Ed McBain - Downtown

“Here in New York?”

“Everywhere. As we say in the trade, it is opening wide — which does not have sexual connotations, by the way. The expression refers to opening on thousands of screens simultaneously, as opposed to two or three dozen. The ads should break in Friday’s papers. Arthur’s giving it six days’ lead time. He’s hoping to make a killing, you see. Which may be the way to do it, who knows?”

Albetha shrugged.

“His last film was a class act. This is crap. But maybe the public wants crap. I find it ironic. In television, Arthur was doing crap. He left television to do a really fantastic film that didn’t make a nickel. Now he’s back to doing crap again.”

He looked at her for a moment. She seemed to be searching his eyes for answers, but he had none for her.

“How do I find your husband’s mother?” he asked.

“You don’t,” she said.

“He was supposed to call her yesterday. Maybe if I can learn what they talked about...”

“He didn’t call her yesterday.”

“It was on his calendar. Call Mama.”

“His mother’s been dead for ten years.”

“Oh.”

“May she rest in peace, the old bitch. And he didn’t call my mama either ’cause they don’t get along.”

“Do you have Jessica Wales’s address?”

“Yes. Why do you want it?”

“I want to talk to her.”

“How do you know I won’t call the police the minute you leave here?”

“I don’t think you will.”

“Why not? You’re wanted for murder.”

“Yes, but I’m Santa Claus,” he said, and smiled behind the beard.

Albetha smiled with him.

“Have you ever been Santa before?” she asked.

“No. But I was Joseph a long time ago. In elementary school in Boston.”

“When the world was still holy and silent,” Albetha said.

He looked at her.

Tears were suddenly brimming in her eyes.

“Come,” she said softly. “Be Santa for my little girls.”

It was bitterly cold when he left the Crandall apartment. He had changed out of the Santa Claus suit and back into the clothes he’d been wearing to Bos — on my God, he still hadn’t called his mother!

She was probably suspecting the worst by now. His plane had crashed over Hartford, Connecticut. He was lying in a heap of wreckage, her Christmas gift smoldering beside him. If he knew his mother at all, and he thought he did, she’d be more concerned about her smoldering gift than his smoldering body. When he’d got back from the war, she’d seemed enormously surprised to see him. As if she’d already chalked him off. Later, when he began having the nightmares, an analyst told him this had probably been his mother’s defense mechanism. Telling herself he was already dead, so that she’d be prepared for it when she found out he really was dead.

“But I was alive,” Michael told the shrink. “I came home alive.”

“Yes, but she didn’t know you would.”

“But there I was. Hi, Mom, it’s me!”

“She must have been surprised.”

“That’s just what I’ve been telling you.”

“You’re lucky she didn’t have a heart attack.”

“She gave away all my clothes while I was gone. My civilian clothes.”

“Yes. her defense mechanism.”

“My blue jacket,” Michael said.

“What?”

“My best blue jacket.”

“Poor woman,” the analyst said.

Well, maybe so. Poor woman had grieved for years after his father died. Poor woman had sold the hardware store and loaned Michael the money to buy the groves in Florida. A loan, she’d said, stressing the word. Paid her back every nickel, plus interest. He’d asked her to come live down there in Florida with him, she’d said, No, she wanted to keep living right there in Boston, even if the neighborhood was going to the dogs. She meant it was turning black. Michael’s best friend in Vietnam had been black. Andrew. Died in his arms. Blood bubbling up onto his lips. Michael had held him close. First and only time he’d ever cried in Vietnam. He wondered later if Andrew’s mother had given away his clothes while he was gone. He wondered if Andrew’s mother had told herself he was dead in preparation for the Defense Department telegram that would confirm her worst fears. Michael wished he could forgive his mother for looking so surprised to see him alive. Surprised and perhaps a trifle disappointed. He wished he could forgive the poor woman for giving away his blue jacket.

He turned up the collar on his coat.

He had twenty dollars in his pocket, the money Connie had given him.

“A loan,” she’d said.

Albetha Crandall had given him Jessica Wales’s address, but he did not know this city’s public transportation system and there did not seem to be any taxicabs on the street. It didn’t seem to him that one-thirty was very late for Christmas morning; there were probably taxis on the street even in Sarasota at this hour. He began walking. He knew that the address Albetha had given him was downtown because she’d mentioned that it was. After he’d come only a block, he knew he was headed in the right direction because the streets were still numbered up here and the one following West Tenth was West Ninth. He told himself that after tonight he would never again go downtown in this city, maybe in any city, he would forever after stay uptown, where it was safe and well-lighted and patrolled by conscientious policemen. Meanwhile, he had to get to Jessica Wales’s apartment because there were things he had to find out. Like, for example, why Crandall was now saying that Michael was the person responsible for the murder of the person who wasn’t Crandall.

On television just a little while ago, Crandall had told the blond newscaster, “I can only believe that this Michael J. Barnes person is responsible.”

Exactly what he’d said.

Go check it.

Rerun the tape, Blondie.

Michael J. Barnes.

His dear mother in Boston had given him the middle name Jellicle, after the Jellicle Cats in T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which she’d read long before Andrew Lloyd Webber was even a glimmer in an Englishman’s eye. Michael Jellicle Barnes, a name his schoolmates had found enormously amusing, reciting over and over again as they beat him up, “Yellow Belly Jellicle, Yellow Belly Jellicle,” he could have killed his mother. He had tried unsuccessfully to hide the name from the girls he met in high school and later in college, all of whom naturally found out mysteriously and at once and who dubbed him “Jellybean Barnes,” which was better, but not much, than getting beat up, he supposed. In the army, he had become “Jelly-ass Barnes” because of the slight accident he’d had the first time the squad went into battle, a name everyone had called him — except Andrew.

Dear, dead Andrew.

Easy come, easy go, right?

The moment Michael got out of the army, he’d become plain old Michael J. Barnes, and that was the name he’d used when he’d applied for his driver’s license and his library card in Florida. And later on, his credit cards. Michael J. Barnes. No middle name, just the initial. And that’s what he’d been ever since, Michael J. Barnes, no Jellicle, just plain old Michael J. Barnes.

This Michael J. Barnes person.

Was what Crandall had said.

This Michael J. Barnes person is responsible.

For murder.

He was suddenly lost.

Lost in thoughts as tangled as the Vietnam underbrush. Lost in time, because the Jellicle was out of his past and the present was an unknown man he had not killed. Lost in space as well, because the streets had run out of numbers and now there were only names and he did not know where in hell he was. Why was he all at once on Bleecker and then Houston and then King and Charlton and... where the hell was he? He looked at the slip of paper upon which Albetha had scribbled the address for him.