Night Film(8)

And unlike five years ago, now I had a lead: Ashley.

There was something violent in the comprehension that this stranger, this wild magician of musical notes, was gone from the world. She was lost now, she’d been silenced—another dead branch on Cordova’s warped tree.

She could be his fragile corridor.

It was a covert line of attack described in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Your enemy expected the direct approach. He prepared for it and fiercely fought it off, resulting in severe casualties, the expenditure of major resources—and, ultimately, your own defeat. And yet, occasionally, there was another entrance, the fragile corridor. Your enemy never expected advancement via this route because it was labyrinthine and treacherous, and he often didn’t even know it was there. But if your army managed to make it through, it would deliver you not just behind your enemy’s lines but to his inner chamber, the heart of his heart.

A tapeworm that’s eaten its own tail, that old journalist had warned me. No use going after it … All it will do is wrap around your heart and squeeze all the blood out.

No, I never found out what happened to him—but I knew the answer. For all his grumbling, the next morning, surely as the sun rose, he climbed out of bed, packed his bags, and rode a bus straight into that damned village.

He wouldn’t have been able to stay away from the story.

Neither would I.





6


A little over a week later, at 3:00 A.M., I boarded a Harlem-bound M102 bus—#5378, as Sharon Falcone had instructed—and took a secluded seat in the back.

If the city had one spot where murmured conversations and dubious glances went ignored, it was this bus at three in the morning. Whatever passengers were present, they were likely to be dead tired, strung out, or involved in shady dealings themselves—so you could bet they wanted to remain as incognito as you did. I’d never understood how Sharon had arranged it, but now, I swore it was the same driver from the last time we’d done this, some nine years ago.

I first met Detective Sharon Falcone back in 1989 when I was a green reporter for The New York Post and she was a rookie cop helping out on the Central Park jogger case. Even now, more than twenty years later, I still knew just snippets about her, but those bits went a long way, like a pinch of Cajun powder in your food. She was forty-six and lived alone in Queens with a German shepherd named Harley. For the past decade, she’d worked for the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, a specialized unit that helped other precincts with homicides that occurred north of Fifty-ninth Street, and she served her deceased victims with a devotion that seemed old-fashioned in its selflessness and dedication.

The bus turned west onto East One hundred sixteenth, passing abandoned housing projects, empty lots, tattered churches—SALVATION AND DELIVERANCE, read a sign—men loitering on corners.

Something must be wrong, I thought to myself. The last time we did this, Sharon had boarded by now. I checked my phone, but there was no missed call, no text. The conversation we’d had the day before had not been promising, nor had she made any real commitment to helping me.

“Tomorrow night. Same place and time,” she’d said curtly and hung up.

The bus was turning down Malcolm X Boulevard and I was just beginning to think she’d blown me off, when we abruptly pulled over in front of a ramshackle townhouse, a lone figure standing by the curb. The doors opened, and within seconds Detective Sharon Falcone was hurrying toward me—as if she’d known precisely where I was sitting all along.

She looked the same: still 53″ and grim, lips thin and unsmiling, a button nose that curved up at the tip like a wood shaving. She wasn’t unattractive. But she was strange. Sharon could pass for a pale nun staring out from a fifteenth-century portrait in the Flemish painting wing at the Met. Only the artist hadn’t quite mastered human proportions, so he’d given her an elongated neck, uneven shoulders, and too-small hands.

She slid next to me, eyeing the other passengers, letting the black shoulder bag fall to her feet.

“Of all the M102s in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine,” I said.

She didn’t crack a smile. “I don’t have much time.” She unzipped the bag, pulled out a white 8 × 10 envelope, handing it to me. I slid out the thick stack of papers, the first page, a photocopy of a file.

Case No. 21-24-7232.

“How’s the investigation going?” I asked, slipping it back and tucking the envelope into my pocket.

“Fifth Precinct’s handling it. They’re getting a hundred calls a day. Anonymous tips, but they’re bullshit. Last week Ashley was spotted at a McDonald’s in Chicago. Three days before, a Miami nightclub. Already they got two homicide confessions.”

“Was it homicide?”

Sharon shook her head. “No. She was a jumper.”

“You’re positive?”

She nodded. “No sign of a struggle. Fingernails clean. She took off her shoes and socks, placed them together at the edge. That kind of methodical preparation, very consistent with suicide. They haven’t done a postmortem. Not sure they will.”

“Why not?”

“The family attorney’s all over it. Religious reasons. If you’re Jewish it’s a sacrilege to desecrate the body.” She frowned. “I noticed some shots missing in the file. Front and back torso. My guess is they’re being held in a separate file so some creep doesn’t leak them to The Smoking Gun.”