A Manhattan Ghost Story Read online

  Whelan said, “It happens.”

  “What happens?”

  “People pass out.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Why are you still here, Mr. Cray? Don’t you find me intimidating enough?” He put the cigar back into his mouth, began rolling it theatrically from one side to the other.

  “I live here,” I said.

  Art started coming around then. His eyelids fluttered; he groaned a couple of times.

  “Uh-huh,” Whelan said. “Well, it’s not important now, is it?” He nodded at Art. “I’ve got him.”

  Art mumbled something incoherent, something about Phyllis, I think, something affectionate.

  Whelan grinned, as if at a private joke and leaned over him. “Mr. DeGraff?”

  Art’s eyes opened. He looked frightened.

  “Mr. DeGraff?” Whelan said again.

  “Yes?” Art managed.

  “Mr. DeGraff, you have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you give up these rights—”

  Art sat up suddenly, pushing Whelan aside. Whelan started reciting his rights again, and Art waved agitatedly at the air, as if waving at flies. “That’s not necessary.”

  “Certainly, Mr. DeGraff,” Whelan said. “Could you get dressed?”

  “Sure,” Art said.

  “We have to go downtown, sir. We have to book you.”

  Art stood, grinned. He looked suddenly very pleased. “Yes,” he said, “I’d like that.” His voice was quivering. “I can’t tell you how much I’d like that, Detective …” He stopped, looked confused. “What’s your name, again?”

  “Whelan. Call me ‘Mr. Whelan.’ I prefer being called Mister.”

  Art nodded, put his hand on the back of his head.

  “I think I hurt myself.” He rubbed the back of his head.

  “Yes, sir,” Whelan said. “We’ll see that it’s attended to.” He looked at me. “Mr. Cray, will you be willing to testify that Mr. DeGraff received this head injury as the result of fainting.”

  I said yes.

  “Thank you.” He turned to Art. “Now, if you could get dressed, Mr. DeGraff.”

  Art started for the bedroom. “Yes,” he said, “I will. I won’t be long.”

  Whelan followed. Art said, “Please, let me do this alone.” After a moment, Whelan nodded. “Okay,” he said, and let Art go alone into his bedroom to get dressed. He shouldn’t have done it, of course. He was stupid to do it; I suppose he considered himself a good judge of character (grizzled cop, twenty or twenty-five years on the force, gets to know people awfully well, right?). I suppose he felt pretty certain that Art wasn’t going to do anything, so he decided to give him a final moment of dignity and let him get dressed alone.

  It was a mistake.

  When Art had been in the bedroom a minute or two, Whelan said, “Can I get a statement from you, Mr. Cray?”

  “About Art’s head injury?” I said.

  Whelan puffed on the cigar; he seemed to delight in it. “Yes. For the record.”

  A kind of high-pitched grunting noise, barely audible, came from the bedroom. We both looked. Whelan, thinking, apparently, that it was nothing to be concerned about, said, “You’d be surprised, Mr. Cray, at the number of suspects who claim police brutality—” He was interrupted by another grunting sound, louder now.

  “Excuse me, please,” he said, and I watched as he strode quickly—and more gracefully, I thought at the time, than I supposed a man his size could—down the hallway to Art’s closed bedroom door, and tapped on it. “Mr. DeGraff?”

  Another grunting sound, now as much a screech as a grunt.

  Whelan hit the door with the side of his fist. “Mr. DeGraff? Open the door, please.” He tried the knob; the door was locked. He cursed, stepped back, kicked the door very hard just below the knob. The door swung open sharply, Whelan pulled his gun out, took up a position to the left of the door, and bellowed this time, “Mr. DeGraff, please come out of there!”

  I had been coming slowly down the hallway all this time, and now I was close enough to Art’s bedroom to see past Whelan, into it. I saw movement inside, though I heard nothing.

  Whelan bellowed again, “Mr. DeGraff, come out of there! Now!”

  It was a quick and frantic kind of movement that I saw in that room, as if something furious and silent had been let loose inside it.

  “Goddamnit!” Whelan hissed.

  “Are you going to go in there?” I whispered.

  He ignored me. “Goddamnit!” he hissed again. He was obviously very upset, and more than a little nervous. “Mr. DeGraff, I am going to ask you only one more time to come out of there. Please come out of there!”

  “I’ll go in and get him if you like,” I offered. I meant it.

  He looked at me as if I were a madman, waved at me with his gun and ordered, “Get out of the way; get out of the way!”

  I stepped back a little.

  And Art screamed.

  Whelan twitched, cursed again, and launched himself, head-first—so he could tuck and roll—into the room. It was very theatrical, and I enjoyed it immensely. He let loose with the gun moments later. I didn’t like that; it was loud, obtrusive—”Christ!” I screamed. “Stop that, you asshole, stop that!” And I ran into the room.

  I found Whelan sitting up against the wall to the right of the door, his feet under the middle of the bed. He was still pointing his gun, and his mouth was moving fitfully—small, spittle-laden curses were coming out.

  Art was not in the room. His robe was there, lying very neatly on the bed. The window was open; cold air was pushing into the room. But Art was gone.

  I grinned. “Great,” I said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I leaned over Whelan. He was flushed; his breathing was shallow, and I guessed that he was in shock, that he had seen something very strange. I patted him several times, softly, on the cheek. It did no good.

  I straightened, stared at him a moment. The small, spittle-laden curses stopped; his breathing remained shallow. “Mr. Whelan?” I said. Nothing. I turned and went to the window, stuck my head out, looked down the fire escape, then right and left.

  Art was on the sidewalk on East 79th Street. He was dressed only in a pair of dark slacks and a white T-shirt. He was barefooted. Three people—a young, casually dressed woman, a child, a young black man smoking a cigarette—were hurrying him along, left, toward Fifth Avenue. “Art!” I called, and he glanced back. I saw a paralytic kind of fear on his face—stiff, and pale, and wildly incredulous. Then Kennedy Whelan shouldered his way in next to me at the window, stuck his head out, saw Art, too, and yelled, “Stop right there, Mr. DeGraff! Stop right there!” and stuck his arm out, gun in hand, and pointed it in Art’s general direction.

  “Jesus,” I said, “what’s that for?”

  He shoved me aside, leaned farther out the window, and leveled the gun directly at Art. “Stop there, goddamnit!”

  I pushed in beside him, looked frantically toward East 79th Street and the tight little group of people that was all but carrying Art away.

  “Damnit!” Whelan breathed. He drew back from the window and headed for the phone on a nightstand near the bed. “Please don’t go anywhere, Mr. Cray,” he said. I nodded, and then moved more quickly than I supposed I could have. Out the window, onto the fire escape, and, before starting down, I looked back, saw Whelan running through the bedroom, reaching into his jacket for his gun. “Shit!” I whispered, and clattered down the fire escape to the ground. I heard from above:

  “Shit, fuck, goddamnit!”

  I looked up. Whelan had started down after me, but had gotten the front bottom edge of his suit jacket caught in the fire escape.

  I ran to East 79th Street. Behind me, from the fire escape, Whelan called, “You asshole, you fucking asshole!”

  I reached the sidewalk. In front of me, a yellow cab came to a sharp halt. The cabbie leaned over, rolled the passenger window down and
said, “Cab, sir?”

  It was Matthew Petersak.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Keystone Cops

  Behind me, Whelan had freed his jacket from the fire escape and had reached the ground.

  “Cabbie,” he yelled, “I am a New York City police officer and I am ordering you to halt!”

  I opened the front passenger door of the cab, hopped in, glanced at Whelan. He was running toward us with his gun pointing skyward and was yelling again, “I am a New York City Police Officer, goddamnit, and I am ordering you to bring your cab to a halt!”

  “Jesus!” I breathed.

  A quick, hollow chuckle came from Matthew Petersak.

  “Jesus!” I said again. Whelan was within fifty feet of the cab now. “Can we go?!” I said to the cabbie. “Please, can we go?!”

  Matthew Petersak chuckled once again. He opened his door, put one foot out onto the pavement, stood, and yelled to Whelan, over the top of the cab, “Yeah? Well I’m a New York City dead man, and I don’t give a fuck!” And he laughed.

  Whelan stopped. His gun still was pointing skyward, but now his mouth was open.

  Ahead of the cab, traffic had come to a standstill—another of New York’s traffic jams—though, in the opposite lane, traffic was sparse.

  Whelan leveled his gun at me. I leaned far forward, noticed, before my head went below the level of the window, that the barrel was tracking me.

  “Stop right there, cabbie!” Whelan yelled.

  And Petersak hit the accelerator. “Madeline wants to see you,” he said.

  Whelan fired.

  I heard a noise to my right, like a hand slicing into water. I looked. I saw a very small, yellowish hole in the side of Petersak’s head, just below and behind his temple.

  “Jesus!” I breathed again. “Jesus, Jesus—”

  “Hurts,” Petersak said, winced, and swung the cab hard around so we were in the opposite lane. I straightened, saw a car brake furiously, heard someone yell a curse.

  “Hurts,” Petersak said again. He brought the cab to a halt, put it in reverse, backed up, stopped, put it in first. I heard another shot. Several square inches of dashboard shredded in front of me.

  “Hurts,” Petersak said.

  Outside the cab, people were cursing all around us.

  “Hurts,” Petersak said.

  “Please,” I said, and slid down as far as I could, so my rear end was nearly on the floor. “Please, let’s go,” I said.

  Petersak hit the accelerator.

  Madeline was very angry.

  “You are stupid, stupid man, Mr. Cray. You cannot, I repeat, you cannot interfere with these people. Do you understand that? You cannot!”

  We were in her living room; she was in the same chair she’d been in the last time I saw her, and she was wearing the same blue nightgown. Gerald was standing beside her, grinning. The cat scratch at his jawline was terribly inflamed. Madeline went on, “Do you think you can actually find Phyllis Pellaprat? Is that the delusion under which you are laboring, Mr. Cray?”

  “Is it a delusion?” I asked. I was seated on the rococo settee near the two tall, narrow windows halfway across the big room from her.

  She stared at me a moment, in much the way that Whelan had and Serena Hitchcock had. “Yes, it is.” She said it very slowly, her enunciation crisp.

  “That’s not what you told me the last time I was here,” I said.

  “I don’t give a hoot or a holler or a tinker’s damn—” She stopped and composed herself. At last, she nodded toward Gerald, who was looking blankly at me. “This, Mr. Cray,” she said, “is all that you can expect. No more than this.”

  I leaned forward in the settee. “No,” I said. “I don’t believe that. I’ve seen evidence—”

  She cut in, “The house on East 80th Street, Mr. Cray? Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The whorehouse on East 80th Street, damnit! Do you know what you did there? Do you have any idea at all what you did to those poor creatures?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, “I hadn’t really thought about it …” I faltered.

  “You probably imagine that you helped them in some bumbling way.” She stopped, thought, went on, “Suffice it to say, however, that you didn’t. Just as you did not help the man in the ragged T-shirt or, for heaven’s sake, that poor boy selling puppies. Don’t you realize, Mr. Cray, that they are in transition and that you cannot do anything for them. You cannot do anything for any of them, including Phyllis Pellaprat. She is in transition. Just like Gerald. You may love them and you may even need them, but you cannot help them. Do I make myself clear?”

  I said, “I’m sorry, no.”

  She looked surprised. I think she was a lot like Kennedy Whelan—unaccustomed to resistance. She smiled stiffly. “And what precisely is it that I have not made clear to you, Mr. Cray?”

  “All of it’s clear, Madeline; all of it’s very clear. I just don’t believe it.”

  That upset her. “And who, Mr. Cray, just who in the name of heaven are you to tell me that? I know these people, I’ve lived around them for a long, long time. For twenty years.” She stopped, took a tissue from a box of pink Scotties on a small, round table near her chair, dabbed at her mouth with it, put the used tissue on the table. “And,” she continued, “I have never seen them suffer the way you have made them suffer. You confuse them. Do you know that?”

  “I don’t mean to,” I said lamely.

  “The ignorant don’t mean any of the harm that they do.” She stopped and put her arm around Gerald, who was standing next to her. It was an affectionate and touching gesture, and he smiled slightly, as if in appreciation of it. “Tell me what you expected to find at the place Phyllis Pellaprat is buried, Mr. Cray.”

  I thought a moment. I answered, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  She smiled a flat, impatient smile. Gerald’s smile strengthened. “You cannot ask me to believe that you went there expecting to find nothing. You went there because that’s where her body is, isn’t that correct? And because that’s where her body is, then, naturally, she’d have to be there, too. It’s a reasonable assumption. Ignorant, but reasonable.”

  “Please don’t patronize me,” I said.

  “Oh, why ever not, Mr. Cray?” She was annoyed. “Why ever not? Do you think that you’re somehow above it. You’re not above it. You’re a meddler; you’re an intruder. And you are confusing them. All of them. Phyllis Pellaprat, too. They’re in transition. Do you know what that means? It means they’re going somewhere. Even Gerald here.” She squeezed him. “And Matthew Petersak, all of them are, in their own time, going somewhere. I don’t know where. I wish to God that I did. But I don’t.”

  I stood abruptly.

  “What are you doing, Mr. Cray? We’re not done here—we’re a long way from being done.”

  “You’re wrong.” I started for the door, then stopped. “I think you’re as ignorant as I am, Madeline. I think that you fool yourself because you’ve been around them so long. But I think you’re just as ignorant as I am. And just as scared. I’m going to find Phyllis Pellaprat. I’m going to go and find her because I love her.”

  Madeline sighed. “Yes, you probably do. And you’ll probably find her, too. But I doubt very much that you’ll like what you find. And I also doubt very much that you’ll be able to hold onto her.”

  I went to the living room entranceway. She called after me, “Mr. Cray?”

  “Yes?” I looked around at her.

  She said, “The man at the cemetery—”

  I cut in, “I think he found what he was looking for.”

  She smiled. “Perhaps. I don’t know what they’re going to do with your friend; I have no idea. But it would be—” another smile, slightly perverse—”very entertaining to find out.”

  And that’s when I left.

  I went back to the little cemetery in Brooklyn the next morning; I stood above that ugly green plaque, and I tried hard to peer
past it to what lay beneath.

  And when at last I did, I saw flesh coming apart and falling away, a brain shriveling up, a yellowwhite skull grinning up through the earth at me.

  And I thought, This is Phyllis. This is my Phyllis. Why do I need more than this?

  Because there is more, I answered myself. Because I can have more, and because I want more.

  Inside that skull, which was like the inside of the earth itself, the brain was shriveling up, and the memories were drifting away from it like dreams: they come and they go; they come and they go.

  They come apart, and they go together again.

  I felt people around me. Millions and millions of people. And I felt sunlight on me. I heard voices raised in anger, and I sensed love and excitement and happiness.

  And I remembered one voice especially.

  The voice of the man behind the maple tree.

  “We gonna take good care of you, Art,” it said. “We gonna take good care of you.”

  At the Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965

  I said to Sam Fearey, as he worked hard at trying to pry open Joe Hammet’s vault door, “It’s gonna knock you right over, Sam.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “What’s gonna knock me over?”

  “The smell.”

  He shoved the big screwdriver I’d brought along, and which he forced me to give him, under the bottom edge of the door and hit it with the palm of his hand. The screwdriver went forward a bare fraction of an inch. “I know all about that, Abner,” he said, and hit the screwdriver again.

  “Yeah?” I said. “Tell me about it, then.”

  He shrugged, hit the screwdriver again, pushed down on it. The vault door creaked slightly, but didn’t appear to give at all. “Well,” he said, “you know—it’s a dead smell.”