Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016

The Long Wake by David Dean

A winner of the EQMM Readers Award, and on the top-ten list for that award a baker’s dozen more times, David Dean began his writing career in our Department of First Stories in 1990. The many stories he’s produced since have earned nominations for the Edgar, Derringer, Shamus, and Barry awards. This dark psychological tale in the noir style is a perfect fit for our Black Mask Department, for what is now called “noir” in crime fiction had its source in Black Mask Magazine tales.

He sat at the bus stop on EightyFirst and stared at the building across the street. It had changed over the years, and he had almost walked past before recognizing it. The grime of the seventies had been blasted from its yellowish bricks and the entrance had been altered entirely. It now sported gleaming brass doors and a grand russet-colored awning. Standing beneath it, a doorman in a matching uniform awaited the pleasure of its occupants. Unlike the previous guardian, he was young and did not appear to be a drinker. The building had gone “condo” since Jimmy’s last visit.

Tugging a pint bottle of cheap vodka from his overcoat pocket, he swept the cap off and brought it to his lips. When he lowered it once more, he noticed several people waiting for the crosstown bus eyeing him. He glared dully at each until they turned away.

He knew what he must look like to these younger people, what he looked like to himself — a hulking grey man, unshaven and grim, with a wide, deeply seamed face and close-cropped grey hair; even his eyes the shade of a bleak winter sky. The only color about him was a faded tattoo of a green shamrock on his neck, a drop of bright red blood at its center — the tribal brand of his mob days.

Wiping his mouth with his coat sleeve, he dropped the empty plastic bottle onto the pavement with a faint clatter amidst the traffic noise, the winds off the Hudson sending it skittering along the sidewalk.

A bus wheezed up to the curb and the dozen or so commuters hurried aboard, anxious for their homes at the end of a long day’s work. Remaining behind, Jimmy was cloaked in a cloud of diesel exhaust and street grit.

Alone now, he removed the letter he had carried since 1977 from an inner pocket and smoothed the stained dirty envelope out on the leg of his trousers. The name of the sender and her address — the address of the building across the street — were nearly erased by the grime and oil of his fingers, the decades of handling. Having memorized it long ago, he didn’t bother extracting the letter within, as touch alone now served to unlock its power.

In a looping, difficult cursive, with a bewildering scramble of sentences, Miranda pleaded for his forgiveness, asked if he would call her, come to her, allow her some small chance to redeem herself. She had made a terrible mistake returning to Graham; the worst decision she had ever made. She couldn’t understand, or properly explain, his hold over her. Please, she begged... please... please.

At twenty-four, he had been unable to comprehend the pain she had inflicted upon him, and his heart, softened by the passionate tumult of Miranda’s love, had hardened over again at her abrupt departure. The letter arrived several months later. It had taken him two months more to finally act on it despite his raging desire to see her — his pride had been that wounded, and it had been his greatest wish that she suffer as he did.

He was on his way to shake down a saloon on Eleventh Avenue when he first saw Miranda. Fat Frankie Lonegan and his crew were crowding a scared-looking couple outside the Irish Rose. Frankie was asking the guy, who sported a bad toupee, whether he had been bitch-slapped lately. The girl, blond, with a slender willowy figure, stepped between them just as Jimmy came upon the scene. She looked frightened, and Jimmy couldn’t imagine what had brought them to this part of town.

Frankie reached out and squeezed her left breast, and she jumped back as if burned.

“When’s the last time somebody bitch-slapped you?” Jimmy asked Frankie, walking into the midst of their little drama.

“Jimmy...!” Fat Frankie blurted, startled at the appearance of one of the Westies’ enforcers. The other guys gave Jimmy room. Up close, Frankie’s big red face and bulging blue eyes were like the face of an ugly clown. Jimmy got up close. Seizing Frankie’s balls in his right hand, he gave them a good hard squeeze to get his attention.

He got it.

“I’m gonna yank these little bastards out at the roots if I catch you being impolite to my friends ever again. Understand me, fat-ass?”

Frankie, his eyes closed in pain, managed to nod. He understood.

Jimmy let go, and Frankie fell back clutching his private parts, trying to walk away without sinking to the litter-strewn sidewalk. His buddies frogmarched him down the street.

Turning to the exotic couple, Jimmy remarked, “You don’t belong here.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. Her narrow, delicate face was flushed with anger and humiliation; her brown eyes wide and startled. He was only vaguely aware of the older man with the bad hairpiece standing behind her.

“We were looking for the Lion’s Head Theater,” she answered, the slightest quaver in her voice. “Thank you for helping us.”

Jimmy nodded, thinking she was nothing like the women he knew here in Hell’s Kitchen. She was not hard or burned-out. He knew it had probably been a mistake to have interfered with Fat Frankie, but didn’t care — she was looking at him now.

He responded after too long a moment, “That’s two blocks south of here on West Fifty-Fourth. This is Fifty-Sixth.” Standing in the doorway of the Rose, a heroin-thin hooker studied them with narrowed eyes, as if trying to place the girl, a cigarette dangling from her smeared lips. Jimmy glanced her way and she went back inside. “What are you going there for?” he asked. Then added, “I should prob’ly go with you.”

She smiled at him and replied, “Okay,” then said, “My name’s Miranda Westbrook. I’m auditioning for a new off-off-Broadway play.”

“You come to the right neighborhood...” Jimmy said, smiling back, “... for off-off , anyways; we’re all a little off-off around here. I’m Jimmy Hennessy.”

“Hennessy,” she repeated, looking him right in the eyes now. “That’s my favorite cognac.”

Jimmy could think of no reply to this.

“This is Graham Rixley,” she said, turning to her male friend, then paused before adding, “He’s my manager.”

The smaller man smiled. “Among other things.”

Jimmy didn’t like that, nor did he care for his rose-tinted glasses, his pale, doughy face, his improbable jet-black hairpiece or expensive overcoat.

“Thanks,” Graham added without a hint of sincerity.

Jimmy walked them to the theater, a desanctified church of grey stone. Having seen them safely inside, he was turning away when Miranda came back out alone. Rushing up to him, she placed a piece of paper in his hand.

“That’s my number if you ever want to call.” Then, she rose up on her toes and kissed his cheek. Before he could think of what to say, she had already rushed back inside, leaving him stunned and dizzy on the dirty sidewalk, disoriented beneath the grimy facade of the former church.

He didn’t make his collection on Eleventh Avenue that day, and before the month’s end Miranda and he were lovers.

Looking up at the building once more, Jimmy noted the last of the day’s light making red sunbursts on the windows of the upper floors, the shadows deepening on the street.

Across the way, separating herself from the homebound pedestrians, he saw Miranda, as he knew that he would. Just as he had seen her the last time he had sat at this bus stop holding this same letter, just as he had seen her a thousand times over in his memory, his dreams; his nightmares. It was as if he had returned to 1977 to witness, and relive, this moment. Graham was a few yards behind her, as he always was, unable to keep up with her furious pace. He appeared both annoyed and concerned. They both looked exactly the same... exactly as they must.

Miranda was disheveled, her blond hair knotted, unkempt, her face white and streaked with misapplied makeup, rigid and masklike, her plum-colored peasant dress thrashing about her booted ankles. People made way for her as she strode along swinging a bunch of keys like a demented bell ringer.

She looked as she sometimes did when she and Jimmy pulled all-nighters drinking her favorite cognac; doing the lines of coke he brought her like offerings — a perk of his outlaw profession, and a moneymaker among her theater friends. Miranda and he had become indispensable guests at every cast party and theatrical bar in Manhattan. Staggering home at dawn, they had made love to the sounds of the workday traffic rising from the streets below; afterwards collapsing into comalike sleeps.

The only dark spot on their happiness had been Graham’s frequent appearances at these same bars and parties, watching them from across the crowded rooms through his rose-tinted lenses. Sometimes Jimmy would find Miranda huddled with the little man in some distant corner of their latest haunt, her expression concerned and strained-looking. Once, he had come upon them just as Graham seized one of Miranda’s long, thin arms in his soft-looking hands, shouting something Jimmy couldn’t make out over the noise in the room. Jimmy had knocked him down, and would have done worse but for Miranda’s pleas.

“He’s still my manager,” she had explained tearfully, as the smaller man, ignoring his bleeding lip, attempted to right his toupee. “And when I first got to New York he was my only friend. I can’t just ignore him!”

Jimmy had said she should get another manager... there must be plenty around.

She had answered, “You don’t understand... it’s not that simple. He’s just trying to help in his own way.”

Across the street, the phantoms drew closer, and Jimmy stood, the tension in his body drawing him upright despite the fact that what he was witnessing had occurred decades before.

She swept past the tottering doorman, shouting to him and pointing back at Graham, then disappearing into the lobby. Graham arrived moments later, the doorman staggering after him as he brushed past, arms flapping in loose, helpless gestures.

Jimmy looked up to the seventh floor now. After a few minutes, the lights of Miranda’s apartment began to come on, room by room. Straining his already smarting eyes, he could see the flash of yellow hair that signaled she was inside. Passing each of the front windows of her large apartment, she switched on light after light in rapid succession. He could not see Graham, but knew he must be near.

The crowds were thinning as actual night set in. Her rooms glowed warmly, reminding Jimmy with actual pain of the many nights he had spent there in her arms, of the songs she sang to him sometimes, sitting up in bed, her small, pert breasts carelessly exposed, accompanying herself on guitar.

She sang with a clear, strong voice that carried within it notes of wild, unbridled exuberance, as well as echoes of something dark and troubling. It was within this singing that he sensed something more than the beloved little sister, the good daughter, the best friend she portrayed on her daytime-television drama.

There had been something in her childhood, something hidden... She didn’t offer it up to him, and he had been afraid to ask... to know. Yet it seemed of a piece with her relationship with the older Graham somehow.

He struggled to see into the rooms above him — already despising himself for not rushing across the street, forcing his way into her apartment — stopping what he knew was coming.

Just as the lights had come on one by one, they began to be extinguished in the same manner. He would catch glimpses of Miranda’s blond hair as she flashed past an unshaded window only to vanish in shadow.

But even as the last room went dark, the process was reversed once more. Like a windup toy, its springs too tightly ratcheted, Miranda uncoiled at an ever more frantic pace, the glimpse of yellow hair no longer accompanied by the shade of her dress, but a peek of bare flesh, a naked shoulder.

She hurtled ever faster from room to room.

Jimmy felt his mouth going dry, the skin beneath his heavy clothing pebbling in dread and terror.

In the last room to be reilluminated she appeared from the waist up in the large window, throwing it open. It was clear now she had shed her clothes, was naked. She turned, and once more lights winked out in rapid progression until she reached the far end of the apartment. For several seconds there was just the darkness, Jimmy unable to take his eyes from the open, waiting window.

Then something white flashed through into the chill night above the cracked pavement, the oily asphalt. With the verve of a high diver, Miranda launched herself into the dark with terrifying lust, the arc of her descent a long, angry scream; the sound of her striking the pavement an organic concussion expressing something so profound, so tragic, so final that Jimmy could neither grasp nor ever forget it.

When he had finally been able to move his feet that day nearly forty years before, he had raced into the street only to be struck down by a taxi, awakening in the same hospital to which Miranda’s lifeless body had been taken. By the time he had recovered from a broken leg, multiple contusions, and a fractured skull, she had already been autopsied, the D.A.’s office ruling her death a suicide and allowing her body to be transported back to Colorado. Jimmy was unable to attend the funeral in that foreign place.

Still, he mourned... and remembered.

His drinking grew worse, and the following year he went too far in dealing with a deadbeat, a sad little gambler who had fallen on such hard times that he could only secure a loan from the Westies. Never recovering from the beating-induced coma, the gambler had died, and Jimmy was sent up for his first serious hitch. When he was released in the mid eighties, the Westies were no more, the Feds having brought them down and scattered their remains across the tri-state area.

Jimmy took up residence in Elizabeth, New Jersey, making use of his ties and reputation to join up with the Keighry Head mob there. They were small potatoes compared to the Westies, but Irish-American gangsters were thin on the ground, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Having been sent up again for his role in exporting stolen luxury cars, he had served twelve years. It could have been less had he agreed to testify against the others involved in the scheme. He had taken his lumps instead and was now free once more. Sixty-one and tired, Jimmy felt as if he had satisfied all remaining requirements expected of him... save one.

This time he looked both ways before crossing the street.

Jimmy could see that the doorman didn’t like his looks, but he called upstairs anyway, never taking his eyes off the shabby intruder as he murmured into the phone.

If Graham declined to admit him, Jimmy intended to go up regardless. He knew his way to the apartment and would hurt the doorman if he must. He ran his thick fingers over the little Walther.380 nestled at the bottom of his coat pocket.

“Go ahead on up, sir,” the younger man said, returning the phone to its cradle. He looked relieved. “It’s number...”

“I know what number it is,” Jimmy cut him off, turning for the elevator. His voice sounded hoarse, unused; even to his own ears. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually had a conversation with anyone.

For doing his time in Rahway like a stand-up guy, he had earned some favors upon his return. One was in his pocket; the other was locating Graham Rixley. It had surprised Jimmy that he had been living in Miranda’s apartment since her death; in fact, now owned it. It would be another question he would ask. He had several.

Stepping off the smoothly operating elevator into the hushed environs of the carpeted hallway, he turned left and walked east toward the corner apartment. The door was partially open for him. Returning his hand to the hidden Walther, he stepped inside.

Jimmy found that it no longer looked as it had in his memory — the furnishings were expensive, if worn-looking, and there were paintings on the walls, not posters; the windows clothed in heavy green drapes. Miranda had never covered her windows, done little decorating other than placing objects she had bought in various spots throughout the apartment, mostly brass pieces from India, colorful scarves used as lamp covers, oriental pillows — all gone now.

An old man eyed Jimmy from a table in the dining room. Without the hairpiece and rose-tinted glasses, Jimmy almost didn’t recognize Graham Rixley. He was surprised to see that he had bright green eyes, shiny as marbles. His bare head appeared lumpy and corrugated, his face drooping like softening dough. A walker stood at his left elbow.

“You know who I am?” Jimmy asked, pulling out a chair and taking a seat. He removed the gun from his pocket and placed it on the tabletop. Graham glanced at it, but remained expressionless as a lizard.

“It took me a moment to recognize your name, but yes... I remember you,” Graham wheezed.

“You know why I’m here?”

“You want to know what happened to Miranda.”

“I saw what happened to Miranda,” Jimmy replied. “I want to know why.”

Graham stared at him, his mouth partially open. “You saw... how?”

“From the bus stop across the street. I was waiting for her to come home; she had written me a letter.”

The older man nodded as he took in this news. “Yes...” he said, at last. “She told me she had written you, asked for your forgiveness. She was looking for her Galahad from the wrong side of town to rescue her! But you never came. What a joke.”

“I came.”

“Months after she had written you, it seems,” Graham responded.

“This isn’t about me,” Jimmy replied. “It’s about you... your hold on her... what you did that night.” The gun remained flat on the table, Jimmy’s hands in his lap. “She never would’ve done it if I’d been with her. It was you. You did something — drove her to it somehow.”

Graham regarded him quietly for several moments, his glassy eyes shining with moisture. “You really don’t know anything? She never told you about me, about our relationship?”

Jimmy shook his head, saying nothing.

“I almost feel sorry for you, then.”

“Don’t.”

“I was Miranda’s manager, just as she said that day we met. I was also her lover, which even you must have figured out. Yes, I was much older — in my late thirties when I met her, and recently divorced. She had a lot of talent, and I felt lucky to represent her — she was going to have a great career. But she was also a wonderful girl, vibrant, full of life, beautiful and giving. Like no one I knew.” His eyes took on a hooded look. “It was the same for you, I imagine.”

“Go on,” Jimmy urged.

Graham paused long enough to pour himself some water from a carafe. Some made it into the glass and he took a sip. “But there was more to her than just that — like everyone, she had a past. She mentioned once that she had almost confided in you about it... about her... father... but held back. She didn’t think that you would look at her the same way if you knew.”

Jimmy nodded, his gaze sliding away. “I thought... maybe... there was something.”

The old man pushed at his dental plate with a pale finger; then pointed the wet digit at Jimmy, chuckling. “Miranda was right... you didn’t want to know, did you?”

“You were nearly old enough to be her father...” Jimmy responded, letting it hang there.

“Yes, but I wasn’t... That’s an important distinction, isn’t it? And I was actually trying to help her... also important, I think.”

“You rented this place for her?”

Graham nodded. “I wanted to share it with her, but she wouldn’t agree. She liked to keep some distance. It was understandable. She was fragile. I figured in time she would come around so I didn’t mind waiting. My God, she was only twenty-two! It would have helped, though, with monitoring her therapy, her drug use, if I could’ve been close.”

“Therapy...?”

“Yes... for what she’d been through. You didn’t know that either?” Graham shook his head. “I paid for all that, and it was going pretty well... until you came along.”

“You were lucky I did.”

“Was I... was Miranda? Oh, she was smitten, all right, and after a while, maybe even a little in love with you. But you were exactly what she didn’t need.”

Jimmy stirred, locking eyes with the smaller man. “What does that mean... exactly?” He felt his jaw aching.

“The coke... the booze... the all-nighters and the parties... Did you think there was no penalty for all that? She lost her role on the soap... Got a reputation for being unreliable... Hell, she was unreliable! Sometimes she didn’t return my calls for days on end. I was having problems even getting her auditions. Didn’t you know that much at least?”

Graham didn’t wait for an answer. “And you had taken her about as far down as she could go. Couldn’t you see what you were doing to her — how fragile she was? That’s why she left you and came back to me. She needed help... and I was willing to give it to her. That’s what people who love you do, Jimmy — they forgive and they help.”

Jimmy saw spittle on the older man’s chin, the plate slipping once more. Graham went on, his voice clotted now and strained. “But it was even harder this time.”

“ This time...?” Jimmy asked, hating the little man.

Graham paused before replying. “Did you think you were the only one? She had strayed before, Jimmy; you weren’t the first. Miranda had relationship... issues.

“Even so, she had convinced herself that she loved you; that I was the problem! You can take some comfort from that if you need it. But when you didn’t come in answer to her letter, I finally got her to agree to sign herself in at a rehab clinic. I was going to pay for it all. She didn’t have to worry about a thing. We just had to collect a few clothes from her place... this place.” Graham looked around the apartment as if he, like Jimmy, was surprised at the changes.

“That was the night — the night I sat at the bus stop?”

Graham nodded, the flesh of his face jiggling, his eyes leaking tears. “It would seem so.”

It had never occurred to Jimmy that someone else might share his grief, least of all this man.

Drawing a ragged breath, Graham studied Jimmy’s face a moment before adding, “If you were ever given the opportunity to do a right thing, you bastard, that was your moment. But you just sat there nursing your anger and your pride and let her go by... didn’t you?”

Jimmy felt his face flushing with the guilt, the shame of his inaction. “But you were up here with her,” he accused Graham. “It was you.”

A bleak smile lifted the corners of Graham’s froggish mouth. “I never made it out of the lobby, you fool. She went ahead of me and told the doorman I was a stranger following her... trying to molest her — she could be very clever when she felt cornered.”

Jimmy remembered Miranda pointing back at Graham, shouting something he couldn’t quite hear from across the street, the doorman following Graham into the building.

“The drunken idiot didn’t recognize me,” Graham went on, the grim smile gone now, “and by the time I managed to explain what was going on she had gotten into the apartment and... well... you know what she did. I was still in the lobby when she... when that sound...” He paused a moment, then added, “I have a copy of the police report, the doorman’s statement, if you care to see it.”

Jimmy sat in silence, his own tears finding their way down the creases of his grizzled face. “She was alone?” he asked after a while, this somehow being the saddest of all possible alternatives. “She died alone?”

“You should never have come here,” the older man murmured. “Memories are always better than the truth — even bad memories — especially bad memories. You should’ve known that.”

Jimmy rose to his feet.

“Well...” Graham sighed, looking at the gun still lying on the table between them, “... I’m not afraid, if that’s what you’d hoped.”

Jimmy glanced at the weapon. “Good for you,” he whispered, as if speaking to himself in an empty room. With a slight shake of his head, he turned away, walking down the long hallway to the corner window — Miranda’s window, as he had always thought of it.

Brushing aside the heavy curtains, he threw it open. The street noise of cars and buses came rushing in, accompanied by a gust of chill night air borne on their exhaust fumes. He breathed it in and looked down.

Waiting at the bus stop across the street he saw a young blond woman in a long, plum-colored dress. A guitar case leaned against the bench where she sat. When she saw that he was watching, she smiled up at him.

Managing a shaky smile in return, Jimmy removed the unanswered letter from his pocket once more. Miranda’s scent rose from it like a faint breath. The percussive clap of the pistol shot from the dining room only made him flinch; he didn’t bother turning to see.

As if cued by the sound, the girl at the bus stop leapt to her feet, snatching up the guitar case and striding away, her movements like a badly managed marionette. A small man wearing a black hairpiece rushed out of the lobby after her.

Letting the letter slip from his thick fingers to be borne away by the wind, Jimmy took a long, ragged breath; then followed.