Nightbird Page 7

  “We were getting like that. Sometimes Gillian would say something, and it was exactly the thing I was thinking. We’d both go ‘Wow.’”

  He watched her fight for control again, biting the inside of her lips so hard, it had to bleed.

  “The thing I can’t understand,” Ryan said, “is that she called you on that night and talked to you for twenty-eight minutes… hung up… and less than an hour later she took her own life. And you had no idea that anything was wrong.”

  “I knew she was upset.”

  “Upset. Of course. She’d just heard she might lose her role in the show. Her producers wanted her tested for drugs. Everything she worked for was being destroyed. I’d be nuts if that happened to me.”

  Faye tightened and coiled, as if trying to squeeze out some deep reserve of inner strength. She wasn’t a cold woman; Ryan knew ice when he saw it.

  “Don’t you think I would have done something if I thought she was going to hurt herself? Called somebody?”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe you didn’t believe what she was saying. That’s understandable. People say wild things when they’re under stress. Crazy things, like they’re going to kill themselves. Most people ignore them at a time like that. I would. If we reacted every time people threatened crazy things…”

  He wanted to tell her to just go ahead and cry, for chrissakes. Let it loose. Blow the dam. She wrestled her demons in.

  “She was a little drunk… just blowing off steam.”

  “I’m sure,” Ryan said. “Probably exaggerating, talking stupidly. We all do it when we’re mad.”

  “She said a few things. I didn’t think she’d really do anything. Just blowing off steam.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Faye.”

  “Some big sister, right? Big help I was.”

  Anthony Ryan leaned over and touched her hand. He had other questions, but he wouldn’t ask them now. He’d made Faye Boudreau suffer enough for one day. She wrapped her arms around her chest, as if to physically hold herself together. A low moan slipped from her throat, escaped past the guards. She never cried.

  10

  Victor listened to Danny Eumont’s tape on the subway ride home. He didn’t see how questions about Gillian Stone’s drug use and her affair with Trey Winters could affect his plan. In fact, the reporter’s probing might encourage Winters to pay greater attention to him and settle the matter quickly. The only thing on the tape that worried Victor was the mention of a “source.” No “source” was going to screw up his plan.

  Back in the Bronx and too stiff to bend over, he kicked the reporter’s tape recorder into the gutter and sent it clattering down a sewer. Then he walked around the corner, dropped the microcassette on the sidewalk, and smashed it under his heel. The pulverized tape went into another sewer directly in front of the wood-frame house on Echo Place in which he shared two rooms and a bath with Pinto the Russian clown.

  Pinto’s Chevy Nova was gone from its parking spot. Lazy Pinto always drove the car, although it was less than a block walk to the Grand Concourse, where you could catch the D train straight to Times Square. Every year Victor suggested they store the car for the summer, take the subway. Much cheaper in the long run.

  But what the hell did he care now. Next year Pinto would be on his own, begging tourists for coins by himself. Next year he’d be a businessman, a man of wealth and respect. Basking in the warm breezes off the Sea of Cortés and the charms of beautiful women. Many beautiful women. As Pinto himself always said, more than anything else, it was money that made women horny.

  Victor climbed the front steps, clutching the rail. The hallway smelled of fresh disinfectant. Their Jamaican-born landlady, the widow of a Puerto Rican subway motorman, had carved the house into five odd-shaped apartments, which she ran like a Nazi den mother, demanding order and cleanliness. Cleanliness at their price level was a rare commodity. That was why every year, as soon as the weather turned warm, Pinto and Victor tossed their belongings into Pinto’s old Chevy and drove north, hoping she had a vacancy.

  Though clean, the place came sparsely furnished: a couch, chair, two beds, dinette set, a few kitchen items. He’d brought his own sheets and towels; he wasn’t going to sleep on the sheets of another. A TV and a weight bench were their only other furnishings.

  Victor flicked on the TV and tossed his undelivered envelope on the dinette table. The envelope contained instructions for Trey Winters on how and when to deliver the money. It was a simple plan, and simple plans worked best. In light of the involvement of this reporter, he’d need to rethink his strategy.

  He put on his gloves and took an old newspaper from the stack. He’d cut out a new message outlining his demands. Winters would see he was not greedy and jump at the deal. He leaned down to pick up the scissors off the floor.

  A sharp pain flashed down Victor’s lower back and down his right leg. The red pills were wearing off. They weren’t as strong as his usual white ones. He dropped the scissors on the table and went into the bathroom. He took the remaining three red pills and washed them down with Pinto’s vodka.

  The French Connection was playing on TV, a movie he loved. He felt dirty and sweaty; he needed a shower, fresh clothes. He hated to feel this way. On the train home he’d promised himself a long, hot shower. But for the moment fatigue won out. He sprawled on the sofa. He’d watch the movie for a while, then clean up. His fingers had trouble working the remote control, trying to turn the volume louder.

  Victor had gone downhill rapidly this past year, having more and more difficulty manipulating delicate objects. The simplest small movements of wrist and finger had become torturous, as if his hands were bound with twine. It was the way he’d seen his father start to deteriorate, the small motor skills first. The fingers, then the wrists, then spreading to the larger joints. On TV the Frenchman Alain Charnier outwitted the dumb cop Popeye Doyle, leaving him stranded on a subway platform.

  Like his father, Victor had been one of the premier trapeze artists in South and Central America. Like his father, he had been in his late twenties when the first signs of the progressive disease had begun to plague him. Cruelly, for his father, the degeneration worsened just as he attained his lifetime dream, a chance to bring the family act under the big top. Less than three years after being signed by Ringling Brothers, his father could no longer perform safely. Both the family and the act fell apart. His father went back to Mazatlán, where he proceeded to drink himself to death.

  Unlike his father, Victor would not let bad luck dictate his life. A man made his own luck. He would not wind up a peon, an object of ridicule. He was better than that. His mother said the Gypsies always told her she’d have a famous son. He was meant to be important, to live his life as a man of respect. Nothing was going to stop him.

  On TV, Alan Charnier, a neat, elegant man, was head and shoulders above the poorly dressed and scatterbrained cops. Charnier planned and used his mind. He made fools of the NYPD, defeating them in their own city. A warmth came over Victor as the pain subsided. Everything coming up rosy. He pulled off the tight gloves and closed his eyes.

  11

  Trey Winters’s duplex had not one, but two top-dollar views: he faced west toward Central Park, and to the south you could see the afternoon sun glinting off the MetLife Building.

  “You know somebody’s rich when you can walk behind their furniture,” Joe Gregory said, running his hand along the back of Trey Winters’s leather sofa. “The rest of us got everything jammed up against the walls. Couches, chairs, lamps, everything. Up against the walls. Rich people, they got room to stroll behind their stuff.”

  Anthony Ryan had been quiet on the ride from Faye Boudreau’s apartment. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. Until he met Faye he’d thought that he was overwhelmed with grief. But she was consumed by it. To him she seemed childlike, a case of arrested development. A woman who knew only how to lead with her heart.

  The maid abandoned Ryan and Gregory in a room paneled with a very dark r
eddish wood, the color of fallen chestnuts. She told them Mr. Winters would be with them in a moment.

  “It must be in the rule book of the rich,” Ryan said. “Make the little people wait in the library.”

  Tall bookshelves lined the room’s interior walls, running close to the ceiling, ten feet up. Top-shelf tomes were accessible only by the sliding ladder. The ceiling appeared to be tin, hammered designs radiating out from the center in ever larger circles. An oriental rug big enough for the lobby in Carnegie Hall covered most of the floor. Floor lamps stood next to overstuffed chairs.

  Trey Winters entered the room as Ryan pulled The Sun Also Rises from a shelf. The actor was tall and lanky in baggy linen pants and a dull orange shirt buttoned up to the neck. He strode across the big oriental, all loosey-goosey.

  “That’s a first-edition Hemingway,” Winters said, his voice resonating throughout the room. “My wife’s father was an avid collector. I believe that’s Hemingway’s first novel.”

  “Second,” Ryan said, replacing the book. “The Torrents of Spring was his first.”

  “I forgot that one,” he said. “I suppose he wanted to as well.”

  Winters’s hair was combed straight back, thinning but well disguised. The color was a too dark brown, a dull bottle tint that reminded Ryan of wet coffee grounds. He directed them to sit on the leather Chesterfield opposite him. The sofa was filled with decorative pillows. Gregory squirmed on the seat, trying to get comfortable with the pillows behind him.

  “We appreciate your seeing us on such short notice,” Gregory said.

  “My lawyers aren’t happy about it, but it’s the least I can do. This has been a terrible tragedy for all concerned.”

  “Why would your lawyers object?” Ryan asked.

  “Civil liability. I do own the apartment. Lawsuits, I’m sure, are looming down the road.”

  A young woman is dead and he’s worried about money, Ryan thought. He waited for his partner to get comfortable; it was Gregory’s show. One by one Joe Gregory stacked the decorative pillows on the floor. Finally, flush against the back of the sofa, he took out his notebook.

  “Okay, Mr. Winters,” Gregory said. “We’ve spoken to the doorman at the Broadway Arms and your doorman here. They confirm your times of arrival and departure. What we’d like to talk about is Gillian’s drug use. When did you first become aware of it?”

  “About six weeks ago. I began noticing some erratic behavior.”

  “What kind of erratic behavior?” Gregory said.

  “Bursts of emotion. One extreme to the other. Some mornings she seemed exhausted, her eyes dull. Then suddenly she’d be sky high, couldn’t stop talking.”

  “My ex-wife was high-strung,” Gregory said.

  “I’m not talking about personality traits, Detective. I’ve been around enough cocaine users to spot the symptoms.”

  “You been around a lotta coke heads?” Gregory said.

  “Cocaine is hardly new to the entertainment industry.”

  Ryan hadn’t observed Mid-Town North’s interview of Winters on the morning after Gillian’s death. But, unlike the case with Faye, this was definitely not someone grieving.

  “When did you first confront Gillian about your suspicions?” Gregory said.

  “We’d been discussing it for about a month. Futilely, I might add. Gillian was in complete denial. Finally, I decided to force the issue. I told her she’d have to take a drug test.”

  “When did you tell her this?” Gregory asked.

  “About six-thirty, the evening she died. I called her from my office.”

  That call should bother him more, Ryan thought. It clearly upset her. After that call she’d contacted Danny.

  “Why didn’t you tell the officers in Mid-Town North about that six-thirty call?” Ryan asked.

  “They didn’t ask, and I assumed their main concern would be my later call and visit.”

  Winters crossed his legs and waited for the next volley. He seemed completely relaxed, a guy with all the answers. He ran his fingers along the crease in his shirt, which was the same dull orange as a duck’s feet. His socks matched his shirt.

  “We know you made a second call to Gillian at ten forty-five P.M.” Gregory said, reading from notes. “What did you do between those two calls?”

  “I had dinner with Abigail Klass at El Bravado. I gave the other detectives all that information.”

  Ryan had just left a woman in such pain that she could hardly look at him. Winters seemed to be making a point of staring at them with each response.

  “We just want to clarify some details about that,” Gregory said. “She’s an old family friend, apparently?”

  “Abigail is a dear friend,” he said. “She’s the youngest sister of Paul Klass, who was my mentor and best friend in this business. Paul died from the complications of AIDS almost three years ago. Abigail is a well-known food writer. She was critiquing the restaurant, which was near my office, and she asked for my company. We were there for almost two hours. Then Abigail caught a cab, and I walked back to my office to call Gillian.”

  “I know you told the other detectives,” Gregory said. “But let’s go over the reasons why you made that second call to Gillian.”

  Winters retold his previous story with perfect diction, enunciating clearly, using his voice and hands to emphasize certain points. He said he’d decided he’d been too harsh with Gillian earlier. He’d try a new tack: positive reinforcement. He decided that some good news might turn her around. That was why he’d brought the dress. He was trying to show her what the future could hold for her.

  “That seems like a major change of strategy,” Ryan asked. “One moment you’re ready to fire her, the next you’re promoting her.”

  “I was never going to fire her.”

  “Unless she showed positive for drugs.”

  “I would have made my decision when and if that occurred. My only goal was to get help for her. I’m not the kind of man who gives up on people.”

  “So she gets this good news,” Anthony Ryan said, leaning toward Winters. “This encouraging news. She puts the costume on and jumps off the terrace.”

  “I had no idea,” he said. “I never would have left her alone that night if I’d had any idea she was that despondent. When I left she was wearing jeans and a gray silk blouse. She was certainly not in that costume.”

  “What the hell happened to her, Mr. Winters?” Ryan said. “You were the last one to see her alive.”

  “I have no idea what happened.”

  “How did you know the blouse was silk?” Gregory said.

  “Because I gave it to her,” he snapped.

  Ryan and Gregory had decided earlier they wouldn’t push the relationship issue at this point. And Winters certainly wasn’t pining or vulnerable; he wouldn’t crumble and admit to love lost. But in Ryan’s opinion, extramarital relationships were not about love and seldom about sex. They were about ego, and Winters had that in spades.

  “How would you characterize her mood when you left?” Gregory said.

  “Hopeful, I thought.”

  “Did you notice she’d been drinking?” Ryan said.

  “I told her I was not pleased with her drinking.”

  “You argued?” Ryan said.

  “I was displeased with her. I suppose that was evident in my tone.”

  “No matter how delicately you phrase it,” Ryan said, “it sounds like an argument to me.”

  “Your words, not mine,” Winters said. “When I left her she was not happy, I admit that. But she was not suicidal. And the doorman, I’m certain, will verify my time of departure. Irish Eddie will back up—”

  “We already covered the doormen statements,” Ryan said, ending Winters’s soliloquy before it started. He didn’t want to let him get into the rhythm of prepared script. “But doesn’t it seem strange to you that she kills herself after you left? Almost immediately after getting your good news?”

  “With that question we end th
is interview,” Winters said. He stood up quickly. “Gentlemen, I agreed to talk to you without legal representation, but if you’re going to insist on taking an adversarial approach, I’m going to have to insist on a more formal arrangement from now on.”

  The detectives let him stand there. They sat, taking their time. In the quiet Ryan could hear a clock ticking in another room. Precious quiet in a noisy city. One of the advantages of living on a high floor, far above the sidewalk. Above car horns, sirens, and garbage trucks at dawn. Far above the screams of the street.

  12

  Still groggy from the morning’s tumble, Danny Eumont wrestled open the front door of Brady’s Bar with his one good arm. Brady’s Bar stood directly behind New York City Police Headquarters at One Police Plaza and was unapologetically a cop’s bar. Official business placards adorned the dashboard of every vehicle on the street. Stacks of empty beer boxes lined the curb. Inside, it smelled of stale beer and Old Spice.

  “Danny Boy,” Joe Gregory said, waving him over to his corner of the bar. “I thought you’d be laid up for a week.”

  “That little fall?” he said. “I do that all the time. This sling and the pained expression on my face mean nothing.”

  “Your uncle’s across the street, finishing up paperwork,” Gregory said. “He’ll be over shortly.”

  Gregory introduced Danny to Shanahan and Sakin from Missing Persons. The two detectives finished paying Gregory for tickets to the Project Children boat ride, then he slid their drinks down the bar to make room for his partner’s nephew. Gregory wrapped a rubber band around the remaining tickets and shoved them into his jacket pocket.

  “Trey Winters buy any tickets today?” Danny said. “He’s got to be good for a few dozen.”

  “That’s a good tactic,” Gregory said. “Latch on to the subject at hand and lead it by the nose. Not bad at all.”

  “It was a simple question.”