Night-Bloom (54 page)

Leaving the roof with the first gray streaks of dawn, Mooney cast his eyes round once more for a final look at the scene. After nearly six years, the case of the Phantom Bombardier appeared to be at an end. Still, Mooney was filled with a troubled sense of incompletion, of questions unanswered.

Across the way a sheet on one of the laundry lines rose gently and billowed outward. The sparks from the incinerator shaft had ceased to fly upward and its sooty brick walls had cooled now in the fresh morning breeze.

The content of our dreams is mostly a by-product of our unremarkable daily struggles transformed by night and electrochemicals into the terrifying shape of nightmares. In fretful sleep Mooney dreamed often of Watford, seeing the sad, puzzled boyish smile behind which lurked the treacherous schemer.

Now he was dead, having expired peacefully in a Bowery flophouse euphemistically called the Ritz. With no family or any next of kin willing to claim the body, it was sent directly to the morgue. Aside from the usual mortuary staff and the drab city functionaries hovering like crows above the open grave in potter’s field, Mooney was the only person to attend the last rites who’d actually known him.

He’d been identified from photographs sent pro forma from the morgue to all city police precincts, along with the requisite set of prints for purposes of identification. Mooney recognized him the moment he saw him even though the eyes in the photo were closed and the face covered with a heavy beard. The name given on the circular was Walter Denton. Having lived virtually all his life as someone else, running true to form right up to the end, Watford chose to die that way. He clearly found the promise and hope of a different identity—any identity—preferable to his own. Camouflage and masquerade were perhaps his truest colors.

In waking life, however, Mooney thought a great deal about Quintius, whose violent ending had posed more questions for him than it had resolved. A puzzle within a puzzle.

Responding to his query regarding the curious pattern of slashes he’d observed on Quintius’s hands, the medical examiner not only verified the slashes during autopsy, but at the same time also discovered at least sixteen additional such wounds in the area of the face and throat.

At the time of the incident Mooney had not seen the face. Much of it, of course, had been shattered from the impact of the fall and covered with blood. “Light superficial scratches,” was how the ME protocol described the wounds. “A millimeter in width, and probably two millimeters in depth. Barely deep enough to draw blood. Inflicted by a sharp, thin-bladed instrument. Possibly a razor. Probably self-inflicted. Cause of death, probable suicide,” the medical examiner concluded.

All well and good for the medical examiner, Mooney brooded, but no one had ever found the “thin-bladed instrument,” although a concerted effort had been made to recover it from the area. Nor had such an “instrument” been found on Quintius’s person. If this were suicide, where, then, had it gone?

Still uneasy with the ME’s report, Mooney sought out the advice of his old friend, Dr. Baum, the police psychiatrist, who concurred with the medical examiner’s determination of suicide. He characterized the strange pattern of slash marks on Quintius’s hands and face as part of an elaborate “ceremonial selfcastration.” Mooney smiled wisely and a bit wearily to himself and left.

At that point the detective was content to let it ride, though he had many doubts about what had transpired in those final moments just before Peter Quintius fell, jumped or was pushed from the roof. Had it not been for the wounds on his face and hands, Mooney might have gladly put his mind at ease with a finding of suicide or possibly accidental death. To the detective, at least, the self-inflicted cuts made no sense whatever. They were precisely the type of wounds consistent with those generally seen on a man trying to defend himself from an assailant’s knife. Mooney knew quite well the small subculture of outcasts, mostly harmless, but occasionally dangerous, who were known to inhabit rooftops above the city. Quintius might very well have had the misfortune of a chance encounter with one of the latter. If such were the case, what an irony indeed. It certainly did not look like suicide to Mooney.

For a fleeting moment the notion passed through Mooney’s mind that it might have been Watford with whom Quintius had his fatal encounter on the roof. In much the same way he had tracked Quintius to Cold Spring Harbor, why could not Watford in his final days have shadowed the art dealer until their paths converged on the rooftop?

But, of course, that was impossible. Mooney had in his desk drawer a medical examiner’s report that set Watford’s death several days before that of Quintius. What had truly transpired that night would probably remain a mystery forever. Several times Mooney’s detective’s curiosity half-tempted him to go back to the area and question the neighbors. At last he did, only to discover that over recent weeks residents of the building on several occasions had reported to the police the appearance of a strangely attired man on the rooftops. Some described him as large and in a leotard or possibly a jogging suit. A woman claimed to have been threatened by him while hanging her laundry. All reports had apparently gone unheeded.

The most satisfying news of all, however, was a simple two-line disclosure buried deep within the ME’s official protocol revealing the fact that a surgical scar nearly six inches long and approximately two years old had been found in the upper area of the right femur just below the buttock.

At last Mooney was able to accept the closing of the books, overjoyed at all the embarrassment it brought to Dowd and Mulvaney. In the days immediately following Quintius’s death, numerous accounts appeared in the newspapers and on TV. The demise of so notable a figure under such bizarre circumstances could not fail to provoke a great deal of attention. What was a man of Peter Quintius’s lofty station doing on a rooftop in such an improbable area and at that hour? No one seemed to know. Furthermore, the matter of the cinder block that had either made the trip down with him, or followed shortly thereafter, immediately resurrected the specter of the Phantom Bombardier.

During that fateful week both Dowd and Mulvaney were subjected to grueling interviews by the press. Potentially embarrassing questions were asked. Time and time again the police insisted that no link existed between the death of Peter Quintius and the activities of the Bombardier. Only once did a reporter, a brash and impolite young man from
The Village Voice
suggest that Quintius and the Bombardier might be one and the same.

The commissioner discounted at once such a fanciful notion, maintaining as he had all along, that the Bombardier who had terrorized the city for five years and had been responsible for the death of six people and the permanent crippling of another, was now tucked safely away behind brick and mortar in a maximum security ward of the state facility at Wingdale, where he would undoubtedly spend the rest of his life. Quintius was a separate and wholly unrelated matter. If, indeed, he was the victim of foul play, the cinder block found beside him was probably a crude copycat attempt or, possibly even someone’s warped idea of a joke. If it was, it was a particularly ghoulish one.

The dossier of circumstantial evidence Mooney had compiled over the years in the Bombardier case, along with the incontrovertible fact of the shattered cinder block found beside Quintius the night he died, were discreetly impounded in the Police archives and never made available to the press. The district attorney drove a final nail into that coffin by impounding the records for a period of seventy-five years. Since no one was going to leap to Gary Holmes’s defense, the matter, to all intents and purposes, was closed.

In any event, Mooney no longer cared. To his mind, the job was done. Fritzi and the Balloon and Gumshoe were more than enough to fill his days. They filled, in fact, far more. He had carried about emptiness for so long, had grown so accustomed to the daily sensation of inner vacancy, he couldn’t fathom that life might ever be anything other than that until, that is, Mrs. Baumholz had come along and shown him otherwise.

Cornet fanfares. Horses surging at the post. A bell rings. The gates bang open with a loud clash. The stands rise to a tumultuous roar.

Mooney and Fritzi stood down on the field amidst a number of other horse owners. Gumshoe had been running route races lately, somewhat unevenly at the beginning, but with a nice and steadily improving consistency. His PP’s showed that he had won two out of his three previous starts at three-quarters of a mile. At the six-furlong mark of his last race he was ahead three lengths. At today’s six furlongs he appeared to be right up to the mark.

The Mooneys had carefully studied the field. The only horse that might trouble Gumshoe was Anthropos, who’d earned an 87 in his next-to-last start at this length.

Gumshoe looked like a prime bet that afternoon. Trained by a good if not stupendous trainer, he was in outstanding condition and would pay no less than $6.40 to win, a price that wouldn’t break the bank at Monte, but was nothing to sneeze at.

Breaking smartly from his post position of number 5, with several speed horses inside of him, he was not quite fast enough to get the lead on the rail. But he was running well in third position and had it in him to run beautifully in the stretch.

Fritzi resplendent beside him, Gumshoe down front going flat-out in full panoply—the bright little Spanish jockey Sanchez, florid in green Irish silks, holding third position and closing on second, life seemed a dream to the detective. The race was a dream. A distant roar and clash—one he’d run often before and invariably lost.

As the field thundered past, the roar behind him was deafening. At the quarter pole Gumshoe had fallen back to fourth position, running 12
⁷
. Now at the half he was at 26, having regained third position. Mooney and Fritzi were on their feet, shouting at the top of their lungs.

The blood punched along Mooney’s veins just as fiercely as it did in those of the wonderful yearling streaking up the course. Pounding past them, Gumshoe closed the gap between second and third position, coming up fast on Anthropos. A big dapple-gray filly called Spanish Main was running third, a ghostly while blur eating up the track with terrifying piston strides.

Suddenly, the yearling was astride Anthropos, running for a full furlong nose to nose, the proud, graceful sweep of their necks conforming with the track’s curve. A voice on the crackling loudspeaker screamed above the din, and it seemed to Mooney that the stands behind him were about to buckle and crash down upon their heads. He didn’t dare turn or look back for fear he might break the eerie state of communion he’d established between himself and the noble creature racing its heart out for him. An unearthly sensation—the horse and himself, suddenly one. He could feel something palpable between them, an invisible tether born of some mutual sense of shared loneliness within all those who have contended.

Tail streaking, legs rising pistonlike, puffs of powder flung backward like cannon shot off his hind hooves, the horse came out of the second turn neck and neck with Anthropos and turned down to face the grinding 1300 feet of the final stretch, the jockey Sanchez flailing madly with his crop.

The once fat man who could only move with great effort felt suddenly light on his feet and fleet as the beast striding free out there on the track, all by himself. Gumshoe blazed under the wire, tail streaking. Sanchez in green silk humped forward, rose in the stirrups, bringing the horse down gradually to a pounding gallop, lovingly stroking the great heaving withers.

Fritzi jumping up and down, waving winning tickets. Crowds roaring. Pennants flying. Voices shouting over the crackling PA. Numbers pulsing big and white on the tote board. The rest of the field thundering in after the winner. Judges streaming down onto the field behind them. War colors brilliant in the bright, late afternoon of lilac spring. The pageantry. The spectacle. The race of races. The proud, vain, empty game. A race that begins and ends at the same point and runs on forever. Mooney smiled as a new field moved into the gate.