Lawrence Block - Everybody Dies

I was close to losing heart, and then Mrs. Horvath turned up with a cup of coffee and a small plate of Nutter Butter cookies, and the next file drawer. She was out the door before I could thank her. I drank the coffee and ate the cookies, and an hour later I found what I was looking for.

The child's name was Gary Allen Dowling, and he'd been born at ten minutes after four in the morning on May 17, 1960, to Elizabeth Ann Dowling, of 1104 Valentine Avenue in the Bronx.

The father's name was Patrick Farrelly. No middle name. Either he didn't have one or she didn't know it.

In myths and fairy tales, just knowing an adversary's name is in itself empowering. Look at Rumpelstiltskin.

So I felt I was getting somewhere when I hit the street with Gary Allen Dowling's birth certificate copied in my notebook, but all I really had was the first clue in a treasure hunt. I was better off than when I started, but I was a long way from home.

I bought a Hagstrom map of the Bronx at a newsstand two blocks from the Municipal Building and studied it at a lunch counter over a cup of coffee, wishing I had a few more of those Nutter Butter cookies to go with it. I found Valentine Avenue, and it was up in the Fordham Road section, and not far from Bainbridge Avenue.

I thought I might be able to save myself a trip, so I invested a quarter in a call to Andy Buckley. His mother answered and said he was out, and I thanked her and hung up without leaving a name. I was annoyed for a minute or two, because now I was stuck with a long subway ride and rush hour was already in its preliminary stages. But suppose he'd been in? I could send him to Valentine Avenue, and he could establish in a few minutes what I was already reasonably certain of- i.e., that Elizabeth Ann Dowling no longer lived there, if in fact she ever had, and neither did her troublesome son. But he wouldn't ask the questions I would ask, wouldn't knock on doors and try to find someone with a long memory and a loose tongue.

The house was still standing, as I thought it probably would be. This wasn't a part of the Bronx that had burned or been abandoned during the sixties and seventies, nor was it one where there'd been a lot of tearing-down and rebuilding. 1107 Valentine turned out to be a narrow six-story apartment house with four apartments to the floor. The names on the mailboxes were mostly Irish, with a few Hispanic. I didn't see Dowling or Farrelly, and would have been astonished if I had.

One of the ground-floor apartments housed the super, a Mrs. Carey. She had short iron-gray hair and clear unflinching blue eyes. 1 could read several things in them and cooperation wasn't one of them.

"I don't want to get off on the wrong foot with you," I said. "So let me start by saying I'm a private investigator. I've got nothing to do with the INS and very little respect for them, and the only tenants of yours I'm interested in lived here thirty-some years ago."

"Before my time," she said, "but not by much. And you're right, INS was my first thought, and as little love as you may have for them I assure you it's more than my own. Who would it be you're asking after?"

"Elizabeth Ann Dowling. And she may have used the name Farrelly."

"Betty Ann Dowling. She was still here when I came. Her and that brat of a boy, but don't ask me his name."

" Gary," I said.

"Was that it? My memory's not what it was, though why I should remember them at all I couldn't say."

"Do you remember when they left?"

"Not offhand. I started here in the spring of 1968. God help us, that's almost thirty years."

I said something about not knowing where the time goes. Wherever it went, she said, it took your whole life with it.

"But I raised a daughter," she said, "on my own after my Joe died. I got the apartment and a little besides for managing this place, and I had the insurance money. And now she's living in a beautiful home in Yonkers and married to a man who makes good money, although I don't like the tone he takes with her. But that's none of my business." She collected herself, looked at me. "And none of yours either, is it? Oh, come on in. You might as well have a cup of tea."

Her apartment was clean and cheery and neat as a pin. No surprise there. Over tea she said, "She was a widow too, to hear her tell it. I held my tongue, but I know she was never married. It's the sort of thing you can tell. And she had these fanciful stories about her husband. How he was with the CIA, and was killed because he was going to reveal the real story of what happened in Dallas. You know, when Kennedy was shot."

"Yes."

"Filling the boy's ears with stories about his father. Now how long was it she was here? Is it important?"

"It could be."

"The Riordans took her apartment when she moved out. No, wait a minute, they did not. There was an older man moved in and died there, poor soul, and you may guess who had the luck to discover the body." She closed her eyes at the memory. "An awful thing, to die alone, but that'll be my lot, won't it? Unless I last long enough to wind up in a home, and God grant that I don't. Mr. Riordan's still upstairs, his wife passed three years ago in January. But he never so much as met Betty Ann."

"When did he move in?"

"Because you'd know she was out by then, wouldn't you?" She thought a moment, then surprised me by saying, "Let's ask him," and snatching up the phone. She looked up the number in a little leather-bound book, dialed, glared in exasperation at the ceiling until he answered, and then spoke loudly and with exaggerated clarity.

"You have to shout at the poor man," she said, "but he hears better on the phone than face to face. He says he and his wife lived here since 1973. Now the old man who died, McMenamin was his name, it's an old Donegal name, if I'm not mistaken. Mr. McMenamin might have been here a year but he wasn't here two. It was vacant between tenants, but it wasn't vacant long either time, flats in this house are never vacant long. So my guess is your Betty Ann and her son left here in 1971. That would mean I had her in my house for three years, and I'd say that would be about right."

"And about enough, I gather."

"And you'd be right. I wasn't sorry to see the back of her, or the boy either."

"Do you know why she left?"

"She didn't offer and I didn't ask. To go with some man would be my guess. Another CIA man, no doubt. She left no forwarding address, and if she had I'd have long since tossed it out." I asked if anyone else in the building was still here from those days. "Janet Higgins," she said without hesitation. "Up in 4-C. But I doubt you'll get anything useful out of her. She barely knows her own name."

She was right. I didn't get anything useful from Janet Higgins, or in the house on either side, or across the street. I could have knocked on a few more doors, but I wasn't going to find Betty Ann Dowling on the other side of them, or her son either. I gave up and went home.

By the time I got home, Dr. Froelich had come and gone, changing TJ's dressing and pronouncing him fit for travel. He'd told him to keep the leg elevated as much as possible. "But not when you're walking," he said, "because it's awkward as hell, and it looks silly. So what's the answer? Stay off the leg. Give it a chance to mend."

Elaine had picked up a second cane, and he used both of them to get across the street to the hotel. I went with him, and sat in the armchair while he got on-line and checked his e-mail. He'd accumulated dozens of messages in the time he'd been gone. Most of them were Spam, he said, bulk e-mailers trying to sell him porn photos or enroll him in unlikely financial ventures. But he had correspondents all over the world as well, people he traded jokes and quips with in a half-dozen different countries.

It didn't take him long to catch up, and then I told him what I knew about Gary Dowling and his mom. The last address I had for them was twenty-five years old, and they could be using Farrelly as a last name.