Red Cat

29

A jaundiced sunset was seeping through the clouds as I drove into Tarrytown, and it tinted the Hudson in the colors of a faded bruise. It was just past four; I’d come to see Kenny Hagen, maintenance manager of the Van Winkle Court condominiums, and Jamie Coyle’s uncle. I turned west off Route 9, onto College Avenue, and worked my way toward the river. Walls of dirty snow were plowed up on the roadsides, and I missed two intersections but eventually found the place. It didn’t look worth the trouble.

Van Winkle Court was an ugly circle of two-story garden apartment buildings, eight squat bunkers with mock brick siding and white vinyl trim. Except for a man with a salt spreader, working the footpaths between the buildings, the complex looked abandoned in the waning light. I watched the man roll the spreader to a flight of stairs, bump it down to a basement doorway, and go inside. I got out of my rented Nissan and followed.

I went through a metal door into a low cinderblock corridor. To my right was a storage room, and lots of tools. A short man in a green jacket was inside, parking a salt spreader beside a pile of folded tarpaulins. He looked at me and pulled off his gloves. His accent was heavy Spanish, and his English was limited.

“Help you?” he said.

“Kenny Hagen?”

The man pointed. “Down there Kenny.” I nodded and went down the hall.

I found Kenny in the office he shared with a squad of old kitchen ranges. They were dented and scorched, and layered in grease and ancient food, and so was he. Kenny was close to sixty, thin and lined, and his face was ruddy where it wasn’t smudged with dirt. His grimy plaid sleeves were rolled over a thermal undershirt, and there was an old Screaming Eagle tattoo on the back of one hand. A dollop of what looked like tomato sauce made a red comma on his chin. He was fiddling with a soldering iron and a little motor when I came in, and the air smelled of hot metal. He looked up from his card-table desk and set the motor down. His eyes were small and blue behind taped wire glasses. He ran a veined hand through his white hair.

“You need something?” he asked. His voice was deeper than his size suggested, and I figured it was the cigarettes. There was a full ashtray on the table, and a pack of Marlboros next to it. He propped the soldering iron on the rim of the ashtray, and fired up a smoke with a white plastic lighter.

“I’m looking for Jamie,” I said.

He squinted at me. “Jamie who?”

“Jamie your nephew.”

“Uh-huh, and you are who?”

“A friend of a friend. I’m trying to get in touch.”

Kenny nodded. “Yeah? Well, so am I. So if you find the prick, give me a shout.”

“I thought he worked here.”

“Only till I see him next.”

There was a plastic chair in front of Kenny’s table, and I pulled it out and sat. “Why’s that?” I asked.

“How about for not showing up to work for a couple of weeks running, and not calling in to say what’s what? How about for not returning my hundred freaking phone calls? How about for screwing over the only relative he has left in the world, who went out on a limb to get him this job in the first place? Those enough reasons for you?” He punctuated his speech with the orange end of his cigarette, and little bits of ash floated in the air when he was done.

I nodded. “You know where he lives?”

“He used to live right here, in the unit at the end of the hall, but he hasn’t been around in weeks.”

“You have a phone number for him?”

Kenny rattled off Coyle’s cell number. “Nobody answers, though.”

“Any other family he’d be in touch with, or maybe visit?”

“His old man drank himself to death twenty years ago, and we lost my sister, God bless her, three years back- so, like I said, I’m it.”

“How about his friends?”

Kenny pulled a hand down his face, and left a streak of grease along his jawline. He shrugged. “You’d know more about that than me- I didn’t think he had any.” Kenny paused and made a thinking face. “There was a guy upstate, maybe, a guy he was inside with.”

“You have a name?” Kenny blew smoke and shook his head. “A telephone number or address?”

Another head shake. “I don’t know- maybe he’s somewhere in Buffalo.”

I nodded. Buffalo. “You don’t know Jamie’s girlfriend?”

He lifted his eyebrows. “He has a girlfriend?”

I didn’t bother to explain. “Jamie leave anything behind when he took off?”

“Check it out for yourself,” Kenny said, and he reached into the pocket of the big orange parka that hung on the back of his chair. He fished out a noisy ring of keys and stepped around the table.

“Come on,” he said. He went clinking down the hall, and I followed.

The apartment was dark and small, not even three hundred square feet and all of it visible from the doorway. To the right was a kitchenette, built into what had been a closet. Next to it was a bathroom, hardly larger than the airplane variety. There was a mattress on the floor, laid out beneath a narrow window set high up on the wall. That wall and all the others were a dingy white, and the floor was gray vinyl. The bare ceiling bulb cast a light like dirty water.

Kenny told me to close the door when I was through, and it didn’t take me long. But for dust and the smell of heating oil, the place was empty. Kenny was back at his desk when I passed his office, looking at his motor and blowing smoke. I didn’t bother to say goodbye.

I got into my rental, pulled out of the Van Winkle lot, and headed back toward Route 9. And stopped when I’d driven fifty yards. There was an alcove in the snow on the other side of the street, a void where a car had been excavated, and I pulled my Nissan in a tight turn and into the snug space. I took out my binoculars and settled in. It was all but dark now, but the path lighting around Van Winkle Court was good enough. I’d be able to see that lying bastard Kenny when he came up the basement stairs.

As an actor, Kenny was right up there with Gene Werner. He’d never pressed me about who I was or how I knew Jamie or what I wanted from him, and he’d never once told me to go away. The line about Jamie’s pal in Buffalo was matched in its dubiousness only by the look of surprise he dressed up in when I mentioned Jamie’s girlfriend. Above all, Kenny had been just too ready to let me poke around in Jamie’s apartment. He’d wanted me to believe that Jamie had moved out- and I did- but I also believed that he was still close by, and that Kenny knew where. I cracked the windows, killed the lights and engine, and zipped my parka to the neck.

As it grew later, traffic picked up at Van Winkle Court, and more lights came on in the brick-faced boxes, but no one came up the basement stairs. While I waited and watched, I thought about my conversation with Ned.

He’d been surprised to hear from me- it had been eighteen monthsbut he knew from my tone that I hadn’t called to chat. He listened quietly as I explained that David had become involved in a murder investigation, that the victim was a woman David had had a sexual relationship with, that David- or Stephanie- might become a suspect in her death, and that if there was an arrest, the press coverage would be vast and voracious.

The news shocked him- how could it not? — but Ned hadn’t risen to the top at Klein amp; Sons by being panicky or dumb, and he didn’t start then. He’d asked smart questions, and had neither pressed me on the ones I wouldn’t answer nor pushed me into wild speculation on the ones I couldn’t. I heard him taking rapid notes throughout. He asked about lawyers, and something relaxed a little in his voice when I told him that Mike Metz was representing David.

“How is David doing?” he asked.

“That’s why I’m calling. I have to go out, but I don’t want to leave him alone. He’s been drinking.”

“Steph isn’t there?”

“No, and I’m not sure when she will be. Or if.”

“Jesus Christ.” He sighed. “I’ll send Liz up.”

Ned rang off and an hour later my older sister had arrived. I met her in the foyer. She wore a black coat over a black suit, and her blond hair was swept straight back from her forehead. Her heels were low, but tall enough to bring her to my height, and her green eyes were narrow and uncertain. Her usual detached cool had deserted her, and her strong, handsome features were set in a mask of worry. On Liz it looked much like anger, and it reminded me uncomfortably of our mother.

“Where is he?” she asked. She spoke in a husky whisper.

“Asleep, on the sofa. With any luck, he’ll stay that way for a while.”

“And what should I do with him when he wakes?”

I shrugged. “Hang out. Give him something to eat. Keep him from doing anything stupid.”

She shook her head. “That’s apparently easier said than done. Will he be surprised to see me?”

“Probably.”

“And pissed off?”

“Definitely.”

Liz shook her head. “Excellent. Ned said he’d been drinking.”

I nodded. “Try not to let him do that anymore.”

“Am I supposed to restrain him?”

“Do the best you can.”

I pulled on my coat and Liz caught my arm. “Jesus Christ, Johnny, this is dramatic even for you. We don’t hear word one for over a year, and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of a murder-and with David, of all people. What the fuck is going-”

I cut her off. “What can I tell you? Shit happens. Right now I’m trying to keep it from happening to David.” I tried to get my arm back, but Liz held on.

“ ‘Shit happens’ isn’t good enough. How did he get himself into…all this?”

“There’s no short answer to that,” I’d said, “maybe no answer at all. But you can try asking David when he gets up.”

There was movement on the basement stairs and I picked up my binoculars. I saw a flash of orange: Kenny Hagen in his big parka walking carefully along a footpath. There was something under his arm, and it took me a moment to make it out. It turned out to be two things: a carton of Marlboros and a box of doughnuts. He walked two buildings south and went down another flight of steps and fished his key ring from his pocket. He fiddled with the lock and went inside. He was in there for twenty minutes by my watch, and when he came out he was empty-handed.

He was descending the stairs to his own basement when a battered brown Ford rolled past me and into the Van Winkle parking lot. Two people got out, and I didn’t need the binoculars to recognize McCue’s aggressive gut or Vines’s cropped blond hair. They headed right for Kenny Hagen’s building. Half an hour later, Vines came out. She got into the Ford and started the engine, but didn’t go anywhere. In a minute or two the windows fogged, and she became a hazy silhouette behind the wheel.

She sat there for fifteen minutes, and emerged again when a Tarrytown police cruiser pulled into the space beside hers. A uniformed cop got out and shook hands with her, and a minute later another crappy sedan pulled up. A big guy who might have been one of the cops in David’s apartment that morning climbed out. He spoke with Vines and the Tarrytown cop, and the three of them walked toward Kenny’s basement. And then the big guy bent his head and said something to Vines. She stopped and turned and he pointed at my car, and Vines began to walk- then jog- toward me.

I fired the engine, shoved the car into R, and prayed that no one was coming up the street. The Nissan swerved and slid as I popped out of the space and onto the road, and I saw Vines sprint across the Van Winkle parking lot. Her coat was open and she was reaching inside and I flicked on the car lights and hit the brights. Her hand went to her eyes and I tapped the gas. For one sick instant my wheels whined and spun and rooster tails of sandy brown snow flew up. Then the car shuddered and slewed, and I was gone.

I called Mike from the Saw Mill.

“I don’t think she made me, though I’ll find out soon enough if she did.”

“And Coyle?” Mike asked.

“He’s gone, but not far, and I’m pretty sure Uncle Kenny knows where. I’ll give it another go tomorrow, assuming McCue and Vines haven’t beaten me to him or yanked my license by then.”

“Not too early tomorrow, though,” Mike said.

“Why not?”

“David finally got in touch with Stephanie. He told her what happened this morning, and explained that there are questions she has to answer. She said she’d come back to town tomorrow morning, to talk.”

“It’s about time,” I said, “but what does it have to do with me?”

There was a long silence at Mike’s end, and then he cleared his throat. “She says you’re the only one she’ll talk to.”