I figured there were three viable explanations for the song and dance, all of them as appealing as a ruptured spleen. The first possibility was Don Juan’s being truly ignorant of Azrael’s demise; that, as far as the Gandolfo crime family was concerned, Azrael Esther Wise was a bad memory still living under the auspices of the Witness Protection Program. But logic and the manner of her execution made that a difficult pill to swallow. The next possibility also depended upon the Gandolfos’ being ignorant of Azrael’s circumstances. In this scenario, however, the Gandolfos are still very interested in Azrael’s whereabouts. Using me as a delivery boy, they flush her out of hiding to settle an old score. I found this one particularly unappealing since they’d have to get rid of me, too. The final possibility didn’t hinge upon the Gandolfos’ ignorance or good graces. In this version Dante knows Azrael is dead, but he’s trying to protect himself by playing dumb and concocting an elaborate charade. It sounded nice, but it was too big a reach. Dante hadn’t killed Azrael himself and besides the triggerman was busy turning into fertilizer under Dugan’s Dump. And hey, a hundred grand is a pretty expensive charade even for a Gandolfo. Like I said, none of them seemed very credible explanations. Maybe there were other possibilities I just wasn’t seeing. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I sat on a bench in the metal and glass courtyard of Larry Feld’s office building. Some people ate their lunches, some read the Wall Street Journal. Some couples kissed in dark corners. I drummed my fingers on the Barnum file and stared at the crinkled photo of Azrael with Don Juan.
“Who were you, really, Azrael?” I asked the girl in the snap, the girl from two decades past, not the made-up mannequin I had found by the tracks. “What was it about you? What is it about you that controls men from the grave?” I wanted to know. I was one of those men.
She did not respond. Maybe that was her secret; silence.
I had come for answers and came away with more questions. Maybe there were no answers. And that frightened me, maybe more than anything.
The Phoenix Myth
The Scupper lights fairly glowed in the blowing snow of blue dusk. MacClough stood behind the bar trying to flip quarters into a shot glass. Bob Street, proprietor of the Star Spangled Deli, and Stan Long, operator of Sound Hill’s lone service station, sat belly-up and side by side next to the beer pulls. Stan was in his usual four-Scotch foul mood and refused to take the always jovial Street’s action on MacClough’s quarter-tossing prowess.
“Fucking snow,” Stan Long muttered as I walked up.
“Bad for business?” Bob Street wondered and winked hello to me.
“Nah,” the scotch drinker barked. “Business is too damned good. Snow don’t give a man time to relax. After I leave here, I’ll be making tow calls till sunup tomorrow. Fucking snow.”
“Life’s like that,” Johnny commiserated.
“Black and Tan.” I ordered out loud, although MacClough had poured the stout and ale before I spoke. “Yeah, Stan, I just drove in from a meeting in the City,” I looked Johnny in the eyes as I spoke. “Cars stuck all over the place.”
“Meeting?” MacClough nibbled at the bait.
“Must’ve been important for you to drive all the way into New York,” Bob Street added as if on cue.
“Very important,” my gaze fixed MacClough in his tracks.
“Fucking snow,” Long slammed his rocks glass on the bar along with a likeness of Alexander Hamilton. “Tomorrow,” he spit an ice cube on the floor and exited.
“I’ll be over there,” I told MacClough, pointing to a table under the impotent harpoons. “Safe home, Bob,” I patted the deliman on the back.
I laid Barnum’s file open across the unsteady table. It was actually two files bound together with rubber bands. One dealt exclusively with the Pulitzer fiasco; the other with her husband’s alleged suicide. Larry was amazing. J. Edgar Hoover had nothing over Feld when it came to obtaining inside info. Between them, the files contained internal memos from the New York Times, confidential reports from the N.Y.P.D. and personal notes passed between Pulitzer committee members. And to make things more accessible, each file came with a word-processed brief explaining certain intricacies that a layman might neglect and/or misinterpret.
Although Larry had neatly separated both incidents into distinct files, the circumstances surrounding each ran together like fingerpaints in the rain. Barnum was a hot young talent at the Times and she had been doing an investigative series on how organized crime directly affected the price of almost anything purchased within New York City. There was a set of articles on mob/union activities, a set on the garment district, a set on the airports and trucking and a set on the construction industry, the banking industry and a high profile set on the Mafia’s infiltration of government and the courts. There were copies of her work in the file. Like I said before, Kate Barnum had teeth and she knew how to use them. But beyond her style, what gave Kate an edge were her sources. She claimed, in memos to the editorial staff, to have the highest-level sources within the unions, the Mafia and even in the government. She’d spent a lot of time doing these pieces, too much time.
Mike Tallenger was an attractive man in a beatniky sort of way. He had a gray pony tail, a salt and pepper soul patch, long sideburns that resembled Italy on an atlas and empty blue eyes. He was a jazzman, a sax player, a manic-depressive and the late second husband of Kate Burnum. Larry had provided a publicity picture. Tallenger had been at Juilliard, Berkeley and Bellevue. He met Barnum at the latter while she was working up a piece about New York’s treatment of the homeless. Kismet it wasn’t, but they got hitched anyway.
Between the two files, I worked out a rough chronology of their lives together. The first two years of marriage had been relatively uneventful. Uneventful, that is, if you allow for Tallenger’s two trips to private hospitals out on Long Island. No more Bellevues for Mike, not with Kate’s corporate insurance. The big trouble came in year number three, the year Kate began researching the Mafia infiltration series.
I didn’t have to infer or deduce or read between the lines. It was all here in police reports, shrinks’ reports and Barnum’s own letters of confession and resignation. The reporter had started to spend a copious amount of time away from home. Tallenger was becoming delusional and increasingly paranoid. He told his psychiatrist that his wife was having an affair and that she and her boyfriend were planning to kill him. He confronted her. Her time away increased as did the confrontations.
She moved out. She began drinking. She began dating other men. She told one of her new beaus she was having trouble sleeping. He got her a script to ease that problem. The pills worked for awhile. In the end, nothing worked. Tallenger tried making nice, wanted to reconcile. She nixed the idea. One night a cop from the Fifth Precinct called her at her desk and suggested they meet at Tallenger’s.
Tallenger had done his last gig. He’d never have to play another wedding or bar mitzvah to make ends meet. His end was met. The unstable sax man had consumed enough sleeping pills to kill a standing-room-only crowd at Shea. Cops didn’t find a note, but they did trace the pills back to Barnum and the prescription her new beau had supplied. Odd thing was, Kate swore never to have given any of the drug to Tallenger. Another odd thing happened. Three days after they found the permanently sleepy Tallenger, the cops received a package in the mail.