Little Easter (2 page)

She was there, face down and to the wall, the back of her ratty coat pressed against the legs of the shoulder-to-shoulder newspaper machines. Almost reflexively, I reached over the vending machines trying to find warmth or a neck pulse. Given the wind chill factor and my lack of gloves, it was a fairly futile gesture. My fingers did find wet, gooey, freezing fur and hair. I pulled the collar down, brushed aside the stiff matted hair and tried to find her throat. The nail and top of my left index finger rubbed up against an earring. I slipped the blind finger beneath her adorned left ear. But instead of finding more flesh, my frozen digit plunged into a moist hole with sharp irregular edges.

Christ! I snatched my arm up with enough momentum to launch it into shallow earth orbit. The cold air caused a clot of the dead woman’s blood to roll slowly down the back of my hand like raspberry pancake syrup. Parts of me wanted desperately to be sick. Parts of me wanted to scream my balls off and run and never stop running. But all I could do was gaze at my nearely frostbitten fingertip. It’d touched something in there, in what, I guess, used to be her mouth. It’d touched something that felt like . . . well, like feathers!

I wiped the blood off on my pants and pulled at the squat vending machines. They came away easily, more easily, probably, than they had for the killer. She rolled over. I jumped back, sliding off the low platform onto the tracks. Heavy vibrations told me to get my ass up unless I wanted to become a National Transportation Safety Board statistic. I took the advice and went back to the lady in blood and mink.

She was dead. When I yanked the newspaper machines away, physics rolled her onto her back. My finger
had
touched feathers. The tail end of a yellow downy body and its two frail feet hung out over the woman’s blue lips, her too-red lipstick smeared on the lemon-colored feathers of the little bird. Even I knew what the yellow bird symbolized.

She was a rat, a snitch, stooly. She’d turned, rolled over. She’d broken the silence, whispered in the wrong ears, given someone up. She’d testified, turned state’s evidence, witnessed for the man. She was a singer, a chanteuse, a canary. That’s what the yellow bird meant. It was a mob symbol as time-honored as a tuna in a dead man’s tux. The white-hairs drinking grappa and playing bocce in the park used to talk about their crude code. The method of the rub or the condition of the body was usually an allusion to the sin the victim had committed. The mob had funny notions about sins and absolution. But that was in the old days when gangsters wore scars and hats and used words like grifter and gunsel.

A clanging bell and air horn split the silent night as an old diesel locomotive lumbered into Sound Hill station. I paid it almost as little mind as the two dead canaries stiffening by my shoes. The woman’s washed-out eyes were open to the cloudy skies. They expressed nothing, not even fear. I wondered about the life-flashing-before-your-eyes cliché and if life was painful in review. It’s funny what you think about.

“Hey, buddy,” a sour-smelling whiskey voice spoke into my right ear, “Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth.” A drunken hand clapped me on the back.

I ignored him.

He didn’t much like it. “Ya don’t havta be that—” he slurred indignantly.“Oh shit! Holy fuckin’ shit! Holy Mary. Oh God! Holy fuckin’ shit, man! God! God! What the fuck, man? Christ! Oh God! Holy . . .”

I never caught his face, but I assumed he’d seen the cold mink package on the concrete. I watched him run drunkenly down the platform; sliding and cursing as he went. I was relieved that help would soon be here and happy that someone in this hard world had managed to scream for the dead stranger at my feet.

Mop of Anarchy

I hadn’t tasted the apparently hot coffee yet nor could I smell its steam. The cheap porcelain cup rested between my still anesthetized fingers and jittery knees. If the shaking had spilled any of the burning liquid, I couldn’t feel it. I rested my dizzy head on the lip of the Scupper’s century-old bar. A scratchy Red Cross blanket kept slipping off my shoulders and someone, probably lots of someones, kept putting it back. I liked it better on the floor.

If you were a sucker for men in uniform, the Rusty Scupper was
the
hot spot on eastern Long Island. We had New York State Troopers, Suffolk County cops, Suffolk County Sheriff’s deputies, Long Island Railroad cops, Suffolk County Coroner’s men, Sound Hill Volunteer Firemen and assorted ambulance drivers from surrounding towns and the forty-eight contiguous United States. I haven’t even mentioned the detectives, forensic cops, clergymen and doctors. Oh yeah, old man Carney had snapped out of his catatonia to come have a look see. I’d been to Mets’ games less well attended. I half expected a vendor to pop in and start hawking hot dogs and scorecards.

My accounting of this white Christmas was as practiced and polished as any tale ever told. Having presented it to most of the law enforcement officials in the western hemisphere, I’d managed to smooth out any rough edges in my delivery. I even told the truth, mostly. I sort of forgot to mention the fancy cut-glass pendant with the white gold hands. And so what if I told the cops that the dead woman had come into the Scupper to catch her breath from the cold? I just wanted to check with MacClough before telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Johnny’d risked his neck for me more than once. I needed to make certain none of this involved him before I conveniently remembered any absent details. I owed him that and more.

And after most of the talking was done, the forensic team took their turn with me. They wanted a swatch of material from all my clothing. I obliged. They asked for MacClough’s moth food golf sweater. They needed it to run some nitrate tests. They were sure I hadn’t shot the bird lady, but procedure was procedure and they could always get a court order and . . . I gave them the sweater. I told them to keep it. Its replacement was upstairs under Johnny’s Christmas tree. They asked for some dried blood from under my fingernail. I let them scrape it. I was in such a giving mood that I volunteered some of my own blood. But that wasn’t on their holiday shopping list. Eventually, they withdrew.

From the battalion of volunteer ambulance crews came some freckle-faced kid, with a stethoscope for a necktie, who said he thought somebody ought to have a look at my finger.

“Why?” I wondered.

He hemmed and hawed, mumbling something about small puncture wounds and the dead woman’s blood.

“Why?” I repeated.

“AIDS!” he flushed red.

I let him look at the whole hand. He bathed and toweled it and poured what might’ve been hydrogen peroxide over it to see if any white foam would bubble up. None did. We agreed that testing for leaks in an inner tube was much easier and that I should have a real doctor check it out. He said he’d tell the cops to run an HIV test on the corpse, but that he couldn’t guarantee they’d listen. I winked my understanding and thanks. He flushed again and planted the hot coffee in my mitts.

“Mr. Klein?” a throaty woman’s voice questioned already knowing the answer.

“Yeah,” I spoke not to the woman at my back, but to the cup in my lap.

“I’m Kate Barnum from the
Sound Hill Whaler.
”

“Great,” I lifted my head off the bar, placing the cheap chinaware in its place. The scratchy blanket slid to the floor again. “Just what I needed, the press.”

“Here,” the reporter fumbled with the blanket, trying to juggle it with her mini-recorder, pad and pen.

“I prefer it there. Leave it where it lays.”

She ceased the juggling act and let go of the woolen blanket.

Unlike the dead woman, Kate Barnum had never been pretty. Guys would call her interesting, just interesting, eternally interesting. I liked interesting. Interesting usually had more depth than flat out pretty and certainly more than beautiful. Her dull blond hair was a curly mop of anarchy; tight ringlets here, droopy twirls there. Her brows were brown and thick in opposition to thin, pale lips and an incongruously delicate nose. Her skin was blotchy from stress and Scotch and cigarettes. And the weak make-up job couldn’t hide where her cheeks sagged slightly at the flanks of her square chin and under crystal gray eyes. Without those eyes she’d be less interesting, but that was one factor we didn’t have to worry about.

“Now that your sharp eyes have surmised I’m not the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, can I ask you some questions about this evenings events?”

I thought about denying the dual correctness of her assessment, but chose instead to hold her inquiries at arm’s length.

“Are you always so charmingly egocentric?” I wondered.

“Sorry,” she gave an insincere bow. “It’s just a line I learned at a Carnegie seminar. Helps break the ice at parties. I do so hate making small talk.”

“Me too; small talk, big talk, any kinda talk. I’ve talked myself sore. So let’s skip it.”

“Come on, Mr. Klein, give us both a break,” the blue-jeaned and cowboy-booted Barnum was suddenly more sincere. “It’s late. I’m tired. You’re tired . . .”

“You forgot to mention it’s Christmas Day,” I scolded.

She plopped her mini-recorder unceremoniously on the bar and rolled up the ends of her frayed sweater sleeves. “It’s Christmas Day. It’s late. I’m tired. You’re tired . . . There! Is that any better?”

“Kate Barnum. Kate Barnum,” I repeated in a loud whisper, ignoring her question. “I know that name. I’ve read it somewhere.”

“In the
Whaler,
” she tried to deflect my meanderings.

“No . . .” I drifted on, running pages of old newsprint from memory past my internal eye. As an insurance investigator, I’d had plenty of dead time for reading the papers. “
The New York Times.
That’s it!” I slapped the bar in self-satisfaction, landing my hand uncomfortably close to her Sony. “You slummin’?”

“Not slumming, Mr. Klein.”

“You’ve fallen quite a ways from the
Times.
”

“Farther than you can ever know,” Kate Barnum’s face took on a sadly serene glow like a leper at peace with her fate.

I’d had to talk to the cops. Even Bojangles himself couldn’t’ve tapped his way around that. Reporters were different. Why say anything to anyone anyway, until I hooked up with John Francis in the morning? A prudent man would’ve followed MacClough’s Law:
Never speak to the fucking press. They can’t twist what you don’t say, though they try hard enough.
But Johnny was an ex-cop and cops rated the press third on their shit list just behind politicians and criminal lawyers and ahead of serial killers and child molesters.

I spoke to her. Maybe just because she had fallen. For me, that could be enough. Interesting and fallen, my kind of woman. But I’d have to explore that weakness of mine some other night. For now I dusted off and trotted out the same old version of the night’s happenings that I’d spoon-fed the law. They’d seemed satisfied with it. I figured it would make Barnum happy, too. That was my mistake.

“Look, Mr. Klein,” the reporter smirked, shaking her head like a skeptical teacher listening to an excuse about a pit bull eating his master’s homework. “Even if I bought the coincidence of Jane Doe just popping in out of nowhere to catch her breath, I couldn’t swallow the rest of it with a five-pound bag of sugar. It doesn’t hang together. Like why did you follow a complete stranger out into the cold and snow while leaving the bar totally unattended? You see what I mean?”

“I was concerned about her,” I tried meekly. “She seemed a little unbalanced. I don’t know.”

“Okay, then, why didn’t you go after her immediately or try and stop her from leaving at all? No, Mr. Klein. I may have tumbled a long distance from the city beat at the
Times,
but I didn’t have a lobotomy on the way down.”

“The cops liked—”

“The cops!” she threw up her hands. “The cops wanted to get home for the holiday.”

I surveyed the Scupper. It
had
pretty much emptied out. This wasn’t the crime scene, after all. And they’d pretty much finished with me.

“The cops,” Barnum started up again. “Just because they’re pretty sure you didn’t kill the stiff, doesn’t mean they believed you. Cops work slowly, but don’t mistake that for stupidity. They can afford to come back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

I knew she was right, but I only needed one tomorrow. I was stalling for a ten-minute chat with MacClough.

“You asked for the story,” I put on an angry mask. “You got the story. Life’s weird sometimes. Sometimes things don’t hang together. Like promising careers, for instance.”

I might just as well have stabbed her for the pain on her face. No, I don’t think a knife would’ve hurt quite so much. But she refused to take up the mask of anger. In fact, she didn’t do anything but shrink.

“Can I buy a drink?” she wanted to know, tensely biting down on her bottom lip. The interview was over. “Bourbon?”

“Sure,” I got up off the stool and made my way behind the bar.

The last of the occupying armada “Merry Christmased” their way out the door. One or two of the detectives suggested I not do any interstate visiting any time soon. I explained that I hated holiday travel anyway.

“Wild Turkey or Maker’s Mark?” I refocused on the thirsty reporter.

“Haven’t you got anything cheaper?” she wondered, throwing some balls of crumpled currency onto the bar top.

“Don’t sweat it,” I flicked the crushed bills back to her. “Tonight it’s on the house. You can pay for the speed rack bourbon next trip.”

If I’d been expecting any proud protests, they weren’t forthcoming.

“Maker’s Mark,” was all she had to say.

“On the rocks or—”

“—straight,” Barnum stole the second option from my throat. “Straight. Neat. A double. And now,” she rattled off like some throwaway character of Hemingway’s.

She didn’t bother trying to coax me into joining her. Kate Barnum no longer cared about drinking alone. Three double bourbons’ worth of watching showed me she’d gotten over that hump some time ago. I poured her a fourth before putting the long-necked bottle dressed in fake, drippy-red wax back on the shelf over my shoulder.