Chapter 8
The next day Billy made sure he was back home in time to drive the kids to school, then sat in the parking lot to survey the terrain as they charged toward the building.
Nothing but the same teachers, parents, and nannies he saw every morning on the days when he dropped them off. No one even vaguely resembling the rough description given to him by the boys.
Once the lot was empty of all souls, he continued to sit for another hour before taking off for a meeting with Stacey Taylor in the city.
Release time would be better.
They met in a beer-damp neighborhood joint around the corner from Stacey’s walk-up a few blocks south of Columbia University. At nine in the morning she was sitting at the not-quite-deserted bar reading the Post and eating a hamburger.
“Hey,” Billy said, taking the neighboring stool and gesturing for a coffee. “How’s it going.”
“How’s what going.”
“I don’t know, life, the boyfriend.”
“The boyfriend’s asleep,” she said. “He gets up at three in the morning, has a cocktail or two, works on the magazine, and crawls back into bed at five. I could throw a flash grenade in there now, all it would do is scare the cats.”
Billy took one look at the coffee set before him and knew it would taste like muddled cigarette butts.
“So, Pavlicek . . .” sliding the cup to the side.
“Pavlicek sees a doctor there, Jacob Wells, but he’s not a cholesterol man, he’s a hematologist. Been seeing him since August.”
“Seeing him for what?”
“That I couldn’t find out,” she said. “Can’t be anything good.”
A too-tall, gaunt, middle-aged man sporting an old but expensive raincoat over pajamas came sauntering into the bar as if into the dayroom of a nuthouse. He had a long narrow face, nose big and sharp as a tomahawk, one eye brighter than the other. He could have run a brush through his tangled gray-brown hair a few times, Billy thought; that wouldn’t have hurt.
He kissed Stacey’s hair without looking at her and signaled for a beer.
“What are you doing up?” she asked.
“I have no idea.” He extended a hand to Billy, again without making eye contact. “Phil Lasker.”
“Billy Graves.”
“What would someone see a hematologist for?” Stacey asked her boyfriend.
“A million things.”
“Besides sickle-cell anemia.”
“All kinds of vitamin deficiency, B12, folic acid, iron, et cetera, thrombocytosis, that’s excess platelets, thrombocytopenia, that’s low platelets, polycythemia, excess red blood cells, anemia, pernicious or otherwise, which is low red blood cells, leukocytosis, excess white blood cells, neutropenia, low white blood cells, all kinds of coagulation disorders, blood vessel abnormalities, hemophilia, scurvy, leukemia, acute and chronic, an encyclopedia of various syndromes, genetic or otherwise . . .”
Billy stared at him, then looked to Stacey.
“He’s just a really good hypochondriac,” she said.
“That means I’ll live into my nineties,” he said, sipping his nine a.m. Heineken.
Stacey looked away.
Billy left a few minutes later, drove home, and called Immaculate Conception. He left a message for the school security officer, asking for a meeting to review yesterday’s footage of the parking lot, then fixed himself his usual Cape Codder, got into bed, and stared at the ceiling, his head a blender.
Early afternoon found him in a small physical therapy clinic on the banks of the Cross County Parkway, thumbing through a two-month-old People magazine as his father worked on his core strength with a young Serbian physical therapist on the other side of the mirrored room. Ferrying the old man here twice weekly for his sessions was the most stultifying chore in the world, but Billy insisted on doing it himself.
“Milan, are you old enough to remember Marshal Tito?” Billy Senior asked the therapist.
“He died when I was very young,” the kid said. “Try not to tense your neck.”
“His real name was Josip Broz.”
“Really.”
Billy stopped reading.
“I was assigned to his security detail in sixty-three when he came to the United Nations.”
“You’re still straining, Mr. Graves.”
“He was a very short guy, you know.”
“Better. Keep your shoulders back.”
“Loved the ladies, that was the biggest headache with him.”
“Dad, are you kidding me?”
“I had dealings with Khrushchev back then, too. I was on the Manhattan Bridge surveillance detail in sixty-one when he came up the East River on the SS Baltika, into, I believe, Pier 71.”
Dates names numbers, Billy’s heart rising.
“They had a floating high school docked next door at Pier 73, Food and Maritime Trades, and I had to go over and tell the principal that with the big Commie coming, he had to shut down classes for a few days and, brother, he was not too happy to hear that, but the students took it like Christmas in July.”
“Keep your shoulder blades back, imagine they’re trying to shake hands across your spine.”
“Do you remember the name of that principal?” Billy just testing.
“Frank Stevenson, a real no-nonsense guy, but you had to be, with some of those kids he had.”
“How about the boat.”
“What boat?”
“That housed the school.”
“It was a ship, not a boat. A mothballed Liberty, the John W. Brown. The navy donated it to the city in 1946.”
“Dad, you never told me any of this,” Billy grinning and grinning. “This is history.”
“You want history? How about Fidel Castro staying at the Hotel Theresa up on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street? Do you know those Cubans were smuggling live poultry into the top-floor suites? Did you ever try to catch a chicken with your bare hands? It can’t be done. Your mother had to give me rubdowns for a week.”
“You’re killing me,” Billy still grinning like a mule.
“Don’t forget to breathe, Mr. Graves.”
“So, Charlie, how’s my little sister doing these days?” he asked Milan.
“Your sister?”
“She says you’re off the sauce for good. Is that true?”
“Sauce?” Milan looking to Billy.
“Just roll with it,” Billy muttered, going back to his mindless magazine.
“Yes, I’m off the sauce.”
“Well, you better be, because if I have to come up there and get her again, this time there’s going to be some laying on of the hands, my friend, that I can promise you.”
As he was adjusting his father’s seat belt in the parking lot behind the rehab center, Jimmy Whelan called, Billy stepping away from the car to talk.
“What are you doing right now.”
“Driving my father.”
“Oh yeah? How’s he doing?”
“The same.”
“Same is better than worse. Listen.” Whelan’s voice dropped. “I need to talk to you about something.”
“About Pavlicek?” the question just popping out of Billy without cerebral clearance.
“Pavlicek?” Jimmy sounding caught up short. “What about him?”
“Nothing,” Billy said, burning to bring up the blood specialist but afraid of being asked how he had come across the information. “What did you want to talk about.”
“Remember that movie Fort Apache?”
“With John Wayne, right?”
“What John Wayne. Fort Apache, The Bronx. They’re doing a remake. Billy Heffernan’s got an in with the people involved, and he asked me if I was interested in working on it.”
“As what?”
“Some kind of consultant. You know, because of what we were doing around there back then.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Money for nothing and chicks for free, right?”
“Could be.”
“Why’d you mention Pavlicek?” Whelan asked, but Immaculate Conception was trying to ring through and Billy had to end the call.
After arranging a time to review the parking lot tapes with the head of school security, then taking a few minutes to calm himself down, Billy called Whelan back from a traffic jam on the Saw Mill River Parkway.
“Something going on with Pavlicek?” the first thing out of Jimmy’s mouth. “I need to know.”
“Forget it,” Billy said, Pavlicek now the last thing on his mind.
“You all right? You sound off.”
“I’m trying to drive here.”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
“Something happened with my kid,” this too coming out of him without any mental vetting.
“What happened with your kid?”
Billy didn’t want to talk about it in front of his father, but the old man was down for the count.
“Jimmy,” Billy keeping his voice low, “I’m freaking six ways to Sunday.”
Although his meeting with security wasn’t until four, Billy was back at Immaculate Conception at two-thirty, the first of the parents to arrive for the pickups. For the next forty-five minutes, he studied every car coming into the lot until a side door of the building opened and the students began to exit, the youngest first, those not bus-bound lined up against the side of the building until each was retrieved by a minder.
Billy hadn’t told his kids he was coming, and he watched as Carlos ran to his designated bus unaccosted, no one taking the slightest interest in him, least of all some wide-bodied, red-handed possible cop. The person who did catch his eye, though, was the teacher with a clipboard posted by the bus’s folding yellow doors, the guy chanting, “No pushing, no pushing,” as the kids scrambled up the short stairs to their seats.