Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Christ, he thinks, it’s harder to run from a woman than to run from an indictment.

The driver passes an exit sign and begins to slow. He pulls right, onto a ramp. Myles glances behind him through the tinted rear window. No other cars have turned off the thruway. He leans back, closes his eyes. In his mind, he sees the Learjet waiting on the landing strip. The pilot is standing by the door, glancing at his watch. The limo pulls over, and Myles gets out. No bags. A briefcase is all. Business trip to Toledo. The pilot says: Mr. Canfield? Then he sees himself tightening the seat belt and hears the engine revving up.

The limo driver makes several turns, and then is on a dark country road. Two lanes. Myles watches now. They pass houses whose windows are all dark. They pass some shuttered country stores. Another turn.

Then the driver leaves the two-lane road, into a lane with a painted sign for a place that ends in “Farms.” He drives slowly now, then passes a dark house, moves into a parking area just beyond, and stops. The area is fenced by trees.

— One moment, sir, the driver says.

He steps out, leaves the door open, walks back toward the house.

Myles thinks, sucking saliva: This is not an airfield.

He pushes a button to lock the door beside him, his heart pounding now. He reaches across the front seat for the open front door.

Then a hand is in the car, and it’s holding a pistol.

— Out of car, a voice says.

— Who are you? Myles says.

— Out.

The pistol is aimed at his head. Myles lifts the door button, pushes down on the handle, steps out into the rain.

There’s a second man on the far side of the car. He walks around to face Myles.

— We take walk, he says.

And gestures to the woods.

3:10 a.m. Ali Watson. Fort Greene.

He can smell her everywhere in the house. Aromas more powerful than when he left, an hour or so ago. In the kitchen. On the stairs. In the sweetness of hand soap in the parlor-floor bathroom. There are traces of her cooking in the air, her breath, her skin. The perfumes of Mary Lou Watson. His body is clenched as tight as a fist. He knows he will have to leave.

His gun lies on the kitchen table, jammed into the holster that fits under his arm. He stares at the pistol. He knows he must carry it back into the night. And use it to find the person who stabbed his wife to death.

And remembers many of the people he has met after slaughter in this city, wives, lovers, husbands, boyfriends, children: the whole broken lot. All wrecked by the death of love. Life blown out of the ones they loved, or sliced out of them, or battered, or gouged. In their presence, working his imperfect craft, Ali was always low-key, knowing that force or threats or accusations never worked when the goal was to find out what happened. He wonders now how long it took the survivors to find sleep. He imagines them reaching for pills or whiskey, reefer or smack, anything that would obliterate memory or consciousness. In memory, every one of them talks about revenge. Some loudly. Some bitterly. Most often in whispers. The baffled children simply weep. But every one of them must have known that there were some problems you could not shoot.

He opens the refrigerator, looking for the bottle of Diet Coke that would scour the ash in his mouth. And sees Mary Lou there, too, in the neat Ziploc bags of cold cuts, the jars of sugarless jam on the door, the plastic cup of fake butter: the armory of her campaign against his cholesterol problem and her diabetes. He takes a bottle of water and closes the door. He cannot yet climb to the bedroom. He cannot stare at her shoes and clothing in the closet, or her dresser with its vials and combs and brushes and powders, or the sink with her mouthwash and toothbrush and tube of Crest.

He should not have come here alone. Ray Kelly offered to drive him home in his own car. “We can talk on the way,” said Ray, who had talked to many survivors too, starting in Vietnam. But Ali Watson insisted that the commissioner had too much to do. Implying that this horror would be in all the papers. Kelly would have to speak in front of cameras and lights, maybe at the side of the mayor. So Kelly hugged him and whispered that he was very, very sorry. Malachy Devlin, his young partner from the task force, arrived in a raw angry mood, and used Ali’s car to drive him back to Brooklyn. He wasn’t angry at Ali. He was angry at whoever had caused Ali such pain. Everything was arranged, the kid said. A local squad car would return Malachy to Manhattan. All the way to Brooklyn, they talked very little. Ali Watson didn’t want to sound like another mourning example of collateral damage. The kid offered to stay the night. No, Ali Watson said, I’ll be all right.

Both of them knowing that he was lying.

Thinking now: I’ll have to leave. But for where?

For a moment now in the kitchen, he imagines Mary Lou at the morgue. On her slab. Permanently silenced.

He forces himself to see her when she was twenty-three. Her skin glowing gold in the dim light of that little one-bedroom place in Bed-Stuy, framed by white cotton sheets. He forces himself to feel her warmth again as he held her tightly, full of need, and she again helped melt the ice jam in his heart, the one he had formed to protect himself from the horrors of the world that he was paid to police. She helped him on many nights to build a fence around all of that, to keep it in a separate place, far from home, far from here, far from all these rooms that bear even now the aromas of Mary Lou Watson. Now he has to build his own fences.

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn.

Oh, Mary Lou.

My baby.

My love.

He leans forward now on the table, his forehead pressed upon his folded arms, and his body unclenches, and he begins to weep.

When he is finished, when there are no more tears left in him, Ali Watson sits up. He reaches forward and taps the cold steel of the revolver.

3:45 a.m. Lew Forrest. Chelsea Hotel lobby.

He knows it’s late because the lobby is empty. He can see it with his ears. Even Harry, the night man behind the desk, is dozing. He can hear the man’s faint snoring, a papery flutter. Or the sound of someone blowing into an old Chiclets box. At this hour, it’s just Forrest and Camus. At this hour, whatever time it is, the dog is usually a no-no. He’s the gentlest and most noble of creatures, but there’s always a chance that some knucklehead will barge through the door and Camus will read him wrong and go for his balls. But on nights when Lew Forrest can’t sleep, the owners let them both sit here. A comforting solitude, in the best of company. No odors of paint or turpentine. No demands to keep working.

After Camus walked him to 24th Street and back, Forrest did sleep for a while. Then he was suddenly awake, his heart racing, and he knew he’d been dreaming about the war. There were no images alive in his head, no scenes, no faces, but he knew what they must have been, for they had been coming to him across more than sixty years. He was lost in the fog of the Hürtgen Forest. The artillery was roaring. And he was running, running, running. With no way out.

Now he is in the lobby of the Chelsea. No running. No panting. No artillery. From the street, he can hear a few cars, and one bus, all moving east and west on wet asphalt. He can hear Harry’s snoring. There is no sound of fresh rain, but he can smell the wetness sliding under the front door. In the old days, the empty lobby was alive with tobacco smells, from cigarettes, cigars, pipes. All banished now by the triumphant armies of reform. There is a trace of disinfectant in the air, so he knows the lobby has been mopped.