“ ‘Send in the Clowns.’ I thought you’d left.”
“I stopped at the bar for ‘Send in the Clowns.’ I thought you were great.”
“Weren’t too broken up, uh, after your talk?”
“Do you want me to tell you about Iris and me? It’ll take about two minutes.”
“But you’re here,” Linda said.
“To bury her. You beat me to it.” Looking into quiet blue eyes, and those long lashes. “I didn’t know you were friends.”
“We met that night. We flew up together and roomed in the same house.”
“But you’re paying for her funeral.”
She glanced around. “I didn’t see anybody breaking down the door. I still owe three hundred, which I don’t happen to have at the moment.”
“I took care of it,” Vincent said. “I’ll give you a check for what you paid them.”
She said, “You don’t owe me anything. If you want to go halves on it, fine, I won’t argue with you.”
“You knew her two weeks,” Vincent said.
“Yeah? How long did you know her? You say you can tell me all about it in two minutes.”
“Don’t get mad.”
“I’m not mad. I’m in a shitty mood, that’s all.” Looking at the casket again. “It’s pathetic, the whole thing. The little party girl, looking for excitement—she gets two people at her wake.”
Vincent waited a moment. “What about Donovan? Hasn’t he been here?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Have you talked to him?”
“About what, Iris? Why would I? It’s an idea though. Shake him down, get him to pay his share.”
“She thought she was going to be a hostess,” Vincent said. “Is that an in joke in the casino business, a hostess?”
“She was a cocktail waitress.”
“During the day,” Vincent said, and paused. “What was she doing in that apartment?”
“I don’t know.”
“She tell you she was going?”
“You know what we talked about, the few times we saw each other? Clothes. Iris borrowed things and never returned them.”
“A black wool coat,” Vincent said.
Linda didn’t say anything.
“You tell the cops it’s yours?”
After a moment she said, “I haven’t yet.”
“Why not?”
He could hear the silence, the sound increasing gradually, becoming the hiss of a radiator. She was staring again at the casket. Something to hold onto.
“Linda?”
Her hands in the pockets of the raincoat, her legs crossed. She wore narrow jeans, scuffed brown boots that were creased with age and looked wet. It was still cold in the room.
“You don’t need your coat?”
“They didn’t mention it,” Linda said, “when I talked to them. I guess they think it’s hers.”
“What was she doing in that apartment?”
“I don’t know.”
“She see much of Donovan?”
“I have no idea.”
“Or talk about him?”
“I told you what we talked about.”
“You mentioned,” Vincent said, “I wondered why you called Iris a party girl. You said, ‘The little party girl, looking for excitement.’ “
Linda stared at the casket and he was aware of the radiator again, the steady hissing sound higher pitched than before. She turned to look at him and paused another moment, those nice blue eyes calm but narrowing a little. She said, “You’re a sneaky mother, aren’t you? I don’t know why I didn’t remember right away, as soon as you started asking questions . . . She talked about you on the plane. Not a lot but enough. How she was leaving this American who was so in love with her, this guy Vincent, the cop.”
“In Miami Beach,” Vincent said, “not here. Atlantic City I’m only a civilian.” He touched her arm and said, “But, Linda? I’ll bet I can help you.”
She said, “Now wait a minute—”
“You don’t have anybody to talk to. You need a friend,” Vincent said. “Tell me if I’m wrong. And you need somebody who can get you your winter coat, before you freeze your ass. Boy, it’s cold up here in New Jersey, isn’t it?”
Linda said, “If you can get the coat I’d love it. Beyond that, I don’t need any help.”
9
* * *
PARKED ON SEASIDE, Teddy had a clear shot of Bertoia’s, over there across a trashy vacant lot on Oriental Avenue. Place looked more like a neighborhood bar than a funeral home. A couple of black guys in leather coats had come past the car twice looking to find out if he was cool. He could see them without any trouble in state clothes, doing a loose shuffle across the yard. They’d be back. “Hey, brother, you got the time?” Half minute or so of bullshit and, “You looking to get high, my man?” Try and sell him some meth. This town was full of meth. Keep the suckers’ eyes open to play the games.
The taxi pulled up in front of the funeral home, a half block from him, and Teddy said, “All right,” out loud, and watched two figures in raincoats come out to the cab. He had called the funeral home and learned Iris was going to be cremated tomorrow. He’d like to see her first, what she looked like after falling eighteen stories, splat, but they probably wouldn’t show her. He wondered if he slipped the guy some money he’d give him a peek. If he slipped him enough. Only he was almost broke, shit, and his mom had tightened up since his last visit, changed into another person. It was amazing, in seven and a half years, to see the change in her: from a sweetiepie mom who would do anything for her sonnyboy, to a selfish old broad turned mean and tight as her arteries hardened and senility crept into her brain.
He waited until the taxi was a block up the street before putting his mom’s car in Drive and turning onto Oriental to follow.
Big yellow turd of a car, ’77 Chevy Monte Carlo that had lost its gleam to the salt air while traveling less than 20,000 miles, 19,681 on the odometer—she’d never wear the son of a bitch out, but she wouldn’t trade it in either. What he might do, run it off that low bridge to Somers Point; there were always people going off drunk into the channel. Long as he didn’t get trapped in it and go down with the turd. His luck was good and bad, starting and stopping. What he needed was to get on a roll with money to spend, operate on.
Teddy followed the taxi down Pacific Avenue, then left on Pennsylvania to the Holmhurst Hotel, a half block from the Boardwalk. It was one of those big old-timey frame buildings with a porch a mile long, even a glassed-in second-floor porch, kind of place where tourists used to spend their vacation in a rocking chair. Now you could almost hear the slot machines clanging over at Resorts International, the back side of it across a couple of parking lots.
The cop went into the hotel with his suitcase and the taxi stayed there. Now what? Teddy waited, parked down the street.
Trade this big yellow turd in. He liked that Datsun he had in San Juan. Be a good car in all this traffic, getting around the goddamn tour buses. Two thousand a day they came into the city, dropped the suckers off for six hours to lose their paychecks, their Social Security in the slots and then haul them back up to Elizabeth, Newark, Jersey City, shit, Philly, Allentown. Bring some more loads back tomorrow—like the Jews in the boxcars, only they kept these folks alive with bright lights and loud music and jackpot payoffs that sounded like fire alarms. A giant hotel billboard out on the highway said their slots paid out over 68 million dollars last month. Yeah? And how much of it did the suckers put back in? They didn’t say.
His mom said colored men were coming in the house and stealing things, somehow getting through the windows covered with grillwork or the triple-locked doors. He said, “Mom, there’s no way anybody could bust in here, even jigs I met who spent their lives doing B and Ees, pros. What would they want, your parrot dishes?”
His mom said, in a voice shaky but snippy, “Well, they took my best ashtray, they took my sewing basket, they took all my underwear. One of them, I saw
him walking down West Drive with my mattress on his head, going toward Ventnor Avenue.”
Teddy said, “Mom, how could the jig steal your mattress when you’re always laying on it?”
She said, “Oh, you. You think you’re so smart.”
The old lady had flipped, her mind out to lunch, till it came to money. Get on money she’d recite interest rates on T-bills, CDs and cash management accounts like a bank teller. “What’re you gonna do with all your money?” he’d ask her. “You don’t have time left to spend it all.”
She’d say, “Never mind.”
The hell kind of an answer was that? “Never mind.” Then she’d be off again, worrying about a colored guy coming in and kidnapping her parrot, Buddy.
He said, “ ‘Ey, mom, the jigs’re making a fortune working the men’s rooms at the casinos. They turn the water on for the sucker going to the toilet, hand him a paper towel with a big nigger grin and the sucker gives him a buck for taking a leak.”
His mom gave him a dirty look and said, “Where on earth do you hear language like that?”
Now the cop was coming out of the hotel. He still had the beard from San Juan, but wasn’t using the cane anymore and didn’t seem to limp. He got back in the taxi and they drove off.
Teddy followed them down Pacific Avenue again. This time they turned off to pull up in front of Spade’s Boardwalk Casino Hotel and the girl, Linda, the friend of Iris’s on the plane, got out and went inside.
Iris was right the time she said this place was bigger than Spade’s down in San Juan. Man, that seemed like a long time ago. This place had the green neon spades decorating the front, but that’s all it was, a front, a snazzy new hotel lobby and casino of glass and chrome, green awnings, built onto an old hotel that had been here fifty years. Look up, there was the old hotel, like a different building. There were other places just like it, wearing shiny false fronts. Put up a glittery shell over an old Howard Johnson and call it Caesar’s Boardwalk Regency.
The taxi U-turned, went back to Pacific Avenue and headed south with just the cop now. Where was he going? Teddy followed. They drove along through early evening traffic to where Pacific petered out and Atlantic Avenue curved down to become the main thoroughfare, and kept going, Atlantic City to Ventnor, out of one and into the other without even knowing it, unless you were a native. Teddy was getting a feeling now that told him where the cop was going. Yeah, Surrey Place. The taxi turned off, came to a stop in front of the condo on the corner, where Iris had taken her swan dive. Teddy pulled to the curb on Atlantic Avenue. He couldn’t help looking up at that top floor, way, way up there, then watched through traffic going by as the cop got out of the taxi and went in the building.
Wasn’t that like a cop? Didn’t trust the local fuzz, had to come here and see for himself. “Well,” Teddy said out loud, “good luck.”
At first Vincent believed the building security guard was at least seventy. Jimmy Dunne. Bald with a thin, clean look, alert, bright-eyed, an old man who’d never grown up. “Haven’t had a drink in thirty years.” Just coffee, but plenty of it. “You want some more? Here. All I gotta do is ring Norma, she’ll bring me down another thermos.” Sitting behind his clean desk in the lobby Jimmy Dunne lined up the clipboard registration pad exactly in front of him. He’d taken this job to be doing something. He liked people, liked to chat, but didn’t get much company when he worked nights. It was a shame, that poor little girl. Captain Davies—or was it in the paper said she was from Puerto Rico? Jimmy Dunne said he was down there with the U.S. army in 19-and-19. Two years later he was playing trumpet with the Victor Herbert Band out on the Steel Pier and had been here ever since. Loved Atlantic City. Vincent revised the man’s age, pushing it up from seventy to somewhere in the mid-eighties. Jimmy Dunne said they’d had him in a nursing home a few years ago over there in Somers Point, but he’d broke out with his trumpet and was now living with this woman friend of his, Norma, right here in the building. The tenants’ association told him he could have this job if he promised not to play his horn anymore. Well, he had lost his lip anyway. He said, “What else can I do for you?”
They sat in black leather director’s chairs Norma had bought him, drinking coffee out of thick pottery mugs, each with a big J baked into the glazed surface.
“Captain Davies was wondering,” Vincent said, “if any of the tenants are Puerto Rican.”
Jimmy Dunne said, no, mostly they were Jewish, but nice folks. He said your Puerto Ricans were all up there by the Inlet.
“You gave the captain a list of visitors.”
“Yes sir, they have to sign in right here or they don’t go upstairs.”
“How about deliveries?”
“We gave ’em a list. Florist, dry cleaners, ones the day man saw. On nights you don’t have many deliveries aside from maybe a restaurant, you know, like an order from the White House Sub Shop. There was a delivery from there. Fella had an extra cheese steak sub he gave me. Nice fella.”
“Did you know him?”
“Yeah, he looked familiar. But you get a turnover, those restaurant delivery boys, they don’t make a lot of money. You see ’em a couple weeks, they’re gone.”
“How about the night before?”
“The night before . . .” Jimmy Dunne sipped his coffee.
“The night of the day before. You give the captain a list of visitors?”
“Well, we musta talked about it.”
“You’re not sure if you did?”
“I guess I did, you know, if he asked.”
“Were you on the night before?”
“Well, I’m always around here, you know, since I live up in two-oh-nine. That’s why the tenants’ association, they know they can count on me.”
“Who was on the night before?”
Jimmy Dunne sipped his coffee. “The night before . . . You know when we switch off, change from days to nights, there’s a time in there I’m not sure if I worked that day or that night. See, cuz I’m here seven days a week.”
“Just two of you work it?”
Jimmy Dunne paused. “Well, they’re substitutes, you know, like one of us gets sick.”
“Maybe that night before, somebody else was working.”
“Gee, I don’t know . . .”
“Could you look it up? It was only a few days ago.”
“Well, we don’t punch in or anything . . . you know.”
“Jimmy, this is pretty serious. Girl was killed . . .”
“Listen, I know it is. This town, it can happen. I love this town but . . . well, you got an influence here now you didn’t have in the old days, it’s different. The old days this’s where you brought your son to get his first piece a ass. You know, so there was plenty of action. But you had everything. You had your classy places, lot a big money had homes here. You had your shoobies, people’d bring their lunch in a shoebox, eat on the Boardwalk or out on the beach, never spend a dime. You had, I mentioned Victor Herbert, you had Sousa, ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ you had all kinds a entertainment. Horse that dove off the pier . . . Then people stop coming, I don’t know why. They’re watching color TV or something. Stores’re going out a business, hotels closing. So they bring in casino gambling to pick up the economy . . . Boy, people like to gamble, don’t they? Twenty-four hours a day, some of ’em.”
“I thought the casinos closed—what, four in the morning?”
“Four A.M. weekdays, six A.M. Saturday and Sunday, open again at ten. But this’s a twenty-four-hour town. You want something, say you want a game, no matter what time a day it is. You know what I mean? You can’t find it, you can arrange it.”
“Yeah? . . . I bet you’ve got some stories.”
“Make your hair stand up. Like I ‘magine you could tell a few yourself.”
Vincent paused. “Jimmy, I’m not with the police.”
“You’re not?” Wide-eyed. “But you said—”
“What I mentioned was, I talked to Captain Davies and he told me what th
ey had. No, I’m not with Atlantic County.”
“You’re not?”
“I’m a good friend of the girl that was killed. No, I came up from Puerto Rico to make the funeral arrangements.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I talked to the cops . . . but you know how they are. They’re good guys, we got along fine. But they only want facts, they’re not interested in any ideas, you know, you might have. Any theories or guesses.”
“Oh, I know it,” Jimmy Dunne said. “Just the facts, ma’am. ‘Member that show? Sergeant Friday? Yeah, I know what you mean. They don’t want you playing detective on ’em.”
“Just tell what you know.”
“Exactly.”
“See, what I’m wondering—” Vincent paused. “This is just between you and me.”
“And the gatepost. I gotcha.”
“I was wondering, what if she went up to that apartment the night before it happened and was there all day and nobody knew it? And that’s why you didn’t see her.”
“Uh-huh.” Jimmy Dunne was thinking, re-aligning his clipboard registration pad, getting it just right.
“I wouldn’t want to bother the cops with it,” Vincent said, “it’s just, you know, an idea. But I could ask the guy that was on duty that night, see what he says.”
“Uh-huh.”
“For my own peace of mind more than anything else.”
Jimmy Dunne stared at his clipboard.
“He says he doesn’t know anything, well, at least I’ve tried.” Vincent paused. “Guy just works once in a while, huh? . . . Jimmy?”
“Yeah, he’ll come in certain times.”
“Cops didn’t talk to him.”
“Well now, they might’ve. I don’t know.”
“But if you didn’t tell ’em this guy was working . . . Jimmy, this’s just between you and me. You understand? I won’t even tell the guy where I got his name. I give you my word on it.”
“He won’t tell you nothing anyway. I know.”
“If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. But I’d sure feel better.”
“See, I don’t want anybody to think I was talking behind their back. Especially this guy, he’s funny.”