Nightbird (8 page)

“Nothing is airtight.”

Out in the dark waters of the East River the rolling wake of a fast-moving tugboat rocked an immense sparkling sailboat.

“I’m gonna drop you off at the sister’s place,” Gregory said. “You don’t need me for this. I’m gonna take a quick run up to
the Bronx and turn this Project Children boat ride money over to the Duck before the worst happens. Carrying somebody else’s
cash around always makes me nervous.”

“I thought the Duck retired to Florida,” Ryan said.

“He did, for two months. Hated it. The day before his terminal leave was scheduled to end, the Duck gets up in the middle
of the night… while the wife is still asleep… knows nothing. He sneaks outta the house in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts,
drives all day and night, straight to One Police Plaza, drops to his knees, and kisses the ground. Goes upstairs, gets his
shield back. They stick him in the Bronx. The Five Oh Precinct.”

“What happened to his wife?”

“Who knows,” Gregory said, shrugging emphatically as if that line of questioning were irrelevant.

“I’ll give you thirty minutes,” Ryan said. “I don’t care what old buddy you run into. Just get your ass back here. I don’t
want to hear about traffic jams, and I definitely don’t want to hear that you stopped in the Greentree Bar for a quick pop
with the Duck or any of the board of directors. Or whatever you guys call yourselves.”

“Pally,” Gregory said, “I’m deeply wounded by that remark.”

“You
will be
deeply wounded if you’re not back to get me in thirty minutes.”

Faye Boudreau lived on East Sixty-fourth Street off the corner of Third Avenue, on the third floor of a seven-story tan brick
building. Ryan leaned on the buzzer until the imprint appeared on his thumb. Then he tried his own keys in the door. Sometimes
the tumblers in the locks on outside apartment house doors were so worn down that any similar key would work. One did.

“Damn buzzer never works,” Faye Boudreau said.

She wore only a black T-shirt, with the new logo of
West Side Story
. A black bra strap dangled midway down her upper arm. Her voice sounded thick, as if she’d been sleeping or crying.

Ryan’s eyes adjusted to the darkness as he followed her down a short narrow hallway: closet on the right, bathroom on the
left. The entire studio apartment had less floor space than the first-class cabin on a 737. Two steps past the bathroom was
the kitchenette. Beyond that, one single square room so small, Patrick Ewing could have touched the two most distant walls
simultaneously.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” Ryan said, and he watched her mouth twist as she fought back tears. She was older, heavier,
and darker than Gillian, but her legs were as long and cheekbones as pronounced. She was barefoot, bare-legged.

Faye sat on the edge of the unmade sofa bed, which took up most of the room. She folded her legs swami style and yanked her
shirt down between her legs. Sheets and a blanket lay half on the floor. A heavy drape covered the lone window, behind her.
In the front center of her right thigh was a small circular scar that looked like a cigarette burn.

“Tell me something about Gillian,” Ryan asked softly. “Who was her favorite actress?”

“I don’t know. She never said. Meryl Streep, maybe. She liked Meryl Streep.”

Ryan lowered himself carefully onto a beanbag chair. The light from the lamp on top of the TV was less than dim. A pair of
cutoff jeans lay on the floor next to his feet, white pockets turned inside out. A baseball bat leaned against the wall near
the TV table.

“Everybody has said such wonderful things about Gillian,” Ryan said. “Not one negative comment.”

“She was moody, sometimes,” Faye said. Then, gesturing to the unmade bed, the clothes on the floor: “But she was neater than
me, that’s for sure.”

Ryan saw his opening and prodded Faye to admit that Gillian was the cleanest woman on earth, often staying up all night cleaning
her apartment. She ironed everything she wore, flossed her teeth after every meal, and washed her bedspread at the Laundromat
in December and May. Like clockwork.

“What kind of foods did she like?” Ryan asked.

“Anything tart, like things made with lemons and limes. And ginger snaps.”

“Anything else?” Ryan said, meaning food.

But Faye misunderstood and said she was sorry, she really didn’t know that much about Gillian. They’d missed so many years
of growing up together.

“You didn’t grow up together?”

“They just found me.”

“Who just found you?”

Faye took a deep breath and pushed her hair from her face. “Our mother gave me up when I was born,” she said. “She gave birth
to me in Key West, and the next day she gave me to the nuns. Then she left Florida.”

“Why?”

“Poor, scared, fifteen years old. I can understand that.”

“How long have you known this?”

“First time I heard about my real mother was two years ago. Some private investigator came into the bar I worked at in Miami,
asked a bunch of questions. Then a few days later Lynnette and Evan Stone flew in from Phoenix. Eight o’clock in the morning
they knock on my door. ‘I’m your mom,’ Lynnette says.”

“Knock, knock… we’re your parents.”

“Just my mother. Evan Stone isn’t my father.”

“Who is your father?”

“You are,” she said, smiling for the first time. In the sliver of light coming through the opening in the drapes, he could
see the whiteness of her teeth. “Just kidding. I don’t know, and it sounds like she don’t, either. She named some guy in the
navy, but the private investigator couldn’t find him in the files.”

“What made her decide to look for you?”

“Some shrink in Arizona said she had to confront her past.”

“And you were in Florida the whole time?”

“With the Boudreaus, mostly. They adopted me. French Canadians. I grew up in Sarasota, Bradenton, around there. A few different
places. I did okay.”

Faye’s skin had a rough, blowsy look, as if weathered in cigarette smoke and long nights. But her hair was a lustrous black
and shoulder length, her eyes dark brown and huge. You could see an inherent beauty, but a squandered beauty. If it had been
nourished and cultivated, who knew?

“Then you met Gillian?” Ryan said.

“Me and Gillian hit it right off. She flew down to Miami when she found out. Brought me here. This is her old apartment, the
lease is still in her name.”

“Call me if you have any problems getting it changed to your name.”

“Oh, I’m not staying. I’ll go back to Florida.”

“Why not Arizona?”

“Don’t think so,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I’m too low-class for Mother. I embarrass her.”

“That’s why you didn’t attend the funeral.”

Faye nodded, then stretched her arms above her head, lazy and catlike. The room smelled like Gillian’s apartment in the Broadway
Arms, delicate, powdery scents.

“Tell me about the last time you saw your sister,” Ryan said.

“Sunday, she came over. She brought me that bat.” Faye swung her legs off the bed and picked up the baseball bat near the
TV. She handed it to Ryan. “It’s a Bobby Bonilla model. She met him at the All-Star Cafe, I think, and got him to sign it
for me. She knew I was a Marlins fan.”

“My son was a big Baltimore Orioles fan,” Ryan said. He gave the bat a short swing, all wrist, and wondered why he’d mentioned
his son; he never did that. He asked Faye to finish telling about Sunday.

“We went to lunch. Around the corner to Caramanica’s.”

“What was Gillian’s mood?”

“Laughing, joking around. That’s what sucks.”

“What sucks?”

“Like, all those years we missed. You know, like playing Barbies or dressing up, things like that. Talking about boyfriends,
whatever. I’ll never get that back now. Know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do,” Ryan said. “Did you see Gillian or speak to her after Saturday?”

“Not till Tuesday night.”

“The night she died?”

Faye nodded, but Ryan already knew it. It was in Faye’s interview with Mid-Town North, plus Gillian’s phone records. Two phone
calls, the last one twenty-eight minutes, terminated less than fifty minutes before Gillian’s fall.

“I read your statement, but tell me again about the phone calls. Did she seem depressed or despondent?”

“Try pissed off.”

“About what?”

“The drug thing with Trey Winters. She knew it was bullshit.”

“So she didn’t have a drug problem. Not even prescription drugs, painkillers, tranquilizers?”

“She drank a little. Gin and Mountain Dew. Tasted weird, like a high schooler’s drink.”

“She wasn’t worried about the drug test?”

“If she was, she didn’t say it to me.”

Faye scratched at her legs unconsciously. She had long fingernails, black polish badly chipped.

“So what did you two girls talk about?”

“Everything. Everything in the world.”

“And her mood was good.”

“Except for being pissed.”

“Did she talk much about Trey Winters?”

“Shit, yeah.”

“Did she tell you about her affair with Trey Winters?”

“No, she never told me anything about that. First call she said he was coming over. The second one she told me that he just
bullshitted about trying to help her and shit. She didn’t believe him.”

“But I didn’t surprise you just now when I mentioned a relationship between them,” Ryan said. “Did I?”

Faye gave an “I don’t know” shrug. The sound of metal rattling caused Ryan to look toward the window… the fire escape. Ryan
had been uneasy in apartments with fire escapes since his rookie years in the Bronx. Another burdensome piece of cop knowledge
was that so many rapists and thugs slithered in through the fire escape window. Like most street cops, even off duty, he always
scanned upward toward the fire escapes, watching for climbing predator scum. Faye seemed not to notice the noise. Maybe a
neighbor’s ritual: shaking a dust mop or watering a marijuana plant.

“I know you loved your sister, Faye.”

“I would have done anything for her.”

“Sisters have a special bond,” he said. “My wife and her sister have an amazing connection. Spooky almost. Sometimes my wife
says she has to call her sister, and that second the phone rings, and it’s her. It’s almost mystical. An understanding that
goes beyond words.”

“We were getting like that. Sometimes Gillian would say something, and it was exactly the thing I was thinking. We’d both
go ‘Wow.’”

He watched her fight for control again, biting the inside of her lips so hard, it had to bleed.

“The thing I can’t understand,” Ryan said, “is that she called you on that night and talked to you for twenty-eight minutes…
hung up… and less than an hour later she took her own life. And you had
no idea
that anything was wrong.”

“I knew she was upset.”

“Upset. Of course. She’d just heard she might lose her role in the show. Her producers wanted her tested for drugs. Everything
she worked for was being destroyed. I’d be nuts if that happened to me.”

Faye tightened and coiled, as if trying to squeeze out some deep reserve of inner strength. She wasn’t a cold woman; Ryan
knew ice when he saw it.

“Don’t you think I would have done something if I thought she was going to hurt herself? Called somebody?”

“Not necessarily. Maybe you didn’t believe what she was saying. That’s understandable. People say wild things when they’re
under stress. Crazy things, like they’re going to kill themselves. Most people ignore them at a time like that. I would. If
we reacted every time people threatened crazy things…”

He wanted to tell her to just go ahead and cry, for chrissakes. Let it loose. Blow the dam. She wrestled her demons in.

“She was a little drunk… just blowing off steam.”

“I’m sure,” Ryan said. “Probably exaggerating, talking stupidly. We all do it when we’re mad.”

“She said a few things. I didn’t think she’d really do anything. Just blowing off steam.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Faye.”

“Some big sister, right? Big help I was.”

Anthony Ryan leaned over and touched her hand. He had other questions, but he wouldn’t ask them now. He’d made Faye Boudreau
suffer enough for one day. She wrapped her arms around her chest, as if to physically hold herself together. A low moan slipped
from her throat, escaped past the guards. She never cried.

V
ictor listened to Danny Eumont’s tape on the subway ride home. He didn’t see how questions about Gillian Stone’s drug use
and her affair with Trey Winters could affect his plan. In fact, the reporter’s probing might encourage Winters to pay greater
attention to him and settle the matter quickly. The only thing on the tape that worried Victor was the mention of a “source.”
No “source” was going to screw up his plan.

Back in the Bronx and too stiff to bend over, he kicked the reporter’s tape recorder into the gutter and sent it clattering
down a sewer. Then he walked around the corner, dropped the microcassette on the sidewalk, and smashed it under his heel.
The pulverized tape went into another sewer directly in front of the wood-frame house on Echo Place in which he shared two
rooms and a bath with Pinto the Russian clown.

Pinto’s Chevy Nova was gone from its parking spot. Lazy Pinto always drove the car, although it was less than a block walk
to the Grand Concourse, where you could catch the D train straight to Times Square. Every year Victor suggested they store
the car for the summer, take the subway. Much cheaper in the long run.

But what the hell did he care now. Next year Pinto would be on his own, begging tourists for coins by himself. Next year he’d
be a businessman, a man of wealth and respect. Basking in the warm breezes off the Sea of Cortés and the charms of beautiful
women. Many beautiful women. As Pinto himself always said, more than anything else, it was money that made women horny.

Victor climbed the front steps, clutching the rail. The hallway smelled of fresh disinfectant. Their Jamaican-born landlady,
the widow of a Puerto Rican subway motorman, had carved the house into five odd-shaped apartments, which she ran like a Nazi
den mother, demanding order and cleanliness. Cleanliness at their price level was a rare commodity. That was why every year,
as soon as the weather turned warm, Pinto and Victor tossed their belongings into Pinto’s old Chevy and drove north, hoping
she had a vacancy.