Come Out Tonight (13 page)

“What?
 
What am I doing?
 
I only want...”

“Is it because of that old girlfriend of yours - this Sherry?”

The truth is, I don’t know what it was.
 
Here was this hot babe with her tongue in my ear, pleading with me to bang her doggy style, and what the hell was going on, anyway?
 
“I just can’t,” I said.

“You what?”
 
She shrieked, throwing my shoes at me.

“I can’t.”

“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for this?” she shrieked.

“You’ve been waiting?” I said.

For a second, Heather stared at me, her head cocked to one side. “Last time was the most amazing...,” she said.
 
Then she came to.
 
“Fuck off, Asshole!” she yelled.
  
I managed to gather up my clothes in my arms, but before I could put them on, she had opened the door, pushed me out naked, and closed the door in my face.

*
    
*
    
*

I had this vague memory of walking in
Central Park
in the dark, but somehow I managed to stumble home.
 
The fact is, I woke up in my bed in my pajamas, alone, but with one hell of a hangover.
 
And, believe it or not, I was still obsessing over the guy who knocked off the babe on the
West Side
.
 
I figured after work, I’d go over to the 24
^th
Precinct on 100
^th
between
Amsterdam
and
Columbus
, and see if I could find out any new info on whether they had caught anyone.
 
Meanwhile, I made myself a cup of coffee.
 
I found half a bagel way in the back of the refrigerator, but I had to throw out the cream cheese because it had turned green.
 
I drank the coffee and forced myself to eat the bagel, and got as ready for work as a guy could, who had a twenty pound bowling ball on his head.

By the time I got to work, Carl was already there.
 
I couldn’t wait to ask him if he knew about the strangling in the 90's.
 

“Nah,” he said.
 
“I try not to read that stuff.”

“It should have been in the
Daily News
day before yesterday.”

“Only read
the Times
.”

“Was it in there?” I asked.

“I only read the first section,” Carl answered.
 
“Might have been in
Metro
.”

“The window over the fire escape was open,” I said.

“Okay, so what?”

“He must have gotten in that way.”

Carl shrugged, not looking up.
 
“Yeah, could be.”

“That’s the way he must have got into my apartment, too.
  
The window was open over the fire escape.”

“Someone broke into your apartment?” he asked, looking at me.

“Yeah!
 
When he hit Sherry over the head.”

“Oh, that time,” Carl said.
 
“You think it’s the same guy?”

“Could be,” I said, all excited.
 
“I’m going over to the precinct tonight to see what they got.”

“You think they’re going to tell you anything? No way Jose.”

“I’m going anyway.”

Carl looked up from what he was doing and said, “Did I ever tell you about the time my apartment was broken into, when I lived on
Riverside Drive
?
 
They just smashed the window, came in one night I was working late.
 
They must have been pretty pissed off when they couldn’t find anything worth stealing.
 
So, they wrote a note and stuck it with a magnet to the refrigerator, saying, “Buy yourself something.”
 
Carl laughed.

“Very funny,” I said.

“What’s with you today?”

“I got this humongous hangover.”

“You go out clubbing after all?” Carl asked, looking at me sideways.

“Yeah.”

“You get laid at least?”

I shrugged.

“You did!”

“Carl, don’t talk, okay?
 
My head is pounding.”

“Go get some ibuprofen from the shelf. The generic.
 
I won’t charge you.”

“Thanks, but I could just use some quiet.”

“Fine with me.
 
But you might just want to look in the pile of
Daily News
on the rack by the door.
 
There might be some old ones that didn’t sell.”

“Thanks,” I said, and ran over to the rack.
  
I turned the copies over, one after another, till I got to the bottom.
 
There it was: July 7.
 
I flipped through the pages till I found it buried on page 10.
 
“Woman strangled in
West Side
apartment.”
 
I read it out loud:
 
“Jessica Finklemeyer, 24, was found dead, apparently strangled, at 10:00 a.m. Tuesday morning in her second floor apartment at 119 W. 96
^th
.
  
The police found her lying on the bedroom floor under an open window leading to the fire escape.
 
“‘Must have come through the window,’ Officer Vincent McNally said.”

The coroner deduced she had been lying there for anywhere between ten and fourteen hours, placing the crime around 12:00 midnight the night before.
 
No further information was available.
 
“Miss Finklemeyer,” I continued, “worked as sales associate in Children’s Shoes at Macy’s on
34
^th
Street
.”

“
New York
,
New York
, it’s a hell of a town,” Carl sang.

For the rest of the morning, we worked in silence, interrupted only by the phone, half a dozen noisy kids, and a long line of customers.
 
Every time the counter bell rang, I looked up, half expecting to see Heather in her tight Capris and belly button ring, banging on the bell, but she never showed her face.
 
I wondered whether she’d even start taking her prescriptions to the CVS across the street.
 
No great loss, I decided.

This headache was killing me.
 
I finally went over to the shelf and picked out the smallest bottle of ibuprofen we had.
 
The bottle said “take one tablet every 4 to 6 hours while symptoms persist.
 
If pain or fever do not respond to 1 tablet, 2 tablets may be used, but do not exceed 6 tablets in 24 hours.”
 
I took two, then when I continued to feel like shit an hour later, I took another one.
 
I didn’t tell Carl.
 
I knew he’d take away the bottle and give me a lecture on dosage.

By the end of the day, though, only the slightest echo of the headache remained.
 
I waved to Nadia, and took off for the 24
^th
Precinct.
 
After the air conditioned cool of the pharmacy, the July heat hit me like a bag of cement.
 
I just stood there for a minute in the middle of the sidewalk, regaining my equilibrium, while traffic coursed around me.
 
You might take that to mean that nobody cares in
New York City
.
 
I was just another traffic obstacle to go around, like a lamp post or a guy selling books on the sidewalk.
 
But, hey, that’s all part of
New York City
in summer: clueless tourists snapping photos; guys in shorts with their stomachs sticking out; fire hydrants cascading water. Executives with their jackets off; huge, stifling clouds of bus exhaust, girls in halter tops chattering non-stop into cell phones. Hot blasts of air spewing out of subway grates; horses, bikes and roller blades in Central Park, all of this rolled up in the smell of sweaty excitement.
 
Ya gotta love it.

I bought a hot dog and a Snapple off a street cart and headed down Broadway, past the drugstores blowing bubbles, past the bodegas selling exotic vegetables, past the funky little restaurants with tiny plaid curbside tables, the air rippling with fast trills of Spanish.
 
I remembered a time like this last summer with Sherry, as we walked downtown on a summer night.
 
We were passing a little place with all these little deep-fried corn-crusted pastry things in the window.

“Let’s try one,” I said.

“They’re empanadas,” Sherry said.

“Okay by me,” I said, already walking in.

I could hear Sherry’s incredulous laugh in back of me.
 
“But you hate empanadas.”

I turned around.
 
“How do you know?”

“We walked by here three weeks ago, and you bought one.
 
You threw it in the garbage.”

“You’re making that up.”

“I am not,” she insisted.
 
“In fact, you didn’t just throw it in the garbage, you
spit
it out in the garbage, and yelled something I’m not going to repeat.”

“I’d never do that.”

“Have it your own way.”

“I’m going in to buy a...whattchamacallit?”

“Empanada,” Sherry said again.
 
“But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I walked into this little shop with hams or salamis or something hanging from the ceiling.
 
I bought a steaming little package of chicken and pastry, and carried it out, my teeth sinking into its soft center.
 
I chewed, my eyes closed.
 
“It’s good!
 
Must have been someone else you were thinking of.”

“‘Fuckin’ awful,’ you said, spitting it out.”

“Must have been your friend Ryan.”

“Let’s not start that again,” Sherry said.

*
    
*
    
*

By the time I reached the brick front entrance of the 24
^th
Precinct, I was sweating through my shirt.
 
I stepped inside.
 
The lobby was quieter and cooler than I thought it would be.
   
I walked up to the front desk and, asked for Detective Donna Sirken, the only name I knew.

“What’s this in connection to?” the clerk asked.

“That’s it.
 
A connection.
 
A connection between the Sherry Pollack case and the Jessica Finklemeyer case.”

“Name?”

“I just gave you two names.”

“Your name, sir.”

“Oh, Henry Jackman.”

“Wait a minute.”
 
She pointed to a wooden bench against the wall, while she called upstairs.
 
“Lucky you, Detective Sirken’s in,” the woman called over to me.
 
“She’s coming down.”

I waited on the wooden bench alongside some well-dressed black dude who wouldn’t look at me.
 
Ten minutes later, I heard my name:
 
Detective Sirken was walking toward me.
   
“Let’s go back to my office,” she said.

I followed her on back to her cubicle, and sat down on a metal chair near the door.
 
She asked me to get up again so she could move the chair a foot while she closed the door.
 
Then I sat down again, and she sidled around the old metal desk.

“You say there’s a connection between the two cases?” she said.
 
“What evidence do you have?”

I started backtracking.
 
“I mean there must be.
 
The window off the fire escape was open in both cases.”

She said nothing, just looking at me.

“I mean,” I said, “the perpetrator must have come in that way.
 
It was night.
Upper West Side
.
 
Both cases they were young women.”
 
I sat back in my chair, waiting.

“That’s it?” the detective said.
 
“Where’s your evidence?”

I decided this wasn’t going well.
 
I’d have to go on the offensive.
 
“What have you done to solve the case with my girlfriend?” I demanded.
 

“How’s she doing?” Sirken asked.

“Lousy.
 
She’s in a persistent vegetative state.
 
She’s not improving.
 
The hospital kicked her out.
 
She’s in a crummy nursing home in the
Bronx
.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Sure you are.
 
Well, what leads do
you
have?”

“I can’t give you any information on the Finklemeyer case.”