“I don’t remember. Sleeping pill. Maybe. Not sure.” He was rambling.
“You need some warm clothes,” I said.
“I like the cold,” he said, but he was shaking now. “Like it.”
“I’ll take you home.”
“Something to tell you.”
“I’ll take you home and we can talk on the way.”
He looked around the club and saw Carver Lennox who waved. Hutchison shrank back. He seemed afraid.
“What is it?”
“I’ll tell you when we leave here. It’s important,” Hutchison said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“About the ghosts?”
“About Marianna Simonova. I have to tell you something about her. Nobody knows. I know. Only I. I knew her in a way nobody else did.”
“I understand.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Damn dog. I can’t wait. I have to go back for the blasted damn dog. Son of a bitch. Literally.”
“Or I could come in the morning? I could put you in a taxi and come over in the morning. Lionel?”
It was a mistake. I saw he wouldn’t ask again, wouldn’t beg for my time.
“Just wait here,” I said. “I’ll get my car keys.”
As I went to find my coat and my car keys, I knew I was too drunk to drive, and all I really wanted was to stay with Lily. Be with her. Dance with her. But Lionel had looked dazed. Maybe his wife had been right; maybe he did wander in his sleep.
I got my coat, went to look for Lily, told her I’d be back as fast as I could, and then discovered that Lionel had already gone. Axel said that one of the guests who was leaving, said he’d give Lionel a lift home. “Which guest?”
Axel didn’t know. “How did he seem?” I said.
“He seemed a little nuts at first, then he was calm. He seemed fine when he left,” Axel said.
I found Lily, I told her a little about Lionel, but not all. Just told her he had dropped by and somebody had driven him home. We got another drink and went to listen to the pianist who had resumed playing after the band left. He was playing “Someone to Watch Over Me.” It was the first song I’d heard with Lily, at Bradley’s.
So we danced in the almost empty club, for an hour-I lost all sense of time-then sat and whispered and danced some more together. I didn’t want to let go of her. I thought if I held on, she’d stay forever.
I forgot about Lionel Hutchison. I would spend real time with him in the morning, I told myself, I’d sit in the freezing cold, if he wanted, smoke with him, hear him out, but for now I just let myself forget. I didn’t think about him again, not for hours, two, three, four hours, there wasn’t much sleeping that night, so I didn’t think about him again until after I woke up in Lily’s bed.
S U N D A Y
CHAPTER 33
I t was a beautiful, bitter-cold morning, clear black sky, an icy slice of moon, the stars still out just before dawn. I could see them from Lily’s window. I could see the faraway lights downtown on the skyscrapers. On the dark, quiet streets closer to the Armstrong, there was only a solitary figure coming in the back door with a big, shaggy dog, somebody who couldn’t sleep, somebody whose pooch had begged for an early walk. Something else caught my eye, but I was distracted by Lily; dressed in a black skirt and jacket, green shawl over her shoulders, she was rummaging in her bag for her gloves.
“I have to go,” she said, picking up her coat. She kissed my cheek and rubbed off some lipstick.
I said I wanted to go to the cemetery with her. She said no.
“Just wait for me, will you? Please?”
I said I’d wait. As soon as she closed the door behind her, I looked out of the window again. My car, a slick of white ice over the red, was parked in the lot surrounded by wire fencing. On the ground a figure sprawled, face down.
I shoved the old sash window up and leaned out as far as I could, looked down, saw the row of gray metal garbage cans, one on its side, maybe knocked over by the wind, or by somebody falling. And the man, spread- eagled, black blood already pooling on the crusts of snow and ice. He was hurt bad, or dead, and then I recognized the Harris tweed jacket.
I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing, figured from fourteen stories up maybe I was wrong. I yanked on my clothes and, not waiting for the elevator, ran down the fourteen stories to the basement, hurried along the endless corridors, banged through the heavy metal door that led outside.
On the ground, face down, Lionel Hutchison was still wearing the jacket he’d had on when he came to the club a few hours earlier. It looked, first glance, like he’d skidded on black ice, fallen over a garbage can, collapsed on the ground, maybe had a heart attack, a stroke. I knelt down beside him. The light over the back door spilled a pool of white light over the body.
The garbage can was on its side, rolling back and forth in the stiff wind. Cigarettes, the Lucky Strikes I’d seen Hutchison smoke, were scattered on the ground. One of his velvet slippers lay on top of a ridge of dirty snow. There was no blood on it.
I got down and put my hand against his neck, and right then I suddenly felt somebody was watching me.
Hutchison was dead. There was no pulse. But there was too much damage to have come from a simple fall, too much broken for a man who had simply tripped on a garbage can. His limbs were skewed in strange positions, at least one arm and one leg looked broken.
I stood up fast because, again, I had the feeling somebody was watching, that I wasn’t alone out by the garbage cans with a dead man on the ice. I should have come back to the Armstrong with Hutchison last night, I thought, I should have paid more attention when he came to the club. But I’d been all wrapped up in Lily.
By now, I was dialing Virgil Radcliff on my phone, trying to get through, then finally reaching him, waking him up. He said he was at his apartment, a couple of blocks away over on 145th Street. He had just climbed into bed, but as soon as he could throw on some clothes he’d get to the Armstrong. I knew he’d been working most of the night.
When Virgil arrived, he found me crouched by Lionel Hutchison’s body. It was still dark.
“Christ, Artie,” he said, clutching two cups of Starbucks coffee, handing me one. “It’s Dr. Hutchison, isn’t it? Jesus, Artie. Shit. I liked the guy so much. Is he gone?”
“Yeah. I called for an ambulance.”
Virgil crouched near the body, his phone already out. At the bottom of his jeans, green flannel pajamas hung out over his boots. He looked like a little kid.
Gently he put two fingers alongside Hutchison’s neck, the way I had done.
“Fuck,” Virgil said. He gulped the coffee. “You’re thinking what?”
“He liked coming out for a smoke. I don’t know.”
“Heart attack?”
“What about all the blood?”
“Where’s Celestina?” said Virgil.
“Last I talked to her, at the party, she was going over to stay at her sister’s. You know where that is?”
He punched something into his iPhone. “I can find out. What time did you see her?”
“Midnight? I’m not sure. Poor bastard. We should check in case she came home. Somebody should go up to the apartment.”
Virgil got up. “I’ll go.”
“I was thinking it looks like he fell from somewhere high up. His bones look all broken.”
