Styx & Stone (32 page)

“It wasn’t the morphine,” said the doctor dryly. “He’s dead.”

I eased back into my chair and drew closer to the bed. A few minutes later, my heart had slowed to where I could at least close my eyes and swallow. Then, a noise on my left. I was startled. Opening my eyes, I looked around for someone, but there was nothing. Then the noise again, and I realized it was him, my father, speaking. I pushed out of the chair, sending it skidding back across the tiles into the wall, and pressed my ear close to his lips.

“What is it, Dad?” I said. “Speak to me. Say something. It’s me!”

His eyes remained closed, but his jaw moved slightly from side to side. Then his dry tongue peeked out of his mouth to moisten his lips.

“Say something, Dad! It’s me. I’m here with you now.”

He swallowed gingerly, then in a raspy whisper, called: “Elijah . . .”

SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 1960

At seven the following morning, Sunday, I was shuffling through the light snow on Twelfth Street, in no hurry to get back to my father’s place. All I could think of was Elijah’s room: that empty chamber. Even from beyond the grave, he was closer to Dad than I, who sat holding his hand at his bedside. Our sorry relationship had crumbled to where he would rather reach through the ages to a ghost than throw me a bone of his affection. I cursed him, and I cursed Elijah as I stopped for a cup of coffee at a diner on Twelfth and Sixth. I stared out the window, huddled over my coffee, and watched the early morning traffic. The faithful on their way to church, the faithless returning home from a late night of revelry, and the irresolute on some unknown errand at this early hour. All marched purposefully toward their destinations.

I descended into gloom, still crushed by my father’s cry for Elijah, his rejection of me. But what could I expect? I hadn’t even phoned him on his last birthday and let him spend Thanksgiving alone while I did the same in New Holland. I didn’t know him anymore, what he did with his days, his nights, or how he was managing since Mom had died. We had become strangers with the same last name and—somehow—the same eyes. Spiritually dead, each toward the other, these were the shambles we had made. How sad my mother and brother would have been. It was hopeless, even if he recovered.

When
he recovered, I thought. When he recovered, he would probably name his attacker. (I figured he had seen who hit him, which prompted the second attempt on his life.) Then he’d ask me how I’d spent my week in New York.

“Well, Dad,” I’d say, “I’ve been trying to find out who clubbed you on the head.”

“And how did you proceed, Ellie?” he’d ask, as if in an oral exam.

“Well, I screwed one of your junior colleagues, Gigi Lucchesi.”

“That’s fine, Ellie! You give new meaning to the investigative term ‘poking around.’”

Damn it! Where had Gigi disappeared to the past few days? Somewhere with Hildy Jaspers, no doubt. I hadn’t heard a word from him since first thing Thursday morning. I tossed a quarter onto the counter and pushed through the door to the street. Striding over Twelfth Street and down Fifth Avenue, I reached my father’s apartment building with sweat beading beneath the wet snow on my brow. The revolving doors spat me into the lobby, where I found Jimmo McKeever waiting on the sofa. Elbows resting on his knees, he dangled his rain-soaked hat between his legs. When he saw me come in, he dropped the hat and jumped to his feet.

“Hello, Ellie. I wanted to speak to you about Ruth Chalmers.”

“I’ve only got about five minutes,” I said.

“Well, I spoke to Miss Chalmers yesterday,” he said, following me into the elevator. “About the jewelry and Mr. Ercolano.”

“And?”

“And she came clean, confessed everything about the relationship. Said she found him in the tub Saturday night. She even admitted she’d taken the ring from his bureau drawer. Thought it was his.”

“Well done, Jim. While you were fishing for confirmation of something you already knew, I found out who the older girlfriend was.”

He looked startled. “Who?” he asked, and I realized my brusque tone was unwarranted.

“Joan Little, the secretary. The arrangement was Joan during the week, Ruth on the weekends.”

The elevator stopped on fifteen, and we exited. Inside the apartment, I changed clothes in my father’s bedroom while McKeever digested the new information in the study.

“Do you think Joan Little killed him?” he asked once I’d redone my face, tied my hair back, and emerged in a fresh skirt and blouse.

“No,” I said. “She loved him, accepted every indignity he heaped on her, and loved him more despite it all.”

“Maybe she got fed up with his other girlfriend.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “But why don’t you go talk to her?”

McKeever looked discouraged.

“It’s easy for you,” he said. “You don’t have to write reports and justify your opinions to your superiors. That means questioning everyone, in order, to the last man, woman, and child.”

I shrugged my shoulders in empathy. “Sorry. I’ve got to talk to Bernie Sanger,” and I headed for the door.

“What about?” he asked, trotting after me.

“My father’s lunch last Friday.”

We rode the elevator down to the street, and McKeever drove me over to Seventh Avenue. In the car he asked me about my father.

“You’re really close to him, aren’t you?” he asked.

I snickered. “Not at all.”

“Well, you must have been once. I can see it. It’s a special bond that a girl has with her father. He must have thought you were the most beautiful thing in the world.”

I ran a finger down the steamed-up window absently, looking away from McKeever.

“Once,” I said, “when I was about seven, we were reading together in the parlor. It was evening, winter, I think, and we were waiting for dinner. Just reading on the sofa, me leaning against him. We were warm. He had a drink on the end table. I still remember that smell of alcohol being consumed. Being consumed by others, I mean. It’s a different smell altogether: very grown up and complicated.” I paused.

“Nice story,” said McKeever awkwardly after a bit, thinking I’d finished. “My old man drank gin, and it didn’t smell none too good on him.”

“My mother came into the room to tell us five more minutes till dinner,” I resumed. “We both looked up from our books and smiled at her. Then I felt my father’s hand stroke my cheek, ever so gently. I turned my eyes to him, and he gazed at me. ‘You’re my girl,’ he said. I think that was the best moment of my life.”

There was a silence as we waited at a stoplight. Had I been paying attention to McKeever, I might have noticed he was uncomfortable with my confession. But I didn’t look at him so I don’t know.

The squad car stopped on the northwest corner of Seventh and Thirteenth. I made no move to climb out, and the car idled patiently.

“My old man was a drunken brawler,” said McKeever without preamble. “Little Man’s Disease. Hated the world for making him short. Used to get in fights every Friday night to prove he was tougher than all the guys taller than him. He got thrown out of every tavern in Jamaica, then all of Queens.” He chuckled softly, bitterly. “It got so bad, he had to go into Manhattan to drink in the gin mills on Third Avenue. Then he’d come home and beat up my ma.”

“That’s rough,” I said.

He shrugged. “I had pals who had it worse than me. At least I had sports after school to keep me away from him.”

“Baseball?”

He shook his head.

“Boxing?”

“No, I got smacked around enough at home. I didn’t feel like getting hit for fun.”

“Not basketball,” I laughed. “You’re too . . .” I stopped myself.

“Short? Yeah, I know. And yet I was an All-City basketball star at Andrew Jackson High.”

“Really? How tall are you, Jim?”

He flushed a bit. “Five foot seven,” he said and paused. “Or nearly. I started playing in the Police Athletic League when I was a kid. It didn’t matter then that I was short. We all were.”

“Tell me more. I love sports heroes.”

“You’re a card,” he sneered. “In high school I was a shrimp, not even as tall as I am now. But irony of ironies, I was the best shooter in Queens. Averaged twenty-six points a game my senior year.”

“Funny I never heard of you.”

He mugged a sarcastic smile. “I went to City College in the fall of 1950.”

I looked at him pointedly. “Did you say 1950?” He nodded solemnly. “But that was the year of the scandal . . . Did you play on that team?”

“No, that was the year before. The news broke in the middle of the next season, but I didn’t get to play anyway,” he sighed. “I went to try out for the team, but Coach Holman wouldn’t have it. Said I was too small.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I used to outshoot the players during practice to teach him a lesson.”

“But I thought you didn’t make the team,” I said.

“I wanted to be there. After the twin championships in 1950, I just had to be part of the team, so I signed on as the equipment manager.”

“And the coach never gave you another chance? After seeing you shoot at practice?”

McKeever shifted in his seat and shook his head. “No,” he sniffed. “He admitted I was good, but said I was too short. My old man said the same thing, then rubbed it in good every chance he got. Just kept telling me what a chump I was.”

“So you knew those guys?” I asked, wanting to get him off the subject of his father. “Ed Warner, Ed Roman, Al Roth?”

“You sure know a lot about sports,” he said. “Yeah, I knew them. Ed Warner used to call me leprechaun.”

“Ouch.”

Jim smiled and pushed the memory aside. “It’s all right,” he said. “I got my degree and went on to join the force. Never would have made it without City College.”

“What did your father say about that? About you becoming a cop.”

“He never knew. He died. Wouldn’t have liked it, though. He hated cops. Hated just about everybody. Negroes, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Protestants . . .”

“You’ve done OK, Jim, for a leprechaun basketball player from the mean streets.”

“Thanks for the kind words, Ellie. Let me know if I can cheer you up sometime.”

“You know,” I said after a long pause, “despite all the pain that’s happened since, I love him. I love my father for that one moment on a winter’s night so long ago.”

“That’s not much, Ellie,” he said.

I turned back from the window and smiled weakly at him. His face was troubled, and I appreciated his kindness.

“It’s all I’ve got,” I told him.

“He must love you very dearly. Some men just don’t know how to show it.”

“Don’t you think I know that? I know he loves me,” I said, returning to my foggy window. “He just doesn’t like me.”

“Are you going to see Joan Little?” I asked through the window after climbing out on Thirteenth.

“Gotta go by the book. Let me know how you do with Sanger.”

I agreed, and McKeever sped off. I turned away from the subway, heading west along Thirteenth Street instead, hating myself every heart-pounding step as I went.

It was just a quarter past eight on a wet Sunday morning when I pressed the buzzer of 340 West Nineteenth Street, a four-story brownstone between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The intercom was out of order, according to a sign taped above the buzzer, and the door was open. I checked the mailboxes for the apartment number, 4, and went in.