The Long Fall

48

My next stop was two blocks north and half a block west of Gracie Mansion: the directions Hannah had given me to her parents’ New York City home.

It was a six-story red brick manor looming from behind a twelve-foot coral-painted stone wall that was quite thick and imposing. The gate was electric and there was no hiding from the rotating cameras that perched over it like mechanical birds of prey.

I stood across the street, trying to appraise my chances of making some headway. I was still armed and wide awake in spite of only having had a single fifteen-minute catnap in the previous thirty hours.

I didn’t know who was in the house at the time. If Bryant was there I could tell him that his father tried to kill me, or maybe I should say that Norman Fell recommended me. I could tell him that I was a private detective looking into the deaths of three young men, including an old case concerning a certain Thom Paxton.

If Roman was there I could say that I was a friend of Timothy Moore and that I had an urgent message from him.

If the river were whiskey and I was a diving duck . . .

It never hurts to bide your time when there’s an opportunity to do so.

Standing out there in the shadow of Hull’s house, making peace with the fact that I had no idea what to say or why the crimes had been committed, I was still better off knowing that I didn’t know than I would have been otherwise.

Understanding my ignorance, I crossed the street and pressed the cracked plastic button to the rich man’s home.

I smiled up at the camera that watched me from a lens hole in the white, cast-iron gate. I was ready to argue, wrangle, wheedle, and whine at whoever challenged my admittance.

Instead a buzzer sounded and a voice ejaculated, “Come on in! I’ve been waiting for you for two days!”

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I pushed and the heavy gate swung in on well-oiled hinges. After taking three steps I heard the portal slam shut behind me.

Inside I found a surprisingly large bright-green lawn that grew around a few dozen well-manicured rosebushes. The flowering shrubs had big generous blossoms of every color imaginable. Soon-to-be-extinct honeybees drifted lazily from one bloom to another, narcotized by the heavy aromas and rich pollen.

The stone pathway passed thirty feet or so through the unlikely Manhattan yard, bringing me to a marble stairway. This ascended eighteen steps to a very old, coffin-lid-like door.

I was looking for the dark barrier’s buzzer when it swung open, with Hannah hanging on the doorknob, laughing for me.

“I bet you didn’t expect me,” she said.

Today she was barefoot in tight blue jeans and a dark-blue halter, with bits of glitter here and there, covering her small breasts.

“No,” I agreed.

“But I knew that you’d be coming.”

“Did you tell your father I’d be here?”

“No.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Are you going to come in, Mr. McGill?” The multiple personalities of her upbringing and education were gone. She was just a sweet young girl, both vulnerable and fearless. I could see in her eyes that she now saw us as good friends that had passed through the gauntlet of her brother’s episode.

She had marked my hesitation correctly. There was something about the ebullience exuding from Hannah that made me want to hang back, or maybe leave. Most guys when they see a damsel in her lonely tower want to ride up and save her—but I knew better. My kind of help shorted out the circuit board, or stripped the gears in your transmission.

She grabbed a couple of my fingers and pulled.

“Come on.”

I allowed her to drag me into the palatial entrance hall. You couldn’t call it an antechamber or foyer. It was a circular room, twenty feet in diameter, with a wide staircase that crawled up the walls for all six floors, ending at a skylight that sprinkled diffuse sunbeams down on this otherworld. The continuous banister made the spiral seem like the lofty box seats of a theater, with the floor as the stage.

In the center of the room was a round mahogany table with a magnificent bouquet of at least a hundred freshly cut flowers arranged in a way that made you feel you were peering into a rain forest or jungle. The florist had to be some kind of genius.

My awe surpassed itself when a hu‹€€o bge, pure-yellow parrot of some kind shrieked and flew out from the tangle of foliage. The bird flew up to the sixth floor and perched on the rail under the glass roof.

“That’s Bernard,” Hannah said, using proper English pronunciation. “He’s my mother’s pet. Daddy wants him in a cage but she says that he has to fly free. The staff is always cleaning up after him.”

Bernard screamed again and then flew somewhere else in his private multimillion-dollar aviary.

“Come on,” the woman-child said.

She led me down a wide hallway that was more like a gallery in an art museum. The paintings here were Impressionist and Post-impressionist masterpieces. There was a Cézanne that I had never seen before, also a Modigliani that was new to me.

I’d spent a lot of my adolescence in art museums—there and the boxing gym with Gordo. I couldn’t draw to save my life but I appreciated the stylized chaos that artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century wrought.

At the end of the hall, in a little recessed area on the left, was a very small painting by Paul Klee. It was composed of red and yellow and gold boxes, with defining lines of cobalt here and there. On the right side, in the lower corner, there was a scribble done in a slightly lighter blue that might have been a squiggle becoming a man, or vice versa, and on the upper-left-hand side there was an oval, bisected face that maybe the squiggle-man had lost, or maybe it was the sun. It was the most arresting painting I had ever seen. While I stopped and stared, Hannah waited patiently.

“It’s beautiful, huh?” she said after a minute or so of appreciative silence.

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you want it?”

Yes, I did, but I didn’t say so.

“You can have it,” she offered in an offhanded way.

“It’s priceless.”

“No. My mother bought it for me for my twelfth birthday. I’d be happy to give it to you.”

I believe that her slamming me in the head with a Louisville Slugger would have made less of an impact.

Material things never mattered much to me. My Communist father had made sure of that. Even though I was not a Marxist or an adherent of anarcho-syndicalism, I simply never gave much thought to possessions. Money paid the rent but it didn’t drive my desires like it did for so many other property-hungry people in the West. I didn’t have a favorite ring or watch. There was nothing that I saved up for that didn’t have a practical use. I had been like that my entire life, but there I was in that hallway, on the outskirts of old age, and Hannah’s offer made me feel like a child who still had everything to learn.

“Wow,” I said. “You know, that might be the best offer I’ve ever had.”

“So you want it?”

“Can we go sit down now, Hannah?”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging lightly as if her responsibilities and that mausoleum of a house did not weigh on her at all.

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