Mitchell Smith (30 page)

She and Keneally stopped at the ribbon, but Nardone ducked under and lifted it higher for her to follow him.

She went through, but Keneally stayed behind. -As Ellie straightened up, she saw Anderson among the other officers, and saw him glance up to see her and Nardone. She thought he looked annoyed, but then he smiled at her, caught Nardone’s eye, and beckoned them both over.

“That’s Carey, over there,” Nardone said, indicating with a movement of his head a short, stout, mustached black man two men down from Anderson.

Inspector Carey had dual reputations in the Department-one earned by killing a man who’d just shot another officer to death (and who shot Carey, too, before dvin , leaving that - 9 young officer with a smashed hip to plague him all his days)-the other, less enviable, for functioning now as a hatchet man under the Deputy Commissioner for Administration, sallying out into the field to monitor precinct captains at their work-and, in more than one instance, to replace them peremptorily.

To this short, stout officer, all present were deferring as they stood in a casual loose-finked circle around a dead man.

Jesds ChAvez seemed to have been a pleasant personeven now, with both eyes nearly closed, his dirty shirt, his crumpled chinos burst open as if the air had roughly molested him in flight, had determined to expose his brown, hairless chest, his soft paunch (a lighter brown), and the small black pit, twin to his navel, dappled with dry blood and located a few inches to the right of iteven now, his expression was quizzical, relaxed, and easy.

His front was fine-only his back, the back of his legs, the back of his head, had had swiftly to conform to the ruined concrete, the bricks beneath him.

He hadn’t been a young man, even on the roof.

An M.Us man was kneeling beside the corpse, had a worn and dirty bandage (Chdvez’) laid out, and a kit still open before him-wads of gauze, sponges, small vials.

“They can take him off,” one of the detectives said.

We’re done with him. -Pictures all done, Toby?”

Toby, a tall detective with a mournful face, nodded, and said, “Yes.”

“Hey,” Nardone said, amid these senior figures, “-what the hell was the guy doin’ up here?”

“His friend or friends brought him up here, Tommy,” Captain Anderson said, inviting no continuation. Inspector Carey, two men down, had left off talking to his neighbor to listen.

“What the hell for?” Nardone said. “-I mean what the hell did they tell the guy?” Ellie reached out and tugged his sleeve.

“What did they tell the guy?” The tall detective, Toby. -They told him they were bringin’ him up to some hincty spic doctor was going’ to fix him up just fine. -That’s what they told this fucker.”

“You step out of a car around here with some meatballs killed a cop with you-you believe you’re going’ to a doctor?” Nardone said. “You believe that? -I sure as shit wouldn’t believe it.”

“Come on, Tommy,” Ellie said-as quietly as she could, and still be sure he heard her.

“Could be they didn’t give him the option-just brought him up. . . .”

Another detective, this man very senior, a man in his early sixties.

“I guess that could be,” Nardone said. “They could have hauled him up here. But more likely, if it wasn’t for him being’ shot, injured that way-I’d figure maybe they got him up here to deal. . . .”

A third officer listening, also an older man, said to a companion,

“What’s this shit … ?”

“Are you on District Homicide or what?” the very senior detective said.

“No, I’m not,” Nardone said, and the detective turned away to talk with another.

“Nardone … Klein,” Captain Anderson said. ‘-Let me have a word with you…… And stepped back a few steps to wait for them in some seclusion against the strand of white ribbon.

“You are here,” he said, “-and why you’re here, I really don’t know-but you two are here on a pass. You understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Ellie said.

“Samuelson was up here before-now you two are up here-and enough is enough. These officers don’t require any advice whatsoever from you, Nardone. Is that really clear to you? -Is that clear to you both?” He waited for a reply, so Ellie said, “Yes, sir.”

“I appreciate your concern-the Squad’s concern that Classman’s killers get what’s coming to them. And, believe me, they will. But the investigation is none of your business. -O.K.? You understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Ellie said.

“Now, why don’t you two get back to work,- Anderson said. “—I believe you people have some things to do. . . .”

Keneally was waiting for them a few yards beyond the ribbon, his hands in his trouser pockets. “-Can’t I take you fuckin’ guys anywhere? You people are poison!

You”-to Nardone-“you got a mouth on you, Tommy, that’s right out of this-world. You know the guys you were bullshittin’ to, back there?

Any one of those guys could turn you into a fuckin’ meter maid with One rePort.” Keneally shook his head. “—What a pair you two are…. You two are one of a kind. . .”

“How about shovin’ it, Kenny?” Nardone said, amiably enough, and set off trudging along the building wall, over rubble and drifts of time-laundered garbage tossed down from high windows long ago, when the building and block swarmed with noisy life. “Let’s go in here take a look.”

Ellie-almost alone in the tram as it swept up in moonlight, humming high over the river, rocking slightly as it rode its cable-was able still to smell the breath of the ruined building on her clothes, odors of dank and stinking corridors, rooms, and stairways (pitch black where no police lights shone, lit there only by Keneally’s tiny pencil flash), their walls ripped and smashed as if by bulky animals raging blind. -The building had reminded her of the building in the fire, and made her nervous, so that Nardone and Keneally, sensing it, had climbed closer to her on the stairs, walked alongside through endless butchered corridors, many written on along their walls, painted with names, swastikas, yard-long curved knives, blue stars, huge initials as elaborately doubled and shaded as any on subway cars, and-these revealed only for an instant, Keneally flicking the slight light aside—outlined naked girls half a wall high, their knees spread wide, their gaping vulvas in fine detail, their faces a single swift and empty circle.

They had, after some time, found the room where Classman’s TV had been discovered. Two patrolmen were there on hands and knees, searching by work light for anything else….

Ellie stood by a tram window, aching behind her knees, and searched the black water beneath for the moon’s reflection. She couldn’t find it-as if the river (the estuary) had tugged the reflection underwater to join the bony wreckage of small ships, tugs and barges, the tatters of long-dead gangsters streaming slowly above rotting chunks of cement. She thought of a nighttime painting, to match the day’s—the river by night, in the night, throughout the night, carrying dark ships on darker tidesthe moonlight threading through in zinc white and silver, streams of light flowing through and under wider streams of darkness. The moon rolling above, drinking its own light … endlessly drunk with its light, giving none of it to the surface of the river. Giving light only to the streams beneath … like veins of silver through a mine of coal.

Philip Murtagh had once told Ellie, in his life class at the Art Students League long ago, “You have a nice feeling for color, Miss Whatever-Your-Name-Is—but you can’t draw worth a damn.” Ellie, fresh down from Sarah Lawrence, waiting tables at Sorrento, had been unable to disbelieve him.

She took the bus from the tram station for its short, circling ride—only three other people on it-and got off at her stop, in front of the travel agency.

t g it Mayo didn’t meet her a her apartment door. Closin i behind her, locking it, Ellie heard regular, spaced, soft thumpings from the bedroom, as if two very entle peo 9 pie were making love. She put her purse down beside the hall phone, went into the bedroom, turned on the light, and saw the Siamese at his infrequent game of leaping from the floor up onto the bed, scratching hastily one or twice at an already damaged and mended place on the blue bedspread … whirling and leaping with a thump down to the floor-then jumping back up on the bed at once to scratch again at that particular spot, only for an instant. Then down to the floor again….

“Pussy smells pussy,” Clara had said of this performance-adding that Mayo, male though neutered, felt something missing, scented nearly that something in the 9 female odor on the sheets. -The -Romans, Clara had said in her humming voice—standing at the time in her bathrobe beside Ellie at the bedroom door-had been able to train leopards to have sex with women captives, criminals, Christians. The women—she said—sometimes spoiled for human intercourse thereafter. Haunting the cages … filthy … smeared with periodical blood. Prostituting themselves to the trainers to be allowed nights in the narrow, pitch-black, stinking dens.-To lie on their backs on wet stone paving in the dark, anticipatory, their legs up, up and back, spread wide to pose themselves properly for the great restless padding cats, smelling’ like them, of piss and blood. -Or, crouched on all fours in the other fashion, their faces pressed down amid ruined meat, feeling first in darkness the hot breath at their presented buttocks-then, if he were pleased, the rough and painful surface of his tongue, abrading, cleaning their asses, their swollen, troubled sexes, preparatory to a sudden and shocking mount (great claws barely extended, lightly, lightly hooking at their ribs … a narrow roiling weight as den-se as bronze, fur-cushioned, bearing upon their backs) from which pain and pleasure came tearing themselves apart, and later joined together.

Roman men and women would pay money, Clara said at the time, lightly stroking the back of Ellie’s neck as they watched the Siamese … would pay money to come down to those cellars beneath the arena, late at night (after parties, perhaps) to stand in the dark, masturbating, listening to the cries of any such woman as the beast seized upon her, and her beast seized upon itself.

Clara had spanked Ellie the night she told that story, and Ellie-though enraged the day after-had then, hot, lain still, taken her spanking, and done Clara favors afterward. . . .

She plucked Mayo off the bed, took him-hanging suspended from her hand, inanimate, staring at nothing as he was carried by-and dropped him in the hall, where he marched away toward the kitchen, commencing to cry for his dinner.

Ellie undressed, stood naked at her closet for a while, considering what to wear in the morning-it would have to do for Connecticut, then for Classman’s funeral in the afternoon-and decided on a dark blue suit, blue shoes, white blouse, blue tie. -Her civilian uniform, she thought of it. She made sure she had one blouse out and cleanthe other, she knew, was at the dry cleaners-and thought of buying a third, maybe on Wednesday, if she could get off early enough for shopping. A blouse, and another skirt. -If they didn’t get more cases loaded on. -I believe you ‘ people have some things to do. . . . Anderson, unpleasantlooking even more handsome, angry.

What if she hadn’t gotten up and gone out of the office that time he’d touched her cheery? What then? Ellie thought of him standing beside her chair, after she stayed still while he stroked her-stand in a. and reaching down very casually to unzip himself, to iach in and open his underwear, tug himself out, show himself-to see what she would do.

Ellie’s breasts were tender when she touched them, walking to the bathroom; she thought her period might be coming a day or two early-she felt a slight discomfort, a mild full ache under her belly. Felt tired.

Too tired for a bath. She ran the shower, dialed the water onlV

lukewarm, and stepped under the near needle spray, turing slowly left, then right, her arms up to let it lave her, almost stinging at her underarms, her nipples.

She soaped quickly, rinsed-not making the water hotter-then wet her hair, soaked it, bent to pick up her shampoo (Seedling Pine), squirted a little into her palm, and massaged it into her hair with both hands, content under the hissing water, under the obedient attentions of her fingers.

Ellie shampooed twice, and rinsed very thoroughly, wringing her long blond hair out, stripping the water from the length of it through gentle fists. She dried herself, then gathered her hair up under her towel before stepping out onto the bathroom carpet, picking up her dryer at the side of the sink. Standing naked at her mirror, watching herself with no affection, Ellie found her big red comb in the top drawer under the counter, unwrapped the towel, and commenced to dry her hair, absorbed by the soft roar of the dryer, the repetitive motions of her right arm as she combed and combed fine fluttering white-blond under its heated breath. Could see her scalp occasionally, in swift pale pink lines as her hair wafted this way and that, lifted, and fell over. More delicate hair than it had been, easier to break . . . split ends. No longer a girl’s careless, shining, supple fur.

Ellie supposed if she didn’t have a child soon-she wouldn’t have one at all.

Her hair finally dry, five small drops of baby oil gently brushed into it, Ellie sat and shit a small, brown, roughskinned snake into the toilet bowl, wiped, then flushed it away, stood, and washed her hands.

She picked her warm maroon winter bathrobe from the bedroom closet, then went to the hall, moved the thermostat to extra-cool-to enjoy being cozy in coolness and checked her answering machine. There were three calls-one from her dentist’s office about a nearly due appointment for cleaning; one from a woman named Janet Ahearn, a friend of Clara’s whom Ellie’d met a few times; and one from Lennie Spears-“Just checking up on you, honey. . . . You O.K.?”

“Thanks a lot,” she said to his voice, “-you son-of-abitch. II Ellie stood leaning against the wall-listening to Mayo complaining in the kitchen-and called her mother.

Gordon answered, and Ellie was nice to him, asked how the real estate business was going in Buffalo, asked if he was taking his insulin.

-Business was not bad at all he said, and he hoped to go on oral, though his doctor, Sonnenburg, was skeptical.