The Night Falconer (12 page)

“Nothing. That’s just it. He was sitting alone on a curb. He looked awful.”

“Homeless?”

“Looked that way. I almost didn’t recognize him.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“I tried to, but he barely seemed to remember me. I asked if there was anything I could do to help and he said no. So I gave him twenty bucks out of my wallet and went and got in my car and drove home.”

“So you’re saying this guy Raines may be wandering around the city and in particular Central Park.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” The beagle shifted on the chair, then jumped into Deebee’s lap. The white-haired man let her stay.

“He say anything to you about falconry or your birds?”

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “But when he looked at the Harris’ hawk I was holding, he got a funny look on his face.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Just seemed to me he was angry about something.”

“You think there’s any chance he might be our man with the owl?”

Deebee shrugged. “Stranger things have happened,” he said.

13

A hour later, Darla and I were seated in the mini-van outside the entrance to Dominic Watisi’s Bedford Hills estate. Darla was right. The man had built himself a personal fortress. A ten foot brick wall ringed the entire acreage. On top was an unbroken row of black, wrought iron spear tips; and if that weren’t enough to keep the curious at bay, discreetly sheltered video cameras monitored every inch of the wall.

“See what I mean,” Darla said.

“I do.”

Just inside the front gate, a bearded, middle eastern man dressed in a security uniform regarded us with suspicion from inside a brick booth.

“You want to try to storm the front gate?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“At least now you know where the man lives.”

“There is that.”

By the time we made it back to the city, the Fourth of July was bursting into full swing. A couple of softball games had heated up in Morningside Park to go with the throngs of morning bikers, joggers, and rollerbladers. The bail jumper in White Plains had turned out to be a bust. There was no sign of him at his residence, despite the tip Darla’d been given.

“So what do you want to do about Raines?” I said, pulling the photo from my pocket and twirling it in my fingers as we made our way down the Henry Hudson toward Midtown.

“I think it’s worth checking out,” Barnes said.

“We’ll start asking around.”

“In addition to talking to people about the shooting.”

“Exactly.”

“What about other people in the building at Grayland Tower?”

“Whoever is home, we’ll try to talk to them. And we’ll make some copies of this picture and pass them around the park this afternoon with our business cards.”

“Have at it. It’s a big park and a big town. I spent weeks once looking for a New Jersey runaway before I finally tracked the girl down.”

“Everybody’s running from something, I guess.”

“I suppose. I promised Carl I’d spend the afternoon with him. Maybe tonight after the fireworks I can help you guys case the park.”

“Sure,” I said.

We passed a black church on Frederick Douglas Boulevard, worshipers spilling out its doors.

“You religious at all, Frank?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Sometimes? What kind of an answer is that?”

“An honest one, I hope.”

As we waited for the light to turn green, a group of well-dressed parishioners—men, women, and children—moved across the street in front of us.

“I used to be religious,” she said. “My father was a preacher. I ever tell you that?”

“No. He still alive?”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “He died from a stroke four years ago. But Dad was a preacher all right. At one time his church had over three-hundred members.”

“No kidding.”

“Sometimes I think the problem with religion isn’t God, it’s the people.”

“Amen to that.”

“Dad used to always say that Jesus was alive and that his holy spirit could come and live inside us if we believed. You think that could be true?”

“Your dad sounds like a very wise man.”

“I don’t know. After a day like yesterday, it’s hard to tell where anything sorts out.”

The light turned green and we continued on down the avenue.

Ten minutes later, she dropped me off in front of Grayland Tower, where she’d picked me up just after sunrise.

“See you back here at eight,” she said. “I’ll keep my mobile turned on in case anybody needs me.”

“You bet.”

I nodded to the lone guard at the reception desk—Jayani Miller must have had the day off—and rode the elevator upstairs to find Nicole in the dining room of the apartment. A Sunday Times was spread out on the table in front of her, and she was eating a bagel and cream cheese. She didn’t look up as I came into the room.

“You get my note?” I asked.

“I got it.” She took another nibble of her bagel, her eyes glued to the newspaper.

“You aren’t mad, are you?”

“What do you think? Of course I’m pissed off.”

“Why?”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“I thought we agreed you wanted to sleep in.”

“I never agreed to that.”

“Plus I thought you could use the sleep more than chasing after some curmudgeonly old falconer who might not even be home.”

“Was he home?”

“Yes.”

“Was he curmudgeonly?”

“No. Not really.”

“There you go, then. You should have woken me up.”

I stepped around and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

“I’m not a teenager anymore. I can do without sleep.”

“You’re right. How are the bagels?”

“There are some more in the bag in the kitchen if you want one.”

“You pick them up down the street?”

“Yeah, and I did a little more than that.”

“What?”

“I took the keys to the Porsche and drove uptown.”

“You what?”

She flipped to the next page in the newspaper. “Talked to the mother of one of last night’s shooting victims and to the sister of the other one. There’s a story here in the paper about the killings, but it doesn’t really tell us much.”

“Now wait just one minute.”

“You didn’t expect me to sit around here in the apartment while you were out working, did you?”

I glared at her for a moment. Brilliant, at times, she had as much of a nose for this thing as I did. Who was I to try to rein her in? Just her father, trying to keep her from getting her beautiful face shot off.

“Next time you don’t go without backup,” I said.

“Hey, it was just background work on a Sunday morning. No one there was going to hurt me.”

“What did you find out?” I could envision Nicole, in her tactful, feminine way, holding the hand of the aggrieved.

“That these two kids were into some serious goings-on.”

“Not just hangers-on with Los Miembros then?”

“Nope. These two were players.”

“In what way?”

“Mansuela’s mother said her son was flashing around a lot of money lately, and that he always seemed to have a different girl with him. Fraser had just bought a new bullet bike, according to his sister.”

“Maybe they hit a major score and someone wanted it back. Were the two of them friends?”

“Not really. The mother said she’d never heard of Damon Hicks before but Louis never really talked much about his friends anymore.”

“I don’t suppose either the mother or the sister knows anything about our mysterious falconer either.”

“No. I hinted around a little and asked some open-ended open questions, but they genuinely didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”

“Okay. So can where can we go from here with what you’ve learned?”

“The brother.”

“What brother?”

“Hicks has an older brother too. Never involved in the gangs, the sister said, but he knows stuff.”

“Where do we find him?”

“At the sister’s place on Lenox Terrace near Harlem Hospital. He was supposed to be coming over there for a big dinner party cookout later, but the plans have been changed with Damon’s shooting. Now it’s just going to be family.”

“A private wake.”

“Something like that.”

“And the sister’s okay with us crashing this intimate get-together?”

Nicole nodded. “I’ve got an appointment for seven. She says she’ll talk to him first, make sure he knows we’re okay.”

“Nice work.”

“One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“She hasn’t told the cops much of this stuff. Doesn’t trust them.”

“But she trusts you, after one conversation.”

“I’m good, aren’t I?” She smiled and gave a bow.

I shook my head. “All right,” I said. “We’ll keep pursuing what you’ve got so far on Los Miembros. In the meantime…” I casually pulled the photo from the back pocket of my jeans and tossed it so it landed face up on the table next to her.

“What’s this?”

“That,” I said. “Is how we’re going to spend some of our afternoon.”

* * * * *

Even with the holiday, we found a copy center on Fifth Avenue that opened at noon. Nicole charmed the young man behind the counter into letting her tweak the image quality controls on the computerized color copier and we managed to crop the image to eliminate the bird and print out several halfway decent copies of the head shot on plain paper.

At Nicole’s insistence, we divided the stack in half and headed off in opposite directions around Grayland Tower and the park, planning to meet up a couple of hours later to compare notes.

The day had become a scorcher. The sun seemed lost in the bright brown haze above. My first stop was the taxi stand on the corner of 110
^th
Street. It being a Sunday and the Fourth of July, business was slower than usual. Several dozen cabs were lined up behind one another in the sun. A group of drivers of varying ethnicities stood beneath the shade of a canopy, talking. A few glanced in my direction as I approached.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for a man who might be living in this area on the street.” I held up a copy of Raines’s photo. “His name is Cato Raines. Any of you gentlemen happen to recognize him?”

Shaking heads all around.

“Why don’t you check out the Piscataway Hotel on 116
^th
Street?” one man said. “They house some of the homeless over there.”

He gave me the exact address and I thanked him.

It wasn’t that far away. Since I was on foot, I would have to pass through the projects between 112
^th
and 115
^th
Streets, but it was a good lead.

The brick rectangular high rises loomed over the sidewalk, where people were milling about. Some kind of festival, probably related to the Fourth, was taking place on the promenade. The only evidence of birds of prey I witnessed were a couple of barrio brothers clearly interested in sizing me up for the taking as I moved around a corner and past their darkened doorway where the crowd had thinned. I would be too much work, they must have decided.

The Piscataway hotel was an ancient establishment with crumbling stucco outside and crumbling plaster in the lobby. In its heyday ninety years before it might have been a decent place to stay. Now, the city’s department of homeless services paid the entrepreneur owners thirty dollars per room per night to temporarily shelter homeless families. Or so I learned from the old copy of a New York Post framed on the wall in the lobby.

I really didn’t think Raines would be living in such a place. First of all, if my information was correct, he didn’t sound like the type to register with the department of homeless services. Second, Raines struck me as a loner. It was the height of summer and the weather was a lot more conducive to sleeping outdoors, where he probably preferred to be anyway.

Still, someone in the Piscataway Hotel might have come across Raines and recognize his picture.

I spent the next half hour canvassing the building, from the sharp-eyed but inarticulate desk clerk in the overcooled lobby to the elderly woman wearing footed pajamas in her sweltering corner room on the top floor. No one remembered seeing Raines. No one seemed to have heard of him.

Okay, by last count there were anywhere from thirty to forty thousand homeless people in and around New York City. Even if I was in Raines’s neighborhood, it still made finding him cold like this a gargantuan task.

Outside on the street, the heat was building to a mid-afternoon crescendo. Cars and buses and cabs plied the streets. Diesel smoke perfumed the air. What would I do if I were Cato Raines on a day like today? I wouldn’t be sitting in some fleabag hotel, that was for sure.

I’d be out enjoying the park.

A few minutes later I was walking along 110
^th
Street again across from the Harlem Meer. Nicole was planning to go down as far as the Reservoir and work her way back north along the west edge of the park. I would enter the park from this end and work my way down the Eastern side, looking for anyone who might recognize Raines.

The old black man was the fourth homeless person I talked to. He didn’t seem inclined to say anything at first, or even look at the photocopy I showed him, but a much higher quality image of Andrew Jackson began to loosen his tongue.

Reed thin, he had a modest crop of curly hair that had turned yellow gray, thick eyebrows, and an unruly tangle of beard the same color and consistency as his hair. A pair of wiry gold hoops pierced through the corner of one his brows. His old coveralls were torn and dirty, but he looked otherwise presentable.

“Raines, you say?”

He repeated the name and stared at the grainy photo I was flashing.

“Yeah. Cato Raines. You know him?”

“I know him,” he said. “But he don’t call himself no Cato Raines.”

“What does he call himself then?”

“Pock.”

“Come again?”

“Pock. Dude calls himself Pock, short for Pocket. Cause he’s short, I guess, and he’s good at relieving people of some of their change, you know what I mean.”