Little Easter dk-2 Read online

  Little Easter

  ( Dylan Klein - 2 )

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Little Easter

  Out of the ash

  I rise with my red hair

  And I eat men like air.

  — Sylvia Plath from “Lady Lazarus”

  Johnny Blue

  The new TV talked to no one but me. Its virginal speakers babbled to an empty bar, a rapidly decomposing dartboard and a pay-for-pool table at which no one was paying and no one was playing. Taxidermied fishes, with sawdust for souls and glass buttons for eyes, turned deaf ears to the moot squawking, choosing instead to spy threatening harpoons, crossed like dueling foils against the red brick and mortar of the opposing wall. Yes, the new TV talked, but I barely listened. I was too busy blowing imaginary dust out of clean pony glasses and watching the weather.

  Sound Hill was wedding dress white, Bing Crosby white, “White Christmas” white. After five fingers worth of years in this town, you’d think I’d be comfortable with the notion of snow keeping its cream for more than a few nods and a wink. I wasn’t. Where I come from in Brooklyn, snow falls dirty. At least I remember it that way. Back there the only white snow you see is spray-painted onto shop windows around the holidays. I guess I’m exaggerating, but not much, really. The air’s pretty dirty over Brooklyn.

  How far was the city; sixty, seventy miles west of here? Yet, for a goodly part of the time, Brooklyn seemed like a distant planet or a place where I came from in someone else’s life. I don’t know. I talked about it sometimes with my fellow Brooklyn emigré, John Francis MacClough. He didn’t know either and cared even less. Like most retired city detectives he’d cracked too many skulls and touched too many corpses to dwell on the metaphysical.

  Funny thing about MacClough was that he never much reminded me of that someone else’s life or the home planet. No, it took things like white snow to stick its finger down my throat and pull out the past. It took things that kept me off balance, things I’d never adjusted to. Things, I imagine, I hadn’t wanted to adjust to. Things that were sort of an escape hatch in case I wanted to travel back and remember. Why I wanted to remember just now, I couldn’t say.

  Tonight I was in charge of MacClough’s lifeless Rusty Scupper, alone with his stiff little fishes and my less than sober thoughts. It was Christmas Eve and I was as comfortable as Moses munching on communion wafers. Forget their protestations to the contrary, all Jews are eternally ill at ease with the whole Christmas ordeal. Hanuka is a nice holiday, but eight colored candles and a four-sided top are no match for the son of God-not even with the points.

  When I was a kid, Catholic girlfriends were my remedy for Christmas discomfort. A little turkey, a little midnight mass, a few green and red and white gift-wrapped baubles do wonders for teen-age, Jewish discomfort. Now girlfriends, Catholic or otherwise, were less of a distraction and considerably harder to come by. Since my move to Sound Hill I’d done the volunteer routine, subbing for MacClough on Christmas Eve. It was, after all, the Christian thing to do. Besides, Johnny figured I couldn’t do much damage in a predictably empty bar. He’d have never left the Scupper in my hands in July. Twenty years as a beat cop and detective had taught John Francis how to pick his spots.

  You see, when the flocks moved east, they moved east in summer. And by no means was the Lord their shepherd. Absolut and orange juice and walk-to beaches with weedy sand dunes like sirens pulled them here. Or was it just the city that pushed them away? It’s hard to know for certain, even having lived on both sides of the migration.

  Summers in Sound Hill are lovely magnets, but it’s spring and winter and fall that make people stay. Things are more real here then. With the passing of Labor Day, life takes on a sort of self-imposed timelessness. The Star Spangled Deli is relieved of its obligation to carry three sizes of French bottled water, six shapes of Japanese rice bran pasta and two brands of Panamanian beer. Over at the service station, Stan Long deflates gas and labor prices back down to a level even people without titles can afford. And the farm stand girls turn in their gingham gowns for cold, early mornings of dirty work and school buses. And. .

  I stopped watching the snow. White weather and alcohol and loneliness are a bad combination, makes a man’s mind wonder where maybe it shouldn’t. I dug some quarters out of the register, poured myself another Black and Tan and strolled to the pool table for a game of Eight Ball, solitaire style. I set my pint glass down on the edge of the worn and pitted table. I chose the least curved cue from the four sad offerings stuck in the wall rack. Twirling and swooshing the stick with my unskilled hands, I was Cyrano, a samurai, a majorette. One thrust at the elevated TV and the background babbling ended, a powder blue chalkmark on the “Power” switch indicating my success. God, the bar was so awfully quiet now. The cue sliding thru the insides of my fingers was the only sound the world had to offer.

  “Is Johnny Blue here?” her emphatic whisper broke the silent spell.

  I turned too quickly to the door, carelessly swinging the curved stick and launching the nearly full pint glass into space. Gravity pulled it toward the center of the earth.

  “How long have you been standing there?” I knelt in the puddle of ale, stout and glass, more concerned with whether she’d seen my Zorro and baton routine than the presence or absence of one Johnny Blue. Thirty-six-year-old men are vain like that.

  “Where is Johnny Blue?” it was less of a whisper this time.

  “Look, lady,” I came out of my crouch, “that’s three questions-two for you and one for me-and we’re not gettin’ anywhere.”

  She didn’t like that, not that she said so. It was more the way she stiffened under her tattered mink. Her shape was pleasant enough, accented by the soft fur belt pulled in at the waist, but she was no teen-ager. Her overly made-up features were sadly grotesque in that once they must have been neither sad nor grotesque. You could count the mileage in her sleepy, pink-shadowed lids and measure the wear and tear by counting the cracks in her almost orange face powder. I couldn’t tell much about what color her hair had been. It’d probably been a lot of colors. Now it was mostly gray and straight and lifeless. Its ends were buried somewhere beneath the half-upturned collar of that once proud coat. Unlike the shattered pint glass, more than carelessness and gravity had contributed to her fall. I could see that even from where I stood.

  “Do you mean, MacClough, Johnny MacClough?” I evened up the questions at two apiece, feeling less embarrassed for myself.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” she said to herself, but loud enough for me to catch. Her drained green eyes didn’t seem to notice me. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  I started to make my way around the back of the bar. “Sit down a minute and have a-”

  “God,” she cut my offer of an Irish Coffee short, “I should never have come.” And with that she turned on the spikes of her inappropriate black shoes, exiting as quietly as she’d entered.

  “Yeah,” I said to her fresh memory, “and a merry Christmas to you too!”

  That was that. I gave last call. No one objected. No one was there to object. The TV was off, the fishes were dead and my visitor had just departed for parts unknown. I clanged the tip bell a few times for the exercise and came around front of the bar to officially close the Scupper.

  “Christ!” I screamed while slipping on the forgotten glass of the cue stick casualty. Unless some wacky guy came in and announced that he was the real Johnny Blue and asked did I know where his mink-coated, orange-faced middle-aged girlfriend had got to, I’d be able to clean up the broken glass in no time. But stepping to the front door, I slipped again. This time I found clear crystals under my shoe that seemed to bear little relation to a b
roken beer glass.

  I dangled the expensive banana peel high above the bar ledge in the soft light of an overhanging globe. The necklace of little cut stones seemed to amplify the dull bar light, breaking it into distinctive sparkling rays. Held close to my amateur’s eye, the white gold and diamond confection was alluring and impressive. I counted twenty-four multifaceted gems aligned like stars in the shape of a heart. Each gem rested in the petrified palm and fingers of petite, but well defined, white gold hands: Twenty-four diamonds, twenty-four little hands. The hands were attached to the heavy heart-shaped body of the setting at the wrists. The orphaned heart appeared unscathed by my clumsy misstep. Its chain, however, would require a new clasp and some skilled untangling. My best guess was that the heart belonged to Johnny Blue’s one-woman fan club.

  I threw MacClough’s golf sweater on and stepped out into the darkness. If she hadn’t come by car, I figured I still had a chance to catch her. Those high spikes of hers would leave a nice easy trail in the snow. Even a former insurance investigator like me could follow footprints like those. At least I told myself I could.

  I looked for tire tracks out in front of the Scupper. The surprisingly bitter cold and bitting wind contributed to my disappointment when I didn’t find any. My newly revived conscience made me keep on. Her stiletto pumps left a series of triangles and dots in the snow leading toward the Long Island Railroad station. That simplified things a bit. I could check out Carney’s Cabs on my way over.

  Old man Carney was head back, slack-jawed and dead to the world. His ancient charred lungs silently sucked in huge gulps of chilled air, exhaling the waste gasses with much noisy pomp and circumstance. He held a burning cigarette-now mostly cigarette-shaped ashes-between two yellow fingers resting on the edge of his desk. The tip of the ashen snake lay in a cheap foil ashtray. The smooth split ends of smoke drifted with the currents caused by the old man’s wheezing. Orange face wasn’t here.

  There weren’t any more footprints to follow. The sidewalks are shoveled and the streets are plowed this close to the railroad station. Yes, even in Sound Hill. I scanned the passenger platform from the taxi stand’s doorway. Both eastbound and westbound looked as empty as MacClough’s place, but I decided to walk both sides of the tracks anyway to satisfy a growing curiosity. My very visible breath reminded me that it was pretty damned cold for someone in a bar apron and spring sweater to be playing hide and go seek. Curiosity makes for poor decisions.

  The darkness and shadows made it tough to see detail, but I spotted a shaggy tail of dyed mink showing itself from between the clapboard ticketbooth on the westbound platform and a row of four newspaper vending machines which stood shoulder to shoulder against the kiosk’s front wall. An icy raw chill shook me; a chill that had nothing to do with cold fronts or Arctic air masses.

  I smelled death from across the tracks. The ragged collection of pelts flapped in the wind, but nothing else was moving over there. I stood, arms folded, and stared, waiting for her to fool me. Waiting for her to leap up and come to me demanding the orphaned heart’s return and the whereabouts of Johnny Blue. Sweat poured over my back, the frigid air trying to freeze the falling drops between my skin and shirt. The night started closing in, but a distant train horn stopped my swoon. I took small, quick steps across the tracks.

  No, she would not fool me nor would she fool anyone ever again. Even before I got to the body, I noticed her leaking blood had stained a patch of slush crimson red. I couldn’t help thinking it looked like a fallen cherry snow cone. I was just old enough to remember real snow cones shaved from huge blocks of ice by bald Italian men under the “el” on 86th Street. The only real snow cones you could get in Brooklyn now were in the Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.

  She was there, face down and to the wall, the back of her ratty coat pressed against the legs of the shoulder-to-shoulder newspaper machines. Almost reflexively, I reached over the vending machines trying to find warmth or a neck pulse. Given the wind chill factor and my lack of gloves, it was a fairly futile gesture. My fingers did find wet, gooey, freezing fur and hair. I pulled the collar down, brushed aside the stiff matted hair and tried to find her throat. The nail and top of my left index finger rubbed up against an earring. I slipped the blind finger beneath her adorned left ear. But instead of finding more flesh, my frozen digit plunged into a moist hole with sharp irregular edges.

  Christ! I snatched my arm up with enough momentum to launch it into shallow earth orbit. The cold air caused a clot of the dead woman’s blood to roll slowly down the back of my hand like raspberry pancake syrup. Parts of me wanted desperately to be sick. Parts of me wanted to scream my balls off and run and never stop running. But all I could do was gaze at my nearely frostbitten fingertip. It’d touched something in there, in what, I guess, used to be her mouth. It’d touched something that felt like. . well, like feathers!

  I wiped the blood off on my pants and pulled at the squat vending machines. They came away easily, more easily, probably, than they had for the killer. She rolled over. I jumped back, sliding off the low platform onto the tracks. Heavy vibrations told me to get my ass up unless I wanted to become a National Transportation Safety Board statistic. I took the advice and went back to the lady in blood and mink.

  She was dead. When I yanked the newspaper machines away, physics rolled her onto her back. My finger had touched feathers. The tail end of a yellow downy body and its two frail feet hung out over the woman’s blue lips, her too-red lipstick smeared on the lemon-colored feathers of the little bird. Even I knew what the yellow bird symbolized.

  She was a rat, a snitch, stooly. She’d turned, rolled over. She’d broken the silence, whispered in the wrong ears, given someone up. She’d testified, turned state’s evidence, witnessed for the man. She was a singer, a chanteuse, a canary. That’s what the yellow bird meant. It was a mob symbol as time-honored as a tuna in a dead man’s tux. The white-hairs drinking grappa and playing bocce in the park used to talk about their crude code. The method of the rub or the condition of the body was usually an allusion to the sin the victim had committed. The mob had funny notions about sins and absolution. But that was in the old days when gangsters wore scars and hats and used words like grifter and gunsel.

  A clanging bell and air horn split the silent night as an old diesel locomotive lumbered into Sound Hill station. I paid it almost as little mind as the two dead canaries stiffening by my shoes. The woman’s washed-out eyes were open to the cloudy skies. They expressed nothing, not even fear. I wondered about the life-flashing-before-your-eyes cliché and if life was painful in review. It’s funny what you think about.

  “Hey, buddy,” a sour-smelling whiskey voice spoke into my right ear, “Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth.” A drunken hand clapped me on the back.

  I ignored him.

  He didn’t much like it. “Ya don’t havta be that-” he slurred indignantly.“Oh shit! Holy fuckin’ shit! Holy Mary. Oh God! Holy fuckin’ shit, man! God! God! What the fuck, man? Christ! Oh God! Holy. .”

  I never caught his face, but I assumed he’d seen the cold mink package on the concrete. I watched him run drunkenly down the platform; sliding and cursing as he went. I was relieved that help would soon be here and happy that someone in this hard world had managed to scream for the dead stranger at my feet.

  Mop of Anarchy

  I hadn’t tasted the apparently hot coffee yet nor could I smell its steam. The cheap porcelain cup rested between my still anesthetized fingers and jittery knees. If the shaking had spilled any of the burning liquid, I couldn’t feel it. I rested my dizzy head on the lip of the Scupper’s century-old bar. A scratchy Red Cross blanket kept slipping off my shoulders and someone, probably lots of someones, kept putting it back. I liked it better on the floor.

  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 C
oroner’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.