Everybody Dies (Matthew Scudder)

  “And is that where you’ve seen him? Around the neighborhood?”

  “I don’t know. I almost think . . .”

  “Aye?”

  “That it’s a face from the past. That I saw it years and years ago, if I ever saw it at all.”

  “Years and years.”

  “But who is he? You know him, obviously, but I never saw you react like that. It’s almost as if . . .”

  “As if I’d seen a ghost.” He stuck out his finger, touched the sketch. “And what do you think that is? What’s that if it’s not a ghost?”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “I’ve lost it all,” he said, “for how am I to contend with a ghost? What chance have I against a man who’s thirty years dead?”

  “Thirty years?”

  “Thirty years and more.” He took the sheet of paper in both hands, brought it closer, held it at arm’s length. “Just the head,” he said. “All you’d put in a drawing, isn’t it? And it’s how I saw him last, and how I see him in my mind. Just the head.”

  He threw down the sketch, turned to me. “Don’t you see it, man? It’s Paddy Fucking Farrelly.”

  “How old was he, this man you saw?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere in his thirties.”

  “That was Farrelly’s age when he died. I killed him, you know.”

  “That’s what I always understood.”

  “By God, I have to say he had it coming. He was a bad bastard, that one. I had my troubles with him in school days. A few years older than myself, and a bully he was, a terrible bully. That ended when I got my size and gave as good as I got. He didn’t care for that, the dirty bastard.

  “’Tis a vast city, New York, but the old Kitchen’s not so big, and the pool we swam in wasn’t large at all. We were forever in each other’s way, forever coming head to head with each other, and everybody knew how it had to end. By God, I thought, if someone’s after getting killed it needn’t be myself, and I laid for the bastard, and I did for him.

  “You’ve heard the stories, and there’s a mix of the true and the false in them. This much is true: I took his great ugly head off his shoulders. Do that, I thought, and your troubles with a man are at an end, for the best doctors in the world won’t sew him together again.

  “I never thought to run a stake through his heart.”

  “Let’s figure this out,” I said.

  “It’s a mystery,” he said. “If you’d been brought up in the Church you’d know that mysteries can’t be figured out. They can only be contemplated.”

  We were in an all-night diner he knew in Queens, way the hell out in Howard Beach not far from JFK. He’d wanted to get away from McGinley & Caldecott, as if Paddy Farrelly’s ghost had itself taken up residence there. I don’t know how he managed to find the diner, or how he knew of it to begin with, but I figured we were safe there. The place was as remote as Montana.

  For a man who’d just seen a ghost he had a good appetite. He put away a big plate of bacon and eggs and home fries. I had the same, and it was good. I could probably be a vegetarian like Elaine, but only if bacon was declared a vegetable.

  “A mystery,” I said. “Well, I didn’t have the advantage of a Catholic education. I think of a mystery as something to be solved. Can we agree that it’s not a ghost I saw?”

  “Then it’s a resurrection,” he said, “and Paddy’s an odd candidate for it.”

  “I think it would have to be his son.”

  “He never married.”

  “Did he like the ladies?”

  “Too well,” he said. “He’d have his way with them if they liked it or not.”

  “Rape, you mean?”

  “Words change their meaning,” he said. “Over time. When we were young it was scarcely rape if they knew each other. Unless it was a grown man with a child, or someone forcing himself upon a married woman. But if a girl was out with a man, well, what did she think she was getting into?”

  “Now they call it date rape.”

  “They do,” he said, “and quite right. Well, if a girl was with Paddy, she ought to know what she was in for. There was one was going to press charges, but Paddy talked to her brother and her brother talked her out of it. No doubt he threatened to kill the whole family, and no doubt the brother believed him.”

  “Nice fellow.”

  “If I go to hell,” he said, “as I likely will, it won’t be his blood on my hands that puts me there. But, you know, there were enough he didn’t need to force. Some women are drawn to men like him, and the worse the man the greater the attraction.”

  “I know.”

  “Violence draws them. I had some drawn to me that way, but they were never the sort of woman I cared for.” He thought about that for a moment. Then he said, “If he had a son, he’d have no love for me.”

  “When did Paddy die?”

  “Ah, Jesus, it’s hard to remember. I can’t be sure of the year. ‘Twas after Kennedy was shot, I remember that much. But not long after. The following year, I’d say.”

  “1964.”

  “’Twas in the summer.”

  “Thirty-three years ago.”

  “Ah, you’ve a great head for mathematics.”

  “That would fit, you know. The man I saw was somewhere in his thirties.”

  “There was never any talk of Paddy having a son.”

  “Maybe she kept it quiet, whoever she was.”

  “And told the boy.”

  “Told the boy who his father was. And maybe told him who killed him.”

  “So that he grew up hating me. Well, don’t they grow up in Belfast hating the English? And don’t the Proddy kids grow up hating the Holy Father? ‘Fuck the Queen!’ ‘Nah, nah, fuck the Pope!’ Fuck ’em both, I say, or let ’em fuck each other.” He drew out his pocket flask and sweetened his coffee. “They grow into good haters if you teach them early enough. But where the hell has he been all these years? He’s spit and image of his father. If I’d ever laid eyes on him I’d have known him in an instant.”

  “I saw how you reacted to the sketch.”

  “I knew him at a glance, and I’d have known him as quick in the flesh. Anyone who knew the father would recognize the son.”

  “Maybe he grew up outside of the city.”

  “And nursed his hatred all these years? Why would he leave it so long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I could imagine him coming for me in his young manhood,” he said. “’When boyhood’s fire was in my blood’—you know that song?”

  “It sounds familiar.”

  “That’s when you’d think he’d have done it, when boyhood’s fire was in his blood. But he’s well past thirty, he’d have to be, and boyhood’s fire is nothing but dying embers. Where the hell’s he been?”

  “I’ve some ideas.”

  “Have you really?”

  “A few,” I said. “I’ll see where I can get with it tomorrow.” I looked at my watch. “Well, later today.”

  “Detective work, is it?”

  “Of a sort,” I said. “It’s a lot like searching a coal mine for a black cat that isn’t there. But I can’t think what else to do.”

  I was home and in bed before sunrise, up and showered and shaved before noon. TJ had had a good night, and was sitting up in front of the television set, wearing navy blue chinos and a light blue denim shirt. He’d told Elaine he had clean clothes in his room, but she’d insisted on buying him an outfit at the Gap. “Said she didn’t want to invade my privacy,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  I brought him up to speed and let him have another look at the man I’d come to think of as Paddy Jr., whatever his name might turn out to be. I was hoping there was a computerized shortcut to the task at hand.

  “The Kongs could probably do it,” he said, “if we knew where they at, an’ if they still into that hackin’ shit. An’ if the records you talkin’ about’s computerized.”

  “They’re city records,” I said, “and they’re
over thirty years old.”

  “Be the thing for them to do. Have some people sit down an’ input all their files. Be a real space saver, ’cause you can fit a whole filing cabinet on a floppy.”

  “It sounds like too much to hope for,” I said. “But if Vital Statistics has all their old files on computer, I wouldn’t even have to hack into their system. There’s an easier way.”

  “Bribery?”

  “If you want to be a tightass about it,” I said. “I prefer to think of it as going out of your way to be nice to people, and having them be nice in return.”

  The clerk I found was a motherly woman named Elinor Horvath. She was nice to begin with and got even nicer when I palmed her a couple of bills. If only the records in question had been in computerized files, she could have found them for me in nothing flat. As TJ had explained it to me, all she would have to do was sort each pertinent database by Name of Father. Then you could just shuffle through the F’s and see exactly who had been sired by someone named Farrelly.

  “All our new records are computerized,” she told me, “and we’re working our way backward, but it’s going very slowly. In fact it’s not really going at all, not after the last round of budget cuts. I’m afraid we’re not a high-priority division, and the old records aren’t high priority for us.”

  That meant it had to be done the old-fashioned way, and it was going to require more time than Mrs. Horvath could possibly devote to it, no matter how nice a guy I was. The money I gave her got me ensconced in a back room where she brought me file drawers full of birth certificates filed in the City of New York starting January 1, 1957. I couldn’t believe he was over forty, not from the glimpse I’d had of him, nor could I imagine he’d been more than seven years old when Paddy got the chop. According to what I knew about the father, by then the son would have had enough neglect or abuse or both to have been spared a passion for revenge.

  That gave me my starting date, and I’d decided I’d go all the way to June 30, 1965. The killing of Paddy Farrelly, which Mick recalled as having taken place during the summer, might have occurred as late as the end of September, and the darling boy himself might have been conceived that very day, for all I knew. It all seemed unlikely, but you could say that about the whole enterprise.

  It was slow work, and if you sped up out of boredom you ran the risk of missing what you were looking for. The records were in chronological order, and that was the sole organizational scheme. I had to scan each one, looking first at the child’s name on the top line, then at the father’s name about halfway down. I was looking for Farrelly in either place.

  I was fortunate, I suppose, in that it wasn’t a common name. Had the putative father been, say, Robert Smith or William Wilson, I’d have had a harder time of it. On the other hand, every time I hit some inapplicable Smith or Wilson I’d have at least had the illusion that I was coming close. I didn’t hit any Farrellys, neither father nor child, and that made me question what I was doing.

  It was mindless work. A retarded person could have performed it as well as I, and possibly better. My mind tended to wander, it almost had to, and that can lead to a sort of mental snow-blindedness, where you cease to see what you’re looking at.

  One thing that struck me, wading through this sea of names, was the substantial proportion of children who had different last names from their fathers, or no father listed at all. I wondered what it meant when the mother left the line blank. Was she reluctant to put the man’s name down? Or didn’t she know which name to choose?

  I was close to losing heart, and then Mrs. Horvath turned up with a cup of coffee and a small plate of Nutter Butter cookies, and the next file drawer. She was out the door before I could thank her. I drank the coffee and ate the cookies, and an hour later I found what I was looking for.

  The child’s name was Gary Allen Dowling, and he’d been born at ten minutes after four in the morning on May 17, 1960, to Elizabeth Ann Dowling, of 1104 Valentine Avenue in the Bronx.

  The father’s name was Patrick Farrelly. No middle name. Either he didn’t have one or she didn’t know it.

  In myths and fairy tales, just knowing an adversary’s name is in itself empowering. Look at Rumpelstiltskin.

  So I felt I was getting somewhere when I hit the street with Gary Allen Dowling’s birth certificate copied in my notebook, but all I really had was the first clue in a treasure hunt. I was better off than when I started, but I was a long way from home.

  I bought a Hagstrom map of the Bronx at a newsstand two blocks from the Municipal Building and studied it at a lunch counter over a cup of coffee, wishing I had a few more of those Nutter Butter cookies to go with it. I found Valentine Avenue, and it was up in the Fordham Road section, and not far from Bainbridge Avenue.

  I thought I might be able to save myself a trip, so I invested a quarter in a call to Andy Buckley. His mother answered and said he was out, and I thanked her and hung up without leaving a name. I was annoyed for a minute or two, because now I was stuck with a long subway ride and rush hour was already in its preliminary stages. But suppose he’d been in? I could send him to Valentine Avenue, and he could establish in a few minutes what I was already reasonably certain of—i.e., that Elizabeth Ann Dowling no longer lived there, if in fact she ever had, and neither did her troublesome son. But he wouldn’t ask the questions I would ask, wouldn’t knock on doors and try to find someone with a long memory and a loose tongue.

  The house was still standing, as I thought it probably would be. This wasn’t a part of the Bronx that had burned or been abandoned during the sixties and seventies, nor was it one where there’d been a lot of tearing-down and rebuilding. 1107 Valentine turned out to be a narrow six-story apartment house with four apartments to the floor. The names on the mailboxes were mostly Irish, with a few Hispanic. I didn’t see Dowling or Farrelly, and would have been astonished if I had.

  One of the ground-floor apartments housed the super, a Mrs. Carey. She had short iron-gray hair and clear unflinching blue eyes. 1 could read several things in them and cooperation wasn’t one of them.

  “I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with you,” I said. “So let me start by saying I’m a private investigator. I’ve got nothing to do with the INS and very little respect for them, and the only tenants of yours I’m interested in lived here thirty-some years ago.”

  “Before my time,” she said, “but not by much. And you’re right, INS was my first thought, and as little love as you may have for them I assure you it’s more than my own. Who would it be you’re asking after?”

  “Elizabeth Ann Dowling. And she may have used the name Farrelly.”

  “Betty Ann Dowling. She was still here when I came. Her and that brat of a boy, but don’t ask me his name.”

  “Gary,” I said.

  “Was that it? My memory’s not what it was, though why I should remember them at all I couldn’t say.”

  “Do you remember when they left?”

  “Not offhand. I started here in the spring of 1968. God help us, that’s almost thirty years.”

  I said something about not knowing where the time goes. Wherever it went, she said, it took your whole life with it.

  “But I raised a daughter,” she said, “on my own after my Joe died. I got the apartment and a little besides for managing this place, and I had the insurance money. And now she’s living in a beautiful home in Yonkers and married to a man who makes good money, although I don’t like the tone he takes with her. But that’s none of my business.” She collected herself, looked at me. “And none of yours either, is it? Oh, come on in. You might as well have a cup of tea.”

  Her apartment was clean and cheery and neat as a pin. No surprise there. Over tea she said, “She was a widow too, to hear her tell it. I held my tongue, but I know she was never married. It’s the sort of thing you can tell. And she had these fanciful stories about her husband. How he was with the CIA, and was killed because he was going to reveal the real story of what happened in
Dallas. You know, when Kennedy was shot.”

  “Yes.”

  “Filling the boy’s ears with stories about his father. Now how long was it she was here? Is it important?”

  “It could be.”

  “The Riordans took her apartment when she moved out. No, wait a minute, they did not. There was an older man moved in and died there, poor soul, and you may guess who had the luck to discover the body.” She closed her eyes at the memory. “An awful thing, to die alone, but that’ll be my lot, won’t it? Unless I last long enough to wind up in a home, and God grant that I don’t. Mr. Riordan’s still upstairs, his wife passed three years ago in January. But he never so much as met Betty Ann.”

  “When did he move in?”

  “Because you’d know she was out by then, wouldn’t you?” She thought a moment, then surprised me by saying, “Let’s ask him,” and snatching up the phone. She looked up the number in a little leather-bound book, dialed, glared in exasperation at the ceiling until he answered, and then spoke loudly and with exaggerated clarity.

  “You have to shout at the poor man,” she said, “but he hears better on the phone than face to face. He says he and his wife lived here since 1973. Now the old man who died, McMenamin was his name, it’s an old Donegal name, if I’m not mistaken. Mr. McMenamin might have been here a year but he wasn’t here two. It was vacant between tenants, but it wasn’t vacant long either time, flats in this house are never vacant long. So my guess is your Betty Ann and her son left here in 1971. That would mean I had her in my house for three years, and I’d say that would be about right.”

  “And about enough, I gather.”

  “And you’d be right. I wasn’t sorry to see the back of her, or the boy either.”

  “Do you know why she left?”

  “She didn’t offer and I didn’t ask. To go with some man would be my guess. Another CIA man, no doubt. She left no forwarding address, and if she had I’d have long since tossed it out.” I asked if anyone else in the building was still here from those days. “Janet Higgins,” she said without hesitation. “Up in 4-C. But I doubt you’ll get anything useful out of her. She barely knows her own name.”