?”

  “What’s his business?”

  “Drugs.”

  “User? Dealer? What?”

  “User. Mainly cocaine, as far as we know.”

  “Bad stuff,” Gooch said. “You might just as well shoot poison into your bloodstream.”

  “Yeah, it’s terrible stuff, but I was asking about Billy Chapman.”

  “I never heard of the guy.”

  Gooch shifted weight from one leg to the other. Nightingale was reminded of a staunch tree swaying in a high wind. The big guy turned away and peered into the stained porcelain sink, rummaging through peelings as if he were searching for something lost. “What’s he done anyway?”

  “We think he killed his sister.”

  “Bad,” Gooch said, turning back to look at Nightingale again.

  “It gets worse. After he killed her, Gooch, he screwed her.”

  “He what?”

  “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

  “Yeah, right,” Gooch said. “You can get kinda spaced out on cocaine, Nightingale. I seen some guys get in pretty bad shape. They don’t live in the real world no more.”

  “Yeah. So. You know this Billy Chapman guy?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.” Gooch smiled: You could just about see the light bulb pop over his head. “I know some dealers, I guess. I run into them. Now and then. You know how it is.”

  “I know what you mean,” Nightingale said. The informer, he thought. A little whisper in this corner of the precinct, a little whisper in that: You added them all up and it created a clamor of half-truths, rumors, innuendos, cold facts, and outright lies. Some people were cop groupies, that was all—they liked to think they had a line on the inside track. Maybe it made them feel secure. Maybe it made them feel like good little citizens.

  “You know any talkative dealers, Gooch?”

  “Unnh. They don’t say much. They like secrets.”

  “They like paranoia,” Moody said.

  Gooch glared at the Boy Wonder for a while. Moody picked up a copy of Archie and flipped the pages, mumbling something about Jughead. Nightingale looked as the big guy flexed his huge hands. The chemistry was bad here, he thought, but then Moody sometimes had this strange ability to rub people the wrong way.

  “I never use the stuff myself,” Gooch was saying in his halting way. His voice seemed to echo in a deep place inside his chest.

  “Yeah, I understand that. I’m only interested in Billy Chapman, Gooch.”

  “You want I should maybe ask a few questions?”

  “Sure.” Nightingale clapped his hands together—he had to get out of this room and back into the midday rain. “You know what discreet means?”

  Gooch said nothing. He stared at Moody, then munched on the other half of his raw potato. The jaws moved like revolving doors. Nightingale glanced at his partner. The Boy Wonder was already opening the door.

  “Keep in touch,” Nightingale said.

  Gooch was staring at his weight-lifting pictures as Nightingale shut the door. The hallway of the tenement was dark. He stumbled against something—a baby stroller, a garbage can, he couldn’t be sure what in the absence of light. Outside, he stood on the sidewalk and looked at Moody.

  “You got to realize, Doug, I’ve been dealing with Gooch a few years now. Sometimes he comes through. Sometimes zip city. I just wanted to toss a ball in the air.”

  Moody stared along the sidewalk. “Social sonofabitch. He took to me like a fish to water.”

  “Gooch doesn’t like cops, Doug. Also he doesn’t like the fact of what he is—he tells tales on people. He informs. I never met a snitch yet who didn’t have a guilty conscience somewhere.”

  Moody said nothing. He turned towards the car; little threads of rain were glistening on his fuzzy cheeks. Nightingale put his hands in his pockets and looked the length of the dark street. There was a phone booth on the corner. Goddamn, I need to talk with her. I need to hear her voice. I need to know she’s alive.

  “Doug, I want to make a call, okay? I won’t be long.”

  “Who you calling, Frank? Monsigneur Apology?” Moody smiled.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Nightingale said. He walked towards the phone booth, fished coins out of his pocket, counted them. You run into the corpse of a dead woman, something you should be immune to, and all of a sudden you’re thinking of Sarah as if you’ve superimposed her face on the poor dead features of Camilla Darugna. He punched coins into the slot, the number rang a few times, then he heard Sarah answer. Fulton Gift and Card Boutique. Boutique, he thought.

  “Sarah? It’s Frank.”

  “This is a surprise, Frank,” she said.

  “Well …” It was such a thrill to hear the sound of her voice. Retarded adolescence, Frank. A throwback. “I was thinking about you. Missing you …” He felt suddenly awkward, words congealing in his mouth like lard.

  “I miss you too,” she said. “I mean, all this crisp fresh air is terrific and everything, but I still miss you.”

  He tried to picture her standing inside that little shop of hers, tried to see the yellowy hair flecked with grey, the eyes that were a tantalizing mixture of green and blue. I love the hell out of her, he thought. “When do I get to see you?” he asked.

  “Now that’s up to you, Frank.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He looked at Moody, who was leaning against the car. “I’ve got this homicide right now.”

  “It figures,” Sarah said. The line crackled; a serpent might have been hissing somewhere deep within the electronic circuits. “There hasn’t been a homicide in Fulton since Santa Claus was a kid, Frank.”

  There hasn’t been anything in Fulton since then, he thought. “Maybe when I’ve got the thing cleared up, Sarah. Maybe then …”

  “Damn it, Frank, I miss you!”

  Nightingale shut his eyes. He said, “Soon. As soon as I can. I love you.” And he put the receiver down, stepped out into the street, stuck his hands in his pockets. He walked towards the car. Moody was looking at him.

  “I figure long distance,” Moody said.


  “Yeah.”

  “How is she?”

  Nightingale shrugged. There was a slight ache around his heart. What if it was too late? What if he had lost her forever? You don’t want to think about that, lieutenant. You don’t want to entertain any such notion. He stared at the barred windows of a pawnshop that looked like it was under seige. Billy Chapman, he thought. Where are you now? And what are you going to do next?

  3.

  I’M SIXTEEN AND I’M STILL A VIRGIN AND THE OTHER KIDS THINK I’M SO STRAIGHT YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE IT BECAUSE I DON’T GET LAID AND I DON’T SMOKE DOPE OR ANYTHING.… SO WHY THE HELL DO I WANT TO APOLOGIZE TO THEM FOR WHAT I AM?

  Harrison smiled, stopping the machine, then raised his face and looked at the woman who sat in the corner of the bedroom with a notebook open in her lap. Maddy’s friend Jamey Hausermann. She seemed to him an unlikely candidate for friendship with Madeleine somehow—there was something slightly hard-bitten about her, something tight around her mouth, a quality of hardness in the thinness of her lips.

  “Is that characteristic of the messages?” she asked. She scribbled something. Harrison thought, Okay, take care you don’t make an idiot of yourself—the idea of print, the black finality of it all, scared him.

  “They come in all forms,” he said. And he pressed the PLAY button again, watching the woman’s face as she tilted her chair back and closed her eyes.

  THIS MAKES ME PUKE.… I DON’T KNOW WHY THE HELL I DID THIS.… I WENT INSIDE THIS MOVIE THEATER AND THERE WAS THIS OLD GUY KINDA WATCHING ME.… I KNEW WHAT HE WANTED. HE WAS LOOKING FOR A BOY, YOU KNOW? SO I CRAWLED ALONG THE SEATS TOWARDS HIM AND I TOOK OUT HIS COCK AND I SUCKED HIM OFF.… I DIDN’T FEEL VERY MUCH.… THEN LAST NIGHT I WENT TO THIS SPA JOINT AND I DID THE SAME THING FOR THIS GUY IN THE STEAM ROOM.… HE WAS BETTER THAN THE FIRST GUY, BUT I DIDN’T FEEL VERY MUCH EVEN THEN … EXCEPT SICK, BECAUSE I WANTED TO GAG ON THEIR COME, YOU KNOW? THE TROUBLE IS, I DON’T THINK I CAN REALLY STOP NOW.…