Nightbird Page 10

  “Was that the extent of your relationship with her?”

  “Va-va-va-voom,” Wacky said, shaking his little hands in front of his chest. “I only wish our relationship had an extent. The lady was stacked. She looked like Judy Tyler, remember her? In Pipe Dream, Shubert Theatre, 1955. Stacked like her. Judy was Princess Summerfall Winterspring on the Howdy Doody show. Poor dear was killed in a car crash the year after Pipe Dream closed. Bill Johnson, the male lead, died of a heart attack the same year. Strange co-inky-dink, don’t you think?”

  Wacky arched his dyed eyebrows and gave a half turn.

  “I know what she looked like,” Danny said. He decided he’d better be more specific. “Did you hear any rumors about Gillian doing drugs?”

  “I heard she was partying hardy. Some days she growled, some days she glowed.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “On the street, here and there,” Wacky said. “Speaking of Mary Martin. South Pacific, 1949. Wash that man right outta my hair.” He smiled and aped the hair-washing motion. “She was supposed to use a bar of soap, but the soap wouldn’t lather fast enough. So they sent me out to buy shampoo. I bought Prell.”

  “Were people surprised she took her own life?” Danny said.

  “Mary Martin?” Wacky said, eyebrows ascending.

  “Gillian Stone,” Danny said.

  “Ooo, shocked,” he said. “Disbelief not suspended. She was a star in the making.”

  “But you heard nothing specific about drugs?” Danny said.

  “Not my area of expertise,” he said.

  “What do you know about Trey Winters?”

  “Did a turn in Barefoot in the Park, 1983. Espresso drinker, lousy tipper. At that time I had to schlep up to Sixth Avenue to get espresso. Marousek’s Deli. It’s gone now. They moved to Florida. And please tell Detective Ryan, please, pretty please, take a look over near the TKTS booth. Charlatans are selling pilfered tickets before the booth opens. Ripping people off and giving the theater a bad name. I told Mid-Town North, but they have bigger fish, apparently.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Danny said. “Were there any rumors of a romance between Gillian and Winters?”

  “Whispers, whispers, whispers,” Wacky hissed, baring his chewed-off fingernails.

  “What were they saying?”

  “The man is a swordsman,” he said, pulling an imaginary rapier from his waistband. “Like Errol Flynn, he’s always in.”

  “Anything more specific you can tell me about Winters?” Danny wanted to address him by name but felt funny calling him Wacky.

  “Looks nine, talent three, class zero,” Wacky said. “Mark it down. Without the wife’s money he’d be working the ticket window. The only thing show biz about him was his Ethel Merman temper.”

  “What about his temper?”

  “Kate Hepburn wouldn’t put up with his shit. Threw him out of a run-through for Coco. Mark Hellinger Theatre, 1969.”

  “Threw him out why?”

  “Late, he was always late. Union rules state you must be in the theater thirty minutes before curtain. Then she caught him bragging about his summer stock turn as Macbeth. Kate said he knew less about the theater than Clive Barnes’s cat.”

  “What does that have to do with his temper?”

  “It’s bad luck to say the name ‘Macbeth’ backstage.”

  “But what does that have to do with his temper?” Danny said. “Wacky, listen to me. I really want to know what makes Trey Winters tick today, not twenty years ago.”

  “Women make him tick, young, pretty ones.”

  “Any current girlfriends?”

  “Not since Gillian.” He made a gesture with his hands like a wobbly aircraft fluttering to the ground.

  “You have any proof they were having an affair? Did you see anything? Or know anyone who saw anything?”

  “There is one witness,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Paul Klass.”

  “Paul Klass is dead.”

  “Don’t remind me. AIDS, the plague. Empty chairs and empty tables. Empty apartments. Empty theaters.”

  Wacky rocked back and forth; Danny figured he was acting out a ticking clock. “What does Paul Klass have to do with anything?” he asked.

  Wacky spun around, his eyes wide, incredulous. “One of the greatest people in the history of Broadway. Choreographer, performer, director. God rest his talented soul.”

  “With this case,” Danny said. “What does he have to do with this case?”

  “Paul Klass was pretty-boy Winters’s mentor when he arrived here from Wyoming or Kansas. One of those big square states.”

  “And he witnessed Gillian’s death?”

  “His ghost saw it all. That was his apartment, eighteen-K. Paul Klass owned that apartment before Winters. He died there and tears flowed into the street. His spirit haunts that apartment, and the Morosco. Maybe the Royale.”

  “I’m confused,” Danny said.

  “So was everyone else,” Wacky said. “No one knows what he saw in Trey Winters. I think he didn’t have the heart to tell him he lacked talent. Too nice a man. No balls. His one failing.”

  He rolled his eyes in a complete circle, then pointed to Vasili’s Shoe Repair. The window was filled with dozens of autographed pictures of stars. Sly Stallone… “To Sam, my pal, thanks for everything.” Liza Minnelli, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, Katharine Hepburn, all apparently counted themselves in Sam’s circle of close friends. Danny couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a shoemaker’s shop. He wondered why movie stars seemed to have more problems with their footwear than the average citizen.

  “Kate Hepburn,” Wacky said. “She has balls. One night she stopped the opening number of Coco and threw a woman out of the audience, a paying customer who took a picture of her entrance. Then she made them start the show all over again.”

  “Wacky,” Danny said, pointing to his watch, “it’s been marvelous, but I’m due back on the planet Earth.”

  Danny’s Groucho Marx voice was humming the theme to Twilight Zone.

  “Would it make it easier if I told you how Winters got into the building unseen?” Wacky said.

  “The ghost of Paul Klass beamed him up?”

  “Funny, but nooo… through the back door. I saw him do it a few weeks ago.”

  “Cops checked the back door,” Danny said. “It’s through the basement, and it was locked.”

  “I bet they didn’t check the old back door,” Wacky said, again displaying his exaggerated eyebrow arch. “Remember March 23, 1982?”

  “I was in grade school that day,” Danny said. “That whole year, in fact.”

  “Blackest day in the history of Broadway,” Wacky said, clapping his hand over his heart. “Five theaters torn down. The Morosco, the Astor, the Victoria, the Bijou, and the Helen Hayes. We were all there, swaying, arm in arm. Like the barricade scene in Les Miz. We sang ‘God Bless America’ and ‘Give My Regards to Broadway.’ Voices of angels. And people in your uncle’s profession arrested Colleen Dewhurst, Estelle Parsons—”

  “What about the old back door?”

  Wacky seemed annoyed at being stopped from ticking off the entire list of those arrested. He spun around twice, then drummed on his coin changer.

  “The old stars,” he said. “The ones who built this street. Before the no-talent pretty faces and the bean counters. They had a back door from the Broadway Arms into the alley behind these theaters.”

  “I bet they closed it up when they built the Merrimac Hotel,” Danny said.

  “You’d be wrong,” Wacky said.

  In his lifetime Wacky Walzak had seen more minutes of live theater than any human being. Every show on Broadway for half a century. But according to Anthony Ryan he’d never seen a single play beginning to end in one sitting. He’d catch the first act of this, the last act of that. He was antsy now, his Air Jordans wanting to fly down the boulevard.

  “I have other eggs to fry,” Wacky said, and fe
igned illness. “A television actor yelled at me, believe it? A regular soap opera Barrymore.”

  “We’ll talk again, when you have more time,” Danny said.

  “Any day except Sunday,” Wacky said. “I never work Sundays.”

  “Never on Sunday?” Danny said, smiling.

  “I don’t work on Sundays,” he said. “But I do have sex on Sunday.”

  And then, like a cellulite Peter Pan, he exited across Fifty-first Street without so much as a single curtain call.

  17

  By the time Ryan left Stella Grasso and crossed the hall to apartment 18K, Joe Gregory’s hands were already under the dress. He squeezed her hips tightly as he waited for the breeze to wane. Gently he leaned forward until her thighs touched the rail, with her light brown feet still atop the woolen hassock. He took a burlesque bite at her ass. Then, on cue from below, he let gravity take the upper body, and the 109-pound hand-sewn canvas likeness of Gillian Stone tumbled eighteen stories into the center of a huge air mattress surrounded by Emergency Services cops and a few hundred gawkers.

  “If this was an Olympic event,” Gregory said, “that would be a gold medal half-gainer.”

  The air mattress had been placed at the curb. A red sheet, cut to the exact dimensions of the roof of a 1984 Ford Econoline, had been taped to the top of the mattress in the exact spot occupied by the van registered to the Times Square Ark of Salvation. The mannequin scored a bull’s-eye.

  “This is what they should do here on New Year’s Eve, instead of dropping the ball,” suggested one of the Crime Scene techs. “A falling blonde has much more inherent drama than a lighted ball.”

  “I’ll call Dick Clark,” Gregory said. “Maybe he can sign Madonna for the millennium.”

  Down below, autos and pedestrians held up for the doll drop resumed the traffic dance. Emergency Services cops hauled the mannequin from the heaving air mattress and commenced the deflation process. On the balcony of the eighteenth floor cops from Crime Scene Unit filed back into the apartment to finish the room-by-room search. Anthony Ryan walked toward the door.

  “Don’t go away mad,” Joe Gregory said.

  “Who’s mad?” Ryan said. “I’m going down to the car to get a couple of DD fives. Write up the interview I did this morning with the woman across the hall.”

  Ryan filled Gregory in on his earlier canvass of the Broadway Arms, including his talk with Stella Grasso. He recounted how Ms. Grasso observed Trey Winters using the stairs on a regular basis to sneak up to Gillian’s apartment. Tap-tap-tapping on her apartment door. But on Tuesday night, during the eleven-fifteen P.M. weather report, he didn’t use the stairs. And he was angry. Bang-bang-banging.

  “I never doubted he was lying about screwing her,” Gregory said. “But I definitely don’t see his coming here pissed off as a major contradiction. He told us he was pissed.”

  “No, he said he was coming up here to smooth things out.”

  “Maybe he intended to come here peacefully, but when he heard her voice on the phone he knew she was sloshed. Got himself worked up on the way over. Still, pally, the guy went home.”

  The heavy slap of wooden police barriers being thrown into an open truck echoed throughout the canyon. The rolling lights around the ITT building predicted a high of ninety-three, a low of seventy, slightly less humid.

  “What the hell is it going to take to convince you, anyway?” Gregory said, gesturing down. “Didn’t that help?”

  “That test? That didn’t prove anything.”

  “Come on, pally. It proves she wasn’t tossed off. You saw me. I let her fall under her own weight.”

  “We proved that’s exactly what happened,” Ryan said. “I believe that test. I don’t think it was a big shove, maybe not a shove at all. But somebody did this to her.”

  “Like a guru, you mean? Hypnotized her.”

  “Anything is possible.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Gregory said.

  Detective Armand Coletti rumbled across the white Berber carpet and appeared in the open terrace doorway. The partners ended their conversation; their disagreements were their private business. Under his breath Gregory said, “Speaking of gurus.”

  Coletti was the rotund poster boy of the Crime Scene Unit. Always on the news with information on the latest big case. Within the whispered world of cops he was known more for his dress than his expertise. White linen suits and Borsolino hats. The terrace trembled when his full weight settled on it.

  “We’re wrapping it up,” he said, looking over the rail. “We found traces of a substance that appears to be resin on her ballet shoes. We got a few prints, a coupla fibers. Nothing to get excited about. Nothing from the balcony at all.”

  “Anything in the safe?” Ryan said.

  Detectives had found a small built-in safe in the closet. Ryan called Trey Winters, who declined to come to the apartment but gave him the combination over the phone.

  “Empty, except forrrr,” Coletti said, as if expecting a drum-roll. “A little Bolivian marching powder.”

  “The safe was locked,” Ryan said. “I doubt Gillian knew the combination. The coke could have been there for years.”

  “Ko-kane is ko-kane to me. It’s your job to find out who, where, and when.”

  “How do you know it’s cocaine?” Ryan said.

  Coletti held up a plastic bag. Inside was a small tube from a test kit. It looked as though it had been tie-dyed dark blue. Positive for coke.

  “Remind me why we hate him, Joe,” Ryan said, turning to his partner.

  “We don’t hate Armand, pally. We hate his brother, Louie. Armand we just don’t care for.”

  “Who the fuck are you two to hate anybody? Two old fucks hanging on by the skin of your teeth.”

  Ryan grabbed Coletti by the tie and yanked him forward, pulling his face over the rail. Opaque panels shook like cheap windows in a storm. A button flew off the tech man’s shirt, pinged off the rail, and sailed into space.

  “See down there, Armand?” Ryan said. “A girl named Gillian fell from here. Could’ve been your wife, your sister, your daughter. That’s how you should be thinking. Of Gillian. Now I want you to wait for the bloodwork from the lab before you go shooting off your mouth to the press. Allow Gillian that much dignity.”

  “My partner’s talking to you,” Gregory said. The ITT sign reported, “Yanks 11–Whitesox 3, Martinez is one-man show, hits two homers.” “He can’t answer when you’re choking him, pally.”

  “We don’t want to read this in the paper,” Ryan said, releasing his hold on the chunky technician.

  “You’re fucking nuts, you two,” Coletti said, readjusting his tie and collar. He waddled away quickly, up the step into the apartment.

  “You gotta relax here, pally,” Gregory said. “You’re starting to scare me.”

  “He needed that, Joe. It’ll make him a better person.”

  “I think Armand’s just become the Coletti who hates us. And we can’t hate Louie no more, he’s gonna be handicapped.”

  “That’s right, his lifelong dream,” Ryan said.

  Armand’s older brother, Lou Coletti, was the kind of sleazy and underhanded cop who wasn’t aware how sleazy he was. He was the kind of cop that cops talked about among themselves but never mentioned to any civilian. Lou Coletti was a useless cop whose only goal in the police department was to acquire a line-of-duty injury so he could retire on three-quarters pay, tax-free, for the rest of his life. It was no secret. Louie said it was like winning the lottery. But he wanted the perfect injury, one that wouldn’t interfere with his lifestyle or cause him any pain.

  Louie’s first attempt was a back injury from a minor radio car accident. He spent a fortune in orthopedists, but his attempt failed. Then he tried to get out on the heart bill, citing all the pressure from a six-month stint in Narcotics. But it backfired. Word was, he took so many stress tests on the treadmills of a dozen heart specialists that he inadvertently worked himself into fairly decent shape. Rejecte
d again, Louie was bitterly disappointed, swore he was going to give up the chase.

  But about a month ago Gregory saw Louie in headquarters. He said he’d just been transferred to the outdoor pistol firing range. Innocently Gregory asked him why the hell he wanted that assignment. Louie put his hand up to his ear and yelled, “To get deaf, Joey. To get deaf.”

  As they left the apartment, Gregory kept repeating the line in Louie Coletti’s gravelly Brooklynese. He had Ryan smiling despite himself. He was still smiling when he opened the apartment door and ran into Danny Eumont.

  “You taking us to lunch?” Gregory said.

  “I’m taking you to the basement,” Danny replied.

  18

  Winters knew about this entrance,” Anthony Ryan said, his voice echoing. “No doubt in my mind.”

  The door Wacky Walzak had described to Danny led to a twelve-by-twelve outdoor space between the Broadway Arms and the Merrimac Hotel. Cluttered and claustrophobic, it was like being at the base of four sheer cliffs. Most of the ground space was occupied by generators, electrical boxes, and other metal containers that hid the mystery machines that made skyscrapers work. An immense aluminum air-conditioning duct, wide enough to be an on-ramp to the Jersey Turnpike, curved across the ground and up. The airspace above their heads ended in blue sky.

  “Didn’t that woman across the hall tell you Winters used the elevator the night of the murder?” Gregory said.

  “Right, and he made a big show of it. Talking to the doorman on the way out.”

  “So he leaves Gillian, says hello to the doorman to set up the alibis. Then sneaks back, climbs seventeen stories.”

  “No, maybe this is where the Scorza connection comes in. Anyone could come through that service door in the Merrimac Hotel and get into the Broadway Arms this way”

  “Provided it was open,” Gregory said.

  “It was open just now,” Ryan said.

  The three of them were standing at the foot of the metal stairs leading up to an entrance to the Broadway Arms known only to air-conditioning mechanics and a dozen living Ziegfeld girls. Cigarette butts, crushed Styrofoam cups, and soda and beer cans littered the concrete. On the other side of the courtyard was a back entrance to the Merrimac Hotel.