Little Easter

Hickory Cure

Vinny, Don Juan’s bodyguard cum coffee boy, was waiting impatiently by the lift doors, pressing the buttons like a hungry rat in Skinner’s lab, looking to the arrows for a cue. My brain was too busy treading water to care much. I noticed him and I didn’t. If he noticed me, Vinny didn’t show it. Labs rats are like that. I decided the walk down would do me good.

When did I ever know what was good for me? The steps made my knees sore and my sore knees reminded me that healing ribs prefer elevators. Hell, my aches and pains were the up side of my descent of Everest. There are protozoa streetwise enough not to carry a tenth of a million bucks down deserted stairwells. Hello! I could’ve been rolled easier than a bagel and my body wouldn’t’ve been discovered until the next fire drill.

So, I wasn’t thinking straight. I was too preoccupied by today’s episode of the Dante and Larry Show to think straight. Those two had blown enough smoke up my ass to hickory cure my colon. If Gandolfo truly didn’t care about Azrael, why bother to meet me at all? Not coming would have made the point with more elegance than threats and denials. And if he did care, again, why meet me? Why give me an audience of lies and then turn me over to Larry for the big payoff? Why not let Larry do the bidding from the get-go? Why dress it up with whistles and bells and cheap theatrics?

I figured there were three viable explanations for the song and dance, all of them as appealing as a ruptured spleen. The first possibility was Don Juan’s being truly ignorant of Azrael’s demise; that, as far as the Gandolfo crime family was concerned, Azrael Esther Wise was a bad memory still living under the auspices of the Witness Protection Program. But logic and the manner of her execution made that a difficult pill to swallow. The next possibility also depended upon the Gandolfos’ being ignorant of Azrael’s circumstances. In this scenario, however, the Gandolfos are still very interested in Azrael’s whereabouts. Using me as a delivery boy, they flush her out of hiding to settle an old score. I found this one particularly unappealing since they’d have to get rid of me, too. The final possibility didn’t hinge upon the Gandolfos’ ignorance or good graces. In this version Dante knows Azrael is dead, but he’s trying to protect himself by playing dumb and concocting an elaborate charade. It sounded nice, but it was too big a reach. Dante hadn’t killed Azrael himself and besides the triggerman was busy turning into fertilizer under Dugan’s Dump. And hey, a hundred grand is a pretty expensive charade even for a Gandolfo. Like I said, none of them seemed very credible explanations. Maybe there were other possibilities I just wasn’t seeing. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I sat on a bench in the metal and glass courtyard of Larry Feld’s office building. Some people ate their lunches, some read the Wall Street Journal. Some couples kissed in dark corners. I drummed my fingers on the Barnum file and stared at the crinkled photo of Azrael with Don Juan.

“Who were you, really, Azrael?” I asked the girl in the snap, the girl from two decades past, not the made-up mannequin I had found by the tracks. “What was it about you? What is it about you that controls men from the grave?” I wanted to know. I was one of those men.

She did not respond. Maybe that was her secret; silence.

I had come for answers and came away with more questions. Maybe there were no answers. And that frightened me, maybe more than anything.

The Phoenix Myth

The Scupper lights fairly glowed in the blowing snow of blue dusk. MacClough stood behind the bar trying to flip quarters into a shot glass. Bob Street, proprietor of the Star Spangled Deli, and Stan Long, operator of Sound Hill’s lone service station, sat belly-up and side by side next to the beer pulls. Stan was in his usual four-Scotch foul mood and refused to take the always jovial Street’s action on MacClough’s quarter-tossing prowess.

“Fucking snow,” Stan Long muttered as I walked up.

“Bad for business?” Bob Street wondered and winked hello to me.

“Nah,” the scotch drinker barked. “Business is too damned good. Snow don’t give a man time to relax. After I leave here, I’ll be making tow calls till sunup tomorrow. Fucking snow.”

“Life’s like that,” Johnny commiserated.

“Black and Tan.” I ordered out loud, although MacClough had poured the stout and ale before I spoke. “Yeah, Stan, I just drove in from a meeting in the City,” I looked Johnny in the eyes as I spoke. “Cars stuck all over the place.”

“Meeting?” MacClough nibbled at the bait.

“Must’ve been important for you to drive all the way into New York,” Bob Street added as if on cue.

“Very important,” my gaze fixed MacClough in his tracks.

“Fucking snow,” Long slammed his rocks glass on the bar along with a likeness of Alexander Hamilton. “Tomorrow,” he spit an ice cube on the floor and exited.

“I’ll be over there,” I told MacClough, pointing to a table under the impotent harpoons. “Safe home, Bob,” I patted the deliman on the back.

I laid Barnum’s file open across the unsteady table. It was actually two files bound together with rubber bands. One dealt exclusively with the Pulitzer fiasco; the other with her husband’s alleged suicide. Larry was amazing. J. Edgar Hoover had nothing over Feld when it came to obtaining inside info. Between them, the files contained internal memos from the New York Times, confidential reports from the N.Y.P.D. and personal notes passed between Pulitzer committee members. And to make things more accessible, each file came with a word-processed brief explaining certain intricacies that a layman might neglect and/or misinterpret.

Although Larry had neatly separated both incidents into distinct files, the circumstances surrounding each ran together like fingerpaints in the rain. Barnum was a hot young talent at the Times and she had been doing an investigative series on how organized crime directly affected the price of almost anything purchased within New York City. There was a set of articles on mob/union activities, a set on the garment district, a set on the airports and trucking and a set on the construction industry, the banking industry and a high profile set on the Mafia’s infiltration of government and the courts. There were copies of her work in the file. Like I said before, Kate Barnum had teeth and she knew how to use them. But beyond her style, what gave Kate an edge were her sources. She claimed, in memos to the editorial staff, to have the highest-level sources within the unions, the Mafia and even in the government. She’d spent a lot of time doing these pieces, too much time.

Mike Tallenger was an attractive man in a beatniky sort of way. He had a gray pony tail, a salt and pepper soul patch, long sideburns that resembled Italy on an atlas and empty blue eyes. He was a jazzman, a sax player, a manic-depressive and the late second husband of Kate Burnum. Larry had provided a publicity picture. Tallenger had been at Juilliard, Berkeley and Bellevue. He met Barnum at the latter while she was working up a piece about New York’s treatment of the homeless. Kismet it wasn’t, but they got hitched anyway.

Between the two files, I worked out a rough chronology of their lives together. The first two years of marriage had been relatively uneventful. Uneventful, that is, if you allow for Tallenger’s two trips to private hospitals out on Long Island. No more Bellevues for Mike, not with Kate’s corporate insurance. The big trouble came in year number three, the year Kate began researching the Mafia infiltration series.

I didn’t have to infer or deduce or read between the lines. It was all here in police reports, shrinks’ reports and Barnum’s own letters of confession and resignation. The reporter had started to spend a copious amount of time away from home. Tallenger was becoming delusional and increasingly paranoid. He told his psychiatrist that his wife was having an affair and that she and her boyfriend were planning to kill him. He confronted her. Her time away increased as did the confrontations.

She moved out. She began drinking. She began dating other men. She told one of her new beaus she was having trouble sleeping. He got her a script to ease that problem. The pills worked for awhile. In the end, nothing worked. Tallenger tried making nice, wanted to reconcile. She nixed the idea. One night a cop from the Fifth Precinct called her at her desk and suggested they meet at Tallenger’s.

Tallenger had done his last gig. He’d never have to play another wedding or bar mitzvah to make ends meet. His end was met. The unstable sax man had consumed enough sleeping pills to kill a standing-room-only crowd at Shea. Cops didn’t find a note, but they did trace the pills back to Barnum and the prescription her new beau had supplied. Odd thing was, Kate swore never to have given any of the drug to Tallenger. Another odd thing happened. Three days after they found the permanently sleepy Tallenger, the cops received a package in the mail.

You guessed it. The package was from Barnum’s late husband. In it they found a note repeating Tallenger’s accusation that Kate was plotting to have him executed. In addition, the deceased jazz man charged that Kate Barnum had recently had meetings with several known felons; some suspected of contract killings. Tallenger also claimed that his estranged wife had been busy trying to take out a life insurance policy in his name. It was all very dramatic, very Hollywood, but the cops looked into it anyway. And when they did, things got curiouser and curiouser.

Kate Barnum admitted to the meetings with the known felons, but asserted she was researching a story. When pressed for the names of these felons, Barnum refused on the grounds that these people were confidential sources. And a few insurance companies had records of calls from a woman asking if their firms covered people with a history of mental illness; specifically, manic depression. Even Tallenger’s doctors thought there might be something to his suspicions as people suffering from his condition tended not to be paranoid or delusional. The cops smelled a rat, but the D.A. liked the case. He was sort of partial to fat headlines and reelection. The Grand Jury was less impressed and didn’t have to worry about reelection. They refused to indict.

The victory was a small and fleeting one. In spite of the Times’ best efforts to keep the Barnum business hushed, some of the details reached the ears of Kate’s confidential sources. Fearing she might be forced to roll over on them to save her own neck or might subpoena them to testify in open court to corroborate her story, Barnum’s sources cut her off and dried up like the Great Salt Lake. Without their help, Kate’s big series was deader than Kelsey’s nuts. She completed the work anyway. Unfortunately, it was a considerable batch of lies pieced together by an alcoholic journalist who was under police scrutiny and whose husband had recently committed suicide. She neglected to clue her editor into that fact, and he ran with it.

The whole paper ran with it, advertising the Barnum series on local TV, on the backs of buses and in the subway. Kate’s blue-collar appeal, showing how the average Joe’s wallet is picked by organized crime, struck a resounding chord with people who usually read the News or the Post or Newsday. It was a coup built on a house of cards. The coup and the cards tumbled when a fellow reporter, who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who worked for a member of the Pulitzer Award Committee, patted her on the rump and informed Kate she was a veritable shoe-in for the prize.

Barnum’s admission of guilt was a blow to the Times, but not as severe as the one the Washington Post had received under similar circumstances. At least Kate hadn’t actually been given the award. The Post reporter had to return hers. Kate resigned, kissed her career au revoir and went into unsuccessful alcohol rehab. The paper printed excerpts from her letter of resignation and an apology to its readers.

God, she had fallen and all the way down. Now she longed to be a phoenix risen from the ashes. But Barnum was reinventing the phoenix myth, for if she was to fly again, not all the ashes would be her own.

“The cops get back in touch with you?” MacClough sat across from me just as I was slapping the rubberbands about the Barnum files.

“Not yet,” I looked around and noticed we were alone.

“Meeting in the City, huh?” Johnny had taken the hook and bait.

“Big meeting,” I yawned a burlesque yawn. “The biggest.”

“About your writing?” What, you finally get some agent with bad enough taste to take you on?” the ex-detective was straining.

“Answers for answers, MacClough. That’s the way it’s gotta be,” I stood to go.

He grabbed my free arm. “Answers for answers.”

I sat back down. “Tell me about her.”

“I was just out of-”

“Not about you,” I cut him off, “about her.”

“What about her?”

I thought for a second. “Her name.”

“Azrael?”

“Yeah, who names their kid after the angel of death?”

“Her full name was Azrael Esther Wise. The Esther was for her mom.”

“But we,” I caught myself, “Jews name only after-”

“-the dead,” he finished. “Yeah, her mom died giving birth to her. So her father’s this nutty bastard and he hangs the albatross on her forever. Then when she was four or five her dad got his right in front of her.” John made a pistol of his thumb and forefinger and placed the barrel against my chest. “Bing. Bing. Blew his fucking heart out his shoulder blade. Murdered for a buck and change. Too bad in a way.”

“How’s that?”

“Azrael started believing, believing in the name. Believed it until. .”

“The Dain Curse. A book,” I explained before MacClough could inquire. “Just a book.”

I wondered if Azrael had ever read it. Maybe living it had been enough.

“The meeting,” MacClough clapped his glass of Bushmills down to let me know my turn had come.

“Here,” I tossed an envelope on the unsteady table. “Take a peek. It won’t bite.”

“There’s a. .” the barman began counting.

“A hundred grand, give or take five thousand.”

“How’d’ya come by this?” Johnny snapped a thousand between his fingers.

“An old running mate of yours: Dante Gandolfo.” MacClough threw his whiskey in my face. “It’s for Azrael,” I went on, using my sleeve to rub the burning Irish out of my eyes. ”Pretty strange, considering she’s dead. Pretty fucking strange since we both know who had her whacked. I guess maybe we don’t know. I guess that’s why it’s taken you so long to hit back.”

“Get out,” he didn’t shout it. He didn’t have to.

“What happened to answer for answer?”

“Get out,” MacClough threw the neat pile of bills at me, their newness keeping them together. “I told you to stay out of it. This is my business.”

“Not just your business anymore,” I waved the stack of cash at him. “Now it’s my business, too.”

I left before MacClough could repeat his desire for me to exit. But there was no exit anymore, really. Not for him. Not for me.