Little Easter (9 page)

There was just one more little favor I had to ask. I gave him as much as I could about Kate Barnum. I needed to know more. I needed to know why she was dumped from the
Times.
I wanted the inside skinny on her husband’s suicide. I needed to know about any dirt, about anything that could hurt or stop her. Larry didn’t respond immediately, but I could swear I heard his fangs clicking against the phone. Larry didn’t have to ask why. He understood about blackmail and painting people into corners. Some people painted corners of their own.

Kate Barnum’s number came quickly enough to my finger. I’d just dictated it to Larry. I got in half a ring before her smoky voice interrupted.

“Your hand surgically attached to the phone?”

“God,” she coughed, “I wish I could be so witty. Do you think you could teach me?” Barnum moved on without waiting for my answer. “I got prelims on the deceased bird collector. Want it now or in person?” This time she waited.

“Give me the basics now and we can get particular later,” I spoke, expecting the dead woman to have; ‘. . . some kinda funny name. Something biblical. An-drella, maybe.’ That’s what O’Toole had prepared me for. It’s not what I got.

“Carlene Carstead. 1422 General Lee Boulevard, Biloxi, Mississippi. Forty-four years of age. Unmarried. No children. Assistant manager Dixieland Pig and Whistle, 2001 Delta Avenue, Biloxi . . .”

She droned on like that for some time. I’m not sure when I stopped paying attention. My mind was racing fast enough to lap itself. I tried recalling the dead woman’s made-up orange face and her self-possessed tone of voice when asking for Johnny Blue. Somehow my recollections of her didn’t add up to the deep south. South Brooklyn maybe, but not the deep south.

“Do you have a place of birth down there?” I shouted into the mouthpiece.

“Wait . . . Yeah, right here; Baptist and Saviour Hospital, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 4/1/45. Why?” Barnum had picked up on my frantic curiosity for a fact which shouldn’t have mattered much.

“Nothin’,” I did my best stage yawn.

“Nothing my ass, Klein,” the reporter didn’t care much for my acting.

“Speaking of your ass . . .” I injected, trying another tack.

“Later. Tonight around eight?” she agreed too readily, figuring she’d have more success with me in person.

“Eight it is. Make me up a copy of your little fact sheet. Okay?”

“It’ll be here. Klein!” she screamed, sensing me about to hang up.

“Yeah?” I pulled the phone back to my ear.

“What do you suppose a glorified grocery clerk from Biloxi was doing in Sound Hill, Long Island, New York on Christmas Eve? And what do you suppose she did to make someone mad enough at her to blow an access road through her skull and then pave it with golden feathers? Klein,” she paused, waiting for an answer that wasn’t forthcoming. “You’re not the only mathematician in town. Pretty soon the whole neighborhood’s gonna be working on this equation. I’ve already started putting some twos and twos together myself.”

“And what’d’ya get?” I played along.

“A headache. But my best hunches come on the heels of headaches. Work fast, Klein,” Barnum’s voice dropped into a more serious octave. “I don’t think we’re alone in this anymore.” I listened to her phone rattle back into its cradle.

I waited for a dial tone and punched up long distance info. Both numbers were listed. They would be. I knew that. Now the ugly part would follow; the scamming, the half-truths, the things that I’d fooled myself I’d left behind. I felt an old need. I brewed some coffee.

I liked coffee less these days. Maybe it was just less important. When I did insurance work, coffee kept me company. When I was an ambulance chaser’s best friend, trailing broken necks to make certain they were wearing their braces, most of my blood was bagel-shop Java. When I had to pretend about who I was and what I wanted and why, coffee straightened my face, stiffened my spine, told some of the better lies. And when the deception was done, I could piss my spent muscle into the empty cup it’d come in. Now this stuff with Johnny had brought it all back; the lies, the scamming and the coffee.

If they could swat a ball around like they bounced my call back and forth, the folks at Baptist and Saviour Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana would have one hell of a volleyball squad. One thing you have to give those Cajuns though, they were polite about fucking up. At least I got to the office I wanted without speaking to any patients.

“Patient Records, Marie Antoinette Gilbeau speakin’. How can we help y’all today?” a voice as bright as the noonday sun wanted to know.

“Hey, yo, Marie Antoinette,” I laid on the Brook-lynspeak thicker than the walls of a fallout shelter. “Let ‘em eat cake, right baby?”

“I suppose,” her tone darkened at the repetition of a bad joke she’d probably heard every day of her life since she was three.

“Sorry ‘bout dat,” I confessed. “Forgive an old cop for his stupidity?” The lie came to my lips easy enough.

“Cop!” Miss Guilbeau seemed impressed. “Y’ain’t no local lawman. Dat tone a your’s ‘bout as Yankee as dey come.”

“Sharp, baby. Very sharp. You gotta good ear,” I complimented, noting to myself that her dialect and mine weren’t that different. “Detective Bob Bosco, New York City Police, Missing Persons.” I left it there. If the hunch I was playing had any merit, she’d supply the momentum.

“I gotta go have my palm read or sometin’. You de third person from New York I spoke wid dis week.” My hunch had merit. “Seems some woman born down dis way been murdered up north. Cryin’ shame, de value a life dese days.”

“Sickening.” No need to lie about that.

“Ain’t it? You wouldn’t be callin’ bout de same woman, would ya?”

“Carlene Carstead, born 4/1—”

“Dat’s her, sure ‘nough,” Marie cut me off. “April Fools Baby.” I hadn’t realized, but Miss Antoinette’s observation was quite right. “I imagine it’s cruel a me to say, but someone’s been playin’ an awful joke wid dat poor baby’s memory.”

“I’m sorry, Marie, but you just lost me,” I admitted. “What baby? We’re talkin’ about a woman in her forties.”

“Maybe
you
are, but dat dead woman ya got up dere ain’t de same one got born in dis here hospital. “No sir,” my phone pal proclaimed indignantly.

“How’s dat?” I pushed her for an explanation I’d already guessed at.

“Now I ain’t a curious Cajun by nature,” Marie Antoinette offered her disclaimer, “but dem two phone calls got to workin’ on my mind. I did some back checkin’ and ya know what I found?”

“What’d’ya find?” I fed her the line she was hungry for.

“De Carlene Carstead dat was brought ta God’s green earth in dis hospital was pronounced D.O.A. here five years later,” she paused to give her words a chance for maximum impact. “I pulled a copy a de death certificate myself. Death by drowning. I read de whole report. Playin’ wid her olda sista down ta Ponsichatchi Creek. Sista was revived. Ya know, Detective Bosco, y’all don’t seem very surprised by any dis,” the not-so-curious Cajun noted with a ring of suspicion in her voice.

“I said you was a sharp one. It’s all de years on de job,” I confided. “God it wears ya down. Sometimes I gotta pinch myself ta make sure I still got feelins.”

“I know how it is,” she commiserated. “Doctors ‘round here say de same tins ‘bout what dey doin’.” Then, switching gears, the former queen of France asked: “Ya gonna find who’s playin’ dis awful joke wid dat sweet baby’s memory?”

“I’m gonna try, Marie Antoinette. I am gonna try.”

“Ya find out. I gotta sense ‘bout it dat ya will.”

“One more item,” I threw in before our farewells. “Can ya name the other people who called about Carlene?”

“Sure can. First one was a woman reporter name a Kate Barnum. Second was a Detective Mickelson from out your way.”

“Does anyone else besides us know the truth about Carlene?” I wondered.

“No Detective Bosco, uh uh, nobody.”

“If ya want me ta find out who de joker is, let’s keep it dat way. It’s our secret for now,” I spoke it like an oath.

“Our secret,” she repeated.

With that vow and a few bonding good-byes, our conversation ended. I poured some fresh coffee down into my suddenly empty soul. It wasn’t the lying and scamming that hurt me so much, but rather the dark pride I took in it. I thought about the price I paid for denial. I thought about my contempt for Lawrence Solomon Feld and about how you hate things in other people you can’t bear about yourself. I thought about confirming my hunches and dialing the Dixieland Pig and Whistle in Biloxi. Oddly, I thought about Kate Barnum’s smoky breath and her appetite for hurt. My chirping phone prevented further progress into the abyss. Sometimes, I liked the phone.

It was MacClough wanting me to stop by the Scupper. He wanted help with this or that. Some table had to come up from downstairs. I should come in via the alleyway. It wasn’t an unusual request. Speech came slowly to me. I was like a stroke victim struggling with aphasia, groping for words and a tone which had once come to my lips without thought. It was one thing to scam a stranger over two thousand miles of phone line. It was quite another to fool your best friend who just happened to be an ex-detective. Johnny didn’t seem to notice my aphasia and promised me a week of drinks for my trouble. I put down the phone, smiling with dark pride.

Penelope and Ulysses

Smack! A fist, a 2 X 4 or a low flying aircraft made square contact with my unsuspecting face. I went down like a sack of farm stand potatoes, blood filling my mouth even before my cut lips could kiss the floor of Johnny’s back room. Exploding tears burned my blind eyes. Streams of unrestrained mucous gushed out of my flattened nose onto the floor, over my mustache and into the wet jungle of my beard.

All at once the world was deafeningly quiet and quietly deafening. The silence was broken soon enough. Stabbing rings of pain bounced like a pendulum between my eardrums as my breakfast coffee and chunks of semidigested twelve grain toast rocketed up out of my stomach, through my bloody mouth and onto the old wood floor. The sour smell of my own guts brought up whatever was left.

I felt, more than heard, heels moving along the floor beside me. Suddenly the pain in my head moved downstairs. My ribs flexed with the kick, but whatever air had managed to stick in my lungs through the facial assault and vomiting, escaped. I tensed the parts of me that still worked, readying for a follow-up kick. None came, that I remember. Only blackness. Only blackness came.

I might have been there a week or three centuries. I don’t know. Maybe it just felt like forever. Cold water washed down over me, bits of jagged ice pinging off my sore neck. The chilly water resurrected more than simply me. The smell of my stale throw-up rose up like a rotting corpse from the New Testament to tug at my intestines. The dry retching seemed almost worse than the original attack. Almost.

Johnny MacClough, dressed in fog and holding a bucket, stood now just before me. A second freezing shower rained down, the ice pecking at my goose bumpy skin like the sharp beaks of angry birds. The empty bucket fell. I held an arm up to him that he should help me stand. Oh, he helped me stand all right. He twisted my coat and shirt collars up in his hard fingers and pulled my face to his. I could see my distorted reflection in a stainless steel counter over MacClough’s shoulder. I cringed. Even through the fog and cobwebs and distortion, I could see I was a mess. I thought it an odd time to discover vanity. The thought made me smile. The smile caused the fresh scabs on my lips to split.

“What’s so funny, Klein?” Johnny seemed unnerved by my inappropriateness.

“My face, Johnny. My face,” I gasped as my tender ribs scolded me for speaking. MacClough turned his still foggy visage away from my sour breath.

“Did you really think you could go to my ex-partners behind my back and not have me find out about it? Did you?” He tightened his grip.

“We live in hope, MacClough,” I smiled some more. “I guess one of ’em called you about our chat.”

“More than one,” he shook his head sadly. “You’re my friend, Klein. Why you snoopin’ around behind my back about things that don’t concern you?”

“If it concerns you, MacClough, it concerns me.”

“Not this, Klein. Not this time.” He loosened his hold, but not completely.

“Back in Brooklyn, friendship and loyalty had nothin’ to do with pickin’ and choosin’ your spots. I also don’t recall havin’ my friends kick the shit outta me.” That was all the heroic speech I could muster.

“Stay out of this, Klein,” MacClough looked me in the eyes and and released his grip. “You can’t help me. Stay out.”

I stepped back and walked around MacClough into the empty barroom. It was still an hour till the opening bell. My hands held what was left of my ribs together. They made a lousy patch. Most of the fog in my head had lifted, leaving only a migraine as a residue of its visit. I waited for MacClough to follow. He did not. He would not.

“I know about her, Johnny, about who Carlene Carstead wasn’t,” I shouted through the door, not certain my sparring partner was still back there to hear me. “I know who she was to you,” I paused waiting for him to stir. I might’ve waited forever. I took up again: “Ya know, MacClough,” I got conversational; loud, but conversational, “I’m no stud at crossword puzzles, but even I couldn’t trip over my own dick on this one. Down or across, it spells ‘Witness Protection Program,’” I finally gave voice to the hunch I’d been playing all morning.

Still, there was no answer. Outside, beyond the windows, brass-handled doors and neon beer signs, a winter fishing boat blew a mournful horn for some nautical reason beyond my citified comprehension or maybe just to protest the long hush of winter. But its protest had come too late. Christmas Eve gunfire had already broken that long silence.

“There’s some stuff, alotta stuff, I haven’t worked out yet,” I continued ray one-way discussion with the walls. “I don’t know who she rolled over on or when. Christ, MacClough, I don’t even know her real name. But something made her come outta hiding, something made her come looking for Johnny Blue. What was it?” I paused to give space for an answer that would not fill it.