He was done with the story, done with a sidebar column playing up the human angle, when something clicked and he checked the names of the victims. The madam was one Mary Mulvaney, forty-four, with an East Side address a few minutes from the UN. But the columnist in the sidebar had referred to her as Molly, and had spun a theory about a propensity for raffish behavior in those whose names ended in — olly. He’d cited Polly Adler, the legendary Prohibition-era madam, and Holly Golightly, the fictional good-time girl in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It didn’t seem like much of an argument to Buckram, not even if you tossed in Ollie North, whom the writer had failed to add to the mix. But now, putting the nickname with the last name—
Jesus, he knew Molly Mulvaney. Had known her, anyway. She’d been a witness twenty-plus years ago, she’d been one of three high-ticket hookers who’d been partying in a Kips Bay penthouse with Tiny Tom Nappi, a midlevel mob guy whose sobriquet derived not from his stature, which was neither tall nor short, but from his sexual equipment, which was rumored to be in the same league with John Dillinger’s and Milton Berle’s. Nappi had said he wanted to die in a room full of booze and pussy and cocaine, and he got his wish, though probably not the way he had in mind. He’d gone to answer the door, and was shot through the peephole. The large-caliber slug went in through his eye and blew out most of the back of his head.
Molly hadn’t seen anything, and was bright enough to have kept her mouth shut even if there had been anything to see. Buckram had caught the case — which they’d solved in the sense that they knew who’d ordered the hit and had a pretty good idea who’d pulled the trigger, but never had enough to charge anybody. And he’d interrogated Molly Mulvaney at length, and liked her. They’d even flirted a little, although he’d made sure it didn’t go beyond that. She wasn’t really in the game, she’d told him. She just liked to party, and the life was kind of exciting, but this was more excitement than she’d signed on for, thank you very much, and what she thought she’d do was get the hell back to Fordham Road and marry a fireman. Or maybe a cop, she’d said, if I knew where to find a real cute one.
If she’d gone back to the Bronx she hadn’t stayed, and if she’d married her fireman it hadn’t worked out, but she’d evidently found the right way to be in the life, moving into management and letting younger bodies do the heavy lifting. Kept regular hours, made a decent living, lived in a good neighborhood. Nothing wrong with that, the illegality of it aside, until somebody beat her brains out with a hammer, and why in God’s name would anybody want to do that?
They’d be checking everything out, and of course they’d checked Creighton and of course he’d been cleared, and the coincidence of the Pankow kid threw a big monkey wrench into the middle of things, but they’d check Molly’s book, and that would probably upset a lot of citizens and screw up a few of their marriages. And they’d track down the other girls who worked for her, or had worked for her in the recent past, and they’d look for somebody with a grudge. If Molly was mobbed up — and she had to be to some extent or other, she was too hip to try riding bareback — they’d look for the OC connection, and lots of luck to them on that one.
Would they close it? The easy ones broke for you in the first forty-eight hours, and that hadn’t happened, but that only meant it wasn’t going to be easy, not that it wasn’t going to be closed. He sat there, in the Joseph Abboud suit he’d worn to Texas, and after a stretch of staring off into space he pulled himself up short, suddenly aware what he’d been doing.
He’d been figuring out what he’d be doing if it were his case. And, he realized, that’s what he really wanted. Not to run around the country telling people what they already knew. Not to hold office, whether it was mayor or commissioner of police.
What he wanted was to be out there on the street, running an investigation, working a case.
There was a phone call he’d tried to return earlier, to a cop he’d known years ago by the name of Jimmy Galvin. They’d lost touch, and the message on his voice mail hadn’t indicated the reason for the call. Probably to tell him somebody had died, he figured. More and more, that’s what a call from the past meant. Somebody else was gone, and somebody wanted to make sure you got the news.
He called back and got a machine with a canned message, not even Galvin’s voice, and he left his name and number and forgot about it, and he was trying to decide where to go for dinner when the phone rang, and it was Galvin. They exchanged pleasantries, and he scanned his memory for the name of Galvin’s wife and came up empty. If he’d ever known it, he didn’t know it now.
“How’s Mrs. G.?” he asked.
“Well, there you go,” Galvin said. “I retired a little over three years ago, figuring I’d get to spend a little more time around the house, and it turned out she liked me better when I wasn’t around so much. So she went and got herself a divorce, and I’m living in Alphabet City in a coat closet that I can’t afford.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “I’d heard you retired, but I hadn’t heard about the divorce.”
“It’s not so bad, Fran. I have to do my own wash and fix my own meals, but you get used to that. The hard part is now I have to break my own balls.”
“Trust me,” he said. “You get used to that, too.”
They talked a little about being divorced and learning to be single again. Galvin said he figured it would be easier if he had a real job. He was working on a private license, and the dough was okay, what with the pension he got from the city. But the work was irregular, with long stretches of nothing to do, and the inactivity got to him.
“I don’t know, Fran. I was thinking, but you probably got things you have to do. I mean, you had the top job, you’re an important guy...”
“Jim, I was important for fifteen minutes. Now all I am is out of work.”
“Yeah? What I was thinking, you feel like getting together for a drink?”
Just what he needed, a boozy evening with a cop who put in his papers just in time to see his life disintegrate. But he found himself saying that might work, that he’d enjoy it.
“There’s this place,” he said. “I been dropping in there, you might like it...”
He thought, Jesus, not a cop bar. He tried to think of an alternative to suggest, but Galvin surprised him.
“It’s called Stelli’s,” he said. “Up on Second Avenue in the Eighties. The food’s Italian, if you want to have dinner, or we could meet afterward. Entirely your call.”
What the hell, he’d been trying to figure out what to do about dinner. “Dinner sounds good,” he said. “Say eight o’clock?”
“Perfect. I’m trying to remember the cross street, Fran. It’s in the Eighties, and above Eighty-sixth, I know that much—”
“I know the place,” he said. “We’d better have a reservation.”
“I guess we’ll need one, if we’re gonna have dinner.”
“I’ll make the call, Jim. Stelli’s at eight. I’ll look forward to it.”
He was out the door at six-forty-five and caught a cab right away. This time the driver was a black man with a French name. Haitian, he supposed, or possibly West African. Wherever he’d come from, the guy’d been doing this long enough to know the city. He didn’t have to be told where Stelli’s was. The name was enough. He drove right to it.
thirteen
Gregory Schuyler was a dear man, and, as chairman of the board of the Museum of Contemporary Folk Art, an important frog in the small pond Pomerance Gallery swam in. Whenever Susan suggested lunch he was quick to select an impeccable restaurant, and wouldn’t hear of her picking up the check, or even splitting it. And there was no question of the museum reimbursing him. Not only did he volunteer no end of unpaid hours to the museum, but he also gave them an annual donation in the $50,000$100,000 range, depending upon the fortunes of the Schuyler family trust of which he was the principal beneficiary.