Night Film

38

“A nightclub on Long Island,” I said. “It has a French name. It might be held in an old jail or abandoned building. Ring any bells?”

I was on the phone with Sharon Falcone, standing outside Gitane, a temperamental little French-Moroccan café on Mott Street. After leaving 83 Henry, we’d taken a cab here to grab a bite and debrief. When a Google search of club, Long Island, French, and abandoned jail elicited no breakthrough, I decided to call Sharon on the off chance she knew what the club could be.

“Don’t tell me you’re harassing me because you need help with your social life,” said Falcone on the other end.

I could hear phones wailing, a TV droning NY1, which meant she was still at her desk at the police station, sitting in her beat-up swivel chair, poring over the details of a case her colleagues had long given up on, glasses perched on the tip of her nose.

“Not quite,” I said. “It’s a lead.”

“I know Long Island like I know my kitchen. I understand it’s there for my pleasure and enjoyment, but somehow I never manage to go there. Can’t help you. Can I get back to work now?”

“What about occult worship in the city? How prevalent is it?”

“Does worshipping money count as occult?”

“I mean, strange practices, rituals. How often do you come across that kind of thing at a crime scene? Would it surprise you?”

“McGrath. I got stabbings. I got gunshot wounds. I got a rich kid who knifed his mother in the neck, a six-month-old baby shaken to death, and a man who was castrated at the InterContinental in Times Square. Sure, we got occultism. We got it all. There might be a Starbucks on every corner and an iPhone at every ear, but don’t worry, people are still fucking crazy. Anything else?”

I was about to say no and apologize for bothering her, when I thought of something.

“I might have a case for Child Protective Services.”

She didn’t immediately respond, though I could practically see her jerking upright, unearthing a yellow legal pad out of the piles of witness testimonies and lab photos, flipping through her illegible scribbles to a blank page, grabbing a pen.

“I’m listening,” she said.

“I just left a woman who’s the guardian of a young deaf boy. It doesn’t look right. The building’s a shithole, might be a brothel.”

“What’s the address?”

“Eighty-three Henry Street, between Pike and Forsyth. The woman’s name is Dot. She runs the place.”

“I’ll have someone look into it.”

“Thank you. Now, when am I taking you out for a drink?”

“When this city gets all warm and fuzzy inside.”

“So, never?”

“I keep hoping.” A phone bleated on her end. “I gotta take—”

She hung up.

It was after ten o’clock now, a Friday night. Groups of twentysomethings crowded the sidewalk, stumbling toward bars and hookups. Across the street, where the sloping redbrick wall surrounding Saint Patrick’s old cathedral cut sharply around the corner, I noticed a man in a black leather jacket talking on a cellphone, his hand cupped over the receiver.

He was staring at me and I couldn’t shake the feeling it was me he was speaking about.

He looked away, past the Ralph Lauren store on the corner, still muttering into his phone. I headed back into Gitane.

I was just being paranoid.