The Hard Way (2 page)

With the back of her coat wet and the snow still coming down, Eunice just wanted out of there. Not any of these, she thought. Not the soldier either. Time to move on. But the soldier was talking to Lookout again. What was it with this man? Eunice lifted the stick and poked Eddie in the chest.

“Don't touch him,” she said. “He bites.”

The soldier, Eddie, threw up his hands, as if Eunice had pointed a gun at him instead of a stick. “I just thought…,” he said, but then he stopped, the look on Eunice's face closing his mouth for him and that's when the wind picked up and even though she didn't want to, Eunice began to picture a brick fireplace, a fire going, something warm to eat, a hot shower, a bed with clean sheets.
But then Eddie began flapping his lips again. Was there no stopping this man, no matter what you did?

“Go away,” she told him. “I don't want your help.”

But Eddie stepped closer. “You in Iraq, too?” he asked her. “You look familiar.” He shook his head, the way Lookout did, shaking off the snow. “The VA Hospital, in Brooklyn?” He pulled his cap off, a watch cap like Eunice's, only in khaki, his hair blond, his face as smooth as a boy's. Hell, he
was
just a boy as far as Eunice could tell.

“Do I look familiar?” he asked her. “Do you recognize me?”

“No,” Eunice shouted, knowing the whole thing was on the verge of going straight to hell, knowing it was time to get away, something squeezing her heart, something that felt like fear. She took a step back from the soldier and then another, waving the stick between them, as if she were a conductor and he were the orchestra. “Just go away,” she told him. “Do you hear me?”

Maybe he hadn't heard, because he didn't go away. He just stood there with his hands at his sides, his fingers twitching, saying nothing.

“If you won't go away, then stay here. Or go there,” pointing west, “just leave me out of it. I don't need your help. I don't want your charity. I have him,” pointing to Lookout now, “and that's all I need.”

She threw the stick into the street and turned away, Lookout following her as she headed in another direction, not the one Eddie had pointed to, not the one where Eddie wanted to show her a place to sleep in the snow, wanting to share what little he had with her. It was life or death and Eunice knew it. She had to get away from the soldier. She had to move before he started to follow her, before he even thought about following her.

She looked behind her only once, the soldier not there, and head down, she continued walking until she got to the wrought-iron gate on West Tenth Street, where she dug her hand into her pocket and pulled out a set of keys, opened the gate and walked into the tunnel made by the town houses on either side, one of
them reaching over the top of the walkway toward the other, Eunice finally out of the snow, watching the dog as he ran ahead into the snow-filled garden at the other end of the tunnel, disappearing off to the right. Eunice stayed put, leaning against the wall opposite the mailboxes, her eyes closed. It was quiet in the tunnel. She could stay there a long time, protected from the weather, safe, someplace where the soldier would never think to look, not in a million years. She took a deep breath and reached into her pocket a second time, took out a cell phone, flipped it open, pushed a few buttons and read the name of the last caller.

I leaned against the wall
opposite the mailboxes and closed my eyes. It was quiet in the tunnel, still cold but out of the snow. Dashiell had run ahead into the garden. I stayed right where I was, pulling off the dirty cap, the frayed scarf, the torn gloves, safe at home now, never, ever even
thinking
out of character until I was.

I'd concocted Eunice that first day, buying the old coat at the Salvation Army thrift shop, using the sneakers I'd worn when I'd painted my office, unraveling the ends of the fingers on an old pair of woolen gloves and digging under the snow for some loose dirt in the garden, rubbing it into my watch cap and old scarf. But the wardrobe, the stick, that was only the beginning. I needed a name, a cover story, a background. I needed to smell right, walk right, speak right. Most important, I needed to think right. Otherwise I might answer to the wrong name. Or not have a smooth answer for a telling question. I might give it all away with a gesture, a grimace, the wrong gait. One small slip was all it would take and I might end up as dead as my client's father.

 

It had started
like any other case. There was always a death, always grieving, always the hope that, in the end, I'd be able to answer the questions I'd been asked. Who did this? Why did they do it?

It had been snowing that day, too, the day she'd called me. It was the first snow of winter, tiny flakes that came down almost too evenly to be real, not sticking when they hit the pavement. Dashiell, my pit bull, and I had just come back from his last walk of the day and I was pulling off my boots when the phone rang.

“I can't sleep,” she'd said, not the first time a call for help started that way.

I understood the problem. There'd been a lot to stay up and worry about for the past few years. But Eleanor wasn't staying awake worrying about terrorism, about the war in Iraq. What was bothering her was something private, pain the rest of humanity didn't share with her.

“I can't stand the idea that the man who killed my father is still out there, that he could kill again.”

“Can you tell me more?” I'd asked, taking the stairs two at a time to the second bedroom I used as an office, pulling over a pad and a pen.

“You probably saw it in the paper,” she said. “He was on his way home from work and he was pushed onto the subway tracks as the train came barreling into the station.”

“Gardner Redstone,” I said, recalling the article. “I'm so sorry for your loss.”

“So are the police. But…”

“They haven't been able to find the man?”

“No, they haven't.”

“A homeless man, as I recall.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Described by witnesses.”

She snorted into the phone. “Yes. He was. I'll tell you all about that when we meet,” not waiting to see if I'd agree to help her, a lady who was used to getting what she wanted, at least when what she wanted was something money could buy.

I met her at her shop the following morning, GR Leather, on West Fourteenth Street, the new mecca of conspicuous consump
tion. I listened to the click of Eleanor's heels on the white marble floor as she led me to the stairway in back and up to her office on the second floor, facing north, looking over the art galleries, trendy restaurants and other chichi clothing stores that had replaced most of the wholesale meatpacking industry that had occupied the area between Gansevoort Street and West Fourteenth Street for as long as anyone could remember.

She sat behind a brushed-steel table that served as her desk, a well-put-together lady in her forties, designer suit, classic, tailored, stunning, probably Armani, the right jewelry, everything just so, even her ash blond hair, not blond and rumpled like the soldier's, blond from a bottle and not a strand out of place.

“He was on his way home from work,” she said, “an ordinary day.”

I was sitting across from her in a butter-colored leather chair, although I was sure there was a more expensive description of the color than lowly butter. Dashiell was lying next to my chair on the white wall-to-wall, carpeting so thick I almost felt I might lose my balance crossing the room.

“He took the subway. It was a point of honor with him.”

“Meaning?”

“That this,” her manicured hand indicating the office, including, I was sure, the lucrative shop beneath it, whatever was above it as well, “didn't change who he was.”

Good one, I thought, wondering if poor people ever said that, that their tacky surroundings, their trailer, their empty beer cans, the car up on blocks or the tiny, dark apartment in a bad neighborhood, the one with the view of an air shaft and the pile of unpaid bills on the kitchen counter didn't change who they were.

“He started out forty-two years ago,” she said, “making handbags, well-designed, good-quality leather bags that he sold to upscale department stores. His first shop was on Madison Avenue, then another on Fifth, then Soho where he expanded his line, adding jackets and coats. And five years ago, he…”

Eleanor stopped, but she didn't take her eyes off me. I didn't
take mine off her. All that perfection on the outside? Didn't it often signify something less lovely lurking beneath? Just what that was would be one of the things I might be finding out in the weeks to come, whether I was looking for it or not.

“For years and years,” she continued, whatever she'd been feeling the moment before safely stowed away again, “the work and the hours were long. He did well, but it was nothing like it is today, young people spending a thousand dollars for what is virtually a silk T-shirt, nearly that for a pair of shoes, five thousand for a leather coat they want to replace the following year because it's last season's.”

“The world's gone mad.”

She didn't comment. What would she have said? The particular madness she'd just described had made her a very rich woman.

“There were witnesses,” I said.

“Yes.” She swiveled her chair around and picked up some papers from the low shelf behind her.

“Only seven people of the estimated forty to fifty who had been nearby on the platform during rush hour claimed to have seen the crime,” she said, “but luckily, all seven were able to describe the man who'd done the pushing in great detail.”

“Oh.” Wondering, in that case, why the police had been unsuccessful in finding the man, an answer I would have soon enough.

“Marilyn Chernow said he was a tall man with light hair, hair that might have been bleached by the unrelenting summer sun, and that he was husky, not fat exactly, certainly not obese, but not thin either, perhaps a little heavier than average, she'd said, and fit enough to run away immediately after he'd committed the crime. Which is what he did, disappearing into the swarm of hot, sweaty commuters trying to get home after work with as little engagement with their fellow humans as possible.”

I heard paper rustle as she turned to the next page of her notes. Despite the fact that she glanced at them from time to time, I had the feeling she could have recited the facts in her sleep. I was mak
ing some notes of my own, and looked down at what I had written as I waited for her to continue.

“Yes, here it is,” she said. “Eleven of the people interviewed, in fact, said they'd been reading the paper and hadn't seen anything, not until they heard screaming, not until a tall, short, fat, thin, black, white man shoved by them running up the stairs, toward the front of the train, across the platform where he jumped onto the local that was just about to pull out of the station, and by then all they remember seeing was the express train and a lot of people with hands over their mouths and one woman crying and a kid holding a hat, his face the color of skim milk.

“The kid, that would be Dustin Ens, who had turned twelve just two weeks earlier.” She looked up to see if I was listening, finding me as attentive as a dog begging for a share of his master's dinner. “He said he thought the man was six three, maybe taller, as tall as a basketball player. Except he was, ‘like white.' He'd had a cap pulled down over his head so that you couldn't see the color of his hair and Dustin told the police he remembered wondering why, thinking maybe he was bald from chemo the way his mother had been for the last year and a half of her life, only her cap had fake hair attached to it, long bangs in the front that covered the place her eyebrows used to be and a fringe in the back, just an inch or so, more the color of an overripe banana than the color his mother's hair had been before it all fell out. ‘Maybe he was angry that he was sick and that's why he pushed the man,' Dustin had suggested.

“Lucille DiNardo said the man who did the pushing was ‘black, African American, whatever the hell you're supposed to say now,' noting that she, for one, had no idea. ‘He had a wild beard,' she said, ‘and he was wearing gloves, gloves, in that awful triple-H weather we'd been having, you'd have to be crazy.' She remembered looking at them, leather or fake leather, but she couldn't tell without touching them and, ‘Lord knows, no one wanted to touch a homeless man's gloves what with where those hands might have been,' and she remembered thinking, ‘What kind of a nut wears gloves in all
this heat?' And also that she was glad he wasn't standing that close to her because even from two people away, she thought she could smell him.

“Elizabeth Mindell said he was big, that he stood head and shoulders above the crowd, a man of about forty to fifty, really thin, as if he hadn't eaten much for a long, long time and that he had a tattoo on his left hand, in that soft place between the thumb and the forefinger, but she wasn't close enough to see what it was, a bird maybe, or a weapon of some sort, or maybe a heart with initials in it. She thought he was of ‘mixed heritage, maybe a black father and a white mother. Or the other way around.'”

Once again, Eleanor stopped to look at me, perhaps to see if I understood what I was up against. Then she checked the notes again before continuing.

“She said when he ran he knocked into her, knocked her shoulder bag right off her shoulder, which is what you get when you don't put the strap across your chest, and that she thought for a minute that he'd taken it, that pushing the man with the attaché case in front of the oncoming train had been a diversion to steal her bag, but then she saw it on the ground, just to the right of her right foot.

“Claire Ackerman always read the paper on the platform, ‘to avoid unnecessary eye contact.' But she'd looked up when she heard the train in the tunnel. ‘That's when I saw him,' she told the police, ‘Mr. Redstone, poor man, flying through the air, almost pausing in midair,' she'd said, ‘or maybe it was like when you're scared and everything seems to slow down?' She thought he jumped at first, but then she saw the homeless man running, coming toward her, and she thought she'd die on the spot, his face right in front of hers for a moment, ‘small, light eyes, barely blue, steely looking, a bulbous nose, thin lips, a big chin, not as big as Jay Leno's, but bigger than average. Tall,' she said, ‘and muscular, too, as if he worked out at a gym, but that wouldn't be possible, would it? Unless he did that before he'd become homeless. He could have lifted the man and thrown him, for God's sake. But they said it was a push, right?'

“Missy Barnes had her cat with her in a carrier and, she said, he'd hissed at the cat. She'd stepped back, to get away from him. ‘It could have been me,' she said, ‘if I hadn't moved away.' She didn't remember how tall he was because when he was hissing at Bette, her Abyssinian, he was bending, so that the cat could see his face. He had on a batik shirt, she thought, something African, and his skin was so dark, it was almost black. And shiny, but maybe that was sweat, it being so hot out and so hot in the station, too. Or he might have been sweating because of what he was planning to do.' Then she seemed to have a change of heart. ‘Maybe he was just trying to get a little space in front of him,' she told the detective who was interviewing her, ‘a little air. Maybe he didn't mean to push that man off the platform. And maybe they didn't have pet cats where he came from,' she'd told the police. ‘Maybe that's why he'd hissed at Bette, because he was afraid. People do all kinds of things when they're afraid,' she'd said.

“Willy Williams had given the homeless man a swipe, paying for his subway ride. ‘I heard this saying once,' he told one of the detectives, ‘no good deed goes unpunished. Maybe I hadn't done that, maybe that white guy, he'd still be alive.' Willy, one would think, because he saw the homeless man and even interacted with him before all the hysteria began, should have been the best witness as to the question of the race of the person the police were looking for and would fail to find during the ensuing three months before they informed me they were accepting failure, but that didn't turn out to be the case,” Eleanor said, her voice brittle, ready to crack.

“When the police asked him about that directly, Mr. Williams said, ‘Man, I just don't know. Maybe I just saw him standing by the turnstile with the corner of my eye, you know what I mean? He was a big guy, you dig, and maybe when I looked, I was eye to eye with his shirt buttons. Or maybe I never really looked and just offered him the swipe because he was standing there, not going down to the trains. I figured, maybe he didn't have the bread to pay for his own ride. Maybe he had someplace he had to be. I mean,
it's their card, the company I deliver for, so it was no big thing and I guess I just didn't pay all that much attention.' When asked what kind of drugs he used, Willy had shrugged and moved his head slowly in a circle, as if he had a stiff neck and said, ‘Let's not even go there. What is it with you people, you see a black man, you figure I'm using while I'm working? Man, I'm here to help you out, and what's on your mind? You're wondering, what crime did the brother commit? You got your eye on me despite the fac' I'm here to help, that I volunteered to help y'all do your job. I got nothing more to say.'”