A Manhattan Ghost Story Read online

  “You’re fulla shit.”

  “No. It’s a dead smell, Abner. I’ve smelled it before.” He took the screwdriver out from beneath the vault door, nodded at the candle I was holding. “Hold that up a little higher, okay? I wanta check these hinges.” I held the candle up. He fingered the vault door’s hinges for a few moments, his tongue working on his lower lip as he did so. Finally, he announced, “Know what, Abner, I think these are capped screws here, and if I can get the caps off—” He shoved the screwdriver under one of the big, rounded metal caps on the door’s top hinge. The cap popped off and fell to the floor. “Good,” Sam said. Then, a moment later, “Shit!”

  “What’s the matter, Sam?” I asked.

  “It’s a fucking Phillips head.”

  “The screw, you mean.”

  He glanced at me, grimaced. “No, skillet-brains, I mean Joe Hammet’s head. Of course I mean the screw.”

  “Oh.”

  “So give me the Phillips head, damnit!”

  “The Phillips head?”

  “Abner, I’ll take it from you. I really will.”

  I reluctantly gave him the Phillips head screwdriver I had in my jacket pocket. He took it, began working at the top hinge with it. I said, “You forgot about the formaldehyde smell, Sam.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Sure you did. You don’t smell anything else. Just the formaldehyde.”

  “Big deal.” He smiled, held a screw up for me to see. “There’s the first one,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I was smart enough to stay away from Art’s apartment. I went instead to Serena Hitchcock’s. She wasn’t home, so I went to a hotel called The Cadillac on East 11th Street, registered. And left immediately. I had stupidly registered under my real name.

  I went to another hotel, The Belmore on East 36th Street. I tried to register under the name Jack McKetchum, who was my baseball coach at Walter Pierpont High, in Bangor. I couldn’t do it. The desk man wanted ID, and I had none for Jack McKetchum, so I made some weak excuse and left. That was when I began to feel desperate. My cash reserve was pretty low and I wasn’t sure I wanted to take a chance and go to my bank. I probably should have started feeling desperate long before, and maybe I had. Maybe needing to find shelter in Manhattan in February and having a lot of trouble doing it, reminded me that I’d been desperate for a few days. But I doubt it. I’m adaptable. We’re all adaptable.

  I went to the building on East 95th Street, where Phyllis had taken me to meet her parents. The building was boarded up, so I found a rusty tire iron in the alley beside it, pried off the boards on the front door, and went in.

  I had supposed that the building would be empty. It wasn’t. Some people had found their way in; I could hear them as I stood at the front of the long hallway. Some men. Some women. A lot of guttural noises and slurred talking.

  It was dark there, except for late afternoon light filtering through open spaces between the slabs of plywood on the windows.

  When my eyes had adjusted to the dim light, I went up the metal stairway at the back of the building.

  I got to the second floor. I heard the same low, gutteral noises that I’d heard on the first floor, but they were louder now. I went to the third floor, the fourth. I found silence there.

  I went to the fifth floor, to Apartment 506, pushed the door open, and went in.

  It was cold in the apartment. I could hear small animals running about in the walls, and the vague smell of urine was in the air. In the front room, the ancient, overstuffed, red couch stood in the center of the floor and the rose-colored rocker against the wall, where it had been when Lorraine Pellaprat was using it.

  In the bedroom was a black iron bed with a mattress, box spring, and pillow, and in the kitchen an old Kelvinator refrigerator kept company with a Burawell stove. Neither of the appliances worked.

  I went back into the living room. “Hello?” I called. Nothing. “Hello. Mr. Pellaprat?” Still nothing.

  Exhaustion caught up with me then. I sat on the red, overstuffed couch, felt my eyes close, forced them open, stood, sat again. I whispered, “Hello, is anyone here? Mrs. Pellaprat? Mr. Pellaprat?”

  I woke after dark. I itched badly, especially inside my elbows, around my groin, in my hair, under my chin. I guessed that the red couch had some kind of lice living in it, but when I searched myself I found nothing, and after a while the itch went away.

  It was very cold in the apartment now, and dark, though not pitch dark. Two windows at the back of the living room faced downtown Manhattan, which was casting a very soft, bluish-yellow light into the room, enough to see by. I could make out the rocking chair and the doorway to the bedroom. The door was open. From several stories below, I thought, I could hear the faint noises of people having a drunken good time. I wondered briefly why they chose to live only on floors one through three, why they hadn’t gone higher, and I guessed that it was probably warmer on the lower floors, and safer, too, in the event of a fire. These were reasonable ideas, and I think that I believed them. But I was wrong.

  I did not like the noises of people having a drunken good time below, and I did not like the bluish-yellow glow in the room, the darkened doorway, the birdprint wallpaper. I was getting very nervous. I was getting spooked.

  I told myself that I was hungry. I remembered passing a diner on Fifth Avenue near East 92nd Street and I thought that I could go there, eat, and come back within an hour. I’d call Serena Hitchcock while I was out, and perhaps, I thought—feeling cocky—I’d even give Detective Whelan a call, too, just to assess my situation.

  I got up from the couch and stretched, to try and chase my fear away. It didn’t work. I heard again the sounds of little animals running about in the walls. And something else. A small, gurgling noise, close to a cooing noise. I thought it was a pigeon.

  I started to itch again. I attributed it to nervousness, to fear, to desperation, because I was feeling all of those things at the same time. Who wouldn’t, under the circumstances?

  I scratched. My chin, my groin, the inside of my elbows, and as I scratched, the soft, gurgling noises grew louder and I guessed that they were coming from the bedroom. I took a couple of cautious steps toward the bedroom, still scratching.

  When I was halfway there, across the front room, the light changed. It grew brighter, as if several low-wattage bulbs had been turned on. I took a quick glance around and saw that it was true. Two bulbs in a grimy ceiling fixture were burning. They had changed the soft, bluish-yellow glow to a gritty orange.

  A low, confused grunt came out of me. I saw a woman appear in the bedroom doorway. She was carrying a baby.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  She smiled. She was a very pleasant-looking woman in her late twenties, dark-haired, with large, friendly brown eyes. Her simple, off-white house dress was opened to allow her baby to nurse, and the baby was cooing delightedly as it suckled.

  She turned then, glanced around at me, smiled again, and went back into the bedroom.

  I went to the doorway, looked in. She was in a far corner of the room, seated on a low wooden stool, with her left side against the wall, her feet and knees together, her arms crossed. She did not have her baby. She had the unmistakable patina of sadness about her.

  I thought, This is the woman in the garden. Good Christ, she’s doomed to play out the loss of her child again, and again, and again.

  But I was wrong.

  I have learned this, too: I have learned that we are not doomed to anything. I have learned that we move, and that we change.

  Again I said to the woman, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” and I stepped back into the living room. I do not like watching the grief of anyone. She came to the doorway. She had her baby again. She was nursing it; she was smiling; her baby was cooing delightedly, a nipple in its mouth. That mouth was its only feature. It had a face like a skin of tapioca pudding, and tiny, pink h
ands that kneaded at its mother’s breast, as a kitten does.

  I backed away, toward the front door, ten feet across the room. “I am so sorry,” I said. The woman’s very pleasant smile grew a little broader, even more pleasant, and I realized that she was telling me I had no reason to be sorry, that she had a kind of happiness, after all. But I said again, “I’m so sorry,” because I was sorry, because I supposed that I had interrupted something eternal and inviolate.

  I still itched abominably, but I tried to ignore it as I backed toward the front door. I reached behind myself and touched the doorknob, grabbed it, turned it, pulled the door open. I watched the woman go back into her room. Then I stepped out, into the hallway, and closed the door softly behind me.

  To my left, down the hallway toward the stairs, a drunken, middle-aged man with an unruly mop of grayish-brown hair was lurching toward me, snorting and cursing and belching all at the same time. He hit the far wall, glanced off it, like a lopsided cue ball, kept coming at me.

  He was saying this:

  “You—” snort, belch—”mis-er-able bastard, you mis-er-able bastard—” snort, belch—”that’s my mother’s room, you stay out of my mother’s—” snort, belch—”room, mis-er-able bastard, mis-er-able bastard—” And he fell at my feet, face-down, with one hand around my left ankle. He continued snorting a while, and belching, though in a muted way. Then he fell silent. I turned him over. It was an act of kindness. I thought if he vomited he would suffocate in it. I propped him up on his right side, and after a minute or two he started gurgling again. Little, cooing noises came from his throat. I noticed he had a cut on his nose, that one eye had been blackened recently.

  His eyes fluttered open. “Whatchoo doin’ here?” he managed. “Whatchoo doin’ in my mother’s room?”

  I sat him up, propped him against the wall near the door to Apartment 506. “I didn’t know,” I said.

  He coughed. The smell of a half-digested whiskey and wine mix wafted over me. He said, “You got—you got a hundred rooms you can stay in here; why you … gotta stay in my mother’s room?”

  “I didn’t know it was your mother’s room.”

  He belched.

  “And I didn’t mean to disturb her,” I said.

  Another belch.

  “I’m sorry if I disturbed her.”

  He belched once again. A rolling triple belch. Then he passed out. I grabbed him under the arms, took him into Apartment 506, put him on the couch with his hands folded on his stomach and his head to the right, toward the center of the room. Another act of kindness.

  He was her son.

  And I had brought him to her.

  I saw her appear in the bedroom doorway, the baby at her breast. I watched her take two hesitant steps into the room.

  And I watched her smile fade when she saw what I had brought her.

  And I knew at once that I had done something terribly wrong.

  I shook my head. I said, yet again, “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry.” I don’t believe that she heard me. She let go of the faceless infant she was holding to her breast, and for the barest fraction of a second it clung by the mouth to her nipple. Then it thudded to the floor, soaked in, like water, as Phyllis had, at Art’s apartment. And was gone.

  The woman did not take her eyes off the man I had put on the couch. She went to the platform rocker, sat in it, folded her arms at her belly, put her knees and her feet together.

  That patina of grief was heavy around her now, as if the air itself had become discolored by it.

  I watched her a long time. The man did not wake. She did not weep. I do not believe that she could weep. I don’t know. It’s possible that they are both still there—he on the couch, she in the platform rocker nearby, while small animals run about in the walls and drunks have a good time on the floors below.

  I had done this: I had stolen her happiness from her, small as it was.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I took a bus to Madeline’s house on East 85th Street. I needed answers desperately, and I thought she could provide them.

  Her house was dark, except for one light visible from the street, the lamp in her parlor, and when I knocked, I heard a distant, “Come in, Mr. Cray.”

  I went in.

  I stopped just inside the entrance to the parlor and saw her in her Morris chair. She had her back turned to me; she was facing a window.

  “Madeline?” I said.

  “Hello.” It was a soft and trembling whisper.

  I came forward a few steps and saw her reflection in the window, on a background of darkness. She was seated with her feet flat on the floor and her knees apart slightly. Her hands were on the arms of the chair, and her head was back. She was dressed in something dark, something black, and though I couldn’t see her face clearly, I sensed that she’d been crying.

  “I need to talk to you, Madeline.”

  “Talk, then.”

  I noticed, again as a reflection from the window, that she had something on her lap, and I stepped closer to see what it was. It was Gerald’s softball. She was caressing it with her left hand.

  I began, “Madeline, I need your help—”

  And she cut in, “I can’t help you.” I heard anger in her voice, and resignation.

  I said again, with emphasis now, “I need your help.”

  “I don’t even want to help you, Mr. Cray.” She looked down at Gerald’s softball. “Even if I could. And I can’t.”

  “Madeline, I’m confused. I thought you—”

  “Thought what? Thought I was some kind of guru, a spiritual Mr. Fixit?!”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m just a lonely, middle-aged woman, and I don’t give a damn about you and your problems. That’s the way it is, Mr. Cray, and if you don’t like it, you can go piss up a rope.” There was a brief pause; I heard a grisly, little chuckle come from her, and then she continued, “But I’ll tell you this, Mr. Cray—I’ve figured one thing out sitting here, watching the daylight pass me by. I’ve figured one thing out. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.”

  “My God, that’s no answer—”

  “Oh, blow it out your ass!” And I heard yet another grisly chuckle; I was seeing a side of her I had never expected to see. “You know what it’s all about; at least you think that you do. And I do, too. So tell me—why not? Why not? What difference does it make anyway?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “If you can see them, and hear them, and touch them—”

  “I’m not one of them, Mr. Cray. I need to be one of them, you understand, to be with them; it’s very simple, to be with Gerald, I need to be one of them. You can understand that, I’m sure. You’re not a moron. The same thing applies to to you and Phyllis Pellaprat—I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now.”

  I said nothing. She went on, “Scares you, does it? Sure it scares you.”

  “I haven’t thought about it—”

  “Yeah, and the pope’s not Catholic.” Another chuckle. “Say that Phyllis was a fish, Mr. Cray. Say she lived in the Atlantic Ocean and you had this same, great overpowering need for her. Say that. Do you think you’d be content merely to put on your little swimming trunks and go frolic in the surf with her for a while? Of course not. You’d become a fish, if you could.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “So? I have a right to be absurd. I’m grieving. I need to be absurd.”

  “I’m going to find her, Madeline.”

  “Of course you are, but as I told you before, you may not like what you find.”

  I sighed. “Where’s your son?” I asked.

  She looked around at me suddenly from the chair, and I saw that her face was red and puffy from weeping. But she was no longer weeping. She had a look of intense, stiff resignation about her; her eyes were wide. She whispered at me, her voice a tight, high hiss: “Gerald is dead, Mr. Cray, My son is dead!”

  At the Hammet Mausoleum, Halloween, 1965

  “It’ll knock you right over, Sam,” I
said as he strained to free the screw from the hinge.

  “So I’ll hold my nose.” He got the screw out, it was the second one of three in the top hinge. He put the screw in his pocket.

  I shook my head. “You’re gonna puke your guts out, I know it.” He started working at the third screw. “I did.”

  He looked oddly at me. “Yeah. When?”

  “When my little cousin drowned. You remember. She was laid out in an open casket and when I went past her I got this little whiff of formaldehyde. I mean, if it was from a frog in a jar in biology or something, it would have been different. But it wasn’t. It was someone I knew.”

  “So you puked your guts out?” He guffawed.

  I shook my head. “No. Just a little. A little bile or whatever.”

  He got the third screw out, started on the bottom hinge. “Well, I smelled it before, too,” he said as he worked at the hinge. “You remember, that woman that got shot by her husband. She smelled of it a little. Course we didn’t look long ‘cuz we heard someone comin’—”

  “You’re lyin’, aren’t you, Sam?”

  He popped the cover off the top screw on the bottom hinge. He said nothing.

  “Aren’tcha?” I coaxed.

  “Course not,” He said.

  “You get a little whistle in your voice when you lie, Sam, did you know that?”

  “That’s bullshit.” He twisted the screwdriver hard counterclockwise. “Damn it to hell!” he muttered.

  “Want me to try it?” I asked.

  “No. Shit, I can get it.”

  “You woulda told me before if you’d really done something like that, Sam.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. He smiled. “Got it,” he said, and held up the first screw to the bottom hinge.

  “Just tell me if you’re lying or not, Sam. What’s the big deal? So you lied.”

  “So I lied.” He was clearly angry now. “So I fuckin’ lied. You never lied?”

  I decided to change the subject. “How we gonna get it outa there, Sam?”