19 Purchase Street Read online

  He drove away with it, left Connie standing there yelling.

  It wasn’t far to Lyle’s place. McCatty figured he had time, Lyle would still be at headquarters making out the report. There was no one else to be concerned about because Lyle lived alone.

  McCatty broke in. Wrapped his fist in a rag and put it through a pane of Lyle’s back door. The other carton of groceries was just inside. McCatty nearly stumbled over it. Rather than unpack it, he ran his hand flat down the inner side of the carton, felt it too had a false bottom. In under that layer of cardboard he fingered the unmistakable texture of paper that was money. He took the carton with him, placed it in the rear seat next to the first.

  For a long while he just drove anywhere with the two million dollars. Killing time until night. Then he was on Purchase Street. Twice he went by the place, checking it out. He slowed to let two cars pass. When there were no cars coming in either direction he pulled into the drive of Number 19 and stopped before its huge outer gate.

  He placed the two cartons in the shrubs to the left of the gate, where, from the gatehouse, they’d surely be noticed and taken in.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NORMA Gainer was also in Harrison on that last of July.

  She came down the drive of Number 19 and the heavy iron gates anticipated her, opened automatically one after another. Norma took it as a minor but important demonstration of acceptance that usually she could leave the place without even having to hesitate at the gates. It wasn’t known, of course, that she was affected by such reassurances.

  This time the man on gate duty signaled her to a stop. He informed her there was an accident down the way on Purchase Street.

  “Bad?” Norma asked.

  “From what I hear.”

  Norma didn’t realize, of course, that she was circumstantially linked to the accident, that she and one of the victims, the dead grocery boy, had so much in common. Norma had never met another carrier. At least not that she knew of. And as far as the way Number 19 worked such things, she’d taken her brother Drew’s advice and stifled her curiosity long ago.

  She continued on out through the gates to Purchase Street, turned right. After a quarter mile she got onto Route 684 and its wide lanes that were like an undeniable chute to the Hutchinson River Parkway city bound. She had the top down on the Fiat 2000 Spyder, creating her own breeze. Strands of her hair, like tiny whips, snapped her cheeks and forehead.

  There was hardly any traffic, however she kept to the far right lane with the speedometer at fifty-five, exactly the posted limit. Westchester County police patrolled in unmarked cars and used radar guns. Norma didn’t want to get stopped. The piece of luggage was right there on the seat beside her.

  She wouldn’t think about it, passed the time with trying to put out of her mind all else except what she considered her blessings. Before long, there was the George Washington Bridge, its blue lines softened by unclear air, and in less than a quarter hour Norma turned onto East Forty-ninth Street, parked in the garage across from the United Nations Plaza. She took the suitcase up to her apartment in that building.

  All the apartments that faced south had unobstructed downstream views of the East River. The United Nations building was practically in their front yard. Naturally, they were choice, most expensive. Norma’s apartment had north and east exposures, nearly no skyline and only an oblique, somewhat restricted view of the river. Still it was in the four hundred thousand class. Being on the twenty-seventh floor gave it premium, that much out of range of the city’s true surface.

  Five rooms. Done mainly with furniture and accessories she’d found in Europe. Almost every trip over she had something sent back. Such as the calling card tray on the table in the foyer. A bronze of a girl in dishabillé, her arms extended to support an oversized scallop shell. Norma had come upon it five trips ago in Paris at the Marche aux Puces. She’d paid the very first asking price for it because she liked it so much, and after the transaction the stallkeeper, in a rare moment of candor, had told her she should have bargained. The foyer table itself she’d found in Amsterdam at an unlikely out-of-the-way shop that bought piece by piece from elderly people in its neighborhood. Norma believed that table with its graceful tapered legs and marquetry top had been most reluctantly exchanged by someone for mere subsistence.

  In such manner she enjoyed personal connections to those things around her. It helped take some of the edge off living alone.

  Now in her kitchen she poured a Perrier over ice, added a bit of Rose’s lime juice and watched the swirl of the lime until she stirred it away with a long sterling silver spoon that could also be sipped through. She drew some into her mouth on her way to the bedroom.

  There she sat in the chair she most often sat in, settled and let out a breath that was inadvertently a sigh. Everything here was in place, she thought, even every magazine. It would be exciting if someone, a certain someone, would suddenly appear and cause disarray. Wasn’t it strange when she was with that person she could even let her clothes drop off just anywhere and not be bothered by it?

  Her thought went to tomorrow and then the day after tomorrow, her birthday. Thursday she’d be thirty-eight, which on the chronological see-saw between thirty-five and forty was an altogether different balance. Norma, thirty-eight. It seemed the older she got the more she felt the name Norma suited her, as though time was on a convergent course with a predestined image. Futile to hope the two would never merge, she thought.

  To her rescue came the desire to be elsewhere. At first anywhere else and then a particular place, because at that moment she needed to be kissed. Not just the light pressing of lips but rather her mouth crowded by another tongue in it, an identical part stroking, becoming resolute and extended within her to its limit, wanting to surpass that, stretching inward until the little ligaments beneath the tongue ached, stabbing as though furious at the impossibility of filling her, and taking persistent licks at the tiny sideways crotches of her lips, left and right.

  Norma’s eyes had closed involuntarily. She opened them but required movement to come almost all the way out of it. She took up a hand mirror from the side table, a silver art nouveau one etched with dragonflies and lily spears. Not intending serious self-appraisal. She glanced at her reflection only long enough to verify it.

  She was a handsome woman, strikingly close to beautiful. Her features were definite and pleasingly related, although her mouth had a way of normally being a little too set and at times when the situation warranted her eyes could be so steady it seemed they might never blink. The pupils of her eyes were an extraordinary green, with black outlining circumferences. Her hair was dark brown, healthy, heavy hair that was naturally straight. She often wore it pulled back taut without a part, playing right into the impression of composure.

  The drink in her hand felt colder than it should have. Rivulets of condensation ran down to her fingers. Using the back of the newest issue of Geo magazine for a coaster, she placed the glass on the table and took up the phone. All day it had been on her mind to call Drew but she hadn’t wanted to call from Number 19. She suspected every phone conversation to or from there was somehow recorded, and although anything said to Drew would be personal, who knew what might be made of it. Her own phone was swept weekly by the Number 19 people. A requirement rather than a favor.

  She dialed Drew’s number.

  After four rings his service answered. Norma knew that didn’t necessarily mean Drew wasn’t home. She left word she’d called, no other message.

  Might as well pack.

  She got two bags from the spare bedroom closet. An overnighter and another of medium size. Both matched the larger bag, the thirty-incher she’d brought down from Harrison. The thirty-incher looked as though it had endured equal travel. Norma wondered how they achieved that. Actually it got only half the wear, because two years ago when she’d bought this set of luggage she’d done as instructed, as she knew to do from times previous: bought an extra bag in the thirty-inch size. Tha
t allowed alternately one bag to be left at Number 19 and made ready while its counterpart was away being carried.

  Norma wasn’t the least indecisive about what to pack, nor did she strew things about. It seemed as though she was merely filling the bags, giving them proper weight and believable content, the way she removed things several at a time from drawers and didn’t sort through. In twenty minutes she was done. She zipped, buckled and locked both bags and placed them in the foyer along with the thirty-incher. There was only one visible difference other than size. The thirty-incher had a red and white, rather than a brown, leather identification tag attached to its handle.

  She tried Drew’s number again.

  His service was still answering and he hadn’t called in for messages. She decided to trust her intuition. Quickly she changed into what she’d wear on the flight. She left the luggage in the foyer, went out and took a taxi uptown to Second Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street.

  There was the Roosevelt Island tramway, all orange and blue and advertising itself thirty feet above street level. A tram car was about to depart. Nevertheless, Norma, on impulse, took the time to go into one of the small shops in the mall at the base of the tram station, a place that sold only candy. She bought all the Necco wafers the store had, five packs, three chocolate, two assorted. Because recently Drew had remarked that while Godivas and Teuschers were fine, they weren’t any better to his taste than Neccos had been twenty-some years ago.

  Norma ran up the steps. In contradiction to the usual city behavior, the tram’s departure was delayed especially for her, the time it took her to purchase her ticket and get aboard. Her heart was pounding from rushing. She thanked the other eight passengers and the tram operator and then they were underway, suspended from a cable, proceeding above the city, going against the taxi yellow grain of the avenues: Second, First, York. And FDR Drive, the traffic headed home in both directions, the various car colors attractive from that high vantage. Actually, everything appeared cleaner from up there, the city’s deterioration not nearly so apparent. The East River was almost as calm as a creek and closer alongside on the right the Queensboro Bridge was, as usual, being painted, splotched with orange.

  From the tram on the way over Norma could also make out Drew’s apartment. His was the highest at the south end of the Roosevelt Island complex. She knew it by heart. Whenever she happened to be going up or down FDR Drive she would glance across the river to it. At night his lights on, even the bathroom light, was their signal that he was home. Then she could rest easier. Other times she believed she could sense when he was there.

  As today. His door wasn’t bolted inside. She let herself in with her key.

  He was where she had pictured he would be. Seated alone at the corner windows. Possibly he had noticed her walking over from the tram, although from what she understood he seldom looked down in that direction. Usually he paid attention to the river and whatever happened to be on it, or the Lilliputian animation among the highrises across the way, which were otherwise as dimensionless as a postcard.

  Norma went directly to him, saved her hello until it was accómpanied by her hand lightly on his bare shoulder. She also said her name for him. Only she called him Drew, short and familiar for Andrew, which she knew he disliked. To most people he was Gainer.

  He offered his face up for her kiss. There was love for her in his smile. He said: “I thought I was supposed to pick you up.”

  “You were,” she said matter of fact, not wanting to break it to him right off.

  He was wearing a pair of blue lightweight cotton shorts and white athletic socks, knee-high socks that were pushed down to his ankles. His legs were extended across the lap of another chair, shins layered with gauze compresses. On the floor nearby was a clear glass bowl containing an amber liquid.

  “Okay by you if we leave later, say around seven or eight? Otherwise we’re liable to hit some tie-ups on account of vapor locks.”

  She didn’t object.

  “Leslie called, just a few minutes ago, from Oak Bluffs.”

  “You should take all your calls.”

  He got that and agreed with a slight nod. The trouble was his phone numbers were spoiled again. He had two separate lines, with two different numbers, both unlisted. Each time he had the numbers changed it was a relief to be that abruptly out of touch with the people he’d given the number to at the spur of a promising moment. When last the numbers were changed he’d vowed to be more discreet, conscientious about it, only Norma and Leslie and a few business connections would know what to dial. But now, just four months later, he couldn’t pick up for someone he wanted to speak to because more often it would be someone he’d rather avoid. Anyway, next week when he got back from Martha’s Vineyard he’d have both numbers changed and unlisted again.

  “When did Leslie go up?” Norma asked.

  “Early yesterday morning. Had herself flown. She wants us to bring some Zabar’s raisin pumpernickel and a pound of birthroot.”

  “That’s a pretty sizable order.”

  “She said there are a couple of holes in the screen porch that the mosquitoes are finding. She wants to use birthroot on her bites.”

  It would be truly Leslie, Norma thought, not to use anything for her mosquito bites until Drew got there with that carnal-sounding herb. Until then, she’d just scratch and bear it.

  Norma’s attention went to the room. She hadn’t been there in three weeks. There in the corner were the Realities, six years of them next to an equally high stack of Daily Racing Forms. A forsaken shoe, a silver spike-heeled sandal, was almost out of sight beneath the couch. Three starfish from an Aruba trip were stuck like a personal constellation on one of the windowpanes. On the low table on the face of an edition of a Nabokov novel was a .32 caliber automatic. Next to a perfect dandelion pod preserved forever in a semi-sphere of clear plastic. Next to the telephones with adaptors attached by simple suction to their earpieces and wires running from them to a pair of Sony M-101 micro cassette recorders. On an alcove wall a numbered and signed Jasper Johns print was hung opposite a framed collection of counterfeit U.S. paper money.

  There were enormous pine cones in a natural basket near a leg of the authentic eighteenth-century armoire. The double doors of the armoire were open to reveal a twenty-four inch Trinitron and a Betamax. On the shelves above, video tapes, bootlegged Truffauts and Loseys and Kubricks along with others, such as Misty Beethoven and Inside Marilyn Chambers. Representing not so much the quality of him but rather his scope, Norma knew.

  “Your plants seem to love it here,” she said. He had quite a few hanging and standing around.

  “Because I ignore them.”

  She doubted that.

  “They’re trying to get my attention by looking good,” he said.

  Norma picked a withered leaf from an otherwise flourishing Ficus tree. She’d given up on Ficus. They always appeared so healthful and irresistible at the florists but became terminal as soon as she got them home.

  “That’s the one I swear at,” Gainer claimed.

  Norma felt up in under the tendrils of an obese Swedish ivy. Its soil was damp, cared-for.

  Gainer removed the compresses from his shins, saturated them again by dipping them into the bowl of amber liquid. His legs were severely bruised, gashed open in places.

  Norma had to look away from them.

  His legs were hurt from being kicked while playing soccer. They were always hurt to some extent because he never gave them time to heal, played at least twice a week.

  Soccer was his game.

  He’d chosen it long ago before there were teams such as the Cosmos. When he was ten he’d gone alone on the subway to various remote city fields that usually didn’t even have any bleachers to watch German New Yorkers against Polish New Yorkers or whoever. A weekend league of amateurs that occasionally got its scores noted in the smallest type in the Daily News. A few of the older players had once been with well-known European teams. Fred Holtz was one of those Gai
ner especially remembered. A block of a man with badly scarred knees who, during a warmup, had shown the boy, Gainer, how to bring down and control the ball with his chest. That same afternoon Holtz had scored two goals, the second from twenty yards out to win the match. And, afterward, on the sideline, while wiping at the perspiration that was dripping even from his blond and gray hair, he had acknowledged Gainer again with his eyes. Shared some of that important moment, was the way Gainer took it and kept it.

  These days, eighteen years later, Gainer frequently went over to Randall’s Island and got into a pick-up game. However, where he enjoyed playing most was in the Bronx on a field with practically all the grass run off it. The guys he played with there were Hispanics who had become used to being unemployed.

  The compresses were again in place on his outstretched shins. He took notice of a blue and white private helicopter as it set down across the river on the huge red X of the Sixtieth Street Heliport. Almost immediately it lifted off and side-swooped eastward. Taking a heavyweight type to his estate on the North Shore or even more likely sent in from out there in moneyland to import some high-priced company, Gainer thought. Offhand he asked Norma, “How’s Phil?”

  “Who?” As though the name was meaningless.

  “That Phil from Michigan.”

  “What’s that you’re putting on your legs?”

  “Peach pit tea.”

  “What good does it do?”

  “For one thing it appeases Leslie.”

  Norma sat in the fat armchair diagonally across from him. She smoothed her hair back with both hands.

  Gainer recognized it as her look before a fib.

  She told him: “I haven’t heard from that Phil.”

  “Why, do you think?”

  A shrug.

  More than likely, Gainer thought, Phil had become discouraged after having made too many unreturned phone calls or heard too many transparent excuses. For a while earlier in the year Norma had spent some good times with the man, seemed to be reacting happily to him. Then she returned from one of her regular trips to Zurich. Changed. From then on she starved the relationship.