Colin Harrison: The Havana Room

I studied the papers, feeling odd, sickened all over again. You could say H.J. had brought all this on himself, but then again, he hadn't, for his original motivations were honorable; his grieving aunt had asked him to secure a death settlement for their family. I didn't expect to feel bad about H.J., yet I did.

On the next Monday I reached Allison at work.

"Bill?" she answered warily. "Where are you?"

"You know we have to talk, Allison."

She insisted we not meet at the restaurant, so instead we found each other at the southeast corner of Central Park, across from the Plaza Hotel, and walked down the path to the pond ringed with green benches with IN MEMORY OF plaques on them. She looked good, Allison, fingernails manicured, one black pump in front of the other as she walked, put together, not a care in the world- just as I expected.

"You saw about H.J.?"

Colin Harrison

The Havana Room

She nodded.

"Probably the fish."

"I don't know," she said.

"What happened to Poppy? To his body?"

"I don't know."

"What happened to Denny and Gabriel?"

"Don't know."

"Did I shoot Lamont? I did, didn't I?"

"I couldn't tell. Honestly. I wasn't watching that. You might have just injured him."

"There was a second shot, I think. All that noise…"

"No one heard," she said. "Because of the vacuuming upstairs."

"Who took the second shot?"

"You didn't kill Lamont," she admitted. "He was just injured. He was waving his gun around."

"Someone else shot him? Who?"

She shrugged. I got a feeling.

" You shot him?"

She didn't answer.

"Jesus, Allison."

"It was horrible, that's all I'm going to say."

"Ha? What happened to him?"

"He's gone. Totally gone."

"Moved?"

"Disappeared. His little room at the top of the restaurant is cleaned out. He could be anywhere."

"If they come looking, then he draws the suspicion towards himself."

"Yes, I suppose so. He would think of that."

"What about all the videotapes of people going in and out of the steakhouse? You have all those cameras. Did Ha take the tapes with him?"

"No."

"So there's a record of everyone going into the place last Monday afternoon?"

Allison shook her head. She was composed. She had no worries. "The tapes get automatically erased with a magnet and reused every forty-eight hours. The machine does it by itself unless told not to."

"Days and days past. Erased three times over since then."

She nodded. "Has Jay called you?"

"No."

"I thought he might have."

"Did he leave after I passed out?"

"Yes," she said. "He left."

"I sort of remember him coughing."

"He was coughing."

"Did he say anything, about his daughter, before he left?"

"Not to me," she said, voice tight.

"He just left."

"Yes."

"He got up and walked out?"

"Yes."

"You saw this."

"Ha told me."

"What about H.J.?"

"He climbed the stairs and got out. The staff didn't see him go. Only a few people had showed up and they were in the kitchen. I think he had that limo waiting."

"What about Lamont? He was shot."

But she wasn't saying anything.

"What did you do, lock all the bodies in the Havana Room, open the restaurant like normal, then get rid of everybody after you closed?" I pictured the clientele arriving, the coat check girl collecting her tips, the waiters and cooks, the whole show, Allison coolly running the evening, while down in the Havana Room there were bodies on the floor, including mine.

"What do you mean?"

"How many bodies went out of there, Allison?" I remembered the man's shoes I'd glimpsed in the van.

She didn't answer.

"Did Ha think I was dead?"

"I don't know."

"He did, I bet. Did you think I was dead, Allison?"

She turned to me. "I did, yes. Well, I wasn't sure."

"You didn't bother to come over and feel for a pulse, to see if your old friend Bill Wyeth, who you'd dragged into this mess, was still barely breathing?"

"I was upset, Bill. Ha told me just to work upstairs. He stayed down in the Havana Room. I never went down there again that night, okay? He called some people, some Chinese men he knows, he said a van would come. I think they carried some of the bodies up the stairs, then down through the kitchen and up through the sidewalk doors. It would be easier that way. No one would see." She nodded. "Ha took care of everything. When I went downstairs to the Havana Room the next morning, it was clean, really clean."

"And Ha?"

"Like I said, then he was gone."

Allison was lying about something, but just what, I didn't know. I pretended a dull acceptance of all that she'd said, and casually got up to leave.

"Bill?"

"I'll come around the steakhouse, give me a little time."

Allison stared at me, then looked straight at the pond as if she didn't know I was still there, as if she had never known me.

If Jay had in fact walked out of the steakhouse, it would have been without his keys. Because I still had them. But certainly he had another set in his apartment. Had he moved his truck? Did it matter that my fingerprints were on the door handles and probably inside on the passenger side? Maybe not, but I didn't want to have to worry about it. And also, it was probably a good idea to see what was still in the truck. I caught the subway downtown to his building on Reade Street. It took me twenty minutes to find his truck three blocks away. A week had passed, and the windshield was plastered with three bright parking violation stickers threatening to tow the vehicle the next day. I found the right key on the ring, opened the passenger's door, keeping my gloves on, and removed the girls' basketball schedule I'd seen earlier. Had I not gone to that game, H.J. might never have found me. Nor would I have been hired by Dan Tuthill, for that matter. I tucked the schedule into my pocket. Anything else connected to Sally Cowles? I checked under and behind the seats, in the back, the glove compartment, behind the sun visors, everywhere. Nothing. I pulled out a handkerchief and rubbed hard over the passenger's dash, inside window, and handle. Then on the outside of the driver's door. Nobody saw, and nobody cared, anyway. I was just being paranoid, probably. I locked the door and slipped away, remembering to throw the handkerchief and the schedule in a trash basket a few blocks south.

The following evening, I made a point of walking down to Reade Street. Rainey's truck was gone, no doubt now sitting impounded in a city lot. I'd bought a handsaw and a box of heavy-duty garbage bags. I opened the building, took the stairs quietly, then opened the empty office adjacent to Cowles's. In a few minutes, I'd picked up the trash. Then I turned my attention to the strange hooded tennis-judge chair, cutting it apart and bagging the pieces. After that I took a hammer to the lipstick cameras and their computer, then tore out the secret phone wiring as far as I could trace it. An hour later the refuse was bundled onto the street, and the office looked marred by some incomplete repair. I spent another half an hour looking for anything else in the office that might be a problem, then checked the basement, finding nothing there.

I called Jay a few more times after that, halfheartedly, each time from a different pay phone, never leaving a message. Then, finally, I could not help myself, could not resist the temptation, and took the subway to Brooklyn two nights later and walked to his apartment. It was dark and there was no light on at the top of the garage stairs leading to his door. The glass had not been replaced in his door but someone had hammered a piece of plywood over the hole, from the inside. I had the keys. I cupped my hand against the glass and could see only Rainey's neat camp bed, the blinking light of the oxygen compressor. Was there anyone inside, was he dead on the kitchen floor? I found the right key, then checked behind me. Someone was standing on his stoop across the street, trying to light a cigarette. He hadn't necessarily seen me, but if I turned on the lights in the apartment, he'd know someone was inside. I'd made a mistake coming at night. I eased down the stairs, eased away.