Manhattan Nocturne (38 page)

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Authors: Colin Harrison

BOOK: Manhattan Nocturne
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A boy. A boy of only eighteen months, asleep in a hospital crib, a bubble rising and falling on his lips, dreaming whatever a child dreams—mother, milk, cookies, sister, animals, red, yellow, green. That a bullet has passed through the tiny biceps of his left arm is not understood by him, only that a bad man was in the room, that Josephine screamed and there was some noise and something hot cut his arm and he was crying, Sally was crying, Josephine was screaming. He cannot know that the bullet, meant to splinter and mushroom at the touch of flesh, has passed through his arm as if it were ethereal, too young yet to present the warm, wet smack of resistance to a projectile. That same bullet, he does not know, has, after passing through his arm, entered the same knee he was hugging in fear, and the bullet has bloomed in accordance with the diabolical specifications of its manufacturer into a many-toothed brass-jacketed blur of fleshly destruction, taking with it the kneecap of a fifty-two-year-old black woman.
I stood at the edge of Tommy's crib in a fugue of fear and anger and guilt. I wished that I could weep. Lisa came up.
“I examined the wound myself,” she said, her voice dead.
“How serious is it?”
“Bottom line? Scar tissue in the muscle but not through its
entire depth.” She rubbed Tommy's back gently. “He's going to need some rehab, especially stretching to keep the tissue pliant. The arm will not be weak, but he'll never have the absolute contraction in that muscle that he would have.”
“Scar?”
She gazed at Tommy, blinked. “He's going to grow so much that it won't be too disfiguring. Maybe a dimple. Very little keloid—he's too young.”
“Josephine?”
Lisa sighed. “It hit the left patella. That's unsalvageable. She'll need some operations, rehab. It will take a year, certainly.”
Lisa went to check on Sally, who was sleeping on a sofa in an office. By now I knew that they had all ridden in the ambulance together—Josephine and Tommy and Sally—Josephine insisting with hysterical strength through her pain that she not be separated from the children. Lisa had arrived within an hour of the shooting from her office and found, she had told me when I first appeared at the hospital, that the children were strangely calm. Upon seeing her, they erupted into sobs of terror and clutched at her, Sally especially, who, unwounded, was yet traumatized by the blood of Tommy and Josephine.
“I've arranged everything for Josephine,” Lisa said.
“Paying for everything?”
“Yes.”
“Private room?”
“I got her the best room in the hospital. And doctors.”
“Can I see her?”
“She's sedated, but I think so.” My wife's voice was cold, abstracted. She looked alone to me.
“Sedated?”
“She's been through trauma, and also antianxiety medication is one of the ways they treat pain now. Anxiety amplifies pain.”
“Whose gun was it?”
“The man's.”
“But Josephine fired her gun?”
“The police think so. She was incoherent. She'll be better now.” Lisa sighed. “I didn't get to talk to her. They were working on her knee.”
“She kept her gun after all.”
“Yes,” said Lisa. “I feel like I don't understand much anymore.”
We stood there, my wife and I. There was something she wasn't saying to me.
“They're going to want this bed.”
“Tommy's?”
“Yes.” Lisa turned her eyes to me.
“But Jesus, he was just shot in the arm.”
“It's a comparatively insubstantial flesh wound, disinfected, sutured, bandaged. He'll take a little antibiotic and be okay.” Her voice was tight, disinterested in my anxiousness over Tommy.
“I don't understand your point. Your tone, to be more precise.”
“You know who the man was, I presume.”
“I have a good idea.”
She considered me. She was purely the mother of her children, not, for the moment, my wife. “This is not finished, whatever this is?”
“No.”
“I can't have the children be part of this, Porter.”
“No.”
Tommy stirred, and she readjusted his blanket. “You've been acting like you're in a lot of trouble.”
“I am.”
“I mean staying out all hours, getting beaten up and making up a story that you were mugged. You must think I'm a fool.”
“No.”
“You must really have some misconceptions about me.”
“No.”
“Then about yourself.”
“Perhaps.”
She set her dark eyes upon me. “‘Perhaps' is the answer of a coward.”
I said nothing.
“Can you guarantee that these men won't come back again?”
“No.”
“You seem to have
really
pissed somebody off, Porter.”
“It's not exactly like that.”
Her face was clenched with bitterness. “Well, I hope it's for a
good
reason.”
“It's not exactly like that, either.”
We stood there, my wife and I, she in her pretty dress and sensible heels.
“I'm going to take the kids to Mom's,” she announced. “Tonight. I'll get tickets at the airport. I have a car that'll be here in maybe ten minutes.”
Her mother lived in the hills outside San Francisco and made birdhouses from pine boards and old California license plates.
“What about your practice?” I asked.
“I feel pretty damn shitty about that, Porter—a lot of patients are waiting for surgery. Luckily it's elective for the next week or so.” She was disheartened that she might be failing them. “As for on-call coverage, I've worked that out, but I don't like to do it. It doesn't make me look very good to suddenly run off. Everybody at the hospital will hear about this, too. But these are my
children
.”
“Yes.”
“I have a lot to say to you, but I'm too furious and upset about Tommy.” She glared at me, then let out a breath. “Damn it, Porter, this really sucks, it's really shitty.”
“Yes.”
She left then, holding Tommy, with a nurse carrying Sally for her. I kissed both children good-bye and was glad they were asleep, that I didn't have to say why I wasn't going with them. I could follow Lisa and try to explain all of it. I didn't.
 
 
Upstairs, in Josephine's room, I poked my head inside, expecting her family to be there. “Josephine?”
She was lying on her side watching a screen set into a large entertainment console. On it was a menu of hospital services. Next to the screen were some complimentary movies if she wanted to watch them.
“Oh, Porter!” She turned to me and I could see the tears in her eyes. “I was with Tommy and Sally, you know, I was starting to cook some noodles, and then I heard the buzzer from the gate, and you know I thought maybe Porter is coming home early, something like that, and then I look up and saw this man at the window—”
No doubt Hobbs's man knew how to slip a lock. “What did he look like?”
“He was a white man, maybe, oh, I would say maybe fifty years old, in a heavy coat, and I was thinking, Oh, no, that's not right, that's not good, nobody say nothing to
me
about some man coming over to the house, you know, and then he smile and knocked on the door, and I called through the glass, ‘Who are you?' And he didn't say nothing, so I said, ‘Go away, I'm calling the police.' And then he kicked in the door, just like that. The kids saw that. Sally, she was very scared by that. Then the man was inside the kitchen and I was thinking, Oh, no,
that's
not right,
that's
not a good man, you know, and he said, ‘Where is Porter's office?' and I said that wasn't his business, and then he say, ‘Show me the office or I'll hurt somebody,' you know. So I show him the office, you know, because I think that—”
“No, no, you did the right thing,” I said. “Absolutely.”
“So then he starts messing around in the office, just pulling out stuff, and then I start to pick up the kids to get away, and then he says, ‘No, you all come in here.' I was trying to pick up Tommy, you know, so I could run. But he came out of the office, and he had a gun and said, ‘All you get in the office,' and so I took my bag and the kids and went in there, and he was pulling your papers and opening drawers and throwing your papers everywhere and saying, ‘Where is it, where is it?' Then I said, ‘Mister, I don't know what you mean,' and then he said he was. going to have to take one of the kids away with him, and then—oh
my
—” Josephine
pressed her hands to her neck and looked down, blinking. “I just—I know you tell me don't bring the gun to work no more, but—”
“We're past that now, Josephine,” I said.
“I just said, ‘No, you can't do that, mister, you can't take these kids,' and I pulled my gun out and I pointed it and just pulled. He yelled and called me some names—you know how they do when they're mad like that—and then he fired and that was the one that hit Tommy and me, and then we both screamed, you know, and I fell down with Tommy and I shot it again, and I think I hit him, maybe, and I fired again and that one missed him, that one hit the wall, and then he started to run outside. He went out the kitchen door right across the yard, and then he fall down, once, you know, and then he kept on going. I didn't follow him. I just held on to the kids. They was so upset that I just held them and kissed them, you know, like that.”
From the hospital I traveled directly to the newspaper's offices and bought a couple of liter bottles of Coke. I'd drink them and be able to stay up all night, which was the idea. Hal Fitzgerald had left two messages on my machine and sounded worried on his own behalf. But I couldn't think about him now. I had the guard open up the newspaper's information services office. Mrs. Wood was gone, but I knew my way around. Campbell. I needed to know where Campbell was. What was his first name? I couldn't remember. You could line up ten thousand men and I could identify him that moment, but for the life of me I could not remember his first name. I could look up “Campbell” on the CD phone directory, a very accurate one provided by a private company and updated every three months, but that would give me too many names. Instead I did a Nexis search with Campbell and Hobbs. A recent story in
The New York Times
on the paper might give Campbell's first name. Nothing. Perhaps Campbell had been promoted while stationed in New York; the newspaper's PR office would have cranked out a release. How about “Campbell” and “London”? “Campbell” and “England”? Here it was, a tiny item:
Walter Campbell promoted to the position
of executive
vice-president …
A native of London,
Campbell will head up the
…
With “Walter Campbell” I could begin. Where did he live? New York? New Jersey? Connecticut? An expensive neighborhood. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey? Very nice place. Darien, Connecticut? Also a nice spot. A tough call. Maybe not. Presumably he flew to London on business pretty frequently. He would be flying out of JFK. Not as many international flights used LaGuardia. A man who uses JFK frequently, who needs to take early-morning flights and so on, will not live in New Jersey or Connecticut. Even with a limo driver, it was simply too far in the morning, too much wasted time. He'd be in New York, either in Long Island or in the city proper. I looked up Walter Campbell in area codes 212, 718, and 516. Eight of them. I threw out the six that were in middle-class or poor neighborhoods. Two remained, both in Bridgehampton. Three hours on the Long Island Expressway every morning—forget it. Campbell had an unlisted number. I remembered that he did not have a wedding ring. He was either gay or divorced; that could put him in Manhattan, which for a wealthy middle-aged man was where the action was. Was he a registered voter? Only if he was a naturalized citizen. Not likely. Retirement benefits are better in the U.K. I had nothing. He was Walter Campbell. I didn't have a birth-date or a Social Security number. How do you find a British citizen in Manhattan without a phone number, an address, or a Social Security number? The man drives a car. I popped in the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles disc. Eighty-four people named Walter Campbell. No address listed. Real estate. I entered a search for Manhattan only. There was a W. Campbell at East 148th Street. Spanish Harlem. No chance. The man did not own property in the city. If he did, then I would have all kinds of ways of finding him. But it made sense that he had not bought property; Hobbs probably moved his key people around every few years. I flipped through the list of possible ways to search for people: Bankruptcy; Mechanics Liens; Sidewalk Violations; Environmental Control Board Judgments; HPD Emergency Repair
Liens; Uniform Commercial Code Filings; Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites. Here was one: Parking Violation Judgments.

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