And so Sport, the next Sinatra, the next Julio, had become, at the age of twenty-six, a prison guard on Rikers Island. A correction officer, as they preferred to be called. And because he was such a good boy, he had soon been able to transfer over to Support Services out on Hart Island, at Potter’s Field. He had been put to work burying what department regulations referred to as “the indigent and the unclaimed.”
Oh, yes, he remembered this place; he would always remember it. It wasn’t only the dead, he remembered thinking, who get buried here. Out here, on Hart Island, he’d had a vision of his life stretching out before him; a life that could have been drawn wholesale from one of his mother’s screeching prophecies. Out here, among the graves, Sport had heard his mother cackling with triumph unto eternity.
And then, out of nowhere, the accident saved him.
It had happened in a moment. He had been overseeing the work in the trench. One prisoner was in there attaching a hook and chain to the heavy bulkhead that was used to hold yesterday’s piles of coffins steady overnight. The civilian machinery man was positioning his backhoe so it could draw the line up, lift the bulkhead out. Two other prisoners, meanwhile, were using a rake and shovel to drain off the groundwater that was continually seeping up into the trench’s bottom. The rest of the prisoners were behind Sport, carrying coffins toward the ditch.
Many of the dead were infants that day. Their boxes were hardly bigger than shoe boxes. The cons were making jokes as they took them off the dump truck.
“Looks like my Adidas finally came.”
“Hey, Homes, here’s the carton of cigarettes you ordered.”
“It’s the new fast food: MacBaby in a Box.”
And as one of the men turned back to shout to another, he dropped his coffin. It tipped over the edge of the ditch, splashed into the puddle on the bottom, and cracked open.
The box lay on its side. The small plank that covered its top had sprung off. A white plastic bag had tumbled out and lay in the muddy groundwater.
The skells fell silent. There was no sound but the rumble of the backhoe’s engine. The prisoners at the edge of the ditch stared down at the white plastic bag. It lay at the feet of the kid who had been working the rake.
“Go on,” someone said from the top of the ditch. “Put it on back in, Homes, t’ain’t no thing. It’s dead.”
The skell in the trench shook his head. He stared down at the white bag. He kept shaking his head.
“Go on, nigger,” another con shouted at him.
“That’s your lunch, man, pick it up,” said another.
All the prisoners were laughing now, shouting to the con in the ditch. The con in the ditch just stood there, staring, shaking his head.
“Go on, man, do it. Do it. Pick it up.”
“Oh, fucking Christ,” Sport muttered finally.
He jumped down into the trench himself. The skells applauded: “Sport-man to the rescue. Go get ’em, Sport.”
Sport crouched down, ankle-deep in water. He lifted the plastic bag. It was so light; it shifted in his hands as if it were full of twigs. He put the bag in the box. Then he fit the lid back on and pressed its nails home with his palm.
And as he did, the backhoe lifted up the hook and chain, the bulkhead was drawn up out of the ditch. The wet bottom of the ditch gave way and the piles of yesterday’s coffins toppled over.
Crouched down as he was, Sport was flattened when the coffins hit him. He fell to the earth and the boxes rolled over on top of him, pinning him in the muck. For a moment, he felt nothing but the mud and water rushing into his mouth, the suffocation, the panic …
And then the pain exploded inside him and he gagged and choked as he tried to cry out.
His appendix had ruptured. The doctors at Bronx Municipal later said they had gotten him to surgery just in time.
Sport immediately got himself a lawyer who loudly proclaimed that the city’s negligence took this incident beyond the bounds of mere workman’s compensation. The city responded by offering Sport a settlement of thirty thousand dollars above benefits. Sport accepted and quit his job at once.
He resolved to take a shot at show business. A real shot this time, no fooling around. Even his mother’s obscene phone calls in the dead of night could not dissuade him. He had new photographs taken. He prepared to hire a recording studio.
And then he had his brainstorm. His great idea about Eddie the Screw.
For three months before the accident, the drunken exguard, ex-con had been telling his story down in the Harbor Bar where Sport liked to meet his CO friends. The story was always the same: how Eddie had run the drug trade in the city prison system; how he had stashed away over half a million dollars in cash; how the feds had come after him and how he had outsmarted them, by converting the cash into diamonds and hiding the diamonds away.
“It was nine years ago,” the old man would say. “The investigators were closing in on me, see. But I still had my diamonds. Half a million dollars’ worth—then—though I wouldn’t care to estimate their value now.” He would tilt his round head so that his liver-spotted pate caught the tavern’s yellow light. He would screw up his skewed face until his enormous right eye seemed ready to pop out onto the table. And he’d say: “I was working the Potter’s Field detail out on Hart Island at the time, ya see. And I thought to myself, I thought: If I can just get two minutes alone with one of these here coffins, I’ll slip this safebox of diamonds into it and it’ll be buried safe and sound until the heat’s off. And then, one day, what should happen, but an opportunity arose too beautiful, too perfect, to pass up. A little girl—Elizabeth Burrows was her name—stowed away on the meat wagon. Yessir. She wanted to see her mother buried, the poor thing did, so we pretended one of the Jane Does was hers and we held a little funeral for her. It was downright moving. Yes, it was. But the point is, the point is, while everyone else was busy attending to the kid, I climbed into the truck, cracked open the Jane Doe’s lid, and slipped my package inside it. It was buried right there in front of everybody, and nobody knew a thing.”
Now, he would point a finger at his bald crown, wink his huge eye, and say, “Soon as I get the backing to pull it off, I’m gonna dig those diamonds up too. No one else can do it, see, ’cause no one else knows the number of that coffin but me.”
And then he’d cackle and say, “No one but me and Elizabeth Burrows, that is. No one but me and that little girl.”
When had it occurred to Sport to believe that horseshit? He couldn’t remember now. It had just suddenly seemed to him that he was in a perfect position to pluck those diamonds from the earth, to make a real fortune, have a real stake for his new career. He had money, he had Correction Department contacts, and he knew the Potter’s Field burial system.
Soon after he got out of the hospital, he wandered over to the Harbor Bar. Eddie the Screw wasn’t there anymore. He’d died, the bartender said. While Sport was in the hospital, the old man’s heart had given out and he’d died in bed in an old hotel just around the corner.
Sport could’ve called it off right there. Christ, he wished he had. But oh, no. He found Elizabeth Burrows in the phone book—and then he got a friend to make him some copies of the Hart Island burial records for the year Eddie was arrested …
Now, he withdrew those records from his windbreaker pocket. He and the machinery man had reached the graves.
They were just off the road in a little field of blackened earth. Small white headstones, gleaming even in the moonless mist, rose from the ground at intervals of about eighty feet. At the near end of the field, right in front of Sport, was the new ditch, an open pit. There were unused coffins at the edge of it. One of these, Sport knew, would be full of digging tools. A backhoe also stood at the ditch’s edge. It looked, in the shadows, like an animal come to drink.
Sport stood where he was a moment. He hunched his shoulders and shuddered. Behind him, the cold wind came off the water. The water slapped the shore, rattling the carpet of mussel shells t
here. The wind moved on and stirred the mist that lay atop the field of headstones. The wind moved on, and on the far side of the field the dense, dead trees creaked and swayed.
“Okay,” Sport whispered.
He left the machinery man standing on the road and walked into the field.
Sport had overseen exhumations before. There were about a hundred of them on Hart Island in any given year. As crafty old Eddie had made sure to bury his Jane Doe at the top, this one would be relatively easy, he thought. He just had to find the right location.
Sport moved slowly through the mist, bending down in the dark here and there to shine his flashlight on a headstone. Each headstone marked a trench, and each trench held the bodies of a hundred and fifty paupers. They were buried in three sections of forty-eight, forty-eight, and fifty-four boxes: they were stacked up in two piles of three and so had to be sectioned in multiples of six. Sport moved on, drawing farther and farther from the road behind him, closer and closer to the woods up ahead.
When he reached the far edge of the field, he paused. The overgrown woods were right beside him. He heard the dead leaves skittering in the dark. He shone his flashlight over the stone at his feet. He read the number on it. He had found the one he wanted.
Sport braced his heels against the stone and began to pace off the distance. The number Conrad had given him corresponded with another number on his records: 2-16. The coffin he wanted was the sixteenth one in the second section. He paced the number off.
When he found the place, he reached down and drew an X in the dirt with his finger. He walked back to the road, to the sad-faced machinery man.
“X marks the spot,” he said.
The machinery man nodded. Without a word, he walked over to the backhoe by the open ditch. He climbed up into its cab.
A moment later, the backhoe’s engine started. Its headlights went on. It rumbled away from the open trench.
Sport walked over to the unused coffins by the trench’s side. He sat down on top of one of them and watched the backhoe moving out across the field.
The machinery man positioned his machine at the place Sport had marked for him. Sport heard the machine’s shovel chunk into the earth.
Marshal Dillon
Conrad was pacing back and forth now, ignoring the pain in his knee, staring into the empty space before him, gripping the recorder in his right hand. He could be wrong, he kept telling himself. The description could fit a million people. He could be completely wrong about the whole thing …
But he stared into the empty space before him, and the face of Sport was there. The young, handsome face with the artist’s eyes. The same face that had leaned sneering into his, that had cursed him and spit at him. And he paced back and forth gripping the recorder tightly. And he did not think that he was wrong at all.
It must have been Sport. It must have been Sport all along. Sport must have been Terry, the struggling actor. The man who had kissed Elizabeth. The man who had murdered the red-haired man, Robert Rostoff, in her apartment. That was it, he thought. That was what must have happened. She had assumed he was a hallucination, her Secret Friend, but he was real. He was real and he had tried to seduce her. But somehow, for some reason, the red-haired man had gotten in the way. The red-haired man had known Sport was coming to her apartment. He had hidden there, he had grabbed Elizabeth, locked her in the bathroom. He had been trying to keep her away from Sport. Maybe he’d even been trying to protect her. Then, while Elizabeth was locked in the bathroom, while she was confused, hysterical, maybe even hallucinating in fact, Sport must have burst in and overcome the red-haired man. He must have murdered this person who had managed to interrupt him as he kissed Elizabeth, who had frightened the girl away after Sport had succeeded in enticing her home, bringing her back to …
Conrad stopped pacing. His eyes went wider. He looked down at the recorder in his hand.
… to his apartment.
Sport had taken Elizabeth back to his apartment. She had told him that. She had told him where it was. He remembered …
He moved quickly to the recliner again. Sat down quickly. He held the recorder between his knees. He pressed the fast-forward button. He tapped his foot convulsively on the ground as the tape spun ahead.
He stopped it. He hit playback.
… looked really angry. He said he would meet me right at the door of the center from . . .
“Shit,” Conrad said.
He hit fast forward. He looked at his watch. Five after eleven. He felt the press of time in his stomach. It had been gone for a while; that pressure, that urgency. For a while, here in this little room, it had been as if time had ceased—or simply ceased to matter. But it was moving again now, moving too fast again. He could feel it, burning in him.
He hit the playback button.
… late by then, I guess, Elizabeth’s voice went on. Around eleven or so. And we walked into a neighborhood that wasn’t very nice.
That was it. There it was. He let the tape roll on.
… we stopped in front of an old brownstone just a block before the Hudson on a little street called Houses Street …
“Houses Street,” Conrad whispered.
He spun the chair around, rolled it to his desk. He pushed the papers there aside, found a pen. He pulled an old envelope out of the pile. The tape was still rolling.
There were no streetlamps and the house we were in front of, the brownstone, was the only one with a light on …
Impatiently, Conrad reached out and jabbed fast forward again. He let the tape scramble on a long time. He had to stop and check it twice. Then, the third time, he found what he was looking for.
They even drove me there. They showed me. There’s the brownstone, they said. Number two twenty-two.
Conrad shut the recorder off. He scrawled the address on the back of the old envelope: 222 Houses Street.
He rolled the chair away from the desk. He stood up.
It could be wrong, he thought.
He laid the recorder on the desktop. Bent over the desk, he pawed through his papers. He had a map somewhere. In one of the compartments. There it was. A pocket atlas of the city. He pulled it out, threw it open. He found the index and ran his finger down the street names.
“Ach!” He had to shake his head, close his eyes to clear the red clouds from them.
He looked again. Houses Street. He flipped to the map of Manhattan. It was there, down in Tribeca. The Broadway local would get him close.
But it could be wrong, it could be wrong. Hadn’t the police checked the building out? Hadn’t they shown Elizabeth it was abandoned … ?
He straightened. He turned. He looked across the room. He looked at the shuttered window.
Don’t walk out of that door, Marshal Dillon, because we have got you covered.
He reached up under the shade of the desk lamp. He snapped it off. He looked at the window.
Don’t walk out of that door . . .
He moved to the patient’s chair. He turned off the lamp that was standing beside it. His head throbbed as the red clouds drifted in front of him. He went to the door, to the light switch beside the door.
It could be wrong, he thought. He would not be able to call the police because it could be wrong, and if Jessica was not there, if Sport saw them but Jessica was not there …
He pulled the switch down. The consulting room went black. Even then, even in the darkness, the red splotches swam and spread and contracted in front of him. He peered through them in the direction of the window.
And if he was wrong, he would have to get back in time too. If he was wrong, if it was all a mistake—then he had to get there and back here by midnight. He had to go and return without being seen, return in time to take that last, small chance that the kidnappers would really return her to him as they’d promised. And even if it was right … Well …
If it was right, if Sport was holding Jessica there, then Conrad had to get to her now and fast. He had to get to her before Sport co
uld check out the number, before Sport had time to decide that he did not need a hostage anymore. Only if he did that, if he found her there in time, only then could he call the police and finally get someone to help her …
But the time was passing and it burned at him, ate at him. He had to do something in either case. He had to do something fast.
He came forward. Nursing his weak leg only a little, he moved slowly forward through the dark. The red clouds were thinning from before him, they were getting fainter, they were fading away. He inched through the dark with his hands out in front of him. He moved around the analysis couch. His fingers touched the wall, passed along the wall until they brushed the window’s wooden shutters.
He unfastened the shutters, folded them open. He looked out at the airshaft.
They wouldn’t be watching this, he thought. Hell, with the shutters closed in here, most people didn’t even know this window existed.
Don’t walk out of that door, Marshal Dillon.
And even if they knew, it just led to an airshaft: a closed alleyway between this building and the one on the corner of Eighty-third Street. The wall of the neighboring building ran up high, at least twenty stories. And while there were small airshaft windows in that wall too, the lower ones were all shut tight. It would be tough. Just to get himself through this window would be tough. And then, to somehow break into one of the windows of the neighboring building … without being seen, without being caught … The kidnappers wouldn’t take the trouble to guard against that, he thought.
He licked his dry lips. His stomach churned. He thought of the blood on the passenger seat of his Corsica. Elizabeth’s blood. He had not thought the kidnappers were watching him then either.