Nightbird Page 6

  “Toxicology takes two weeks,” the Chief said. “We ain’t waiting two weeks to close this.”

  Paddy Roses’ fortunes changed when he was “kidnapped” from a Rockaway gin mill by Monsignor Dunn’s AA crew They delivered him directly to the NYPD’s secret dry-out farm upstate. After six months of picking apples he returned a healthy man, with an appreciation for his mind as well as his liver.

  “I found these around her neck,” Ryan said, handing the Chief the broken rosary he’d taken from Gillian. Inscribed on the back of the silver crucifix was the word FAITH. The loose white beads had pooled in the bottom of the plastic evidence bag. “I’m going to voucher them separately. In case we get a rash of confessors.”

  “So now we have a possible junkie who says her beads,” the Chief said, examining the broken rosary. “And who may or may not have had her mouth taped.”

  Paddy Roses started studying for boss after he “dried out.” He made number four on the sergeant’s list and was in the top ten for lieutenant and captain. As a test taker Paddy Roses was pure genius. On the wall behind him was a plaque that read, “God Bless Multiple Choice.”

  “In the meantime, what do I tell Hizzoner, that bastard,” the Chief said. “He tells me he’s getting worried calls from the Mouse in Hollywood. The Mouse is worried about bad publicity for his new Shangri-la on Forty-second Street.”

  “Tell him we got a plan,” Gregory said.

  “And what will that plan be?”

  “To conduct a thorough and tireless investigation,” Gregory said. “We will not sleep until we get at the truth, and if necessary bring the alleged perpetrator to justice.”

  “And after I extract the phone from my ass, what will I tell him next?”

  “Tell him to go fuck himself if he can’t take a joke,” Gregory said.

  The Chief leaned forward, almost halfway across his desk, and fixed his blue eyes on his two senior investigators.

  “We’re having fun, aren’t we,” he said.

  “All we need is a bottle a booze and a coupla broads,” Gregory said.

  “Fun’s over,” the Chief said as he slapped his palm on his desk. “The deal is this: Was she alone in the apartment at the time of death, or wasn’t she? It’s as simple as that. I’ll let you guys work on this for two days, understand? Two days. As long as we keep it on the QT. The official word is we’re tying up loose ends.”

  “We gotta confirm the glue thing,” Gregory said.

  “Fine, what else?”

  “My nephew thinks Trey Winters, the show’s producer, has something to do with her death,” Ryan said.

  “That’s a writer’s opinion,” the Chief said. “You know what writers are in this town, don’t you? Writers are actors who’re too lazy to work in a restaurant.”

  “Gillian told my nephew she was sleeping with Winters. And he was the last one to see her alive.”

  “What time was that?”

  “He popped in around eleven-fifteen,” Gregory said. “Stayed approximately twenty minutes. Left alone.”

  “Eleven-fifteen’s a little late for a pop-in,” the Chief said. “Who is this Winters? Why is that name familiar?”

  “He’s married to Darcy Jacobs, daughter of Marty Jacobs, the developer.”

  “Mother a God,” the Chief said, smacking his forehead with the back of his hand. “Ever since Marty Jacobs died that outfit has been a major pain in my ass.”

  “We ran a name check on Winters,” Gregory said. “He doesn’t have a record. Plus he has solid alibi witnesses. The Broadway Arms doorman says he was only up in her apartment about fifteen minutes. His own doorman and his wife confirm he was home before one.”

  “Thank God for doormen,” the Chief said. “Reinterview Winters anyway. Doormen, too. Thorough is my middle name.”

  “What about Mrs. Winters?” Ryan said.

  “You don’t need to talk to her,” the Chief said, motioning for them to hurry up and finish.

  “After Winters left,” Gregory said, “Gillian made a phone call to her sister on the East Side. Next thing we know it’s one A.M. and she’s airborne.”

  “Guy like Winters is too rich to toss anybody off a balcony,” the Chief said. “He’d hire a pro.”

  “That’s what you said about O.J.,” Gregory reminded him.

  “Hey,” the Chief said, jabbing his finger at Gregory. “You could be picking your Jockey shorts outta your ass on a foot post in Staten Island tomorrow. All it takes is a stroke of the pen, remember that. Now tell me about the apartment. Crime Scene find anything?”

  “Nada,” Gregory said. “No physical evidence, no note, no signs of struggle or forced entry.”

  “If this is a homicide,” the Chief said, “we’ll need a goddamned crystal ball to solve it.”

  “Save that line for the press,” Ryan said. “They’ll love that one.”

  “You got the LUDs there, smart guy? Any other phone calls?”

  “She made a total of three calls that evening. The one to my nephew, a two-minute call beginning at seven-fourteen. The second was to her sister, eleven oh-seven for three minutes. The third call, made after Winters left, lasted twenty-eight minutes, ending at eleven minutes after midnight. Apparently the sister was the last person she spoke to. We’re going to interview her as soon as we leave here.”

  “I didn’t think you could get length of time on local calls.”

  “You can since NYNEX went digital,” Ryan said.

  “Live and learn,” the Chief said. “Talk to the sister again. What about the canvass?”

  “Mid-Town North handled the canvass,” Ryan said. “Covered the whole building and the one across the street. Less than seventy percent of the residents of the Broadway Arms were home at the time. Nobody heard or saw anything. Three apartments on Gillian’s floor were out at the time and have still not been contacted.”

  “Where the hell are all these people at that time of night?”

  “Broadway babies,” Gregory said. “They don’t say good night till early in the morning. Quite often the milkman’s on his way.”

  “Who are you supposed to be, Cole fucking Porter?” the Chief said, checking his watch again, the hint to wrap it up. “You at least got a name for this case?”

  “In keeping with the Broadway theme,” Gregory said, “we’re thinking of calling it ‘Fiddler Off the Roof.’”

  9

  Anthony Ryan was surprised when Faye Boudreau answered the phone. He’d expected an answering machine. He’d expected the sister of Gillian Stone to be in Arizona with the family. She told him she’d explain when he got there.

  “I hope we don’t have a problem with Danny on this case,” Joe Gregory said as they drove up FDR Drive, past the UN. “First he tells me he’s not writing this story. Next day he turns around and interviews Winters.”

  “He’s writing the story,” Ryan said. “He says he owes it to Gillian. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “Answer me this, pally. Why the hell would Winters’s bodyguard go to that extreme? He coulda killed him.”

  “Maybe he didn’t intend for Danny to fall down that chute.”

  “Yeah, and maybe it’s just a garden-variety mugging. Wouldn’t be the stupidest I ever heard of.”

  “That’s true. But I figure Winters knows who Danny is; you always know the previous boyfriend. And he probably knows Gillian ran to him on the night she was murdered. Maybe he thinks she told Danny something.”

  “Like he was screwing her. I could see him worrying about that, but that’s all, because he has an airtight alibi for one A.M.”

  “Nothing is airtight.”

  Out in the dark waters of the East River the rolling wake of a fast-moving tugboat rocked an immense sparkling sailboat.

  “I’m gonna drop you off at the sister’s place,” Gregory said. “You don’t need me for this. I’m gonna take a quick run up to the Bronx and turn this Project Children boat ride money over to the Duck before the worst happens. Carrying somebody
else’s cash around always makes me nervous.”

  “I thought the Duck retired to Florida,” Ryan said.

  “He did, for two months. Hated it. The day before his terminal leave was scheduled to end, the Duck gets up in the middle of the night… while the wife is still asleep… knows nothing. He sneaks outta the house in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, drives all day and night, straight to One Police Plaza, drops to his knees, and kisses the ground. Goes upstairs, gets his shield back. They stick him in the Bronx. The Five Oh Precinct.”

  “What happened to his wife?”

  “Who knows,” Gregory said, shrugging emphatically as if that line of questioning were irrelevant.

  “I’ll give you thirty minutes,” Ryan said. “I don’t care what old buddy you run into. Just get your ass back here. I don’t want to hear about traffic jams, and I definitely don’t want to hear that you stopped in the Greentree Bar for a quick pop with the Duck or any of the board of directors. Or whatever you guys call yourselves.”

  “Pally,” Gregory said, “I’m deeply wounded by that remark.”

  “You will be deeply wounded if you’re not back to get me in thirty minutes.”

  Faye Boudreau lived on East Sixty-fourth Street off the corner of Third Avenue, on the third floor of a seven-story tan brick building. Ryan leaned on the buzzer until the imprint appeared on his thumb. Then he tried his own keys in the door. Sometimes the tumblers in the locks on outside apartment house doors were so worn down that any similar key would work. One did.

  “Damn buzzer never works,” Faye Boudreau said.

  She wore only a black T-shirt, with the new logo of West Side Story. A black bra strap dangled midway down her upper arm. Her voice sounded thick, as if she’d been sleeping or crying.

  Ryan’s eyes adjusted to the darkness as he followed her down a short narrow hallway: closet on the right, bathroom on the left. The entire studio apartment had less floor space than the first-class cabin on a 737. Two steps past the bathroom was the kitchenette. Beyond that, one single square room so small, Patrick Ewing could have touched the two most distant walls simultaneously.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” Ryan said, and he watched her mouth twist as she fought back tears. She was older, heavier, and darker than Gillian, but her legs were as long and cheekbones as pronounced. She was barefoot, bare-legged.

  Faye sat on the edge of the unmade sofa bed, which took up most of the room. She folded her legs swami style and yanked her shirt down between her legs. Sheets and a blanket lay half on the floor. A heavy drape covered the lone window, behind her. In the front center of her right thigh was a small circular scar that looked like a cigarette burn.

  “Tell me something about Gillian,” Ryan asked softly. “Who was her favorite actress?”

  “I don’t know. She never said. Meryl Streep, maybe. She liked Meryl Streep.”

  Ryan lowered himself carefully onto a beanbag chair. The light from the lamp on top of the TV was less than dim. A pair of cutoff jeans lay on the floor next to his feet, white pockets turned inside out. A baseball bat leaned against the wall near the TV table.

  “Everybody has said such wonderful things about Gillian,” Ryan said. “Not one negative comment.”

  “She was moody, sometimes,” Faye said. Then, gesturing to the unmade bed, the clothes on the floor: “But she was neater than me, that’s for sure.”

  Ryan saw his opening and prodded Faye to admit that Gillian was the cleanest woman on earth, often staying up all night cleaning her apartment. She ironed everything she wore, flossed her teeth after every meal, and washed her bedspread at the Laundromat in December and May. Like clockwork.

  “What kind of foods did she like?” Ryan asked.

  “Anything tart, like things made with lemons and limes. And ginger snaps.”

  “Anything else?” Ryan said, meaning food.

  But Faye misunderstood and said she was sorry, she really didn’t know that much about Gillian. They’d missed so many years of growing up together.

  “You didn’t grow up together?”

  “They just found me.”

  “Who just found you?”

  Faye took a deep breath and pushed her hair from her face. “Our mother gave me up when I was born,” she said. “She gave birth to me in Key West, and the next day she gave me to the nuns. Then she left Florida.”

  “Why?”

  “Poor, scared, fifteen years old. I can understand that.”

  “How long have you known this?”

  “First time I heard about my real mother was two years ago. Some private investigator came into the bar I worked at in Miami, asked a bunch of questions. Then a few days later Lynnette and Evan Stone flew in from Phoenix. Eight o’clock in the morning they knock on my door. ‘I’m your mom,’ Lynnette says.”

  “Knock, knock… we’re your parents.”

  “Just my mother. Evan Stone isn’t my father.”

  “Who is your father?”

  “You are,” she said, smiling for the first time. In the sliver of light coming through the opening in the drapes, he could see the whiteness of her teeth. “Just kidding. I don’t know, and it sounds like she don’t, either. She named some guy in the navy, but the private investigator couldn’t find him in the files.”

  “What made her decide to look for you?”

  “Some shrink in Arizona said she had to confront her past.”

  “And you were in Florida the whole time?”

  “With the Boudreaus, mostly. They adopted me. French Canadians. I grew up in Sarasota, Bradenton, around there. A few different places. I did okay.”

  Faye’s skin had a rough, blowsy look, as if weathered in cigarette smoke and long nights. But her hair was a lustrous black and shoulder length, her eyes dark brown and huge. You could see an inherent beauty, but a squandered beauty. If it had been nourished and cultivated, who knew?

  “Then you met Gillian?” Ryan said.

  “Me and Gillian hit it right off. She flew down to Miami when she found out. Brought me here. This is her old apartment, the lease is still in her name.”

  “Call me if you have any problems getting it changed to your name.”

  “Oh, I’m not staying. I’ll go back to Florida.”

  “Why not Arizona?”

  “Don’t think so,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I’m too low-class for Mother. I embarrass her.”

  “That’s why you didn’t attend the funeral.”

  Faye nodded, then stretched her arms above her head, lazy and catlike. The room smelled like Gillian’s apartment in the Broadway Arms, delicate, powdery scents.

  “Tell me about the last time you saw your sister,” Ryan said.

  “Sunday, she came over. She brought me that bat.” Faye swung her legs off the bed and picked up the baseball bat near the TV. She handed it to Ryan. “It’s a Bobby Bonilla model. She met him at the All-Star Cafe, I think, and got him to sign it for me. She knew I was a Marlins fan.”

  “My son was a big Baltimore Orioles fan,” Ryan said. He gave the bat a short swing, all wrist, and wondered why he’d mentioned his son; he never did that. He asked Faye to finish telling about Sunday.

  “We went to lunch. Around the corner to Caramanica’s.”

  “What was Gillian’s mood?”

  “Laughing, joking around. That’s what sucks.”

  “What sucks?”

  “Like, all those years we missed. You know, like playing Barbies or dressing up, things like that. Talking about boyfriends, whatever. I’ll never get that back now. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do,” Ryan said. “Did you see Gillian or speak to her after Saturday?”

  “Not till Tuesday night.”

  “The night she died?”

  Faye nodded, but Ryan already knew it. It was in Faye’s interview with Mid-Town North, plus Gillian’s phone records. Two phone calls, the last one twenty-eight minutes, terminated less than fifty minutes before Gillian’s fall.

  “
I read your statement, but tell me again about the phone calls. Did she seem depressed or despondent?”

  “Try pissed off.”

  “About what?”

  “The drug thing with Trey Winters. She knew it was bullshit.”

  “So she didn’t have a drug problem. Not even prescription drugs, painkillers, tranquilizers?”

  “She drank a little. Gin and Mountain Dew. Tasted weird, like a high schooler’s drink.”

  “She wasn’t worried about the drug test?”

  “If she was, she didn’t say it to me.”

  Faye scratched at her legs unconsciously. She had long fingernails, black polish badly chipped.

  “So what did you two girls talk about?”

  “Everything. Everything in the world.”

  “And her mood was good.”

  “Except for being pissed.”

  “Did she talk much about Trey Winters?”

  “Shit, yeah.”

  “Did she tell you about her affair with Trey Winters?”

  “No, she never told me anything about that. First call she said he was coming over. The second one she told me that he just bullshitted about trying to help her and shit. She didn’t believe him.”

  “But I didn’t surprise you just now when I mentioned a relationship between them,” Ryan said. “Did I?”

  Faye gave an “I don’t know” shrug. The sound of metal rattling caused Ryan to look toward the window… the fire escape. Ryan had been uneasy in apartments with fire escapes since his rookie years in the Bronx. Another burdensome piece of cop knowledge was that so many rapists and thugs slithered in through the fire escape window. Like most street cops, even off duty, he always scanned upward toward the fire escapes, watching for climbing predator scum. Faye seemed not to notice the noise. Maybe a neighbor’s ritual: shaking a dust mop or watering a marijuana plant.

  “I know you loved your sister, Faye.”

  “I would have done anything for her.”

  “Sisters have a special bond,” he said. “My wife and her sister have an amazing connection. Spooky almost. Sometimes my wife says she has to call her sister, and that second the phone rings, and it’s her. It’s almost mystical. An understanding that goes beyond words.”