Richard Stevenson - Death Vows

None of Moore ’s story quite added up – his knowledge and understanding of Fields’ behavior was far too selective – and on impulse I phoned an acquaintance at FBI headquarters in DC. I asked about the circumstances of William Moore’s retirement from the bureau five years earlier. My contact, a former Albany cop drawn southward by the cachet and the eventual good pension benefits of federal employment, called me back in ten minutes with this information: four men named William Moore had been agents at the bureau during the past thirty years. Two were long since deceased; one was currently a twenty-seven-year-old special agent assigned to the San Diego field office; and the other William Moore was a man in his mid-sixties working as a ballistics expert at Washington headquarters. My contact said he had seen this Bill Moore in the lobby of the FBI building just a few days earlier. There was no William or Bill Moore in his late forties who had retired from the bureau five years earlier.

I thought, Swell . I had a retainer check in my pocket from Moore, and I decided I needed to get it back to Albany and into my bank fast.

I walked across Main Street under a gauzy late summer sky. Only a few of the leaves had begun to turn, and it felt more like August than September – except for the absence of the tourist-season throngs, many of them New Yorkers, the visitors and second-homers for whom downtown Great

Barrington functioned as a kind of Columbus Avenue North. Though on this post-Labor Day lazy Thursday afternoon, the town felt more like a Truman-era burg, with maybe a car gliding by with its windows open and its radio tuned to a World Series with the Yanks and the Cards.

The Triplex Cinema, down a business-block passageway and out back beyond a parking lot, was plenty up-to-date. It looked like it had been smartly refashioned in recent years out of a warehouse or other non-artistic space. It was playing one pop hit of a not entirely repellent nature and two art-house features. A few customers had ambled in for the matinee showings, and I waited while Myra Greene sold them their tickets and gave the robot projectionists their orders.

As she led me up the stairs to her office in a loft over the concession stand, the tiny theater manager creaked and wheezed and showed the effects of what Bill Moore had told me were her eighty-nine years. Greene was bent and unsteady in her blue work pants and faded gray sweater, but peering out from her ruined face were alert black eyes, and when I introduced myself, her smile was a cracked version of Rita Hayworth’s. The distinct odor of nicotine and tar that trailed behind Greene was not abhorrent on her, the way it usually was in our fresh new largely tobacco-free world; on Greene it was pleasantly anachronistic, as if she were a grainy old newsreel from a more innocent time.

She saw me eyeing the Save-the-Thalia poster on the wall behind her desk, and as I took a seat across from her, Greene croaked out, “You old enough to remember the Thalia? I ran it for eleven years, ya know.”

I did recall the long-gone famous repertory art house on Manhattan ’s Upper West Side, and I said I was impressed.

“Nowadays you can watch Shoeshine or Nights of Cabiria at home, so who gives a damn about the communal experience. Television didn’t just kill the movies; it killed sitting in a dark theater with five hundred other people and keeping your mouth shut and feeling your common humanity.” Greene tried to gesture with her head at the poster behind her, but she seemed to have trouble moving her neck.

I said, “This place seems to be carrying on at least part of the tradition nicely.”

“It’s good in the summer, and we make it through the winter. And we’re appreciated. I’d like to screen some of the classics, though. We tried it, but too few people showed up. What does anybody need us for, when they can get Rules of the Game from Netflix?”

“I understand that Barry Fields is a real movie nut like yourself.”

Greene squinted at me and said, “So you’re a real-life private eye?”

“I am. Licensed by the state of New York.”

“You’re no Dick Powell and no Bogie either. And not at all Elliott Gould – though in a lot of ways he was my favorite Marlowe. Altman’s The Long Goodbye is a wonderful picture, funny and textured, about awful old LA and the thug-ridden movie business. Pauline Kael, who loved it, said it finished off the hard-boiled genre. But luckily people like Frears and Curtis Hanson don’t seem to have noticed.”

I said, “I wish I had more time to delve into my fictional antecedents. But it’s hard to do that when you’re mainly trying to earn a living. Myra, I’m told you’re going to retire next year, and that Barry Fields is going to take your place.”

“So, Donald, give it to me straight. Are you packing heat?” She let loose with a phlegmy laugh, but this too seemed to hurt her neck and so she just grinned.

“I am not carrying a gat, Myra. I rarely do. Are you disappointed?”

“Let down, but not surprised. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to get into a shootout around here. The Barrington cops were trained by the Ottoman Turks, and you wouldn’t last long.” Another hoarse chuckle.

“I’ve only met a statie so far,” I said. “Trooper Joe Toomey. He’s in charge of the Jim Sturdivant homicide. Did you know Sturdivant?”

Greene got a sour look. “I’m sorry Jim was killed. But, in truth, he was a pisher. The man charmed or intimidated or bought the people he needed. He ignored or walked over everybody else. I won’t miss him, and you won’t find many who will.”

“The police think Barry Fields shot him. What do you think?”

“Not a chance,” Greene said, stiffening and trying to throw her head back, except her neck wouldn’t let her. “Barry hasn’t got a violent bone in his body. He’s tetchy and he can blow off. But that kid would never physically hurt a soul. It’s asinine!”

“He did hit Sturdivant with a wheel of cheese yesterday.”

She chortled again. “I saw that in the Eagle .”

“And maybe one thing led to another?”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“You read about the fight in the grocery store in the paper. Didn’t Barry tell you about it himself?”

“He didn’t mention it to me,” Greene said and lowered her eyes from my gaze, as if she was embarrassed over telling this fib. “Barry just called me last night and said he needed to take some time off, and sorry about the short notice. I was lucky I was able to get somebody to cover for him tonight, this kid Annette who works for us part-time.”

“What time did Barry call? As I mentioned on the phone, I’m trying to track him down. It’s important for his defense that I get to him before the police do.”

“It was late,” Greene said. “I stay up all hours. I get by with four hours of sleep a night. I’ll get plenty of rest any year now when it’s time for me to sleep the you-know-what.”

“ The Big Sleep ?”

She said, “Donald, very good.”

“And do you own a police scanner, Myra? I’m just curious.”

“No, Donald, as a matter of fact, I don’t own one of those obnoxious squawk boxes. Why would I want to know what the real cops are doing, when I can pop The Naked City into my DVD player? Or Kubrick’s The Killing ?”

“But perhaps, Myra. you have a friend with a scanner?”

She looked down again and, I think, blushed. She was a fundamentally honest woman. And a good-hearted, well-intentioned co-conspirator for Fields, just not a very effective one.

“I won’t ask you any more about that, Myra. But you really must try to understand what I’m saying. I can help Barry best if I know where he is and can speak to him personally. So where do you think Barry might have gone?”