Night-Bloom (20 page)

“This is Mooney. I’m still here. Can you tell me what happened?”

Jeffrey Archer’s befogged mind appeared unable to grasp the question.

“Do you know what happened to you, Jeffrey?” Mooney persisted. “Did you see anyone? Anything? Is there anything you want to tell me?”

This time the pause was not quite so long. “Roof,” he muttered. “Roof.”

Mooney leaned forward. “Someone on the roof. You saw someone on the roof?”

Archer’s nod was barely perceptible, but it was there.

“You saw him?”

The nod came once again.

“Could you describe him?”

There was a pause. Archer closed his eyes again. But this time it appeared to Mooney that he was summoning energy for some huge exertion of will. “Mr. Archer? … Jeffrey?” he whispered and restrained the impulse to prod him. “Jeffrey?”

The eyes struggled open again.

“Could you possibly describe him? The man who dropped … who did this?”

To Mooney’s amazement, the young man smiled— a ruined, feeble little grin. The head stirred, or more possibly a breeze from somewhere had rustled faintly the wavy chestnut hair. Mooney heard him mutter something beneath his breath and bent down as if to scoop up the words. “What’s that? I’m sorry … I can’t … I’m afraid I don’t … Angel?” Confused, the detective repeated the word several times, looking for signs of corroboration. “Was that ‘angel’ you said, Jeffrey?”

Again the smile—this time a little more crumpled and depleted.

“Angel,” Mooney pondered and scribbled it into his pad. With a faint gasp he stood erect, closed his pad and tucked it away. “I see from your driver’s license you’re from Evansville, Indiana.”

The head drooped and the frightened eyes closed. “Has your family been notified? Do your people know?”

Once again the eyes opened. This time they were hard. Full of defiance and self-awareness.

“Okay, okay,” Mooney said placatingly. “But sooner or later …”

“No.”

The force behind that word astonished the detective. He waited there, helplessly. He had run out of ideas and now merely rolled his tongue over dry lips. “All right, Jeffrey. You’re the boss.”

Mooney planted his fedora hard on his head and stared gloomily down at Archer. The young man appeared to have finally dropped off. Mooney sighed and switched off the night lamp. For a while he stood quietly in the thickening shadows. A warm orange light glowed in the doorway from the corridor outside. Mooney’s hand rose and stretched tentatively forward. It retracted, then inched forward again, touching at last with the back of his finger the young man’s neck exposed above the lip of the full-length cast that encased him.

Even as Mooney departed the room, still walking on tiptoe so as not to violate the hushed sanctity of convalescence, his eye swept across the back of a squat, drab figure in a brown messenger’s uniform.

He stood at the counter of the reception area, stooping slightly toward the nurse seated there. He was in the process of handing her a tall plant wrapped in cellophane with a bright lavender bow tied gaily round its middle.

The image flitted swiftly across Mooney’s visual field and was quickly gone, supplanted by a host of others swarming through the corridors before him and mingling with his own dark thoughts.

“Boyd,” the messenger at the desk repeated the name to the nurse on duty there. “Mr. A. Boyd.”

“Just that? No other message?”

“That’s all I’ve been given. Just that. Best wishes, Mr. A. Boyd.”

“He’ll know who it’s from then, I take it?”

“I guess so.” The messenger shrugged and trundled off.

“You gotta be crazy.”

“Not crazy. Just dumb to have overlooked something so obvious for so long.”

“But it’s over a year ago.”

“So? They keep records.”

“Not emergency ward activity. Only the regular inpatient, outpatient stuff. You got thousands of people stumbling in and out of emergency wards day and night in this city. Every wino and stumblebum who needs his nose bandaged. Where the hell am I supposed to start?”

“With the Yellow Pages, dummy. Under ‘Hospitals, New York City.’ Start with the night of April 30, 1979. What the hell are you asking me for? You’re a big boy. You’re supposed to know where to start. You wanna be a detective? So go be a detective.”

Michael Defasio stood limp and depleted in his shirt-sleeves. Seated before him like some imperious zoo gorilla, Mooney lorded over a landscape strewn with the husks and rinds of assorted junk foods. With a slow, oddly fastidious motion, he swiped a smear of grease off his fleshy chin.

“You know how many hospitals there are in New York City?” Defasio spoke in a soft, faintly tremulous voice.

Mooney sat back in his seat and extracted a kingsized Hershey bar from the inside pocket of his jacket. “No. Tell me.”

“Probably upward of two hundred. And what about doctors? Have you forgotten all the doctors’ offices in the area of West Forty-ninth Street?”

“We’ll check them after we check the emergency wards.” Mooney stripped the candy bar wrapping with a sharp yank. “Look. I’ll run this thing past you once more. When did the last fatality occur?” Defasio moaned and palmed his forehead. “Oh, Jesus.”

“When?”

“April 30, 1979.”

“Where?”

“At 423 West Forty-ninth. Only six blocks from where Archer got creamed the other night.”

“Marvelous.” Mooney rammed the last half of the bar into his maw. “And the ME told you, only at least a dozen times, that the quantity of blood found at the bottom of the fire escape that night, and out in the alleyway, suggests a fairly serious injury. A possibly severed blood vessel, he said, didn’t he?”

“Yeah? So?”

“So, if you were losing blood fast, where would you head first? The nearest hospital, right? Six’ll get you ten that if it were an artery or something like that, you’d go for a hospital before a private physician’s office. Okay?”

“Okay, okay,” Defasio snapped.

“Easy, easy. Don’t get your hot Latin blood up.”

“So I start by looking for a hospital in the vicinity of 423 West Forty-ninth.”

“Right. You start with the hospitals on the West Side, beginning with the closest to Forty-ninth, going as far north as Seventy-second Street, as far south as Eighth Street, and as far east as the river.” The younger man scowled.

“Now, another point,” Mooney continued. He enjoyed greatly the role of pedagogic browbeater. “How did our Bombardier get to the hospital?”

“Not on foot, if he was that badly injured.”

“Marvelous. But he wasn’t waiting round for no bus either. With all the blood spurting out of him, he probably grabbed the first cab he could get. Not an easy thing to come by in that area, that time of night, with theaters letting out, and what not. But given the emergency, the quantity of blood all over him, he was probably able to commandeer something.”

“So you want me to check the cab companies.”

“Right again, Dick Tracy. Drivers and dispatchers.”

“They keep records of injured fares like that?”

“Right, and moreover, drivers talk. They’d remember picking up a fare covered with blood and rushing him over to a hospital. Even if it was over a year ago.”

Defasio shook his head despairingly. His shoulders bore the slump of defeat.

“One other thing before you go,” Mooney said, pulling from his vest pocket a small ragged swatch of material. “Remember this?”

The young man stared at it blankly. “Sure. It’s the stuff that was found stuck on the fire-escape ladder.”

“Wonderful. And what did the police lab tell us about this ‘stuff,’ as you call it?”

“They said it tore off the guy’s clothes when he jumped from the ladder to the ground. I think they said it was part linen, part …”

“The composition doesn’t interest me,” Mooney snapped. “Where did they say the piece probably came from?”

Momentarily bewildered, Defasio’s jaw dropped open.

“I’ll give you one hint. There were threads still clinging to it and part of a buttonhole.”

“Okay,” Defasio’s face brightened. “I gotcha. They said it looked like it most probably ripped off from the back trouser pocket.”

Mooney’s eyes danced wickedly. “And what does that suggest to you about where our man most probably injured himself?”

“The leg. The thigh.”

“What about the butt, my friend? This guy could have very well torn his ass open on that ladder. So when you tell the emergency wards to look in their files for the night of April 30,1979, what will you tell them to be particularly on the lookout for?”

“Anyone who came in that night with injury to the extremities, especially the legs or butt. Like a deep cut that had to be sewn.”

“I’m astonished by your keenness of mind, Defasio. You’re a regular Nero Wolfe.”

The young man stared back at him bitterly. “Am I glad they turned this investigation over to you, Mooney. What an opportunity to learn under a master. It gives a man something to look forward to every day.”

“I, too, Defasio, am gratified,” Mooney’s eyes glinted wickedly. “It gives me a chance to kick your ass around a little more.”

“Who was Sevrenson?”

“The brother-in-law.”

“Not the same one driving the car?”

“No. That was the brother. The one who was fencing the stuff out of the warehouse in Queens.”

“Bauer?”

“No. For Chrissake. Don’t you listen? Or am I talkin’ to myself. Bauer is not related to these guys. Bauer’s a small-time three-story man who’s never done anything bigger than Class C felonies. Residences. Muggings. Auto theft. Peanut operations. He just happened to fall in with this Sevrenson crowd.”

“And they needed a fall guy?”

“Right. Your classic klutz, if you know what I mean.”

They were driving over the Queensboro Bridge from Queens where Mooney had just successfully closed a two-year investigation on a three-million-dollar-a-year fencing operation in Astoria.

It was slightly past 7:00
P.M.
, and the saw-toothed skyline of the city rose a luminous chalk-white against the indigo dusk of early fall. It was a Friday evening, the beginning of the weekend and just that hour when workers were spilling out onto the street from glass towers, homeward bound. Bars and restaurants had begun to fill. People were unwinding. So was Mooney, expansive, even kindly, in the flush of victory. “I knew I had that son of a bitch nailed the minute I got my hands on that pawn ticket. If he just hadn’t tried to pawn that coat—”

“All the guy hadda do was hold it for a while.”

“That’s just it. They never do. They always need cash, and the minute they’re tapped out, they panic. You got a twelve-grand mink sittin’ round a warehouse collectin’ dust. It’s hot; you wanna unload it, right? So you try the first place you can, right? The fuckin’ pawnshop down the block. Dumb. Just so fuckin’ dumb.”

“Lucky break for you, Mooney.” Defasio drove the unmarked city car with characteristic Italian panache. It was as though he were conducting the Philharmonic. For every one required motion, he would execute four—cocky, swaggering, completely unnecessary. When they stopped at lights, he would eye the ladies in the cars alongside.

“Lucky?” Mooney’s grin faded. “What d’ya mean lucky?”

“I mean the pawn ticket, and all. You just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

“What d’ya mean the right place at the right time? No one told me where that pawn ticket was. I hadda go find it. I hadda drag my can around to fifty different pawnshops in the Astoria, Corona section. I figured it hadda be somewhere in the vicinity, and I was right. No miracles. No luck, Defasio. Simple gumshoe, my friend. Hard work and experience. Right out of the Old School. Not like you, wise ass.”

“Come on, Mooney. Don’t start on me now. I done everything I could, didn’t I?”

“Everything, and still you come up with nothing. Zero. Goose eggs. That can’t be. That don’t wash, my friend. You mean to tell me there’s not a cab dispatcher in this city don’t have a record the night of April 30, 1979, of one of his hacks pickin’ up an injured fare, some guy bleedin’ like a stuck pig all over his back seat?”

“Right.” The younger man’s voice grew shrill. “That’s exactly what I mean. You know as well as I do most hacks won’t file reports on injured passengers ‘cause they know if they do they gotta go to court, or appear before insurance companies. Why the hell should they? It’s a big hassle. Hangs ‘em up a long time. Costs ‘em money. And then their own companies get pissed off with them—‘Oh, you still hung up in court, Smith. That’s tough shit. I’m gonna have to go get someone else to turn your trick!’ So that’s why I got nothin’ to show for talkin’ three weeks to cab companies all over Queens and fuckin’ Manhattan.”