In the Still of the Night (10 page)

Dee folded her arms and looked down at her for a long time. “Don’t you ever want to see your parents again?”

“Not really.” She gave her shoulders a shrug.

“You’re a conniving little bitch, Juanita. Did you think I’d fall for a line like that? Get up and take off the robe.”

“No.” The knife was in the pocket. “I don’t want to take it off, please.”

Dee came up behind her and tried to wrench the robe from her shoulders. Juanita clung to the lapels. But when she could hold on no longer, she wriggled round on the bench and swung at Dee with all her might. The red hair leaped off the woman’s head and plopped on the floor like a bird’s nest. Juanita jumped for the wig and ran with it to the front of the loft. She tried to get through the heavy curtains, but Dee was too close. She threw herself at the girl and brought her to the floor.

Julie was near despair when she got home. Reggie Bauer’s scenario could be due entirely to his own aberration. Great. But if that were so, what to do next? Once more she checked in with her service. A call had come from Nuba Bradley of the Actors Forum. They had found a sign saying PUPPET SHOW INSIDE. A homeless person was incorporating the sign into his wind shelter. A building-by-building search was under way. Julie called Detective Russo. He confirmed the search and the discovery of a pair of sneakers that could belong to the missing subject. “You might as well know the worst,” Russo summarized. “They’re bringing in a squatter from the building across the way. He watched two people load something into a station wagon about eight o’clock last night. We’ll try to improve his memory, but all there is so far—a black wagon. Even the windows looked black to him.”

Julie phoned Kevin Bourke. The line was busy. She had left his place only ten minutes before and had not even taken off her coat. She ran back to and up Eighth Avenue. A cabbie pulled alongside her and tapped his horn. She signaled that she wanted him, but kept on running. She could see the black car at the curb outside Bourke’s shop. Not a cop in sight, not even a meter maid.

Mr. Bourke stepped out of the shop with the customer, who looked at his watch and poked a cautionary finger at Bourke. He strode to the wagon and pushed the street person out of his way. When he drove off, the cabbie took over the spot.

“I tried to call you,” Bourke said. “You’d have known what I meant.”

“I got a bead on him,” the cabbie said as Julie jumped in. The wagon turned left at the stoplight. The late afternoon traffic was building. On Ninth Avenue it was at a crawl. The wagon stayed near the middle lane; the cabbie, to be sure the car he followed didn’t opt for the Lincoln Tunnel, kept to the fire lane himself.

Julie made a note of the California license number and asked the driver if he couldn’t radio a message to the police.

“No, ma’am. I’m a gypsy. I don’t have that intercom stuff. But don’t you worry none, he ain’t going to get away.”

But he almost did get away, slipping into a tunnel lane and then spurting out of it instead of turning west. He ran the light and went free while the westbound traffic closed in ahead of Julie’s cab.

“He sure drives California style,” the driver said. “What’re you after him for?”

“I’m pretty sure he helped kidnap an eleven-year-old girl.”

The cabbie shot out on the orange light and within four blocks of progressive lights was headlights-to-back-bumper with the wagon. “I’ll ram him if you want me to.”

“For God’s sake, no. I want to see where he’s going.”

At Fourteenth Street the wagon made a couple of starts in the wrong direction before taking off down Hudson. Now Julie was afraid he’d know the cab was following him. At Bleecker and Bethune he came to a full stop at the playground gate.

“Keep going,” Julie said.

But the driver in the wagon rolled down his window and signaled. The cabbie stopped alongside him.

“How in hell do I get to Houston Street from here?” He pronounced it like a Texan.

“Follow me,” the cabbie said, and then to Julie as he led the way through the Greenwich Village maze, “See my point?”

The cabbie crossed Houston, a one-way street going west at that point, and signaled the wagon. But the wagon turned east, the wrong way.

The cabbie swore and ran two lights to get back on Houston by way of Sixth Avenue where Houston was two-way by then. They kept their distance as the wagon slowed down at every intersection, the driver looking for his street. He turned in at Wooster. But Wooster, they discovered when they got there, was blocked this side of Prince Street. A movie shooting there? So where were the trailers, where were the cops? The cops loved movies. Julie overpaid the cabbie and took her chances on foot. She knew SoHo pretty well.

She soon spotted the black wagon parked tight against a high wire fence midblock. The driver was wriggling across the front seat to get out on the passenger side. He went to the back and unloaded a couple of high-wattage lamps and a reflector. Could be they were on rental from Mr. Bourke. The man started up the street with them on the opposite side to the crowd. Julie stayed on the crowd’s side, but at the fringe. At last the distant wail of approaching police. Two things happened at once: the man set down the lamps and reflector and, ignoring the crowd, took out his keys to unlock a door, and the crowd let out a collective cry, “Look! Look!”

Julie looked. A woman was dancing nude in the third-floor picture window. Not dancing, but jumping up and down, flailing her arms, and not a woman. It was Juanita.

Julie plunged across the street, waving to the girl and calling out, “Juanita!”

Some of the crowd moved with and past her. Interpreting for themselves, they caught hold of the man, pushed him from one to another, and pulled at his clothes. The multilocked loft door swung open. The redheaded woman took a step into the street, then tried to retreat inside the building again. When no one else took hold of her, Julie lunged and grappled her to the ground. The crowd loved it. The police came finally, swinging their nightsticks to disperse the crowd.

Julie and Juanita rode home in the chief inspector’s car after they had stopped at One Police Plaza, to swear out the necessary complaints. There were things Juanita would not or could not talk about—mostly her fear and what she’d imagined might happen to her, but she liked to tell the action parts, especially how, when Dee had chased and caught her, she clung to the front window drapes and brought them down on top of Dee and her. By the time Dee had found her wig, Juanita was dancing in the window. Oh, yes, she insisted, she
was
dancing.

In time, police across the country fleshed out the chronicle of Dee and Danny, a horror story. They would arrive in a city, sublet quarters, recruit local talent, film, and move on. They supplied a flourishing market in underground cassettes. The true horror was not only in their corruption of the innocent, but in the despair in which they left the corrupted. These unfortunates rarely went home again and almost never broke their silence on the street.

M
ARY RYAN WAS CERTAINLY
not homeless. She had lived in the Willoughby for forty-three years. Once it had been a residential hotel occupied mainly by show folk, people who worked in or about the theater at subsistence or slightly higher level. Recently it had been renovated into a stylish cooperative, but with a few small inside pockets, you might say, of people like Mrs. Ryan, who were allowed to remain on as renters by the grace of a qualified managerial charity: after all, what can you put in an inside pocket? Besides tax rebates.

The neighborhood—the West Forties of Manhattan—had gone, in Mrs. Ryan’s time, from respectable working-class to shabby and drug-pocked misery and back again to a confusing mix of respectability, affluence, and decay. But through all the changes, the area had remained a neighborhood, with people who had lived there all their lives loyal to one another, to the shops who served them, to church and school, and who were, by and large, tolerant of the unfortunates and the degraded who came and went among them with the inevitability of time and tide.

As Mrs. Ryan got out of the elevator that January morning, she saw the nun backing off from the doorman. Louis seemed to be trying to persuade her to go out of the building by demonstrating how it could be done. He would prance three or four feet ahead of her toward the door and beckon her to follow him. The nun would take a step away from him deeper into the lobby.

Mrs. Ryan had seen the nun in the building before, and she had seen her on the street, always hurrying, always laden with nondescript bundles and shopping bags. She was tall and lean and wore a habit such as most orders had stepped out of years before. Nor could Mrs. Ryan associate her garb with that of any order in her long religious acquaintanceship. “Is there any way I can help you, Sister?” she asked when she came abreast of the nun and the doorman.

“Better you can help me,” Louis said, pleading with empty hands. “The super says she’s not to come in, but she is in.”

“You ought to show respect, Louis. A Sister is a Sister. You don’t speak of her as
she.
”

The nun gazed at Mrs. Ryan with large china-blue eyes that were full of pleading. “Can he put me out if I’m waiting for a friend?”

“Certainly not,” Mrs. Ryan said.

Louis started to walk away in disgust and then turned back. “Miss Brennan left the building an hour ago in her nurse’s uniform. Wouldn’t you say it would be a long wait till she comes back, Mrs. Ryan?”

“Sheila Brennan is a friend of mine,” Mrs. Ryan said. “If she said she’ll be back, she’ll be back. Would you like to come up to my place for a cup of tea, Sister? We can phone down to Louis and see if she comes in.”

“How very kind of you, Mrs. Ryan. I would love a cup of tea.” Moving with more grace than would be thought possible in the heavy, square-toed shoes, the nun collected two shopping bags from among the poinsettias. Mrs. Ryan hadn’t noticed them. Whether Louis had, she couldn’t know. He was standing, his back to them, looking out onto the street and springing up and down on his toes.

In the elevator, Mrs. Ryan surveyed her guest surreptitiously. She wore a full black skirt all the way to her shoe-tops and a jacket that seemed more Chinese than Christian. It buttoned clear up under her chin. The crucifix she wore was an ivory figure on what looked to be a gold or bronze cross. It put Mrs. Ryan in mind of one she had once noticed on a black man who, according to her friend Julie Hayes, was a pimp. For just that instant she wondered if she had done the right thing in inviting the nun upstairs. What reassured her was an association from her youth in Ireland: there was a smell to the nun only faintly unpleasant, as of earth or the cellar, but remembered all Mrs. Ryan’s life from the Sisters to whom she had gone in infant school. Alas, it was the smell of poverty.

Over her head of shaggy brown hair, the nun wore a thin veil that came down to her breast. It was not much of a veil, but there was not much breast to her, either. She said her name was Sister Justina and her order was the Sisters of Our Lady of Hope, of whom there were so few left each was allowed to choose her own ministry: most, Sister Justina said, worked among the poor and the illiterate, and often lived with them, as she herself did.

What Mrs. Ryan called her apartment was a single room into which she had crammed a life, and which she had for many years shared with a dachshund recently gone to where the good dogs go. A life-size picture of Fritzie hung on the wall among a gallery of actors and directors and theater entrepreneurs. “There’s not a face up there you’d recognize today, but I knew them all,” she said, coming out of the bathroom where she’d put the kettle on to boil on the electric plate.

The nun was gazing raptly at the faded photographs. “Were you an actor?”

“I was an usher,” Mrs. Ryan said proudly.

“Theater people are the most generous I’ve ever begged from. I am a beggar, you know,” Justina said with a simplicity that touched Mrs. Ryan to the core. There was something luminous about her. She spoke softly, her voice throaty and low, but an educated voice.

“The Franciscans—I always give to the Franciscans,” Mrs. Ryan said. It was the only begging order she knew.

“I feel closer to St. Francis myself than to any other saint,” Sister Justina said. “Sometimes I pray for a mission among birds and animals, and then I’m reminded that pigeons are birds, and that rats and mice must have come off the ark as well as the loftier creatures. But I think I do my best work among the poor who ought never to have come to the city at all. They are the really lost ones.” She was sitting at the foot of the daybed, rubbing her hands together. The color had risen to her cheeks.

Mrs. Ryan thought of tuberculosis. “Don’t you have a shawl, Sister?”

“I’m warm enough inside, thank you. I have so many calls to make, would you think it ungrateful of me to run off without waiting for tea?”

Or Sheila Brennan, Mrs. Ryan thought. But she had grown accustomed to visitors finding her apartment both claustrophobic and too warm. “The electric plate is terrible slow,” she said, making an excuse for her guest’s departure.

“You’re very kind,” the nun said. Her eyes welled up. “God bless!” She gathered a shopping bag in each hand and went flapping down the hall like a bird that couldn’t get off the ground.

A few minutes later Mrs. Ryan was downstairs again, about to resume her trip to the Seminal Thrift Shop. She lingered near the elevators until Louis went outdoors to look for a cab for one of the tenants with liquid assets, as Sheila Brennan liked to say of the coop owners. She was not in the mood for a lecture from Louis, who couldn’t stand street people, even if they belonged to a religious order. She was almost to the corner of Ninth Avenue when a gust of wind came up, whirling the dust before it. She turned her back, and so it was that she saw Sister Justina emerge from the service or basement entrance of the Willoughby. She clutched her veil against the wind and hurried toward Eighth Avenue, the opposite direction from Mrs. Ryan. And without her shopping bags.

Julie had the feeling that Mrs. Ryan had been waiting for her—not exactly lying in wait, but keeping an eye out for her to appear, either coming to or going from her ground-floor apartment on Forty-fourth Street. Theirs was a friendship of several years, recently broken and more recently mended. Julie still kept the tin box of dog biscuits in case the old lady appeared one day with another Fritzie in tow.