The James Deans Part 8

"No problem."

The place was nicely appointed with gray carpeting, wood veneer desks, leather furniture. There was a water cooler, a coffee machine, a little fridge. The walls were covered with informational placards, a few in Spanish, ranging in subject from how to reach a suicide hotline to how to apply for food stamps. The main feature on each wall was a poster featuring Moira Heaton's face. It was much like any such poster. MISSING-$25,000 REWARD was printed boldly above her picture. Her physical description, the date she disappeared, what she was thought to be wearing at the time, and a phone number were listed below.

It was sort of a wasted trip. All five members of the office staff seemed to try their best to cooperate, some clearly distraught and frustrated over their inability to contribute anything to the search for Moira. To a person, they treated me with complete respect, even when I asked the ugly but necessary questions about their boss and Moira. It wasn't quite a total waste of time, because certain themes became clear to me during the course of the interviews.

The staff were categorically behind Brightman, certain he would never sleep with an employee, let alone murder one. They were at least half wrong about that. He was a caring, compa.s.sionate warrior for the causes in which he, and by extension they, believed. Generous to a fault, he inspired loyalty not only from his staff, but from the voters in his district. Even after Moira's disappearance, he won reelection with over a 70 percent majority. A wise man once said that all politics are local. Like most adages, it was only partly true. Because he got the streets plowed in the snow, he could probably get reelected for the next hundred years in his own district, but he wouldn't be elected to any higher office until the nagging suspicions about Moira Heaton's disappearance were cleared up.

Something else was becoming painfully clear to me. Moira Heaton had been almost as difficult to know before she disappeared as she was after. Though the office staff were all quick to point out that she had been head and shoulders the best intern they'd ever been a.s.sociated with, a woman willing to overcome her lack of political savvy with hard work and tenacity, Moira apparently didn't inspire much affection. They all used the same phrase: "She was a very private person."

"Not shy, exactly," said Sandra Sotomayor, Brightman's most experienced staffer. "Very good with the people who come in off the street. She don't take no bulls.h.i.t from city agencies or n.o.body when people need help, but with us, she keep her distance."

I thanked them all very much for their cooperation and left numbers I could be reached at in case they remembered anything, even if it seemed stupid, that might help. What the visit did more than anything else was convince me that my first instinct had been the right one. I had to talk to John Heaton, whether Wit liked it or not.

GLITTERS WAS FAR more sedate than during my first visit. In fact, everyone from the doorman to the c.o.c.ktail waitresses seemed to be in a bit of a stupor. The thump of the drumbeat sounded a bit less insistent. The dancers were nearly sleepwalking, the expressions on their faces devoid of either pa.s.sion or pain. Maybe the heat and humidity of the first oppressive day of the year had infected the place, seeping in through cracks in the windows and beneath the doors. The air-conditioning was rendered helpless against the drowsy atmosphere.

In spite of the general malaise, my reappearance seemed to inject a bit of a spark back into things. Adonis at the door scowled at me even as he took my ten bucks. I was potential trouble, that's all he cared about. I waved h.e.l.lo to one of the bartenders I recognized from my last visit, the one who had wondered why I was looking for her old dead boyfriend. She smiled back before quickly retreating to the far end of the bar. It's nice to be popular. I found that lonesome little two-top I had sat at previously and bided my time until the stupor set back in.

Luckily, the waitress from my first visit, the woman with the otherworldly blonde hair, had my station. It took her a second, but the flash of recognition rippled across her face. I'd seen happier expressions on morticians.

"You again," she hissed.

"Yeah, but you can call me Typhoid Mary."

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

"Dewar's rocks, right?"

"Right. You didn't call. I'm hurt."

"Only a cop would think twenty bucks would buy him anything but a smile around here. You guys are the cheapest motherf.u.c.kers on the planet."

I smiled, doffed an invisible hat. "And a pleasant day to you, too, ma'am."

"I'll be right back with your scotch."

So, word had spread after I flashed my badge. Though it clearly hurt my chances of being elected homecoming queen, it was too early to tell whether it had improved my chances of talking to John Heaton.

The waitress dropped my drink, sticking around just long enough to get paid. The first chords of "Whip It" blasted over the PA. It was time for Domino's black rubber romp across the stage, and the club, which only minutes before had seemed empty and tomblike, was abuzz. She was good, so good I found I was watching her in spite of myself. She was so good that when she got around to removing her mask, she almost appeared to be enjoying herself. In a dive like this that was no mean feat.

After Domino left the stage, Glitters quieted back down some, but not all the way back. No, she had revved things up considerably. The stupor would not return this evening. I sat, drank my Dewar's at a leisurely pace, and rehea.r.s.ed the words I thought I might use. My plan was to try and see Domino again. During my last trip in I thought I had spotted a drop of sympathy in her yellowy eyes. Of course, I might have wanted to see it.

It hadn't been my intention to ask directly about John Heaton. I was thoroughly aware how little that approach had brought me. No, this time someone else would do the pleading for me. If I had to spend several hundred dollars of Thomas Geary's money to convince Domino it was in her best interest to act on my behalf, so be it. I couldn't afford to count on her phantom sympathies. I had a second scotch before heading downstairs.

I didn't have to wait very long for her to pop out of the dressing room, and she saved herself the embarra.s.sment of fending me off with that lame bulls.h.i.t about the house rules. Today she was wearing denim shorts and a tube top.

"Whaddya want?"

"To buy you a drink and talk some business."

She laughed. "s.h.i.t, I never heard that line before, especially not from a cop."

"We must not know the same cops," I said.

"Oh, yeah, that must be it, 'cause the cops I know never use the words 'buy' and 'business.' Their vocabulary only includes words like 'free' and 'on the house.'"

"I was wrong. I guess we do know the same cops, but that's not the kinda business I'm interested in."

"You're a man, right?"

"The last time I checked, yeah."

"Then you're interested in that kinda business."

She wasn't wrong. She was a commodity. That's what Glitters was, a kind of commodities exchange. Only here, no one traded on their futures, just their yesterdays and todays. Though I wasn't interested in using her body, I guess I was hoping that John Heaton might be. Wit had it right: using people was what made the world go round.

"Yeah, okay, maybe I am," I confessed. "Can I buy you that drink?"

"Sure, stud, why not?" She shrugged her shoulders. I turned to go up the stairs, but she stopped me, slipping her arm through mine. "Screw the stairs, we'll go out the side door."

She led me the opposite way down the hall, through a door marked PRIVATE, through a storage room, and out a steel door that fed us into an alley that stank of cat p.i.s.s and garbage. In other words, it smelled like any other alleyway in the city. As soon as the door clicked shut behind us, Domino pressed herself against me, but I ducked out of the way. If she was offended by my reluctance, she didn't show it. Once again, she looped her arm through mine and started us toward the street. We didn't quite make it.

As we pa.s.sed several steel Dumpsters, Domino unhitched herself from me. A strong hand reached out of the shadows, yanking hard on my left wrist. I was thrown completely off balance. Domino was running down the alley toward the street, her sandals clickity-clacking against the grimy cobblestones. A steel fist drove itself so hard into my gut that you could have seen the knuckles on the skin of my back.

"Oh, f.u.c.k!" I gasped with the breath the punch forced out of my lungs, the words tasting like regurgitated scotch.

When I tried to recover, a bat struck me across the backs of my knees and I collapsed into a bag of bruised flesh and bone. Knowing, experienced hands patted me down. My .38 was pulled out of the holster I kept clipped to my belt. Its cylinder was opened. The falling bullets pinged off my forehead and face. The cylinder was snapped shut. Metal creaked as the lid to a Dumpster was lifted. Something clanged against the metal. My gun, most likely. A shoe pressed down on my cheek, squeezing my jaw against the paving stones.

"Next time, a.s.shole, take the hint. Come around here again and it'll be your teeth, not bullets, bouncin' off the floor. Get it?"

When I didn't answer immediately, the foot pressed down even harder on my face.

"I get it," I gurgled.

"What?"

"I get it. I get it."

The shoe was off my face, but the pain stayed behind. I was in no shape to do anything but listen to two sets of feet retreating unhurriedly back down the alley toward the club. After about five minutes, the pain eased enough for me to sit up and get my bearings. I rubbed my jaw, wiping the grit off both sides of my face. I tried standing to test out my knees. They both burned with pain. The surgical one wasn't any less stable than usual. Actually, the doctors hadn't left enough tissue in there to damage. My good knee was of more concern. It responded pretty well, and I went about collecting my bullets and searching the myriad Dumpsters for my .38.

I didn't need to be a rocket scientist or even an ex-cop to figure out what had just taken place. It was to laugh. Domino, in her way, had introduced me to John Heaton or, rather, had smoothed the way for him to introduce himself to me. All that and it hadn't cost Thomas Geary a penny. But it had cost me. I'd be back to collect, and when I came back, I'd have my head up instead of up my a.s.s.

Chapter Seven.

IT HAD BEEN my experience that pain seldom evoked pleasant memories. This morning did nothing to dissuade me from that view. Sure, my gut ached, my jaw, too, but that pain didn't come with any baggage, not even a carry-on. My knee, however, was quite another story. It usually ached in damp weather. You can't have all that I'd had done to it and expect a free ride. Today was different. Today it hurt like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, like it hadn't hurt since right after the second surgery. I stood there in the bathroom watching my hands shake as much from remembering those days as from the freshness of the pain.

It was August of 1977. Copwise, it had been a good few weeks. Word was out that the department was reconsidering the freeze on promotions. Something that was owed me as far back as Marina Conseco's rescue. I'd also been making a s.h.i.tload of overtime since the July blackout. And now that Son of Sam had extended his franchise to Brooklyn, that overtime was only likely to increase. By snuffing out the life of Stacy Moskowitz and putting a bullet into Robert Violante's eye, Sam had unknowingly set in motion the end to both our careers.

When they captured him and brought him in for arraignment, they bused a bunch of us in from precincts all around the city to work security and crowd control. Today, it's hard to recall just how huge Sam's capture was. This pudgy little bar mitzvah boy from the Bronx had held the city in his murderous grasp for months. He had set off the biggest manhunt in New York's long history, perhaps the biggest manhunt in the history of the United States. Unless you lived through those days, it would be easy to forget the other factors which had so frayed our collective nerves.

The city was teetering on the edge of fiscal collapse. We had just endured one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record, and in mid-July the city was plunged into a blackout. In '65, during the first big blackout, there was no looting to speak of, but in '77 the town went nuts. The looting and rioting went on for days. In some ways, it almost felt disconnected from the blackout itself. It was as if years of resentment over Vietnam and the failed promises of the sixties boiled up to the surface in one crazy, angry moment. And casting a shadow over it all was the Son of Sam.

So after Sam's arraignment and the press conferences, after the handshakes and backslapping, they shipped us back to our precincts. In my absence, the maintenance crew had waxed the precinct floors for the first time in months. I never did find out why they had chosen that particular day. Anyway, on my way to the locker room, one of the precinct detectives called out to me, busting my chops about how I had looked on TV, standing there behind Sam and Detective Ed Zigo. When I turned to answer back, I slipped on a piece of carbon paper some careless schmuck had thrown on the newly waxed floor.

They tell me my knee got so twisted up that some of the guys got nauseated just looking at me. Luckily, I guess, I was knocked silly when my head hit the floor. But by the time I got to the ER at Coney Island Hospital, the pain had made itself intimately familiar. I had known that pain to differing degrees every day since. That day in August of '77 was the last time I ever wore my police blues.

The phone rang and I was transported back to the present, to the pain my knees felt now. I waited for Katy to pick up, but she must have been in her studio. Phones were strictly verboten down there. Katy thought telephones were the bane of creative thought. I'm not sure I would have gone quite that far, but I was no artist. I hobbled over to the nightstand and picked up.

"h.e.l.lo."

"He wants to talk to you." It was Domino. I didn't have to ask who he was.

"Put him on. I don't think they make a baseball bat that stretches this far."

She ignored that. "He wants me to talk to you first."

"This is bulls.h.i.t! If he wants to talk to-"

"He says it's this way or no way."

"All right. Where?"

"As far away from Glitters as-"

"You know Coney Island?"

"I've heard of it, but I don't get out much."

"Think you can find it?"

"Yeah, I'm a big girl. I pick out my own G-strings and everything."

"Very funny. Meet me on the boardwalk at West Fifth Street in two hours."

"But-"

I hung up before she could finish her objecting. All I knew was that I'd be there. The rest was up to her. Besides, I had to stop at the bank. Somehow I got the feeling this little talk wasn't being arranged out of the goodness of anyone's heart.

MY CAR SEEMED to know the way, easing down Ocean Parkway, slipping beneath the el at Brighton Beach Avenue, and sliding finally around the smooth neck of Surf Avenue. I was plenty early, giving myself time enough to make sure I wasn't being set up for John Heaton's second at bat. First, I drove past my old precinct house across from Luna Park.

Sixty or seventy years ago, Luna Park, like the Steeplechase, had been its own amus.e.m.e.nt park. There were four or five separate parks back then, each with distinct character and attractions. Luna Park, for instance, was world famous for the thousands upon thousands of incandescent bulbs strung across every inch of the place. Scientists have speculated that it was so bright, it might have been visible from s.p.a.ce. Luna Park burned to the ground three or four times. Now a collection of hideous apartment buildings stand disrespectfully on its ashes. You can't see them from s.p.a.ce, and the rest of the neighborhood wishes you couldn't see them from across the street.

I thought about driving farther into the throat of Coney Island, past the abandoned factory building where the firemen and I had found Marina Conseco. The city had long since removed the water tank from its roof, and I hadn't been there since I'd showed it to Katy five years ago. No, I decided, it was best to leave my past behind, even if the rest of the world wouldn't let me. Instead, I parked in the shadow of the ugly apartment houses and walked back to the boardwalk.

It was another scorcher and sun was warm on my face, but in Coney Island there's always more to the equation than just the sun. The breeze was blowing hard in off the Atlantic so that you could almost be fooled into believing the remainder of the day would be pleasant, even cool. The beach was still more crowded with gulls than people, and the boardwalk was quiet if not quite deserted. This would all change in a week or two, when schools let out for the summer. The handball courts were busy, as they always were.

From where I positioned myself I had a clear view of the boardwalk in either direction, of the steps leading up to it from the street, and of the steps leading from it down to the beach. To sneak up on me, someone would have had to parachute in or materialize out of thin air.

Domino took a more conventional route, strolling alone from the Brighton Beach end of the boardwalk. She wore denim cutoffs, a black bikini top, and those now famous sandals. They clacked against the wooden planks as they had against the cobblestones the night before. As she walked, the taut muscles in her legs and abdomen flexed and relaxed, flexed and relaxed. Just as she had at Glitters, she had injected a spark into things. The old Russian men stopped playing chess, stopped talking, to watch her approach and then pa.s.s. Even the gulls seemed to take notice.

What I noticed as she got close was the abject paleness of her skin and the faint red marks on her forearms. She wasn't lying; she didn't get out much. Not while the sun was up, anyway. It was an awkward moment. Neither of us knew quite how to greet one another. Maybe if I had been sure of what the h.e.l.l it was we were really doing here, I might have been able to work out the proper protocol. In the end, we both sort of shrugged our shoulders and leaned over the guardrail.

"That's a stupid game," she said, pointing at the crowded handball courts below. "Men slapping a ball against a concrete wall."

"Stupider than some, less stupid than others."

"It must hurt their hands."

"It's like anything else, Domino. You get used to it."

"Yeah," she snickered, "tell me about it. Men and their f.u.c.king games. Look at them clowns down there." Domino nodded at two men exchanging money. "They actually gamble on this s.h.i.t?"

"Men gamble on anything, especially when women are watching. A lot of money has changed hands on West Fifth Street."

"That old p.r.i.c.k over there must be eighty. He's gonna drop dead."

"It's been known to happen," I said. "Anything worth gambling on is worth dying for. It's an old Brooklyn rule."

"f.u.c.k the rules and Brooklyn, too."

I didn't argue the point, getting instead to the matter at hand. "You have a message for me?"

"John wanted me to say he was sorry."

"Apology's not accepted. Move on."

"He was drunk." Domino was going to plead his case even if court wasn't in session. "He gets a little, you know, outta control when he's had a few."

"That's too f.u.c.king bad for him." I walked a few steps to show her how I was limping. "See this knee? I've had two major surgeries on it. That a.s.shole coulda crippled me. So you'll forgive me if I don't cry in my beer for his drinking problem. All the f.u.c.k he had to do was talk to me."

"But he can't," she said.

"Why, because Wit's money says so?"

That confused her some. She didn't say it with her mouth, but her eyes asked: How did you know about Wit? And suddenly I got the funny feeling Domino was trying to play me too. I began to wonder if Heaton had sent her here at all or if she'd gotten the bright idea to use her knowledge of the situation to her advantage. Maybe she thought she could squeeze me for a few hundred bucks in order to set up a meeting between Heaton and me that might or might not happen. You had to admire her entrepreneurial spirit.

I started walking away without saying a word.

"Where the f.u.c.k you going?" she called after me in a trembly voice.