Agnes Among the Gargoyles (16 page)

   "Hi."

   Sarah, freshly wakened, joins Agnes at the window. Agnes makes a choked little sound.

   "Are you all right?" asks Sarah.

   "I'm not sure," says Agnes. "I'm so tired I'm seeing things."

   "You look like you just saw Bigfoot."

   "My own personal Bigfoot," says Agnes. "I have to get home."

   But, tired as she is, Agnes doesn't sleep. She keeps seeing the bloody bedroom, and the outlines of the bodies marked off with tape on the floor: Mrs. Bloch with one leg bent demurely under, arms neatly at her side; Barbara sprawled violently, arms and legs pointed in four different directions.

 

It is impossible to pick up a newspaper without seeing the oddly coupled photographs. On the left, usually, is Barbara. It is her last headshot but one, when she had her hair in that unflattering, helmet-like arrangement. Mrs. Bloch's picture, a blurry enlargement, was taken at a picnic of some sort. Her
sheytl
in place, she holds a child's pail and shovel.

   Agnes sits with the police artist. Jack the Pinboy cannot be found. He has vanished. It doesn't look as though he was ever employed by Hippodrome Lanes, where he and Barbara met. Detective Whitey Walker—who was pulled from a detail investigating reports of sabotage on the construction site of the Palace of Versailles—has been assigned to work with Tommy Thurston, and Whitey spends a day at the bowling alley with the owner and manager and a bunch of pinboys and payroll records.

   "This guy never worked there," Whitey declares, his little button eyes blinking in his pink face. A shock of white hair sticking up, tendrils of white eyebrow sticking out—Whitey Walker always looks as though he just dragged himself out of bed. "You got 18 pound balls flying at you, pins whizzing at your head—this is not a job that attracts the cream. Most of the pinboys aren't all there."

   Agnes and Tommy visit Smitty's Cove, at the South Street Seaport. There actually is a Smitty. He wears a $300 fisherman's sweater and suede deck shoes. He is insulted by the suggestion that he might remember an individual band member, or even a whole band.

   "Do you pay in cash?" asks Tommy.

   "I give them the coins in the video games."

   "Really?"

   "No, I'm pulling your prick. My records are in order. I pay them by check made out to cash. They usually don't have an account set up with the band's name. And even if they did, I couldn't be bothered."

   Outside Smitty's, Agnes slumps on a bench. She is thoroughly depressed. The jolly ambiance of the Seaport, the strolling juggler, the mime in the down coat, all seem to make her feel even worse.

   "I was a bad friend," she tells Tommy. "I knew he was bad for her. If I'd really tried, I could have convinced her of it."

   "You're better than me," he says. "I've never convinced anybody of anything. Besides, you're not the world's policeman. She was a grownup."

   Agnes spends a lot of time with the police artist. She feels she has successfully conveyed to him the pointed contours of Jack's face. She tries especially to get the lips right—prissy they are, thin and mingy, old man's lips, vampire's lips.

   Agnes has a dreadful meeting with Barbara's mother and her sister, Vivian. Barbara's mother sits across a desk from a social worker, holding a ball of tissues to her face as though stanching a wound.

   "She thought the world of you," Vivian tells Agnes. Vivian has a stockbroker husband and two kids and a house in Mount Vernon. She is settled and prosperous. "She thought you really had your life together."

   "How can I help?" says Agnes.

   Vivian lights a long cigarette and starts to cry. Mrs. Foucault looks over from the social worker, momentarily distracted from her own grief.

   "There is one thing," says Vivian, sobbing. "Could you sign Barbara's body out to the undertaker?"

   "Anything."

   "When I think of the things we used to do, I can't believe it," says Vivian. "We'd go to the movies at ten, eleven at night. But now...I begged her to get out of the city.

   Agnes knows this to be true. Vivian drove Barbara to distraction. She badgered Barbara to come live in Mount Vernon.

   "She's the one with the stockbroker," Barbara said. "What am I supposed to do in Mount Vernon? Go from house to house mending pots?"

   Barbara's mother goes to the bathroom.

   Vivian's husband is in Fort Worth, on business. He'll be back in New York in the morning. "But I don't even want him here," Vivian tells Agnes. "I'm worried about my mother. If he's here, I have to worry about him. Who's worried about me? I want my daddy."

   A daddy is a tall order. For Vivian and Agnes and nearly every woman Agnes knows, Daddy is a distant memory, dead in many cases before Nixon's second term had begun, a victim of smoking or drinking or simply beef every night. Daddies would be nice. The Mommies roll feebly along, existing if not flourishing, like spiny desert plant life, their bodies contracting, their hairdos expanding as their heads get smaller.

   Agnes misses her own daddy.

   Agnes and Sarah go to the morgue, where they meet Maurice Sharfman, the undertaker. He is a slight, deeply tanned man wearing tinted glasses.

   "Sympathies," he says. The word is a verbal business card.

   Sharfman, Agnes, and an administrative assistant sign and countersign documents. Then an assistant medical examiner appears and they have to go through it all over again. Sharfman asks if there was an autopsy performed. No, answers the doctor. There was an external examination of the wound but no incisions were necessary. Sharfman reminds the doctor that when death occurs violently, there is no ritual washing of the corpse, no
taharah,
and the clothes are not removed. He will need all of Barbara's clothing, as well as any blood that has been collected and, if possible, the section of her neck that was cut away. The assistant medical examiner nods and says nothing, and Sharfman does not press the point. The two men, on opposite sides of a desk in a New York City agency, have an understanding. The undertaker asks, and the doctor does what he can, and the matter will not be spoken of again.

   On the day of Barbara's funeral, a dusting of snow falls. Throughout the service, Agnes feels her heart dissolving slowly, like a lump of dry ice. Hidden cameras photograph everyone in attendance. Barbara would have enjoyed that. There is hope that the Pinboy will show, but he doesn't.

Quickly, the double homicide is out of the news. The lead story becomes the agreement worked out between Father Matt Clarence, working on behalf of the archdiocese, and Ronald Wegeman. St. Basil's will not be demolished. A swap has been arranged: in return for handing over his title to the land beneath St. Basil's, Wegeman will take possession of the St. Basil's rectory, across the street. The rectory can house twenty priests, but only Father Clarence and Father Chris, his assistant, live there.

   Agnes follows all this with great interest. The major events of the day are swirling around her. How much more compelling the news is now that she knows everyone involved personally.

   Wegeman and Father Clarence hold a press conference and beam at each other.

   "Maybe Weege can help me find an apartment," says the priest.

   "I wish all men of religion were so reasonable," says the Great Man. "And thanks for selling me those indulgences."

   "Who'll get more use out of them?"

   On Neptune Avenue, Reverend Lenten Gunn tells his flock, "Enmity between the wealthy and powerful can never last for very long. The rivalries and feuds of the rich are nought but a show put on for you and me."

   Agnes and Tommy drink hot chocolate at a desk in his precinct.

   "New York is too dangerous for a woman ever to be alone," he says. "You should all travel in packs."

   He smiles resignedly. He's a couple of years younger than Agnes; he might not yet be thirty. There is a fresh quality to his appearance that she finds appealing. He's got a fleshy nose and a cleft chin and eyes the color of those few chocolate caramels in the bag. He has a habit of squinting when others speak (as though he were paying very close attention) and he seems to embarrass easily.

   "While we wait for Jack the Pinboy to surface, I've been looking into Barbara's theatrical life, such as it was," he says. "I visited the theater companies whose names you gave me. You say she had a new job directing, but she didn't mention it to anyone else."

   "When
Sonja Henie
fell through, she vowed she wouldn't jinx the next job," says Agnes.

   Tommy sighs. "There's no place for superstition in the Big Apple. One's movements should be well documented. Now, where was I? Oh, here's something interesting: a woman at the temp agency overheard part of a telephone call. She heard Barbara ask if the sisters had been cast yet."

   Detective Diaz joins Agnes and Tommy. "Did the fingerprints come back from Albany?"

   "Not yet."

   He holds up a stack of forms. "Then help me go through these hot line tips."

   "All right," says Tommy reluctantly.

   "I'll make copies for you."

   "Don't bother. I've got tips from my last five cases. I'll just use those. It's the same screwballs calling in."

   Diaz gives an envelope to Tommy. "And, by the way, you owe me $27.75."

   "What for?"

   "Yankee tickets."

   "Oh yeah," says Tommy without a lick of interest. "When are they for?"

   "Opening day."

   When Diaz leaves, Tommy says, "Baseball games are just one of the hundreds of things that are no fun since I stopped drinking. I'm an alcoholic—recovering, recovered, whatever. You know the jargon."

   "I don't know what to say," says Agnes. "I'm sorry. Congratulations."

   "Both are appropriate," he says. He puts a cassette into a player. "I want you to hear this," he says to Agnes.

   It's the tape from Barbara's answering machine. Almost before Agnes realizes it, Jack the Pinboy is there and gone.

   The hairs on her neck feel like Velcro. "That's him."

   "We thought so. It's his only appearance on the tape."

   They listen again. It's Jack, all right, but what he says doesn't make any sense.

   "Gibberish," says Diaz.

   "Play it again," says Agnes.

   "Maybe it's the Lord's Prayer in Esperanto," says Tommy.

   "It's Gaelic," says Agnes. "He sang a song in Gaelic at Smitty's Cove."

   "We'll have it translated," says Tommy.

   Diaz asks Agnes if what Tommy told him is really true: that in a pious Orthodox Jewish marriage, intercourse must take place with the woman covered by a bedsheet with a hole in it.

   "Yes. And there has to be total darkness."

   "That's wacky," says Diaz. "That's wackier than the rule about not turning on the TV on the Sabbath."

   "They just see God in everything," says Agnes.

   Diaz is not convinced. "Your church and your TV should be separate."

   Tommy shows Diaz a book:
The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944.

   "I got this from Mrs. Fayne, the matchmaker," says Tommy. "Dov left it at her house the night of the murders. He says he was home by ten after eight. She called him until nine-thirty. He didn't answer."

   "So where was he?" says Diaz.

   Agnes coughs quietly. "I think I know."

Agnes brings Tommy to the roof of Barbara's building. The covering of snow is undisturbed; no one has been up here since the day of Barbara's funeral.

   She leads Tommy to the skylight and there tells him of her strange encounter with Dov. She tells him how the skylight window seemed to be a regular form of entertainment for the rabbi's son.

   Tommy wipes some frost from the skylight. In Barbara's bedroom, Vivian sorts through her sister's things.

   "So after the matchmaker, you think he came up here to catch the show?"

   Vivian looks up. Tommy gives her a little wave.

   "If he did, it means the Pinboy was here," says Agnes.

   "He couldn't admit to being here, could he?" says Tommy. "I wonder if he saw something."

   Agnes and Tommy return to Barbara's apartment. The Crime Scene Unit has finished going over the room—there's nothing left to photograph or measure or dust—and Vivian has gotten permission to start removing Barbara's things. She kneels in the center of the living room, sorting through stacks of clothing. Her heart really isn't in it. She is only three years older than Barbara, but so settled and affluent that she might as well be Barbara's mother. Barbara's clothing confuses her, and probably makes her feel old. Vivian packs the designer dresses into one box; into another goes Barbara's everyday clothing, shorts and T-shirts, really little more than rags.

   "Where are her sweaters?" Vivian wonders. "She loved crew necks."

   Agnes never saw Barbara in a crew neck.

   Agnes has agreed to take the turtles. First she must clean the tank, which reeks from inattention. The water is so dirty that the turtles won't go in it. They huddle together on a rock like survivors of a shipwreck. Agnes puts them in the bathtub. They can't believe their good fortune. She disconnects the heater and filter, then carries the tank to the kitchen sink. As she starts to pour out the water, she notices something half-buried in the gravel.