If you were a sucker for men in uniform, the Rusty Scupper was the hot spot on eastern Long Island. We had New York State Troopers, Suffolk County cops, Suffolk County Sheriff’s deputies, Long Island Railroad cops, Suffolk County Coroner’s men, Sound Hill Volunteer Firemen and assorted ambulance drivers from surrounding towns and the forty-eight contiguous United States. I haven’t even mentioned the detectives, forensic cops, clergymen and doctors. Oh yeah, old man Carney had snapped out of his catatonia to come have a look see. I’d been to Mets’ games less well attended. I half expected a vendor to pop in and start hawking hot dogs and scorecards.
My accounting of this white Christmas was as practiced and polished as any tale ever told. Having presented it to most of the law enforcement officials in the western hemisphere, I’d managed to smooth out any rough edges in my delivery. I even told the truth, mostly. I sort of forgot to mention the fancy cut-glass pendant with the white gold hands. And so what if I told the cops that the dead woman had come into the Scupper to catch her breath from the cold? I just wanted to check with MacClough before telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Johnny’d risked his neck for me more than once. I needed to make certain none of this involved him before I conveniently remembered any absent details. I owed him that and more.
And after most of the talking was done, the forensic team took their turn with me. They wanted a swatch of material from all my clothing. I obliged. They asked for MacClough’s moth food golf sweater. They needed it to run some nitrate tests. They were sure I hadn’t shot the bird lady, but procedure was procedure and they could always get a court order and. . I gave them the sweater. I told them to keep it. Its replacement was upstairs under Johnny’s Christmas tree. They asked for some dried blood from under my fingernail. I let them scrape it. I was in such a giving mood that I volunteered some of my own blood. But that wasn’t on their holiday shopping list. Eventually, they withdrew.
From the battalion of volunteer ambulance crews came some freckle-faced kid, with a stethoscope for a necktie, who said he thought somebody ought to have a look at my finger.
“Why?” I wondered.
He hemmed and hawed, mumbling something about small puncture wounds and the dead woman’s blood.
“Why?” I repeated.
“AIDS!” he flushed red.
I let him look at the whole hand. He bathed and toweled it and poured what might’ve been hydrogen peroxide over it to see if any white foam would bubble up. None did. We agreed that testing for leaks in an inner tube was much easier and that I should have a real doctor check it out. He said he’d tell the cops to run an HIV test on the corpse, but that he couldn’t guarantee they’d listen. I winked my understanding and thanks. He flushed again and planted the hot coffee in my mitts.
“Mr. Klein?” a throaty woman’s voice questioned already knowing the answer.
“Yeah,” I spoke not to the woman at my back, but to the cup in my lap.
“I’m Kate Barnum from the Sound Hill Whaler.”
“Great,” I lifted my head off the bar, placing the cheap chinaware in its place. The scratchy blanket slid to the floor again. “Just what I needed, the press.”
“Here,” the reporter fumbled with the blanket, trying to juggle it with her mini-recorder, pad and pen.
“I prefer it there. Leave it where it lays.”
She ceased the juggling act and let go of the woolen blanket.
Unlike the dead woman, Kate Barnum had never been pretty. Guys would call her interesting, just interesting, eternally interesting. I liked interesting. Interesting usually had more depth than flat out pretty and certainly more than beautiful. Her dull blond hair was a curly mop of anarchy; tight ringlets here, droopy twirls there. Her brows were brown and thick in opposition to thin, pale lips and an incongruously delicate nose. Her skin was blotchy from stress and Scotch and cigarettes. And the weak make-up job couldn’t hide where her cheeks sagged slightly at the flanks of her square chin and under crystal gray eyes. Without those eyes she’d be less interesting, but that was one factor we didn’t have to worry about.
“Now that your sharp eyes have surmised I’m not the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, can I ask you some questions about this evenings events?”
I thought about denying the dual correctness of her assessment, but chose instead to hold her inquiries at arm’s length.
“Are you always so charmingly egocentric?” I wondered.
“Sorry,” she gave an insincere bow. “It’s just a line I learned at a Carnegie seminar. Helps break the ice at parties. I do so hate making small talk.”
“Me too; small talk, big talk, any kinda talk. I’ve talked myself sore. So let’s skip it.”
“Come on, Mr. Klein, give us both a break,” the blue-jeaned and cowboy-booted Barnum was suddenly more sincere. “It’s late. I’m tired. You’re tired. .”
“You forgot to mention it’s Christmas Day,” I scolded.
She plopped her mini-recorder unceremoniously on the bar and rolled up the ends of her frayed sweater sleeves. “It’s Christmas Day. It’s late. I’m tired. You’re tired. . There! Is that any better?”
“Kate Barnum. Kate Barnum,” I repeated in a loud whisper, ignoring her question. “I know that name. I’ve read it somewhere.”
“In the Whaler,” she tried to deflect my meanderings.
“No. .” I drifted on, running pages of old newsprint from memory past my internal eye. As an insurance investigator, I’d had plenty of dead time for reading the papers. “The New York Times. That’s it!” I slapped the bar in self-satisfaction, landing my hand uncomfortably close to her Sony. “You slummin’?”
“Not slumming, Mr. Klein.”
“You’ve fallen quite a ways from the Times.”
“Farther than you can ever know,” Kate Barnum’s face took on a sadly serene glow like a leper at peace with her fate.
I’d had to talk to the cops. Even Bojangles himself couldn’t’ve tapped his way around that. Reporters were different. Why say anything to anyone anyway, until I hooked up with John Francis in the morning? A prudent man would’ve followed MacClough’s Law: Never speak to the fucking press. They can’t twist what you don’t say, though they try hard enough. But Johnny was an ex-cop and cops rated the press third on their shit list just behind politicians and criminal lawyers and ahead of serial killers and child molesters.
I spoke to her. Maybe just because she had fallen. For me, that could be enough. Interesting and fallen, my kind of woman. But I’d have to explore that weakness of mine some other night. For now I dusted off and trotted out the same old version of the night’s happenings that I’d spoon-fed the law. They’d seemed satisfied with it. I figured it would make Barnum happy, too. That was my mistake.
“Look, Mr. Klein,” the reporter smirked, shaking her head like a skeptical teacher listening to an excuse about a pit bull eating his master’s homework. “Even if I bought the coincidence of Jane Doe just popping in out of nowhere to catch her breath, I couldn’t swallow the rest of it with a five-pound bag of sugar. It doesn’t hang together. Like why did you follow a complete stranger out into the cold and snow while leaving the bar totally unattended? You see what I mean?”
“I was concerned about her,” I tried meekly. “She seemed a little unbalanced. I don’t know.”
“Okay, then, why didn’t you go after her immediately or try and stop her from leaving at all? No, Mr. Klein. I may have tumbled a long distance from the city beat at the Times, but I didn’t have a lobotomy on the way down.”
“The cops liked-”
“The cops!” she threw up her hands. “The cops wanted to get home for the holiday.”