Nightbird Page 4

  “No, she didn’t,” Danny said.

  He was aware that Gregory was staring at him, trying to gauge his reaction. It was surprise. Genuine surprise.

  “Well, he was here,” Gregory said. “Apparently the last person to see her alive.”

  “She didn’t say anything about it to me,” Danny said, and he wondered if it would be too nervy to take out his own notebook. “Maybe he dropped by unexpectedly.”

  “And by the way,” Gregory said, reaching into a dresser drawer, “contrary to your prediction, we found these three nightgowns.”

  “I swear to God, I never saw her wear one before.”

  “Did you know Gillian was the understudy for the role of Maria?”

  “No,” Danny said.

  “I guess she forgot to tell you that, too. Yeah. Actually, what she was wearing when she died was a costume, not a nightgown. It was a dress from the show’s wardrobe, for the ‘I Feel Pretty’ number. A costume Trey Winters brought over last night for her to try on.”

  “I had no idea,” Danny said. “He brought her a costume to try on?”

  “That doesn’t sound like someone who is about to be dropped from a show, does it?”

  “Why would he bring a costume at that time of night?”

  “That was my next question, kid.”

  On the terrace, Anthony Ryan went through Gillian’s motions again. He always walked in the victim’s footsteps. Only two steps: door to hassock. The hassock was short and wide with small, round wooden legs. Her white ballet shoes had been found, side by side, next to the hassock. Apparently she’d stepped out of the shoes, then up onto the hassock, thus destroying Joe Gregory’s “clean feet” theory.

  He tried to imagine the young woman in the white dress moving from the glass door to the hassock. Barefoot, Ryan stepped up onto the cushiony hassock. The covering felt like rough wool, the pattern varied red and beige squares and circles. His jacket whipped and snapped in the blast furnace of a breeze. The top of the metal rail was now even with his knees. He put one foot on the rail. For the five six Gillian the rail would have been at midthigh. Still easy to step over. Fall over. Be pushed over.

  He wobbled on the hassock as he glanced down at the chaos of Times Square. A haze of smog and dust had turned the scene surreal. He wondered what indescribable pain could cause a beautiful young woman to step over the metal rail and fall into space. To fall and fall, for a length of time his mind would not let him consider. He’d heard that people fainted, passed out, before they hit bottom. He hoped so. He hoped with all his heart. My God, he hoped his child hadn’t suffered.

  Gregory looked up when the squat, uniformed cop appeared in the bedroom doorway, a copy of Variety in his hand.

  “I’m outta here,” the cop said, pointing to his watch. “It’s my meal hour, and the house informs me that no personnel is available for relief. So fuck it, you’re on your own.”

  Danny took the opportunity to look around the apartment, try to photograph it with his mind. Nail the detail.

  “Give us a few more minutes, kid,” Gregory said.

  “I don’t think so,” the cop said. “You guys are dragging this out like I got all day.”

  “Ask my partner to watch the door for a while,” Gregory said.

  “You mean the guy out on the terrace in deep conversation with himself.”

  The cop made a gesture, flipping his thumb toward his mouth, as if to let Gregory know that he was so streetwise, he knew Ryan was a drunk. Gregory rose from the bed, one of Gillian’s T-shirts in his hand, a black one from Les Misérables.

  “Get back in the hallway, Officer,” he said. “And plant your ass out there until I tell you to leave.”

  “Hey, don’t get your balls in an uproar with me,” the cop said. “But I’m not holding the bag if that oiler falls off the fucking terrace. You don’t believe me, go look yourself. Walking tightrope on the rail, whatever the fuck he’s doing out there.”

  “I don’t have to look,” Gregory said, shutting his notebook and slipping it into his jacket pocket. Anthony Ryan had told Danny that Gregory had a special little pocket sewn into all his suit jackets, to hold his shield. It was something he’d learned from the Mob guys, who had the pocket made for their cigarettes.

  “I know exactly what he’s doing,” Gregory said. “He’s walking in the victim’s shoes; reconstructing her last acts, trying to get inside her head. It’s called detective work, hoople. And the fact you didn’t know that illuminates the reason why he’s a first-grade detective and you’re up here guarding furniture.”

  “Hey, the man is placing himself in a dangerous position. Consider yourself duly notified. I wash my hands of this matter.”

  Gregory mumbled something, then turned to Danny, his face crimson. “We got an appointment. We’ll continue this later.”

  He walked to the terrace door. But he didn’t step outside.

  “Hey, Spiderman,” he said. “Get your shoes on and let’s get going. We have to meet the Stones. I don’t want to keep those people waiting.”

  “Now?” Ryan said as he stepped out of the sunlight. Gregory didn’t answer him. Ryan’s hair was windblown, his pupils dilated, as he stepped into the darkened apartment, giving him an oddly confused look. “What time are we supposed to be there?” he said.

  Again Gregory didn’t answer; this time he was too busy sneezing.

  “How many is that?” Ryan said.

  “I lost count,” Gregory said, still clutching Gillian’s shirt. The sketch of the dark-eyed waif Cosette stared out from under his meaty fist. “I’ll complete the sneeze cycle in the car.”

  “Where are you meeting them?” Danny asked.

  “At a prearranged location,” Gregory said.

  “Am I going with you?” Danny said.

  “You’re going wherever you go,” Gregory said. “Not with us.”

  “Which hotel are they staying in?” Danny said, looking directly at his uncle. “Might as well tell me. I can find out through other sources.”

  “Then that’s how you should do it,” Gregory said.

  6

  Danny Eumont strode furiously up Ninth Avenue, crossing streets against moving traffic, banging into everything and everyone in his path. Curses and car horns littered his wake. Fuck Joe Gregory, he thought. He’d tried to make him look foolish, ambushed him, let him say his piece, and then sprung information he’d held back. Like he was Mike fucking Wallace.

  How the hell was Danny supposed to know Gillian was in costume? And that understudy shit, what was that all about? Gillian would have told him if she was the understudy for the lead role. Was Gregory too stupid to see that? Trey Winters was selling a bogus story, painting Gillian as some out-of-control junkie, trying to make himself look like the good guy. It was too late, too obvious. Gregory may have bought into it, but not him. Danny wasn’t going to let Trey Winters skate on this. The hell with Gregory, he’d write this story. He owed it to Gillian.

  When he arrived at his apartment, the fresh baguette he’d picked up at the baker was still warm, but in two pieces from Danny squeezing it in the center. He tossed it on the kitchen counter and snapped on his computer. Then he put his baby to bed for a short nap. His baby was a 525-page manuscript, his first novel, one he’d been working on since college. It was an NYPD story about a renegade gang of brutal cops.

  He dropped the novel into a fireproof box in the closet, then he called his mother. His mother would never forgive him if she had to hear this news from Aunt Leigh first. He’d call so she’d be able to say those all-important words: “I already know.”

  Danny’s phone and his computer sat on an old maple butcher block–style table near the apartment’s lone window, the monitor raised by the Manhattan Yellow Pages. The table had once resided in the kitchen of his boyhood. It was a gift from Mom, intended for dining, but Danny’s culinary conflicts were rare.

  His mother seemed to know more than he expected. Her long silences during his phoned-in confession
were the worst penance he’d ever received. On the wall directly above the computer screen were pictures of his heroes: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Groucho Marx, and Rip Ryan. To his left: the window. Danny liked working near the window; he could watch all the other budding writers walking the street, and he knew he was pounding out more pages than they. Plus he could see over the small park adjacent to a luxury high-rise, across Fifty-seventh Street, keep an eye on the front window of Kennedy’s. Many nights he heard the siren call of neon. Finally Danny told his mother someone was at the door.

  He began writing the minute he hung up. He knew he had to jump on the story while the images were still fresh. Get words on paper when the fire was burning. Write in the wild flames of passion, edit in the cool blue afterglow. Starting with Gillian’s bedroom: family pictures in silver frames, mostly people in shorts and T-shirts; a cactus garden in a red clay pot; the head of an American Indian carved out of a chunk of solid turquoise the size of a peach; the smell of perfumes and powders; a gold tassel slung across a framed theater program, the Arizona State University production of Oklahoma! at Gammage Auditorium, a building Gillian had once told him was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

  On Gillian’s nightstand sat a familiar music box that Danny knew played “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” a gift from Evan Stone. It was engraved, “To my shining star, From Daddy.” The gift from Daddy was the key detail. Soften the reader with a universal tug of the heart, then snap them back into real life. Describe the black fingerprint powder swirled on glasses and tabletops. The fat asshole detective sitting on the bed among tiny lacy underwear. Juxtaposition.

  Danny typed for three full hours before he realized he was starved. The act of banging the keys had calmed him. He went into the kitchen, barely wide enough for one slender adult standing sideways. Technically his apartment was a studio, but a previous tenant had built a wall to create a tiny bedroom. The wall lacked electrical outlets, and the bedroom lacked a door. Only a landlord could imagine it as a junior three.

  He flicked on the small portable TV that took up too much of his kitchen counter space. The news at six. The teaser hinted at new information on the dead actress.

  Danny started a pot of water heating on the stove. He had a small repertoire of meals, most of them centered around pasta. Yesterday rigatoni, today… rigatoni. From the refrigerator he took the leftover canned asparagus. And the butter, real butter, let it melt a little for the baguette. Then he poured a glass of wine from the box in the refrigerator. Chillable red, five liters for eight bucks, you couldn’t beat it. He was set. A man with cheap wine and a mission.

  On the TV screen Evan Stone, with perfect white hair and a desert tan, pushed through cameramen hustling backward through the crowds at JFK airport. A woman, probably Gillian’s mom, walked head down, her face buried in an upturned collar. They were moving fast toward the departing gates, leaving reporters breathless in the pursuit of a sound bite.

  It was this kind of banzai journalism that gave the business a bad name. Not his style. He knew exactly how he was going to get his story, the old-fashioned way: digging it out detail by detail. Danny scooped out a rigatoni noodle and tasted it cautiously. It was still a beat away from al dente.

  Danny knew that the broken hearts in this story resided not only in the lights of Broadway, but also in the Arizona desert, where the tale began. He planned to make airline reservations as soon as the funeral date was announced. He’d talk to Gillian’s friends. Visit her high school, her drama professors at ASU. Her parents. Maybe see her room. He’d ask to see a pink blanket she’d told him about, one she’d carried as a child, worn so thin that light shone through it. A writer knew that heartbreak’s permanent home was in the small, personal details.

  He tried to recall Gillian’s face last night, the way she’d acted. Had he missed something? She’d seemed stressed and more subdued than he remembered, but that was understandable; she’d said she’d been betrayed by someone she loved. She’d been a little drunk, not bombed, not staggering sloppy. Joe Gregory had implied Danny should have been more observant; he should have seen a girl in trouble. He kept replaying the evening over and over in his mind. Had he been so concerned about himself that he’d missed something? The one thing Danny swore he’d never be was a self-centered man, a man like his father, who found it so easy to walk away from a wife and son.

  Cameras zoomed in on the tired face of Evan Stone. The couple slowed up at the security checkpoint. Reporters kept pushing, wouldn’t take no for an answer. Danny poured another chillable red as a security guard stepped in and ordered the TV crews back. About time.

  Safely through the checkpoint, Evan Stone snatched his carry-on from the short conveyor belt beyond the X-ray machine. His wife faded into the distance, walking quickly out of camera range. He turned to the cameras.

  “Do something about your city,” he said.

  Danny held up his glass, toasting the TV. “I’ll make it right, Mr. Stone. I’ll bring that bastard to his knees.”

  This is a damn shame,” Leigh Ryan said as her detective husband walked through the door of their aging Cape Cod in Yonkers. Leigh sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, dozens of theater Playbills scattered around her. She was watching the news, Evan and Lynnette Stone fighting their way through a handful of reporters at JFK. “Why didn’t someone go to the airport with them, Anthony?”

  “Because Evan Stone told us they were staying overnight,” Ryan said, lowering himself next to her. “They must have checked out right after we left.”

  “We need a hands-off rule,” Leigh said, waving at the TV. “A forty-eight-hour grief moratorium, something like that.”

  Anthony Ryan focused on Evan Stone, his arm around his wife, whose face was hidden in her jacket. Ryan saw the anger boiling in him, and he understood. At that moment he wanted to be at JFK with them, to lay his hands on someone, to shove a cameraman, to knock some goddamned reporter on his or her ass.

  “The mother looks terrible,” Leigh said.

  “She was heavily sedated.”

  For all the deaths he’d seen as a cop, he’d never understood the shock that enveloped people on the unexpected death of a loved one. Now he did. It was a good thing, a state of grace, a protective sac. A state of floating disbelief that God wrapped us in as he slammed us against the bare stone walls of grief. Especially the waves of bottomless grief that followed the bewildering deaths of the young.

  “Danny called his mother a little while ago,” Leigh said. “Told her all about Gillian.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I was hoping I didn’t have to break the news.”

  “You don’t, but Nancy wants to talk to you anyway. I told her we’d take her to dinner.”

  “Why?” Ryan said, sighing. “I’m sure Danny told her everything.”

  “She just wants reassurance.”

  “Dinner with Nancy, and a cross-examination? I don’t know. Tell her he’s not in any trouble. Nothing to worry about. I’ll call her tomorrow.”

  “He’s her son,” Leigh said, and knew she didn’t have to say anything else. “Besides, she probably knows more about this than you do.”

  “According to Danny she doesn’t have a clue about his love life.”

  “Is that what Danny told you? Nancy knew it long ago. It was obvious. All of a sudden he develops this big interest in theater, going to more plays than a critic. Who else but a woman could drag Danny Eumont to Off Broadway? One day Nancy asked him about the Gillian on his speed dial, and he almost wet himself lying. We put it all together this morning, when he called looking for you.”

  Leigh shuffled Playbills around the floor, looking for something in particular. She had saved them since the first play she went to with her young husband, both of them awed by live theater.

  “We saw Gillian Stone in A Chorus Line,” she said, handing him one of the programs folded over to the cast page. “The last time we saw it, just before it closed. She played Sheila.”


  Leigh and Anthony Ryan had tried to expose their kids, Margaret and Rip, to all the wonders of N.Y.C.: plays, concerts, restaurants, parades, exhibits, museums, ball games. Rip loved Yankee Stadium, a place he roamed like an explorer; he made a point of sitting in every single section for at least one at bat. Their daughter, Margaret, always told them she missed the theater. Margaret and their granddaughter, Katie, were living in Dublin for the year, unearthing the family roots.

  “Was it definitely suicide?” Leigh said, lacing up a pair of Reeboks that were the same exact model she’d worn for twenty years. She had to scour the outlets and discount stores to find them now. Then she bought every pair in her size.

  “Suicide is the early consensus,” Ryan said.

  “Had she been depressed?”

  “Not according to her father. But he also denied she had a drug problem. No problems whatsoever.”

  “Gillian had been away from home for a long time,” Leigh said. “So maybe Mom doesn’t know, either. One of the TV reporters said there were rumors she was going to be fired from this show. Maybe she was more brittle than anyone realized. She gets the first bad news of her life and snaps.”

  “Danny doesn’t think so.”

  “Men do not notice subtle changes. Ask a woman.”

  Ryan wondered if Evan Stone noticed the identification room in Bellevue morgue. Would he remember its fake leather couches and low tables? Did he read the religious pamphlets or notice the boxes of tissues, the pitcher of water and two glasses? Would he recall the glass partition that separated the room from the one next door? The dark blue curtain that covered the partition? The bright light that came on when the curtain slid back? The single gurney covered by a blue sheet? The attendant in blue scrubs who pulled back the sheet?

  “People handle bad times differently,” Leigh said, standing over him and putting on her linen blazer. “Gillian might have been one of those who just couldn’t deal with it.”