Mr. Apology Read online

  “I never bowled as a kid,” Moody said. “The noise of these joints scared me. Also the fact my father told me they employed evil dwarves to put the pins back in place. You shouldn’t tell kids things like that, Frank.” Moody swung around on his stool at the snackbar counter and sipped from a waxy cardboard cup of Pepsi.

  Nightingale listened to the roar of balls as if they were ricocheting back and forth inside his tired mind; it must be bloody and raw in there, he thought. You haven’t slept in hours. You’ve been going on tobacco and black coffee—plugging yourself into those stimulant poisons. You couldn’t sleep anyhow. You shut your eyes and the insides of your brain buzz like a million flies trapped in a jar and all you keep seeing are pictures of the dead. Those brutalized faces. Blood, carnage. The way lives unfinished, cut down abruptly, are ruined like so many condemned buildings. He stared up at the fluorescent lights of the bowling alley; they glimmered in such a way that they made him dizzy. Spaced-out, he thought—tired, disgusted, burned. You reach that point where you know you’ve had enough, more than you need to take—maybe more than any man has to experience. Make this the last one, Frank, he told himself. After this you grab your pension and go off in search of the woman you love—if it’s not too damn late to get it rekindled.

  “Why does he want to meet us way out here, Frank?” Moody asked. “The Bronx makes me nervous. I don’t feel good unless I’m sucking on the lead-filled air of good old Manhattan.”

  Nightingale said, “Gooch doesn’t like to take chances. He doesn’t want to run the risk of anybody seeing him talk to us.”

  “It’s overkill in the precaution department,” Moody said.

  “Also he has a sick father out here he likes to visit; Maybe he wants to kill two birds with one stone.”

  “Gooch has a father? I’d imagined immaculate conception by way of a faulty assembly line.” Moody crumpled his cardboard cup and stuffed it into an ashtray. He looked across the lanes for a minute, then said, “I know you don’t think I’m right, Frank, but what if Billy Chapman’s responsible for this last one as well, huh?”

  “As well as what? The first two? Camilla and Henry?”

  Moody nodded. “Yeah. Say he’s developing a pattern of some kind, Frank, some overall plan, a grand design of violence, something so deranged in its intricacy we can’t even begin to see it.”

  Nightingale said nothing. What came back to him was the outrage he’d felt in Hausermann’s apartment, the black disgust, the sheer sharp edge of horror. A temporary madness had overwhelmed him. You just upped and lost it there, Frank. You let go for a while. But what you haven’t let go is your determination to nail this sonofabitch. He looked at his partner and said, “I don’t know anything about designs, Doug. I don’t know shit about detective-fiction patterns. I’d like it to be Chapman. I’d love it if it was just this one guy, if one guy had done all three murders. I’d love it on account of the fact that it’s neat and tidy. But you’re going to have to convince me some more. You’re going to have to tell me it’s not related to some old grudge.”

  “Grudge?”

  “Why sound surprised? Isn’t that a torch you’re carrying for Billy Chapman?”

  Moody shook his head. “That what you really think, Frank?”

  “I think it’s a strong possibility.” Soft-pedal it—don’t turn on the kid too sharply.

  “Okay,” Moody said. “First, we got three strangulations.”

  “Yeah, but they were different kinds, Doug.”

  “A strangling is a strangling,” Moody said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s done with the bare hands or an electric cord. You don’t expect a crazy fucking killer to follow the same MO every time, do you? What do you think? He’s gonna leave an obvious trademark lying around?”

  Nightingale listened to the rumble of bowling balls. “I’m still waiting, Doug. I’m sitting here waiting to be convinced of your case.”

  “Okay, in each case you got the sexual thing. Camilla is screwed when she’s dead. Old Henry has his mouth filled with sperm, which they tell us might have been deposited after his death. And Jamey Hausermann gets the works with a hairdryer.”

  “They’re all brutal, Doug. But even the Hausermann thing made the others look pale in terms of brutality, right?”

  Moody blinked. “He’s building. He’s getting more elaborate. He’s becoming more and more intricate the longer he remains free. Maybe he’s started to think he can get away with anything. Maybe he thinks he’s way above the law.”

  “Mmmmm,” Nightingale said. He tapped his fingertips on the counter. What if the Boy Wonder was absolutely correct? What if his scheme was the right one? What if Moody had hit the nail smack on its little head? He found himself thinking: Make me a case, Doug. Make it stick with me. I want to go along with you on this one because I don’t have the guts or the heart to think we might be dealing with three goddamn killers. Make it easy on me, Doug. Do your level best. He studied the curlered, scarved women for a while, as if he might find soothing normality there, a retreat into the mundane. He turned back to Moody. “Look, we got prints at the scene of Camilla’s killing. Why didn’t we get prints in old Henry’s place? Why didn’t we find jack shit at Hausermann’s apartment? Has Billy Chapman taken to wearing gloves or something? All of a sudden taken a shine to handwear?”

  Moody shrugged. “Why not? He’s got to protect his ass.”

  Nightingale was quiet for a while. Then he said, “I don’t know, Doug. I honest to God don’t know.” And he realized that what was absent was the old feeling in the marrow of the bones, the sense of something like warm steel working in the skeletal tunnels of himself. “Change of subject slightly. Did you talk with Hausermann’s editor?”

  “They promised they’d come up with a complete list of her assignments lately.”

  “Good. Maybe we’ll find something there. Maybe somebody took severe umbrage at the way she wrote about him, something like that. Who knows? It’s an outside chance anyhow.”

  “She must’ve talked with hundreds of people, Frank.”

  “Sure.” Hundreds and hundreds of interviewees. The whole methodical ploughing through of the victim’s associations. He thought about Walt for a moment. He’d been sedated—he wasn’t going to be able to tell them anything for a while yet. The problem about being sedated was that the chemical wore off and you had to wake up sooner or later and face the fact that your world had changed inexorably, that nothing was ever going to be the same again no matter how long you lived. He turned towards the entrance.

  He saw Gooch come through the glass doors, a canvas bag in one hand, enormous sneakers on his feet. He approached slowly, looking from side to side as he moved. A game, Nightingale thought, the game of snitching. Maybe Gooch liked to imagine he was involved in very important undercover work. He approached the counter and lofted himself up on a stool, trying—with dismal lack of success—to look inconspicuous. For a moment Nightingale was reminded of the Jolly Green Giant. It was as if the big man might have a stash of corn kernels stuffed away in his sweats.

  “Nice afternoon,” Nightingale said.

  Gooch nodded and looked serious, working his eyebrows. “Beats the rain, lieutenant.”

  “Sure does.” Nightingale splayed his hands on the formica counter and stared at the bronze stain of nicotine on his index finger. “So, Gooch. What’s the word? You sounded kinda pleased on the telephone.”

  Gooch looked in the direction of Moody; his expression was one of suspicion. Moody smiled over the rim of his Pepsi.

  “Did you have to bring that dude?” Gooch asked.

  “He’s attached to me, Gooch. It’s called a team. Where I go, he goes. It’s so he can drag me out of gunfire if we should run into some criminals.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t let him worry you. And don’t piss him off. He’s a mean sonofabitch if you rile him. Black belt. Twenty-seventh Dan or whatever those guys get.”

  “A black belt?” Gooch gazed back at Moody.
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  “He picked up some wicked tricks in Vietnam. He can kill a guy with one hand. It’s not pleasant. I’d advise you to stay clear of him, Gooch.” Nightingale paused. “So, what do you know?”

  “I got something for you.”

  “Yeah?” Nightingale slipped a ten from his coat and balled it up in his closed fist.

  “I been asking a lot of questions concerning the party you mentioned.” Gooch shrugged. He scratched his sneaker; when he rose from his bending position, his big face was blood red.

  “You’ve been asking questions,” Nightingale said, tapping his fingers.

  “Yeah. You ever hear of a guy called Sylvester?”

  “No, I can’t say I ever did.”

  “What I hear is this Billy Chapman connects with Sylvester.”

  “Sylvester who?” Nightingale asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Terrific, Nightingale thought. One name in a city of millions. One name that might be a first name, might be a last. He was suddenly reminded of a sadistic TV game show called The New Treasure Hunt in which participants could choose a box and win either a huge fortune or a plastic dog turd. You could open all the boxes that were labeled Sylvester—and how long would that take? He pushed his face closer to the big man.

  “That’s all you know, Gooch?”

  “I know this much: Your Billy Chapman gets his shit from this Sylvester.”

  “I heard you already. You don’t know where this character hangs out?”

  Gooch shook his head. “People don’t wanna talk, lieutenant, and that’s about the size of it.” As if he imagined he were being followed, observed, Gooch swung around in his stool. Nightingale opened the palm of his hand and the bill sprung out. Gooch picked it up by tucking it inside the elastic cuff of his sleeve. The whole CIA thing, Nightingale thought. The entire secret agent trip. Maybe he has a kit at home he plays with, one of those boxes you can buy in a kiddie store complete with invisible ink, mock handcuffs, a book of codes, a magnifying glass—all the paraphernalia of the espionage game reduced to child size. Moody moved down the counter, slurping through his straw.

  “You give us Billy’s address, Gooch. Huh? You come up with his address, date of birth, next of kin, regularity of bowel movement, intake of roughage, whether he suffered from vagina envy at some tender age?” Moody said.

  “What’s with this guy?” Gooch asked Nightingale.

  “He went to college, Gooch.”

  “College?”

  Moody said, “Yeah. This collection of buildings wherein hamsters are deceived into wandering through tubes and men cut their wrists if they don’t get tenure.”

  “Moody,” Nightingale said.

  “Well,” Gooch said. “I told you what I got.” He stepped down from his stool.

  “Thanks,” Nightingale said.

  “Any time,” the big man said.

  Nightingale watched him wander towards the exit, where he paused and looked up at the giant plastic bowler as if he were greeting a long-lost brother.

  “What’s your problem, Doug?”

  “He’s a temptation. You find a guy like that who walks around with space between his temples. I don’t know. Maybe I get off on throwing out little darts and watching him as he tries to catch them sizzling past his head.”

  “Okay, you had a superior education to Gooch.”

  “And I was fortunate enough to be born with a working brain instead of a sawdust wad beneath the skullbone.”

  Nightingale closed his eyes. The smell of burger was stronger than ever. He wondered a moment about all the grease in the world, imagined great Amazons of it, huge tidal waves of polyunsaturated safflower, massive sea creatures carved out of lard. His stomach shifted a little, one degree south. “I don’t need that kind of fucking around, Doug.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’m thinking about this Sylvester.”

  “A needle in the Manhattanstack.”

  “I’m going to call Narcotics. Eddie Fodor. If anybody knows this Sylvester, it’ll be Eddie Fodor. I used to work with him, maybe ten years ago. He’s a character.”

  Moody was staring over the lanes now. He appeared deep in thought. After a short silence he said, “Know what would be useful, Frank?”

  “Tell me.” Sperm prints. Microchips inserted into the behavioral center of the brain. What new wonder had Moody imagined now?

  “An informant bank would be pretty damn useful. You know, guys like Gooch could write their information down on specially coded slips of paper and stick them in night-deposit slots where they’d be decoded and entered in one central computer. That’s the trick, Frank. Centralization. As it stands, this informant business is just a cottage industry.”

  Nightingale stepped away from the counter. An informant bank, a big central computer—if Moody had his way, he thought, the element of chance would be removed from all aspects of crime detection and everything stuffed into computer circuitry. Then you wouldn’t need cops—you’d only need technicians, engineers. I’ll be dead and buried before that day, thank Christ.

  He moved slowly towards the exit. There was a phone booth just outside. He searched in his coat pockets for a couple of dimes. Eddie Fodor, he thought. Eddie Fodor was a walking encyclopedia of narcotics—he knew the guys who sold it, the middlemen who cut it, the users who bought it on the streets. He knew the names of the South American ships that hauled the cargoes from Peru and Colombia. He hadn’t seen Eddie in a while but he remembered Eddie’s party trick—he’d slip out his upper and lower plates of false teeth and crumple his face up like a catcher’s mitt until his nose disappeared and his jaws sunk to nothing. Eddie didn’t get asked to a lot of parties.

  Through his closed lips he found himself humming an old tune, and realized it was the first vaguely happy thing he’d done in a while. An old enthusiasm stirred: warm and getting warmer.

  Moody watched him. “What’s the name of that tune, Frank?”

  “It’s before your time, friend. An old Johnny Mathis hit called ‘Chances Are.’ The good old days when Ronnie Reagan was still going to bed at night dreaming he was a romantic actor and a guy called Chubby Checker was about to emerge with the Twist and the streets hadn’t really begun to run with blood.”

  Moody shrugged.

  Nightingale heard a voice on the other end of the line. He said, “Eddie, this is Frank Nightingale. What’s new in the muddy world of narcotics?”

  6.

  Madeleine went inside a bar on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and wondered how far she’d walked since she’d left the police station. Hours ago and many miles of Manhattan sidewalk, it seemed—but she knew very little time had passed, very little distance covered. She was thirsty and weary. She sat down at a table. The bar was dimly lit, stained-glass lanterns hanging low over tables. Ferns, plants in great brassy pots, the kind of place that suggested some Californian idyll.

  I don’t feel in the mood for an idyll.

  I feel vacant, an absence from myself.

  She looked across the room. Why did everyone appear shadowy? The afternoon drinkers might have been shimmering slowly away into some alcoholic dimension, undergoing some spooky chemical transformation. She shut her eyes and listened to a faint pulselike noise beat inside her skull.

  A guy calls me at the gallery

  then hangs up

  asks for me by name, hangs up

  why

  It rises into one prolonged scream inside the mind, if you let it; it turns into one echoing shriek. She opened her eyes, looked at the waitress standing near her table. She ordered scotch and soda and drank half of it as soon as it came.

  She gazed back across the bar.

  You couldn’t see faces in here, couldn’t make out expressions. Great shadows fell across features, creating darkness, sculpting charcoal-colored patches out of pale skin.

  What if he’s here? What if he’s one of the drinkers at the bar?

  What if he’s been following you all afternoo
n?

  How would he know?

  Because Jamey, poor goddamn Jamey, told him.…

  She tried not to think in this direction.

  She stared inside her drink: It had already begun to go to her head. She sipped it, then she thought, You must call Harry. You must call him and tell him what you’ve done with his precious cassette, tell him about the cops. He deserves to know. She didn’t move. She shut her eyes again. Even here, in this place surrounded by people, you don’t feel safe. Vulnerable—that’s what you feel now.

  “Madeleine?”

  She thought she imagined hearing the sound of her name. She thought it must have come from inside her own head. But when she opened her eyes she saw Rube Levy standing over her, smiling down. She didn’t say anything. Coincidences, she thought. Rube Levy just happens to turn up here.

  “Small world,” he said. He sat down alongside her, lightly laying one hand on her arm.

  “Very small,” she answered. She moved her arm away and reached for her drink.

  He removed his beret and stroked his small beard. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

  “When?”

  “Outside. On the street. You were walking some distance ahead of me. I called your name.”

  Why did it suddenly chill her to think this? Somebody following her along the sidewalks. Somebody she didn’t see.

  “Then I lost sight of you, so I figured you must have come in here, although I admit I did look inside a couple of stores.” His hand came down and covered her own. This time she didn’t move. He was silent for a moment, then said, “You’re trembling, Madeleine. Is something wrong?”

  She didn’t answer. His hand felt like dough against her skin. Why was she having this reaction? Rube was a friend, one of Harry’s oldest, there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing to suspect. A man stands in a doorway across the street from the loft and strikes match after match, trying to light a pipe. No, she thought, it isn’t Rube Levy. It’s got nothing to do with Rube Levy. Just the same, she moved her hand from beneath his.