Nightbird Page 3

  “Another Latin lover to contend with,” one cop said.

  “That’s the juggler,” the other said. “Thinks he’s God’s gift.”

  The light changed and the juggler moved away gracefully despite the heavy bag. When he reached the center island he found his performing partner sprawled against the statue of George M. Cohan, snoring peacefully in the morning sun. He let the duffel bag slip from his shoulder. The bag contained his juggling props, including three bowling balls, and weighed almost seventy pounds. It hit the sidewalk like a clap of thunder.

  “Bastard,” the man yelped. “What is wrong with you? I thought it was bombs.”

  “Russian bombs, Pinto,” the juggler said, laughing. “Your own people’s bombs. Who else would bomb New York?”

  “Bomb is joke to you?” Pinto, the Russian said, squinting into the sunlight. “Scaring people to heart attack is joke. Everything big joke.”

  Pinto was a baggy pants clown who specialized in magic. Time and vodka had dulled his skills, but he could still work a crowd. His given name was Nickolai Timoshenko. A skin condition, called vitiligo, had earned him the nickname Pinto when he worked the one-ring Mexican circuses. That was where he’d first met the juggler Victor Nuñez, twenty years ago. Only eight years old then, Victor Nuñez was already a vital part of his family’s trapeze act, which was on its way to becoming the premier trapeze act in all the world.

  Victor flattened his back against the cool base of the statue. He shoved Pinto over and they sat shoulder to shoulder in a spot they called the best seat on Broadway.

  “Your head should be examined,” Pinto said, peeking around to check the lines.

  The lines for the TKTS booth behind them were already past the statue of Father Duffy, the doughboy priest. The booth carried half-priced tickets for that day’s non-sold-out theater performances. On matinee days like today they opened at ten A.M. In a few minutes the lines would stretch all the way back to where they sat, back to the statue of the Yankee Doodle Dandy. Hours of waiting, a bored crowd. It was a street performer’s dream.

  “So, last night where was the Mexican stud horse?” Pinto said. “Performing between whose legs?”

  “You wish you were between someone’s legs, you jealous Russkie.”

  “Tell me jealous when I visit you in the AIDS ward. I have enough to worry with living in the same house with you.”

  “If you saw this chica, ooh, baby. You should be jealous.”

  “I should get another roommate, that’s what I should. You chase too much pussy. I boil the forks after you eat.”

  The pair had worked the New York theater district for many years. They knew where to find every back door, open bathroom, free meal, and loose woman in a ten-block radius. They appeared only in the hot months, Memorial Day to Labor Day, then went south. They loved the big city’s money but hated the cold weather, Victor especially. Jack Frost strummed cruel tunes on his arthritic joints.

  “We’ll have a crowd today, my friend,” Pinto said. And the day did look promising: plenty of young, well-dressed Europeans with money to burn. “I can smell the shekels already.”

  “Shut up, Russkie. Don’t talk about work, talk about women.”

  On Wednesdays they did two shows: one for the matinee line, one for the evening ticket seekers. Matinee days were always a strain on Victor Nuñez; he’d hurt tomorrow. But today was different; he could feel the adrenaline rush, an excitement that had nothing to do with juggling. He needed to calm down.

  Victor closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. The sun was important to him; his bronzed skin made him stand out in any crowd. Every day he rubbed baby oil into his face. A man needed lubrication to keep his skin young. Especially a man who worshiped the sun. And getting sun in this city was not an easy task. A bare sliver of morning sun sliced between the buildings. Noon was the best time, when the sun stood directly overhead. Two hours either way and the narrow floor of the canyon turned dark enough for vampires. In front of them a steady stream of tourists crossed the small concrete island that separated Broadway from Seventh Avenue.

  “We need the bucks today,” Pinto said. “To pay the blood money in the parking lot.”

  “Why do you bring the stupid car? Take the subway. Leave the car in the Bronx.”

  “With this bag to carry? Besides, too many spics in the subway.”

  Pinto had his own bag of props containing the tools of prestidigitation. He’d learned his craft in the Moscow Circus, but the lure of easy rubles in con games and the pickpocket trade won him over, and he wound up having to do a disappearing act… to America. For eighteen years he’d plied magic in every flea-bitten circus and side show this side of the Atlantic. At least those desperate enough to hire him.

  Victor’s part of the act ran about twenty-five minutes depending on crowd banter. But banter, as long as it was gentle and funny, established rapport, and that was Pinto’s most valuable contribution. Victor with his dark good looks zeroed in on the ladies. Always the ladies. And that drew more cash than any artistry. On days like today, with the weather warm, Pinto worked the kids, while Victor did his entire routine—the pins, the bowling balls, then finishing with the torches. The bowling balls were the hardest part, ravaging his elbows and shoulders, but fire was the big ending. Guaranteed to open wallets. They liked to finish at the exact moment the ticket booth opened. Moods changed at that moment, people sensed movement, progress, and happy people were generous people.

  “The woman from the Big Apple Circus could come today,” Pinto said.

  “Forget the Big Apple Circus, Pinto. They don’t want us, and I don’t want them. This summer is my last in this city. Finito.”

  “Oh, I forgot. The man with big plans. El patrón, strutting around his fancy restaurant in his white suit. Fucking all the little waitresses.”

  “Silencio, por favor. Your bad breath is making dark clouds.”

  Victor angled his body so he could watch the flow of detectives coming in and out of the Broadway Arms. He could tell the detectives by the way they walked. Cocky little bastards, strutting around as if they owned the city. Pale, paunchy guys in cheap suits, hair sprouting from their ears. Cops didn’t frighten him at all. He’d already buried one in a tropical swamp.

  “Show time,” Pinto said. “Grease the crowd for the star… the Mexican stud horse. Maybe some rich lady is here who will buy restaurant for you. All you have to do is fuck her five times a day. Right, my friend?”

  “Find her and tell her it’s a deal.”

  Victor heard the laughter as Pinto began. He worked the back of the crowd slowly, pretending they weren’t there, like Emmett Kelly sweeping away the spotlight. Then the scarf trick; he blew his nose in the last one. Bodily functions were guaranteed laughs.

  Across the street, cops on the eighteenth floor of the Broadway Arms lined up on the terrace. All doing the same thing: looking down. As if that would somehow reveal the answer. Their heads lined up along the rail like painted coconuts on the cart of a Juarez street vendor. If he had an M-16, he could pick them off one by one. Splat, splat, splat.

  On the sidewalk, under the green canopy of the Broadway Arms, the big red-faced detective flailed his arms at the doorman. Victor wondered where the other one was, the thin one. The one who had climbed onto the roof of the van.

  Victor reached into his bag and took out his performing gloves. Right on top for a change. He pushed his hands into the tight leather fingers. He rolled his shoulders back toward the statue and heard the pop of cartilage. The sounds of his body grew louder every day, crying out to him that enough was enough. The family curse of rheumatoid arthritis had not skipped his generation. But he could sense change in the air, the life he’d dreamed of, a life he could almost taste.

  Opportunity knocked, and he had answered. The days of passing the hat were numbered, days of sunshine promised to be endless. He could pull it off. It was like the trapeze. The critical moment in trapeze was the moment you left the platform. The timing
had to be perfect, and his was flawless. The courage to push off… he’d always had that. Victor Nuñez was fearless. It was the most exhilarating feeling in the world, the rush of danger. Off into the darkness. Without a net. No turning back. He was airborne.

  5

  Everybody in my family sneezes twelve times,” Detective Joe Gregory said, the back of his hand up to his nose. “Exactly twelve. Physically impossible for any of us to quit before twelve sneezes.”

  He was sitting on Gillian Stone’s bed, recovering from sneeze number six, surrounded by delicate lacy bras and French-cut bikini panties in shimmering Jell-O colors.

  “Maybe you’re allergic to perfume,” Danny Eumont said.

  “It ain’t perfume I’m allergic to, kid,” he said. “Trust me on that one.”

  Danny told Gregory the same story he’d told his uncle: the time sequence they were so worried about. Gregory added that the Broadway Arms night doorman said Gillian got out of a cab a little before ten-thirty. They both seemed to think this backed up Danny’s story.

  “Do you still have a key to this place?” Gregory said.

  “I never had a key to this place.”

  Gregory registered sneeze number seven. Ryan excused himself, saying he was going to see what the Crime Scene Unit had done on the terrace. A male uniformed cop from the precinct sat in the living room, reading magazines.

  “You’re sure you never had a key,” Gregory said. “Young stud like you might have so many keys he forgets which is which.”

  “I was never even in this place before. When I was going out with her she lived on the East Side. And I never had a key to that place, either.”

  Danny had overheard Gregory saying that detectives responding from the Mid-Town North Precinct found Gillian’s door locked—dead-bolted. It was one of those locks where the dead bolt could be engaged by a thumb switch from the inside but needed a key to be locked from the outside. Gillian Stone’s house keys had been found in her purse.

  “Who, to your knowledge, might have a key to this place?” Gregory said.

  “Trey Winters, of course.”

  “The squad interviewed him in the precinct this morning. Anybody else?”

  “Maybe her sister, only other one I can think of.”

  “Faye Boudreau,” Gregory said. “One hundred eighty-five East Sixty-fourth Street, apartment three-K.”

  “Gillian’s old apartment. I’ve been in that one.”

  “Faye surrendered a key to detectives at the morgue this morning. What’s your take on the sister? Little wifty, isn’t she?”

  “I met her three or four times,” Danny said, wondering what “wifty” meant. “Hardly opened her mouth. Hello, goodbye.”

  “This morning at Bellevue,” Gregory said, “she came off as a bit of a space cadet. Wouldn’t even set foot in the viewing room. Now we have to wait for the parents to fly in from Arizona to make the official ID.”

  That’s one for my book on cops, Danny Eumont thought. The fact that Joe Gregory found it strange that Faye Boudreau was unable to look at the body of her sister. It was another piece of irrefutable evidence that cops, like the rich, were different from the rest of the world.

  “I gotta tell ya,” Gregory said. “The thing that bothers me about all this is you. Why call you? You say your relationship ended six months ago. Now she’s involved with someone else. But… out of the blue, when she’s upset, she calls you.”

  “I’ve been trying to explain that. The reason she called me… and why she was so upset… was that she was afraid she might be getting dropped from the show. Her producer, Trey Winters, trumped up this phony rumor that she had a substance abuse problem.”

  “So she calls you for a shoulder to cry on.”

  “She couldn’t exactly cry on Trey Winters’s shoulder, could she?”

  My bombshell, Danny thought, and Joe Gregory didn’t even look up. As if he’d heard it all before. He continued to pick his way through her underwear, nonchalantly, enjoying it.

  “Still seems strange,” Gregory said, “she calls you. Seems to me she’d have to have a damn good reason to call a boyfriend she dumped six months ago. You think maybe it was because you’re a magazine writer, and she’s thinking—”

  “She didn’t bring that up. I asked her if she wanted me to write a story.”

  “Are you writing this story? Let’s get that out on the table right now.”

  “No, I’m not writing this story,” Danny said. “But you’re missing the point. The point is that there was no drug problem in the first place.”

  “Winters made it all up.”

  “Exactly. That’s what needs to be looked at. Not what happened six months ago.”

  Gregory’s Charlie Chan style of questioning was beginning to get on Danny’s nerves. His uncle had told him that interrogation was becoming a lost art. He said that some detectives got so used to easy cases, or “ground balls,” that they forgot that sometimes they actually had to solve one.

  “According to Winters,” Gregory said, “Gillian’s drug problem has been an ongoing issue for over a month. If so, what set her off last night?”

  “Winters did. He called her last night and insisted she had to be tested by a lab of his choosing.”

  Gregory changed the focus of the questioning to Gillian’s family. Danny told him the little he knew. Gillian was Arizona born and raised. Gillian’s mother, Lynnette, was active in theater groups around their home in Scottsdale. Her father, Evan, was a high-profile investor and developer, known mostly for extravagant shopping malls in the Southwest. On the dresser was a picture of a smiling Evan Stone arm in arm with Barry Goldwater, both wearing cowboy hats and bolo ties.

  “So what’s the bottom line here, Danny? Was she doing drugs or not? Toxicology will eventually settle the issue, but it might take a while.”

  “Let me put it like this: I went with her for almost a year, and we were very close. Very, very close. I’d know if she was doing drugs, believe me.”

  “Then why was she so upset about the test?”

  “Because Winters had her trapped. Once the word got around, no matter what the outcome, her reputation on Broadway would be damaged. People would remember the fact she was tested, not the results.”

  “You buy that?”

  “Yeah. Broadway is a small town.”

  “What kind of shape was she in when she left the bar last night?”

  “She had a buzz going,” Danny said. “A minor buzz.”

  “Slurring her words, according to the bartender. Wobbly on her feet, according to the doorman. After only three drinks.”

  “She only weighed about one oh five. It doesn’t take many drinks at one oh five.”

  “But she was drunk, right?”

  “Maybe she didn’t eat; I don’t know.”

  “See, now that bothers me,” Gregory said, looking up from a stack of Broadway show T-shirts. “She’s someone you care for, and you admit she had half a load on. Yet you didn’t even offer to see her safely home?”

  “See her safely home? What century are you from? For your information, I did ask her if she wanted me to take her home. She said no. End of story.”

  “Number eight,” Joe Gregory said, and sneezed into a camisole.

  Anthony Ryan stood on the terrace, looking down onto Times Square and wondering what it would be like to fall upside down in the wind, your last glimpses of life confined to fleeting glances into the windows of the neighbors below… seventeen sad scenes… a flickering stack of Hopper paintings, subtly hinting that everyone was lonely and desperate, the rest of us only one disappointment away from going off a terrace ourselves.

  A few floors below, a large-winged bird floated in the murky heat. It was odd watching a bird from above. A hawk, maybe. Ryan had read there were hawks in the city. He didn’t know anything about birds. But he did know about his son, who had flown through the canyons of immense western states on nylon wings that failed. He couldn’t stop seeing his son falling through sp
ace, the sound of collision suddenly so catastrophic that the mere thought sucked the breath from him. He clutched the railing as his legs buckled and his knees banged against the opaque panel.

  Ryan had always been terrified of heights, but with the death of his son all fear of death evaporated. What difference did it make? Death will come, sure as shit it will, but we’ll all be together again. How bad is that? He’d lost all patience for people who complained about niggling crap. At night he’d sit in front of the TV and watch people complaining about taxes, traffic, politics, prices, about every stupid thing. How shallow were the lives of these people to get worked up over such inconsequential bullshit. Try losing a child. See what’s important then.

  The hawk flew closer. Ryan spoke his son’s name aloud, and the hawk floated toward him. Anthony Ryan was angry with himself for not having been a better father. But he was comforted by the thought that his son was no longer falling.

  Did you know Trey Winters owns this apartment?” Gregory said.

  “I figured he did,” Danny said. “A lot of the production companies own apartments. They use them to lure big-time stars. It’s a major perk, especially in New York.”

  “But Gillian’s small potatoes in this show. Doesn’t a major perk like this apartment sound a little generous to you?”

  “I know exactly what you’re driving at,” Danny said. “And I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  “Did she actually say they were having an affair?”

  “Not in so many words. But the point I got was that this trumped-up drug charge was Winters’s way of insulating himself from any accusations she might make.”

  “You got all that from ‘not in so many words,’” Gregory said. “Did Gillian tell you that she expected Winters to visit her last night? Here in this apartment?”