Mrs. Palatino knew my late mother from church, and that’s why she rented to me, even though I’m not Italian. She sat on the couch in her robe and slippers and looked at me long and hard. This was a woman who thought the worst of everyone and never saw anything that made her doubt her judgment.
“You decided to dress like a detective today,” she said, like she couldn’t decide why this was wrong. I nodded and tipped my hat. Mr. Palatino had died. Some years ago. I pegged him as a coward who took the easy way out.
On the way to my office I thought about Bertrade and the dream and how in it she had told me some things I couldn’t quite remember.
For some years after that encounter in Red Hook in ’41, I didn’t see Bertrade. When she reappeared, she was still beautiful and young despite being a couple of decades older than me. But she looked maybe frayed, and Darnel wasn’t with her.
They had both served in something called the War of the Elf King’s Daughter—fairies versus elves. At one time, the idea would have made me laugh. But not after Bertrade let me see a bit of what she’d gone through.
Her war occurred at about the same time as World War II and looked in some ways just as bad. Spells and magic, getting tortured to the point of suicide by hideous nightmares, seeing friends—minds invaded by the enemy—tearing out their own throats. Darnel hadn’t come back. He wasn’t dead, because the Fair Folk never die. “Lost to this world,” was how she put it, and I knew it made her sad.
For other guys, maybe it was Garbo or Hayworth they thought about. For me, ever since that first encounter, it had been Bertrade. And whenever she came back here and wanted to be with me, it was like a daydream became real.
She knew more, had seen more, than anybody I’d ever met. Something she once showed me, which I thought about as I walked to work that day, was a whole unit of trolls, ordinary soldiers like I had been, if you ignored how they looked, caught by tall elves. Rifles fell from their hands as their minds were seized and twisted by the Gentry. They fell dead, wiped out without a sound made or a shot fired.
Weapons were beneath the Fair Folk, she told me. You could walk up to one, pull out a gun, and shoot him, provided you could somehow keep all thought of what you were about to do out of your mind.
At the Bigelow Building I went into the big pharmacy on the first floor, got a few black coffees to go, and took those upstairs, drinking one on the elevator. It was still just short of noon. My energy and purpose amazed me.
The mail had already been delivered: a couple of bills, a few fliers, and a report on the whereabouts of a bum who had skipped out on the alimony and child support he owed a client of mine. All but the last got tossed in the wastebasket. I’d had nothing from Bertrade except maybe that foggy dream.
I called Up to the Minute and got Gracie. “You have six calls, including four so far this morning from Anne Toomey.” She paused. “Mr. Grant, this is none of my business. But a couple of times a man—I think it was her husband—was yelling at her. It sounded bad.”
“Thanks.” This time Jim must really have jumped the rails.
I hung up and made the call. Anne answered halfway through the first ring. She spoke softly, like she didn’t want someone to overhear. “Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you.” She did sound very sorry. “And I’m going to have to ask if you’ll do it again today. I promise I’ll get—”
“I was going to volunteer. How’s Jim? The operator says he was shouting at you.”
“He’s quiet right now. Sam, this whole case is strange. I’ve tried half a dozen times to call Mrs. Culpepper, you know, while her husband’s at work. No answer. They’re not listed in the telephone book. Jim’s the only one she’s talked to. And he’s . . . not good. Last night he was talking, yelling at someone who wasn’t there. And he told me someone was in his head. He’s been saying that for the last couple of days. It’s never been this bad.”
“Was it more than just shouting at you, Anne?”
She said, “This is what I’ve been afraid of.”
“Anne, I’ll be out there as fast as I can. Is there some place you can go meanwhile?”
“My aunt’s a few blocks over.”
“Go there right now. Don’t talk to Jim. Just leave. Understand?”
Anne said she did. I doubted her.
Then I made a call to Police Chaplain Dineen. Young Private Kevin Dineen had served as an altar boy in France for the famous Father Duffy of the Sixty-Ninth. He came back home and found a vocation. It was said that Father Dineen spiked the sacramental wine with gin, and he was reputed to get a bit frisky with the widows he comforted. But it was Dineen who got called when O’Malley at the Ninth Precinct, a fellow vet, was at the Thanksgiving table eating mashed potatoes with the barrel of his loaded revolver while all his children looked on. Dineen got O’Malley to hand the weapon over and had the kids smiling at the game he and their daddy were playing.
When I explained as much of the situation as he needed to know, all Dineen asked was, “Do we need an ambulance or a squad car?”
“Both,” I said. Before going downstairs to meet the chaplain, I took my service .38 out of the locked drawer, cleaned and loaded the revolver, buckled on the holster. I remembered doing the same thing in my dream the night before.
I called Up to the Minute and told Gracie I wouldn’t be back until late and not to wait up. She laughed. As I adjusted my hat and went out the door, I remembered something from the dream: Bertrade, lying among pillows and bedclothes, had looked right at me and spoken about bait and traps.
Ten minutes later, Father Dineen and I were in his brand-new Oldsmobile four-door, headed through the drizzle for Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn. His car had a siren and a flashing light. We went through red lights; traffic cops waved us on at intersections. Dineen was on the radio to a squad car out in Park Slope as we crossed the bridge with a motorcycle escort, and he cursed because we weren’t going faster.
Anger was what I felt: anger at the one who had maybe screwed around with Toomey’s mind and caused Anne pain. They weren’t even the object of this operation. I probably wasn’t either. It struck me that they and I were just bait in some game the Gentry were playing.
When we arrived at Sixteenth Street, a crowd had gathered in the drizzle, and homicide was out in force. Anne Toomey must have tried one last time to talk to Jim. She was at the bottom of the stairs. Jim had stood halfway up and shot her twice in the face before pumping two shots into his open mouth.
For the young homicide detective who took my statement, this was open-and-shut murder-suicide. The second bullet in the shooter’s mouth was nothing more than a dying twitch, not a sign someone else was operating Jim’s hand. And this young man was confident his career was not going to end like Toomey’s or mine.
What I wanted to tell him was, “The creature that had James Toomey in its control used Toomey’s own hand to eliminate him and cover its tracks.” My actual statement stuck strictly to the facts, with nothing more than a brief mention of the Culpepper case.
——
Father Dineen drove like a cop, as if he owned the road. He knew something was up, but not even a couple of belts from the ecclesiastic flask made me talk. The image of Anne and Jimmy dead in their house was burning a hole in my brain.
It was very late afternoon when the chaplain dropped me off in front of the main post office and told me to go home and get some rest.
On the ride back from the Toomeys’ I’d thought about the dream and Bertrade. Usually dreams are vivid when you wake up, but as you try to grab them they turn to nothing and disappear. This one had started out vague but seemed to linger.