Dead Famous aka The Jury Must Die

Chapter 16

THE JANITOR HAD FINISHED SWABBING THE FIRST TOILET bowl when he realized that he was not alone. A sign had been posted to close the men's room while he cleaned it, but a patron had slipped silently past him when his back was turned. He watched the stall door at the end of one row slowly, softly closing. And he detected a scent unrelated to cleaning solvents, piss and defecation. It was not cologne, for he knew all those smells. Odors were his life. Perfume?

Well, if there was a transvestite back there, he was a quiet one. And, absent the sound of a zipper, what might the pervert be doing? Shooting drugs of course – so predictable. He also knew that the addict would be a newcomer to this downstairs rest room. All the permanent residents, homeless men who made their beds in the stalls, would know better than to enter this place while his cleaning cart barred the door.

After ten years in Grand Central Terminal, the janitor was never taken by surprise. His job had gone stale; he had seen it all and sometimes saw it ahead of time. He could even roughly describe the next person to enter the facility by the light tap of a cane on the floor beyond the door. A blind man was an easy guess – too easy. It was hardly worth the trip around the corner to the section of urinals and sinks. The door opened, and, surprise (yeah, yeah), a white cane preceded – a blind woman? Oh, no, the janitor was not so easily fooled. That was definitely a man behind those dark glasses. Apart from the long, red hair, everything was masculine. So what he had here was a blind drag queen dressed for a day job from the neck down.

But not a redhead.

The wig disappeared into a pocket of the black coat, and the blind man's own snow-white hair was mussed. Leaning toward the vaguely shiny metal that passed for a vandal-proof mirror, the old geezer ran his gnarly fingers over his scalp to smooth down the wild strands.

Not blind either.

But this was hardly surprising. Grand Central was a mecca for bogus beggars. The janitor leaned on his mop, bored by the ongoing striptease, but this was all the spectacle he had. The old man's dark glasses were now secreted in the breast pocket of a very fine suit that really belonged in the posh ticket-holders' rest room upstairs, and the white cane was hooked in the crook of his arm, then hidden beneath the folded black coat.

When the crazy old bugger had closed the door behind him and the janitor believed that the rest room held only one drug-shooting, cross-dressing occupant, he turned in the direction of the toilet stalls. His mouth fell open, and his heart banged against the wall of his chest. A tall, green-eyed blonde blocked his way to the stalls. He quickly stood aside as she marched across the tiles, heading for the door in hot pursuit of the old man. And she was no transvestite, no sir – no Adam's apple on her. This one was all girl and strictly uptown in that long, black leather coat that must have cost the world.

The janitor's heart calmed down. He smiled. Life still had a few surprises for him.

Mallory glared at the old man's back. He stood at the center of the great hall and the crisscrossing traffic of commuters. Once again, she had followed a fake blind man with a long red wig. He had led her back to this same place. But this time, she had passed the young man by, entering the men's room well ahead of him – only to watch him grow old before her eyes. Somewhere along the route of changing subway trains, this elderly man had donned the disguise of the younger one, and she planned to make him pay for that deception. Mallory reached out and clamped one hand on his shoulder, then spun him around. A cellophane-wrapped cigar flew from his hand, and he could only stare at her in bug-eyed surprise. "Where is he?" She grabbed the old man's arm in a tight grip. "Where?" "You'll have to be more precise, my dear. I know so many people." The cultured tones of an educated man were a good match to his tailored suit. She had counted on a little stammering, signs of frayed nerves, the typical response of civilians in sudden encounters with police. So why was this man smiling?

"The guy who gave you the wig and the cane – the young one – where is he?"

"Oh, I really couldn't tell you. Sorry," he said, though his grinning face put a lie to that. "Well, I expect you'll want to arrest me now. Obstruction of justice or some such thing? As if the city doesn't have enough lawsuits for false arrests." He put out his hands awaiting the manacles, entirely too gleeful.

Mallory regarded him as she would a bag of snakes and cockroaches, for she suspected him of being a lawyer. Near his feet was the cigar he had dropped, but littering was only worth a ticket. She stepped closer to him and feigned a swoon, eyes closing. He reached out to break her fall, grabbing her by both arms.

"That's assault!" Her voice was loud. Heads turned all around the hall. "You just assaulted a cop!"

The old man's eyes were bulging, and he lacked the presence of mind to take his hands off her shoulders. He was staring at all the faces turning his way. People were slowing down, then stopping to watch, and two young policemen were running toward him.

Johanna Apollo opened the door to find Mrs. Ortega standing in the hall, clutching a large plastic bag with a pharmacy logo. The cleaning woman wordlessly moved into the room and dumped out the medical supplies on the coffee table. Then, breathless from running all the way, she hurried down the short hall to the bedroom. Johanna followed, intending to approach this wiry little person with greater caution than she had taken with Riker's other protectors.

In the bedroom, Mrs. Ortega was fretting over the sleeping man, tucking the blanket under his chin and smoothing stray hairs from his brow. Such simple services – and done so awkwardly. Clearly, acts of tenderness were outside the character of this rough-spoken New Yorker. The cleaning woman exuded anxiety, and she no longer had her mask of bravado to disguise the fact that she was coming undone.

"He's in deep trouble." Mrs. Ortega continued to fuss with the blanket, picking off tiny wadded balls of wool as she spoke her piece. "All the drugs in the world ain't gonna help him."

"I know," said Johanna, and not in any condescending manner. "But the prescriptions always make the friends and family feel better."

"Gotcha." Mrs. Ortega nodded as one conspirator to another, but her sorry eyes remained concentrated on Riker. "I should've got to him sooner. I seen this kind of thing before." The cleaning woman waved one hand in the air to say that she had borne witness to the whole sorry range of humanity. "Riker's got nothin' and nobody. Holes up like a hermit since he got shot. I mean the time he was really shot, real bullets. Now look at him. I seen it before – maybe not this bad. Say one of my customers loses his job. Well, life gets a little crazy, sure, but that guy's still got his nice clean home – real clean." She pressed one hand to her bosom and said with great pride, " I do windows." She turned back to the man on the bed. "Most people in trouble, they still got friends, family – something normal. You know what I'm sayin'?"

"I know," said Johanna.

"Riker's home was in Brooklyn." Mrs. Ortega pulled a rag from an apron pocket. "He can't go back." She absently polished an uncluttered corner of the small table by the bed, the rag running round and round as she spoke. "So how does this happen – gettin' ambushed again?" She wagged one finger at Johanna. "I'll tell you how. He cut off his friends, lost his job. He's off his game. If he'd gotten one piece of his life together just a day sooner, nobody could've taken him down this way. Not Riker. No, ma'am. If I'd only got to him sooner." She sat down at the edge of the bed, slowly folding her lean frame, as if deflating, losing air and will, and her voice was smaller when she said, "I could've fixed him."

"How?"

Mrs. Ortega looked up, suspecting derision. Instead she found compassion in Johanna's eyes and also the encouragement to keep going, and so she continued. "It's like everybody's life sits on three legs. You got your home – that's a big one. And then there's work, then friends. Well, say one thing goes wrong, maybe two – you can still stand on one leg, right? But what's Riker got?" Mrs. Ortega's eyes were unfocused, looking inside where the guilt was stored. "No wonder he fell down. I should've got to him sooner."

"He's still fixable." Johanna pulled a wad of money from the back pocket of her jeans. "I'd like to rent your cart of supplies for the rest of the day."

"Naw." The woman waved away the proffered money. "This is my day off. That's why I stopped by to finish up with my charity case here." The old New Yorker attitude was creeping back into Mrs. Ortega's voice, and her face showed the more normal state of contempt as she threw up her hands. "You think this slob would ever pay for a cleaning woman? Never. So I'll stay and finish the job – for free."

"I've got a better idea," said Johanna. "You'll like it." And Mrs. Ortega did like the plan. She loved it. It reeked of the pop-psychology cures found in her self-help books and television programs. For Johanna's part, it was merely an entree, a means of walking around inside Riker's head.

The elderly lawyer stood in the company of policemen and a hundred other people.

He was not the focus of everyone's attention, for the most dedicated travelers, obviously out-of-towners, were bent on catching trains of overground rail and underground subway, and selectively blind to the show.

But a hardcore New York crowd was assembling in a wide circle, maintaining the distance of an experienced audience for live theater.

The old man waited with great trepidation as the two young officers spoke with the pretty blond police who had accused him of assault. Detective Mallory smiled as she turned his way, and he took this as a good sign that their recent misunderstanding would be presently and pleasantly resolved.

She looked down at one of her black running shoes, and her face was somewhat petulant when she said, "You scuffed it. Do you have a handkerchief?"

"Ah, yes." What a small price to pay for freedom, a very small price indeed. With a courtly bow, the old man pulled a folded square of mono-grammed Irish linen from his pocket and handed it to her. She held it for a moment, her eyes meeting his with a cold stare. When she opened the handkerchief, a twenty-dollar bill appeared in the fold of material. He stared at it aghast. There was no way it could have -

"A bribe?" The young woman held up the handkerchief and the mysterious twenty-dollar bill. She handed the money to one of the men in uniform. "The bill is evidence. Bag it."

"That's not my twenty," said the incredulous lawyer. "I can prove it." He opened his wallet. "See? I don't have anything smaller than a fifty."

"So now you're trying to bribe all of us?" She turned to the officers. "That's probable cause for a search. Pat him down for weapons."

The brief foray into his clothing turned up the odd contents of his pockets and what was hidden under his folded coat. A red wig, a white cane and dark glasses were confiscated as the audience of civilians stepped closer. This show kept getting better and better.

The detective had a very unnerving smile. "This better be a good story. What are you up to, old man?"

It was the tapping of the blind man's cane that woke Riker. No, not that. Jo was lightly rapping the floor with her soles, a sit-down tap dance, an old soft shoe to the rhythm of Wake up, wake up. He opened his eyes a bit wider when he saw the long tube that began with a needle in his arm and led up to a bag of fluid hanging from the bedpost.

"That's a Valium drip," she said.

Valium? How humiliating – the drug of choice for old ladies and other sissies. A cluster of pharmacy bottles on his nightstand completed the image of an invalid's sickroom. He looked down at his chest, where four new bullet holes should be, and saw that his clothes had been changed. He wore a black T-shirt. His pants were also black, part of a suit that he seldom wore, and that accounted for the lack of stains and cigarette burns in the material. And his feet were bare. He was all laid out like a corpse at his own wake.

"So, Jo, who picked out my ensemble?"

"I did. That's your shroud. You're dead today." She smiled, as if this might be a good thing. "It's a trick I learned in college. Remember final exams? Those days when you didn't want to get out of bed – ever again? Playing dead can actually cheer you up. Nobody expects anything of a corpse. Life gets so much easier after you die. Oh, did I mention that I'm the one who dressed you? And now that I've seen you naked, shouldn't I at least know your first name?"

"I told you the day I met you, Jo. I don't have a first name, never did." He fished in one pocket and found it empty. "Go get my ID. Check it out." "I already looked at it. There's an initial, a P. What does that stand for?" "That's all it says on my birth certificate." He watched her remove the needle from his arm, then noticed the puncture wounds of other injections, a chemical soup. He felt docile but not dopey, no fog in the mind, and he needed no help to get out of his bed. Had he known what Jo had in mind for the day, he would have rolled over and gone back to sleep.

Lieutenant Coffey had a comfortable front-row seat in the shadows, but the show on the other side of the one-way glass was over. In the next room of bright lights, an elderly prisoner sat with his baby-sitter, a great hulk of a cop, whose facial features suggested that he might be prone to bone-snapping violence. Detective Janos was under orders not to speak, for his soft and gentle voice was evidence of a benign soul adored by dogs and children. So he merely stared at the old man, sometimes grunting a reply. The prisoner was smiling, apparently enjoying Janos's company and chatting amiably, not caring that the guttural responses were somewhat limited.

Lieutenant Coffey turned to the young detective seated beside him in the dark. "What possessed you to arrest a lawyer?"

"Always wanted to," said Mallory.

Jack Coffey nodded. This was every cop's fantasy.

"What the hell?" Riker would have decked anyone else for trying to wrap him in an apron, but since it was Jo, he was helpless to untie the bow she had fashioned behind his back.

"We'll start with the kitchen," she said. "It's a pit."

A good description. The floor was so sticky with spilled food and beer, he sometimes got stuck like a bug on flypaper when he walked through the room barefoot. She led the way down the hall to the kitchen, where a familiar object was waiting. Riker had never seen Charles's cleaning woman separated from her wire cart of tools and supplies. "Don't tell me what you did with Mrs. O.'s body. It's better if I don't know."

Jo pulled a garbage bag from a box on the cart and handed it to him. "I supervise. You do the work." She sat down at the table and watched him bundle junk mail and beer cans into the bag. After the floor had been cleared, she handed him a plastic bottle. He struggled with the concept of a spray nozzle as she explained that the liquid would cut through the grease on the tiles, then asked, "So what did your parents call you when you were little?"

After spraying the floor, he pushed the mop around in silence. Jo's foot tapped to an impatient rhythm, and he said, "My dad called me Hey Kid. My little brother's name was You Too."

"You never asked what the P stood for?" Highly unlikely, said the tone of her voice.

"Okay, I'll tell you the story my old man told me." Riker pretended interest in the floor tiles emerging from the dirt. "Dad's name was Phillip. He said I was named after him. But he didn't want me to get stuck with a tag like Junior for the rest of my life, so he just put the P on my birth certificate. He said it was a secret, just between us, and even my mom didn't know. Well, I loved that story, and I never told it to anybody, not ever. Not having a first name – that drove the other kids nuts. It was great."

"But when you were older and less gullible, you asked him for the real story, right?"