Ten Little New Yorkers (10 page)

I
n a sense, we were just doing legwork, picking up pieces of the puzzle that the cops and the hard-boiled computer might have missed. Realistically, we were not much closer to solving the case or identifying the killer than we had been before, but there was a certain degree of promise that had presented itself. If the cops had missed Celeste, what else might they have overlooked? The NYPD had the means and the manpower, all right, but they were far from infallible. I was fairly sure by now that the abusive husband or boyfriend angle would hold up with the fifth murder victim as, indeed, it had with the other four. Five out of five would undeniably provide a motive for this maniacal murder spree. And a motive was as good a place to start as any.

I decided not to lecture Ratso on his bedside manner during interviews. He was pumped about the success of the Celeste Rossetti visit, and, to be perfectly candid, I was a little surprised as well at how easily it had all come to pass. We didn't really have to check out the scene of the one remaining victim, but I figured we were on a roll. This was the most recent victim, the guy in Chelsea that the cops had found with a knitting needle rammed up his nose and into his brain. There was no doubt in my mind that we would find something dark and sinister lurking in this victim's background. But as things transpired, even I was a bit blindsided by what we were soon to discover.

It was late afternoon by the time we got down to Chelsea, with Ratso very much wanting to stop for a lunch break in Chinatown. I told him we'd make quick work of the fifth guy's crime scene, provided we could even get into the building. Then we'd go to Chinatown and plot our next amusement. This building looked very similar to all the others on the street. You wouldn't have thought that less than a week had gone by since a guy had had a knitting needle jammed into his head on these very premises. But sometimes, in little, almost undetectable ways, the crime stays with the scene.

We were in luck with this one as well. The guy's name was right there on the buzzer: Jordan Skelton. 6E. We didn't know if anyone would be answering, of course. Could be new occupants already. Could be the ghost of a man with a knitting needle in his medulla oblongata. Could be nobody home. You roll the dice and you play it as it lays. I pushed the buzzer. Nothing happened. I pushed it again. We waited a few moments and I pushed it a third time. Nothing. So I pushed all the buzzers in the building. A moment later, the door buzzed open.

We ankled it into the lobby only to discover that the building's one elevator was out of order. So Ratso and I legged it up to the sixth floor by which time we began to truly understand from whence the term “legwork” had derived. Perhaps, I thought, we should've called this one in from the deli. On the other hand, a good little private investigator leaves no detail unexplored, no witness uninterviewed, no road untaken. Sometimes you pursue the investigation; sometimes the investigation appears to pursue you. Either circumstance, of course, can often be extremely tedious.

Finding Jordan Skelton's previous place of residence was no problem. We walked down the deserted hallway to 6E. No signs of activity. No police crime scene gift-wrappings. We knocked on the door. No sounds from within the apartment. No one answered the door. No sounds in the hallway at all, actually, except Ratso carping in my ear about
now
going to Chinatown. That could well have been the end of it, no doubt, but the Lord commanded me to persist in my knocking upon just another one of heaven's doors. I listened again, more closely this time, and I knew I'd either been blessed or cursed by the ancient God of the Hebrews. Time would tell, of course. In the meantime, I could definitely hear muffled sounds within the apartment.

“Yes?” said a tentative female voice. “Who is it?”

“It's Richard and Larry,” I said. “Friends of Jordan. Just wanted to come by and see if there was anything we could do. Can we come in?”

The sounds of a chain being removed from a door. The door opens. A grieving, ghostly, strawberry blonde puts her beautiful head into the hallway. No makeup. Nothing left but guts and glory.

“I didn't know Jordan had any friends,” she said.

“Boys' club,” I said. “He probably wouldn't have mentioned it.”

“You know,” Ratso interjected, “hockey, poker, pickup basketball games, occasional bowling nights?”

“That doesn't sound like Jordan,” she said. I felt like shoving a knitting needle into Ratso's brain.

“Sometimes we don't know everything about even the people we think we know best,” I said. “What's your name?”

“Heather,” she said, leaving the door open for us to follow her back into the room. “Heather Lay.”

She walked with shapely grace, a trim little figure, like a bird imbued with the God-given certainty that it could fly safely through the storm. We followed her into the living room and sat down on the sofa.

“You're the only visitors I've had since the police were here,” she said, stating simple fact. “So make yourselves comfortable.”

So the cops had interviewed her, apparently, and Jordan Skelton's background was still a question mark at best, at least as far as the hard-boiled computer was concerned. Heather Lay was smart, you could tell that. Smart and brave and strong. I found myself admiring what I saw as her ability to embody Churchill's credo: “When you're going through hell, keep going.” But, no doubt, it's easier said than done.

“I'll tell you what I'm going to do,” said Heather. “I'm going to make us all some tea.”

“Don't bother,” I said. “We just—”

“It's no trouble,” she said. “In fact, I think I'd like to do it. You both seem very nice. And I'd like to hear about Jordan.”

Ratso rolled his eyes almost in sight of the woman and when she went into the kitchen he made a vaguely masturbatory gesture with his hand. I had to agree that this could present a bit of a problem. Should we level with the poor woman, I wondered, and risk losing her confidence? Or should we simply continue to fake it, after the fashion that most of us have followed for most of our adult lives? Honesty may be the best policy, but when in doubt, always fake it, and that's exactly what we planned to do. Get Heather to talk about Jordan and, we hoped, she wouldn't notice that we wouldn't have known the guy if we'd stepped on him—which was no longer possible, of course, because he was six feet under. That was the plan, anyway, and it almost worked.

Things rocked along for the next ten minutes or so, with Heather coming in and out of the kitchen, still remarking on the things she never knew about Jordan, and Ratso, warming to the new role as Jordan's friend, tossing out little crumbs to the grieving girlfriend. Finally, he seemed to be getting so dangerously out on a limb that I felt it was time to intercede. I pointed out the fact that just as there were many things Heather didn't know about her late boyfriend, there were probably a few things Larry and Richard didn't know about him as well. Maybe she could tell us about the other side of Jordan Skelton? This, I hoped, would have the dual effect of getting Ratso to pull his lips together and prodding Heather to open up.

“Jordan was always being misunderstood,” she said. “He really was a genius, but he was always getting fired from jobs. He worked so hard, but his bosses never appreciated it. He tried everything, poor baby. Nobody ever gave him a real chance. His family didn't. His former wife didn't. He thought everybody was against him. He just never had any luck. He tried so hard, poor baby.”

It has long been my theory that women who use the phrase “poor baby” about their men don't really know their men very well. Also, Heather was reciting her lines about the dearly departed almost like a Stepford wife. She had to know better. When she brought me a cup of tea I got a good close look at the face of an angel. Her eyes seemed to be waiting to sparkle. Yet her words had been those of the typical abused woman in denial about the true nature of her man. She was smart, soulful, beautiful, and every native instinct I had in stock told me she'd been knocked around pretty badly by this guy. Why did scumbags, to borrow a common term of Rambam's, so often seem to wind up with wonderful women like Heather? I wondered. Was it just something in the nature of woman? Or was it just something in the nature of man?

“But back to your questions about Jordan's ‘other side'—hell, I don't know,” said Heather ruefully, as we all sipped at our tea. “I've been trying to pull my head out of my ass for two years now, so the truth is, I don't know which side was up.”

The remark certainly brought the tea party to attention. To me it indicated a toughness and awareness in Heather that she'd no doubt had to park at the door for much of her relationship with the scumbag. Yet it was those very qualities that had kept her from becoming a totally broken woman, that would soon, hopefully, help her mend and get on with her life.

“I take this to mean,” I said, “that he did cause you physical harm?”

Heather, whom I now observed had beautiful freckles, fixed me with a look that somehow managed to make eye contact with my soul. She was clearly, and not unpleasantly, I thought, taking the measure of the man. The man, of course, being me. It felt surprisingly good to be focused upon by Heather. How could a woman like this ever fall for such a scumbag?

“I take that to mean,” she said, “that you weren't really Jordan's friends?”

“No,” I said, for once not having to fake sincerity. “We're
your
friends.”

I don't remember the small talk, if any, that occurred after that. She collected the tea cups and saucers like a little girl playing house. At some point I gave her my card, stopping just short, I believe, of begging her to call me. At the door, she started to shake hands, then ended up hugging both of us, an unexpected move that surprised Ratso, and surprised me even more because it almost brought a tear to my eye.

As we headed down the mountain of stairwells, farther and farther from Heather Lay, Ratso and I did not speak. Neither of us, in fact, said a word until we were out on the street. All the way down, we had been in our own little worlds, as if leaving a synagogue or church after a wedding, or a bone orchard after a funeral. For all I knew, Ratso had been reflecting upon Chinatown. For my part, I had been reflecting upon what it might take to put the sparkle back in Heather Lay's eyes.

“Do you think she'll call?” Ratso said at last.

“I doubt it,” I said. “Too proud.”

“What I want to know,” said Ratso, “is how a woman that proud could let herself become abused?”

“The same way,” I said, “that a brave man can let himself become afraid.”

T
he days went by like gypsy moths; the nights like lazy fireflies. There was a measure of easement in my soul and I attributed that to having met Heather Lay. Not that I ever expected to see her or her glorious freckles again, but merely the knowledge that someone like her was in this world, waiting atop six flights of stairs and a broken elevator, seemed to give my crazy existence all the affirmation it needed. Now I was not just burning the candle at both its ends; now in the waxy countenance of that imaginary candle there was something I'd never really seen before: a flicker of hope.

I felt with some certitude that Heather, though she didn't cop to it in so many words, was an abused woman. She had seemed to me like a diamond in the rough, and the rough, I suspected, had really been rough. Maybe what I saw in her was the raw, noble humanity that was left after everything else had been stripped away. As Oscar Wilde had said, “What fire doesn't destroy, it hardens.” And yet, she wasn't hard. She was a woman who had flowered into a beautiful, doomed bloom of what Nelson Algren had called “achieved innocence.” Not the innocence a baby is born with, or a young child often naturally possesses, but the innocence of a woman who's probably had the shit beaten out of her many times, not to mention the more subtle and often more deadly soul-grinding experiences that are endemic in an abusive relationship. The courageous innocence of a woman who's lost a bad man she loved, and must continue to go on living. And if Heather could do it, after all the heartaches and disappointments and tragedies that life had sent her way—if Heather could do it, so could I.

So throw another Jew on the fire. Warm your hands replete with the broken fingers of life. When all the innocence you were born with is gone, what is left, my friend, is always worth keeping.

Hell, I thought, as I sipped a hot espresso one morning in the brittle sunlight that slanted in from the kitchen window, I wish the cat were here to talk to. What a great conversationalist she was! Never argued. Never really listened except with her heart. Never pretended to be interested when she wasn't. Never said a fucking thing. People could learn a lot from cats. They could probably learn a lot from dung beetles, too. If you thought about it, we were all novices at life, and we rarely became more experienced with experience. Or maybe we do become more experienced, but we rarely become more wise. I was wise enough, however, to finally realize that the cat was in a better place. Whether it was some distant garbage can or across the rainbow bridge, I knew she'd landed on her feet. Now it was my turn to do the same.

I plucked an Epicure Number 2 out of Sherlock's head, lopped the butt off with a facileness wrought by years of practice, and prepared for ignition. Striking a kitchen match deftly upon my strides, I fired her up. Hell, I was so good at it I could've done it in my sleep if it weren't for the obvious fire hazard. I leaned back in the chair and started to blow the smoke up toward the lesbian dance class until I realized that it wasn't there. Fuck me dead, mate. There were a lot of things that weren't there anymore. The years had gone by like young women sliding over my face.

This was the nature of the worldly and unworldly thoughts I was thinking when I was interrupted by the ringing of the two red telephones. I took a few existential puffs on the cigar, then collared the blower on the left.

“Start talkin',” I said.

“MIT! MIT! MIT!”

“To whom am I speaking?”

Obviously, it was McGovern. Obviously, there was a problem of some sort. I took another patient puff on my cigar.

“Are you sitting down?” he asked.

“No. I'm hanging upside-down from my inversion table. What's so fucking important?”

“I just thought you'd like to know that the killer's confessed.”