Mr. Apology Page 28

It couldn’t have been Harry. Harry wouldn’t have hung up.

  Then who?

  He just hung up.

  He he he

  She had never felt quite so cold; it seemed she would never be warm again. The cold was inside her bloodstream.

  “I’ll get you a cab,” Berger was saying. Then he had gone out of the office and she could hear him crossing the gallery and the sound of the bell ringing above the front door. Faintness, a sense of all her blood having congealed in her legs, a sense of not belonging to this reality, to these perceptions she received—

  He he he

  Berger was coming back. “The cab’s outside, Madeleine. Go home. Call me later if you feel better.”

  She let herself be led through the gallery even as she was thinking, It’s safer here with you, Mr. Berger. This is a safe place for me. Then she was out in the street, stepping inside a yellow vehicle.

  “Do take it easy,” Berger said.

  She watched as Berger slammed the door shut. She closed her eyes, opening them only when she heard the driver ask for a destination. She didn’t answer him at once—she just looked at how the purse lay in her lap. It had the appearance of an unwanted object lying in a thrift store bin.

  3.

  “There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” Scorpion Scypion said. “And Billy Chapman’s is only one of them.”

  Gooch nodded. In the palm of one hand he crumpled an empty Tab can, enjoying the sensation of aluminum crumpling. Eight million stories. He stared at the Scorpion, who was wearing reflective sunglasses in which Gooch saw a small distorted version of himself in duplicate. They were sitting together at a booth in a diner on Broadway and 11th Street. Scorpion was running pieces of pancake through the ooze of egg yolks. Sometimes when he was chewing he’d talk in such a way that Gooch couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  “So what about Chapman?” Gooch asked.

  The Scorpion rubbed his bare arm, leaving a trace of yellow egg matter matted in the hairs. “Billy Chapman,” he said. And he winked at Gooch. He had a little smile on his face that bordered on a smirk, a knowing smirk.

  “Yeah. What about him, Scorpion?”

  The Scorpion hummed a few phrases of a song that Gooch recognized. “Come on, babe, trust in me, I am the Pied Piper.…” He looked away from the reflection of himself in the sunglass lenses and out into the street. Unseasonable weather, for sure. He turned his face and saw a waitress bend over one of the tables to clear dishes away. She was a slim young kid of about seventeen and she had long dark hair and a noticeable moustache. Her name, Gooch remembered, was Ameliorata Gonzalez. He liked the first name a lot because it had the sound of water running over smooth rocks. One time when he’d asked her for a date she’d informed him that her brothers, Roderigo and Hector, would have to come along as chaperones. He hadn’t asked again. He looked back at the Scorpion.

  “What’s the word, Scorpion?”

  Scypion grinned. “You came up with a real difficult one, Gooch. Real hard.” He shook his head, still grinning.

  “Well? Do you know anything?”

  “I might. Might not. Hard to say.”

  Holy shit. Gooch tapped his fingertips on the table and looked at the crushed Tab can. In the gym this morning he’d lifted three hundred and ninety-four pounds in the clean-and-jerk and now the muscles in the small of his back were aching. “Hey, Scorpion, I ain’t got all day to sit here and wait for you to tell me if you know anything about this Chapman guy or if you don’t. I mean, it was you that said you knew most everybody. It wasn’t me.”

  The Scorpion lowered his head and talked out of the side of his mouth. “The word on this dude is baaaad, man. He is one hot motherfucker. Trust me. You don’t want to tangle with this asshole.”

  “I only want to know where the guy hangs out,” Gooch said.

  Scypion took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Like I said, you don’t want to know.”

  “You mean you don’t know.”

  “Gooch, my man, would I bullshit you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Scypion put his glasses on again and grinned. He tapped his tip of his nose with his index finger. “I been hanging around these streets since the biggie at Woodstock, Gooch. Did I ever tell you I did all the sound up there? Worked the speakers. I talked with Joni Mitchell personally. I was as close to her as I am to you right now. Neat chick, Joni. I got her autograph someplace. Know what it says? ‘To My Tattooed Man, Love from Joni.’ Honest.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  The Scorpion smiled. Gooch stood up as if to leave, but Scypion tugged at the sleeve of his sweats. “Hey, where are you going?”

  “I got to take a hot shower, Hubert.”

  “You said you wanted to know about this Chapman character.”

  “You don’t exactly seem eager to tell me.”

  Scypion said, “Does the Scorpion ever let you down? Does he, Gooch?”

  He opened his eyes, turned, looked at the answering machine.

  Does he, Gooch?”

  “I don’t want to hear about Joni Mitchell and I don’t want to hear about Woodstock or about the time you led the acid revolution in San Francisco, Scorpion—”

  “Hey, hey, take it easy.”

  Gooch sat down again. Christ, those back muscles.

  “Okay. Here’s the pitch. The word on Chapman is hot. I don’t know what he’s supposed to have done, and frankly I ain’t interested, but what I hear doesn’t sit good on me, okay?”

  “Okay,” Gooch said.

  “He’s a coke freak, this Chapman.”

  Gooch nodded his big head.

  “A real bad coke freak. He uses the needle. This is what I hear.”

  “It don’t tell me where the guy is, Scorpion.”

  “What I wonder, Gooch, is why you wanna know.”

  “Business,” Gooch said mysteriously.

  “What kinda business would you have with a guy like this, man?”

  Gooch thought a moment, then said, “It’s personal.”

  The Scorpion looked at the crisscrossing tracks of egg yolks on his plate. “I got to confess I don’t know where the dude lives, Gooch. I got to tell you that right off the bat, man.”

  Gooch said nothing. He was watching Ameliorata again. Pity about the moustache, he thought. You just knew it was going to thicken with time and then turn grey later on.

  “I know who he scores from, though,” Scypion said. “I got that much.”

  “Who does he score from then?”

  “Well, this is all kinda indirect, you unnerstand? I talked with this guy, who has to remain nameless, see, and this guy says he used to do some minor biz with Billy Chapman, only Chapman started to go off the fucking wall, coked and spacy—you know the score, right? He don’t do business with Billy nowadays. But he tells me”—and here the Scorpion, in a flamboyant gesture of furtiveness, lowered his head across the table—“he tells me that sometimes Billy buys from a source called Sylvester.”

  “Sylvester who?”

  The Scorpion shrugged. “That’s all she wrote, Gooch.”

  “You don’t know this Sylvester?”

  Scypion shook his head and looked momentarily miserable. “You reach a point where you’ve used up your quota of questions for a while, unnerstand? You ask too many questions, Gooch, and pretty soon people start asking questions about you. I don’t like the idea much. So I ain’t gonna ask no more questions for a while.”

  “Sylvester,” Gooch said.

  “That’s the name of that tune, man.”

  “And you don’t know where this Sylvester hangs out?”

  “Like I said, man, I told you all I know.”

  Gooch got up from his seat. The Scorpion asked, “Does it help?”

  “Sure it helps.”

  “I like to be useful, Gooch.”

  4.

  There was a smell in the corridor, an overpowering confusion of scents, a congestion of stale city perfumes—disinfectant,
human sweat, old tobacco smoke, the acrid quality of spilled milk turned sour. Madeleine felt faint, stood for a moment leaning against the wall. The overhead fluorescent lights buzzed. People went back and forth between desks or sat idly on benches and every so often a uniformed cop would call something out or some guy would be dragged in from the outside world, handcuffed, then disappear into a back room. It was all so confusing—this stream of movement, the ringing of telephones, the sound of voices. What was she doing here? It was a strange realization, but she’d never been inside a police station in her life. She couldn’t imagine the procedure, what it was you were supposed to do. For a moment her mind emptied. How could you possibly begin to make any sense of all this movement, all these smells and sounds?

  Then she thought about the cassette in her purse. Jamey. She was here because Jamey had been killed; she was here because of a voice on a tape. A tape she stole. When you took that cassette you might have been subtracting something from the relationship with Harry. Plundering the notion of trust. And something happens to love, an erosive thing, structures alter and substances change. I can’t see him get hurt. I can’t let that happen.

  She moved slowly forward, approached a desk where a uniformed man was writing something inside a big logbook. Where to begin, she thought, how to start, how to make it all sound like it wasn’t the product of a diseased imagination. She reached out and laid her hands lightly against the desk. The cop smiled at her in a weary way.

  She cleared her throat. This is all a bad dream, one of those violent nightmares that don’t add up, don’t make sense except in terms of a terrible inner logic. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of a drunk lunging against a bench, then a policeman came and grabbed him by the arm. She said, “I need to talk with somebody.” She hesitated. How did she sound? Was her voice too thin and high? “A man’s been threatening us. My boyfriend, myself. I know it’s the same man who killed Henry Falcon. I believe he also murdered Jamey Hausermann.” She fished the cassette from her purse and laid it on the desk and the cop looked at it as if he suspected a bomb. “I’ve got the man’s voice on this tape. Have you got a cassette player? You could listen to it. It would make more sense if you could listen to it for yourself.” The cop hadn’t said a word. He’d just stood there and let her ramble on. His eyes were flat and unresponsive.

  He doesn’t believe me.

  I’m just another airhead from the streets.

  “Do you have a cassette player?” she asked again.

  “You’re going way too fast for me, lady. Suppose you do an about-face and go back to the beginning.” He smiled at her. Now she noticed a nameplate on the desk with STANISLAVSKI written on it. You’re humoring me, Stanislavski. “You’d better let me have some background details. Name, address. Okay?” And he picked up a pen and found a printed form from somewhere.

  “Is it really necessary?”

  “It’s just procedure.”

  Time, she thought. Time passes. All the clocks are ticking down dangerously. Procedure, he was interested in following procedure.

  “Madeleine Demarest,” she said.

  He wrote very slowly, like a backward pupil in grade school.

  “Can’t we hurry this?” she asked.

  “You can’t hurry procedures,” Stanislavski said and smiled, as if he had uttered some holy truth. She gazed at his pen. So slow. The way it covered spaces on the form. Please, she thought. Please, faster, faster.

  “Address?”

  She gave him Harry’s—what was the point in mentioning her own tiny apartment when she rarely ever slept there anymore?

  “Okay,” the cop said when he’d finished writing. “What’s the story with this tape?”

  Did she have to say it again? “I want you to play it. There’s a certain voice that’s connected with two murders, maybe three.…” Maybe more than that. The cop looked incredulous. “Listen, people have been killed. The killer is going to kill again. Can’t you do something to push this thing along?”

  He didn’t answer her question. “How did you get your hands on this tape?”

  “It’s a long story.” God, God. How much longer is all this going to take?

  “Suppose you tell it to me anyhow?” He sat down with a look on his face that reminded her of childish anticipation. Goody-goody, somebody’s going to tell us a fairy tale.

  She hesitated. It wasn’t going to come out right, no matter how she phrased it or shaped her narrative. It was going to sound lunatic. “Do we really need to get into this? Isn’t it enough that I’ve got the tape?”

  “I’d like to hear the whole story.” He folded his thick arms across his chest, settling back in his chair.

  She took a deep breath and told him. She told him about Harry and his project, told him about the handbills, the recording machine, the kinds of messages he received—and as she spoke she seemed to be hearing herself as if it were quite another person talking. It didn’t sound sane. It was an unbalanced story, a fact she could see reflected in the cop’s expression. When she finished, her throat was dry. She stared at the cop’s face. He stood up, poked at the cassette, then gazed at her a long time.

  “Lemme get this straight. Your friend takes calls from strangers, right? He wants to get them to apologize to him, right? I don’t think I get it exactly, Miss Demarest. I don’t think I understand that.” He was shaking his big face from side to side.

  “I don’t think it matters if you understand it or not,” she said. “The only damn thing that matters is that you get your ass out of that chair and do something.”

  He grinned at her. He enjoys playing with me, she thought. He’s enjoying some kind of smirking game here. Asshole. She looked past him at the other side of the large office. There were two hookers in gaudy clothes talking with a uniformed cop, a black guy sitting strung-out and red-eyed on a bench and mumbling to himself, a broken-down old bag lady sneaking cigarette butts from ashtrays. A sense of incongruity came over her: What the hell am I doing here? You’re bringing a tape to the cops, Madeleine. You’re trying to get them to stop the killings. You’re trying to protect yourself and Harry. Keep that in mind. Don’t lose sight of that.

  “Look,” she said. “What do I have to do to get through to you? I don’t think it matters if you consider the Apology idea crazy. The only thing that matters is that you do something! The only thing that matters is you somehow stop this man from killing anybody else—”

  Stanislavski stood up now. “You mentioned the Henry Falcon thing.”

  “Right.”

  He jabbed the cassette, as if he were still convinced it was going to explode in his face. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Lieutenant Nightingale’s in charge of the case. I’ll turn the tape straight over to him, then I guess he’ll be in touch with you when he’s had a chance to listen to it.”

  “I’m not making you understand, am I? There isn’t time for me to hang around waiting for your Lieutenant Nightingale to listen to the tape and then make up his mind about calling me. There just isn’t time for that. Why can’t I get to see him right now?” She was aware of the palm of her hand striking the surface of the desk. Slapslap—a quick impatient gesture.

  “He’s not here right now. He went out a while ago.”

  “Terrific,” she said. “Is there some way you can get in touch with him?”

  Stanislavski shook his head.

  He’s lying, she thought. Didn’t they have radios in cop cars? So why is he lying? Because he thinks I’m crazy, my whole story is off the wall. I’m just some demented housewife making up an adventure yarn to pass a boring afternoon. Because he doesn’t take me seriously. “You’ve got to be able to contact him,” she said. “I mean, there’s got to be some way of getting through.”

  Stanislavki said, “Look, the best thing is to wait until he gets back. Then I’ll give him this cassette personally.”

  “Can’t you radio him or something?”

  Stanislavski sighed. He was weighing the cassette in on
e hand, apparently convinced it contained nothing explosive. She watched his face. She could see in his wearily resigned expression all the madness of his occupation—she could see the crazies and the deluded, the drugged and the freaks, the mad bombers and urban terrorists that must pass in front of his desk on a daily basis. He had to listen to everybody’s story, had to write reports on what was said to him; maybe after a time you gave up, paying only cursory attention to the faces and tales that you saw and heard from behind your desk. And mine, she thought, is just another such item of nonsense.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  He turned, threading his way between desks, then went through a door at the back of the room. She wondered what he was doing, whether he was actually doing anything, or if he were just lurking out of sight someplace and pretending to make contact with Nightingale, another means of humoring her. She looked around the room. She felt faint again. She had a sense of things around her melting, images running one into another like dripping wax. She covered her eyes with the palm of her hand. Then she heard Stanislavski come back.

  “I tried,” he said. “I tried to get him in his car. I guess he wasn’t there.”

  “Are you sure you tried?”

  “I’m sure.”

  She shrugged. “When will he be back?”

  “It’s hard to say.” The cop picked up his printed form and looked at it for a moment. “Why don’t you go home? When he gets in I’ll make sure he listens to this tape and then calls you. Okay?”

  She sighed now. Weariness—she had to fight against fatigue. She picked up her purse. “Are you sure you really tried to get Nightingale?”

  “Lady,” he said. “I told you.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  She turned away from the desk, moved across the room, down the corridor, and then out into the street. She wondered how long it would take for Nightingale to reach her. Or if he’d ever get in touch at all.

  5.

  Nightingale stared at the bowling alleys: Big black balls thundered towards the pins, most of them thrown by massive women who had their hair in curlers and scarves over their heads. Maybe it was some kind of afternoon league, Housewives of the Bronx or something like that. Maybe they even had a name—the Deegan Expressway Die-Hards or something along those lines. He lit a cigarette and watched a bowling ball scurry into a gutter and go sliding beyond the pins with the force of a small bomb.