A Ticket to the Boneyard (24 page)

Did they? I didn’t know how to respond to that, but fortunately I didn’t have to. He said, “I just thought I’d give you a call, find out what kind of progress you were making.”

Great progress, I thought. Every couple of days he kills somebody. The NYPD doesn’t have a clue what’s going on, and I stand around with my thumb up my ass.

What I said was, “Well, you know how it goes. It’s a slow process.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I guess that’s one thing’s the same the whole world over. You put the puzzle together a piece at a time.” He cleared his throat. “Why I called, I might have a piece of the puzzle. There’s a night clerk at a motel on Railway Avenue who recognized your sketch.”

“How did he happen to see it?”

“She. Little bitty woman, looks like your grandmother and has a mouth on her would shame a sailor. She took one look at him and knew him right away. Only problem was matching him to the right registration card, but she found him. He didn’t call himself Motley. No surprise there.”

“No.”

“Robert Cole is what he put down. That’s not far from the alias you said he used in New York. You had it written down on the sketch but I don’t have it handy. Ronald something.”

“Ronald Copeland.”

“That’s right. For address he put a post-office box, and he put down Iowa City, Iowa. He had a car, and he put down the plate number, and the motor vehicles people in Des Moines tell me there’s no such plate been issued. They say they couldn’t issue such a plate because it doesn’t jibe with their numbering system.”

“That’s interesting.”

“I thought so,’’ he said. “Now my thinking is either he just made up the plate number or he used the one on the car he was driving, but it wasn’t an Iowa tag in the first place.”

“Or both.”

“Well, sure. To take it the rest of the way, if he drove from New York he most likely had New York plates, and he might want to put down the correct plate number just in case some sharp-eyed clerk compared his car with the card he filled out. So if you were to check motor vehicles there at your end—”

“Good idea,” I said. He gave me the plate number and I copied it down, along with the name Robert Cole. “He used an Iowa address at a local hotel here,” I remembered. “Mason City, though. Not Iowa City. I wonder why he’s fixated on Iowa.”

“Maybe he’s from there originally.”

“I don’t think so. He sounds like a New Yorker. Maybe he locked with somebody from Iowa in Dannemora. Tom, how did the motel clerk get to see the sketch?”

“How did she get to see it? I showed it to her.”

“I thought the case wasn’t going to be reopened.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “Still hasn’t been.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What I do on my free time’s pretty much up to me.”

“You ran all over town on your own?”

He cleared his throat again. “Matter of fact,” he said, “I found a couple of the fellows to help out. I was the one who showed the sketch to that woman, but that was just the luck of the draw.”

“I see.”

“I don’t know what good all of this is, Matt, but I thought you ought to know what showed up so far. I don’t know where we go from here, if anywheres, but you’ll hear from me if anything else turns up.”

I hung up and went over to the window again. On the street a couple of uniforms were in conversation with a street vendor, a black man who’d set up shop a few weeks ago in front of the florist’s, selling scarves and belts and purses, and cheap umbrellas when it rained. They come over from Dakar on Air Afrique, stay five and six to a room in the Broadway hotels, and fly back to Senegal every few months with presents for the kids. They learn quick over here, and evidently their curriculum includes low-level bribery, because the two blues left this one to tend his open-air store.

Nice of Havlicek, I thought. Decent of him, putting in his own time on a case his chief wouldn’t reopen, even getting some other cops to work some of their off-hours.

For all the good it would do.

I looked over at the bottle and let it draw me across the room to the dresser. The federal tax stamp ran from one shoulder to the other, so arranged that you’d tear it when you twisted the cap. I teased the edges of the stamp with the ball of my thumb. I picked up the bottle and held it to the light, looking at the overhead bulb through the amber liquid the way you’re supposed to view an eclipse through a piece of smoked glass. That was what whiskey was, I’d sometimes thought. The filter through which you can safely look upon a reality that’s otherwise too vivid for the naked eye.

I put the bottle down, made a phone call. A gruff bass voice said, “Faber Printing, this is Jim.”

“This is Matt,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Not so bad. And you?”

“Oh, I can’t complain. Say, I didn’t catch you at a bad time, did I?”

“No, it’s a slow day. What I’m doing right now is running carry-out menus for a Chinese restaurant. They buy thousands of them at a time and their deliverymen leave stacks of them in every vestibule and hallway they can find.”

“So you’re printing litter.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” he said cheerfully. “Contributing what I can to the solid-waste disposal problem. And you?”

“Oh, nothing much. It’s a slow day.”

“Uh-huh. There’s a memorial service for Toni. Did you hear about that?”

“No.”

“What’s today, Thursday? It’s sometime Saturday afternoon. Her family’s holding a funeral somewhere in Brooklyn. Is there a section called Dyker Heights?”

“Near Bay Ridge.”

“Well, that’s where the family lives, and they’ll be having a wake out there, and a service with a requiem mass. Some of Toni’s friends in the program wanted a chance to remember her, so somebody arranged the use of an assembly room at Roosevelt. There’ll be an announcement at the meeting tonight.”

“I’ll probably be there.”

We talked a few more minutes, and then he said, “Was there anything else? Or can I go run the rest of these menus?”

“Go to it.”

I hung up and sat down in my chair again. I must have sat there for twenty minutes.

Then I stood up and got the bottle from the dresser. I walked into the bathroom, and when I got there I gave the cap a twist, breaking the seal and tearing the tax stamp. In one motion I removed the cap with my right hand and tilted the bottle in my left, letting its contents spill into the sink. The smell of good bourbon came rushing up from the porcelain basin, even as the booze spiraled down the drain. I stared down at it until the bottle was empty, then raised my eyes to regard myself in the mirror. I don’t know what I saw there, or what I’d expected to see.

I held the bottle inverted over the sink until every drop was out of it, capped it, dropped it in the wastebasket. I turned on both taps and let the water run for a full minute. When I turned it off I could still smell the booze. I ran more water and splashed it up against the sides of the basin until I was satisfied that I’d washed it all away. The smell of it still rose from the drain, but there was nothing I could do about that.

I called Jim again, and when he answered I said, “This is Matt. I just poured a pint of Early Times down the sink.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “There’s something new available that you ought to know about. It’s called Drano.”

“I think I may have heard of it.”

“It’s better for the drains, it’s cheaper, and it’s not a whole lot worse for you if you should happen to drink it by mistake. Early Times. What’s that, bourbon?”

“That’s right.”

“I was more a scotch drinker myself. Bourbon always tasted like varnish to me.”

“Scotch tasted medicinal.”

“Uh-huh. They both did the job though, didn’t they?” He paused for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was serious. “Interesting pastime, pouring whiskey down the sink. You did this once before.”

“A couple of times.”

“Just once that I recall. You were about three months sober. No, not quite that, you were just coming up on your ninety days. You say there was another time?”

“Around Christmas last year. Things had fallen apart with Jan, and I was feeling sorry for myself.”

“I remember. You didn’t call me that time.”

“I called you. I just didn’t happen to mention the bourbon.”

“I guess it slipped your mind.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did he for a moment. Outside, someone, hit his brakes hard and they squealed long and loud. I waited for the crash, but evidently he stopped in time.

Jim said, “What do you suppose you’re trying to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it limit-testing? You want to see how close you can come?”

“Maybe.”

“Staying sober’s hard enough when you do all the right things. If you go and sabotage yourself, the odds get longer and longer against you.”

“I know that.”

“You had a lot of chances along the way to do the right thing. You didn’t have to go into the store, you didn’t have to buy the bottle, you didn’t have to take it home with you. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

“No.”

“How do you feel now?”

“Like a damn fool.”

“Well, you earned it. Aside from that, how do you feel?”

“Better.”

“You’re not going to drink, are you?”

“Not today.”

“Good.”

“A pint a day’s my limit.”

“Well, that’s plenty for a fellow your age. Will I see you at St. Paul’s tonight?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Good,” he said. “I think that’s probably a good idea.”

But it was still only the middle of the afternoon. I put on my jacket and got my topcoat from the closet. I was halfway out the door when I remembered the empty bottle in the wastebasket. I fished it out, wrapped it in the brown bag it had come in, and returned it to my coat pocket.

I told myself I just didn’t want it in my room, but maybe I didn’t want the maid to find it during her weekly visit. It probably wouldn’t mean anything to her, she hadn’t been working at the hotel all that long, she very likely didn’t know that I used to drink or that I’d stopped. Still, something made me carry the thing in my coat pocket for a couple of blocks and then slip it almost surreptitiously into a trash basket, like a pickpocket ditching an empty wallet.

I walked around some. Thinking about things, and not thinking about things.

I had told Jim I felt better, but I wasn’t sure that was the truth. It was true that I had been very close to drinking, and it was true that I was no longer in any real danger of taking a drink. That crisis had passed, leaving in its wake a curious residue, a mixture of relief and disappointment.

Of course that wasn’t all I felt.

I was on a bench in Central Park a little ways west of the Sheep Meadow. I’d been thinking of Tom Havlicek and trying to figure out if there was any point in calling the DMV and trying to run that license plate. I couldn’t see what good it would do. If the plate led anywhere, it would probably be to a stolen vehicle. So what? He wasn’t going to go away for auto theft.

I went on sorting things out, deep in my own thoughts, and the kid with the radio was pretty close before I was aware of him. He and the radio were both oversize. It was as large a ghetto blaster as I’d ever seen, all gleaming chrome and shiny black plastic, and you’d have had to check it on an airplane. It was too big for carry-on.

He’d have been a small man on a basketball court, but nowhere else. He was six-six easy, and built proportionately, with wide shoulders and thighs that bulged the legs of his jeans. His jeans were black denim, ragged at the cuffs, and he had high-top basketball sneakers on his feet, their laces untied. The hood of a gray sweatshirt hung over the collar of his warm-up jacket.

On the other side of the asphalt path from me was a bench occupied solely by a heavyset middle-aged woman. Her ankles were badly swollen, and there was an air of great weariness about her. She was reading a hardcover book, a best-seller about extraterrestrial aliens in our midst. She looked up from it when he approached, his radio blaring.

The music was heavy-metal rock. I think that’s what it’s called. It was senselessly loud, of course, and it didn’t sound like music to me, it sounded like noise. Every generation says that of the next generation’s music—and, it seems to me, always with increasing justification. As loud as it was you still couldn’t make out the words, but the underlying rage was evident in every note.

He sat down at one end of the bench. The woman looked at him, a pained expression on her round face. Then she stirred herself and heaved her bulk over to the other end of the bench. He didn’t seem aware of her presence, or indeed of anything but himself and his music, but as soon as she’d moved he swung the radio up onto the spot she’d vacated. It sat there, blaring across at me. Its owner stuck his long legs out into the path, crossing one over the other at the ankle. The untied shoes, I noted, were Converse All-Stars.

My eyes went to the woman. She did not look happy. You could see her weighing alternatives in her mind. At length she turned and said something to the kid, but if he heard her he gave no indication. I don’t see how he could have heard over the wall of noise rising between them.

Something was rising within me, too, as angry as the music he liked. I breathed into the feeling and felt it building in my body, warming me.

I told myself to get the hell out of there and take a hike, or find another bench. There was an ordinance against loud radio playing, but nobody was paying me to enforce it. Nor did some code of chivalry demand that I come to this woman’s aid. She could haul ass and go elsewhere if the noise bothered her. And so could I.

Instead I leaned forward and called out. “Hey,” I said.

No response, but I was fairly certain he’d heard me. He just didn’t want to let on.

I stood up and moved a couple of yards toward him, covering maybe half the width of the path. Louder I said, “Hey, you!
Hey
!”

His head swung around slowly and his eyes moved to fix on me. He had a big head, a square face with a thin-lipped mouth and an upturned porcine nose. He lacked definition around the jawline, and he’d be jowly in a few years. A flat-top haircut accented the squareness of the face. I wondered how old he was, and how much weight he was carrying.