A Stab in the Dark

Page 22

 

  "Was she a saint?"

  "We werent that close. " She looked away, picked up a pencil from the desk top. "She was my big sister. I put her on a pedestal and wound up seeing her feet of clay, and I went through a period of holier-than-thou contempt for her. I might have outgrown that but then she was killed, so I had all that guilt over the way Id felt about her. " She looked at me. "This is one of the things Ive been working on in therapy. "

  "Was she having an affair while she was married to Ettinger?"

  "She wouldnt have told me if she had been. The one thing she did tell me was that he was playing around. She said he made passes at their friends and that he was screwing his welfare clients. I dont know if that was true or not. He never made a pass at me. "

  She said that last as if it was one more item on a long list of resentments. I talked with her for another ten minutes and didnt learn anything beyond the fact that Barbara Ettingers death had had an impact on her sisters life, and that wasnt news. I wondered how different Lynn had been nine years ago, and how different she might have turned out if Barbara had lived. Perhaps it was all there already, all locked in place, the bitterness, the emotional armor. I wondered-although I could probably have guessed-what Lynns own marriage had been like. Would she have married the same man if Barbara had been alive? Would she have divorced him if she did?

  I left there with a useless photograph and a head full of irrelevant-or unanswerable-questions. I left, too, glad to escape from the womans cramped personality. Dan Lynchs bar was just a couple blocks uptown, and I turned toward it, remembering the dark wood, the warmth, the boozy, beery aroma.

  They were all afraid Id dig her up, I thought, and it was impossible because she was buried impossibly deep. The bit of poetry Jan had read came to mind and I tried to recall just how it went. Deep with the first dead? Was that right?

  I decided I wanted the exact wording. More than that, I wanted the whole poem. I had a vague recollection of a branch library somewhere around there on Second Avenue. I walked a block north, didnt find it, turned around and walked downtown. There was indeed a library, right where Id remembered it, a squarish three-story building with a nicely ornamented marble facade. A sign in the door gave the hours, and they were closed on Wednesdays.

  All of the branch libraries have cut back on their hours, added closed days. Part of the financial pinch. The city cant afford anything, and the administration goes around like an old miser closing off unused rooms in a sprawling old house. The police force is ten thousand men below what it used to be. Everything drops but the rents and the crime rate.

  I walked another block and hit St. Marks Place and knew thered be a bookstore around, and one that would most likely have a poetry section. The busiest commercial block of St. Marks Place, and as trendy a block as the East Village possesses, runs between Second and Third Avenues. I turned right and walked toward Third, and two-thirds of the way down the block I found a bookstore. They had a paperback edition of the collected poems of Dylan Thomas. I had to go through it a couple of times before I spotted the poem I was looking for, but it was there and I read it all the way through. "A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London" was the title. There were parts I didnt think I understood, but I liked the sound of them anyway, the weight and shape of the words.

  The poem was long enough to discourage me from trying to copy it into my notebook. Besides, maybe Id want to look at some of the other poems. I paid for the book and slipped it into my pocket.

  FUNNY how little things nudge you in one direction or another. I had tired myself with all the walking Id done. I wanted to catch a subway home, but I also wanted a drink and I stood for a moment on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore, trying to decide what to do and where to go. While I was standing there, two patrolmen walked by in uniform. Both of them looked impossibly young, and one was so fresh-faced his uniform looked like a costume.

  Across the street, a shop sign read "Habermans. " I dont know what they sold there.

  I thought of Burton Havermeyer. I might have thought of him without having seen the cop or having my memory jostled by a name not unlike his. In any event I thought of him, and remembered that he had once lived on this street, that his wife still lived here. I couldnt remember the address, but it was still in my notebook. 212 St. Marks Place, along with the telephone number.

  There was still no reason to go look at the building she lived in. He wasnt even part of the case I was working on, because my meeting with Louis Pinell had satisfied me that the little psychopath had killed Susan Potowski and had not killed Barbara Ettinger. But Havermeyers life had been changed, and in a way that interested me, a way not unlike that in which mine had been changed by another death.

  St. Marks Place starts at Third Avenue and the numbers get higher as you go eastward. The block between Second and First was more residential and less commercial. A couple of the row houses had ornate windows and letterboards near the entrance to indicate that they were churches. There was a Ukrainian church, a Polish Catholic church.

  I walked to First Avenue, waited for the light, walked on across. I made my way down a quiet block, its houses less prepossessing and in poorer repair than on the preceding block. One of a group of parked cars I passed was a derelict, stripped of tires and hubcaps, the radio pulled out, the interior gutted. On the other side of the street three bearded and longhaired men in Hells Angels colors were trying to get a motorcycle started.

  The last number on the block was 132. The street deadended at the corner, where Avenue A formed the western boundary of Tompkins Square Park. I stood there looking at the house number, then at the park, first at one and then at the other.

  From Avenue A east to the river are the blocks they call Alphabet City. The population runs to junkies and muggers and crazies. Nobody decent lives there on purpose, not if they can afford to live anywhere else.

  I dragged out my notebook. The address was still the same, 212 St. Marks Place.

  I walked through Tompkins Square and across Avenue B. On my way through the park, drug dealers offered to sell me dope and pills and acid. Either I didnt look like a cop to them or they just didnt care.

  On the other side of Avenue B, the numbers started at 300. And the street signs didnt call it St. Marks Place. It was East Eighth Street there.

  I went back through the park again. At 130 St. Marks Place there was a bar called Blanches Tavern. I went in. The place was a broken-down bucket of blood that smelled of stale beer and stale urine and bodies that needed washing. Perhaps a dozen of the bodies were there, most of them at the bar, a couple at tables. The place went dead silent when I walked into it. I guess I didnt look as though I belonged there, and I hope to God I never do.

  I used the phone book first. The precinct in Sheepshead Bay could have made a mistake, or Antonelli could have read the number to me wrong, or I could have copied it incorrectly. I found him listed, Burton Havermeyer on West 103rd, but I didnt find any Havermeyers listed on St. Marks Place.

  I was out of dimes. The bartender gave me change. His customers seemed more relaxed now that they realized I had no business with them.

  I dropped a dime in the slot, dialed the number in my book. No answer.

  I went out and walked a few doors to 112 St. Marks Place. I checked the mailboxes in the vestibule, not really expecting to find the name Havermeyer, then went back outside. I wanted a drink but Blanches wasnt where I wanted to have it.

  Any port in a storm. I had a straight shot of bourbon at the bar, a top-shelf brand. To my right, two men were discussing some mutual friends. "I told her not to go home with him," one of them was saying. "I told her he was no good and hed beat her up and rip her off, and she went anyhow, took him on home, and he beat her up and ripped her off. So wheres she get off coming and crying to me?"

  I tried the number again. On the fourth ring a boy answered it. I thought Id misdialed, asked if I had the Havermeyer residence. He told
me I did.

  I asked if Mrs. Havermeyer was there.

  "Shes next door," he said. "Is it important? Because I could get her. "

  "Dont bother. I have to check the address for a delivery. Whats the house number there?"

  "Two twelve. "

  "Two twelve what?"

  He started to tell me the apartment number. I told him I needed to know the name of the street.

  "Two twelve St. Marks Place," he said.

  I had a moment of the sort I have now and then had in dreams, where the sleeping mind confronts an impossible inconsistency and breaks through to the realization that it is dreaming. Here I was talking to some fresh-voiced child who insisted he lived at an address that did not exist.

  Or perhaps he and his mother lived in Tompkins Square Park, with the squirrels.

  I said, "Whats that between?"

  "Huh?"

  "What are the cross streets? What block are you on?"

  "Oh," he said. "Third and Fourth. "

  "What?"

  "Were between Third and Fourth Avenues. "

  "Thats impossible," I said.

  "Huh?"

  I looked away from the phone, half-expecting to see something entirely different from the interior of Blanches Tavern. A lunar landscape, perhaps. St. Marks Place started at Third Avenue and ran east. There was no St. Marks Place between Third and Fourth Avenues.

  I said, "Where?"

  "Huh? Look, mister, I dont-"

  "Wait a minute. "

  "Maybe I should get my mother. I-"

  "What borough?"

  "Huh?"

  "Are you in Manhattan? Brooklyn? The Bronx? Where are you, son?"

  "Brooklyn. "

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes, Im sure. " He sounded close to tears. "We live in Brooklyn. What do you want, anyway? Whats the matter, are you crazy or something?"

  "Its all right," I said. "Youve been a big help. Thanks a lot. "

  I hung up, feeling like an idiot. Street names repeated throughout the five boroughs. Id had no grounds to assume she lived in Manhattan.

  I thought back, replayed what I could of my earlier conversation with the woman. If anything, I might have known that she didnt live in Manhattan. "Hes in Manhattan," she had said of her husband. She wouldnt have put it that way if shed been in Manhattan herself.

  But what about my conversation with Havermeyer? "Your wifes still in the East Village," Id said, and hed agreed with me.

  Well, maybe hed just wanted the conversation to end. It was easier to agree with me than to explain that there was another St. Marks Place in Brooklyn.

  Still…

  I left Blanches and hurried west to the bookstore where Id bought the book of poems. They had a Hagstrom pocket atlas of the five boroughs. I looked up St. Marks Place in the back, turned to the appropriate map, found what I was looking for.

  St. Marks Place, in Brooklyn as in Manhattan, extends for only three blocks. To the east, across Flatbush Avenue, the same street continues at an angle as St. Marks Avenue, stretching under that name clear to Brownsville.

  To the west, St. Marks Place stops at Third Avenue-just as it does at an altogether different Third Avenue in Manhattan. On the other side of Third, Brooklyns St. Marks Place has another name.