Nightbird (14 page)

“Shh,” Danny said, pointing up.

Whispering, Gregory said, “You’re the guy who’s always preaching to put yourself in everybody’s shoes. What I figure, when
I get in Winters’s shoes, is that he isn’t stupid enough to try to dump her by creating this whole scenario. This is a guy
who’s convinced he’s slick. He’d find a different way, a simpler, safer way. Buy her off, something like that. Not freaking
kill her.”

Ryan stepped back. Danny knew he was thinking hard by the way his eyes moved. All his life he’d watched his uncle think things
through as if he were reading a scroll, his eyes moving up and down. Then Gregory whispered to Ryan, so low that Danny could
hardly hear it.

“I ain’t against you here,” Gregory said. “I’m just thinking we’re getting real close to stepping on our cocks. Maybe it’s
time we go get a drink and talk about it. All this whispering is making me thirsty.”

I don’t know about the drugs,” Danny said. “But I don’t think she committed suicide. And I think Winters is in on this. If
he didn’t do it himself, he hired somebody.”

“We need to find the connection between Scorza and Winters,” Ryan said.

“Send Danny Boy over to the Orifice Lounge.”

“Orpheus, Joe,” Ryan said. “It’s the Orpheus Lounge.”

“It should be Orifice,” Gregory said. “Let Danny go in and ask them about the correct pronunciation. He can ask around how
Scorza and Winters know each other.”

A pair of pigeons fluttered above their heads, then disappeared into an immense metal air duct.

“No, we’ll deal with Scorza,” Ryan said.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to,” Danny said. “Just let me know.”

“See if you can find out why you never see any baby pigeons,” Gregory said. “I’ve lived in this city all my life, never saw
a single baby pigeon.”

“Now it’s time for that drink,” Ryan said.

L
ater that evening Danny Eumont experienced an epiphany in Morley’s Bar. It happened when Leigh Ryan walked in. She paused
in the doorway, looking for him. All his life Danny had heard people talk about her beauty; he finally understood. She wore
a simple white blouse, open at the neck, and a black rayon skirt covered with gray orchids. She stood there against the window,
in the bar’s smoky haze. The light of the setting sun behind her. Aunt Leigh. Elegant and glowing.

“You act as if you don’t recognize me,” she said. “You probably don’t. It’s been what, months?”

“More like weeks. I figured I’d see you on the boat ride Sunday night.”

“Oh, I have to come to Manhattan to see you, is that it? Now you’re a big magazine writer, too good for our raggedy old neighborhood.”

Leigh Ryan had a natural beauty. Her face was the sum of perfect, even features, big brown eyes, and a man-killer smile. She
even seemed to be turning age into an asset. That stunning, silver hair.

“So are you all packed for the desert?” she said. “Toothbrush, clean underwear?”

“Who needs that stuff? It’s an overnighter, out and back. I’m just going for the funeral. I’ll be home Sunday.”

Morley’s Bar was a place Danny had visited every Sunday after church since he was an infant. Then called the Emerald Isle,
it dominated the top of a green mount called Hog’s Hill in a residential section of the old industrial city. But, sick and
dying were the three-story wooden frame buildings that had housed Irish immigrants since the turn of the century. The Irish,
many from County Waterford on Ireland’s rocky east coast, walked directly from ship’s steerage to this hill, carrying everything
they owned. A few decades later their sons and daughters drove away in BMWs.

“Do you know any of Gillian’s family?” she said.

“I met her half-sister, Faye, a few times. That’s it.”

They sat at a table opposite the horseshoe bar, both comfortable up front. Aunt Leigh waved to Billy Harrington, the bartender,
who told her he thought it was a movie star coming through the door. Deuce Doran, a high school pal of Anthony Ryan’s, asked
where her reprobate husband was. Almost all the stools were inhabited by men whom his uncle had grown up with. The bulk of
them were alumni of Gorton or Sacred Heart High School.

“So tell me everything,” she said. “Any new girlfriends?”

“You kidding? I hardly have time to visit my sainted mother and my glamorous aunt.”

“Oh, my God. You’ve become a first-class Irish bullshitter. There must be something in the water up on this hill.”

Danny wondered why Aunt Leigh had asked him to meet her in Morley’s. It wasn’t to discuss his love life. He was sure she knew
all about the parts of that he was willing to make public.

“I can’t imagine a handsome man like you doesn’t have the girls falling all over him.”

“Oh, I’m a babe magnet. I attract nuts, and I bolt.”

Aunt Leigh approached touchy subjects cautiously, like a cat stalking a bird. He figured this came from her southern background.
She was the exact opposite of the blunt, cut-to-the-chase New York women he knew. He preferred the forthright New York approach.
Say it, get it over with.

“Your mom is a little worried about you, Danny.”

“Tell her not to worry, Aunt Leigh. I’m fine.”

“Just like your uncle. He keeps telling me he’s fine.”

“I am fine, honest.”

“Your mom thinks you were more in love with Gillian Stone than you’d like to admit.”

“I was, but I’ve had six months to get over it.”

Leigh ordered the potato soup and a salad. Danny took the corned beef on rye, although the waitress was laughing so hard that
she could hardly write. The Blarney Boys were holding court on the other side of the bar, giving an impromptu preview of some
of their new material. The Blarney Boys were a pair of retired Con Ed meter readers who did stand-up Irish comedy in the local
hospitals and nursing homes. Always a captive audience.

“I could understand it if you were upset,” she said. “You had just been with Gillian a few hours before she died.”

“It stirred up some old feelings.”

“She must have had some old feelings herself, Danny. She called you when she was in trouble. Maybe going out to Arizona will
help you reach closure.”

“I have reached closure, Aunt Leigh. This is just something I want to do. Pay my respects to the family. Tell them how much
I thought of her.”

From the corner came the bells and boops of an electronic tote board. Two old-timers tried to outgame each other on the shuffleboard
machine, playing for fifty-cent drafts. The metal puck clickety-clacked over the counters and slammed against the back of
the machine.

“Remember the old shuffleboard?” Leigh said. “The long one? You and your cousin used to play it for hours. Your sweater sleeves
would be covered with sawdust.”

“We had to stand on chairs when we first started playing.”

The old shuffleboard had taken up the length of the room in those days. No electronics, no coins required, just a gentle touch
and the ability to keep score in your head. The sound of voices had dominated the place then, the musical Irish voices, telling
stories and laughing. Some of the old-timers, in their beards and caps, would bet on Rip or Danny, calling them “the lads.”
They’d exhort them in those soft brogues as the green metal puck slid across the endless expanse of hardwood, striking the
red puck with a delicate click.

“I miss Rip’s sense of humor,” Danny said. “God, he could make me laugh.”

“I used to think he got the nickname Rip because he was such a rip. Then I found out about Cal Ripken. I should have known,
all those baseball posters on the wall.”

“The kid was flat-out crazy. Some of the stuff he dreamed up.”

The TV was on, but silent, above Billy Harrington’s head. Those who preferred the company of an idiot box could read the dialogue
on the closed captioning flashing across the screen. Billy said the empty chatter of the TV should not interfere with good
conversation.

“Does your uncle ever talk about Rip?” she said.

“He’s a very private guy, Aunt Leigh.”

“He keeps things bottled up.”

“I’m sure he talks to Joe Gregory. A lot of private exchanges go on between the two of them.”

“You know, I used to be a little jealous of the closeness between them. After all, he’s probably spent more time with Joe
than with me over the past thirty years. But when Rip died… I don’t know what either of us would have done without Joe. And
him just losing a son himself.”

Danny almost started to tell her a story he’d heard Gregory tell. He changed his mind; it was not for her ears. One St. Patrick’s
Day during their heavy drinking years the two of them hooked up with a midget in a Kelly green dress. They toured their old
haunts, drinking free as the tiny raucous woman they called their leprechaun danced her jigs on the bar tops of Manhattan.
True or not, Gregory’s rendition had Ryan laughing out loud.

“A few months after Gregory’s son died,” Danny said, “I asked him how he was doing. He says, ‘You pick yourself up, dust yourself
off, and get back in the race.’ I know Uncle Anthony loves him and all, but you have to wonder about a guy whose entire philosophy
of life is spelled out in Sinatra songs.”

Aunt Leigh laughed. Gregory seemed to have that ability to make them laugh. At least he’s good for something, Danny thought.

“It’s a wonderful thing for men to have close friends,” Leigh said. “I can remember you and Rip on the phone for hours, talking
about this girl and that girl.”

“He thought he was the Ann Landers of Yonkers. But we talked about a lot of other things. Things just between us.”

“Who do you talk to now, Danny?”

Danny shrugged and looked out through the Guinness sign in the window. The area around Morley’s had changed since Danny was
a boy. Now blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners squeezed into the sad former digs of the McSpedons, the McGeans,
the Sullivans, and the Coughlins, whose aging children returned to Morley’s Bar every now and then to reminisce about their
childhood in the last outpost of the endangered Irish hilltopper.

“I used to tell Gillian all those old stories,” he said. “About Rip. Crazy stuff we did when we were kids.”

“Was she easy to talk to?”

“Oh, Christ, yes. I could say anything to her. Anything. That was the great thing about her. No pretensions. I could run around
unshaven, in my underwear.”

“It’s nice, that kind of relationship, isn’t it.”

Danny pushed his glass around in circles. The truth was, that kind of relationship scared the hell out of him. He didn’t know
whether he was the type of man who could handle the forever part of it. One person for the rest of your life. They become
your life. His uncle always said the price of love is grief. Maybe the price was too steep for him.

“I keep thinking that maybe I missed something that night, Aunt Leigh. Maybe there was some way I could have prevented all
this. Maybe she was trying to tell me something. A cry for help, I don’t know. And there I am all wrapped up in my act, showing
off the wonderfulness of myself.”

“If Gillian asked for your help that night, you would have heard it. She didn’t. Go to Arizona, then put it all behind you.”

“I’d just hate to think…”

“Hate to think what?” she said.

“Skip it.”

“You are nothing like your father, if that’s what you were going to say. Nothing at all, believe me.”

They ate mostly in silence, exchanging bits and pieces of news and local gossip. Who married who, who was divorcing who. They
didn’t talk about death again.

T
wo candles flickered in the tiny apartment of Faye Boudreau. She led Anthony Ryan down the darkened hall as their shadows
swarmed over the walls. It was six in the evening on Friday, and she wore an old black slip, the lace top frazzled, the material
translucent from wear. The room was warm. It smelled sickly sweet, like decaying fruit.

“Your air-conditioning broken?” Ryan said.

“I got chilled with it on.”

“Open a window.”

“I don’t like the windows open. Not in this city.”

Ryan noticed that the clock on the microwave was the only evidence of electricity in the room. The air conditioner had to
have been off for hours.

“I hoped you’d come,” she said. Her face was puffy; it looked as though she’d been crying.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like caca,” she said.

As his eyes adjusted, he watched her stop short, just before the unmade bed.

“I’m thirsty,” she said, going back into the kitchenette. “Want something cold to drink?”

He could feel the heat off her body as she squeezed past him. A can of Café Bustelo sat on the kitchen counter.

“I want to go over your last conversation with Gillian,” Ryan said.

“Why are you still doing this?”

“I thought you’d want to find out the truth.”

“She’s dead. That’s the truth.”

Faye took two bottles of Corona from the refrigerator and placed them on the counter. She held the door open with one leg
while she searched for an opener. The stretch to the refrigerator door flexed the muscles in her thighs. Black silk clung
to the curves of her ass.

“I know it’s not easy,” he said.

“It hurts like hell.”

“But we have to know.”

“So ask God when you see him.”

In the light of the open refrigerator he watched her slice a lime with a bartender’s practiced hand. As she raised her arm
the weight of her breasts shifted within the flimsy black slip.

“We were just talking that night,” she said. “We just talked.”

“Twenty-eight minutes, Faye. You ‘just talked’ for twenty-eight minutes. You told me she was saying crazy things. What kind
of crazy things?”

She pushed the lime slices down into the neck of the bottles and handed one to him. He found the beanbag chair and sat, although
he knew Faye intended for him to sit on the bed, next to her.

“She told me she put her dress on,” Faye said. “The costume. And she had an argument with Mr. Winters, and other shit I don’t
remember.”